Experts who were not involved in the multi-center trial agreed larger trials were needed, and said the impact of the drug on blood glucose levels[—.5% reduction in A1c over three months at the highest tested dose of 4g daily—]was moderate. But they said the findings were exciting because they suggested Type 2 diabetes could be treated by targeting the underlying inflammation....
Since atherosclerosis is also considered an inflammatory state, this approach may also potentially reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications associated with diabetes...
Salsalate sells for less than a quarter a pill, and does not present the opportunity for profit that would attract large pharmaceutical companies to do the research...
The patients continued with their regular Type 2 diabetes treatment regimen throughout the study.

"Then we realized that there were other salicylates, chemically similar to aspirin, that don’t carry the same risk of bleeding.” The drug they’re studying now, salsalate, was widely used not too long ago to treat arthritis, but it got “back-shelved” when other drugs were developed for the treatment of pain and arthritis.
The researchers’ first salsalate studies showed that blood glucose control and glucose metabolism improved in people with diabetes; salsalate also lowered inflammation markers and improved levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood. The second round of studies, investigating whether the drugs could have a beneficial impact on overweight people who do not have diabetes but are at risk for developing it, found that blood glucose levels improved, as did inflammatory markers and other risk factors for disease.

Federal regulators have warned Johnson & Johnson that it could face fines and other sanctions for selling faulty insulin pumps and delaying disclosures of serious injuries to diabetics who were using its OneTouch Ping and 2020 pumps. The FDA ordered the Animas Corp. unit of J&J to explain why it kept selling pumps known to fail and also to submit a plan to rectify a failure to promptly report cases in which its device might have caused or contributed to death or serious injury....
In the issue with the Animas insulin pumps, some pump keypads for controlling how much insulin is injected were deteriorating prematurely, leading to failures. "We decided to go with a new keypad because it's more durable," [spokesperson Caoline] Pavis said.
But while Animas was lining up the new keypad supplier, it was still selling the older ones. The FDA demanded documents about the company's decision to do that.

I may say some nasty and completely true things about the medical establishment.
I only started paying attention [to the ACCORD study] when the intensive blood sugar control arm was canceled. The more I found out about it, the angrier I got...ACCORD is a great example of most of what is wrong with American medicine, and with the way our media covers it....
From the beginning, ACCORD was a drug trial. The study called for participants to receive diet and exercise counseling if they wanted it, but set no guidelines for the counseling. There was no self-management group. It was all, repeat all, about the drugs.[Encouraging participating doctors to unsystematically and aggressively prescribe multiple drugs all but guaranteed drug interactions and adverse effects.]
In February, NHLBI stopped the intensive blood sugar control arm because more of the participants in that group were dying than in the normal care group.
Then came the outrageous part: NHLBI and media dummies came out saying that the intensive group’s blood sugars had been too low....
What kind of madness is this? You throw scads of drugs at sick people, treating only their numbers, not their bodies and lives as a whole. Then, when they die, you say it couldn’t have been the drugs. It must be the numbers. And you tell people with diabetes to get their blood sugars up.
You better believe that if ACCORD had shown a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths from intensive blood glucose management with drugs, those drugs would have become standard therapy for every person with Type 2 in the country. Nobody in the media would have said, “It wasn’t the drugs.” The drug companies would have made billions. That was the goal of the trial.

Unlike most of the windbags currently roaming Capitol Hill, this was a case of the federal government doing its job. And it wasn't only the FCC, it was the Department of Justice and some well-reasoned state attorneys general.
This is what effective regulation of corporate greed is supposed to look like. Not all mergers are a good idea because you say that they are. This was one of them.
[CEO Stephenson invoked the ruling to justify raising prices....] Because AT&T can't get more spectrum, and because it pursued an ill-advised and destructive method for pursuing more spectrum, it has to raise your prices. Do you feel that on your face? That's AT&T spitting on it....Customers should not pay for your mistakes, AT&T, nor should they pay for ineffective politicians who care more about disagreeing than they do about getting something done....
[Stephenson implied] that the FCC's inaction on spectrum also means that AT&T won't be able to create jobs through capital investment projects...AT&T used a similar "It will create jobs!" line when promoting the merger.
How AT&T got some civil rights groups and labor unions to mouth that same promise will remain one of my life's deeper mysteries, especially since the consolidation of two major carriers (and two major GSM carriers) would likely have resulted in job losses through the elimination of redundancies.

One former [Apple] executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company...

Few of us would want to live in a society without rules that keep our air and water clean; that give consumers the confidence to [invest in financial markets or to buy groceries. When new standards are proposed, opponents often claim an assault on business and free enterprise. Drug companies argued the bill creating the FDA would "destroy the sale of patent remedies." Automakers predicted a seatbelt mandate would destroy the] industry....The President of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as "a communistic effort to nationalize children"....

Companies adapt and standards often spark competition and innovation...[Steve Chu, my Secretary of Energy, reminded me how the government set modest, gradual energy efficiency targets a couple decades ago. Companies competed to hit these markers, and] hit them every time, and then exceeded them. [A] typical fridge now costs half as much and uses a quarter of the energy...It saves families and businesses billions of dollars.

Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she [distinguished between good capitalists and bad: the good ones, those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad,] well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs... <br />
[S]he was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them. <br />
“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety...“It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest—to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners—the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

NYU prof who 4 years ago accurately predicted the global financial crisis invokes Marx's critiques of capitalism.

If Twitter wants to be a "force for good" in areas like literacy and disease prevention—both touted as "Causes We Support"...—it can start by paying its hometown taxes in full, just like loads of less fortunate small businesses do. Not only is San Francisco's payroll tax less than half the rate of the personal income tax in fast-growing tech hotbed New York City, but San Francisco, like many other municipalities these days, is desperate for the cash. Despite deep cuts in prior years, it's facing a deficit of close to $380 million this year. The city faces the prospect of "more catastrophic cuts—rather than cutting to the bone we will likely have to actually cut the bone of city sevices," says Board of Supervisors president David Chiu...chief backer of Twitter's tax break in the desperate wake of the company's threats...[B]udget shortfalls are already felt in the police department, health services and transit, which all now face steeper cuts.

"We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license...Then we got another law passed that said [the state can only issue one license. We] were the only ones that applied.” <br />
Simmons and [Waste Control Systems manipulated state and federal law to allow building a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. Construction has been delayed for years because the site overlays the Oglalla Aquifer, which supplies water to] 1.9 million people in 9 states....<br />
Perry’s appointees on the [Environmental Quality commission voted 2 to 1 to license the WCS site; officials on a radioactive waste commission appointed by Perry allowed the site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a] decision later ratified by the state legislature.... <br />
[The Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal left government] to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.

[Greeks] do not want the bail-out at all. They have already accepted [unfathomable cuts].... <br />
My mother [is nearly 70, worked all her life for the Archaeology Department of the Ministry of Culture, paid tax, national insurance and pension contributions for over 45 years, and now has had her pension cut.] She faces the same rampantly inflationary energy and food prices as the rest of Europe. <br />
A good friend’s grandad, Panagiotis K., fought a war 70 years ago—on the same side as the rest of Western democracy. He returned and worked 50 years in a shipyard, paid his taxes, built his pension. At the age of 87 he has had to move back to his village [to plant vegetables and keep] four chickens. So that he and his 83 year old wife might have something to eat....<br />
GPs and nurses have become so desperate that they ask people for money under the table in order to treat them, in what are meant to be free state hospitals....The Hippocratic oath violated out of despair, at the place of its inception.

Tables Turned: Bank Of America Pays Couple’s Legal Fees After Deputies Threaten It With Foreclosure via @thinkprogress

[Kaplan] intends to launch a new venture, one that embraces “all the same tenets as the Flip: Simple, nostalgic, memorable, affordable"....What do you supposed the creator of the Flip camcorder does for an encore? <br />
He founds a chain of grilled-cheese-and-soup restaurants. <br />
That’s right. He plans to open five The Melt restaurants around San Francisco this year, then 500 more nationwide by 2015. You’ll order online or from your phone; you’ll be sent a QR barcode, which you hold up to a scanner when you arrive at the restaurant. Your sandwich and soup combo ($8) will be ready in one minute. <br />
They’re upscale grilled-cheese; the combos will include “aged gruyere on wheat with wild mushroom soup,” he says, or “goat cheese and mint with carrot ginger soup.” With each visit, you’ll be asked if you’d like to round up your purchase price to the nearest dollar, with the difference donated to a charity dedicated to fighting world hunger.

9...There’s [growth for everyone:] demographic, vertical, horizontal, circumferential...<br />
8...Once we [got] them to put Kraft Singles on their enchiladas, we knew their asses were ours....<br />
7...[Sugar consumption has yet to be definitively linked to dieabetes. We stand] with the salt and fossil fuel industries in demanding [practical science] that supports the bottom line! <br />
6...[We're opening up new doors for research in an underserved population. All] the attention will do those people good. <br />
5...[Why] leave population control in the hands of Planned Parenthood?.... <br />
4...The family that decays together, stays together. Well, except for the pieces that fall off. <br />
3....African-Americans, [you're next]! There’s plenty of sugar for everybody! <br />
2...[The mixed-race market?] You won’t believe some of the crazy ideas our Oreos people are coming up with! <br />
1....When you’re in the business of selling fake-flavored sugar water, you’ve pretty much checked your ethics at the door on the way in.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz...collected 2.7 million options in November 2008, about quadruple the number of options he had received the year before. <br />
The options gave the Starbucks CEO the right to buy, at a future date, 2.7 million of the latte giant’s shares at the low they hit in November 2008. For accounting purposes, Starbucks valued the total option grant to Schultz at $12.4 million. <br />
In the two and one-half years since then, Schultz has axed the jobs of 39,000 Starbucks workers and quadrupled the Starbucks share price. The 2008 option grant to Schultz, the Wall Street Journal noted last Tuesday, would, if redeemed today, add $76 million to the Schultz family fortune. <br />
Starbucks shares, despite their recent rise, are still running 5% under their price five years ago. In other words, Starbucks shareholders who bought their shares in 2006 are still swimming in the red, while tens of thousands of baristas are looking for work and Howard Schultz is admiring a colossal windfall.

5.6% of hospital patients in the US contract some form of health care-associated infections [(HAIs)—1.7 million preventable infections resulting] in over 99,000 deaths each year.<br />
[Hospital-born outbreak hijacks resources that could] be funnelled into research or providing better primary healthcare....[I]mmunocompromised children, such as cancer patients, premature babies and transplant patients...are particularly vulnerable to the horrors of HAIs[: "Precise definitions need to be established and] rigorous research needs to be performed…the expectation that adult criteria can be used to define, track and eliminate HAI in children is problematic"... <br />
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was joined by leaders of major hospitals, physicians, nurses and patient advocates when she announced the Partnerships for Patients initiative which hopes to avoid 60,000 deaths caused by preventable hospital injuries and complications, as well as save up to $35 billion, including $10 billion in Medicare.

Obscured in such Nuke vs. Coal vs. Gas vs. Whatever arguments, the truth is that there is only one benign energy source: efficiency [or] conservation. Conservation puts people to work in every job-craving community, keeps our money at home, structurally reduces every form of energy consumption, global warming and environmental impact, and de-funds tyrants and terrorists. But tragically, energy conservation lacks the one thing it most needs: the gigantic special-interest political machine that backs every major form of energy production. <br />
A rational free-market society would take two radical steps:<br />
• remove all subsidies for energy production (including government-provided nuclear-industry liability limits—without which there would be no nuclear industry...); <br />
• tax each energy source to cover the costs society now pays for its externalities (trillion-dollar wars, planetary destruction, hundreds of billions in health care costs for those dying and sick from coal and fossil fuels, etc.).

[The study doesn't prove salt helps diabetics live longer. Patients with lower sodium levels] were sicker and older...
"Although the authors used statistical models to try to 'correct' for these imbalances, it remains likely that the results are still confounded by them"...[Higher blood pressure was also] tied to longer survival..."which just isn't plausible"...
"[Reducing sodium has many effects, some good like reducing blood pressure, and others bad" R]educing sodium increases insulin resistance...the main problem in diabetes. It also ups the production of certain other hormones that have been linked to heart disease. "The impact of reducing sodium must be the sum total of all these physiological effects"...
[A] clinical trial comparing people told to eat less sodium to those who maintain their usual intake..."is surely safer, and probably cheaper than to ask 300 million Americans to reduce their sodium intake because of the hope that it will actually extend or improve life"...

[Max Blancke,] (along with his partner Isaac Harris) has gone down in history as the man who locked the factory doors—some say to keep out union organizers after a bitter strike. Their acquittal by a jury caused outrage then, and still rankles today.... <br />
"The Blancke family lost more people in the Triangle that any other family. No one really knows this....You start to humanize these people and start to tell their stories differently." <br />
Susan Harris, the granddaughter of Max Blancke...knew nothing of the Triangle Fire [until as] a teenager, she came across a book, and a name that looked familiar.... <br />
Harris has spent the last five years remembering the fire, and its victims, by stitching the names of the dead, including her own relatives, onto pieces of old shirtwaist fabric and handkerchiefs. <br />
"The reason I used the shirtwaist pieces is obvious...And the reason I use the handkerchiefs is because of the loss and the grief." <br />
She calls the pieces prayer flags.

RT @pourmecoffee: A nice sports story. "Players chip in to save coach’s life after Clippers decline medical coverage"

On the left you have the "shared sacrifices" and "painful cuts" that the Republicans claim we must make to get our fiscal house in order. On the right, you can plainly see WHY these cuts are "necessary."

in Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev presides over the world’s largest oil reserves with an iron fist. Among his greatest hits: the convenient “suicides” of his top two political opponents a few months before a presidential “election.” The two men apparently shot themselves in the back of the head, then bound their own hands behind their backs and dropped into a ditch outside Almaty.... <br />
“In 2007, President Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style...At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia’s biggest pop stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance.” How did he come up with all that coin? “Timur Kulibayev is currently the favored presidential son-in-law, on the Forbes 500 list of billionaires (as is his wife separately), and the ultimate controller of 90% of the economy of Kazakhstan,” states a January 2010 missive.

There are no “government unions,” just unions of private workers. And they have no interest in campaigning for higher taxes – they are unions of taxpaying citizens. They do push for better pay, benefits and working conditions, like private sector unions, but officials elected by American voters determine the number and size of public programs and therefore the ultimate cost of government. <br />
[The Heritage Foundation] also makes much of the fact that public unions lobby for various policies that conservatives don't like, and claims, yet again, that they do so with “taxpayer dollars.” That's false, as we know, but it is true of another group: private contractors. They routinely include a line-item billing the government for part of the money they spend on lobbying – they, rather than the unions, actually use taxpayer dollars to lobby for, as Heritage puts it, “legislation and ballot measures that raise taxes and spending.”

Teachers [get] fired, Pell grants for the poor [get] slashed, energy assistance for the needy is disappearing, other vital public services shriveling. Regulatory agencies don’t have the budgets to pay the people they need to enforce the law. Even if it wanted to the Securities and Exchange Commission couldn’t police Wall Street. <br />
[This] is precisely where Republicans want the nation to be. It sets them up perfectly to blame government, blame public employees, blame unionized workers. It lets them pit workers against one another, divide the Democratic base, and promote the false idea that we’re in a giant zero-sum game and the nation can’t afford to do more. <br />
It diverts attention from what’s happened at the top–so no one sees how well CEOs and Wall Street bankers are doing again, no one views the paybacks and tax giveaways engineered by their Republican patrons, and no one focuses on the tide of money flowing from the likes of billionaires Charles and David Koch into Republican coffers.

Right Wing politics and Fundamentalist religion made a devil’s bargain a long time ago. They would both work to undermine science, thereby rendering the population ever so more open to manipulation and control. This paves the way for unregulated industry (read as: unlimited profit) and for the mixing of temporal power with spiritual (read as: theocracy). Economic conservatism and social conservatism. The two banes of modern America’s existence. <br />
This is great news for the rest of world. As we become dumber and dumber and more technologically unsophisticated, we are unintentionally seceding the role of world leader to whoever can claim it first. Someone else will make it to Mars first. Someone else will invent the new, virus free, internet. Someone else will create the first quantum computer. Someone else will perfect nanotechnology. We’ll just be their customers. We’ll have terrible credit and won’t understand the instruction manual.

Studies by the Economic Policy Institute [and] University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee economists Keith Bender and John Heywood show clearly that public-sector employees are less well-compensated than comparably educated and experienced private-sector workers in Wisconsin.... <br />
There are 13 states with no collective bargaining rights for public workers; eight of them have larger budget shortfalls than does Wisconsin. In Texas, for example, a non-collective bargaining state whose low-tax, "open for business" economic policies are vaunted by the right, the state's deficit as a percentage of the total budget is over twice that of Wisconsin's... <br />
Walker is using the relatively modest fiscal strain facing Wisconsin as a pretext to roll back basic worker rights and undermine public employee unions as a political force...[B]eyond this indefensible demonization of public employees as the primary cause of the state's budgetary shortfall, Walker's plan makes no macroeconomic sense.

Many clinically well documented oral implant systems have by and large been abandoned for the potential benefit of new, untested devices. Oral implant companies have [launch new products] despite a terrible lack of clinical documentation...[N]either in Europe nor in the US is any documented clinical research needed before launching new products... <br />
[I]f things go wrong, the dentist and the patient...pay the major costs...[Implants from] TiUnite (Nobel), SLA (Straumann), Osseotite(3i) and Osseospeed (Astra Tech) have all been positively, clinically documented for...periods of 3–5 years. This positive statement need not include other implants or implant solutions from the same companies, exemplified by the [Direct Implant and the Teeth in an Hour] concept of Nobel Biocare, where independent investigators have reported clinical problems in several studies... <br />
[T]he profession must demand clinical pre-testing of every new implant before marketing with this information properly published...

[Study subjects who drank diet soda daily] had a 61% higher risk of vascular events, including stroke and heart attack, than [non-drinkers. Researchers surveyed 2,564 New Yorkers about eating, exercise, and cigarette and alcohol use....Increased risk of vascular events remained after accounting for factors] such as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol...[No increased risk was found from drinking] regular soda.... <br />
Although the researchers know the total calories study volunteers were consuming, they weren’t able to account for unhealthy eating habits...[HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?—DMM]....An earlier study [linked diet soda to] increased risk of metabolic syndrome....[Animal studies link vascular problems to caramel-containing products like Coke and Pepsi].... <br />
“People with a lot of risk factors[—high blood pressure or cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, metabolic syndrome and a personal or family history of cardiovascular events—might want to reduce the] diet soda they consume"...

Despite growing public concern about the tragic consequences of Thalidomide, a sedative that was withdrawn from the market after being found to be a cause of serious birth defects, the drug and cosmetic industry opposed the Drug Industry Act of 1962, which required drug manufacturers to provide proof of the effectiveness and safety of their drugs before approval, required drug advertising to disclose accurate information about side effects, and stopped cheap generic drugs being marketed as expensive drugs under new trade names as new "breakthrough" medications. Edward Breck, CEO of John Breck, Inc. claimed that government regulation wasn't necessary because manufacturers would be "foolhardy not to carefully formulate and test the product to all practicable lengths before asking for consumer acceptance." <br />
[As corporate practices after regulation have clearly shown!—DMM]

Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday's Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said....<br />
[Among businesses attracted by the event is] the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl. <br />
"The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January.... <br />
Up to 300,000 girls between 11 and 17 are lured into the US sex industry annually, according to a 2007 report sponsored by the Department of Justice and written by the nonprofit...Shared Hope International. <br />
Some 90% of runaways and children whose parents force them to leave home fall into the trade and are often beaten, drugged, raped or imprisoned to force compliance...

Raab is absolutely correct to suggest that many are "fed up of men and women being pitted against each other in an outdated battle of the sexes". Unfortunately, his insistence that working men's problems are the fault of feminism seems set to stir up yet more bitterness between men and women in the workplace: a classic strategy of divide and rule. Convincing ordinary people that women are making gains at the expense of men, or vice versa, distracts us all from the truth – that more than ever under this government's austerity programme, it is the rich who are making gains at the expense of the poor. <br />
True feminism seeks not to make women the equals of men within an exploitative system, but to liberate both sexes from oppression.

Profit vs. people. Consumerism vs. conscience. Via @TheLightedBridg and Lori M.

It's not that Frances doesn't think that Asperger's exists and is a real problem for some people; he does. But he also believes the diagnosis is now radically overused in a way that he and his colleagues never intended. And why, in his view, did Asperger's explode? Primarily, Frances says, because schools created a strange unintentional incentive.<br />
<br />
"In order to get specialized services, often one-to-one education, a child must have a diagnosis of Asperger's or some other autistic disorder," he says.<br />
<br />
"And so kids who previously might have been considered on the boundary, eccentric, socially shy, but bright and doing well in school would mainstream [into] regular classes," Frances says. "Now if they get the diagnosis of Asperger's disorder, [they] get into a special program where they may get $50,000 a year worth of educational services."

Long famed for hiding money for everyone from Nazis and drug lords to spies and dictators, the Swiss government's banking arm has decided that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are just too hot even for it to handle. And so the PostFinance, which runs the country's banks, declared in early December that it had "ended its business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Paul Assange" after accusing Mr. Assange of - gasp! - providing false information about his place of residence.... <br />
Should CIA agents, mafia bosses and other fellow Swiss banking customers who have likely been even less than forthright in their personal representations than Assange is alleged to have been also worry about the loyalty and discretion of their Swiss bankers?

What makes the Kano incident very curious is that the test was carried out even when animal testing had indicated that Trovan might cause significant side effects in children such as joint disease, abnormal cartilage growth, a disease resulting in bone deformation and liver damage. [The drug] in early-stage testing, had caused liver and joint damage in young rats and dogs, which should have ruled out testing in children.
That, apparently, did not matter to Pfizer, which cashed in on the outbreak of meningitis, measles and cholera in Kano, which claimed thousands of lives, to dispatch its medical team to establish a treatment centre in the state's IDH.
Otherwise, how come that while other humanitarian organizations such as...Doctors Without Borders, that were in Kano's IDH in respect of the outbreak, offered the sick safe and effective treatments for bacterial meningitis, Pfizer could only embark on a medical experiment involving the "new, untested and unproven" antibiotic, Trovan?

Other drug companies, though...are undaunted by the FDA’s warnings and are continuing to use social media without even linking directly to adverse effect warnings,...Rather than having risks one click away, some ads require a click and then a scroll to the bottom of the page, where a viewer then has to follow another link to get the warnings. “Industry is probably trying to ride this wave” of unregulated social media...As services like Twitter and Facebook keep growing, companies feel increasingly compelled to use them to interact directly with consumers or to market their brands.
“They’re falling all over themselves to get into the game. If you’re not in it, you can’t win it,” says Mack, who is also a blogger at Pharma Marketing Blog. But with looming FDA regulations, “that game will soon be over.”

In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But...the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.
Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.
Here’s their explanation: When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely.

Saving the American auto industry...is a monumental achievement that few [outside Michigan appreciate]. After getting their taxpayer lifeline...both General Motors and Chrysler are now making money by making cars. New plants are...scheduled to open. More than 1 million jobs would have disappeared had the domestic auto sector been liquidated. “An apology is due Barack Obama,” wrote The Economist, which had opposed the $86 billion auto bailout. As for Government Motors: after emerging from bankruptcy, it will go public with a new stock offering in just a few weeks, and the United States government, with its 60% share of common stock, stands to make a profit. [A]n industry was saved, and the government will probably make money on the deal... Interest rates are at record lows. Corporate profits are lighting up boardrooms; it is one of the best years for earnings in a decade. All of the above is good for capitalism, and should end any serious-minded discussion about Obama the socialist.

This good informal discussion can serve as an introduction to media criticism and consumption issues, commodification, and appropriation of rhetoric. Some participants linked to other online discussion, or were moved to publish their own thoughts.—DMM

[Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company] spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year's Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the "Friends of America Rally".,,.,,
The Friends of America Rally featured...Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and Hank Williams, Jr., and was graced by Blankenship himself going off on a diatribe that seemed strange at the time, but has come to be commonplace these days. It concerned President Obama, Democrats, and any one who doesn't salute God, coal, and apple pie....
Blankenship and Massey Energy spend millions to defend unsafe workplaces....Massey ranks among the nation’s top 5 coal producers and is among the industry’s most profitable....The federal mine safety administration fined Massey a then-record $1.5 million for 25 violations that...contributed to the deaths of two miners trapped in a fire....Aracoma Coal Co. later paid $2.5 million in fines after [pleading] guilty to 10 criminal charges in the fire.

The artificial hormone [increases painful and debilitating bovine] lameness and mastitis...[B]ecause it increases udder infections...it has greatly increased the use of antibiotics in the U.S. dairy industry. If you wanted to design a system to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, you'd be hard pressed to do better....
[A]ccording to Dr. Richard Burroughs, a veterinarian deeply familiar with rBGH[,] "It results in an increase of white blood cells...which means there's pus in the milk! [The antibiotic] leaves residues in the milk. It's all very serious"....
[Approval of rBGH was overseen by Michael R. Taylor, FDA] Deputy Commissioner of Policy from 1991-1994....Prior to holding that position, he was an attorney at King & Spaulding, Monsanto's law firm, [heading] the firm's "food and drug law" practice. After [greenlighting rBGH, he went to work] directly for Monsanto, as vice president and chief lobbyist....Today, Taylor again works for the FDA, now as Deputy Commissioner of Foods.

RT @Ihnatko: New on Ihnatko.com: I fret about the "most ethical" way for me to buy books here in the Age of eBooks. »

'Steven Eisman, the portfolio manager whose foresight about the subprime mortgage crisis was profiled in Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short[, testified before a Senate committee:] “Until recently...I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong"...
'[The for-profit education sector has captured] billions of taxpayer dollars while, in many cases, bankrupting the students it was meant to educate. Though students at for-profit schools accounted for less than 10% of US higher education students overall, they soaked up almost 25% of federal student aid in 2008-2009 and contributed 44% of the federal loan defaults, according to both Eisman and an independent report by Senator Tom Harkin...
'For the five largest for-profit schools, federal student aid made up 72% of revenue, with [an average half of that money, or as little as 10%,] going to actual education spending.'

'As a kid, [Cohen] built computers, yammered on ham radios...took special trips to the electronics shops in Lower Manhattan with his dad[, and] pored over the RadioShack catalog the day it arrived, studying up on what was then cutting-edge technology—reel-to-reel tape decks, fax machines—and...pages of arcane electronic components.
'Cohen bought this store in 2003 after 25 years as a project manager at companies like Hughes Aircraft and Hewlett-Packard. Housed in a strip mall...it is not among RadioShack’s 4,470 corporate-owned stores but one of about 1,400 franchised dealerships. In exchange for using the RadioShack name, Cohen [must] buy a certain amount of his inventory from the company. Otherwise, he has a lot of leeway. And he has used it to fashion his shop into something like the eccentric, mad-scientist RadioShacks he grew up with. But he knows that he’s largely on his own in this, fighting a battle for the soul of the company that’s pretty much been decided everywhere else.'

'In two separate [prior disasters], 30 BP workers have been killed, and more than 200 seriously injured...BP has admitted to breaking...environmental and safety laws and committing outright fraud. BP paid $373 million in fines to avoid prosecution...[I]n the last 3 years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas...accounted for 97% of the "egregious, willful" violations [deemed by OSHA, representing] "intentional disregard for the requirements of the [law], or...plain indifference to employee safety and health"....
'In 2007, a BP...spill poured 200,000 gallons of crude oil into...pristine Alaskan wilderness. [I]nvestigators discovered BP was aware of corrosion along the [leaking pipeline but did not respond properly....
'P]rice gouging affected as many as 7 million...customers who depended on propane to heat their homes and cost...consumers $53 million...[F]or a company that reported profits of $14 billion in 2009, [even record] fines represent a small fraction of the cost of doing business.'

RT @ebertchicago: The bankrupt Chicago Tribune has paid $72 million in executive bonuses. Reporters overlooked.

'Lisa Pack...who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama...got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when...she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees [had] to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt—meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
'As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher[:] "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning...I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard—foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night...in tears."'

'[Wal-Mart has fired] Joseph Casias, a 29-year-old medical marijuana patient and sinus cancer survivor who suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. Casias’s cancer is in remission, and marijuana alleviates his pain that resulted from it. The Marijuana Policy Project is asking shoppers to demand that Wal-Mart abandon its discriminatory policy of firing employees who are legal medical marijuana patients under state law.
'After dutifully working at a Wal-Mart in Battle Creek, Michigan, for five years, Casias was suddenly terminated because he tested positive for marijuana during a drug screening administered after he sprained his knee on the job. Casias, who was named store Associate of the Year in 2008, is a registered medical marijuana patient in Michigan, where it is legal to use medical marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation....
'Casias’s firing violates the “Michigan Medical Marihuana Act"....Wal-Mart is contesting Casias’s eligibility for unemployment.'

''[T]he vast majority of the right subscribes to a form of libertarian populism inflected with social conservative attachments–an unholy hybrid of Ayn Rand, William Jennings Bryan, and Morton Downey, Jr.
'That certainly sounds like the Tea Party movement, where participants demand all sorts of contradictory things for contradictory reasons, mostly lower taxes and larger government benefits for "deserving" people. And a Republican Party that now counts the Tea Party folk as one of two pillars–along with the Christian Right–of its popular support, all worshiping at the shrine of Ronald Reagan, is hardly a political institution that Rand could have in any way supported. If, against all her expectations, there is an afterlife, the adoption of Rand’s work by people she would have intensely disliked must be sheer hell. She is probably a most unhappy ghost at the tea party.'

'Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields. We feed our children Bt...cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies. 'Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French study proved Monsanto's GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity. Soft drinks and candy have highly concentrated...high fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). "[E] ssentially our entire food supply is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company"...Grocery Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70% of US food contains GM traits. 'Meat:...Monsanto steroids bulk up animals--more weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel? 'Poultry:...USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards and attempted to allow sewage sludge as [crop fertilizer].'

'Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November—3 months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety—a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills....Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards....In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view [and from budget overseers in Brussels] because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.'

SOS Impresa [said cash-flush] organized crime may target the bourse to launder its money[: "They] could take advantage of the [crisis of large cash-strapped business groups to try] to get into the stock market...in a big way"...It estimated the mob's joint turnover last year at 135 billion euros, topped by trafficking in drugs, people, weapons and contraband....[With] prices of property, stocks and bonds and companies...brought down by the crisis, mobsters could use profits from recession-proof activities like drugs to "go on a financial shopping spree." [Showing] an increasingly sophisticated business environment, [mobsters are] diversifying away from traditional areas like public contracts, property and construction. in Sicily there [is] "a sort of criminal career" where a bodyguard could become a godfather, and in the slums of Naples the child drug runners known as "muschilli" grow up in gangs where "pushing is considered a real job giving them independent economic status."

Steele panned President Barack Obama’s long-stated plan to let income tax rates return to higher levels for families making more than $250,000 a year. “Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money,” Steele said....Of course, to most Americans, $250,000—let alone a million—is “a lot of money.” The median household income is about $52,000 and only 2% of Americans make $250,000 or more. Fewer than half-a-percent make more than a million dollars. “After taxes,” someone making a million dollars can still expect to keep about $675,000...Steele is not alone in his out-of-touch assertion. Hate radio host Rush Limbaugh—who reportedly makes about $50 million a year—also recently argued that “$250,000 is not wealthy.” And like Limbaugh, we can “trust” Steele about high income. In addition to his $223,500-a-year RNC post, Steele charges between $8000 and $20,000 for personal speaking engagements. Indeed, the University paid Steele and Ford a combined $40,000 for Thursday’s event.