Thursday, Dec 18th
Last update08:48:44 AM GMT
Just take a look at banking. The "too big to fail" banks just keep getting bigger and bigger. Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.
If you can believe it, the "big six" U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now control assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America's gross national product.
Countless studies have highlighted the industrial and medicinal uses of marijuana (cannabis), yet the federal government claims that it has ‘no accepted medical use’ and continues to classify it in the same category as heroin, MDMA, and PCP. Despite the ruling, the medial marijuana market is priced at around $1.7-billion — that’s almost as much as the explosive Viagra market, coming in at around $1.9 billion.
Studies have found marijuana use to be beneficial in treating multiple sclerosis, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, brachial plexus neuropathies, insomnia, pain, memory disorders, anxiety disorders, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and many more conditions.
The City of Binghamton is looking to help a group of residents in Dimock who say they've run out of clean water.
Wednesday was the last day that Cabot Oil and Gas was forced to deliver daily water supplies to some residents on Carter Road after a drilling operation contaminated their water several years ago. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection okayed the stoppage, agreeing that the water is safe. However, impacted residents say it's not safe to use. They did appeal the DEP's decision, but were denied.
The drinking-water supply for 9 million people in New York City won’t be protected by New York state’s proposed rules on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, residents and politicians said.
“There is no possible regulation strong enough that you could come up with to prevent that one accident,” State Senator Tony Avella, a Democrat who has introduced a bill to prohibit fracturing, or fracking, said at a hearing yesterday at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. “New York state should never consider this process.”
Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments.
In a society that tends to avert its gaze from the homeless, the hungry, the addicted and the mentally ill, the Occupy movement’s compassion has become an albatross around its neck. “We don’t exclude the people at the margins,” one protester at Occupy Oakland told me. “We invite them in and feed them.”
Texas cotton grower Brad Heffington speaks Wall Street's language of hedges, correlation charts and the like as easily as he discusses weevils and pesticides. Yet today his financial knowledge is of limited use.
Heffington's been sidelined from the cotton futures market, thanks to a surge of financial speculators into the market, which originally was designed to protect farmers like him against price shifts.
Within hours of the dismantling of the largest of the remaining Occupy Wall Street-inspired encampments outside Los Angeles City Hall, organizers were framing the eviction as a new beginning.
"City Hall and the occupation of City Hall was a potent and powerful symbol," said Mario Brito, an Occupy protester who was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed Monday in an attempt to stop the city's action. But "our movement is not just made of symbols."
Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has preliminarily agreed to a $3 billion settlement over the sales and marketing practices of several of its drugs, including the diabetes drug Avandia.
This represents the largest federal drug-company settlement to date, surpassing the $2.3 billion paid by Pfizer in 2009 for illegally promoting off-label uses of four of its drugs.
As it turns out, GlaxoSmithKline spent 11 years covering up trial data that showed Avandia was a risky drug for the heart. In 1999, drugmaker SmithKline Beecham began a study to compare Avandia with another diabetes drug, Actos. The results showed that Avandia worked no better than Actos and had greater risks to the heart.
and How Newt Gingrich Abetted the Theft of Average Joe’s Home
The untold story in the foreclosure crisis unfolding across America is that, following a foreclosure perpetrated by one of the October 2008 Bailout Banks (e.g. Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo) Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac suddenly appear as the record owner of Average Joe’s home. These federal government sponsored entities then go into local housing court and get a court order authorizing them to evict Joe. If Joe resists, these supposedly charitable institutions obtain a writ ordering the local sheriff to forcibly remove Joe from his home.
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