TV News LIES

In a suburban oasis amid golden hills north of San Francisco, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union are processing thousands of marijuana cigarettes a day, rolling joints in rice paper cylinders from Amsterdam.

The startup factory for a Bay Area firm called Medi-Cone is part of a commercial industry evolving to serve the hundreds of thousands of medical pot users who can legally use the drug in California, as well as marijuana dispensaries amassing an estimated $1.3 billion in annual transactions.

Economists and historians will study the so-called Great Recession for decades to come, but we already know that the deep downturn laid bare the widening income gap between rich and poor in America.

The Census Bureau reported on Sept. 16 that the number of Americans living in poverty hit a 51-year high in 2009, and income disparity has only grown more severe in economic hard times. It's led Robert Reich to conclude the time is now for tough medicine to narrow this gulf.

One in seven Americans is living in poverty, the highest number in the half-century that the government has kept such statistics, the Census Bureau announced Thursday. Last year was the third consecutive year that the poverty rate climbed, in part because of the recession, rising from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, last year.

Asians were the only ethnic group whose poverty rate did not change substantially; every other race and Hispanics experienced increases in poverty rates.

Stepping up his campaign against outsourcing, US President Barak Obama today asserted his administration would offer tax benefits only to those firms which will create jobs in the country, a move that may hit Indian IT firms in a big way.

"We believe on tax breaks for those firms that create jobs in the US. So we are beginning to do that," Obama said at a press conference here.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said he regretted not saying in congressional testimony shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 that the central bank had no authority to save the firm.

The testimony at the time “has supported this myth that we did have a way of saving Lehman,” Bernanke said today in response to questions during a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing in Washington. “I regret not being more straightforward there because clearly it has supported the mistaken impression that in fact we could have done something.”

The nation's biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today. The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In "CEO Pay and the Great Recession," the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month's worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.