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December 30, 2010Dear Governor-Elect Cuomo:The conditions where many regular New Yorkers live are grim. Poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, and small business bankruptcies keep growing.On the other side of the tracks, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers recorded an average of $1 billion each, or over $80 million each a month in 2009. Quite a quick…
Pharmaceutical Industry Fraud By Ralph Nader The corporate defrauding of taxpayers (eg. Medicaid and Medicare) and prescription drugs with skyrocketing prices was the subject of a report by Public Citizen’s Dr. Sidney Wolfe and his associates (see Citizen.Org). Dr. Wolfe’s team compiled a total of 165 federal and state settlements since 1991 totaling $19.8 billion…
Thomas Blanton, the esteemed director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University described Washington’s hyper-reaction to Wikileaks’ transmission of information to some major media in various countries as “Wikimania.” In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, Blanton urged the Justice Department to cool it. Wikileaks and newspapers like The New York…
On Friday, December 10, 2010, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent Socialist, of Vermont, came of age. At last. With just about the best progressive voting record, Senator Sanders has nonetheless been an underachiever in the minds of those Americans who marveled at his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vt. before he became a Congressman and now…
Dear President Obama: Increasingly credible press reports say that you are going to join with the Republican minority in the Congress and support the two year extension of the Bush tax cut for the Rich, along with the cuts for the $200,000 (individual) and $250,000 (couples) that the Democrats were favoring. It has become a…
If there was a mental health hospital for institutions the Republican Party and its top leaders would be admissible as clinically insane. Their bizarre wackopedia seems to contain no discernible boundaries. Repeatedly, these corporate supplicants oppose any measure, any regulation, any legislation that will directly help workers, consumers, the environment, small taxpayers and even investor-shareholders.…
Published in the 8/18/2010 Edition of the Wall Street Journal Earlier this year, Barney Frank and Ron Paul convened the Sustainable Defense Task Force, consisting of experts “spanning the ideological spectrum.” They recommended a 10-year, $1 trillion reduction in Pentagon spending that disturbed some in the military-industrial complex. Other members of Congress were surprised by…
The recent reports by the two deficit commissions—one appointed by President Obama (fiscalcommission.gov) and the other from the private Bipartisan Policy Center (bipartisanpolicy.org)—do not lack specifics. In fact, they are so specific that they obscure the need for a more explicit public philosophy that reveals both their value biases and their establishment thinking. The compositions…
A new cartoon by Matthew Marran appears at: Cartoon By Matthew Marran
November 23, 2010 James E. Lentz, President and CEO Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. 19001 South Western Ave. Torrance, CA 90501 Dear Mr. Lentz: I was disappointed with the unresponsiveness to my October 15, 2010 letter from your public relations Vice President, Mr. Michels. This is not a PR matter. That is what my letter…