Tainted Beef, Inadequate Government Monitoring

The federal agencies tasked with protecting consumers have failed:

A program set up to test beef for chemical residues "is not accomplishing its mission of monitoring the food supply for … dangerous substances, which has resulted in meat with these substances being distributed in commerce," says the audit by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Inspector General.

The health effects on people who eat such meat are a "growing concern," the audit adds.

Swine Flu Hoax?

What happened to the widely-hyped swine flu predictions in 2009? Was it a hoax? Was it an engineered panic to sell more vaccines?

WHO admits shortcomings in handling flu pandemic
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA, April 12 (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation conceded shortcomings on Monday in its handling of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, including a failure to communicate uncertainties about the new virus as it swept around the globe.

Harrisburg & Greece

Greece hid their debt (through CDOs from Goldman Sachs) to improve the country's balance sheet so they could qualify for inclusion into the Euro zone. When Greece entered the Euro zone, they lost their own currency. Without control of their own currency they can not print money nor set the price of money. Greece is in economic dire straits, looking for bailouts from the EU, Germany, and the IMF. Greece is also attempting to cut social benefits and the reaction has been strikes and protests.

Like Greece, America's cities and states can not print their own money. Some cities (Harrisburg) and states (California) are unable to match their spending with their revenue. They are in a similar situation as Greece.

Harrisburg is considering bankruptcy:
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which has missed $6 million in debt payments since Jan. 1, should consider seeking Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, City Controller Dan Miller told a three-hour special committee hearing.

Amish Farmer Raided

An Amish farmer sold milk and had his property raided at 4 AM by two FDA agents, two U.S. Marshals, and a Pennsylvania state trooper.

Is this America with freedom, or a dictatorship with no rule of law?

GM Repays Bailout Loan With Another Bailout Loan

GM double-speak in Barron's magazine:

GM firmly on road to viability: Treasury

The Treasury confirmed that GM had repaid in full the $4.7 billion balance it owed under the government's Trouble Asset Relief Program, five years before the loan maturity date and ahead of an accelerated repayment schedule set last year.

"We are encouraged that GM has repaid its debt well ahead of schedule and confident that the company is on a strong path to viability," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a statement.
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Tax cheat Timothy Geithner says GM has repaid the TARP loan. Should we believe tax cheat Geithner to tell the truth or to mislead? Tax cheat Geithner misleads because he left out the fact that GM repaid the TARP loan with another government loan.

But the money to repay the loan will come from a portion of the government money it has set aside. In other words, GM has not actually drawn down every dollar of the $50 billion. It has about $13.4 billion sitting in an escrow account, and it has tagged $8.1 billion of that to repay loans from both the U.S. and Canadian governments. (Incidentally, GM also got a $1.3 billion loan from Germany in support of its European unit.)

Fluoride Hurts Cattle

Volcanic eruptions in Iceland are causing ranchers to protect their cattle from fluoride in the volcanic dust.

"The ash is toxic – the fluoride causes long-term bone damage that makes teeth fall out and bones break."

Anti-virus Vendor Breaks PCs

McAfee shut down many of it's customer's PCs. Home computers and office computers were affected. Economic damage included the shutdown of one conglomerate's chain of stores.

If you can't trust your paid anti-virus vendor, who can you trust? This highlights the importance of complete and current data backups.

Creating Enemies

The Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan.

The Americans, by killing Afghanistan women and attempting to cover up the crime, are creating enemies. When will the Americans leave Afghanistan and stop creating enemies?


U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan — After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths.

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Bombs Inside Murrah Building

News reports and a report from the Justice Department confirm removal of two undetonated bombs from inside the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Who had access to plant the bombs inside a secured federal building?



Was the Oklahoma City terrorism an inside job?

Federal Reserve Admits Law Breaking

The law that created the Federal Reserve (private banking cartel that sets price of money via interest rate) is allowed to purchase debt that is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. The Fed is not authorized to purchase corporate debt nor corporate securities.

The Fed recently admitted to buying corporate securities "to aid Bear Stearns’s takeover by JPMorgan Chase & Co.".

Where are the prosecutors who should be filing charges against Ben Bernanke and the Fed?

Too Big To Jail

When companies become huge, they can commit crimes and receive just a slap on the wrist. Pfizer broke the law by illegally marketing a drug, and the executives responsible for the illegal actions have escaped punishment solely because of the size of the company.

Feds found Pfizer too big to nail

... Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns.

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Promoting drugs for unapproved uses can put patients at risk by circumventing the FDA's judgment over which products are safe and effective. For that reason, "off-label" promotion is against the law.

But with billions of dollars of profits at stake, marketing and sales managers across the country nonetheless targeted anesthesiologists, foot surgeons, orthopedic surgeons and oral surgeons. "Anyone that use[d] a scalpel for a living," one district manager advised in a document prosecutors would later cite.

A manager in Florida e-mailed his sales reps a scripted sales pitch that claimed -- falsely -- that the FDA had given Bextra "a clean bill of health" all the way up to a 40 mg dose, which is twice what the FDA actually said was safe.

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According to Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, "They pushed the envelope so far past any reasonable interpretation of the law that it's simply outrageous."

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But when it came to prosecuting Pfizer for its fraudulent marketing, the pharmaceutical giant had a trump card: Just as the giant banks on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail, Pfizer was considered too big to nail.

Why? Because any company convicted of a major health care fraud is automatically excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. Convicting Pfizer on Bextra would prevent the company from billing federal health programs for any of its products. It would be a corporate death sentence.

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