Former Keystone pipeline lobbyist hired by Obama campaign

By Neela Banerjee
LA Times

President Obama’s reelection campaign has hired a former lobbyist for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline as a top adviser.

The campaign said that Broderick Johnson, founder and former principal of the communications firm the Collins Johnson Group, would serve as a senior adviser for the campaign. Before founding the firm this spring, he worked for the powerhouse lobbying firm, Bryan Cave LLP, where his clients included Microsoft, Comcast and TransCanada, the company planning to build the $7-billion pipeline to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to the Texas Gulf Coast.

FDA Approves Nonexistent Product from Nonexistent Company for Human Testing

by Heidi Stevenson 10 January 2011          gaia-health

A sting nailed a company the HHS authorized to oversee human drug trials. The absurdities in the application are belly laugh funny, but in their rush to keep the money coming, they approved it.

The FDA farms out drug and medical device testing. It’s in the hands of the companies hoping to gain approval for their products, but they must first get approval before doing tests on humans. Even here, though, there’s a catch. The FDA doesn’t review the testing plans. That’s done by more for-profit companies, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). But it gets worse. The IRBs are paid by the companies hoping to gain FDA approval for their products. So, it’s a conflict of interest on top of a conflict of interest.

The First Sting

Congress became suspicious, so they got together with the General Accountability Office (GAO) to set up a sting. They sent out an application for testing of a nonexistent product, Adhesiabloc, by a nonexistent company, Device Med-Systems.

Subtlety is apparently not one of the GAO’s strong suits. Adhesiabloc was described as a gel that would be poured into a patient’s stomach after surgery to collect the bits and pieces left over from the operation. The instructions were to pour more than a liter into the wound.

Congress just sold you out to Comcast, Verizon and ATT

Free Press Action Fund

74 House Democrats and 37 Senate Republicans have signed industry-written letters telling the FCC to abandon efforts to protect Internet users and stop big companies from blocking Internet traffic.

It’s yet another example of dirty politics destroying our democracy, and it has to stop.

Tell Washington: Congress Doesn’t Speak for Me

The nasty little secret that everybody knows? Almost every one of these representatives has accepted massive contributions from the phone and cable lobby. Now the industry is demanding a return on its investment.

By signing the industry letter, these members of Congress have drastically undercut the FCC’s ability to get a fast, affordable and open Internet to everyone in America. They are actually taking a position against the interests of rural and low-income communities.

Feds on GMO Labeling: Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask

The policy is a direct carry-over from the Bush years. Want fries with that “change?”

By Barry Estabrook, The Atlantic
Posted on April 28, 2010, Printed on May 11, 2010

If you were hoping there might be some change in the U.S. government’s official position on genetically modified and genetically engineered (GM/GE) foods under the Obama administration, tough luck.

Last month there was the appointment of big-time GM/GE advocate (and former Monsanto lobbyist) Islam Siddiqui to Office of the United States Trade Representative as the country’s chief agricultural negotiator. Now comes a position paper from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that opposes labeling for genetically modified food. The U.S. claims that letting consumers know whether or not food contains GM/GE products is “false, misleading, or deceptive.”

You read that correctly. In Obama Newspeak, telling the public the truth is false, misleading, or deceptive, while concealing facts is not. Incidentally, the language is identical to that used by previous administrations. How’s that for change?

The Ugly Truth About the Health Care Bill

This excerpt from Glenn Greenwald‘s column tells the tale:

“Just consider what Nate Silver wrote yesterday in trying to understand why progressives have suddenly united behind this bill, in a post he entitled “Why Liberals (Suddenly) Love the Health Care Bill”:

“It has occurred in spite of the fact that the bill hasn’t really gotten any more liberal. Whatever might come out of the reconciliation process will be marginally more liberal than what the Senate passed on its own, but still lacks a public option or a Medicare buy-in, and suffers from most of the same flaws that some liberals were critiquing in the first place. It might have helped a little bit to get the Senate bill off the front pages — but the differences between the “Obama”/reconciliation bill and the Senate’s December bill are fairly cosmetic.”

In other words, the bill which many progressives were swearing just a couple months ago they could not and would not support (the Senate bill) is materially similar to the bill they’re now vigorously supporting (the Obama/reconciliation bill).

The Good the Bad and the Ugly in the Dodd Bill

• Real Economy Project PRWatch March 16, 2010

Here are some highlights regarding the 1,300 page bank reform bill released by U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CN) yesterday.

THE GOOD

1) Capital requirements and leveraging requirements to be set by regulators (although some reformers would like these set in law to makes sure they do the job).

2) Creates a council of systemic risk regulators called a Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is generally a good idea. We don’t want to just leave it to the Federal Reserve.

3) Obama’s “Volcker Rule” included, not perfect, but at least it made the cut.

Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us

Sibel Edmonds Has Named Names. Why Isn’t the Media Reporting the Story?

By Brad Friedman
Hustler Magazine 

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

March 01, 2010 – “

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

Progressive organizer: White House has “loser mentality”

The group pushing for a healthcare public option through reconciliation says the White House is wrong to doubt it

By Mike Madden

Salon.com Feb 23, 2010

AP: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs speaks to reporters, Monday, April 20, 2009, during his daily press briefing in the White House pressroom at the White House in Washington.

WASHINGTON — The White House has done just about all it can to signal that the Obama administration isn’t on board with a push by progressive groups to pass a healthcare public option as part of a budget reconciliation measure. The idea isn’t in the proposal officials released Monday; aides aren’t talking it up; and Tuesday, press secretary Robert Gibbs said it just wouldn’t work.

“Though there are some that are supportive of this, there isn’t enough political support in a majority to get this through,” Gibbs told reporters.

But the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the group that’s behind a letter being circulated among Senate Democrats to push the plan, isn’t giving up. “The White House obviously has a loser mentality — but America rallies around winners,” co-founder Adam Green e-mailed reporters shortly after Gibbs’s remark. “Polls show that in state after state, voters hate the Senate bill and overwhelmingly want a public option, even if passed with zero Republican votes. More than 50 Senate Democrats and 218 House Democrats were willing to vote for the public option before, and the only way to lose in reconciliation is if losers are leading the fight. That’s why Democrats in Congress should ignore the White House and follow those like Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, who know that the public option is a political and policy winner.”

Wall Street’s Dirty Lies

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger   Care2.com

Over the past thirty years, Wall Street has waged a steady war against governments around the globe, convincing policymakers of various ideological stripes that whatever raises profits for bankers and traders will be good for the rest of society. It’s a very simple and appealing portrait of how the world works. Unfortunately, it’s completely wrong.

Profiting from hunger

In an interview with AlterNet’s Terrence McNally, economic luminary Raj Patel explains the connection between widespread global poverty and wild Wall Street profits. Markets are defined by a set of rules—if those rules completely disregard social welfare, then the participants in those markets will ignore them as well. When traders can make a quick buck speculating on the price of rice, they will, even if that speculation drives up the price of a basic necessity and makes people go hungry.

Taking Aim At SCOTUS Ruling: Grayson Gets Powerful Ally For ‘Save Our Democracy’ Bill

On the Hill

Already fast out of the box with an entire suite of legislation aimed at rolling back this week’s Supreme Court campaign finance decision, a freshman House member has just as quickly picked up important backing for at least one of his measures to put the lid back on money in politics.

In a split 5-4 conservative decision that was breaktaking in its breadth, the high court struck down most of the federal campaign finance apparatus — much of it put into law on a bipartisan basis — designed to limit the power of corporations in American politics.

While senior Democrats from President Obama on down angrily denounced the decision and vowed to develop responses, they haven’t been as forthcoming about just what those solutions might be.

Not freshman Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The Orlando-area liberal has proposed six bills designed to reinstate limits on the influence of big business in politics that the court’s five conservative members did away with, some of those limits dating to the administration of President Teddy Roosevelt.

A Predatory System- The Health Insurance Monopoly

By DON MONKERUD                         Counterpunch

Like pathetic knights of another era jousting at windmills, industry shrills attack health care reform, claiming it “tramples individual liberty” and stifles “free enterprise.”

Far from protecting individual liberty or promoting free enterprise, these forces uphold monopoly control of health care insurance that has a stranglehold on American consumers. And they pay huge sums to control the debate and twist legislation to their advantage.

Wall Street’s 10 Greatest Lies of 2009

By Nomi Prins,      AlterNet December 28, 2009.

Lies that justify screwing over Main Street.

On December 13, President Obama declared that he was not elected to help the “fat cats.” But the cats got another version of that memo.

The Cost of Corporate Communism

By DYLAN RATIGAN            HUFFINGTON POST COMMENTARY

Lately I have been using the phrase “Corporate Communism” on my television show. I think it is an especially fitting term when discussing the current landscape in both our banking and health care systems.

As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.

Pay to Play Is Washington’s Sport of Kings

By Michael Winship

As we marvel over the depths of hypocrisy and greed currently plumbed in the health care reform debate, it may help to remember that even Honest Abe Lincoln had his share of tainted colleagues, one of the most notorious of whom was his first Secretary of War Simon Cameron.