Ed Silverman - Pharma Fraud Continues To Fill The US Treasury

PHARMALOT

By Ed Silverman // December 19th, 2011 

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/12/pharma-fraud-continues-to-fill-the-us-treasury/

Boasting about recovering lots of money from prosecuting health care fraud has become an annual pasttime at the US Department of Justice. In general, fraud is a hot topic. Why? For the second consecutive fiscal year, the feds recovered more than $3 billion under the False Claims Act, and the total since January 2009 was $8.7 billion.

Of the $3 billion recovered this past fiscal year, which ended September 30, $2.4 billion in recoveries involving fraud committed against federal health care programs, nearly matching the $2.5 billion recovered in the previous fiscal year (see here). And of the $3 billion, whistleblower cases filed under the False Claims Act accounted for $2.8 billion.

As for drugmakers, the feds say that enforcement actions involving the pharmaceutical industry were, once again, the source of the largest recoveries this year. In all, the Justice Department recovered nearly $2.2 billion in civil claims against drugmakers last fiscal year, including $1.76 billion in federal recoveries and $421 million in state Medicaid recoveries (here is the Justice Department statement).

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Theodore Rush - 2012: The Year the Bankers and Corporations Intend to Take Over the US

Dec-20-2011

Theodore Rush for Salem-News.com

http://salem-news.com/articles/december202011/2112-bankers-tr.php

If ever there was a need for loyal US police, national guard and military, and an aware population, it is now.

(NEW YORK) - The US is on a schedule (video) to be ended as a constitutional country.

Bush laid out 5 things that are to justify martial law here - the end of the Constitution.  They are economic collapse, environmental disaster, civil unrest, an attack on the US and a pandemic emergency.

Economic collapse is being created as is apparent to most of the country.

Environmental disaster is being caused by BP and Exxon spills and through genetically engineered crops with Round-up, which a plant pathologist with a background in agricultural bioweapons says can cause the collapse of agriculture.

Civil unrest is occurring now, over what the bankers and corporations are stealing from the country,

An attack on the US can be arranged, just as 9/11 was, with video to support 9/11 as a false flag attack, and with the same groups involved which put Hitler into office and ran the camps and their criminality is official.

A pandemic emergency doesn't require proof and can be completely false, as the H1N1 was, with political and human consequences are dire.

In the plainest terms, the bankers, oil companies and pharma caused WWII and have grown astoundingly rich and 20 times bigger.  Their greed for more riches and for total power is beyond fathoming.  They want to own everything.  Virtually all living creatures require three things to live - air, water and micronutrients - in India, these companies, via a grossly corrupted Indian government, have put together an interagency group, including military, to take absolute control of all micronutrients.  (Imagine  doing the same with air).  

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Randall Amster - Seeing Beyond the Shadows on the Walls Around Us

Published on Thursday, December 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/22

 

by Randall Amster

Social movements, when broadly construed and successfully applied, serve as something akin to elaborate filters. By holding a mirror up to society, a movement causes us to reconsider basic assumptions and structural processes that often exist invisibly yet pervasively in our collective midst. Social movement activities render such practices visible, and subject them to scrutiny in a manner that can become contagious in its breadth and depth alike. Movements make us question those things that we take for granted, assume are unchangeable, or benefit from without repercussions.

In this sense, a movement acts like a lens that sharpens and clarifies the reality we observe and participate in, making the strange familiar and the familiar strange all at once. When this movement consciousness begins to “go viral” and infuse the larger culture itself -- as we have seen with Occupy -- it has the initial effect of breaking down the facade of “consensus reality” that subsumes a great deal of “normal life” without much investigation or contestation. A viral movement perspective, in short, begins to erode the virtual prism that envelops the larger part of our daily existence.

In this context, we can define a prism as “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it.” We carry this prism around with us throughout the spaces, places, relationships, and business of our lives, over time coming to embrace its distortions -- even the obvious ones -- as realities. Plato wrote about something quite like this millennia ago in his “allegory of the cave,” in which people conditioned to face only in a particular direction fail to recognize that the images they take to be real are merely backlit projections onto the surface of the walls set in place around them.

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Zachary Roth - Paulonomics: Ron Paul’s plans for taxes, spending and Social Security

By Zachary Roth

Senior National Affairs Reporter

If you know anything about Ron Paul's economic views, it's probably that he's not a big fan of the Federal Reserve system, or that he loves the gold standard. But those are hardly the only noteworthy planks in his platform. The Republican congressman from Texas, who now looks to have a real chance of winning the Iowa caucuses in less than two weeks, also wants to abolish five Cabinet departments, drastically lower corporate taxes, and allow younger workers to opt out of the Social Security system.

Here are they key components of Paul's economic plan, "Restore America," released in October:

Spending: Paul proposes cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget during his first year in office, and balancing the budget by his third year. He would do this in part by eliminating five cabinet departments: Energy; Housing and Urban Development; Commerce; Interior; and Education. (Paul has not offered specifics on what would happen to some of the functions currently performed by the departments he wants to abolish--maintaining our nuclear weapons, administering our intellectual property system, and conducting the Census, for instance.)

He would also scrap the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate corporate subsidies, end foreign aid, and return most other federal spending to 2006 levels.

Paul says he would cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, and accept a presidential salary of $39,336- roughly equal to what the average American makes. The president currently makes $400,000.

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Les Leopold - Why Are We Forced to Worship at the Feet of 'Mythical' Financial Markets Controlled by the Elite?

By Les Leopold, AlterNet

Printed on December 22, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153497/why_are_we_forced_to_worship_at_the_feet_of_%27mythical%27_financial_markets_controlled_by_the_elite

The markets are “jittery,” “upset,” “skittish” and “unnerved.” They are “confident” or “unsure.” They are “demanding” that political leaders “put up or shut up.” And they are “reacting unfavorably” to Obama’s newfound populism.

These are just a few of the many ways financial markets are described each and every day by the media, financial players and public officials. At first it seems as if these markets are humanoids onto which we project our feelings. Yet, on closer inspection, it’s more like we have ascribed to them god-like powers. We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation. As President Obama warned Europe recently, they must “muster the political will” to “settle markets down.”

Why do we worship these angry market gods?

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Robert Reich - Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

http://robertreich.org/post/14535718993

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican crackup threatens the future of the Grand Old Party more profoundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for America.

The crackup isn’t just Romney the smooth versus Gingrich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Republicans who just scotched the deal to continue payroll tax relief and extended unemployment insurance benefits beyond the end of the year, versus Senate Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps making agreements he can’t keep, versus Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who keeps making trouble he can’t control.

And not just venerable Republican senators like Indiana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of foreign policy for more than three decades, versus primary challenger state treasurer Richard Mourdock, who apparently misplaced and then rediscovered $320 million in state tax revenues.

Some describe the underlying conflict as Tea Partiers versus the Republican establishment. But this just begs the question of who the Tea Partiers really are and where they came from.

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Robert Scheer - On to the Next ‘Bubble Fantasy’

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/on_to_the_next_bubble_fantasy_20111222/

Posted on Dec 22, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Few journalists have greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East, than New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But his tortured obit of a column this week on the official end of the neocolonialist disaster that has been the Iraq occupation reminds one that the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner often gets it wrong.

Was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he did so much to encourage, a “wise choice”? Friedman hides behind one of his trademark ambiguities: “My answer is twofold: ‘No’ and ‘Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.’ I say ‘no’ because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.”

Aside from the stunning amorality of assessing the cost of war from the standpoint of the royal “we,” Friedman seems wildly optimistic about what the invasion has wrought. On a day when Iraq’s prime minister, a Shiite, demanded that the leader of the Kurds arrest the Sunni vice president, Friedman celebrated the unity of the three groups as “the most important product of the Iraq war.” He blamed the failure of the U.S. occupation to accomplish more, in roughly equal measure, on “the incompetence of George W. Bush’s team in prosecuting the war,” “Iran, the Arab dictators and, most of all, Al Qaeda,” which he seems surprised to report “did not want a democracy in the heart of the Arab world.” 

President Bush’s argument for the invasion was not based on democratic nation-building but rather on two specific lies that Friedman has long danced around: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that threatened U.S. security and that it was somehow linked to the 9/11 attacks. Friedman now insists “Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed for me from a different choice: Could we ... tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?”

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Mark Hertsgaard - Deniers-in-Chief: How the Most Powerful Leaders in the World Just Guaranteed Us a Climate Disaster

By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation

Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on December 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153459/deniers-in-chief%3A_how_the_most_powerful_leaders_in_the_world_just_guaranteed_us_a_climate_disaster

The following article first appeared on the Web site of the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its email newsletters. 

A different and more dangerous breed of climate denier commanded the stage at the recently concluded international negotiations in Durban, South Africa. These were not the usual cranks blathering fossil-fuel-industry talking points about how the science is all rubbish aimed at fostering a liberty-crushing world government. No, this breed is even more frightening, precisely because its members are not wacko outsiders. Rather, they are Serious People who actually run governments, or at least negotiate on behalf of those who do. They are lawyers, diplomats and government ministers, and they would be very surprised to hear themselves described as climate deniers.

After all, men such as Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, the top two US negotiators in Durban, and Xie Zhenhua, who headed China's delegation, understand the basics of climate science well enough. They know that burning fossil fuels, leveling forests and other types of human activity are dangerously overheating the planet. They know that far-reaching action must be taken if their countries and humanity as a whole are to escape encroaching disaster. They even know--for they explicitly endorsed it at the last round of major climate negotiations in Copenhagen two years ago--that 2 degrees Celsius is the absolute maximum temperature rise that can be allowed if there is to be any chance of avoiding catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate change.

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Benjamin Schett - Russia's Elections. Who is Calling the Shots at the Duma?

By Benjamin Schett

Global Research, December 22, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28317

The Russian elections this month held some unwelcome surprises for the nation’s ruling party, "United Russia". Administered in tandem by current president Dmitri Medvedev and prime minister Vladimir Putin (soon to be president once again), United Russia found itself receiving significantly lower-than-normal parliamentary results. This, combined with the protests that ensued quickly thereafter, seems to have sparked the corporate media’s hopes for a "colour revolution".

The situation echoes the Serbian, Georgian and Ukrainian models; in these and several other countries, the governments had to step down after mass protests were organised with the support of US think tanks including the National Endowment for Democracy. These actions, led by the US and several EU countries, were geared toward the installation of leaderships that were more in line with Western agendas than their predecessors, and not necessarily in the interest of the Russian population.

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Ray McGovern - Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth

December 21, 2011

Exclusive: The prosecution of Pvt. Bradley Manning for inconvenient truth-telling is more proof of how hypocritical Official Washington is, especially when Manning’s case is compared to how Bush administration officials walked despite clear evidence that they sanctioned torture and other war crimes, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/21/pvt-manning-and-the-imperative-of-truth/

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

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