Americans for Political Change

Western drug companies tested pharmaceuticals on more than 50,000 people in the former communist East Germany, often without the knowledge of patients, several of whom died, the Spiegel news weekly reported Sunday.

Some 600 clinical trials were carried out in more than 50 hospitals until the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the report said, citing previously unpublished documents of the East German health ministry, pharmaceutical institute and Stasi secret police.

Many major drug companies from Germany, Switzerland and the United States took part, offering up to 800,000 West German marks (about 400,000 euros, $520,000 at today’s exchange rate) per study, a boost for East Germany’s underfunded health care system, Spiegel said.

via Revealed: Big Pharma tested dangerous new drugs on unknowing Germans | The Raw Story.

Are you listening Obama supporters? We’ve been had. We thought we getting change, but instead got more of the same–government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich:

The U.S. economy has recovered for households with net worth of $500,000 or more, a new study shows. The recession continues for almost everyone else.
Wealthy households boosted their net worth by 21.2 percent in the aftermath of the recession, according to the study released today by the Pew Research Center. The rest of America lost 4.9 percent of household wealth from 2009 to 2011.
Pew attributed the disparity to gains during that period in the stock and bond markets, benefiting affluent households, while the housing market’s decline hit others harder. The report underscores the nation’s growing income inequality, with the top 13 percent of households recovering their losses from the 18- month recession that ended in June 2009, and the rest of the country continuing to hemorrhage wealth.

…The Pew report, based on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, reinforces a body of evidence that the U.S. is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

…One of the most common measures of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, has risen in the last generation. The coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, with a zero indicating that all income is shared equally and a one representing complete concentration of income.
Income inequality in the U.S. grew to 0.477 in 2011, according to the Census Bureau, a 20.2 percent increase from the 0.397 measured in 1967.

They commit fraud and get to buy their way out of trouble:

Source:

As part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Congress passed a national menu labeling law in 2010 that would require restaurant chains with more than 20 locations post calorie counts for each standard menu item. Three years later, the Food and Drug Administration is still deliberating on the “extremely thorny” issue of how to accommodate various special interests in executing the law. The latest delay concerns clashing interests in the restaurant and grocery lobbies, which believe they should be exempt from the labeling rules…

State and local governments lost $39.8 billion last year because corporations and the wealthy shifted profits to offshore tax havens, an amount roughly equal to what they spent on firefighters in 2008, according to a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The federal government lost $150 billion in revenue to the same practices.

Corporations shifting profits to tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands has consequences for both individual taxpayers and America’s small businesses, and it also complicates efforts to reduce the size of the national deficit, a priority of both parties in Washington. The $150 billion lost to offshore tax avoidance at the federal level annually, the report notes, would be more than enough to offset the automatic spending cuts that are set to take place at the beginning of March if Congress does not offset it. Those cuts total $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

via How Offshore Tax Dodging Is Busting State And Federal Budgets | ThinkProgress.

Source: Raw Story:

US democracy has been “hacked” by big business and needs to be reclaimed using the power of the internet to hold politicians to account, according to former US vice-president Al Gore.

He gave a blunt assessment of the extent to which private companies influence decision making in the US. “American politics has fallen into a state of disrepair,” Gore told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show in an interview to mark the publication of his new book The Future.

Continue reading →

What a joke. No one is going to jail even though BP is guilty of manslaughter. How is that possible? Is that what it means when the Supreme Court said corporations are people? This is farce masquerading as justice:

A federal judge on Tuesday approved an agreement for BP PLC to plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges and pay a record $4 billion in criminal penalties for the company’s role in the 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Before she ruled, U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance heard testimony from relatives of 11 workers who died when BP’s blown-out Macondo well triggered an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and started the spill.

BP agreed in November to plead guilty to charges involving the workers’ deaths and for lying to Congress about the size of the spill from its broken well, which spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil. Much of it ended up in the Gulf and soiled the shorelines of several states.

The company could have withdrawn from the agreement if Vance had rejected it. Neither the Justice Department nor BP presented arguments to the judge before her decision in New Orleans.

source: NY DailyNews

Corporate Profits Have Grown By 171 Percent Under Obama — Highest Rate Since 1900 | Alternet.

U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II, and are now at their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and more than 50 percent greater than during the late-1990s Internet boom, measured by the size of the economy.

An influential group of business CEOs is pushing a plan to gradually increase the full retirement age to 70 for both Social Security and Medicare and to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans.

The Business Roundtable’s plan would protect those 55 and older from cuts but younger workers would face significant changes. The plan unveiled Wednesday would result in smaller annual benefit increases for all Social Security recipients. Initial benefits for wealthy retirees would also be smaller.

via U.S. CEOs push plan to raise full retirement age to 70 – CBS News.

But no one is going to jail. That is why this is not justice. It is a large bribe paid to the government to keep them in business. Just the price of doing business. Corporations are people except when it comes to doing time. They are too big to jail:

UBS AG is expected to be hit with a $1 billion-plus fine to settle charges of rigging Libor interest rates this week, making it the second bank to be brought to book for its role in the global scandal.

The fine, to be imposed by regulators in Britain and the United States, would be the latest blow for the Swiss bank that suffered a rogue trading scandal last year, paid a $780 million fine to settle a U.S. tax investigation in 2009 and nearly collapsed in 2008 under the weight of huge subprime losses.

Source:

Sen. Bernie Sanders fired back at 80 CEOs who wrote a letter lecturing America about deficit reduction by released a report detailing how 18 of these CEOs have wrecked the economy by evading taxes and outsourcing jobs.

[...]1). 1. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan
Amount of federal income taxes paid in 2010? Zero. $1.9 billion tax refund.
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? Over $1.3 trillion.
Amount of federal income taxes Bank of America would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $2.6 billion.

2). Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein
Amount of federal income taxes paid in 2008? Zero. $278 million tax refund.
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? $824 billion.
Amount of federal income taxes Goldman Sachs would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $2.7 billion

3). JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? $416 billion.
Amount of federal income taxes JP Morgan Chase would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $4.9 billion.

It’s a remarkable statement to make at the Democratic National Convention. Especially since it is this party that has helped create this system. Warren is running for the Senate because Obama threw her under bus. Unfortunately, if elected, she would be part of that system:

But for many years now, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered. Talk to the construction worker I met from Malden, Massachusetts, who went nine months without finding work. Talk to the head of a manufacturing company in Franklin trying to protect jobs but worried about rising costs. Talk to the student in Worcester who worked hard to finish his college degree, and now he’s drowning in debt. Their fight is my fight, and it’s Barack Obama’s fight too.

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs–the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs–still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

[...]These folks don’t resent that someone else makes more money. We’re Americans. We celebrate success. We just don’t want the game to be rigged. We’ve fought to level the playing field before. About a century ago, when corrosive greed threatened our economy and our way of life, the American people came together under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt and other progressives, to bring our nation back from the brink.

We started to take children out of factories and put them in schools. We began to give meaning to the words “consumer protection” by making our food and medicine safe. And we gave the little guys a better chance to compete by preventing the big guys from rigging the markets. We turned adversity into progress because that’s what we do.

At lest the Occupy movement has never betrayed it’s followers:

The so-called March on Wall Street South organized by Occupy Charlotte was an overwhelmingly peaceful protest Sunday that echoed the motley causes of Occupy Wall Street that are challenging President Barack Obama. NY1′s Josh Robin filed the following report.

The modest but feisty crowd in Sunday’s “March on Wall Street South” in Charlotte, N.C. channeled the scene of New York’s Occupy movement for an election-eve lament: that President Barack Obama has sold out his liberal base.

“Obama beware, Zuccotti Park is everywhere,” chanted the crowd.

Some said they were reluctant to vote for Obama, while others said the Democrat has become indistinguishable from the other side.

“I hate to say I’m going to vote for the less of two evils, but yes, I’m going to vote for Obama,” said Allyson Caison of Code Pink.

source: NY1.com