Category Archives: Law

May 15

IS MITT ROMNEY REALLY A JOB CREATOR?

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Before Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought the rambling SCM factory in Marion, Ind., it was running three shifts a day, making hanging file folders and other office supplies. But on July 5, 1994, everything changed.
The former SCM/AmPad plant in Marion, Ind., which Bain Capital closed back in 1994, is now occupied by another company called Novapak.
The new owner, American Pad & Paper, owned in turn by Bain Capital, told all 258 union workers they were fired, in a cost-cutting move.
Security guards hustled them out of the building. They would be able to reapply for their jobs, at lesser wages and benefits, but not all would be rehired.
“We were told they bought the assets, not the union or the [labor] contract,” recalls Randy Johnson, who at the time worked as a machine operator and was a union shop steward. The workers – some the third generation in their families to have jobs there – eventually went on strike, and Bain closed the factory 5-1/2 months after acquiring it.
Not far from the former plant is a Staples office supply company – the typical store employs 20 to 30 people – and a Domino’s Pizza franchise, which typically has about 15 workers. Both outlets can point to contributions from Bain Capital, which provided seed money for the parent company to grow, eventually adding thousands of jobs across the US.
For much more click on:
May 08

HOW TO RAISE PROERTY VALUES AND DECREASE CRIME….

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RESPONSE FROM FRIEND:”I do not think that those states are trying to block votes…. I think it will help prevent fraud. Now do not tell me that there has been no fraud…..I think 99.44% of registered voters have picture IDs. But that is just my humble opinion.”
My friend has a point: Registered or not, Voting or not…, ID or not is a dilemma. It’s difficult to tell.  Many that don’t vote say they are “too busy.”  We know that the more people vote, the better for them, our county, state and our country.  The person that votes feels more involved in the community which can lead to better communities, lower crime rates and increase the value of their homes and rentals.
To make sure we get a majority to vote we need to do a couple of things: 1) Make sure each person is qualified to vote in the state they are in and are helped to get to the voting booth and vote without hindrance if necessary, and 2} Make sure there are plenty of voting booths in all communities that give proper notice and time. Some states don’t place Boothe’s in poor and/or non-white areas. That is  not American, raises crime and lowers property values that spread to other communities in adjourning areas.  Absentee voting with proper time allowed would be great. As Americans, no right is more precious than the constitutional right to select our leaders. Yet many eligible citizens are not even registered to vote. You can help reach out to eligible people in your neighborhood who are not yet registeredSee More

www.dosomething.org

As Americans, no right  is more precious than the constitutional right to select our leaders. Yet many eligible citizens are not even registered to vote.You  can help reach out to eligible people….
May 07

31 STATES TRY TO BLOCK VOTES….

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FUNDAMENTALIST STATES BLOCKING VOTES OF YOUNG & OLD NON-WHITES AND POOR WHITES (unless they have an ID). WHAT HAPPENED TO ONE PERSON ONE VOTE? They are also closing voting booths in poor WHITE AND NON-WHITE AREAS. HOPEFULLY ENOUGH FAIR MINDED CITIZENS WILL MAKE SURE EVERYONE VOTES (even if they have to pick them up and make sure that they vote without hinderance).

Thirty-one states have voter identification laws, including eight — Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — that were enacted or toughened last year. Of the 31 laws, 27 are expected to be in effect for the general election this year, says Meagan Dorsch, spokeswoman for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a bipartisan research group. One has been blocked by federal action; three have later effective dates.
Laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls have been around since 1970, but they are becoming more numerous and stringent. Once a voter registration card or utility bill sufficed. Now a growing number of laws require voters to show picture IDs.
Most of the new laws have been passed by Republican legislatures, the NCSL says. Supporters say they are necessary to prevent fraud. Opponents say they keep the poor, minorities and seniors — who often back Democrats — from voting because those groups are less likely than the general population to have government-issued IDs.
The Justice Department and civil liberties groups are challenging laws in several states:
May 07

CONGRESS HOLDING CANCER DRUG FOR BABIES 14 MNTHS?

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CANCER DRUG FOR BABIES HELD UP FOR 14 MONTHS AND WAITING. WHY? It hasn’t reached the floor. Asked leader of house and senate: We have our own way of doing things & it’s so complicated I don’t have time to tell you. GOD HELP US!!! They are your employees.

CALL THEM! If we don’t they’ll just keep on talking to lobbyists $$$, etc. If the GOP STALLS LONG ENOUGH THEY MIGHT REACH THEIR GOAL: GETTING THAT BLACK PRESIDENT OUT! MANY  FUNDAMENTALIST STATES BLOCKING VOTES OF YOUNG & OLD NON-WHITES AND POOR WHITES (unless they have an ID).  TO HELL WITH THAT.  WHAT HAPPENED TO ONE PERSON ONE VOTE?  They are also closing voting booths in poor  WHITE AND NON-WHITE AREAS. 

TO HELL WITH  THAT!  HOPEFULLY ENOUGH FAIR MINDED CITIZENS WILL MAKE SURE EVERYONE  VOTES (even if they have to pick them up and make sure that they vote without hinderance).

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       Want to change your city, state, country and world? Following is your best way:   CALL YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/ Even if you get a voice mail, leave a message for they count the “For/Against.” Vote for the candidate who WILL BE FAIR TO ALL, OK?
HELPING OTHERS HELP THEMSELVES HELPS YOU!
May 01

10 TOP TWEETS FOR YOU…

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10,000 – 25,000+ #MayDay Protesters in NYC w/ Tons of Cops…. but #OWS is Dead. How’s the Teaparty Doing? #M1NYC#M1GS#OWS#p2

New At C&L: Mitt Romney, Then and Now: Osama Bin Laden Edition http://gocl.me/IwNAtH

Obama hails the future of a ‘new kind of relationship with Afghanistan http://on.msnbc.com/Ktna7m
Crowd estimates place size the #NYC march between 10,000 to 25,000. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?
Retweeted by TheNewDeal
SHOCKER: The Media is Downplaying #MayDay Protests. If it’s Not a Big Deal… Tell That to the Scores of Cops in NYC. #M1NYC#M1GS#OWS#p2
Employers could save billions by dropping workers from health plans, report shows http://fxn.ws/IExOMI#obamacare
Obama sees ‘clear path’ to end Afghan mission http://aje.me/Ktoffr
U.S. Marines accused of injuring Brazilian stripper http://thebea.st/JQFz29
Why Greece, Spain, and Portugal need to quit the Euro to save their economies: http://slate.me/IlcQPd
Apr 29

WHEN IN DOUBT CHECK IT OUT?

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BEWARE WOLVES IN SHEEPS CLOTHING. ~mackie
By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Obama “a low level socialist agitator,” said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is “a threat to the gene pool” and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or the discredited right wing rocker Ted Nugent.
But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief: “78 to 81 Democrats… members of the Communist Party?” That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics.
Back in the early 1950’s, the Cold War had begun and Americans were troubled by the Soviet Union’s rise as an atomic superpower.  Looking for a campaign issue, McCarthy seized on fear and ignorance to announce his discovery of a conspiracy within: Communist subversives who had infiltrated the government.
In speech after speech, McCarthy would hold up a list of names of members of the Communist Party he said had burrowed their way into government agencies and colleges and universities. The number he claimed would vary from day to day and when pressed to make his list public, McCarthy would stall or claim he accidentally had thrown it away.
Apr 26

NON WHITES FEAR VOTE NOT COUNTING…

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Brentin Mock on April 26, 2012 – 10:21 AM ET

It’s becoming more difficult for people to see how their vote is going to matter in the 2012 election. When states are increasingly passing voter ID laws that mandate voters prove they are citizens or that they are legitimate voters at the polls, while Super PACs are able to field millions of dollars, often from unidentified people, to influence elections, then democracy becomes less of a real thing to many people. A new survey from the Brennan Center for Justice shows majorities of Americans seeing Super PACs as corrupting forces on elections. There’s enough Super PAC distrust in the survey that many said they likely won’t vote. Evidently Bonnie Raitt isn’t the only person who feels, as she said in Rolling Stone, that “we have an auction instead of an election.”Voters of color certainly feel that way. In the Brennan survey, African-Americans and Latino Americans were more likely than whites to say they feel discouraged from voting due to the outsized influence of Super PACs, and who can blame them?  In many states, voters of color will have to go through the often user-unfriendly process of excavating birth and marriage documents, and then hoping there’s a DMV office close by that they can get to between shifts or after work hours, all to get ID cards that they otherwise wouldn’t need. Once done, they better hope their address doesn’t change (hope they’re not evicted, foreclosed upon or otherwise homeless), or that their name doesn’t change (hope they don’t get divorced), or if they are Latino, hope that their name is recorded correctly, or else they may get turned away after a long wait in line because the ID information doesn’t match with the registers.

For more click on:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/167579/people-color-less-likely-vote-due-super-pac-influence

Apr 19

LESS EXPENSIVE AND BETTER HEALTHCARE?

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Roger Foster, senior director, DRC (source cited below)

Today, healthcare in the U.S. is a $2.6 trillion market. According to recent reports, at least $600-850 billion of the healthcare spending goes to embedded inefficiencies that increase the cost and decrease the overall quality of public health.
These inefficiencies include the un-warranted use of healthcare services, criminal fraud and abuse, administrative inefficiencies, provider inefficiencies including medical errors, lack of overall coordinated care, and preventable conditions/avoidable care.
In an attempt to address these challenges, government agencies are flooded in a tidal wave of biomedical information. It is not unusual to see hospitals and hospital chains addressing petabyte (1015 bytes) scale data sets when they review all their electronic records.
According to Graham Hughes, CMO of the SAS Center for Health Analytics and Insights, the U.S. healthcare data sets reached 150 exabytes (1018 bytes) in 2011. For context, 5 exabytes of data would contain all words ever spoken by human beings. At this rate, Big Data will soon reach the zettabyte (1021) scale and a yottabyte (1024) won’t be far behind.
If properly managed, modeled and shared, however, the same wave of health data or “Big Data” flooding government agencies will also be the key to improving care outcomes and ultimately population health.
A McKinsey Global Health Institute study projected that the application of Big Data health analytics can potentially remove $200-$300 billion in cost inefficiencies from the U.S. healthcare system. This means that creative and effective use of Big Data could reduce national healthcare expenditures by 8 percent.
The collective actions and shared goals of government agencies have a large impact on the healthcare system. Between government investments in healthcare and the insured lives of all Medicare/Medicaid recipients, federal and state workers, active duty military and veterans — government agencies influence nearly 40 percent of all healthcare spending in the U.S. How government agencies approach managing their huge stores of healthcare data will be critical to improving public health and delivering better quality care with improved outcomes and lower overall cost.
Apr 17

FORMER FEDS NOW WORKING ON WALLSTREET?

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Tune in to the Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC at 4pm ET for an exclusive look at the transcripts of meetings of top Fed officials during the financial crisis from 2007-2010.

As I told you on Friday, the Huffington Post and the Dylan Ratigan Show got some significant internal documents from the Federal Reserve.  We’ll be releasing them at 4pm on my show, on the Huffington Post, and at DylanRatigan.com.  They gave us the transcripts of certain internal meetings from 2007-2010, the meetings where their top officials planned their response to the gathering crisis (these are known as Federal Open Market Committee meetings, or FOMC).  Willingly giving away documents isn’t how the Fed typically operates, especially documents that might point to serious management problems within the central bank.  They are known as a tight-knit bank-friendly super-secret agency.

Is the Fed finally coming clean?

After all, recently, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has engaged in a public relations campaign to improve the image of his vaunted Fed.  The central banker has lectured to college students, gone on a media outreach campaign, and even opened a twitter account.  New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley has also gone out of his way to introduce his part of the system to the public.  The New York Fed has opened up its research team to the world with a new blog.

For more click on: http://www.dylanratigan.com/2012/04/16/is-the-federal-reserve-coming-clean/

Apr 11

Justice Department formally charges Apple

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Justice Department formally charges Apple, big five publishers in e-book price fixing case (update)

By posted Apr 11th 2012 10:10AM
The Justice Department has formally decided to sue Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillian, Penguin and Simon & Schuster over alleged e-book price-rigging. Apple and Macmillian have already denied any wrongdoing, saying that the agreements were enhancing competition in an industry previously dominated by Amazon. The case centers around a deal to switch to agency pricing, where the vendor takes a 30 percent cut of each sale rather than the wholesale model which allows stores to sell books at rock-bottom prices. It was previously believed that the publishers had cut back-room deals with the Government agency after bowing to pressure to withdraw Cupertino‘s “favored nation” status. If successful, the DoJ will allow Amazon and Barnes and Noble amongst others to return to the wholesale model to sell best-sellers at a loss, something that the big five are desperate to avoid, and will look to fight the battle in court. Update: The PDF of the DoJ’s filing is now available online — it makes for fascinating reading. Update 2: Bloomberg is now reporting that Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA‘s Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins have settled with the DoJ over unspecified terms. Hasty!