Conflicts of Interest and Revolving Doors that Affect Health and Well Being
This important article has various examples of government/private industry revolving door employment and conflicts of interest in the medical industrial complex that can and has killed people.
Example of revolving door from it:
“Joining a parade of other high-ranking government officials who pass through the revolving doors between government and Big Pharma, [Julie] Gerberding [former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and drug companies] left a trail of controversy behind her when she left the CDC. While a 2009 article by the Institute for Southern Studies lists a number of them, I believe they left out the most important ones, namely her misinformation campaign about the pandemic swine flu vaccine, as well as her naive stance on vaccine safety issues in general.
Veterans Today, 1 August 2012 [ with repeat of 11 January 2011]
EXTRACT:
Next, there’s the valuation based on how much the business owner can inflate the sales price. I will call this the seller’s valuation. Usually, when the buyer plans on keeping the business there is a back and forth struggle for final valuation between buyer and seller. But when the buyer is an investment bank the valuation is based largely on how much they think they can flip it to others for in a public offering. So in this later case the company only receives seller’s valuation because the buyers aren’t involved in the valuation process. Thus, as you can imagine when Wall Street gets involved in the IPO game, many stocks collapse within a couple of years of their IPO price.
Phi Beta Iota: It's not a conspiracy if the facts bear out the story. We are not completely comfortable with this account, but as with the 9/11 truth movement, there is more than enough here to warrant indictments and send people to jail. When a government does not do that–does not defend the public interest–it is called “control fraud” which means that the government is complicit in the crime.
Michel Bauwens examines how collaborative, commons-based production is emerging to challenge capitalism. Below, Hilary Wainwright responds
Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.
Once one of the most solid states in the Middle East and a key pivot of the regional power structure, Syria is now facing wholesale destruction. The consequences of the unfolding drama are likely to be disastrous for Syria’s territorial integrity, for the well-being of its population, for regional peace, and for the interests of external powers deeply involved in the crisis.
A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.
The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.
The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, and commissioned by the Tax Justice Network.
He said $21tn is a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn.
The most interesting item mentioned in this article about this self-published book from a CIA contractor, is the following:
“ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) – Former CIA contractor Jonathan Scherck published a book “containing intelligence-related information” without the CIA's permission and in violation of his secrecy agreements, the United States claims in Federal Court…In the excerpt from his book, Scherck writes: “As I will lay out in much greater detail, I believe the People's Republic of China delivered a turn-key nuclear ballistic missile system to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the course of several years beginning no later than December 2003. This illicit transfer, a flagrant violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, occurred while Dick Cheney was managing both the intelligence and foreign policy portfolios of the George W. Bush administration.” Scherck says in the book that he worked as a collection management officer in the CIA from mid-January 2005 to April 3, 2007. “I was one of only a few individuals in Washington with access to what was being said overseas at the time about Saudi Arabia's procurement of a new ballistic missile system from China,” according to the book. “I read things, I heard things, I saw things. Admittedly, I did not see all – but I saw enough.”
Phi Beta Iota: He is not making money on the book — it has sold under 500 copies at Amazon, yielding 45% of retail to the author. either the CIA is clueless on how its lawsuits actually promote books that would otherwise remain obscure, or someone on the political side has decided Israel needs an assist in publicizing Middle Eastern threats, however nominal, to Israel.
The article about the Libor scandal, coauthored with Nomi Prins, received much attention, with Internet repostings, foreign translation, and video interviews. To further clarify the situation, this article brings to the forefront implications that might not be obvious to those without insider experience and knowledge.
EXTRACT:
Does this mean that the US and UK financial systems can only be kept afloat by fraud that harms purchasers of interest rate swaps, which include municipalities advised by sellers of interest rate swaps, and those with saving accounts?
The answer is yes, but the Libor scandal is only a small part of the interest rate rigging scandal. The Federal Reserve itself has been rigging interest rates. How else could debt issued in profusion be bearing negative interest rates?
As villainous as they might be, Barclays bank chief executive Bob Diamond, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs are not the main villains. The main villains are former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chairman Robert Rubin, who pushed Congress for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the sponsors of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall was put in place in 1933 in order to prevent the kind of financial excesses that produced the current ongoing financial crisis.
CONCLUSION:
To sum up, what has happened is that irresponsible and thoughtless–in fact, ideological–deregulation of the financial sector has caused a financial crisis that can only be managed by fraud. Civil damages might be paid, but to halt the fraud itself would mean the collapse of the financial system. Those in charge of the system would prefer the collapse to come from outside, such as from a collapse in the value of the dollar that could be blamed on foreigners, because an outside cause gives them something to blame other than themselves.
