Slashdot Mirror

Apparently it's now part of "Art Institutes":
https://www.republicreport.org/2018/inside-a-for-profit-college-conversion-lucrative-ties-troubling-actions/

I run DCEH, Richardson said. I run Woz U.

That was true. Richardson, while serving as head of DCEH, which is a subsidiary of the faith-based, Los Angeles-headquartered non-profit Dream Center, is also the chairman of the board of Woz U., which is connected to a network of for-profit companies owned or staffed by Richardson, his close relatives, and long-time associates.

You can file a complaint, Richardson said on the call with his staff, but I’m not going to answer your 62 questions. Go back to work, he said, or whatever you do. For some of those listening, Richardson’s tone was not just hostile, but intimidating.

And there's this:
https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/university-of-greed-public-citizen-education-report-2018.pdf

Brent Richardson, who helped engineer the transformation of Arizona-based Grand Canyon
University from a religious non-profit school into a publicly-traded for-profit giant, is now
CEO of Dream Center Education Holdings LLC, which is owned by a Los Angeles-based
Christian nonprofit 167 that purchased 31 Art Institute schools, plus South University and
Argosy University. Dream Center has hired a former Trump campaign advisor, Barry Bennett
to lobby on its behalf and paid Bennett $90,000 in the first quarter of 2018, according to a
lobbying disclosure form.168

I never heard of "Art Institutes" before; anyone? Doesn't sound good though.

Let's review: Wilson couldn't fix California, and neither could the Governator. But Governor Moonbeam did, and now the state is out of the hole, growing again, and projecting a surplus, all from RAISING TAXES.

To be a bit more clear: Wilson got close, significantly reducing the gap on the deficit in the weeks before the recall election. Also recall: California had been shaken down by Enron's manipulation of the newly (and badly) deregulated energy market, paying usurious electricity prices, completely eating up CA's budget surplus and more besides.

Then the special recall election happened, and Ah-nold got elected because everyone thought it would be cute -- not to mention a self-satisfying poke in the eye to the establishment -- to have a rank amateur running things (sound familiar?).

It's also worth noting that this is the second time that Governor "Moonbeam" has cleaned up the mess left behind by a bumbling B-grade movie actor.

Nah.

I'm from there.

There are lots of examples where people and entities will not do what's legal, right, or ethical until litigation kicks in.

I give you tobacco, fire codes, food safety, and other shit.

It's true lawyers work for a profit, but a lot of professions are like that.

http://www.citizen.org/documen...

And on several occasions it's been shown that bills submitted by representatives were essentially (sometimes literally) word-for-word copies of legislation drafted by lobbying groups.

http://www.npr.org/sections/it...

It's cliche' that if you're rich you buy yourself a politician. If you're rich and smart, you buy yourself a lobbyist - lobbyists can't be kicked out with an election.
=Smidge=

It's the logo! Read the Demand Letter. The logo is trademarked. What part of that don't you understand?

It doesn't necessarily have to be a health affecting issue for them to be required to label it. One of the conditions of TPP (and might be part of NAFTA as well) is that you won't be allowed to label what country the food comes from. Personally, I like to buy food that comes from my country. Call me "nationalist", but I see value in keeping my dollars local. It's not a health issue in that case (although it can be for other clauses of TPP-enforced labelling), but an economic and ideological one. Why shouldn't people get to make the same choice when it comes to GMO?

Efforts to prevent disclosure of facts only serve corporate interests and no-one else's.

You think Greens would actually support desalination? Look at these:

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.o...
(Huntington Beach is a small coastal town in our country which is suffering a record drought).
http://www.citizen.org/documen...
http://desalalternatives.org/
http://www.dcbureau.org/201103...
http://www.watereducation.org/...

These links are not about random ranters, but well-funded activist groups with the legal resources it takes to tie up vital projects for as long as it takes to starve them to death. It's time we investigated where all the activist cash is coming from.

WTO and similar arbitaration boards existed for many moons now. They deal with protectionist tariffs

No, they don't.

'According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done"'

"The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations." ref

'According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done"'

"The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations." ref

Assuming the existing companies will allow such a network to exist, what will we do with it?

The TPP is going to lock everything down, so our only choices are ultra-high speed access to what we already have on cable TV right now.

That's simply not true.

https://action.citizen.org/p/d...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/d...

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Right. This is what happened with the financial meltdown, exactly. There were few prosecutions and none of the household -name people - Jamie Dimon Lloyd Blankfein, Angelo Mozilo, Richard Fuld, Bear Stearnsâ(TM)s Jimmy Cayne, Merrill Lynchâ(TM)s Stan Oâ(TM)Neal, Citigroupâ(TM)s Chuck Prince all of these people are untouchable even though we lost literally a trillion dollars and more during the meltdown and entire lifetime retirements of people were destroyed . Eric Holder and his justice department looks and looks but golly! just can't find a gosh-darn thing he can charge them with.

It's a joke. A sick sick joke and made me lose a LOT of respect for the whole process of criminal justice. This is not a nation of laws, it's a nation of money and a nation of men when it comes right down to it. Same thing with the Transpacific Partenership- people with money and connections are literally usurping the environmental, labor , patent, copyright and other laws of nations. Laws which were arrived at through the respective societys' democratic process.

This is how empires fail They overreach. They heedless impose the will of mere individuals - or in this case corporations- upon people who disapprove of what they're doing by a ratio, in this nation at least , of 300 million to one.

This is how societies collapse. This is the steady rip rip of the social contract between the government and it's people that is not forgotten but instead goes underground, into people's living memories only later to emerge and play a decisive roll in the dissolution of that society. The government is known by all, in this case left and right and center, to be corrupt, unresponsive, indifferent to its people and serving only the needs of its elite, which are endlessly craven and grasping and greedy. People are cynical, but that's just the outward tell of their inner states.

Then something ecological happens directly owing to the untrammeled greed of the 1% and the society goes down all at once. This is not speculative, it's happened time and time again. To the Anasazi of the U.S. Southwest, to the Classic Lowland Maya, to the inhabitants of Easter Island and some other Polynesian societies, to the Greenland Norse, to the Mycenean Greece, and to the Western Roman Empire.

Hate to present a totalizing narrative which "explains all things" but it's not just my opinion that this is coming; it's the Pentagon's and the NSA's also:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism

If the Pentagon and the NSA and Obama had any sense at all, they'd prioritize climate legislation and start treating the manufacturers and purveyors of climate change denial like the threat to civilization they literally are.

Then they'd go after the deprivations of the 1% - typical example the contents of the TPP- which are literally tearing the social fabric of this nation apart.

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

http://www.exposethetpp.org/

https://www.citizen.org/TPP

Environmental disaster as the trigger to societal collapse:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/3632.full

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

\http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/07/17/2858655.htm

This look at credit-card related MBA doesn't look good. It also isn't a good sign that even the Wall Street Journal, not exactly known for its The Daily Worker editorial slant, has observed the problem.

So, yeah, the available statistics don't look good, and the structure under which company/consumer arbitration is operated(Company requires many arbitrations/year, gets to select arbiters, results of past arbitrations are obviously available to the company; but typically not available to the consumer, arbiters know that future business can depend on past 'results') it'd be a fucking miracle if any impartiality existed...

Yes, you did need to provide a link because googling it shows that you are wrong. Promotional budgets at US pharmaceutical firms average 24.4% of their US domestic sales, less than half what you claimed. Here's another source saying 30%, and that's from a largely anti-big pharma report.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think pharma companies should spend (or necessarily be allowed to spend) so much money on advertising, especially direct-to-consumer advertising, but get your facts straight, especially when you're going to make such sweeping claims.

"I just wish they would make an exception for pharmaceuticals, because getting the fruits of someone else's labors for nothing is a moral issue."

There, fixed that for you.

Meanwhile, here in Reality, pharmaceutical companies are doing just that, and jackasses are jumping blindly off the cliff to defend them...

They may also outcompete on patient satisfaction.

Generics don't necessarily equate (nor do branded versions), and both for that reason and physician inertia, the prescription market tends to be slow to shift. Here's an example:

http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3106

As to why they don't equate -- even when the active ingredient is identical, the various binders and excipients can greatly differ, and that can mean that some patients only do well on a specific brand. This can be particularly critical with drugs that are prescribed in very low doses (micrograms) or that tend to degrade very rapidly.

I was just reading a study on that the other day (can't find it again offhand but it was in NEJM) -- for one commonly-prescribed drug, results were radically different depending on the binder -- from 18% to 90%. This can result in nominally-identical drugs not being bioequivalent (and the FDA has a rating system for bioequivalence).

[BTW as it turned out, the cheap old-fashioned sugar-based binders performed best.]

Sue them for what, exactly? Arbitration companies advertise themselves to corporate clients as a highly effective form of debt collection. You think they'd be quite that shameless if they didn't have carte blanche to do as they please once someone is foolish enough to sign a contract waiving their ability to use the courts?

To quote Public Citizen:

• With rare exceptions, arbitration decisions are not subject to court review on their merits. Courts have ruled that "wacky" and "silly" decisions can be upheld. Even decisions that cause "substantial injustice" are allowed to stand.

• Limited public information shows the bias of BMA:

  • In California, National Arbitration Forum arbitrators handled more than 19,000 disputes involving credit card holders. The card holders prevailed only 4 percent of the time. The companies won 94 percent of the time.
  • In 16,056 of the 19,000 cases, the arbitrator based a decision solely on documents provided by the company. Consumers won two times; the companies won 16,054 times.
  • In 2,019 cases where the arbitrator actually held a hearing, the consumer prevailed in only1.4 percent of the cases.
  • Documents filed in an Alabama court case show that NAF arbitrators decided in favor of the consumer 87 times and in favor of First USA Bank 19,610 (99.6 percent) times.

To be sure, big companies may win in the courts more often than the little guys do... but 99.6%?

Close. If they took arbitration they would have lost. 96.8% of arbitration goes in favor of the company. http://www.citizen.org/documents/ArbitrationDebateTrap(Final).pdf

Funny the only case I can think of for a "shrink wrapped" EULA product is the AutoDesk case. In that case the judge ruled that the item in question was sold and not licensed.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

Here is a linked copy of the Judge's decision:

http://www.citizen.org/documents/vernororder.pdf

I see you cited plenty of these cases. Oh wait this is /. where AC's make broad comments with nothing to back them up.

Medical malpractice lawsuits are tort cases... and we know how much testing is only done because of fear of the lawsuits. Limit the liability, and there would be much less wasted medicine being practiced.

Hasn't seemed to make much difference in Texas - the state with so much tort reform that the Governor likes to brag that malpractice insurance rates have come down - but no metric that measure the quality of healthcare has improved, for example:

• The percentage of uninsured people in Texas has increased, remaining the highest in the country with a quarter of Texans now uninsured;
• The cost of health insurance in the state has more than doubled;
• The cost of health care in Texas (measured by per patient Medicare reimbursements) has increased at nearly double the national average; and
• Spending increases for diagnostic testing (measured by per patient Medicare reimbursements) have far exceeded the national average.

Even worse - most of the malpractice savings have gone to the insurance companies, because malpractice payments have gone 67% but malpractice insurance premiums have only gone down 27%.

Public Citizen, Dec 17th, 2009

The identity of the journalist may possibly be considered protected if the journalist is anonymous, but I highly doubt it.

With regards to defamation, courts generally hold that anonymous people remain anonymous until the plaintiff can prove that defamation occurred, ie the identity of the messenger has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the message (for a randomly selected example see this which itself cites other cases on page 8 (lol scanned pdf)).

In the general case, anonymity has existed since before Publius, who the Supreme Court is generally fond of referencing when upholding anonymity.

The information requested in the subpoena is the same data listed in the statute listed.

Going back to my other post, if the law said that you can subpoena for my unicorns, would you look any less stupid if you went to court to demand my unicorns? Absent mod_psychicpowers, unicorns are as likely as SSNs and bank account numbers to be in the webserver logs.

Please explain what part of the First Amendment is being violated.

The other half of the right to speak without government interference: the right to listen without government interference. Upheld multiple times.

Please explain how the gag order is unconstitutional, including the relevant sections of the Constitution and other law.

Generally speaking, issuing a gag order directly against a journalist is not permissible. This is why gag orders are generally restricted to parties involved, to keep them from talking to the press. Other cases cited at the EFF link above.

The subscriber, commenter, etc. has no standing under the Fourth Amendment because the property of the subscriber, commenter, etc. is not being searched.

Well, good thing IndyMedia was the one objecting to the search, making this line of argument pointless.

What happened to Video Professor? Should have made the list IMO:

In mid-August, in federal court in Denver, the Video Professor, a self-proclaimed consumer advocate, sued his own customers for posting comments on two consumer comment Web sites. The sites, infomercialratings.com and infomercialscams.com, are run by a Nevada company, Leonard Fitness, Inc.

The Professor alleged that his detractors had violated federal trademark laws by saying negative things about the name of his product, as well as committing defamation and several violations of state law

By following TFA to the comments section you get led to ars which has a link to the judgement it says that the defendant did ask to have his auction reinstated and it was with no further requests from Autodesk to have it removed again. http://www.citizen.org/documents/vernororder.pdf

Here is a quote:
In 2005, Mr. Vernor purchased an authentic, used AutoCAD package1 at a garage sale and put it up for auction on eBay. Autodesk responded by sending a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (âoeDMCAâ) notice to eBay claiming that the sale would infringe its copyright. EBay suspended the auction. Mr. Vernor responded with a DMCA counter-notice claiming that his sale was lawful, to which Autodesk never responded

For the reasons stated above, the court DENIES Autodeskâ(TM)s motion for dismissal or summary judgment (Dkt. # 20).

So as you can see the action that the parent is talking about is a motion from Autodesk for summary judgment. The judge is just hearing arguments to determine if the case can be heard bench or by jury.

If you read the judge's insight from the document it would sound like he will hear arguments for the case in bench trail and then send the case up to Ninth Circuit Appellate court, seeing how that's where the kluge is, you can tell from Section III sub-section 5 of the ruling how conflicted the judge is (but at least he mans up and picks one.)

R&D is not the only major cost involved with new drugs. Regulatory hurdles are enormous as well.

Yes, but not as enormous as lobbyists and kickbacks to politicians or marketing.

R&D is not the only major cost involved with new drugs. Regulatory hurdles are enormous as well.

Yes, but not as enormous as lobbyists and kickbacks to politicians or marketing.

Looking at WHO's methodology, what a joke. "Fairness of financial contribution?" And of course, Cuba is a police state. Not exactly an open, transparent society. So how is WHO they getting open access to information?

That's just one measure, and Cuba didn't do so great in it either. As for how WHO gets their information, they gave up after 2000 as it's too complicated to do this type of assessment. Luckily we still have you.

Plus, Americans are unhealthy because they are fat and don't exercise and drive everywhere. Cubans, who are starving most of the time and have to walk everywhere obviously have some "advantages" that have nothing to do with healthcare.

There's still the matter of those 36 countries above us. Are they all third world countries?

Any ranking that puts Canada ahead of the US is one I give little credence to. The US is where rich Canadians go to get their healthcare, LOL.

I'm sure rich Americans get great health care too. That doesn't mean the country has a good health care system.

There is no other country in the world that I would rather be that America when I get sick. Not Cuba, not Canada, not the UK, not France. The USA. Because some part of the population here 1) are illegal aliens or 2) would rather drive late model cars instead of paying for the privilege of heath care (lets face it, the poor already have medicaid), does not affect the 80% of Americans who have kick ass healthcare.

Just hope you don't get a chronic condition. If your job lays you off and the Cobra runs out your stuck with a pre-existing condition and premiums that are through the roof. Hopefully it won't happen to you, but it's probably happening to someone. That's not what I call insurance. Matters are even worse if you're close to the poverty line; it's estimated that 58% of Americans will spend at least one year in poverty. (Hacker, J. S. (2006). The great risk shift: The new insecurity and the decline of the American dream. New York: Oxford University Press (USA)) and it's estimated that approximately 60 percent of poor Americans are not covered by Medicaid http://www2.citizen.org/hrg/medicaid/assets/reports/2007UnsettlingScores.pdf

The ranking I care about isn't compiled with some silly left wing methodology. It's called mortality rates for diseases like cancer and heart disease. And the US does a lot better than most of those socialized medicine countries in survivability of those diseases, those which I am most likely to get. You can take your free abortions in Cuba.

So there are universal healthcare systems that do better than the US in the narrow statistic you care about. So what's your point again?

It's called harmonization and it is generally profit-driven.

Drug companies do not make particularly high profits.

According to this report (which I found by searching google for "drug company profits"), the median profits of Fortune 500 drug companies in 2002 were 17% of revenue. The median profits of all Fortune 500 companies were 3.1% of revenue. I'm not sure that this particularly matters, though, when discussing the ethics of price controls.

These figures do have some weight, however, when discussing the practicalities of price controls. You claim that price controls would discourage drug companies from developing new drugs. I have heard this argument a few times before and I am yet to be convinced by it. If drug companies stand to make a profit by developing new drugs, they will develop new drugs. If government were to cut their profits in half, say, by imposing price controls then the drug companies would still have lots of incentive to develop new drugs. The drug industry has a large enough profit margin that I cannot see it collapsing due to government intervention.

Of course, the ethics of price controls are more interesting than the practicalities. Even if it had no negative effects on the development of new drugs, would it be ethical for government to pass legislation to harm drug companies? Personally, I would be OK with that. Drug companies currently benefit from government intervention in the form of patent law and publicly funded scientific research. Allowing them unrestricted profits seems like a case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

If I purchase a copy of the game, I *DO* own it. Otherwise, I have the right to get a replacement and or refund if my CD or DVD gets scratched. Does that really happen? I don't think so.

If we gave money and got a CD, it's not a license. It's a sale. Especially when you go to the website and see the words "purchase", "order" and "buy". See Vernor v. Autodesk. A good review of the decision is available at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080523-court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.html

So what DRM is really about, is an attempt at circumventing the first sale doctrine. Therefore, it should be declared illegal.

[sarcasm]I'm sure there are plenty of inspectors to enforce that law as well.[/sarcasm]

Mad cow disease, just so you understand it, is prion based. It does not just randomly happen. It is impossible for the brain to just make up prions. It must first come in contact with them by consumption or injection. Considering the fact that no one goes around injecting the bovine population with syringes filled with prions we must conclude a cow get's them by ingestion. That would mean that a "mad cow" infected animal got that why be eating the brain or spinal tissue of another MAMMAL.

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1629

http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/silence51104.cfm

http://www.goveg.com/ABD_madcow.asp

... that they apparently defeated the 'weapons industry' for the title of 'most profitable industry in the world'.

Actually, he started with no lawyer, then Public Citizen gave him some help. I found this information in a copyright blog by one of Google's lawyers mentioned further down in the responses to this article.

I find that plausible, but care to cite a source?

RTFA. Note that nobody ever comes out and says that the emails are in fact lost, except for people who are spinning the story as or to journalists. The government is only ever describing ways in which the emails could have been lost, all the while not supplying the emails themselves. This is because there are laws that would have to be broken in order for these emails to have been lost and it does not appear that Theresa Payton is anxious to be indicted for federal crimes. These statutes have applied to email and electronic records since 1993, so there is no excuse for missing emails, and so the secretive Bush/Cheney administration tries to gum up the works with acts of God with a heapin' helping of "whoops."

I continue to contend that the emails still exist in a known location, but the administration is deseperate not to provide them pursuant to a lawful court order. Ms. Payton should be thrown in the clink for facilitating such contempt of the legal process until such time as she figures out a way to follow the law.

I am not sure that there were any legal fees. According to her blog post, Ms. Seidel was represented by the First Amendment team at Public Citizen. Perhaps Public Citizen should be the ones recovering some of the expenses? In any case they should be congratulated for the win!

I am not sure that there were any legal fees. According to her blog post, Ms. Seidel was represented by the First Amendment team at Public Citizen. Perhaps Public Citizen should be the ones recovering some of the expenses? In any case they should be congratulated for the win!

What I wanted to find out is the annual consumer spending on drugs and compare that to your number of $10 billion So according to this drug companies made 35.9 billion dollars in 2002. Its not exactly the data I wanted but you can figure that money already supplied by the government(medicare, etc) and money "wasted" (would be unnecessary otherwise) on marketing will cancel each other out to some extent. The ultimate point was that people are privately spending tens of billions of dollars a year on patented medicines right now anyway, if we did away with patents and just funneled that into research (via taxes)it could be that everyone ends up paying less for their medicines.

So really patents aren't obviously necessary to the process of drug discovery.

Here's the C&D that was decisioned. They haven't managed to take this down. Then again, it's now part of the public record.

http://www.citizen.org/documents/directbuycd.pdf

Keeping an open mind is a great idea - which is why I'm not going to boycott GMO foods just because they are new.

Good for you. As for myself, I want choice and if I want to wait until GMOs are thoroughly tested I need labels stating if an item is or uses any GMOs. Can we agree on labeling? But if you ask Monsanto or other providers and venders they are against labeling for GMOs. If GMOs are so good these people would be fighting for labeling, they could use it as a selling point saying how good GMOs are. Companies lobbied in Europe though to stop mandatory labels. When the EU required mandatory labeling though the US and US businesses sued the EU in the WTO against it: "Final WTO Tribunal Decision on GMO Policy Reaffirms Lower Panel: WTO Wades into Food Fight, but Stops Short of Ruling Against Underlying GMO Policy"

Then I guess I shouldn't say that the supposedly copyrighted C&D letter could be obtained at http://www.citizen.org/documents/directbuycd.pdf by anybody with an internet connection? Good to know.

is here(warning, PDF)

I tire of websites that make you jump through hoops to show you the dealio.

Why would any sane person want to restrict education (or health care for that matter) to those wealthy enough to afford it?

It is class war, and it's just as alive today as it was in the 1800s, though some try their best to pretend that it isn't. The skyrocketing costs of tuition to even public universities like my own are certainly not scaling up with the rate of inflation. The lower-mid and middle classes are disappearing because of this kind of thing, and have been for a while now. The "petite bourgeoisie" of old is becoming part of what was traditionally the proletariat.

As for restricting things such as education and health care to those who are wealthy enough to afford them, that is the end result of privatisation. Makes sense (to the capitalists, at least) when you are talking about a television set, but it becomes an abomination when it is applied to water or something else that is a necessity for survival. As far as I am concerned, education is one of those things. Everyone should have the right to further education. They may choose not to take advantage of that right, but it should be there nonetheless.

Of course, if all people were to receive a continuous education, along with the ability to utilize it, instead of being too wrapped up with staying alive, then we might one day collectively decide that there is no reason for a "power elite" to exist in the first place.

Tim Griffin, Michael Elston, Paul McNulty, Monica Goodling
Sara Taylor, Bradley Schlozman, Steve Biskupic, Alberto Gonzalez, David Safavian, Lurita Doan, Ken Tomlinson
Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Ted Stevens, Kyle Foggo, Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Curt Weldon, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Tobin
Scooter Libby, Manuel Miranda, Darleen Dryun, Thomas Scully, Chuck Mcgee, Pete Domenici
Porter Goss, Brant Bassett, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ed Buckham, Steven Griles, Mark Foley, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Lay, Conrad Black, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Roger Stilwell, Tony Rudy, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, William Heaton, Adam Kidan, Neil Volz,

If you really had any knowledge of nuclear-related science, you'd know that anything with a "many many thouseands of years of lifespan" in terms of nuclear waste is very very mildly radioactive at all, and mostly harmless.

Apparently, some people who claim to know about "very very mildly radioactive at all, and mostly harmless" nuclear waste plan to spend 100 billion dollars to store to for a while.

Yucca Mountain: Stolen twice from the Native Americans, the second time to test nuclear weapons and securely store nuclear waste and RNC email servers. Brought to you by Bechtel and SAIC, two names you can trust for pork laden, incompetently managed, environmentally damaging, covert and spooky projects. You may remember Bechtel from such hits as The Big Dig (a joint venture with Parsons who helped exaserbate the decay of Iraq by taking 200 million and not building even one of the hospitals or clinics they were supposed to), stuff in Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Mexicali, Bolivia, Humboldt Bay, San Francisco and Iraq and India and other stuff in other places. I am not going to say anything else bad about SAIC because I am afraid of them... He, he, ahh - Just kidding!

An internal National Institutes of Health (NIH) document, obtained by Public Citizen through the Freedom of Information Act, shows how crucial taxpayer-funded research is to top-selling drugs. According to the NIH, taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development of the top five selling drugs in 1995. (See Section III)

"The OP has a choice about which coverage option to choose, and can change if it's not the best option given individual circumstances. You don't and can't."

Incorrect. Canadians are free to purchase additional coverage over and above the provincial plans at their own cost or with costs shared by employers. The provincial plan is a *baseline*, not a *ceiling*.

"Things don't come for free. It's all about how you choose to pay for it. Personally, I'd much rather have the choice in my own hands, rather than in the hands of a politician who can't possibly know what's best for me as an individual, and has only weak standards of efficiency to live up to."

You clearly don't know about how private insurance works, if you think "efficiency" has anything to do with it. Private insurers eat up to 30% (industry average of between 10% and 15%) of all premiums in "overhead" costs (salaries, buildings, processing, etc.), compared to less than 5% for public insurers (See http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/349/8 /768 and http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/ 24/6/1629 and http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=16 23 for starting sources and you can continue your research from there).

What's far more amusing in your stance, however, is your willingness to trust profit-motive-driven corporations with knowing what's best for you as an individual (you don't pick your health plan--your employer does, and even then they can only pick what plans are *offered* by the insurance companies) which have no accountability to you whatsoever, rather than trust someone who is ultimately accountable to the citizenry such as elected provincial officials and the offices they oversee.

True capitalists are all for the right to give things away. That's among the biggest of reasons they oppose the death tax.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are not true capitalists? They don't oppose the estate tax. It is not difficult to find capitalists who support the idea of an estate tax.

The main reason it is an issue seems to be 18 very rich families have purchased enough influence to make it an issue.

Libertarians oppose the estate tax because they oppose taxation in general. Taxation and government are not necessarily anti-capitalist, though Libertarians may disagree.

You can't give things away that the government takes away first.

That is not always true. Generally, the government cannot take what you give away first. Mr. Buffett just greatly reduced the potential tax liability on his estate by giving away 85% of it. Every year, you can decrease your tax liability by giving away some money. In fact, you can give away so much money, that the government will give you back money that they have already taken from you. If the government takes your assets based on some criminal or civil action, your statement holds true; but I don't believe it is true in most cases in the context of federal taxation.

The incentive to give things away created by the estate tax is one of the arguments for keeping it. Sales taxes and usage fees generally create no such incentive.

As a matter of fact, because a communist society doesn't recognize the concept of private property, how can you give something away if you don't have the right to own it in the first place?

I'm certainly not an expert, but I believe the theory goes something like this. You give away the value of your labor in return for what you need. There is no need for charity, because you will not be denied something you need because someone else is claiming it as property. Of course, things work differently in practice; but, that is true of most political and economic theories.