[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 07 November 2017 06:42.
Pardon the liberal sources, but in the case of Democracy Now, for example, it was among the first sources to interview the author of the investigation and the coverage sticks pretty much to what he has to say. Democracy Now is literally an anti-White news program and Jewish as well - beginning with Amy Goodman, of course. Hence they are not going to amplify the wrong doings of Jews per se. Please take that under consideration. Critiques as such and suggestions of alternative sources on the story are welcome.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 02 November 2017 07:10.
Although Schumer remains as self righteous a bracket about immigration as ever, in point of fact, he was part of a group of eight which proposed a bill in 2013 to end the Visa Lottery Program. True, he was perhaps opposed to the Visa Lottery for the same reason that the Republican dominated Capital Hill shot down the bill to end the lottery - because it provided a loop hole in which some Whites, who might not otherwise be able, could actually immigrate to the Unites States despite the anti-White measures of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act.
NBC News, “Trump: Suspect Entered U.S. in ‘Diversity Visa Lottery,’ Blames Schumer”, 1 Nov 2017:
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the Uzbek immigrant suspected of killing eight people in New York City with a rental truck entered the U.S. through the “Diversity Visa Lottery Program,” and the president accused Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats of having loosened the nation’s borders.
Trump did not provide any supporting evidence for the claim about the visa program, which was being discussed on the morning TV program “Fox and Friends” that the president indicated in his tweets he was watching.
“The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based,” Trump tweeted.
At a Cabinet meeting later, Trump said he would work with Congress to end the visa program.
“I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program. I am going to ask Congress to immediately…get rid of this program,” said the president, who called the suspect an “animal.” “Diversity lottery — sounds nice, it’s not nice. It’s not good. It hasn’t been good.”
Trump continued, “We want people that are going to help our country, we want people that are going to keep our country safe. We don’t want lotteries where the wrong people are in the lotteries and guess what? Who are the suckers that get those people? We want a merit-based system.”
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security later confirmed the suspect in the attack, a 29-year-old Uzbek immigrant named Sayfullo Saipov, had been admitted to the U.S. “upon presentation of a passport with a valid diversity immigrant visa to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2010.”
After Trump’s attacks on him, Schumer shot back on Twitter: “I guess it’s not too soon to politicize a tragedy.”
In a statement, the New York senator slammed Trump for “dividing America” and called on the president not to follow through on proposed cuts to “vital anti-terrorism funding.”
“I have always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America,” Schumer said. “President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be focusing on the real solution — anti-terrorism funding — which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget.”
Schumer also took on Trump in a passionate speech from the Senate floor, asking, “President Trump, where is your leadership?”
The New York lawmaker drew a comparison between Trump’s conduct after Tuesday’s attack and the way former President George W. Bush responded to 9/11.
Bush “understood the meaning of his high office” in the midst of a national tragedy, Schumer said. “The contrast between President Bush’s actions after 9/11 and President Trump’s actions this morning couldn’t be starker.”
The Trump-Schumer back and forth came less than 24 hours after eight people were killed and more than a dozen injured when a motorist in a rented pickup truck deliberately drove down a bike path in lower Manhattan and mowed down several people before crashing into a school bus in what officials said was a terror attack.
Police found a note inside the truck indicating the suspect claimed to have carried out the attack to show his support for ISIS.
In a planned attack which he declared on behalf of ISIL, Sayfullo Saipov rented a pickup truck and mowed down pedestrians and cyclists along a busy bike path near the World Trade Center memorial 31 Oct 2017, killing eight.
According to The New York Times, he had obtained a green card, giving him permanent legal resident status in the U.S.
Trump, in his tweets Wednesday, was apparently referring to the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery, which was established by the Immigration Act of 1990. That bill was passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush.
The program allows the State Department to offer 50,000 visas annually to immigrants from countries with low immigration rates.
Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans alike hit back against Trump.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on “Morning Joe” that “it was kind of absurd (for Trump)...to be using it as a fulcrum for…this kind of a debate.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, at a press conference later Wednesday, said Trump’s tweets “were not factual” and “were not helpful.”
“You play into the hands of the terrorists,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said when asked for his thoughts on the tweets. “The tone now should be the exact opposite on all levels.”
Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who have both become vocal Trump critics since announcing they would not run for reelection next year, also took on the president.
“I don’t think that brings out the best in our country,” Corker told NBC News, while Flake called Trump’s response “premature.”
“He should express solidarity with those trying to fix this (visa) program,” Flake said.
Another Republican defended the diversity visa lottery.
“To be honest with you, I’ve known a number of people in New York who come in under the lottery system — they’ve made outstanding contributions, they’ve become citizens,” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., a former House Homeland Security Committee chairman, told the Fox Business Network. “So that really is separate from the idea of the vetting.”
According to the State Department, diversity visa lottery applicants must meet certain education and work experience requirements, including having obtained “at least a high school education or its equivalent” or “two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience to perform.”
The State Department determines those accepted under the program through a randomized computer drawing, its website states.
In 2013, a bipartisan group of senators, including Schumer, known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a compromise immigration reform bill that would have eliminated the diversity lottery. The bill did not make it through Congress.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 31 October 2017 06:07.
CNBC, “Mueller Is Now ‘Untouchable’ After The Manafort Indictment: Former US Attorney”, 30 Oct 2017:
John Lauro, former U.S. Attorney on the scope of the indictment:
“It’s very aggressive.” While it doesn’t have anything to do with the campaign yet, it is a historical indictment that includes money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy against the United States.
“And they threw in something at the end there which was very significant - at the very end an item about his son-in-law. They are going to press him to no end. They are going to pressure Paul Manafort to flip or cooperate [like the prisoner’s dilemma?]. Absolutely”
“The significance of this indictment is that it gives Mueller cover going forward, nobody’s going to touch him because Paul Manafort is under indictment. And this gives him opportunity to press Manefort for information.”
[When you say nobody’s going to touch him, what do you mean?]
“He can’t be fired by the president of the United States, there’s no way, this indictment is significant because going forward nobody is going to even suggest that the investigation should stop or that Meuller should be relieved of his duties.”
“Because Paul Manafort is under indictment now, the investigation is moving forward, Trump would be impeached the next day [for obstruction of justice] if he tried to remove Mueller.”
“Mueller is now untouchable as a result of this indictment. That’s the significance of it.”
[You’ve actually got two guys under indictment, Manafort and Gates, setting up another prisoner’s dilemma as they could turn on one another]
“Right, right.”
“And here’s how the conversation goes: Mr. Manefort, you’re facing a long time in jail. Your son-in-law could be implicated, we’re ready to indict your son-in-law as well, what are you going to give us in return? What are you going to talk about? Whether its the Trump administration, other business deals or the campaign itself?”
[and they’re saying the same thing to Rick Gates as well?]
“Absolutely, that’s going on right now.”
“It’s very specific: they call it a ‘speaking indictment’, and prosecutors do that in order to signal to the defense that we have a powerful case against you.”
“This is actually a long standing case against Manafort that Meuller picked up because it allows him to squeeze Manafort and Gates.”
“The government acts slowly, but when they do, they’ve made sure to button-down every hatch.”
“The indictment sends a message to everybody that ‘we’re serious.’ There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Manafort. I suspect that there’s going to be other indictments as well; anybody who is the subject of a federal investigation, with dozens of FBI agents and sixteen of the most skilled prosecutors, good luck to you.”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 25 October 2017 12:21.
McClatchyDC.com, “Steve Bannon’s already murky Middle East ties deepen”, 23 Oct 2017:
Former presidential aide Steve Bannon appears to be fostering ties to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, countries that have cut off ties with Qatar and have been encouraging the United States to act against the nation as well - though it is home to largest American base in the Middle East. Brynn Anderson AP
White House
WASHINGTON
Shortly after Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon left the White House, a company with close ties to him was hired by the United Arab Emirates to launch a social media campaign against its Arab neighbor, Qatar.
It was part of a multimillion-dollar effort by several Middle Eastern nations to isolate Qatar that received a boost when Trump criticized the country that for years had been a critical regional ally.
The UAE is paying $330,000 to a firm with the same parent company as Cambridge Analytica, the business Trump employed to reach voters with hyper-targeted online messaging during the campaign, to blast Qatar on Facebook and Twitter, among other sites, according to federal records.
Bannon, who remains one of Trump’s closest advisers, has long had an interest in the region. He has huddled with UAE officials behind closed doors, visited the country as recently as last month and pushed for a group of Middle Eastern nations, including the UAE, in their bitter dispute with Qatar.
On Monday, Bannon is scheduled to speak at a day-long conference in Washington organized by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and paid for by multiple donors, entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The speech follows Bannon’s September meeting in the UAE with its crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The two weren’t strangers: Bannon, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn met with the crown prince at Trump Tower during the presidential transition in December. That meeting triggered controversy, as the UAE hadn’t notified the outgoing Obama administration about the visit as is customary.
The UAE also helped broker a meeting in January between a Bannon friend, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin to try to establish a back-channel line of communication to Moscow for Trump just days before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Washington Post; Prince met with the Russian in the Seychelle islands off East Africa.
Prince lives in the UAE and had a multimillion dollar contract with that government to assemble a mercenary security force there. His firm also does security work in Africa, much of it for Chinese interests. But Bannon has encouraged Prince to move back to the U.S. and run for office, and in recent weeks, Prince has begun to publicly consider a primary challenge to Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt cut off all ties with Qatar in June, supposedly in response to its alleged support of terrorism and ties to Iran, and mounted a blockade against the nation. Trump abruptly began accusing Qatar of funding terrorism despite its importance as host to al Udeid, the largest American military base in the Middle East, home to nearly 10,000 troops.
The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level, and in the wake of that conference, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior.
- President Donald Trump
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 19 October 2017 05:01.
Pence owes his position to doing the dirty bidding of the Koch brother’s interests, starting with lobbying against carbon tax, an initiative that wound up putting oil man Scott Pruitt in charge of EPA - the proverbial fox in charge of the hen house. That’s not the half of Pence’s classic story of right wing corruption.
NPR, “Understanding Mike Pence And His Relationship To Trump: ‘His Public Role Is Fawning”, 18 Oct 2017:
Though President Trump ran as an outsider, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer describes his vice president as “the connective tissue” between Trump and the billionaire donors in the Republican party.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Many of President Trump’s critics are hoping he won’t serve his full term, but what kind of president would Mike Pence make? That’s one of the questions Jane Mayer sets out to answer in her new article about Pence titled “The President Pence Delusion.” It’s published in the current issue of The New Yorker.
She writes about how Pence became an evangelical Christian and how he became a favored candidate of billionaire backers, most especially the Koch brothers. She traces how religion and money shaped his ideology. She investigates how Pence became Trump’s running mate and how much power he has in the White House and how he’s used it.
Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She’s also the author of the bestseller about the Koch Brothers titled “Dark Money: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right.” Last March in The New Yorker, she profiled another billionaire funder of right-wing causes, Robert Mercer, who she says has become a major force behind the Trump presidency.
Jane Mayer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So I feel like I don’t see Mike Pence very much, and I often wonder if he’s a power behind the scenes or if he really doesn’t matter that much within the Trump administration. So what’s your impression?
JANE MAYER: Well, it’s really hard to tell. He is - as Joel Goldstein, a specialist in the vice presidency, told me, he calls him the sycophant in chief because when you do see him, he’s usually acting as an emcee to Trump or kind of echoing Trump and praising Trump. So his public role is really fawning. Behind the scenes, though, according to Newt Gingrich, he’s 1 of the 3 people who have the most power in the Trump administration along with the chief of staff, John Kelly, and Trump himself.
GROSS: What are the signs that he’s that powerful?
MAYER: Well, (laughter) that’s a good question - because I think he acts as the connective tissue between the Trump administration and Congress, between the Trump administration and the - kind of the socially conservative base of the party. And most importantly, he is the connector between the Trump administration and the billionaire donors in the Republican Party. He is the guy who does most of the fundraising and outreach to the money.
GROSS: And the money includes the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer.
MAYER: It does. And one of the interesting things to me in writing about Pence is it poses such a juxtaposition between the way that Trump ran, which was as a populist outsider who was attacking the big-money forces in the Republican Party as corrupt and saying that they were puppeteers trying to control the candidates as puppets. And Trump made a huge point of saying, I’m my own man; I’m so rich; no one controls me. Yet as his vice president, he chose Mike Pence. And you could hardly find a candidate in the American political scene who has closer ties to the big donors and particularly the Koch brothers. He’s been sponsored by them for years.
GROSS: So how do the Kochs first start backing Mike Pence?
MAYER: So this was when Pence was in Congress in 2009. He really did the Kochs a big favor. There was legislation pending that might have put a tax on carbon pollution, and it would have been terrible for Koch Industries. And Pence took up the cause and tried to help defeat that legislation and specifically carried around a pledge that the Kochs had created, trying to get people to sign it. And after he was successful in that, the Kochs invited him to come to their secret donor summits. And at that point on, they started showering him in money. So it was - it’s really became a working relationship then. And I hadn’t realized that until recently.
GROSS: One of the things you say Mike Pence is responsible for is bringing the Kochs and Donald Trump together. The Kochs didn’t support Trump’s candidacy. Charles Koch described the choice between Trump and Hillary as one between cancer or a heart attack. (Laughter) So what did Pence do to bring the Kochs and Trump together?
MAYER: Well, so this is what was interesting to me - is that Pence has been very close with the Kochs, and they have just showered money on his campaigns. And he’s kind of act as a peacemaker between the Kochs and Trump. And but in that process, what interested me most was that I really do think that Trump ran as a different kind of Republican. He ran against the big-donors orthodoxy and kind of libertarian vision of people like the Kochs. He said he was going to deliver something for the little guys and build infrastructure all across the country and use the government in various ways that the Kochs disapprove of.
And what you’ve seen with Pence is that in many ways, Pence has brought in a ton of people who are allied with the Kochs into the government, and he’s brought a lot of their policies in - so whether it’s on environmental issues or tax policy now where the Kochs are working very closely with the Trump White House on the Trump tax plan. And it is a tax plan that the Kochs love, and it’s a tax plan that’s going to help the super-rich according to many nonpartisan analyses and not do very much for the middle class. So you’re beginning to kind of see the government moving in the direction of the Kochs.
GROSS: You say 16 high-ranking officials in the Trump White House have ties to the Koch brothers.
MAYER: Well, and that’s according to a study by a group called the Checks And Balances Program. And you can count them. You can see it online. They’re - that’s in the White House. There are also many, many people who’ve worked for the Kochs in the government at large, in the cabinet, in the other departments. And a tremendous number of people who work with and for Pence have gone in and out of working for the Kochs to the point that you had Politico saying - they quoted a Republican operative saying that the Koch operation really was the shadow campaign for Pence for president.
And chief among them really has been Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, who went - after working for Pence in Congress, he went to run the Koch’s political operation, Freedom Partners. And then when Pence was chosen as vice president on the ticket, Marc Short came back, worked with Pence in the campaign and is now the head of Congressional Liaison in the Trump White House. So the man that actually ran the Koch’s political operation is a key player inside the Trump White House.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 18 October 2017 05:01.
“I got the phone call Nov. 12 at 2:39 in the afternoon,” Tina Snyder recalled. Her 24-year-old son, Lee Winder, had been found in a shopping center parking lot near his car outside a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Winder had become addicted to pain pills and died of a heroin overdose.
Washington Post, “Amid a targeted lobbying effort, Congress weakened the DEA’s ability to go after drug distributors, even as opioid-related deaths continue to rise, a Washington Post and ‘60 Minutes’ investigation finds”, 15 Oct 2017:
In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.
A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.
The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.
For years, some drug distributors were fined for repeatedly ignoring warnings from the DEA to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of millions of pills, while they racked up billions of dollars in sales.
The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street.
Political action committees representing the industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill, including nearly $100,000 to Marino and $177,000 to Hatch. Overall, the drug industry spent $102 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016, according to lobbying reports.
“The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before,” said Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s division responsible for regulating the drug industry and led a decade-long campaign of aggressive enforcement until he was forced out of the agency in 2015. “I mean, to get Congress to pass a bill to protect their interests in the height of an opioid epidemic just shows me how much influence they have.”
Besides the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have. It sailed through Congress and was passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. The White House was equally unaware of the bill’s import when President Barack Obama signed it into law, according to interviews with former senior administration officials.
Top officials at the White House and the Justice Department have declined to discuss how the bill came to pass.
Michael Botticelli, who led the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the time, said neither Justice nor the DEA objected to the bill, removing a major obstacle to the president’s approval.
“We deferred to DEA, as is common practice,” he said.
The bill also was reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“Neither the DEA nor the Justice Department informed OMB about the policy change in the bill,” a former senior OMB official with knowledge of the issue said recently. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal White House deliberations.
The DEA’s top official at the time, acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg, declined repeated requests for interviews. A senior DEA official said the agency fought the bill for years in the face of growing pressure from key members of Congress and industry lobbyists. But the DEA lost the battle and eventually was forced to accept a deal it did not want.
[...]
Deeply involved in the effort to help the industry was the DEA’s former associate chief counsel, D. Linden Barber. While at the DEA, he helped design and carry out the early stages of the agency’s tough enforcement campaign, which targeted drug companies that were failing to report suspicious orders of narcotics.
When Barber went to work for the drug industry in 2011, he brought an intimate knowledge of the DEA’s strategy and how it could be attacked to protect the companies. He was one of dozens of DEA officials recruited by the drug industry during the past decade.
Barber played a key role in early version of the legislation that would eventually curtail the DEA’s power, according to an internal email written by a Justice Department official to a colleague. “He wrote the Marino bill,” the official wrote in 2014.
Barber declined repeated requests for an interview.
With a few words, the new law changed four decades of DEA practice. Previously, the DEA could freeze drug shipments that posed an “imminent danger” to the community, giving the agency broad authority. Now, the DEA must demonstrate that a company’s actions represent “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat,” a much higher bar.
[...]
Today, Rannazzisi is a consultant for a team of lawyers suing the opioid industry. Separately, 41 state attorneys general have banded together to investigate the industry. Hundreds of counties, cities and towns also are suing.
“This is an industry that’s out of control. If they don’t follow the law in drug supply, and diversion occurs, people die. That’s just it, people die,” he said. “And what they’re saying is, ‘The heck with your compliance. We’ll just get the law changed.’ ”
[...]
‘Drug dealers in lab coats’
2006: 52,277 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.
Joe Rannazzisi came to DEA headquarters as an outsider with an attitude. He worked as an agent in Detroit, where he watched prescription drugs flood small towns and cities in the Midwest.
Hundreds of millions of pain pills, such as Vicodin and oxycodone, ended up in the hands of dealers and illegal users.
Rogue doctors wrote fraudulent prescriptions for enormous numbers of pills, and complicit pharmacists filled them without question, often for cash. Internet pharmacies, supplied by drug distribution companies, allowed users to obtain drugs without seeing a doctor.
“There were just too many bad practitioners, too many bad pharmacies, and too many bad wholesalers and distributors,” Rannazzisi recalled.
[...]
Rannazzisi brought an aggressive approach to the diversion control office.
The year he took over, Linden Barber was promoted to run diversion control’s litigation office, which crafted the legal arguments that supported the team. He was a former Army lawyer who served in Iraq. The cadre of attorneys who worked for him saw him as a tough litigator unafraid of an influential industry.
Barber and Rannazzisi formed a powerful combination that the drug companies would learn to fear. “Early on he did really good work,” Rannazzisi said. “He jumped into the Internet cases when he first came here.”
After shutting down the Internet pharmacies, Rannazzisi and Barber pursued the pain management clinics that replaced them and soon became as ubiquitous in South Florida as the golden arches of McDonald’s. To get there, drug dealers and users would take the “Oxy Express” down Interstate 75.
“Lines of customers coming in and going out,” said Matthew Murphy, a veteran DEA supervisor in Boston whom Rannazzisi hired to be chief of pharmaceutical investigations. “Armed guards. Vanloads of people from the Appalachia region driving down to Florida to get a prescription from a pain clinic and then get the prescription filled, going back to wherever they’re from.”
Back home, each 30-pill vial of oxycodone was worth $900.
DEA officials realized they needed a new strategy to confront this new kind of drug dealer.
“They weren’t slinging crack on the corner,” Rannazzisi said. “These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats.”
Rather than focusing on bad doctors and pharmacists, Rannazzisi and Barber decided to target the companies feeding the pill mills: the wholesale drug distributors, some of them massive multinational corporations.
[...]
“They definitely didn’t like Joe Rannazzisi,” Murphy said. “Not at all. He wasn’t viewed as a person that they could work with. And maybe that was appropriate. He didn’t want to work with industry much.”
Rannazzisi was unmoved by their complaints.
“We’re worried about their feelings being hurt because we were doing our job?” he said. “We were making them comply. We were holding their feet to the fire.”
Murphy recalled a telling meeting with drug company representatives.
He said the president of one of the drug companies sat on the other side of the table, put his hands up and said, “ ‘You got us. What can we do to make this right?’ ” Murphy recalled.
Murphy said he had heard the same thing from drug dealers.
There was an important difference, Murphy noted.
“You know,” he said, “the heroin and cocaine traffickers didn’t have a class ring on their finger from a prestigious university.”
‘This is war’
2011: 121,468 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.
In 2011, Linden Barber left the DEA to join the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm Quarles & Brady. He started a practice representing drug companies. “If you have a DEA compliance issue or you’re facing a government investigation,” he said in a promotional video for the firm, “I’d be happy to hear from you.”
Barber’s move turned out to be a key moment in the struggle between drug companies and the government, but it was far from the only one. Dozens of top officials from the DEA and Justice Department have stepped through Washington’s revolving door to work for drug companies.
[...]
‘it was bad’
2013: 149,853 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.
The field generals in the DEA’s war on opioids are men and women such as Jim Geldhof, a 43-year agency veteran who managed the diversion control program in the Detroit field office. He witnessed firsthand the heartbreak pain pills were causing across the Midwest.
One night, at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, Ohio, Geldhof sat quietly as the Portsmouth High School gym fell dark and a large screen flickered with photographs.
Geldhof was in tears.
“Sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters in graduation pictures,” he recalled. “Some were wearing football jerseys. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and then they were gone.”
[...]
Geldhof, the DEA program manager in Detroit, was investigating a midsize Ohio-based drug distributor. Between 2007 and 2012, Miami-Luken had shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia. About 11 million wound up in one county, Mingo, population 25,000.
Despite the rising death rate in West Virginia — the highest in the nation — Geldhof said his pleas in 2013 to halt Miami-Luken’s operations were ignored by the legal office at headquarters.
“First we got blown off by the company,” he said, “and then we got blown off by our own lawyers.”
Novak suspected another reason for the slowdown.
At times, he said, some of his colleagues appeared more concerned with pleasing the industry than working on behalf of the public. Some of the lawyers had simply given up fighting the industry and seemed to be preparing for a future working with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, he said.
“It was not just one person who left the office; everyone started to leave. That’s your payout. You do your time, and more and more people were auditioning for the industry. It stopped us from doing our jobs.”
The departures gave the industry an unfair advantage, Novak said.
“There was a fear,” he said. “It comes from seeing that some of the best and brightest former DEA attorneys are now on the other side and know all of the weak points. Their fingerprints are on memos and policy and emails.”
[...]
Epilogue
2016: 197,713 deaths from prescription opioid overdoses since 2000.
John Mulrooney, the chief DEA administrative law judge, has been documenting the falling number of immediate suspension orders against doctors, pharmacies and drug companies. That number has dropped from 65 in fiscal year 2011 to six so far this fiscal year, according to the DEA. Not a single order has targeted a distributor or manufacturer since late 2015, according to Mulrooney’s reports, which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Mulrooney said in his reports that the judges under him were handling so few cases at the DEA that they began hearing the cases of other federal agencies.
Mingo County, West Virginia, racial makeup 97.1% White
[...]
A spokesman for Whitehouse said that the DEA could have expressed its opposition at any time.
“The fact that it passed the entire Senate without hearing any sort of communication that would have triggered concern of at least one senator doesn’t really pass the smell test,” the spokesman said.
Jim Geldhof, the DEA program manager in Detroit, retired from the agency at the end of 2015 after 43 years on the job. He said the companies were fully aware of their responsibilities under the law.
“When you’re selling half a million pills to some pharmacy and you’re telling me that you don’t know what the rules are for a suspicious order?” said Geldhof, who is now working as a consultant to lawyers suing the industry. “All we were looking for is a good-faith effort by these companies to do the right thing, and there was no good-faith effort. Greed always trumped compliance. It did every time. It was about money, and it’s as simple as that.”
Just before Geldhof left, his two-year quest to persuade the DEA to take action against Miami-Luken finally paid off. In November 2015, the DEA accused the company of multiple violations of the law for allegedly failing to report orders for tens of millions of pain pills from pharmacies, most of them in West Virginia. That case — the most recent one to target a distributor — is pending.
Of the millions of pills sent to Mingo County, many went to one pharmacy in Williamson, the county seat, population 2,924. In one month alone, Miami-Luken shipped 258,000 hydrocodone pills to the pharmacy, more than 10 times the typical amount for a West Virginia pharmacy.
The mayor of Williamson has since filed a lawsuit against Miami-Luken and other drug distributors, accusing them of flooding the city with pain pills and permitting them to saturate the black market.
“Like sharks circling their prey, multi-billion dollar companies descended upon Appalachia for the sole purpose of profiting off of the prescription drug-fueled feeding frenzy,” the lawsuit says.
...West Virginia was not alone among poor White areas targeted, but provides a graphic example of how much big pharma, big business, big money and the government care for disadvantaged Whites, as West Virginia is markedly the poorest and Whitest state in America.
Almost heaven, West Virginia, the corporations can’t lay off - Massey corp. strip mines its mountains, poisons its water and big pharma preys on the despair of the first casualties of cultural Marxism.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 05 October 2017 09:15.
Scotland’s ban on fracking poses something of a dilemma for nationalists. While it is indisputable that fracking is environmentally destructive, it is also the case that the destruction can be mitigated some in that the process can be turned off such that it is not an endless source of pollution; and it can be turned on when, for example, Russia threatens to withhold oil supply for not yielding to its political pressure as an oil supplier; which it aspires to do and that’s why Russian Active Measures has a certifiable presence in anti-fracking movements, including that of Scotland.
BBC, “Scottish government backs ban on fracking”, 3 Oct 2017:
The Scottish government has announced an “effective ban” on fracking.
Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse told MSPs that the practice “cannot and will not take place in Scotland”.
He said an existing moratorium on the technique, which has been in place since 2015, would continue “indefinitely” after a consultation showed “overwhelming” opposition.
The government will seek Holyrood’s endorsement for the ban in a vote following the October recess.
But with only the Conservatives now opposed to a ban, the vote is likely to be a formality.
The move was welcomed by environmental groups but has been slammed by Ineos, operators of the huge Grangemouth petrochemical plant, which holds fracking exploration licences across 700 square miles of the country.
Scotland and fracking: how did we get here?
The Scottish government has previously imposed a similar block on underground coal gasification (UCG) - a separate technique used to extract gas from coal seams deep underground - on environmental grounds.
It followed the introduction of a moratorium on both fracking and UCG in 2015, which saw a series of expert reports published on the potential health, environmental and economic impact of the controversial techniques, as well as a public consultation being carried out.
Mr Wheelhouse said the consultation came back with “overwhelming” opposition to fracking, with 99% of the 60,000 respondents supporting a ban. He said this showed that “there is no social licence for unconventional oil and gas to be taken forward at this time”.
The move comes almost exactly a year on from the UK government giving the go-ahead to horizontal fracking in Lancashire.
Shale gas is currently processed in Scotland at a site in Grangemouth, having been shipped in from abroad, but cannot be extracted from beneath Scottish soil under the current moratorium, which is enforced through planning regulations.
Mr Wheelhouse said local authorities would be instructed to continue this moratorium “indefinitely” - calling this “action sufficient to effectively ban the development of unconventional oil and gas extraction in Scotland”.
He said: “The decision I am announcing today means that fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland.”
Mr Wheelhouse’s announcement was welcomed by environmental groups, with Friends of the Earth Scotland and WWF Scotland both hailing a victory for campaigners.
WWF Scotland official Sam Gardner said it was “excellent news”, saying “the climate science is clear” that fossil fuels should be “left in the ground”.
Mary Church from Friends of the Earth Scotland said it was a “huge win for the anti-fracking movement” which would be “warmly welcomed across the country and around the world”.
‘Poor decision’
However Ineos said the move could see “large numbers of Scottish workers leaving the country to find work”.
Tom Pickering, operations director of Ineos Shale, said: “It is a sad day for those of us who believe in evidence-led decision making. The Scottish government has turned its back on a potential manufacturing and jobs renaissance and lessened Scottish academia’s place in the world by ignoring its findings.”
Ken Cronin of UK Onshore Oil and Gas also said it was a “poor decision”, which ignored “extensive independent research” and was “based on dogma not evidence or geopolitical reality”.
And the GMB Scotland trade union said the move was “mired in dishonesty” and “an abandonment of the national interest”, saying Scotland would now be dependent on gas shipped in from “the likes of Qatar and Russia”.
The Scottish Conservatives also said Scotland would miss out on a “much needed economic boost” and high-skilled jobs as a result of the decision.
Tory MSP Dean Lockhart said ministers had ignored scientific and economic evidence to take a “short-sighted and economically damaging decision which is nothing more than a bid to appease the green elements of the pro-independence movement”.
However Labour MSP Claudia Beamish said the move did not go far enough, arguing that ministers were merely extending the existing moratorium which “could be overturned at any point at the whim of a minister”.
‘Legally shaky’
Ms Beamish has a member’s bill tabled at Holyrood calling for a “full legal ban”, but Mr Wheelhouse said this would not be needed until his proposals.
The Scottish Greens said the announcement was “a step in the right direction”. However, they also wanted a more permanent ban, with MSP Mark Ruskell saying the moratorium was “legally shaky” and open to challenge.
This was also echoed by Friends of the Earth Scotland, with Ms Church saying ministers should “go further than relying on planning powers” and “instead commit to passing a law to ban the fracking industry for good”.
Scottish Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur welcomed the decision, saying that ministers had taken the “scenic route” but had ultimately decided “effectively to ban fracking”.
MSPs have previously voted to support a ban on fracking, but SNP members abstained from that vote.
What is fracking and why is it controversial?
- Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside.
- The extensive use of fracking in the US, where it has revolutionised the energy industry, has prompted environmental concerns.
- The first is that fracking uses huge amounts of water that must be transported to the fracking site, at significant environmental cost.
- The second is the worry that potentially carcinogenic chemicals used may escape and contaminate groundwater around the fracking site.
- But the industry suggests fracking of shale gas could contribute significantly to the UK’s future energy needs
Oswald Mosley died in 1980 but his ideas live on. ‘Ten Points For Action’ was published forty years ago but they are still relevant. Compare these visionary policies to the paranoid fantasies of the far-right.
1) Action to Build Houses. We want Action to solve the housing problem. It should be taken out of the hands of local authorities and entrusted to Government leadership with powers to mass produce houses and flats like an ‘operation of war’, turning out homes as munitions were mass-produced in time of war.
2) Stop the Land and Rent Rackets. Give the Government the power to acquire land at pre-boom prices and to finance housing by low-interest loans, paid for by high-interest charges on all non-essential and luxury building. Such action would bring down house prices and rents and at last provide good but cheap housing for all.
3) Stop Immigration - Start Repatriation. We want Action to ease the pressure on housing and other social problems (like the reintroduction of diseases unknown in Britain for hundreds of years) by stopping all further immigration and by repatriating all post-war immigrants to good jobs and conditions in their homelands, to which prosperity had been restored by using the surplus wealth and production of united Europe. But Britain could make a start now before the complete union of Europe is achieved.
4) Choice in Education and Health. We want Action to build good schools, colleges, universities and hospitals, just as we would mass-produce houses and flats. Parents should have a choice of schools for their children. We should not be taxed to provide those health services we will never use (maternity benefits for confirmed bachelors!) but free to pay in proportion to our requirements.
5) Free Speech - Law and Order. We want Action to ensure freedom of speech for everyone, guaranteed by the Government, which has a duty to maintain law and order in the State and to take effective action against mob violence, which today denies freedom of expression to any views of which its agitators disapprove. Let us maintain local police forces with their local knowledge and experience, but let us supplement them with a highly-trained, well-equipped, mobile national police force, to put down organised crime and to maintain public order.
We would ensure freedom of the Press for both newspapers and the public. Any man who felt himself misrepresented in the Press should be guaranteed (by law) equal space to reply in the newspaper concerned. This would free the public from the expense of seeking justice through costly libel action and free the newspapers from the legal blackmail of a threatened libel action by some unscrupulous racketeer.
6) Capital Punishment. The death penalty should be restored to the statute book, to be used sparingly in the case of premeditated murder. The Court of Appeal should have a solemn duty to reprieve if in any doubt. The sentence could be carried out not by hanging, but by a quick and painless injection or by some other humane method.
7) Action in Europe. To put these policies into practice Britain must advance beyond the concept of a so-called united Europe and Common Market to which the Conservative Party has at last been converted and which the Labour Party still opposes. We must advance quickly to “Europe a Nation”, which we have advocated since 1948. We stand for a union of all Europe, our former white Dominions and southern Africa, a great “third force” independent of both America and Russia.
This “third force” must have a central government for its defence, the economy, finance and scientific development, with power to raise wages and control prices as production increases for a guaranteed market, insulated against unfair competition from the rest of the world.
We need a European army, equipped with the most modern weapons to defend our continent against attack from any quarter. This should be financed on a European budget, instead of each small country straining its economy to finance its own defence.
8) National and Regional Governments. There should be independent national and regional governments for each European country and the main regions. This would enable England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and other European countries and regions to have their own parliaments for internal affairs and for the preservation of their national and regional cultures.
9) The Irish Problem. The ultimate solution to the Irish problem is the union of that country within a united Europe. But the bloodshed must first be brought to an end by a free vote on a county basis in each of the Six Counties and a subsequent readjustment of the border. The bulk of the Catholic population in the North would then be ruled (as is their wish) from Dublin, with a lessening of present tensions, the IRA would lose its bases in the North and the British Army would have a much shorter border to patrol against infiltration from the South. In this improved situation agreement could more easily be reached on the eventual union of Ireland, with the rights of the Protestant minority protected and guaranteed by European government.
10) Government of National Union. We stand for a government of national union and effective action, drawn from the whole nation, from the professions and the trade unions, arts and science, the law and the armed forces. Government elected by the whole people alone should govern. It should have power to lead the economy, raising wages and controlling prices as science increased production. Then we will have cooperation instead of conflict in industry.
We want Action to halt the “brain drain” and to arouse a new spirit of national service in our British people, by relating all reward directly to skill, effort, initiative and responsibility. There should be “great reward for great service”, crowned by higher pensions drawn from the wealth of the new economic system, as the reward in old age for those who had loyally served the nation throughout their lives.
Pence owes his position to doing the dirty bidding of the Koch brother’s interests, starting with lobbying against carbon tax, an initiative that wound up putting oil man Scott Pruitt in charge of EPA - the proverbial fox in charge of the hen house. That’s not the half of Pence’s classic story of right wing corruption.
In a planned attack which he declared on behalf of ISIL, Sayfullo Saipov rented a pickup truck and mowed down pedestrians and cyclists along a busy bike path near the World Trade Center memorial 31 Oct 2017, killing eight.
