Health insurance companies in the U.S., Canada and Europe hold nearly $1.9 billion in fast-food company stock, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard Medical School and the department of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance. In the study, published this week in the American Journal of Public Health researchers examined major insurance companies’ stock [...]

Philip Giraldi, on March 29th, 2010 at 6:42 am Said: The war economy runs on the Dick Cheney 1% principle – if there is a one per cent chance of something happening a massive security response is justified. Every single “threat” since 9/11 has been hyped unrealistically to require creation of a huge government infrastructure. [...]

Tea Party activists, who are becoming a force in U.S. politics, want the federal government out of their lives except when it comes to creating jobs. More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is [...]

The Times report, written by Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti, has the character of a controlled release of information for the purpose of containing the damage to US covert operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. It is not only the US military and intelligence agencies that are being protected, but the Times itself. According to the [...]

One day, Obama is saying he will sign no health care bill without a government-run “public option”; the next, he all but drops it. One day, he is bashing the “shameful” bonuses for “fat-cat bankers” at bailed-out firms, the next he is serving dinner to corporate titans at the White House and saying he does [...]

Options for Obama abound: Mixing jobs, populism and American nationalism, for example, creates a perfect political trifecta for the Democrats. One of the State of the Union dial focus groups indicated that the strongest pro-Obama response occurred when the President suggested ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource American jobs. Up to now, Obama has [...]

Citing anti-competitive concerns, the Justice Department sued Election Systems & Software in order to force the company to divest itself of the voting machine assets it obtained from Premier Election Solutions [Diebold] last year. The department’s antitrust division, along with nine state attorneys general, filed the civil antitrust lawsuit (.pdf) in U.S. District Court in Washington, [...]

3. You present the question of the draft as a moral issue for society, and you trace it from the draft riots of the Civil War to the present day. Politicians today appear broadly to support a professional army as a way of avoiding the public controversy presented by the draft. It also means that [...]

So why isn’t this called The Great Depression II? The data, which are for the fourth quarter, come from a new study (.pdf) by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada and Sheila Palma at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. The researchers conclude that “what has been missing from the public debate over the labor market [...]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE[/youtube] Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged [...]