Readers' Comments

It's such shame that reactive policy making seems to be the science of the Senate's decision making. A proactive approach would have saved the economy from predatory loaning. When is the Senate going to learn!

This insanity will eventually stop, but do we need to go completely broke before then?

This sounds familiar to the Tobin tax.

http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2101-Tax-The-Speculators.html

The most discussed and popular one is a simple sales tax on currency trades across borders. Called the Tobin Tax after its originator, the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist at Yale University, 10 to 25 cents per hundred dollars of the huge amounts of dollars traded each day across bordered would produce from $100 to $300 billion per year.

...

Pollin writes in the current issue of the estimable Boston Review: “A small tax on all financial-market transactions, comparable to a sales tax, would raise the costs on short-term speculative trading while having negligible effect on people who trade infrequently. It would thus discourage speculation and channel funds toward productive investment.”

He adds that after the 1987 stock market crash, securities-trading taxes “or similar measures” were endorsed by then Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and even the first President Bush. Professor Pollin estimates that a one-half of one percent tax would raise about $350 billion a year. That seems conservative. The Wall Street Journal once mentioned about $500 trillion in derivatives trades alone in 2008—the most speculative of transactions. A one tenth of one percent tax would raise $500 billion dollars a year, assuming that level of trading.

The California Chamber of Commerce was forced to pull these ads over this controversy, but the whole affair may indicate what we may see more of as we get closer to the 2010 elections.

Anne Landman

Anyone, even the WHO, who says that "smoking" is the problem is unwittingly, or intentionally, working to pass blame for the plague of illnesses onto the victims for their behavior. That is scapegoating.

To do this is to ignore that typical (VERY non-organic) cigarettes are contaminated with residues of any of hundreds of tobacco pesticides, carcinogenic levels of radiation (PO-210) from the still legal use of certain phosphate fertilizers, dioxin-creating chlorine substances (pesticides and chlorine-bleached paper), added burn accelerants, any of over 1000 untested (often toxic) non-tobacco additives, addiction-enhancing additives, and kid-attracting sweets and flavors galore.

What alchemy can put all that together to come up with just "tobacco"?
In any case, many brands may contain not a shred of tobacco but, instead, "tobacco substitute material" made in patented ways from all sorts of industrial waste cellulose, all flavored, colored, scented, texturized, and dosed with nicotine to create the illusion of tobacco. It is interesting that even the most zealous opponent (ostensibly) of the cigarette industry does not charge the industry with fraud.

Few Guinea-pigged, secretly-poisoned smokers know about this. They believe and are told that they are just using tobacco. The smoke is, often wrongly, called “environmental tobacco smoke”. They believe that public regulators and public health officials are human beings who would never allow such harms.

Many others seem to believe, wrongly, that tobacco (itself, without adulterants) has been tested and proven to be the sole cause of all the diseases and deaths. No published studies note what was studied, be it adulterated tobacco, fake tobacco, or plain tobacco. Medical science is just too tight with various parts of the cigarette cartel (chlorine, pharmaceuticals, insurance, etc.) to do honest research.

The entire seemingly "nice" and "progressive" anti-smoking campaign is an attempt to save the cigarette makers, and their ingredient suppliers, and their investors (including health insurance firms), from the potentially biggest liability suits and corporate criminal charges in history. The campaign is about saving the "good name" of chlorine...even though virtually all so-called "smoking related" diseases are identical to effects of dioxin exposure. (Dioxins are from industrial chlorine, impossible to be from tobacco or any plant.)

The campaign is about taking yet another un-patentable, public-domain plant from the public for the sake of pharmaceuticals that hope to replace it with patented synthetic nicotine delivery products. And, it's about public officials hoping to seem as if they care about health and "clean air" even though they were the gate keepers on whose watch millions, if not billions, of people unwittingly poisoned themselves with what are better called "Pesticide Pegs", "Dioxin Dowels", or "Radiation Rods". It would be a good thing if Uruguay put some of that wording on its cigarette labels. Not on the plain tobacco products, of course.

Above details are easily referenced by simple searches for relevant terms--- "pesticides tobacco", "radiation tobacco", "dioxin chlorine", "GAO tobacco pesticides", etc.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm
That humans are causing global warming is the position of the Academies of Science from 19 countries plus many scientific organisations that study climate science. More specifically, 97% of climate scientists actively publishing climate papers endorse the consensus position.

to Mindy Rodriguez - Obama's duty-to-die plan????
Unfortunately I don't have to wonder where on earth you get your information from. It's never too late to educate yourself. :-)

According to a Democrat appointee to the independent advisory group investigating the FNMA/Freddie Mac fraud last week she assets there are and estimated $16Trillion in notional value of derivatives of which may have no value on the books of the government and various financial institutions. This didn't raise an eye from the executives or other members of the panel. The regulators are ignoring this and are not even estimating their market value for fear of reprisals from the bi-partisan politically connected class.

On top of this the Federal Reserve has 50:1 leverage which means a slight increase in interest rates, which they have manipulated for years, would wipe their 2.5% equity out in a heartbeat. The Fed refuses to open their books even to those of questionable veracity in Congress who have started this over-leveraging mess in the first place..

Evidently the cost of the bailout is substantially higher than anyone really knows and if anyone does they aren't talking. Transparency is fiction only relevant during political campaigns.

If one just sits back and thinks about it, the mind just boggles, as it looks like someone out there has lost the plot.

Just picture this - a women you fancy somewhat for her feminine charms pulls out a pink little packet of something. At first you're intrigued, but then horrified and totally put-off as she proceeds to pull out a fag, light it and puffs away. Somehow I do not feel as enamoured as before to give her that first kiss anymore.

How they can link femininity to smoking and make people think it to be appealing is beyond me.

Do you work on tax returns, other than your own? Can you substantiate that you pay more than "the big boys on Wall Street?"

Why don't they protest their own unions for bankrupting GM?

Actually, the original report made no less sense than many other things this lady is saying. We are still sane either way.