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FOCUS | New Hampshire: The Birthplace of Electronic Election Theft |
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Monday, 08 February 2016 12:52 |
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Excerpt: "Computerized voting machines, with software programmed by partisan for-profit corporations, make election fraud easy."
An election worker resets a voting machine as a voter waits in 2008. Many of the country's machines were replaced after the 2000 election, but are now reaching the end of their useful lives. (photo: Rob Carr/AP)
New Hampshire: The Birthplace of Electronic Election Theft
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
08 February 16
 s the New Hampshire primary lurches toward the finish line, the reality of electronic election theft looms over the vote count.
The actual computer voting machines were introduced on a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The godfather was George H.W. Bush, then the vice president. As former boss of the CIA, Bush was thoroughly familiar with the methods of changing election outcomes. The Agency had been doing it for decades in client states throughout the world.
In the Granite State, Bush was up against Bob Dole, long-time senator from Kansas. Dole was much loved in hard-core Republican circles. But Bush had an ace-in-the-hole. For the first time, the votes would be cast and counted on electronic voting machines, in this case from Shoup Electronics.
Governor John Sununu, later Bush’s White House Chief of Staff, brought the highly-suspect computer voting machines into New Hampshire’s most populous city, Manchester.
The results were predictable. Former CIA director George H.W. Bush won a huge upset over Dole and the mainstream for-profit corporate media refused to consider election rigging.
Here’s the Washington Post’s account of the bizarre and unexplainable election results when touchscreens were first used: In 1988, H.W. Bush was trailing Dole by 8 points in the last Gallup poll before the New Hampshire primary. Bush won by 9 points. The Washington Post covered the Bush upset with the following headline: “Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”
Was it a late surge of Bush devotees who reversed all reasonable expectation? Or was it the kind of electoral manipulation that had been perfected by the Agency over the decades, this time with an electronic assist?
While the mainstream for-profit media tried to explain it away, the Manchester Union Leader had been suspicious of the former CIA director going back to his first presidential bid in 1980.
“The Bush operation has all the smell of a CIA covert operation … strange aspects of the Iowa operation [include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a six percent bulge over Reagan,” according to the Union Leader.
In the next presidential election, in 1984, Bush’s rival, President Reagan, signed National Security Directive Decision NSDD245. A year later, the New York Times explained the details of Reagan’s secret directive: “A branch of the National Security Agency is investigating whether a computer program that counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the United States in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.
In 1987, Gary Greenhalgh resigned as director of the Election Center to become vice-president of operations for the R.F. Shoup Company. The company’s founder, Ransom Shoup, had been convicted in 1979 for conspiring to defraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt to obtain voting machine business, according to the Memphis newspaper Commercial Appeal. His machines were known as Shouptronics. Under the name Danaher they were used in the disputed 2004 election in Columbus, Ohio, where numerous voters complained that their vote for Kerry “faded away” on the screen.
Computerized voting machines, with software programmed by partisan for-profit corporations, make election fraud even easier. We have known about this for four decades. Roy G. Saltman’s work at the National Bureau of Standards has documented the vulnerability of computer voting since the 1970s.
Saltman issued a report for the Bureau numbered NBSIR-75-687 documenting the lack of computer security in vote tallying and the potential for election tampering. He traced the use of computers to tally vote results from September 1964 through his 1975 report. He found that in 1971, Bob’s junior year in high school, “an error in programming” had caused a levy to pass by 1000 votes in Bob’s hometown, Redford Township, Michigan, rather than failing by 100.
A follow-up report by Saltman in 1988 pointed out other problems with computer voting. In 1986 in Stark County, Ohio, a recount programming error reversed the correct election results. There’s a question on whether this was a real error, since a special programmer was brought in to write the code for the recount.
The ultimate implication for this year's primary has yet to be played out. This year in New Hampshire, we have Bernie Sanders rolling into Election Day with a very strong lead. Barack Obama did much the same (though with far smaller margins) in 2008, and emerged the loser. Could a similar outcome follow for Bernie?
On the Republican side, it's anyone's guess.
But whatever happens, remember that for decades the Granite State has set the tone for the general election, and could do so again on Tuesday. It remains to be seen whether we get a legitimate outcome, or another strip and flip selection, with ultimate control of the government still at stake. But the whole world had better be watching.
Harvey Wasserman’s “Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, AD 2030” is at www.solartopia.org. Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org. He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including “Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election?,” “As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004,” “How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008,” and “What Happened in Ohio?”
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What Do Progressives Eat for Breakfast? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 February 2016 09:10 |
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Weissman writes: "Why are some liberals so eager to help the right wing fight against ever electing a socialist, an anti-imperialist, or anyone dedicated to working night and day to break Wall Street's chokehold on so much of the global economy?"
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. (photo: AP)
What Do Progressives Eat for Breakfast?
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
08 February 16
 rogressives and democratic socialists in this year’s elections are working for radical change or even a nonviolent “political revolution,” as Bernie Sanders likes to call it. Not being fools, we knew from the start that the odds were stacked against us. Some of us even suspected that liberal pundits like Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait would berate us for risking a complete rout in the elections, as George McGovern and Walter Mondale suffered in 1972 and 1984.
Why are these liberals so eager to help the right wing fight against ever electing a socialist, an anti-imperialist, or anyone dedicated to working night and day to break Wall Street’s chokehold on so much of the global economy? Do they really believe that Hillary Clinton would work as hard as Sanders against her patrons and playmates on Wall Street or their global pipeline deals and trade agreements? Did they ever hear her condemn her husband’s role in deregulating Wall Street and creating the economic crash of 2007 and 2008? Why, then, do they lend their voices to the red-baiting that has already begun?
Don’t get me wrong. The risks of electing a radical right-wing Republican are real, just as they were in 2008 when a little-known African-American with a Muslim father and the provocative name of Barack Hussein Obama ran in the primaries against Hillary. The risks today are far greater, as galloping economic inequality, a new Cold War, racism, overt white supremacy, nativism, xenophobia, Christian nationalism, Islamophobia, and even fascism now threaten both sides of the Atlantic.
These are historic threats that only a root-and-branch political revolution has any chance to overcome. By contrast, Hillary’s have-guns-will-travel imperialism abroad and incremental tweaking at home will only deepen the economic, social, and ideological divides.
The bigger risk – if we can believe the recent Quinnipiac poll showing a virtual tie nationwide between Sanders and Clinton – is that we will win the elections and lose the more decisive battles, as we did to a large extent with Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. Go back and read the transcript of Thursday’s debate in New Hampshire between the two candidates, especially the segments on foreign policy.
Hillary may have sounded more gung-ho about using US and allied special forces to work with local Arab and Kurdish forces in fighting against the Islamic State, while Bernie worried more about quagmires and not becoming “the policeman of the world.” But both generally supported Obama’s continued military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, which guarantees that US and NATO forces, special or otherwise, would remain in the region for decades to come.
Is this what those of us who support Sanders really want? If not, we had better start speaking out now. A serious political movement has to have its own voices apart from whatever political candidate we may be supporting at a particular time, and that distinction is the only way we can remain true to ourselves and to Bernie’s better instincts.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Martin Shkreli Is Just One of Many Pharma A-Holes |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36366"><span class="small">Samantha Allen, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 08 February 2016 09:07 |
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Allen writes: "They throw lavish boat parties while marking up life-saving medication 5,000 percent."
Martin Shkreli. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Martin Shkreli Is Just One of Many Pharma A-Holes
By Samantha Allen, The Daily Beast
08 February 16
They throw lavish boat parties while marking up life-saving medication 5,000 percent.
 ancy Retzlaff is not Martin Shkreli. She won’t inspire hundreds of news articles nor will she become the subject of any Internet memes. She won’t threaten Ghostface Killah and it seems unlikely that she will ever flirt with a minor on a YouTube livestream.
But the chief commercial officer for Turing Pharma is just as responsible for keeping the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim 5,000 percent higher than it used to be. And as long as the public eye is still trained on the Shkreli sideshow, she’ll get away with it.
During last Thursday’s congressional hearing on prescription-drug pricing, Retzlaff sat next to her smirking ex-CEO, calmly defending her company’s choice to keep charging $750 per pill for Daraprim, which is used to help pregnant women, HIV patients, and other immunocompromised individuals fight off toxoplasmosis infection.
She even admitted that Turing handed out large salary increases and held a lavish boat party while the year-old pharmaceutical company was still reportedly in the red.
“Do you know who Metro Yacht Charters is?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz asked her.
“Uh, yes, I do,” she admitted after a pause.
“Why would you know them?”
“I believe we rented Metro Yacht Charters for a sales force meeting,” Retzlaff replied.
“Yeah, for a party. Twenty-three thousand dollars” Chaffetz said, consulting Turing documents. “Did you spend money on fireworks?”
“Yes.”
“Did you spend money on a cigar roller for a yacht night?” he persisted. “Eight hundred bucks?”
“Yes, we did,” was Retzlaff’s response.
It should have been the story of the hearing: Turing Pharma partying on the dime of the hospitals and insurers who are now paying exorbitant amounts for Daraprim, which used to cost $13.50 per pill. Instead, Martin Shkreli stole the show by repeatedly pleading the Fifth Amendment during his own questioning before leaving the room and calling Congress “imbeciles” on Twitter.
Shkreli’s stunts have been effective in drawing public attention to the problem price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry. But now that he’s at the center of that conversation, he’s threatening to suck all the air out of the room. And if the Pharma Bro has been telling the truth about one thing, it’s this: This problem is so much bigger than him.
For one prominent example, all you have to do is follow his trail. In 2014, Shkreli, then the CEO of Retrophin bought Thiola, used to treat the rare kidney disease cystinuria, and raised its price from $1.50 to $30 per pill. Shkreli was then fired from the company but his price hike lived on. A single 100-milligram tablet of Thiola at a New York City pharmacy costs around $36.
The current CEO of Retrophin is Stephen J. Aselage and his name is not on the front page of any newspapers. He doesn’t tweet. He didn’t buy a Wu-Tang Clan album. But he still hasn’t reversed Shkreli’s decision.
Outside of Shkreli’s sphere of influence, there are still more cases of extreme price hikes.
As Bloomberg reported, a recent DRX survey of around 3,000 brand-name prescription drugs found that prices had been at least quadrupled in 20 cases and doubled for 60 since December 2014. The most dramatic increases—of 500 percent or over—include a heart disease treatment, a beta blocker, and an antidiabetic drug.
“The data shows that price increases are an integral part of the business plan,” Jim Yocum, executive vice president at DRX, told Bloomberg of the survey.
It’s disappointing that it took Shkreli’s antics to bring this problem to the attention of Congress. Now, at least, some of these companies are being asked to account for their price hikes even if they don’t have notoriously mouthy leaders.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals, the company behind two of the most egregious increases of recent years, was also present during last week’s hearing at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform but their representative, at least, had the good sense to act contrite.
“Where we’ve made mistakes, we’re listening and we’re changing,” Howard Schiller, interim CEO of Valeant, said before the committee, adding that “our price increases in the future will be well within industry norms and much more modest than the ones that drew your legitimate concerns.”
In February of last year, Valeant had raised the prices of two heart medications, Nitropress and Isuprel, by 525 percent and 212 percent.
Retzlaff, on the other hand, was unrepentant, saying that she was “comfortable” with the decision to raise the price of Daraprim under Shkreli’s tenure. In her prepared statement, she trotted out the same excuses that the former CEO once used to defend the price hike: some revenue was used on research and development, hospitals were given a “discount”?which only reduces the price of a 100-count bottle to a $35,000?and patients were given access to an assistance program.
“I believe the decisions made by the company have been appropriate and strike the right balance between patient access, innovation, and shareholder value,” she concluded.
She said this even while sitting next to the smug 32-year-old ex-hedge fund investor who wrote “$1 [billion] here we come” in an email to the Turing board when they were about to close the deal on Daraprim.
Under questioning from Chaffetz, Retzlaff noted that Turing’s first-year net sales were $20 million, largely resulting from sales of Daraprim, which she estimated is only used to treat about 3,000 people.
And under fire from Rep. Elijah Cummings, she claimed that Turing’s attempts to secure a meeting with the president of the Human Rights Campaign was not PR maneuvering but an attempt to “engage all important stakeholders to make sure they were aware that the most vulnerable patients suffering from toxoplasmosis … can access that product at a penny per pill.”
Martin Shkreli became the public face of price gouging because he was so transparent. But Retzlaff’s cool, calm, and collected attempt to spin the same exorbitant price increase for an HIV drug as a net good is arguably more dangerous because it is less obvious. Hate the man who raised the price but beware the executive who cleans up his mess and answers questions about the cost of a cigar roller with a straight face.
There are more Martin Shkrelis out there, and not all of them are acting like assholes on Twitter. And if the Shkreli Show overshadows the people who still need easy access to a once affordable treatment, everyone loses. The Pharma Bro started out as a poster child for a pressing problem. He may end up being a red herring.
Martin Shkreli can go to jail. But that won’t change the price of Daraprim.
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What You Get When You Mix Chickens, China and Climate Change |
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Monday, 08 February 2016 08:53 |
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Shah writes: "It's not just the growing scale of the poultry industry in Asia that increases the probability that new avian influenza viruses will emerge. It's also the peculiar nature of the trade. About half of China's poultry trade traffics in live birds."
Chickens. (photo: EPA)
What You Get When You Mix Chickens, China and Climate Change
By Sonia Shah, New York Times
08 February 16
 t was a gray, damp January afternoon a few years back when I visited the Jiangfeng wholesale poultry market on the outskirts of Guangzhou, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. With its bleak wire enclosures and grid of cement paths, the place had the feel of a neglected 1970s-era urban zoo. And despite the comparatively narrow range of species there — chickens, geese, ducks, quails and partridges, mostly, with a smattering of rabbits and one large slumbering hog — it smelled like one, too. As I walked around, watched suspiciously by the market’s handsome young security guards, a slimy mix of bird droppings and decomposing feathers slowly crept up the heels of my clogs.
Every few months, it seems, an invasive virus from a distant land attacks the Americas: dengue, chikungunya and, most recently, Zika. But the pathogens that frighten me most are novel strains of avian influenza.
I’d come to see their birthplace. Highly virulent and easily transmissible, these viruses emerge from open-air poultry farms and markets of the kind that stretch across Asia. Thanks to rising demand for chicken and other poultry, they’ve been surfacing at an accelerated clip, causing nearly 150 percent more outbreaks in 2015 than in 2014. And in late 2014, one strain managed to cross the ocean that had previously prevented its spread into the Americas, significantly expanding its reach across the globe.
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obby Kennedy was shot to death 48 years ago. Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted for his murder, doesn’t remember anything about that night. But he does know things about the past. His parole hearing is February 10. What can he say?
