Stop Fox News: Tell FCC To Revoke Broadcast License NOW!

Stop Fox News: Tell FCC To Revoke Broadcast License NOW! 

Help us take Fox News off the air—get the FCC to revoke Rupert Murdoch’s broadcast licenses NOW!

The deplorable actions Murdoch has taken to run his News Corp. empire prove we can't trust him to act in the public interest. Now, a study by Farleigh Dickinson University shows Fox News can’t even claim to inform its audience: its viewers are less informed than those who avoid news outlets altogether!

It’s the Federal Communications Commission’s job to consider the character of a media owner when dealing out broadcast licenses, and to label programs as news only when they actually inform viewers. The Murdoch Mafia has failed on both counts, and we have a chance to take them down for good. Save the airwaves from bigotry and corruption: tell the FCC to enforce the law NOW!

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION: Rupert Murdoch has failed every “character” test available, and the programs under his broadcasting licenses have both been implicated in scandal and have been proven to make audiences less informed, not more. We urge you to revoke Murdoch’s broadcasting licenses immediately, and to take a stand against his corrupt media empire.

SIGN HERE!!!

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Scott Walker: Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus And I Are A 'Cheesehead Revolution'

The Huffington Post  |  By Chris Gentilviso Posted: 11/20/2013 10:34 am EST 

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) coined a spirited term over the weekend for a trio of high-powered Republicans from the Badger State.
In a Saturday interview with USA Today’s Capital Download, Walker talked about his friendship with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). When asked if both he and Ryan could run for president in 2016, Walker said it was an "interesting question," adding that "who knows what the future will bring?"
What he was sure of was the success of three big-name Wisconsin Republicans, remarking how he, Ryan and Reince Priebus all grew up within miles of one another.
"Paul grew up 15 miles to the west of me," Walker said. "Reince Priebus, who’s the RNC (Republican National Committee) chair, grew up about 20 miles to the east of me. There must have been something in the water at the time….We say it’s kind of a Cheesehead Revolution."
With nearly three years to go before the 2016 presidential picture hits its peak, HuffPost Pollster's latest compilation of 27 publicly available polls shows Ryan and Walker both in the mix as potential GOP candidates. Ryan, who served as the party's 2012 vice presidential candidate, netted 11 percent of the hypothetical vote, while Walker earned eight percent.

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Paul Ryan: Poor People Need Jesus, Not Food Stamps

Paul Ryan: Poor People Need Jesus, Not Food Stamps

• By Jonathan Chait

Paul Ryan has spent more than a year furiously distancing himself from the wreckage of the 2012 Republican campaign. Even in the closing weeks before the election, Ryan gave a high-profile speech about poverty that amounted to a personal escape pod from Mitt Romney’s disastrous caught-on-tape denunciation of the moocher class. Since then, Ryan’s team has openly discussed the need to rebrand him and the particular danger, in the wake of the 47 percent tape, of his association with Ayn Rand-ism.
Today, we see the next step in Ryan’s rebranding, in the form of a largely credulous Washington Post story outlining his plans to launch himself into anti-poverty policy.

The article asserts, “Unlike Romney, Ryan is no child of privilege.” And Ryan certainly did not come from Romney-esque riches; he was born into “one of the most prominent families in Janesville,” and received a share of two family trust funds. Ryan Lizza reported in a profile of Ryan last year:

Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town, especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and today Ryan, Inc., started in 1884 by Paul’s great-grandfather, is a national construction firm.

Ryan does carefully tend his working class bona fides – when his visit to a Belgian brewery was discovered, he let it be known he prefers Miller Lite and found the foreign beers on tap unfamiliar.

The substance of Ryan’s anti-poverty agenda remains yet to be announced, but the general spirit of the endeavor can already be discerned from Ryan’s previous remarks, and those of the allies helping him formulate it. Ryan believes that the main impediment facing poor people is the existence of government programs that give them money and health care – a problem his budget rectifies by cutting subsidies to the poor. Those subsidies, Ryan has said, amount to a “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

Ryan’s new line seems similar to the old one:                                           

“Paul wants people to dream again,” Holloway said of Ryan. “You don’t dream when you’ve got food stamps.”

In fact, lots of people who survived on food stamps — like J.K. Rowling — went on to achieve great things.

The other emerging element of Ryan’s anti-poverty agenda is Jesus:

“You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul,” he said last week at the Heritage forum. “Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people.”

Basically, Ryan loves the poor the way fundamentalist Christians love gays.

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Paul Ryan's Pity Party

Paul Ryan's Pity Party

According to David Cantonese at The Run 2016, Paul Ryan was in Iowa to give a speech at a fundraiser Saturday night, but it turned more into a pity party:

Paul Ryan admitted it took him a good six months to get over his loss to President Obama and Joe Biden.

And a year later, the wounds on the former GOP vice presidential nominee still seem raw.

At a fundraiser for Gov. Terry Branstad in Iowa Saturday night, the Wisconsin congressman bemoaned the 2012 defeat in a dull and, at times, awkward speech that failed to extract the rapturous reaction one would expect for a rising star or potential 2016 presidential candidate.

Perhaps the crowd caught a bit of the 2012 bug Ryan was still carrying.

“We were in a funk for a good six months because we made mistakes,” he acknowledged, adding that it was “obviously very frustrating.”

Cantonese goes on to note that Iowa had gone to President Obama by five points. He also noted that Ryan petulantly made it sound that this was the Republicans' fault for not delivering the state.

Cantonese ends his article with these telling words:

In addition to [Governor Terry] Branstad, Ryan name-checked and thanked Rep. Tom Latham and Sen. Chuck Grassley but did not mention Rep. Steve King, the most vocally conservative member of the delegation.

“Maybe we should come back and do this more often. People are really friendly here,” Ryan said, in a hint that was clearly meant to signal he’s keeping the presidential door open.

He could’ve used a few more friendly folks in the room tonight.

The only question would be is Ryan doing so poorly because of his own corruption and absurdity, or is he also receiving some of Scott Walker's John Doe taint.

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Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Posted by Brendan Fischer on November 15, 2013

 

Wisconsin Republicans rolled a raft of anti-democrat measures through the legislature late Thursday night, ranging from additional restrictions on voting to new limits on the right to recall elected officials, following a recall effort against Governor Scott Walker last year.

Recall the Recalls

A proposed constitutional amendment passed by the Assembly on Thursday would limit the recall power that has been part of the state constitution for eighty years.
Currently, the state Constitution allows for recall of state elected officials for any reason. The amendment would only allow for recall if a state officeholder is charged with a felony or ethics violation. Wisconsin is one of 18 states that allows for recalls; of those, only seven limit recall to elected officials guilty of misconduct in office.
The constitutional right was exercised in recent years to trigger a recall election for Scott Walker after the newly-elected governor pushed a series of radical measures through the legislature, including restrictions on public sector collective bargaining, cuts in education funding, and voting restrictions; many of the measures were never discussed on the campaign trail and took the state by surprise, prompting massive protests in the capitol. State Senators from both parties were also targeted for recall. Those recall efforts could never have proceeded had the limits passed Thursday been in place.
The broad, unlimited right of recall was added to the state constitution in 1926 during the Progressive Era as a mechanism of accountability. ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette campaign literature from the early 20th Century says: “By the recall, a faithless public official may be retired without waiting for the evil to be fully consummated. Under such a law, the public official will no longer betray his constituency."
Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) echoed those sentiments on Thursday. "What are the authors [of the recall amendment] afraid of?" he asked. "Why in the world are they trying to set aside the ability of voters ... to recall someone who they think made a mistake? ... It's a democratic right of people to be heard and it's something that should not be suppressed."
The proposed amendment passed along party lines but is not a done deal. A constitutional amendment must pass the full Legislature two sessions in a row, and then be approved in a statewide vote; the earliest that could happen in 2015.
The legislature also passed similar limits on recall for municipal and school officials, which need only pass the Senate and be signed by Governor Walker. Ironically, had those restrictions been in place in 2002, they would have quashed the recall effort that led to Walker's rise to power. In 2002, Walker aligned himself with an attempted recall against then-Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament, who hadn't been convicted of a felony or ethics violation; after Ament resigned, Walker was elected County Executive.

Voter ID, Back Again?

The legislature also voted along party lines to alter the state's voter ID law in the face of legal challenges.
After Governor Scott Walker and a GOP-dominated legislature took power in 2011, Wisconsin was one of several states to pass a law requiring an ID to vote. The law threatened to disenfranchise more than 300,000 voters who did not have the required forms of ID, primarily people of color, students, and the elderly -- voters who had turned out in record numbers just a few years earlier to elect President Obama. Wisconsin's law was subsequently struck down by two separate state courts on grounds that its burdens were too severe and it imposed eligibility requirements beyond those provided by the Wisconsin Constitution. One decision was reversed on appeal, but the other is still in effect and the law remains blocked. The law is also currently being challenged in federal court under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
This latest bill is designed to overcome those legal challenges but would still make it harder to vote for low-income Wisconsinites.
Under the legislation, voters will still be asked to present an ID, and if they do not have one, they must sign an affidavit swearing not only that they do not have the forms of identification required under the law, but also declaring that they either are too poor to get an ID or cannot gather the necessary documentation.
"This bill says that poor people need to declare their indigency. It's a scarlet letter," said Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa (D-Milwaukee).
The bill passed the Assembly 54-38 along party lines and now goes to the Republican-dominated Senate. Its fate in the Senate is uncertain: Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) has said that he would rather wait for courts to rule on the original voter ID legislation before making changes to the law.

Early Voting Limits, Chief Justice Selection Alterations

Another bill will limit early voting to weekdays between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m., effectively ending weekend voter drives in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee and Madison. In 2008, President Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, thanks in part to an aggressive "vote early" campaign where one in five voters cast absentee ballots in-person at their County Clerk's office. After Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, they cut the number of days and weekends for early voting in half, from one month before the election to just two weeks. Still, in the 2012 elections at least 392,000 people voted early at their clerk's offices, and Obama again won the state by a sizable margin.
The measure passed Thursday will limit the practice even further, eliminating early voting on the weekends, and during the weekdays, imposing a 6pm cutoff. This would have a significant impact on working people. Last November in Milwaukee County and other larger counties, voters could cast a ballot until 7pm on weekdays, and between 9am and 5pm on weekends. The measure now goes to the Senate.
The legislature also voted along party lines to amend the state constitution to alter the selection process for the state Supreme Court's Chief Justice, changing it from a seniority system to one based on peer selection. The measure appears aimed at ousting Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, an independent judge on a court that in recent years has become dominated by corporate-backed jurists, many of whom have been elected with support from the state chapter of the Chamber of Commerce and shadowy out-of-state groups. Spending on Wisconsin's judicial elections have skyrocketed in recent years, shifting the court to the right and helping its reputation to plummet.
Like the recall measure, the amendment must pass two sessions of the legislature and be approved by voters.
Among other things, the Assembly also voted along party lines to approve new specialty license plates that read "In God We Trust" and "Choose Life," and to limit public access to a proposed iron ore mine site in Northern Wisconsin.

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Paul Ryan To Give 2016 Bid 'A Hard Look' At The End Of His Term

Catherine Thompson – November 13, 2013, 9:10 AM EST

For now, former vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said he's focused on legislating -- but come 2014, he plans evaluate the odds for another shot at the White House.
“I’ve decided I will consider this later,” Ryan told the Des Moines Register in an interview published Tuesday. “Once I’m through with this term, then I’m going to give a hard look at it.”

This year Ryan has been asked repeatedly whether or not he's considering a run at the top of the Republican ticket in 2016, and he's repeatedly demurred in response.
Ahead of a trip to Iowa this weekend, the Wisconsin Republican told the Register that he is busy working on the federal budget and policy issues like health care and immigration reform, rather than "worrying about my own personal ambitions or career moves." The congressman has indeed been keeping busy, citing budget negotiations as the reason he took a pass on campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Recent polls have shown Ryan towards the back of the potential 2016 pack, trailing Republican contenders like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

 

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Wisconsin Election Fraud Alert: Assembly GOP Changing Voting Rules to Give Themselves Partisan Political Benefit

One Wisconsin Now Press Release

November 12, 2013
Contact: Mike Browne
Phone: (608) 444-3483

Wisconsin Election Fraud Alert: Assembly GOP Changing Voting Rules to Give Themselves Partisan Political Benefit

'None of These Measures Will Prevent Voting Impropriety, And They're Not Intended To' 

MADISON, WI -- Undeterred by court rulings declaring previous election law changes unconstitutional and continuing federal court action on the voter ID law, Assembly Republicans today advanced new restrictions on voting that will decrease access to the franchise in Wisconsin.
One Wisconsin Now Executive Director Scot Ross commented, "The only thing that the Assembly Campaigns and Elections majority voted to do today was to make voting more complicated and less convenient for hundreds of thousands of legal Wisconsin voters."
Among the new voting restrictions now available to be considered by the full Assembly are:

• Restrictions on the hours of early voting that will eliminate most evening and weekend voting, including nonpartisan "souls to the polls" efforts by faith communities.
• New notice requirements on voting at assisted care living facilities for the elderly and persons with disabilities.
• Another attempt to enact a voter ID law that would allow for the segregating of ballots based on economic status and allowing challenges to a person's declaration of poverty based on unspecified criteria.

In November 2012 nearly 400,000 Wisconsin residents took advantage of early voting and roughly one in four ballots cast in 2008 were cast early under the current law provisions being attacked by the Assembly Republicans. In addition, it was estimated roughly 300,000 legal Wisconsin voters could be prevented from accessing their right to the franchise under a state voter ID law.
Ross noted that One Wisconsin Institute will be joining with other voter rights advocates in arguing against the GOP voter ID law at a December 17th state court hearing. The Institute's amicus brief in the case exposes the lack of widespread voting impropriety in Wisconsin, including the absence of voter impersonation, the only improper voting an ID requirement would prevent. In addition, the brief notes the significant lack of access to Department of Motor Vehicle offices, based on both hours of operations and number of offices, compared to Indiana where a voter ID law was upheld by the courts.
"None of these measures will prevent voting impropriety, and they're not intended to. Republicans are a trying to change the rules on voting, again, to give themselves a partisan political advantage. And that's the real voting fraud in Wisconsin," concluded Ross.

# # #

One Wisconsin Now is a statewide communications network specializing in effective earned media and online organizing to advance progressive leadership and values

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Racine women closed Street sat in middle of road front of Paul Ryans office

Protest. Racine women closed Street sat in middle of road front of Paul Ryans office

Protest shuts down Sixth Street

  •  By Aaron Knapp

Twelve women hold hands Friday afternoon, November 8, 2013,
as they block Sixth Street during an immigration reform
protest outside Congressman Paul Ryan's office in
Downtown Racine. /
Gregory Shaver gregory.shaver@journaltimes.com

RACINE — Twelve Racine women effectively closed a block of Sixth Street for an hour Friday afternoon after they sat in the middle of the street in front of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s office, 216 Sixth St., to push him to take action on immigration reform.
Police blocked off the street at Main Street and allowed the women to address a crowd of several dozen that gathered in front of the Racine office for Ryan, the Janesville Republican who represents Racine County in                                                                                            Congress.

The women-led protest, organized by the Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, called on Ryan to work for speedy immigration reform and stop deportations.
Police wrote down each woman’s information and told them that they would be cited for the incident, according to Joe Shansky, a representative of the organization.

Cecilia Anguiano, right, talks about her
family's struggles with immigration, as
she and her mother, Sofi Anguiano, center,
and her grandmother, Luz Maria Hernandez,
left block Sixth Street with other women
during a immigration reform protest Friday
afternoon, November 9, 2013, outside
Congressman Paul Ryan's office in Downtown Racine.
Gregory Shaver gregory.shaver@journaltimes.com

One of the women, 77-year-old Racine resident Luz Maria Hernández, said some of her children have been waiting in Mexico for 17 years for their visas to be approved.
“I have no fear because I’m fighting for my children and for many families who also suffer and are saddened,” said Hernández, who has nine children, 31 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Hernández, her one daughter who has been able to move to Racine, 57-year-old Sofia Anguiano, and her granddaughter Cecilia Anguiano were three of the women cited during the protest.
Hernández and her granddaughter were arrested together in a protest in Washington, D.C., in September, but Sofia Anguiano said that Friday was the first time she has ever been ticketed in the United States.
Another protester, Luisa Morales, 25, said that deportations are of particular concern for her because she was raised in Racine by two parents who were
                                                                               always at risk of being deported.

Racine police gather information from twelve women
Friday afternoon, November 8, 2013, as they block
Sixth Street during a immigration reform protest
outside the Congressman Paul Ryan's office in
Downtown Racine. /
Gregory Shaver gregory.shaver@journaltimes.com

“I feared everyday in my childhood because they came to this country undocumented,” she said. “I had to grow up much sooner than most kids.”
Shansky said that the organization has held similar protests in front of the offices of Ryan, Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ron Johnson in the past to spur action on immigration reform.
The protest began at about 3 p.m. and lasted for about an hour, until the women concluded the protest and willingly moved out of the street.

 Journal Times, 212 Fourth St. Racine, WI

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Fox, Facts, and the "Galt"-ernate Universe

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Hypnotized by Ayn Rand and Reaganomics, Republicans Have Completely Lost Touch with Economic Reality

The GOP doesn't understand how the economy works or the concerns of middle-class families.

Photo Credit: Flickr

August 23, 2013  |  

  By Bob Burnett Huffington Post

On September 9th, when Congress returns from its summer vacation, negotiations will begin on a new Federal budget and a U.S. debt limit increase. As a quid pro quo Republicans will demand restrictions on Obamacare. Once again, this raises the specter of the GOP pushing the government into default. Why don't Republicans understand that's a terrible idea that would crater the economy?
Once upon a time, the GOP stood for responsible economic policy. I grew up in a middle-class family in Southern California, where my father and grandfather ran a small business. They were Republicans, as were most of the people we knew. In those days, the GOP attracted the middle class because it was the Party of common sense: it understood business and the economy.
Over the ensuing years the Republican Party abandoned the middle class and become the party of the wealthy -- the one percent. In the '80s, Republicans fell under the spell of Reaganomics. Conservative economists infused American political discourse with three malignant notions: helping the rich get richer would inevitably help everyone else; markets were inherently self correcting; and, "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." Reagan's ideology produced deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and powerful, and monopoly capitalism. It resulted in unprecedented income inequality. The American ethos changed from "we're in this together" ("I am my brother's keeper") to "you are on your own."
These changes might not factor in the latest crisis if Senators and Representatives understood that the American economy requires a healthy middle class. But these days the average member of Congress is more likely to have had a prior occupation as a lawyer than as a business person. Furthermore 78 percent of Congress people have no academic background in business or economics.
As a consequence, the Republican leadership doesn't understand the American economy; they're living in a dream world where shutting down the government doesn't impact middle-class Americans. Consider the backgrounds of the GOP leaders: In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, is a lawyer, as is his second in command, John Cornyn. The Republican policy committee chair is Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, an orthopedic surgeon. The minority chair of the Senate Finance Committee is Orrin Hatch, a lawyer.
In the House of Representative Speaker John Boehner does have a business background. However, his second in command, House majority leader Eric Cantor, is a lawyer who has worked in his family's real estate development business.
Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, directs most Republican economic policy. Ryan doesn't have much of a business background -- he's spent his adult life in politics -- but he does have an undergraduate degree in economics. What appeals to contemporary Republicans is Ryan's devotion to reactionary novelist Ayn Rand. A New Yorkerprofile observed that Congressman Ryan often mentions Rand: "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." In 2009, Ryan said, "what's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."

Paul Ryan has reshaped the contemporary Republican ideology by layering Rand's philosophy on top of Reaganomics. Ayn Rand believed in Objectivism: "The concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Ayn Rand saw a limited role for government, only the military, police, and judiciary. As a consequence, Paul Ryan and Rand's many other Republican disciples want to severely cut government spending and eliminate the social safety net. (The Paul Ryan budget attacks the core components of the safety net: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and affordable health care.) That's why the GOP leadership is not worried by the prospect of a government shutdown or default. They believe it will produce less government.

Republican congressional leaders have not only been influenced by Ayn Rand but also by their status as millionaires: Barasso, Boehner, Cantor, Hatch, McConnell, and Ryan, to name only a few. Indeed, 47 percent of members of Congress are millionaires.
A recent study by professors Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright compared the political attitudes of these millionaires, the one percent, to those of the American public in general. Not surprisingly, America's wealthy are much more negative about Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and affordable healthcare than are the 99 percent.
Republicans don't understand that it would be a terrible idea to crater the American economy because they've lost touch with reality. Hypnotized by a toxic blend of Reaganomics and Objectivism, Republicans don't understand how the economy works or the concerns of middle-class families.

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GREED? THY NAME IS AYN

GREED? THY NAME IS AYN

In Business, History, Politics, Social commentary on March 13, 2013 at 12:00 am “Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s ideas have never been more important.
“Unfettered capitalism, unregulated business, bare-bones government providing no social services, glorification of selfishness, disdain for Judeo-Christian morality—these are the tenets of Rand’s harsh philosophy.”
So reads the jacket blurb for Ayn Rand Nation: The Struggle for America’s Soul, by Gary Weiss.

“The timing of this book couldn’t be better for Americans who are trying to understand where in the hell the far-out right’s anti-worker, anti-egalitarian extremism is coming from,” asserts Jim Hightower, New York Times bestselling author of Thieves in High Places.
“Ayn Rand Nation introduces us to the godmother of such Tea Party craziness as destroying Social Security and eliminating Wall Street regulation. Weiss writes with perception and wit.”
For those who believe that Rand’s philosophy is the remedy for America’s economic and social ills, a 60 Minutes news story sounds a warning.
New England Compounding Center (NECC) pharmacy, based in Framington, Massachusetts, is under criminal investigation.  The reason: Shipping, in the fall of 2012, 17,000 vials of a steroid to be injected into the joints or spines of patients suffering chronic pain.
But instead of relieving pain, this steroid–contaminated with fungal meningitis–brought only agony and death.

The vials went out to thousands of pharmacies scattered across 23 states.
Forty-eight people have died, and 720 are still fighting horrific infections caused by the drug.
Just as Ayn Rand would have wanted, the pharmacy managed to avoid supervision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
NECC was one of thousands of pharmacies that Congress exempted from FDA oversight. The reason: By law, they are allowed to make custom drugs for just one patient at a time.
But within a few years, NECC went national–and vastly expanded the quantities of drugs produced.
“The underlying factor is that the company got greedy and overextended and we got sloppy, and something happened,” John Connolly, a lab technician for the company, told 60 Minutes, the CBS news magazine.
And, also as Rand would have wanted, the four family members who founded the pharmacy were enriched by it–receiving over $16 million in wages and profits, from December 2011 through November 2012.
Bankruptcy records show the family members racked up $90,000 on corporate American Express credit cards, including charges made after the company shut down in early October.
A month before the first steroid death, Connolly says he warned his supervisor: “Something’s gonna happen, something’s gonna get missed and we’re gonna get shut down.”
His supervisor just shrugged.
NECC was shut down by the authorities.  Barry Cadden, the president and lead pharmacist of the company, was subpoenaed by Congress to testify.  In true gangster fashion, he pleaded the Fifth.
He claims he doesn’t know how the contamination started.
Which brings us back to Ayn Rand–and, more specifically, Ayn Rand Nation.
Among the themes explored in Weiss’ book:

• Atlas Shrugged–Rand’s 1957 novel–depicts a United States where many of society’s most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations and go on strike. The refusal evokes the imagery of what would happen if the mythological Atlas refused to continue to hold up the world.  The novel continues to influence those who aren’t hard-core Rand followers, who are known as Objectivists.
• Ayn Rand’s novels dramatically affirm such bedrock American values as independence, creativity, self-reliance, and above all, a permanent distrust of government.
• In Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living–set in Soviet Russia–her heroine, Kira Argounova, tells a Communist: “I loathe your ideals; I admire your methods.” Objectivists believe in defending capitalism with the same ruthless methods of Communists.
• In Rand’s ideal world, government would control only police, armies and law courts.  To her, a   government which performs more than these three functions is not simply impractical or expensive: it is evil.

Many of those who embrace Rand substitute rage for logic: Tea Partiers are furious about the 2008 Wall Street crash, yet they blame the government for it.
(Ironically, in a way, they are right: The government can be blamed–but not for too much regulation of greed-fueled capitalists but too little.)
Weiss asserts that Tea Party members resent the social and economic realities facing the nation, but lack a coherent intellectual framework to help them focus and justify their rage.  But Objectivists have–and offer–such a framework.
Thus, Tea Partiers form the ideological part of the right wing, and the clarity–and fanaticism–of their views gives them a power far out of proportion to their numbers.
Weiss believes that Rand is presenting a moral argument for laissez-faire capitalism, which means eliminating  Social Security, Medicare, public road system, fire departments, parks, building codes–and, above all, any type of financial regulation.
Weiss maintains that Rand’s moral argument must be directly confronted–and defeated–with moral arguments calling for charity and rationality.
Given the fanaticism of Tea Partiers and the right-wing Republicans they support, success in countering Rand’s “I’ve-got-mine-and-the-hell-with-everybody-else” morality is by no means assured.

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