Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I’ve been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

The ‘Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act’ (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling […]

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The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe – a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers.

In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress. But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair. Paulson’s plea for a permanent bailout fund – the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP – was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.

By December 2011, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission. And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press. The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s eurocrat overseers demand.

The bankers’ coup has triumphed in Europe seemingly without a fight. The ESM is cheered […]

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Buckminster fullerene molecules, the naturally occurring spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, have long been suspected to have biological benefits. Now, a study that set out to establish if they were toxic when administered orally has proven quite the opposite-they almost doubled the lifespan of the rats that they were fed to.

The experiments, which were carried out at the Université Paris Sud, France, set out to assess what adverse reactions might be caused by ingesting Bucky balls orally. To do that, they fed three groups of rats differently. Along with their normal diet, one group was held as a control; a second was fed olive oil; and a third group was fed olive oil doped with a 0.8 mg/ml concentration of Buckminster fullerene.

The results, which appear in Biomaterials, took the researchers by surprise. The control group had a median lifespan of 22 months, and the olive oil group one of 26 months. But the Bucky ball group? They stuck it out for 42 months. That’s almost double the control group.

The researchers have established that the effect is mediated by a reduction in oxidative stress-an imbalance in living cells that contributes to ageing. To say these results are important is […]

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FOSTER CITY — The University of California is testing a potential HIV prevention pill in a first-of-its-kind study in the state. The UC-based California HIV/AIDS Research Program (CHRP) has awarded grants totaling $11.8 million to see if a current HIV drug can be used to prevent the onset of the virus.

The antiretroviral pill Truvada, made by Foster City-based Gilead Sciences, Inc., was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 2004 to treat HIV patients. An international trial has shown it works as a preventive measure in select gay and bisexual populations, according to Dr. George Lemp, the director of CHRP.

‘It found that prep was effective in preventing HIV infection overall at 44 percent,

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Just over one quarter (26%) of all Americans of working age in 2011 experienced a gap in health insurance cover, says a new report published by the Commonwealth Fund. The authors explained that in many cases, when people change their jobs or become unemployed, many of them lose health coverage.

It can be extremely difficult to recover employer-sponsored health coverage after it is lost, the report showed. 69% of those who spent time with no health insurance, did so for at least 12 months; for 57% the period was longer than two years.

The data, which is based on the 2011 Commonwealth Fund Health Insurance Tracking Survey of U.S. Adults, showed that among those who had no insurance when the survey took place, 41% reported having had employer-sponsored coverage. 67% of individuals who lost their employer-sponsored coverage said the main reason for their loss of coverage was a loss or change of employment.
Many cannot find affordable insurance coverage on their own
The report, entitled ‘Gaps in Health Insurance: Why So Many Americans Experience Breaks in Coverage and How the Affordable Care Act Will Help’, explained that purchasing coverage on their own is either not an option, or extremely hard for a […]

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