Friday, April 17, 2009

Another Nobel prize winning economist says: we're screwed

Joseph Stiglitz joins fellow Nobel-winner Paul Krugman in calling out the Obama administration. Both agree that the Obama plan will not work; Stiglitz is to be admired for stating in plain and unadorned language exactly why it won't work.

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahnPchOxZMh8&refer=home

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration’s bank- rescue efforts will probably fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

"First Do No Harm"

Looks like the Gitmo doctors were back in the dorm sleeping off a kegger the day that the Hippocratic Oath was covered in class. Amoral bastards.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603654.html?hpid=topnews

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program "inhuman."

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."