pinched this from morriganswitch. i heard the song the other day, but didn’t know who did it or anything–just liked the voice. anyway, nice song from a pretty painted lady…
Category: Uncategorized
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This is pretty despicable. This country is in deep shit if this move is allowed to stand.
The following article is by the lawyers representing the families of four American contractors who worked for Blackwater and were killed in Fallujah. After Blackwater refused to share information about why they were killed, the families were told they would have to sue Blackwater to find out. Now Blackwater is trying to sue them for $10 million to keep them quiet.
Raleigh, NC — The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men’s estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.
Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.
Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.
After filing its suit against the dead men’s estates, Blackwater demanded that its claim and the families’ existing lawsuit be handled in a private arbitration. By suing the families in arbitration, Blackwater has attempted to move the examination of their wrongful conduct outside of the eye of the public and away from a jury. This comes at the same time when Congress is investigating Blackwater.
full story here: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/53460/
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so, i just realized how i’m going to approach my need to create art in homage of vultures.
i’ve had vultures in my head for about a year now and i’ve got sketches of vultures and images of vultures in my brain but for some reason i’ve not gone anywhere with it all.
but now, i know what to do.
i have bamboo
i have unstretched canvas
i have paints
i have a desire to remove as much structure as possible.
now, i just have to finish this stupid commissioned painting and i’m on my way to making vulture art.oyeah!
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Not that I think it will help or change things, but…it’s about time our congresscritters started looking into the FDA and how it’s become nothing more than a strong-arm of bigPharma. So in the NYTimes today I found this little tidbit:
Diabetes Drug Still Has Heart Risks, Doctors Warn
By STEPHANIE SAUL and GARDINER HARRIS
Published: June 6, 2007A medical study intended to demonstrate the heart safety of a well-known diabetes treatment seems, instead, to have added to the controversy over the drug.
Its manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, says preliminary results of the clinical trial provide reassurance that the drug, Avandia, an oral medication for Type 2 diabetes that has been used by an estimated seven million people worldwide, does not raise the risk of a heart attack or death from cardiovascular disease.
Influential doctors said that the data published online yesterday in a major medical journal did nothing to ease their concerns about the heart risks. The doctors raised their concerns in three editorials accompanying the Avandia study in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Questions about the safety of Avandia and how regulators have dealt with its risks are to be the subject of a Congressional hearing today. The data could intensify criticism, expected at the hearing, that the Food and Drug Administration should have warned about the potential heart risks years ago.
A supervisor in the drug safety office at the agency said in an interview yesterday that she was rebuked last year after calling for a stronger warning label on Avandia and a competing drug, Actos.
The supervisor, Dr. Rosemary Johann-Liang, said that in March 2006 she approved a recommendation from a safety reviewer at the agency that the drugs be required to carry the strongest warning, a so-called black box warning, because they posed a risk of unusual swelling that could lead to heart failure.
But after officials at the agency who dealt more closely with Glaxo complained, Dr. Johann-Liang said she was ordered to retract her approval of the warning, lost her power to approve such assessments and no longer supervised reviews of the safety of Avandia and Actos.
“This was a very careful review that came to an inescapable conclusion,” Dr. Johann-Liang said in the interview. “They decided to act like the review never happened and punish me for approving it.”
Read the whole story at
I’ll be interested in the outcome of this one since it’s actually looking at what the FDA is doing. I doubt (due to my jaded nature) that much will happen, but every little inkling of truth holds some hope that we can eventually loosen the strangle hold that pharmaceutical companies have on the FDA, and how they exploit illness for profit.
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this was posted to a forum i’m on. thought some of you might enjoy it.
Croneswood Art 