FCC takes calls to pull Fox's broadcast licenses 'very seriously'

By Brendan Sasso - 05/09/12 05:25 PM ET  -  The Hillicon

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski testified Wednesday that his agency takes calls to cancel Fox's broadcast licenses "very seriously."

Groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), have urged the FCC to pull Fox's licenses because of evidence that its parent company News Corp. hacked people's phones in the United Kingdom to get stories.

During a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) pressed Genachowski on whether he plans to do anything about the allegations.

Genachowski said it wouldn't be appropriate to comment on a specific case, but that the commission is "certainly aware of the serious issues that have been raised in the U.K."

He noted that the law requires that the FCC only grant broadcast licenses to people of "good character."

"If any issues arise, the commission has an obligation, we would take it very seriously, to look at the record, look at the facts and apply the law," Genachowski said.

A British parliamentary committee ruled earlier this month that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is "not fit" to run an international media company because of the phone hacking scandal.

News Corp. owns 27 Fox stations in the United States.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, wrote to the British committee probing the scandal earlier this month, requesting that it provide any evidence of whether News Corp. violated any U.S. laws.

**If you want some kind of alternative news to the MSM big 3 time to call, fax or write in, in favor of Fox News and perhaps some of the one-sided slanted coverage, especially on NBC and ABC.**

Technorati Tags: MSM,Mainstream Media,FOX,Fox News,media,communication diversity czar,ABC,NBC,CBS,News Corp. watch the other hand,stand-up America

Big Pharma and the FDA: Suppress the Science, Ban the Natural Substances, Sell the Drugs!

In 2005, an up-and-coming pharmaceutical company made a big mistake: they invested millions of dollars into developing a drug only to discover that the only active ingredient of the drug, pyridoxamine, was really a common, naturally occurring substance that has been sold for decades at low cost to consumers in the form of a dietary supplement, and has always been available in commonly consumed foods such as chicken and brewer’s yeast.

We’re taught as children that when you make a mistake, you should own up to it and face the consequences. Apparently the pharmaceutical company in question, Biostratum, Inc., has yet to learn that lesson. Instead of owning up to their mistake, Biostratum tried to game the system to their advantage by asking the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to declare supplements containing pyridoxamine “adulterated” and effectively ban anyone but Biostratum from selling pyridoxamine.

Sadly, Biostratum’s desparate ploy to save their investment worked. Earlier this year the FDA agreed to ban companies from selling pyridoxamine as a dietary supplement. They denied the request to declare products containing pyridoxamine “adulterated,” but instead they declared that such products are not dietary supplements at all—claiming they are excluded from the definition of dietary supplements under the “prior market clause” [21 U.S.C. 321(ff)(3)(B)(ii)] and so may not be marketed as such.

Please note that nowhere in the FDA’s response letter is anything said about safety concerns. In fact, the FDA’s letter specifically says that “to allow such an article to be marketed as a dietary supplement would not be fair to the pharmaceutical company that brought, or intends to bring, the drug to market.” Fair to the pharmaceutical companies? What about fairness to consumers, some of whom rely on affordable pyridozxamine supplements to provide the levels of vitamin B-6 required for their survival? Is it fair to force those consumers to pay for expensive prescription drugs and doctors’ visits to supply their B-6 needs when they could get the exact same thing for a fraction of the cost in the form of a supplement? Isn’t this why our health care system is so ineffective?

This is hardly the first time the FDA has attacked naturally occuring substances. On October 17, 2005, the FDA banned information about the health benefits of cherries from appearing on websites—scientifically proven benefits, such as tart cherries’ ability to reduce the risk of colon cancer because of the anthocyanins and cyanidin contained in the cherry. Cherries, according to the latest research, help ease the pain of arthritis and gout; reduce risk factors for heart disease and diabetes; help regulate the body’s natural sleep patterns, aid with jet lag, prevent memory loss, and delay the aging process; and helps lower body fat and cholesterol—risk factors associated with heart disease. Moreoever, Scientists at Johns Hopkins have found that tart cherry anthocyanins reduced painful inflammation as well as a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, indomethacin.

When the 2005 ban was instituted, the FDA sent warning letters to twenty-nine companies that market cherry products. In these letters, they ordered the companies to stop publicizing scientific data about cherries. According to the FDA, when cherry companies disseminate this peer-reviewed scientific information, the cherries become “unapproved new drugs” and are subject to seizure. The FDA warned that if those involved in “cherry trafficking” continue to inform consumers about these scientific studies, criminal prosecutions would ensue.

But fresh fruit and vegetables are not the FDA’s only target: As we reported in this newsletter recently, General Mills was recently issued a warning letter by the FDA for illegally marketing Cheerios Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal. The problem was the claim on the cereal box that Cheerios can lower cholesterol 4% in six weeks, and the statement on their website that “diets rich in whole grain foods can reduce the risk of heart disease.” The letter, dated May 5, 2009, called the above claims “serious violations” of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and applicable regulations.

FDA stated that based on the claims made, Cheerios is now an unapproved drug, and must go through FDA new drug approval process.Note that the FDA isn't disputing the claim. It's disputing the company's right to make the claim.

As one newspaper columnist humorously put it, “One of these things is not like the others: morphine, penicillin, aspirin, Cheerios. Most drugs, if taken improperly, will kill the consumer or cause substantial bodily harm. An entire bottle of aspirin at one sitting will harm or kill. If Cheerios is a drug, therefore, one should be able to commit suicide by consuming the entire box.”

For years, the FDA barred health claims about the benefits of fish oil for heart, cancer, depression, body pain, and various other conditions until a drug company paid a great deal of money to go through the approval process. This type of enforcement effectively censors scientific information and greatly restricts consumer access to scientific studies that provide valuable information.

In the case of pyridoxamine, the FDA did not act out of concern for public safety. This is about money, and about a profit-seeking corporation taking advantage of what is supposed to be a public health organization in order to save their skins.

Source: American Association for Health Freedom

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Posted: True Health Is True Wealth

The Weimar Solution

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency,” said Lord Keynes.
Ben Bernanke disagrees. A student of the Depression, the Fed chair appears far more fearful of deflation — a vicious cycle of falling prices, debt defaults, home foreclosures and rising unemployment.

Deflation is what America underwent in the 1930s. A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls to go out to stockholders, who ran to their banks that, besieged, collapsed, wiping out a third of our money. As Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel for his thesis that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, told PBS in 2000: “For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing … with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

“(T)he Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were … urging them to do that. So it was … clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.”

Is Bernanke fighting the war of 1929 in 2009? Surely, today, with the explosion in M1, the basic money supply, there is no shortage of dollars out there, even if they are not circulating fast enough.

To end our recession, Bernanke may be running an even greater risk: hyper-inflation. This has destroyed more nations than deflation or even depression.

Recall: It was French military intervention in the Ruhr in 1923, to force payment of war reparations, and Weimar’s decision to let the currency fall and pay the French in cheap marks that led to the wipeout of the German middle class, the discrediting of that democratic republic and the Munich beer-hall putsch of Adolf Hitler.

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation,” said Ernest Hemingway, “is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

Which brings us to last week’s shocker...

The Fed will buy up $300 billion in long-term Treasury bonds and spend $750 billion more buying sub-prime mortgages to remove them from the balance sheets of ailing big banks, to get the banks lending again.
Bernanke is printing money to buy U.S. bonds.

This new gusher from the Fed, after the $700 billion TARP bailout, comes on top of a Congressional Budget Office estimate that this year’s deficit will be $1.85 trillion, 13.1 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the share of the U.S. economy of the largest previous postwar deficit.

Concluding the dollar is being abandoned in a frantic Fed effort to stop the recession, markets reacted instantly. The dollar plunge was the steepest since the Plaza Agreement of 1985. Gold shot up to $950 an ounce. Silver had a 12 percent run-up, the sharpest ever. Oil prices surged above $50 a barrel. Commodity markets advanced.

The Fed seems to have confirmed the fears of Premier Wen Jiabao, who said that China is “definitely a little worried” about the value of the U.S. bonds Beijing has purchased with the dollars piled up from her trade surpluses with the United States.

Can one blame the Chinese? They have already been burned on their U.S. investments. And if the defense of the dollar against its ancient enemy inflation is being abandoned, and protecting the dollar is to take a back seat to the Fed’s fight to avoid deflation, than it is indeed time to get out of the dollar and dollar-denominated assets.

For inflation is theft. It make liars and cheats of governments. By eroding the value of a currency, inflation punishes savers and creditors and rewards debtors. And what nation is the biggest debtor of them all? The United States of America.

Insidiously, inflation consumes the value of cash, savings, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, Treasury bonds and T-bills. Friends who lent America money, who bought our debt in good faith, are robbed and made fools of, while speculators who bet against America by shorting the dollar in the currency markets are vastly rewarded.
Given the $3.6 trillion budget Obama plans, the $1.8 trillion in red ink he will run by Oct. 1 and the trillions the Fed is pumping into the economy, gross domestic product should spike, as it did after the far smaller stimulus package of 2008.

We will feel a healthy glow, and folks will begin to sing, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Yet, one senses that we are doing again exactly what we have done before in this generation. Rather than endure the pain and accept the sacrifices to cure us of our addiction, we are going back to the heroin. And this time, with Dr. Bernanke handling the needle, we may just overdose.

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By Pat Buchanan who is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,"  "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and  "Where the Right Went Wrong."