“Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined, helping make the former Massachusetts governor the best-financed candidate in the Republican nomination battle.”
By Andrew Dunn~
The country’s biggest banks are overwhelmingly supporting Mitt Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, an analysis of federal campaign contributions shows.
Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., had given Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.
The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed. The Republican presidential hopeful with the second-highest total, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, dropped out of the race in mid-August.
Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined, helping make the former Massachusetts governor the best-financed candidate in the Republican nomination battle, which is heating up in South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s primary.
“Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.”
By Bill Moyers~
The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.
Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.
Rick Santorum received more than $11 million in contributions from corporate and other special interest political action committees (PACs)
By AAron Metha and Josh Israel~
Rick Santorum the presidential candidate casts himself as a Washington outsider, “one of the most successful government reformers in our history,” according to his campaign bio, “taking on Washington’s powerful special interests from the moment he arrived in our nation’s capital.”
But Rick Santorum the House and Senate member received more than $11 million in contributions from corporate and other special interest political action committees (PACs) over his career, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.
Among the largest donors are giants from the telecommunications, tobacco, and banking industries, the analysis found. The Center examined contributions to the Pennsylvanian’s congressional, senatorial and 2012 presidential campaigns — as well as his “America’s Foundation” and “Fight PAC” leadership PACs, entities set up by Santorum to aid others in their political campaigns.
Corporate PACs connected to telecommunications firms that became today’s AT&T Inc. poured more than $98,000 into Santorum’s campaign coffers, making the behemoth his top career patron.
Those donations may have been rewarded with support for the industry; in 1996 Santorum was one of 91 Senators to approve the heavily lobbied rewrite of telecommunications law that deregulated the industry.
I started caregiving for my husband, Maj. Larry S. Potter, Ret. USAF
By Dr. Ethelle G. Lord~
Providing three square meals a days and receiving help with getting dressed in a nursing home should really be no longer acceptable.
This is the traditional way. Recently I received a call from the social worker where my husband resides in a dementia unit at a nursing facility. She wanted to know if I just wanted him kept comfortable and hydrated since he was unresponsive, or did I want him sent to the hospital. Naturally I jumped from my chair and said: “He just had the beginning of a head cold. What is going on? You really do not have enough staff for one-on-one care which is what he needs. I will do it and I am coming over now”. I felt my husband was home again and I had to suddenly provide the 24-hour caregiving I used to provide him when he was at home.
With my bags still intact from two days before having just visited with him for Christmas, it did not take me long to get in the car to drive the 300+ miles from home to the nursing center where he is in Maine. Normally it takes me 5 hours to get there and another 5 hours to return home. This time it took me 3.5 hours to get there as I was able to speed and did not stop for any
He had stopped walking on his own in the spring of 2010. After 10 years of providing his family care-giving, almost all by myself except for the last year, I could no longer continue to lift on him, support him physically, without getting sick myself. This is a common outcome of family caregivers who cannot see the forest for the trees and find themselves sick, even dying before the individual with Alzheimer’s.
Determined to be here for him to the end, I had to make the difficult decision to let him go into long-term care on May 18, 2010.
The head cold this year often leads to pneumonia. In individuals with Alzheimer’s who are not mobile, this is extremely dangerous. My husband was treated in November for a UTI. The attending physician usually treats him twice in a row as his UTI is quite well established and difficult to treat. UTI is a common condition in long-term residents. For whatever reason this time the doctor did not treat him twice and so he was still infected. The head cold did result in the beginning of pneumonia for him. This was all discovered on the second day I was there when he was taken to the emergency room with a temperature of 102+.
At the nursing facility the professional caregivers provided the traditional care: changing him and feeding him his meals (although I fed him since I was there and willing to do whatever was necessary to provide him some comfort). Although it is well known and recognized that drinking plenty of fluids help flush the urinary system, the staff at the nursing facility was not able to provide the extra time to do that. This was left to me and I was grateful to have been able to rush to his side to keep him alive.
At times I felt I was in the way and witnessing events that regularly go on in this long-term facility. At times I was grateful to witness the 1-2% of professional caregivers that give their all, put up with all the frustrations of under staffing, stay beyond their shift, and even called in to enquire about an update on my husband. Without my active participation as the family caregiver, my husband would not be here with me today. He may not have a lot of time left as he is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, but every minute counts for us. You might say that we are a very tight couple.
Moral of this experience: Seize every opportunity, every moment. If you have someone in a long-term facility and they become ill, rush to their side and stay with them around the clock to provide any type of caregiving you can. If they are not ill but simply residing there for any reason, visit and call often to enquire about their well-being.
Target one individual, in my case it is the social worker, as a primary contact. Hold that person responsible and accountable for what is going on there, or not going on. By your caring actions it will be clear that your loved one is not just another person occupying a bed in their facility. Furthermore you are asking the facility to go beyond the traditional services of feeding and dressing. Now you are ready to partner with the facility instead of just being a customer.
Tom Krause said “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them”.
European markets have not let the massive ratings downgrade cast a shadow over trading on Monday, with only a slight fall.
The announcement of the ratings giant Standard & Poor’s that it slashed the scores of nine EU nations, including the Triple-A scores of France and Austria, came after Europe’s markets closed on Friday.
European leaders have been quick to criticize credit ratings agencies for having a negative impact on the 17-nation monetary union at the very time it is attempting to avert a crisis.
It has been a tense weekend for financiers, but financial commentator and co-founder of Quantum Hedge Fund Jim Rogers explained to RT why the markets are calm on Monday. It is simply because the US-based agencies are becoming obsolete.
“It means that you should not bother to pay any attention to the rating agencies. Everything they have done in the past 15 or 20 years has been wrong,” he raged. “I stopped bothering about them long ago. Everybody knows that France is no longer Triple-A, everybody knows that Italy is no longer as highly-rated as it used to be. The market knows all about this. This is not news. I know you have to report something, but this is not news to people in the market.”
Meanwhile another ratings agency, Moody’s, says on Monday it is keeping France’s AAA credit rating for now, despite rival S&P’s downgrade. This forced S&P to promise it would update its position on France later this quarter.
America’s mainstream media is being accused of playing with fire and hyping-up global tension, while trying to steer public opinion to please their sponsors.
In a sensitive time with the military standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and looming sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, the MSM is cynically playing-up the prospect of war, between Iran and the West.
RT’s Gayane Chichakyan reports from Washington that viewers in the States are repeatedly hearing how war is virtually inescapable.
With tension between Iran and the West as high as ever, a host of hardline speakers on US mainstream media seem to be pushing the audience to believe that war is inevitable.
There is constant warmongering all over the mass media in the US, although experts say war with Iran is far from being inevitable.
“I don’t think that we are there yet, that is to say, at the precipice,” Dr Charles Kupchan from the Council on Foreign Relations told to RT.
The media are already preparing the grounds for it – some by misinforming the public.
The New York Times wrote that the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective.
