Well Fargo announced today $3 Billion in profits. It was fantastic news and it sent the stock market soaring.

However, one thing that didn’t get talked about was why they made so much money.

Wells Fargo CFO Howard Atkins discusses the banks $3 billion reported first quarter 2009 earnings. Atkins hypes the impact of mortgages to the bottom line, due to low interest rates and foreclosure selling no doubt, but shockingly admits at the 7:45 mark that with the writedowns that would have been required by Mark to Market the bank actually lost money on the quarter.

To put it another way, Wells Fargo made money because the government allowed them to play “let’s pretend your assets are worth something”.
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Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has some important business before her in Kansas as she is preparing for a role on the federal scene as secretary of Health and Human Services, assuming she is confirmed.

You see, the Kansas legislature has bowed to pressure and passed a law that is intended to prevent dairy farmers who do not use growth hormones in their cows from letting the public have this information. In recent years the public has clearly voted against milk produced using Posilac / rBST / rBGH.

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The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law has announced a project related to national and international health law. Of the project, it says it is building a diverse portfolio of health law projects . . . collaborative relationships with faculty who possess a diverse set of interests and expertise.

Incidentally, and before getting into its projects, the ONeill Institute has announcement of jobs and fellowships. Something to do while waiting out the economic storm . . . and to further health care.

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Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the Pittston strike, a coal miners’ strike that would drag on for 14 months into 1990. On April 5, about 1,700 miners in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky struck Pittston Group’s coal mining operations. Within a couple months there were demonstrations and solidarity strikes that involved 10 times as many people.

This was a strike that provided and still provides a window into who we were as a people and what we value. It still does. Twenty years after the strike began is time to re-examine the portrait of us as a people.

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Essay by gjohnsit and crossposted with permission.

I’m old enough to clearly remember their lies. Their promise to us was that we would “think” while others would “sweat”.

It sounded too good to be true, and like anything that sounds too good to be true, it was a lie.
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The only things certain in life are, death, taxes, and misuse of military contractors. Not that there haven’t been efforts to deal with the third inevitability. And not that those efforts haven’t so far all gone down to defeat. But consider the recent efforts with SPOTting the contractors.
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Out-of-state anti-abortion activists who rallied behind Colorado’s Amendment 48 last year came up with another big goose egg Friday when the North Dakota Senate rejected a “personhood” bill that sought to confer constitutional rights to zygotes.

But reproductive rights advocates aren’t cheering Roughrider State lawmakers just yet.
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The government doesn’t want you to panic because the risk is “hard to assess,” but…

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have found that 15 brands of powdered infant formula are contaminated with perchlorate, a rocket fuel component detected in drinking water in 28 states and territories. (Environmental Working Group)

Why shouldn’t that worry parents? Because, “the government requires that formula contain iodine, which counteracts perchlorate’s effects (Associated Press).” But, somebody must be worried about the effects on infant health because “[government] researchers would not disclose the brands of formula they studied (AP).” Haven’t we been here before?
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American News Project’s Lagan Sebert explores the nomination of yet another Wall Street veteran to fix the broken financial regulatory system. Video story cross-posted by permission.

Barack Obama’s plan to name yet another Goldman Sachs alum to his economic team is proving too much for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sanders put a hold on the nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, effectively stopping the nomination process in its tracks. Sanders says Gensler, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs and then joined the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, played too big a role in deregulating derivatives in the 90s’ to be trusted to reregulate the market now.
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An essay by Judith Browne-Dianis, Co-Director Advancement Project, and crossposted with permission from Racewire.org.

For several months, the media has been pushing the fairy tale that the United States moved beyond racism with the election of President Obama. As untrue as that is, there are people who started acting on their post-racial fantasies years ago, eight years in fact, as the Bush Administration used that excuse to essentially stop enforcing the civil rights laws we already have. President Obama and his administration have the opportunity to take dramatic steps towards dismantling institutional racism and inequality by simply enforcing the laws that are already on the books. Rather than blindness or silence, taking this action requires us to live in reality so that we can change that reality.
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