Author: Joshua De Leon

While champions of the lower and middle-class, debt-ridden students, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are advocating economic fairness for newly minted college graduates, the GOP is looking to break their backs even further with even more financial burden.  Much to Warren’s disdain, the House of Representatives just approved a bill that adds even more instability and uncertainty to graduates’ bank accounts. In a 221 – 198 vote, the Republican-controlled House passed H.R. 1911: Smarter Solutions for Students Act.  The main provision of this brainless act states that “interest rates for all new subsidized and unsubsidized students loans would be...

Reports have indicated that several Type-2 diabetes therapy drugs increase the likelihood of pancreatic cancer 25 fold.  Of the five drugs that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tagged, two are Januvia by Merck & Co. and Byetta by Bristol-Myers Squibb. The drugs, Byetta and Januvia, are in a class of drugs called incretin mimetics.  How incretin mimetics work that when taken, the drugs make the pancreas increase insulin levels which helps regulate the body’s blood sugar levels.  Now, several studies have been released connecting these incretin mimetic drug to increased risk of pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer.     ...

The GOP has been in the Obama Administration’s ear yelling “unfair profiling” by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for targeting conservative groups that were looking for tax exemptions as 501(c)(4) organizations.  However, this alleged “scandal” that was cooked up by the GOP has been unearthing another, this time tangibly provable, scandal. What made it easy for the Tea Party cash cattlers to abuse the 501(c)(4) non-profit status are its vague and loosely written codes.  So much so that The Nation reports that the “IRS rules for primary activity have been interpreted to mean that 501(c)(4) groups cannot spend more...

The Justice Department and the U.S. Treasury are still walking on eggshells about the affability of “too big to fail.”  Despite there being no studies focusing on how breaking apart big banks would affect the economy, both entities put a great deal of speculative weight on the “too big to fail” theory. During a hearing back in March, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen answerable.  Warren cited the admission of U.K. big bank HSBC to laundering nearly $1 billion for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels and violating U.S. international...

In vigorous support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, a group including Wikileaks founder Julian Assange filed a suit against the Department of Defense, demanding transparency in Manning’s trial, The Huffington Post reports.  This lawsuit marks the second attempt to allow open, public access to Manning’s trial. U.S. Army private and, as of 2012, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Manning was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking over 700,000 documents and videos to Wikileaks in 2010.  Manning was one of six in a wave of indictments under the Espionage Act since Obama took office in 2009.  The group...