GBVDems.org

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/10/25/why-americas-highest-paid-ceos-are-insanely-overpaid/

. . .

So then, let my evisceration commence. The one to triumph in this year’s tournament for the most rapacious pillage of shareholder property is John H. Hammergren, chairman and CEO of McKesson Pharmaceuticals. His “compensation” which is doesn’t really capture the essence of his remuneration, was a mind blowing $131.2 million U.S. dollars. This number is obscene. It is just shy of 11% of the total $1.2 billion in net income for the entire company. The number is so offensive that my brain thought surely the reference had to be Japanese yen or some other currency. If we were talking 131.2 million yen that would be more reasonable–equivalent to around $1.7 million. That’s a good salary for a manager of 36,400 people.

But defenders will say, McKesson’s stock is up 20% and Hammergren has created prodigious amounts of shareholder value. And my goodness, McKesson is the 15th largest company in America with deca-billions in revenue and they do all of these incredibly wonderful things and John is such a great leader and manager and family man, and charitable and a civic leader, and don’t go on because nausea has overcome me and I’ve already vomited. Deaf to it all I am. It cannot be reiterated enough.  He’s a manager, nothing more nothing less. McKesson has been “a trusted supplier of medical goods and supplies” for more than 175 years. Hammergren joined the company in 1996. His CV on the company website attributes to him no inventions or holder of patents. He assumes no personal risk: Unlike an entrepreneur, he has no personal capital whatsoever on the line. MANAGER. He is surely an astute and capable one given his pay, but a manager nonetheless.

Just like the Catholic Church protecting itself and not its juvenile parishoners

At the same time that their policy:

. . .  has remained adamant about excluding openly gay people from becoming members or scout leaders because officials say allowing gays would expose children to sexuality.

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/10/31/Scout_Leader_Led_Decades_of_Child_Abuse/

Their practices have protected pedophiles & the organization and left the kids (and their families) out in the cold:

Scouting officials helped cover up more than two decades of molestation from a leader who admitted to sexually assaulting children, according to a joint investigation by theLos Angeles Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

. . .

“We were following exactly the national recommendations of the Boy Scouts of America and its board who set up the rules,” said A. Buford Hill Jr., a former Orange County Scouting executive, in a recent interview. “You do not want to broadcast to the entire population that these things happen. You take care of it quietly and make sure it never happens again.”

except that it did

Turley is one of more than 5,000 suspected child molesters named in confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts of America. The documents — called the “perversion files” by the organization — include unsubstantiated tips as well as admissions of guilt.

http://www.latimes.com/la-me-scouts-molest-story,0,207035.htmlstory

meanwhile, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_membership_controversies)

Litigation has challenged the granting of preferential or equal access of the Boy Scouts of America to governmental facilities and resources:

• A US District Court’s ruling against the BSA on the favorable terms under which the City of San Diego leases public land to the local BSA Council was referred to the California Supreme Court by the Federal Appellate Court. See Barnes-Wallace v. Boy Scouts of America.
• Philadelphia revoked the terms under which the City of Philadelphia leases public land to the BSA. The local BSA council sued the city over the breach of contract. See Cradle of Liberty Council v. City of Philadelphia.^[54] The US District Court ruled June 2010 in favor of the Boy Scouts of America and that the city’s selective actions against the council were designed to impinge BSA’s First Amendment rights.^[55][56] Under federal Civil Rights Law, the Cradle of Liberty Council Council is now also entitled to collect its legal costs (estimated at one million dollars) from the city’s unlawful action. As a result, the city and the Cradle of Liberty Council are engaged in negotiations to transfer the building from the city to the council in exchange for the council not collecting those legal costs from the city.^[57]
• In July 2003, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by a U.S. District Judge that excluded the BSA from an annual workplace charitable campaign run by the state of Connecticut because of the BSA’s policy on homosexuals. In March 2004, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case.^[58]
• In March 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled in Evans v. Berkeley that the City of Berkeley did not have to continue to provide free dock space to the Sea Scouts.^[59] In October 2006, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Evans v. Berkeley.^[60]
• In September 2006, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that recruiting by BSA in public schools did not violate the state’s nondiscrimination laws.^[61]
• The U.S. Army gives the BSA special access to a base, Fort A.P. Hill, for its national Scout jamboree and the U.S. Department of Defense spends approximately $2 million per year in taxpayer funds to assist the BSA in staging it. On April 4, 2007 the US Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling on the basis of a lack of standing to sue, thus allowing the 2010 and future Jamborees to go forward with continued DoD support (see Winkler v. Rumsfeld).^[45][62]

 

For a skirmish, it was a big one, reaching at one point the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the R-71 petitions were not exempt from Washington’s public disclosure law, which, unlike California’s, requires that names on petitions be made public.

The high court left room for those who wanted to repeal the law to argue that there were special circumstances that made their signers particularly vulnerable and exempt from disclosure.

U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle in Tacoma rejected that, though, in a ruling Monday that concluded there was no “reasonable probability” of reprisals, threats or harassment as a result of the release of names from petitions signed two years ago.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/10/gay-marriage.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/188239-market-regulators-impose-oil-speculation-curbs

A divided Commodity Futures Trading Commission voted along party lines Tuesday to impose new restrictions on speculative trading in energy futures markets.

The rules, required under last year’s Dodd-Frank law, are aimed at reigning in speculative Wall Street trading that some allege has driven up oil prices and worsened market volatility in recent years.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/188259-lightsquared-and-gps-can-coexist

There is a fascinating debate playing out in Washington that will impact nearly every American. It is over whether the federal government should allow an upstart company called LightSquared to enter the telecom market as a new national wireless broadband provider.

Anyone with a cell phone, computer or a tablet, should be paying attention, because LightSquared is proposing to build something that currently does not exist: a high-speed wireless system that reaches almost every corner of America, including underserved rural areas and over-capacity urban areas.

LightSquared proposed investing $14 billion in private dollars on a plan that would bring wireless broadband to 260 million Americans by 2015, and create 15,000 jobs a year over the five-year build out of the network. LightSquared is a satellite company, and its unique model would create the nation’s first broadband system that uses a combination of satellite and cell tower technology. Because satellite signals are ubiquitous, using them as a back up to terrestrial service would eliminate the massive service holes that still exist all over America, bringing high-speed internet for the first time to vast swaths of the country that have never had it.

But of course, nothing is that easy – especially in Washington. The slice of spectrum the government licensed to LightSquared is next to the spectrum allocated to GPS, which is used broadly in America for both public and commercial purposes. And the GPS industry has launched a mighty lobbying and public relations campaign, rife with scare tactics designed to stoke partisan opposition and stop LightSquared.

. . .

Lost in the political hysteria is a crucial point: LightSquared’s spectrum does not emit signals into GPS’s spectrum. The company invested nearly $10 million in filtering technology to ensure that its signal dropped off a cliff before it crossed into GPS’ spectrum. Through a series of regulatory actions in the early 2000s, the GPS industry was told it needed to develop filtering technology for its devices so that they wouldn’t interfere with neighboring spectrum, but they failed to make these innovations.

The GPS industry and its friends in Washington persist in their opposition, scaring Americans into believing that LightSquared’s signal will “jam” GPS, therefore dropping airplanes from the sky. Nonsense.

The military has always claimed that its own precision devices were battle-hardened and resilient to sophisticated enemy jammers. But now the Pentagon is suggesting that a commercial operator like LightSquared can flip a switch and disable the U.S. defense system? Enemy jammers can be much closer to the GPS band and much more sophisticated than the benign signal format of a civilian signal like LightSquared. Surely, military receivers must have protections currently available for civilian GPS receivers that would prevent this.

Former FCC official Michael Marcus, a spectrum use expert, also recognizes this incongruity and wrote in his blog: “Is this all it takes to disrupt the military’s multibillion dollar critical investment in GPS that is so critical to our national security? If so, there is an urgent problem at hand and it is not just the LightSquared issue, it is the extreme fragility of military GPS systems! More likely, however, is that the proposed system will have no impact on military users but that the whole GPS community is ‘circling the wagons’ in an ‘all for one, one for all’ strategy to protect a few GPS manufacturers who made odd design decisions in their receivers…”

On Wednesday, when the Army holds its 12th-annual Diversity Leadership Conference at West Point, gays and lesbians will be well represented for the first time. But so will another disparaged military minority: self-identified atheists and freethinkers in uniform, as many as 40,000 of them. In an unorthodox move, the academy has invited Jason Torpy, an Iraq vet and president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, to plead the case for—among other things—adding atheist chaplains to the armed forces.

Huh? Isn’t “atheist chaplain” a contradiction in terms? Not at all, Torpy says. In an interview with Mother Jones, he explained how the military’s chaplain corps in fact performs mostly secular counseling and community services for the troops—while still eschewing gays, lesbians, atheists, and religious skeptics, denying them the same means to mental well-being that most Christians, Jews, and Muslims can find in the ranks. The big problem, Torpy points out, is that the services’ chaplains aren’t representative of their flocks: Conservative evangelical clergy dominate the ranks, in numbers way out of proportion to those among servicemembers
(chart: http://www.militaryatheists.org/resources/demographics.jpg )

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/military-atheists-humanists-army-tillman

Other religion representation: