Big pharma cover-up: Antidepressants cause birth defects

False advertising and deceptive promotion can have deadly consequences. But big pharma appears to be acting outside the law, no matter the costs. That appears to be the case with manufacturers of the antidepressants Lexapro and Paxil.Mothers of babies born with birth defects have filed numerous lawsuits against Forest Labs, manufacturer of Lexapro, for failure to warn them of potential risks to their unborn …

This Can’t Be Happening – 11.04.15

Host Dave Lindorff and guest Linn Washington, a Philly-based investigative reporter and colleague of Dave’s on the news site thiscantbehapppening.net, discuss Tuesday’s election results in Pennsylvania and recent comments by Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Scalia, all suggesting that a historic moment has arrived in which the US death penalty obsession may finally be ended. Lindorff notes that in Pennsylvania voters elected three new state supreme court judges, all liberal Democrats who owe their win in considerable part to black and other minority voters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other urban areas of the state. Washington, who has written extensively about the state’s racist death penalty system, withthe fourth-largest death row in the nation, and says that with Democrats now in a 5-2 majority on the formerly Republican high court, and with the new Democratic governor already having imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, it could be that the death penalty could be ruled unconstitutional under the state’s constitution. Meanwhile Justice Breyer has virtually called for a test case to be brought to the Supreme Court this year, and Justice Scalia, a staunch backer of execution, has stated publicly that he thinks the votes are there now to declare the death penalty in the US unconstitutional.

The Fight Over Obamacare Was a Giant Political Charade By Sonali Kolhatkar

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 25 that the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) subsidies for health insurance for the poor were indeed constitutional, liberals cheered. The last-ditch attempt by the right to gut President Obama’s signature act failed. In his weekly address, Obama triumphantly announced that “after more than fifty votes in Congress to repeal or weaken this law; …

15 Ways Bill Clinton’s White House Failed America and the World By AlterNet Staff

Bill Clinton remains one of America’s most popular presidents. A national poll last March by NBC and the Wall Street Journal found [3] 56 percent of Americans had a clearly favorable view of Clinton. That’s long been true for African Americans—from novelist Toni Morrison famously calling him the “first black president [4]” while in office, to books explaining [5] his appeal after his presidency ended. Clinton has used this …