Nice job by Walter Brooks!

The strange case of Delahunt's mari-nopoly

For his $250K salary neither former Congressman nor his partners will run operations - "A perversion so absurd it’s practically comical." - Boston Magazine

Article | Politics | February 7, 2014 - 11:45am | By Walter Brooks

Delahunt to add $250,000 to his annual paycheck.

Former Congressman has near marijuana monopoly in three counties

He was a county prosecutor for years and the United States Congressman for Cape Cod, the South Shore and the Islands for almost two decades until he retired amid questions about his handling of the Amy Bishop murder investigation while he was the District Attorney in Norfolk County, and today our former Congressman Bill Delahunt is almost cornering the marijuana market with a whopping 10 percent of all the licenses awarded including ones in Barnstable, Plymouth and Bristol Counties.

This new business venture will pay Delahunt a $1/4 million annual salary. He is slated to be the highest paid chief executive among the twenty state-wide successful dispensary applicants with an annual salary listed as $250,000.

The other firms’ chief executives would be paid about half that amount, according to the Boston Globe’s examination of the applications.

In fact, Delahunt and his four partners have themselves down for a total of $1.1 million in annual pay despite projecting the three dispensaries will lose over twice that amount the first year.

Criticism mounting

Critics of the licensing process, including the Massachusetts Republican Party, questioned the level of transparency, describing it as "politicized and secretive" and alleging that state Public Health Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett who was a contributor of Delahunt's campaigns, is too closely associated with former Congressman Delahunt. Her department just awarded his company, Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts, licenses for dispensaries in Mashpee, Taunton and Plymouth.

According to a lengthy investigation in today's Boston Globe, the former Congressman's marijuana venture omits key details about the business including any details about the person actually running his marijuana dispensaries in Mashpee, Plymouth and Taunton.

Not to be outdone, Boston Magazine weighed in saying, "On its face, this is a perversion so absurd it’s practically comical. It’s so unprecedentedly offensive, it’s hard to find a comparison."

The magazine goes on to say that the very idea of a man who was the District Attorney for Norfolk County, a man whose job it was to arrest and prosecute citizens for the possession and sale of marijuana, now has "three state-issued licenses to deal weed".

The articles point out that William Delahunt and all of the other top executives at Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts won’t be running the company’s cultivation and dispensing operations, a man brought here from California will, but he supplies no information about that man.

Read the recent stories about Delahunt here.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/article/2014/02/07/23984-strange-case-delahunts-mari-nopoly

 

Letting Congress & Wall Street review NSA policies laughable

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Published time: October 31, 2013 13:08

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland (AFP Photo/Saul Loeb)

 

It is weird to entrust the same policy-makers who were caught lying publicly on the record to Congress in an internal review of NSA programs. As laughable as Wall Street banks regulating themselves, geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser told RT.

RT: Let’s listen to what General Alexander said defending the NSA policies. “It is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.” He’s got a good point, hasn’t he?

Eric Draitser: Well, to some degree that’s true, but again, we have to remember that bureaucrats at that level of the US government, they are masters of distortion and ambiguous statements. But that should be noted that some of the arguments that have been made by Alexander and others are actually valid just not in the way they think they are.
Yes, it’s true these things are for military purposes and for intelligence gathering and all of these things - that is absolutely true. But at the end goal, it is for the purposes of wielding this information as a weapon against political competition, against geopolitical rivals. So when we see the United States and its economic power waning, the United States are even on the ground of military power becoming ever more impotent and so we see an exponential increase in the attention to information gathering, intelligence gathering in order to be able to use it as yet another weapon of dominance and coercion.

RT: What do you make, of this latest development with the EU officials going to demand an explanation why the NSA was spying on us and now that has been revealed more leaks thanks to Snowden. But actually these intelligence agencies from European countries weren’t colluding with the NSA?

ED: That’s absolutely right. This is all political posturing, it’s all for the photo that can be sent back to their home countries to say that they are actually doing something about this, when you are pointing out we have known the collaboration - and I think probably collaboration is not even strong enough a word for what they have been doing.
They have been an intimate part of the US intelligence apparatus, and this apparatus extends across all NATO counties, this extends across all other satellites and client-states and other countries that are dependent on the United States in one form or another. If you exist within the US sphere of influence, then you are part of this espionage, you are part of this surveillance, you are part of the system that has been created to further US dominance and hegemony as the policy-makers have understood now for the last few decades. At the very least the US power in decline can only be stemmed by new and improved ways of exercising hegemony. The NSA program is an integral part of that.

RT: But are the things going to change? The NSA programs are going to be reviewed by White House, the NSA bill is going to be in Congress. Do you have any faith anything actually will change?

ED: No, of course not, because this is a weird way to entrust the same bureaucrats as Clapper and others who have been caught lying publicly on the record to Congress and to other policy-makers and officials about the nature of these programs, about what the United States has been doing, about its very operations in the most public sense of the word. And so we are to entrust these people a kind of an internal review? That’s laughable! It is just as laughable as Wall Street banks regulating themselves.

http://rt.com/op-edge/congress-review-nsa-policies-laughable-025/