The FTC, which estimates that the pay-for-delay deals cost American consumers $3.5 billion per year in higher drug prices, announced that it plans to proceed with litigation, now that it has gotten a green light from the Supreme Court. So which side really came out ahead as a result of this ruling? Jeffery Cross, an antitrust expert with Freeborn & Peters LLP, told Reuters that that answer was simple: “The winners here are the trial lawyers.”   Read More

Not only is the Pentagon wasting taxpayer dollars on overpriced contractors, the contractors’ role in running PPBS makes them, in the words of Defense contracting expert Chuck Spinney, “privy to—and in some cases deeply involved in—shaping the detailed decisions concerning how the Pentagon intends to spend its money over the next five or six years. That means, to put it charitably, there are conflicts of interest between the buyer and the sellers.”   Read More

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that wages in the U.S. declined 4.3% during the first quarter of this year. The drop was the steepest on record, going back to 1947. But the first three months of 2013 were fantastic for banks, which posted a record $40.3-billion profit, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.   Read More

Zions received a cut of the fee received by Modern Payments for each person whose account was accessed. Between 2007 and 2009, Zions allowed about $39 million to be withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of its accounts, much of which was transferred to other bank accounts in India, Canada and the Caribbean. This enabled Zions to charge $20 million worth of insufficient funds fees to its customers who had been scammed.   Read More

The Power Fire began after a crew of workers were careless with their cigarettes in a heavily wooded area with extreme hazardous fire conditions. The workers were employed by VCS Sub Inc., which PG&E had hired to trim trees and brush around a utility distribution line. The fire damaged protected habitats for the northern spotted owl, caused harmful erosion into watersheds, and destroyed artifacts in Native American historical sites, according to federal prosecutors.   Read More