Chris Parker

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How Big Medicine and Politics as Usual Sabotaged Obamacare

By Chris Parker
May 8, 2014

It was the winter of our discontent, 2009. A season of bank failures, massive layoffs and $5-a-gallon gasoline. Finally, a fractured country could at least agree on one thing: This had to change. So President Barack Obama set out to deactivate the next bomb awaiting the U.S. economy, the one...
Monsanto: The Belligerent Strongman Trying to Control America's Food Supply

And the government that looks the other way.

By Chris Parker
Jul 25, 2013

When you're good at something, you want to leverage that. Monsanto's specialty is killing stuff. In the early years, the St. Louis biotech giant helped pioneer such leading chemicals as DDT, PCBs and Agent Orange. Unfortunately, these breakthroughs had a tendency to kill stuff. And the torrent of lawsuits that...
How Medicare Became a Thieves' Bazaar

In Dallas and across the country, hospitals, doctors and dealers have made Medicare the nation’s sweetest crime. The feds are now trying to shutter the door.

By Chris Parker
Apr 25, 2013

Houston Riverside General Hospital specialized in the kind of medicine its better-heeled brethren did their best to avoid: treating the poor, the mentally ill, the drug-addled. So it's no surprise that the 95-year-old nonprofit — formerly known as Houston Negro Hospital — shared the same broken finances as the people...
The 10 Most Corrupt Tax Loopholes

If Mitt Romney won't tell you which need to be closed, we will

By Chris Parker
Oct 11, 2012

A year ago Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, studied the tax returns of 280 corporations. What it found was a Beltway version of a Mafia protection scheme. From 2008 to 2010, at least 30 Fortune 500 companies — including PepsiCo, Verizon, Wells Fargo and DuPont — paid...
Mission of Burma

Friday, September 14, at Dan's Silverleaf

By Chris Parker
Sep 13, 2012

Arguably the finest extant '80s underground rock act to return to service, Boston's Mission of Burma were never particularly popular beyond the cognoscenti, and their comeback shows weren't mobbed like those of the Pixies. But where Black Francis & Co. will never be anything more than a nostalgia act, MoB...

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