Economy

 

Senate GOP Blocks Disaster Aid

REPORT: As Their States Crumble, GOP Leaders Oppose Infrastructure Spending

Fact-Check: Perry's Social Security Scaremongering

GOP Voted For $50 Billion To Rebuild Iraq Without Cuts, Now Insist On Cuts To Offset Funding To Rebuild America

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 8, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Wildfire damage in Texas

The recent unprecedented onslaught of natural disasters has left already cash-strapped states with a record $36 billion in damages. Ten different natural disasters have struck in 2011. According to FEMA, damages from Hurricane Irene alone will cost at least $1.5 billion in disaster relief — and the hurricane season isn’t over.
This disastrous year is also the year that many Republican lawmakers have also decided to break precedent and demand that much-needed disaster relief be offset with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to quickly usher $6 billion in emergency disaster relief for states through the Senate. However, even as wildfires obliterate more than 1,000 homes in his state, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) insisted that those funds be offset because “we can’t keep spending money we don’t have.” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), whose state has suffered “millions and millions of dollars” in wind and flood damage from Hurricane Irene, simply demanded that “we’ve got to offset everything“:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]
“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.
Cornyn and Burr’s position — first espoused by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) — is so callously out of touch that even fellow Republicans are slamming the idea. After enduring serious bipartisan backlash, Cantor is now gun-shy. Calling Reid’s emergency funds bill “unprecedented,” he is not clearly taking a stand against it.

Paul Ryan at Labor Day Parade

This is What Contempt Looks Like:

By Jeff Simpson On September 12, 2011 · 22 Comments · In Activism, Big Government, Broken Promises, Class Warfare, Deficit, Election 2012, Hypocrisy, Local Politics, National Politics, News, Social Justice, Tea Party, Those Kooky Conservatives!, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Politics

Here is video of paul ryan(R-Wall St.) and his wife getting ready to walk in the labor day parade in Janesville, WI. A constituent comes up to pink slip paul and asks a legitimate question.
Q: Do I need to work for $1 an hour to be competitive with China?
paul ryan: Would you like some candy? Packer/Badger Schedule?
The look on his face is pure contempt that this plebe is bothering him. You can also see the look on his wife’s face that she can’t wait to shower the smell of the lower class off of her. This is who the people of the 1st Congressional district of Wisconsin want representing them in Congress?
Also be sure to check out how he holds on for dear life to the stroller using his kids as a human shield. What a brave warrior he is.

H/T Sly for the video.

The GOP Position on Health Care is Killing Us

 

Submitted by mark karlin on Fri, 09/09/2011 - 10:32pm.MARK KARLIN, EDITOR FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The GOP position on health care is killing us.
That's a narrative that President Obama should have used when battling for health care reform. His absence of doing so is indicative of his inability - even while giving stirring speeches, as he did on jobs - to instill a larger vision and narrative into his presidency.
The reality is that the current health care system for those with insurance - many of whom opposed the White House's health care reform package - increasingly means that they are paying more and getting less in coverage. This is resulting from escalating deductibles, co-payments, out-of-pocket limits and higher premium co-pays. Ask any American, except for the wealthiest, and this is most likely a growing financial challenge that they are experiencing.
Ezra Klein of The Washington Post wrote a column entitled, "How Health Costs Wiped Out a Full Decade of Income Increases."
Klein notes:

All evidence points to American voters not really caring about rising health care costs. But here's one pretty compelling reason they should: The escalating cost of health care has wiped out nearly all income gains made by the average American family in the past decade....
[Rising health care costs, in the form of increased insurance premiums and co-pays, ate up nearly all of that [increase in wages].

So, instead of emphasizing the larger narrative of rising personal medical insurance costs that threatens most Americans, Obama emphasized the uninsured. The Republicans turned this to their advantage through code words and fear - but mostly through the usual wink and nod that this was some scheme to benefit minorities and dead beats.
Obama lost the battle over this narrative, even though it was his to win, because he all too often is afraid of speaking in terms that reflect the contextual reality of public policy options in plain, homespun terms. Instead, he accepts the debate "frame" of the likes of right-wing think tanks funded by the heavy-hitting Koch brothers' crowd.
The choice was never between "Obamacare" and a system that works. It was between a health care delivery system that is eating away at the wages of all but the wealthiest Americans and a paradigm shift in providing medical care in the US.
Obama avoided the paradigm shift and created a system that will enrich insurance companies that are themselves a key cause of rising health care costs, while managing to provide the Republicans a cudgel with which to hit him over the head.
Without a vision, without resetting the terms of the debate, without bringing the truth to bear down upon the important public policy issues of the day, Obama is a trapped man trying to punch his way out of an alternative universe narrative created by three decades of right-wing propaganda and bullying.
What about that average $1,500 in payroll tax deduction that the president proposed in his new jobs bill? Most of us will be spending it on increased health insurance premiums, deductibles and paying for non-covered services.
President Obama needs to spell out the real narrative of America, not to de facto accept the one forced down our gullets by Fox News.

How Ya Like Him Now?!!!

 

REPORT: As Their States Crumble, GOP Leaders Oppose Infrastructure Spending

Reminder To Republicans: The Stimulus Worked

Corporations Flush With Cash Don't Need Another Tax Break

While McConnell Opposes Infrastructure Investment, Major Kentucky Bridge Shuts Down Over Safety Concerns

By Travis Waldron on Sep 10, 2011 at 2:32 pm

Sherman Minton Bridge in Louisville, KY

Yesterday, ThinkProgress published a report detailing Republican Congressional leadership’s opposition to infrastructure investments even as structural deficiencies in bridges and roadways persist in their home states. Among those is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, where 34 percent of bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
The Sherman Minton Bridge, one of three major bridges spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, KY and southern Indiana, was among the Kentucky bridges listed as deficient. And last night, the Sherman Minton Bridge was closed after further deficiencies, including cracks, were found in a load-bearing part of its structure. The Louisville Courier-Journal reports:

The Sherman Minton Bridge was closed late Friday afternoon and will remain shut down indefinitely after officials discovered cracks in the span.
Will Wingfield, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation, said officials “do not have an estimate” on how long it will take to repair and reopen the bridge, which carries Interstate 64 traffic across the Ohio River.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) ordered the closure of the bridge, as the state of Indiana maintains and operates the bridge. But the 49-year-old bridge serves as a major thoroughfare for Louisville, McConnell’s hometown and Kentucky’s largest city, carrying 50,000 people a day into or out of the city, according to Chuck Wolfe, spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The state of Kentucky assists in maintenance and evaluation of the bridge’s structure. While the Sherman Minton Bridge is closed, much of its regular daily traffic will be re-routed over another bridge that was already slated to be inspected for structural damage Monday.
The closure came just a day after President Obama renewed his call for Congress to invest in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy and address the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads, as studies have shown the nation needs $2 trillion in investment just to bring its infrastructure up to date. McConnell criticized Obama’s plan, saying it was “a re-election plan.”
But while McConnell insists that Republicans “agree that we must bring America’s infrastructure up to 21st century standards,” his recent record doesn’t show it. When progressives and Democrats argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act should be geared toward infrastructure, the GOP under McConnell’s leadership fought to focus it on tax cuts. The Senate GOP derailed a 2010 jobs plan focused largely on infrastructure investment, and if McConnell’s post-speech rhetoric is to be believed, he will be at the forefront of the Republican Party’s opposition to this plan too.

TPMDC

McConnell's Swipe at Obama's Jobs Plan Even Before the Speech

 Brian Beutler | September 7, 2011, 6:05AM

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

  Congress returned to Washington on Tuesday, which gave Republicans their first national whack at President Obama since public anger over the debt limit fight boiled over, and details of his jobs plan started to leak, and he nixed a forthcoming pollution regulation at the behest of Republicans and conservative business interests.

Who better to wield the truncheon than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who perhaps unwittingly affirmed a recent, widely cited critique of the GOP, written by a 30 year Republican Capitol Hill vet.
"[E]very one of us, I'm sure, is aware of the fact that many Americans are not only frustrated with the state of our economy, but also with the state of their government," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "I don't think any one of us is under any illusion that the American people were particularly eager to see us come back."
McConnell took a preemptive swipe at the jobs plan Obama will spell out before a joint session of Congress on Thursday evening -- and specifically at the idea that the government should partner with the private sector to pay people to build or improve U.S. infrastructure.
"I'm...certain that, taken as whole, they'll represent more of the same failed approach that's only made things worse over the past few years, and resulted in even fewer jobs than when he started," McConnell said, dismissing the economic consensus that Obama's stimulus prevented a deeper recession than the one the country experienced. "Over the weekend, the President tested a few of the lines I expect we'll hear on Thursday. His central message, evidently, is that anyone who doesn't rubber stamp his economic agenda is putting politics above country. With all due respect, Mr. President, there's a much simpler reason for opposing your economic proposals that has nothing to do with politics: they don't work."
And if Obama thought scrapping a long-promised new regulation to reduce smog pollution would entice Republicans to give him some leeway on other job proposals, he was wrong.
"[Y]ou don't lift a single regulation and suddenly claim to be Margaret Thatcher," McConnell snarked.
Turn now to this article -- Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left The Cult -- by Mike Lofgren, a respected veteran who served on the Republican staffs of both the House and Senate Budget Committee.
"A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption," he wrote. "Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner."
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
If that's the game plan, then what better time for Republicans to pick the debt limit fight and reject public works projects than when public anger at Congress' total failure to address the employment crisis is at a fever pitch.

 GOP Voted To Rebuild Iraq, But Won't Rebuild America

Everything Is Bigger In Texas, Including Food Insecurity

Corporations Flush With Cash Don't Need Another Tax Break

GOP Voted For $50 Billion To Rebuild Iraq Without Cuts, Now Insist On Cuts To Offset Funding To Rebuild America

By Tanya Somanader on Sep 8, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Wildfire damage in Texas

The recent unprecedented onslaught of natural disasters has left already cash-strapped states with a record $36 billion in damages. Ten different natural disasters have struck in 2011. According to FEMA, damages from Hurricane Irene alone will cost at least $1.5 billion in disaster relief — and the hurricane season isn’t over.
This disastrous year is also the year that many Republican lawmakers have also decided to break precedent and demand that much-needed disaster relief be offset with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to quickly usher $6 billion in emergency disaster relief for states through the Senate. However, even as wildfires obliterate more than 1,000 homes in his state, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) insisted that those funds be offset because “we can’t keep spending money we don’t have.” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), whose state has suffered “millions and millions of dollars” in wind and flood damage from Hurricane Irene, simply demanded that “we’ve got to offset everything“:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]
“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.
Cornyn and Burr’s position — first espoused by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) — is so callously out of touch that even fellow Republicans are slamming the idea. After enduring serious bipartisan backlash, Cantor is now gun-shy. Calling Reid’s emergency funds bill “unprecedented,” he is not clearly taking a stand against it.

Rick Perry pushed bill that could benefit stem cell doctor's firm

Stem cell 'bank' creation may aid company founded by his physician and a political donor

 Video: Stem cell ‘bank’ a boon for Perry backers?

  

By Michael Isikoff National investigative correspondent

WASHINGTON — Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently underwent an experimental injection of his own adult stem cells to relieve back pain, pushed a bill through the Legislature in June that paves the way for a company co-owned by his doctor to become the first state-approved "bank" to store and cultivate such cells for medical treatment, according to internal emails and corporate records obtained by NBC News.

1.  The measure, which was adopted without any public hearings, could prove a financial bonanza for Celltex Therapeutics Corp. — a Houston company headed by Stanley Jones, the surgeon who injected the cells into Perry, and David G. Eller, the former chairman of the board of Texas A&M University and a longtime political donor to Perry who says he has served as a "strategic" adviser for his presidential run, according to industry officials and scientific researchers who have closely followed the issue.

Perry's role in pushing the stem cell bank bill, at the same time he was receiving injections of stem cells, illustrates two aspects of his record that are drawing increasing attention as he pursues the presidency: his enthusiasm for ideas that are sometimes outside the scientific mainstream and what critics view as his willingness to use the levers of state government to benefit friends and political benefactors.

'Unproven science' The use of adult stem cell treatments, which involves re-injecting a person's stem cells back into his or her body after they have been extracted and "cultured," or expanded in a laboratory, is viewed as experimental or "unproven science" by many top researchers. (It is also different from embryonic stem cell research, which is vigorously opposed by social conservatives like Perry.)

While many scientists believe ongoing clinical tests could lead to using adult stem cells to treat diseases — including heart ailments and Parkinson's — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved adult stem cell infusions for the public and has moved to crack down on some companies that are marketing such therapies, citing potential safety risks and misleading advertising to consumers. But the new Texas measure, which Perry signed into law last month, could help turn the state into a national capital of such treatments: It authorizes the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to establish rules for the operation of a single "autologous stem cell bank" that would be approved to receive "blood and tissue components" from "live human donors."

     "The governor is interested in innovative medical procedures that cure people," Mark Miner, Perry's campaign spokesman, said when asked about the governor's initiative. "This is about treating people for diseases (and) making Texas a destination for coming to be treated for ailments and diseases."

Minor added that the adult stem cell initiative was "not related" to the activities of Celltex, whose two top executives, Jones and Eller, met with Perry in March, three months before it launched a new stem cell bank just as the legislation was moving through the Legislature. He said Perry had long backed investments in adult stem research and had made this a "priority" area. "That's why Texas is a leading state in health care," he said.

      The bill that passed in Austin was originally sponsored by state Rep. Rick Hardcastle, whose rural district includes the governor's parents and who suffers from multiple sclerosis — a disease he says he hopes can be successfully treated through adult stem cell infusions.

      When originally proposed by Hardcastle in early June, the bill authorized the licensing of multiple adult stem cell banks in the state. But it was changed to authorize the approval of a single bank after being redrafted by Perry's office, according to copies of internal emails that circulated among state legislators in June.

       "The governor's office has asked us to go forward with this," one of Hardcastle's aides wrote June 8 after receiving a revised version of the lawmaker's amendment from Perry's office that changed the word "banks" to "bank."

Miner said the change was a mistake that would be corrected in the future.

"It was a drafting error," Miner said. "The legislation was always intended to cover not just one bank, but all banks."

Perry surgery In March, Celltex, the company co-founded by Jones and Eller (and then operating under a different name), signed a $30 million licensing agreement with RNL Bio, a South Korean biotech company, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by NBC News. RNL has aggressively promoted the use of adult stem cells for medical and cosmetic use. According to the internal legislative emails, one of its executives provided the initial draft of the legislation introduced by Hardcastle.

Eller, who has been friends with Perry for more than 30 years and has donated $35,000 to his gubernatorial campaigns, is Celltex's chairman. Jones, the governor's back surgeon, is the firm's vice chairman and medical director. The firm is also backed by about 30 Texas oil and gas investors, many of whom are also Perry supporters, according to Eller. (He declined to identify the other investors.)

As part of the new contract, Celltex will have the exclusive rights to market RNL Bio's stem cell technology in North America. Eller said he believes adult stem cell treatments will become a "multi-billion dollar industry." But before signing the contract, Eller said, he did his "due diligence" and consulted with Perry.

"He told me that, certainly, anything that we could do that would help and enhance the health of citizens, he was for it," Eller said.

On June 7, the day before Perry's redrafted stem cell bank bill was submitted to state lawmakers, RNL officially registered as a foreign corporation in Texas, stating its intention to provide "stem cell therapeutics" and "stem cell banking services."

'Independent' Super PAC heavily backs Perry

Although the Texas Health Commission has not yet begun writing rules governing such procedures, RNL and Celltex have already opened their new lab outside Houston and begun offering their services to Texas consumers, executives of both firms told NBC News.

Among the services the firms are offering: "lifetime banking options" that include paying up to $50,000 apiece for "culturing" and "lifetime cyropreservation" of a customer's adult stem cells to be used for future medical use, according to a copy of its "banking services fees" menu that Celltex provided to NBC News.

In recent years, Perry has publicly backed adult stem cell research, approving millions of dollars in state grants, contending that such research could yield treatments for diseases ranging from diabetes to many forms of cancer. He has also argued that it can put an end to embryonic adult stem cell research.

Eric Gay  /  AP file

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is running for the Republican presidential nomination.

"Let's get Texas in on the ground floor and invest in adult stem cell research, the one area of that field that is actually proven to expedite cures," Perry said in his 2009 State of the State address. "Expertise in this emerging and increasingly promising field will not only bring healing to the suffering and create jobs for Texans, it will also establish an appropriate firewall protecting the unborn from exploitation."

What hasn't been known until recently was Perry's willingness to use his own stem cells to advance the cause — and the commercial interests in Texas that are positioning themselves to benefit from his personal and governmental support.

As first reported by The Texas Tribune, Perry underwent the stem procedure in late June — a decision that surprised many in Texas, especially because it came on the eve of his decision to run for president.

Jones, the governor's back surgeon, confirmed to NBC News that the governor had small amounts of fat tissue extracted from his body in early June. The cells from the tissue were then cultivated and grown in the new Houston-area lab being run by RNL Bio and Celltex.

Jones said he then reinjected the adult stem cells into the governor on two occasions — once during surgery at a Houston hospital to fuse vertebrae in the governor's spine and a second time intravenously in Jones' medical office. Perry is due to receive a third intravenous injection in his office shortly, he said.

"This is the future of medicine, OK?" Jones said in an interview about Perry's treatment, saying that before the injections and surgery, Perry was experiencing "very, very painful" back problems that made it difficult for him even to walk up and down stairs.

     "He's not cured, but he can run up and down the stairs, and he can do things that are absolutely phenomenal," Jones said. "His physical shape is unreal."

(Miner, Perry's campaign spokesman, said Perry made a personal decision to undergo an "innovative" procedure and paid for it out of his own pocket. Another campaign official, Ray Sullivan, said in an email that "the governor is recovering quickly and thoroughly." Asked about reports that Perry continues to wear a back brace, Sullivan replied: "use of any kind of brace is optional and intermittent.")

Suspicious therapy? But there are serious legal, safety and effectiveness questions surrounding such therapies — as well as the activities of RNL Bio, according to federal regulators, scientists and an independent watchdog group that monitors stem cell research

"A major part of my concern is that he is legitimizing a process which is unfortunately highly suspicious," said George Q. Daley, a Harvard Medical School professor and past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Daley noted that in addition to receiving stem cell injections in his spine to enhance the healing from his back surgery, Perry also received intravenous injections from Jones.

"That is bizarre, quite frankly ... and I would be concerned about his safety," Daley said. "These cells taken from Governor Perry's body were kept in the petri dish for many weeks, and during that time we really don't know what happens to them. And that's the time when problems like infections, mutations and other complications can set in, making this a potentially risky intervention. It is certainly unproven."

Citing similar concerns, the FDA this year moved to shut down another company that was marketing adult cell therapies in Colorado. The agency contended that cultured stem cells are the equivalent of a "drug" that can become "adulterated" in a lab and therefore need agency approval before they are sold to the public, according to court documents the agency has filed in the case.

In another recent case, federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against the operator of an Arizona medical clinic that marketed stem cell therapies for cancer and other chronic illnesses. In a plea deal, the operator of the clinic pleaded guilty to 12 charges, including selling and using the mail to distribute what the agency concluded was a "drug" that had not been approved by the FDA. (Prosecutors had charged that the clinic operator obtained the stem cells on the black market from umbilical cords bought from the parents of newborn babies.)

(Another Texas firm, BioLife Cell Bank, also recently started an adult stem cell bank. But unlike the Celltex-RNL venture, it does not engage in "culturing" or growing cells -- the aspect of adult stem cell treatments that is considered most controversial and most likely to be objectionable to the FDA.)

Shelley Burgess, an FDA spokeswoman, said she could not comment on whether the agency would investigate RNL Bio or Celltex for providing stem cells to Perry. But when the agency becomes aware of companies that are marketing adult stem cell therapies to the public without agency approval, "we would look into that," she said.

Controversial history RNL Bio, Celltex's partner, has had a controversial history and was recently expelled from an international medical society for its alleged failure to impose safety controls after the death of one of its patients from a blood clot, according to the executive director of the group.

The company first garnered worldwide headlines three years ago for being the first company to commercially clone dogs, replicating five puppies from the skin cells of Booger, a deceased pit bull terrier owned by a California woman. But it has also aggressively marketed adult stem cell treatment around the world, touting its abilities to cure patients of everything from hearing loss to arthritis.
The company's headquarters is in South Korea, which bans adult stem cell procedures. As a result, the company has advertised and set up clinics for its treatments in Japan, China and Mexico, prompting charges by some scientists and watchdog groups that it is engaging in "stem cell tourism."

Last year, the International Cellular Medicine Society, a professional organization of stem cell researchers and practitioners, dispatched a team of scientists to investigate the death of an RNL patient in Japan who died of a blood clot that migrated to the lungs.

The association concluded that the death was "likely" triggered by RNL's stem cell treatment and announced that RNL had agreed to make changes in its procedures that included better informing patients and their doctors of the risks involved.

But afterward, "we never heard from them again," said David Audley, executive director of the society, explaining that he sent several emails and placed phone calls that went unanswered. As a result, "the company was expelled from the ICMS," Audley said in a statement he provided to NBC News.

Asked in an interview about the medical society's action, Donna Lee, RNL's vice president for business development, said, "Oh, we didn't know about that."

Lee and Jeong Chan Ra, RNL's chairman, both insisted in a joint interview that they were unaware of the society's concerns because Ra had been traveling and had not had a chance to review a recent email from the group. Ra also said that the death of the patient in Japan was unrelated to his stem cell treatments.

"According to my research, your stem cell is for you (the) most, most safe technology," Ra said. "... It's common sense."

'Revolutionary potential' Despite the questions about its treatments, RNL last year landed an extremely enthusiastic customer: Jones, Gov. Perry's back doctor. Jones told NBC News that, after hearing about the company's treatments, he flew to Japan last year in hopes that an adult stem cell infusion could cure crippling arthritis in his hands that had spread throughout his body and made it virtually impossible for him to operate on patients.

"I couldn't even believe how much pain I was in," Jones said in the interview. "I could not walk up and down the stairs. I couldn't turn the keys on in my car. I couldn't honestly put my gloves on to operate. I couldn't even hold a scalpel."

But within five months after receiving the stem cell injections, Jones said, he got miraculously better.

"I woke up one day and I had no pain," he said. "And I jumped out of bed and I told my wife, I said, 'Wow ... this is — it's amazing.'"

Ever since, Jones said, he has felt he had a "calling" to spread the word about adult stem cell treatments, causing him to encourage his most famous patient — Rick Perry — to receive such injections for his back pain.

     It also led him to form Celltex with Eller. Celltex signed its exclusive marketing agreement to market RNL's treatments on March 19. The day after the contract was signed, Eller and Jones took Ra and Lee to meet Perry in the governor's office in Austin to discuss the future of such treatments in Texas.

After the stem cell bank legislation passed and he had his own procedure, Perry wrote a letter in late July urging the Texas Medical Board to adopt new rules that would "recognize the revolutionary potential" of adult stem cell therapies and would protect and encourage doctors in the state to use such treatments.

The Medical Board, a state body whose members are appointed by the governor, has since appointed a "stakeholders' group" that will draft the new rules. That group includes Jones.

As for RNL, it has recently assembled a promotional video on YouTube that touts the company's work in adult stem cell treatments. Among the highlights: photos of this year's meeting among Ra, the CEO; David Eller; and Gov. Perry.