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Your Money AND Your Life
Every so often, a picture comes along that shakes you to the core of your being, a picture that so completely captures some deep, suppressed reality that once you have seen it, the image will never leave your mind again as long as your can remember anything.
The picture above is one of those pictures for me.
I digress to one of my favorite bug-a-boos, capitalism, in its current globalized incarnation, the full-bore, Milton Friedman/Chicago Boys, markets are the answer to everything version which the powerful (and rich) of the U.S. have foisted off on us since the election of Ronald Reagan--during which time wages have largely stagnated, and the gap between the rich and poor has grown ever larger.
Defenders of capitalism and unfettered markets claim there is an inherent morality in the operation of this system, that the unregulated "invisible hand" of the market leads to greater good (defined entirely in terms of goods and services that can be assigned monetary value) than any other system.
But look at the picture above if you want to see what we have wrought since Reagan took office.
The process we are looking at is a step in the manufacture of one of the most important drugs in the world, heparin, a life-saving blood thinner used in surgery and dialysis. And where does heparin come from? Turns out, it's produced from the mucous membranes from the intestines of pigs.
And American drug companies, in their pursuit of lower production costs, now buy a great deal of the heparin from China.
Even in the United States, where there is, on paper, the pretense of regulatory oversight of some industrial practices, companies get away for years with horrendous, public-health threatening operations, like the meat-processing company that was recently caught using forklifts to shove cows who could no longer stand (a possible indication of Mad Cow syndrome) into the slaughter line to be fed to our kids in school lunch programs.
But in China, there's effectively no oversight at all--not by the United States, and not by the government of China.
The photo above shows what happens when you turn the market loose: standing at a filthy sink a worker cooks up several pots of pig intestines in a family-owned workshop. The product of this shop then flows through the hands of some number of intermediaries, until it ends up in a vat at a Chinese company from whom Baxter International, the American drug company, bought what was delivered to American hospitals as heparin. And somewhere along the way, someone as yet unidentified slipped another chemical into the mix, something that looked rather like heparin in unsophisticated tests. Something that finally got the FDA's attention after 19 deaths and hundreds of severe allergic reactions.
No one with even a scintilla of concern for the lives of fellow human beings can look at this picture of industrial depravity and not want to slaughter the American corporate criminals who have been allowing these contaminated products into our bodies at the very time when we were looking for healing.
What is even more infuriating is how many people and organizations are damned by this picture. At every step of the way, not a single person ever stopped to ask, how do we know that this product is safe? No doctor? No FDA official? No member of Congress? No member of any of the multitude of scientific bodies that advise the president? No medical journal?
Oh right, "the market" delivered the stuff, and surely no company would want to risk the liabilities involved in marketing a poisonous product to the America people?
No wonder corporations hate trial lawyers as much as they do. Without the occasional lawsuit, we would know virtually nothing about many corporate criminal activities. And even when we do, the villains rarely suffer. Life without parole would be far too sweet for everyone involved in the tobacco industry's decades-long campaign of lies, and yet their executives walk among us as free men, even after lying through their teeth under oath before Congress.
And as this heparin example shows, the amount of corporate criminality far exceeds all but the most "paranoid" of imaginations. And who's to say who's a paranoid, if we keep learning that our government and the corporations that own it are perfectly happy to make products that kill us, as long as not too many of us die in a given time period and blow their game.
Insanity. I look at this picture, and the full insanity of what passes for mainstream media/public school education reality hits me so hard I can barely breath. We are in the hands of madmen--from the criminals in the White House, with their aiding and abetting of corporate crime, illegal pre-emptive wars, and assaults on the Constitution, to the criminals in the boardrooms of corporations who, actively or passively, are willing to see ordinary citizens be sickened or even die until the bodies pile up high enough to threaten profits.
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Uck!!!!!!!!!!
Sickened. Worried. Sickened.
One major point of free-market capitalism is COMPETITION. Without competition, under a monopoly, everything suffers.
Capitalism itself had to compete for support among the people in the past, because other ideologies, such as authoritarianism and socialism, co-existed. Not anymore. Today is a capitalist monopoly, and capitalism is no longer obligated to care for the masses. Especially the crony monopolistic kind that we know of today.
In addition, China is the worst example of what happens when you put the worst of communism (authoritarian government) together with the worst of capitalism (lack of checks and balances). But to a greedy executive, none of that matters - China is simply an attractive pool of skilled, underpaid, obedient workers.
Debbie Shank used to stock shelves at night for Wal-Mart. Now she owes Wal-Mart almost $500,000.
The 52 year-old Missouri Wal-Mart employee was left “brain damaged, disabled and penniless” from a car accident seven years ago. But when the Shank family received a settlement from the driver at fault, Wal-Mart demanded reimbursement for every cent they had paid for Deborah’s medical bills – plus interest and legal fees.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Debbie Shank’s case, leaving her family no choice but to pay Wal-Mart $470,000. Now her family doesn’t know how they’re going to be able to afford Debbie’s nursing home bills.
The Shanks aren’t gold-diggers. In fact, just six days after the U.S. District Court sided with Wal-Mart over the Shank family, Debbie’s 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed while serving in Iraq. They’re an honest, hard-working family living most people’s worst nightmare – and Wal-Mart is only making it worse.
Join this group and sign our petition to tell Wal-Mart: Deborah Shank had paid enough.
http://action.walmartwatch.com/debbieshank
Action
Hey, I think twice every time I order food from one of the gazillion corporate franchises that have besmirched Americas local landscapes, knowing full well that not only is that food NOT gonna look like the picture in the menu, it SURE as hell is not gonna be freshly prepared from high end, safely produced food and meat products.
I think twice every time I put my kids on a ride at a theme park or the county fair, or whatever. I know for a fact that those rides, which are supposed to be regulated by SOMEBODY for safety, are not exactly getting the inspections necessary to ensure they are operating as they should, if they get inspected at all.
Oh sure, there will be some literature stating how much oversight goes into these things, or some unbelievably well crafted marketing campaign, complete with the overdubbing of soothing tones from an actors voice made to give that "reassuring" feeling... or that steak restaurant commercial with the thick country accent tellin' ya how yer steak was just fresh cut from an organically grain fed cow slow cooked to perfection over mesquite wood coals.
Or how about the airlines?
FORT WORTH, Texas (CNN) -- Regulators have largely ignored a series of dangerous incidents in which cockpit windshields in commercial airliners shattered in midflight, sometimes forcing emergency landings, according to an American Airlines pilots' group.
Members of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines pilots, say the company and the FAA have known for four years of this problem and done nothing.
"In 2004, there were two 757 incidents," said Todd Wissing, a pilot and APA safety committee member. "The NTSB investigated and made safety recommendations to the FAA."
But he said those recommendations were not acted upon, and he charged that safety lapses are occurring because the FAA is too close to the airlines.
"We depend on the FAA to have oversight of our company's operation and, in fact, the whole operation," he said.
"And we're disappointed when we see evidence that they haven't."
more...
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/02/cockpit.windows/index.html
There seems to be this whole conspiracy by the government & corporate America, hand in hand, aimed at making the public BELIEVE that everything is as they say it is, while winking and keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs, while simultaneously laughing all the way to the bank.
And truly, what ARE we getting out of all this Hocus Pocus?
Everything now is a roll of the dice, and with each passing day it becomes more and more clear that those who are CLAIM to be fully committed to a so-called LIFE platform are also FULLY committed to doing as little as possible to protect those lives via policy and oversight.
Death of a Salesman
(CNN) -- In light of the recent Hannah Poling decision, in which the federal court conceded that vaccines could have contributed to her autism, we think the tide is finally turning in the direction of parents like us who have been shouting concerns from our rooftops for years.
Autism is a debilitating disorder, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is suffered by 1 in 150 kids, making it more common than childhood cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined.
Recently, England and Ireland reported that autism is affecting one in 58 individuals.
Is it any wonder that autism has become many new parents' No. 1 fear?
-snip-
We think our health authorities don't want to open this can of worms, so they don't even look or listen. While there is strong debate on this topic, many parents of recovered children will tell you they didn't treat their child for autism; they treated them for vaccine injury.
Many people aren't aware that in the 1980s our children received only 10 vaccines by age 5, whereas today they are given 36 immunizations, most of them by age 2. With billions of pharmaceutical dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine program is becoming more of a profit engine then a means of prevention?
more...
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/02/mccarthy.autsimtreatment/index.html