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It’s no secret that Big Pharma has been providing doctors with special perks in return for prescribing their products. This has been going on for ages. But to get a better grip on why the costs of healthcare have been increasing dramatically we need to understand about the massive networks that Big Pharma is involved in. Believe it or not, Big Pharma is connected to everything. The AMA, the FDA, the financial markets/big business, the insurance industry, law and politics; these are all affected by Big Pharma.

Recently it was reported that there are more Americans addicted to prescription drugs than illegal drugs. An article in The New York Times stated that “An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.” That’s a pretty hefty number. I know quite a few people who became addicted to prescription drugs. Some said tranquilizers and painkillers were harder to quit than illegal drugs. Prescription pain killers have become the “new heroin”, and are increasingly becoming a major problem in the school system.

Not only are the doctors getting “perks” from the drug companies, but the professors and the research facilities of major universities have been the recipient of “special benefits” as well. Recently “three influential psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School seem to have been caught with their hands in the drug-laced cookie jar, and now they’re in big trouble. Two days after it was alleged that the three doctors failed to report a collective $4.2 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies, Harvard and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into the doctors’ behavior.” Big Pharma = Big Money.

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- research thanks to: Bruce S.

By Bob Herbert

Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future.

For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary — when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers.

Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.

The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released — their lives ruined — without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.

He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”

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- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

- I’ve been murmuring for sometime now that the folks who have organized and sponsored these climate disinformation campaigns may well be held responsible for crimes against humanity in the future once folks see the full consequences of their malfeasance. And I am glad to see that someone like James Hansen with some serious credibility has put the idea out there publicly.

- Some will say that those who run these big corporations are just doing their jobs; just following orders; just doing what they have to do so they can hang onto their jobs. And the corporate folks themselves will say that if they didn’t do it, someone else would.

- Well, they’ll say all that, but it doesn’t cut any slack with me.

- When WWII ended, we had the Nuremberg Trials and the issue of whether or not soldiers could plead that they were ‘just following orders from their superiors’ was looked at as a possible defense. But the answer from the judges was ‘No’.

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

- They said that even each lowly soldier had the responsibility to make a judgment whether or not what he or she was doing was immoral or not.

- So, the corporate CEOs who’ve put the might of their business’ money behind climate disinformation campaigns; whose orders were they following? And the answer is, they were following the aggregate will of the many shareholders they work for. And the will of those many shareholders, above all else, was and is to maximize the company’s profits - to increase their own.

- When you look at the causal connections, it’s hard to know where to hang the blame but, the fact is, the buck has to stop somewhere. These corporate entities, and those who run them, cannot be allowed to conduct disinformation campaigns designed to protect their profits at the cost dissuading humanity from reacting appropriately to an impending global disaster.

- At the deepest level, I think responsibility lies with those who, through their shortsightedness, allowed corporations to become equal to sovereign citizens and to develop levels of power equal or exceeding that of many nation states. I’ve talked about this before here.

- But, in the shorter term, those who sat in the board rooms and made cold-blooded decisions in favor of protecting their corporation’s profits (and their own jobs) and ignored the likely consequences to humanity’s future (and, indeed, the biosphere’s future) - these folks need to be held accountable. They’ve traded all of our future’s and our children’s futures away for some transient baubles.

- So, I agree strongly with Hansen on this issue; these folks need to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, foractively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

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· Testimony to US Congress will also criticize lobbyists
· ‘Revolutionary’ policies needed to tackle crisis

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: “When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.”

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- The steady erosion of our liberties and the unending decent into ever and ever more partisan politics bodes ill for what was once the world’s most enlightened nation state.

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Months of troubled negotiations over new surveillance legislation ended in the House of Representatives today, with the approval of the so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Hailed in some quarters as a “ compromise” after the capitulation of the Protect America Act of 2006, the new surveillance bill is nothing of the kind: on core issues of privacy and accountability, there is no compromise, since little in the measure honors those two values.

Since the New York Times’s revelation of massive illegal surveillance by the NSA, electronic privacy has been a battlefield for claims of executive power and civil liberties. In 2006, the Administration used the shadow of midterm Congressional elections to stampede both Houses into temporary authorization of sweeping new powers in the Protect America Act (PAA). The measure’s grants of new authority had sunset clauses, which expire either immediately before or after the 2008 elections.

The PAA set the scene for another legislative bait-and-switch: On the cusp of national election contests, the Administration rang alarms of crisis, claiming the nation is losing spying capabilities. Legislators inclined to protect civil liberties weighed their exposure to soft-on-security attacks against their allegiance to constitutional values. Either way–in terms of raw power or partisan advantage–the Administration and its supporters win.

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- research thanks to Michael M.

NEW YORK, May 28 — Some of the nation’s leading scientists, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top science adviser, today sharply criticized the diminished role of science in the United States and the shortage of federal funding for research, even as science becomes increasingly important to combating problems such as climate change and the global food shortage.

Speaking at a science summit that opens this week’s first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of climate change, the reluctance to federally fund stem cell research, and some U.S. officials casting doubt on evolution as examples that have damaged America’s international standing.

“I think there’s a loss of American power and prestige that came about as a result of our anti-science policies,” said David Baltimore, a biologist and Nobel laureate and board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Raising questions about the science of evolution, he said, “leads to a certain disdain for American intelligence.” He added, “What we need is leadership that respects science.”

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- If you don’t know what ‘Net Neutrality’ is then this might be a good place to tune in. For an introduction, follow this link:

- I’ve written/posted several times on this subject. Follow these links to see my previous posts on this:

- This issue is just going to get hotter and hotter as the corporations try to capture the Internet for their own monetary profit and political power. All the other media have been co-opted; newspapers, magazines, radio, T.V. The Internet is the only free media left.

- Watch this space (because it could vanish…). Or, as Joni Mitchell says in her song, “You don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.”

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NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Internet service providers that monitor their networks for copyright infringement or bandwidth hogs may be committing felonies by breaking federal wiretapping laws, a panel said Thursday.

University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, argues that ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T and Charter Communications that are or are contemplating ways to throttle bandwidth, police for copyright violations and serve targeted ads by examining their customers’ internet packets are putting themselves in criminal and civil jeopardy.

“These ISPs are getting close to the line of illegality and may be violating the law,” Ohm told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference Thursday.

Charter’s proposed test of a system that eavesdrops on the URLs its customers visit, in order to serve them targeted ads, has already spurred a powerful Congressman to question whether the scheme would violate the Cable Act. For its part, Comcast’s heavy-handed throttling of peer-to-peer sharing by sending fake stop messages to its customers has the Federal Communications Commission holding hand-wringing public hearings over whether it should ban the practice as being inconsistent with its open network principles.

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- I wrote about this case previously back on February 1st, 2008.   I said then, and remind you now, that this is the government we (the US) put into power and are supporting in Afghanistan.

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An Afghan student journalist who was sentenced to death for blasphemy has told an appeals court that he confessed after being tortured.

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted in January of insulting Islam.

But at the appeals court in Kabul the 24-year-old insisted he was innocent of all the charges.

He said he was tortured into confessing that he had disrupted university classes by asking questions about women’s rights under Islam.

He was also convicted of distributing an article on the same subject, and adding three additional paragraphs.

He told the crowded, hour-long appeal hearing: “As a Muslim … I never allow myself to do such a thing. These are totally lies.”

Kambakhsh’s death sentence was handed down during a closed-door trial, which drew condemnation from parts of the international community.

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- One would hope that after all the years of racial strife in the U.S. that we might be beyond stories such as this.   But, alas, it isn’t so.

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Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here’s the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into “a horrible response,” as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

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Saudi women are being kept in perpetual childhood so male relatives can exercise “guardianship” over them, the Human Rights Watch group has said.

The New York-based group says Saudi women have to obtain permission from male relatives to work, travel, study, marry or even receive health care.

Their access to justice is also severely constrained, it says.

The group says the Saudi establishment sacrifices basic human rights to maintain male control over women.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are not allowed to drive.

Saudi clerics see the guardianship of women’s honour as a key to the country’s social and moral order.

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- I wrote a piece the other day entitled Immigration and Assimilation in which I discussed the problems that can arise when immigration rates are too high.

- Here’s a nice follow on which describes what’s going on in Germany now between the native Germans and the imported Turks.

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HE DID not plan it that way. But when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, arrived in Germany for an official visit in February he found the Turkish community in turmoil. A few days before his arrival nine Turks, five of them children, had died in a fire in the south-western city of Ludwigshafen. A hate crime, many Turks suspected. The month before, Roland Koch, the conservative premier of the state of Hesse, had tried to win re-election by promising to deport foreign criminals (two-thirds of Turks do not have German citizenship). The transparent appeal to xenophobia backfired, costing Mr Koch his majority and perhaps his job.

Mr Erdogan both calmed tempers and inflamed them. In Ludwigshafen he reassured sceptical Turks that German police and firemen could be trusted. But then he seemed to urge them to hold themselves aloof from German society. Assimilation was a “crime against humanity”, he told a crowd of 16,000 in Cologne. Turkish children should be able to study in Turkish-language schools and at a Turkish university. With that, he largely wore out his welcome. Politicians across the spectrum accused him of fomenting Turkish nationalism on German soil. Perhaps, some mused, the European Union should suspend membership talks with Turkey.

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