dan e, concerning Pharma, it strikes me as interesting that many indigenous people never die of degenerative illnesses such as cancers, diabeties, heart disease, MS, etc. These are all Western/US illnesses and Pharma and the great non-profit fundraisers are claiming to be working on “cures” for these tragic illnesses and killers of our time.

Afterall where do most of these pharmaceutically concocted drugs come from but nature, the patents/privatization of what is available (or could/should be) to all?

What holds us hostige is not Big Pharma, but our inability to think outside this box that even makes Pharma relevant.

By Dr. Doug Henderson and Dr. Gary Null

URL of this article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15758

Global Research, October 21, 2009
Progressive Radio Network – 2009-10-20

It has been a particularly bad month for the pharmaceutical industrial complex in its ongoing litigations in American courts. Among the main pharmaceutical headlines, Merck’s Gardasil vaccine for HPV, now being widely administered to pre-teens, was found to be linked to amyltrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease; following a $1.4 billion fine in promoting one of its blockbuster drugs Zyprexa off-label, deceptive correspondence was uncovered by Eli Lilly gaming the system again by promoting another one of its drugs, Cymbalta, off-label for fibromyalgia; AstraZeneca was fined $160 million for scamming the Medicaid system in Kentucky after being fined $215 million for ripping off Alabama; Glaxo lost a Pennsylvania trial for failing to warn doctors and pregnant women of the dangers of its antidepressant drug Paxil related to birth defects; and Pfizer scored a record-breaking fine of $2.3 billion for illegally marketing several drugs over the years: Bextra, Zyvox, Geodon and Lyrica. These kinds of charges, among the many others, have become a habit for drug makers for the past dozen years.

When we speak of the pharmaceutical industry complex, it does not refer solely to private drug manufacturers. The complex, like a Matrix that holds captive the health of the nation in medical slavery by its own design and manipulation, is a consortium, a spiders’ web woven with financial attachments throughout the medical profession. In addition to the pharmaceutical and medical device firms, this complex includes every government health agency—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and or course the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—as well as drug lobbying firms now employing a large number of former Congresspersons, insurance and HMO companies, all of the leading professional medical associations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the majority of medical schools and their research departments who are heavily funded by drug money, many of the most prestigious medical journals, and ultimately all of this filtering downward to the physicians who diagnose our illnesses and prescribe our medications and treatments.
SNIP — long article follows, see the URL

But of course wealth creates poverty. The specific kind of wealth I mean is material. Material wealth requires privatization of the world’s resources to the exclusion of the vast majority of humans. The only way that such wealth can be expanded is their the kinds of schemes Wall Street has devised which are purely speculative in nature.

There is, to be sure, an expansive, perhaps infinite, wealth which is transferable while never given away. Perhaps it shouldn’t be referred to as wealth since we’ve become fixated on material wealth as the be all end all. But it is based on human needs. What are those needs?

I would say they are finite, but satisfaction is infinite. These include:
subsistence,
protection,
affection,
understanding,
participation,
leisure,
creation,
identity and
freedom.

These needs are universal and they are very dynamic, interacting with one another and are reinforced either positively or negatively. When a need is satiated it can bleed into other needs, curtailing their satisfaction. These needs change over a life-time.

The only need that must first be fulfilled is subsistance in order to move to all the others. All other needs are equal in their importance to a healthy existence. An example of a negative fulfillment is, say, protection and the response of an annual expenditure of a trillion dollar military industrial war machine and 800 bases world-wide. Such an negative reinforcement works in reverse creating less protection, AND depriving other needs from being fulfilled. Our material excesses work much the same way.

If we thought of poverty in these terms it would create a much more livable sustainable world for most if not all of the world’s population. But a system based on GNP, GDP and Consumer indexes is totally alien to this way of meeting human needs; and thus deprives many from fulfilling lives – Americans do poorly in the 9 areas mentioned.

Obama is limited. He sees all problems through the prism of US politics and that prism distorts the problem. The problem is vast in scope and depth and it crosses national boundaries.

The problem begins with understanding who and what we can and want to be on this planet. It is question that the current policies, institutions and political system are incapable of grasping.

So, when Obama says this and that are “unsustainable” he is talking in the meager narrow scope of what is within acceptable politico frameworks. (And yes lichen you are right about shifting resources from the pathology of war to human rights and needs).

Power is concentrated away from solutions. It is a fundamental fact, an irrefutable truth. This will not be corrected through our actions, without utter collapse. Are we heading toward collapse? What has kept this menacing rogue nation afloat is the deep, and growing, interdependency that starves so many and works for so few. The dollar as the basis of world trade has a strangle hold on solutions.

Poverty is the obverse of wealth. One creates material wealth by creating poverty in its wake. That poverty exists here and throughout the globe. It shifts all balance to the centers of power. This is a fundamental principle which must be understood without leaning on ideological crutches that distort the problem, even if some ideologies concede an acknowledgement of some of the problem.There is no “plug and play” ideological solution; and it is a horrible waste of our resources to focus so completely on past ideologies to answer what the problem has become.

Welfare for the privileged. Hunger, inadequate health care, and death
for the proles. I hope I see anyone who voted for these inbredding
piles of bile in trouble, I going to let them die. Anyone who respects
them, same fate.