Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

The demand for oil is categorized as “demand inelastic,” considering there are no ready substitutes available for oil, the implications being consumers have few opportunities to switch to other fuels for the myriad activities which oil enables. Strict supply conditions and a growing demand for oil give rise to an economic environment in which, as a rule of thumb, each 10% increase in the price of oil restricts U.S. GDP growth by up to 0.1 percentage points. Proceeding the Joint Economic Committee in April 2002, Alan Greenspan observed, “all economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

U.S. oil consumption habits are quite extraordinary: for, due to a monumental privilege made possible by the U.S. dollars current status as reserve currency, the U.S. accounts for more than 25% of global daily demand, despite composing only 4% of the human population. Transportation accounts for 67% of U.S. oil consumption, and 97% of transportation in the U.S. is fueled by oil, with virtually no substitutes. An overwhelming amount of this movement of goods and services is on behalf of the major industries, featuring at center the military-industrial complex.

Over the past three years, gasoline prices in the U.S. and western world have fluctuated dramatically. In the summer of 2008, for instance, they rose to over $4/gallon but subsequently settled; decades of price inflation aside. Many analysts cite the reality of Peak Oil as the main reason for the inflationary and wild oil prices, however others argue that the price of crude oil today is not determined by the relation of supply to demand, but, rather, the control of oil through speculation by four major Anglo-American companies and their associates. This highly deferential pyramid in regards to the number of sellers in the oil market, in and of itself, results in higher prices. More sellers, on the other hand, would lead to more supply, leading to a more competitive environment with lower prices and higher quantity. Many maintain that Peak Oil not an ecological phenomenom, but, rather a political one, such as the prolific researcher and author William Engdahl.

At least 60% of the $128 per barrel price of crude oil in the summer of 2008 was, indeed, the outcome of unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. While some of the spike has to do with summer’s status as driving season, other factors, such as the paper markets, play a significant role. U.S. rules as stated in Commodity Futures Trading Commission enable speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the NyMex, having only to pay 6% of the value of the contract. So, a futures trader in the Summer 2008 was required to pay approximately 8$ for every barrel, borrowing the other $120. This 16 to 1 hyper-leveraging of oil futures abated the high prices and ameliorated bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters by expenses suffered by the population.²

The selling of oil futures and derivatives contracts have major implications for where oil prices sit at any given time, for the number of buyers and expected prices shifts demand. Further, the process of fixing these prices is so open-ended, only few insiders, such as major oil trading banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, know who is buying the oil futures and derivatives contracts; that is, “paper oil.”

This perceived anticipation for the future affects our present demand, and when a multitude of investors bet on a bullish oil market, the price will increase. Similarly, cash for clunkers, for instance, increased consumer demand due to the tax write-off and deflated price of the cars featured in the program, shifting demand from the future to the present. In the future, profits of the auto industry and price of automobiles should fall due to depressed demand exacerbated, in part, by this program.

The appearance of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past 15-20 years has made possible the present speculative bubble in oil prices. The advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts has landed control of oil prices not with OPEC, but with Wall Street.

In June of 2006. a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report entitled “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices,” observed “…substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The ability for certain firms to influence prices by way of speculation is one symptom of a decades long process of deregulation in the marketplace and the following explosion in derivatives trading.

The report noted, also, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulation of financial futures, had been mandated by Congress to ensure the laws of supply and demand were reflected in the prices on the futures market. The U.S. Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future deliver… causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue an unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA, moreover, instructs the CFTC to implement trading limits, “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery … causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.”

Therefore, the world’s keystone commodity market, oil, is unregulated and highly manipulated. The global economy runs, so to speak, on oil. The U.S. dollar, since 1971 under Nixon, has been a purely fiat currency, as are the majority of global currencies and all speculative instruments; in other words, it’s intrinsic value has been, since 1971, based solely on arbitrary pronouncement and maintained through responsible fiscal policies and management. No longer backed by gold or silver, paper and digital dollars were effectively backed by the world’s oil, especially when one considers that, in order to buy crude oil, virtually each nation had to first purchase US dollars. This dynamic is what Valery Giscard d’Estaing termed an “exorbitant privilege,” in reference to the benefit the U.S. enjoyed in the U.S. dollar being the international reserve currency: one outcome being, that the U.S. would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency.

The aforementioned US Senate Report further acknowledged:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.

David Kelly of J.P Morgan Funds, the Chief market strategist for one of the world´s leading oil industry banks, recently told the Washington Post: “One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong.” The story is floated around, and generally accepted for that matter, that China´s oil imports are exploding, meaning grave implications for the supply-demand equilibrium, and subsequently reason for the spike in prices. David Kelly´s enunciation, in contraposition, negates that hypothesis.³

OPEC, furthermore, left its 2008 global oil demand forecast unchanged, citing slowing economic growth in the industrialized world and slight growth in the emerging markets. OPEC predicted oil demand in 2008 to be, for the most part, unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India, and Latin America will rise, offset by lower demand in the EU and North America.

Big oil conglomerations profit enormously from high oil prices. Advocates of Peak Oil argue that, in the near future, Absolute Peak Oil was the coming end to cheap oil. One premise of Peak Oil holds fossil fuel to be the leftovers of fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, and so therefore characterized by finite supply. Alternatively, a theory of oil formation, arrived at in the Soviet Union of the 1950’s, criticizes the assumptions of western biologists to be unproveable, citing the fact that western geologists have warned an end to oil for more than century, thereafter discovering more supplies.

For the USSR, in the Cold War of the 1950’s, a domestic supply of oil was a geopolitical necessity, and a considerable boost to security. In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev and a team of other scientists concluded: “Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.” They termed this new theory “a-biotic,” or, in other words, non-biological.⁴

Implications of such a theory being that earth’s oil supply is limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon materials present deep in the earth at the time of earth’s formation, as well as the technology available to drill uber-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. The scientists argued that oil comes from deep in the earth, and from conditions of high temperatures and very high pressure. Porfir’yev: “Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth.”

The theory of Peak Oil originated in a 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist employed by Shell Oil. Oil from wells is extracted, he argued, in a bell curve nature, and once a “peak” was reached, what he termed “Hubbert’s Curve,” decline ensued. By 1970, he argued, oil production in the United States would peak and the oil crises of the seventies are oft cited as evidence of the legitimacy of his theory. Free trade agreements world wide have taught us, on the other hand, that it is more likely the flooding of the US market with tariff free and dirt cheap Middle East imports by Shell, Mobil, Texaco, and the other Saudi Aramco made it impossible for California and many Texas producers to compete.

Exacerbating theories that political posturing promotes the illusion of limited oil supplies, the suppression of alternative modes of transportation is well-documented; from electro-magnetism to water powered cars. Why does the combustible engine reign supreme in an age of moon exploration, globalization and other seemingly sky-high technologies?

How do few companies get to the point of wielding so much influence?

By the 1870’s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the United States, as well as various foreign countries. The King of Holland, in 1890, supported the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company for the purpose of refining and selling kerosene from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. In the same year, a British company founded to ship oil, the Shell Transport Trading Company, “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”⁵

In 2008, it was widely reported that the U.S. government secretly led dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts. Andrew Kramer, for the New York Times, uncovered the story that the world’s oil giants, “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller companies” were present at “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”

According to the Times, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…”

There is much evidence that the Bush administration, foreign firms and Iraq’s Oil Ministry had conspired during the most important periods of the Iraq War. There are deep financial ties between the military occupation in Iraq and the aforementioned oil giants; for instance, the oil giants Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron often make appearances on the Pentagon’s payroll. In 2007, these five firms earned more than $4.1 billion from the Pentagon, with Royal Dutch Shell at the forefront with $2.1 billion.

The government of Iraq and Royal Dutch Shell eventually signed a $4 billion deal to “to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas.” The Times reported that Shell “established an office in Baghdad.” A “Green Zone” was guaranteed, and Shell was handed a $338 million contract for aviation fuel by the Pentagon. Therefore, the U.S. government was heavily involved in dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and the U.S. military regularly pays Shell billions of dollars each year.⁶

These subsidies should drive the price of oil down, as, from the businesses´ perspective, subsidies lower costs and make firms willing to offer more at a given price.

In an October 6 Business Week article, Robert Fisk elaborates upon the coming demise of the dollar. The phenomenon will see Gulf Arabs, along with China, Russia, Japan and France end dollar dealings for oil. The break from the post World War II Bretton Woods world order will be an in-between period as the aforementioned nations shift to a bread basket of currencies; among which will be the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a fledgling, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.⁷

It is possible that such plans partially explain the dramatic rise in the price of gold over the last few weeks. Certainly, they portend the end of the Dollar System as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Further, these questions center on the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil to both the rising giant of China and the waning United States. The deadline for the currency transition is 2018. Adding to the drama, Iran recently announced that its foreign currency reserves would from now on be held in euros as opposed to dollars. Many analysts recall what transpired after the last Middle East oil producer decided to sell its oil in euros than dollars. After the decision by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq.

Others hold that the timeline for revaluation is much shorter. The decline in consumer spending, which makes up 70% of the U.S. economy, and unemployment rates, which, though their rise has slowed continue on an upward trajectory, are indicators of this. A revaluation of the US dollar, if even only by one-third, would seriously compromise the U.S.’s ability to import commodities, such as oil.

In September, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that oil price could potentially peak at $85 a barrel by the end of 2009, and average approximately $90 in 2010. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, recently raised their prediction $10, but it still lands at $65 a barrel. This is after they predicted in 2008 $150 oil by 2010.⁸

1. Securing America’s Future Energy. Fundamentals of the Global Oil Market.
2. F W Engdahl. ‘Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation‘. Global Research, 2 May 2008.
3. F W Engdahl. More On the Real Reason Behind High Oil Prices, Global Research, 21 May 2008.
4. F W Engdahl. War and Peak Oil. Global Research, 26 September 2007.
5. Andrew Gavin Marshall. Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order. Global Research, 28 July 2009.
6. Nick Turse. Pentagon Hands Iraq Oil Deal to Shell. Global Research, 4 October 2008.
7. Robert Fisk. Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018? The Independent, 6 October, 2009.
8. Deutsche Bank raises 2010 oil price forecast. Boiler Juice, 6 October 2009.

That’s the startling finding of a new study — Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults –- that appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The 44,000 dead a year estimate is about two-and-a-half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine in 2002.

The Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health,” said lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

“Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives.”

“Even the most liberal version of the House bill would leave 17 million people uninsured,” Woolhandler said. “The whittled down version that Senator Max Baucus is proposing would leave 25 million uninsured. That translates into about 25,000 deaths annually from lack of health insurance. Absent the $400 billion in savings you could get from a single payer system, universal coverage is unaffordable. Politicians in Washington are protecting insurance industry profits while sacrificing American lives.”

The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking education, income and many other factors including smoking, drinking and obesity into account.

It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.

Previous estimates from the Institute of Medicine and others had put that figure near 18,000.

The methods used in the Harvard were similar to those employed by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, which in turn were based on a pioneering 1993 study of health insurance and mortality.

Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease.

An increase in the number of uninsured and an eroding medical safety net for the disadvantaged likely explain the substantial increase in the number of deaths associated with lack of insurance.

The uninsured are more likely to go without needed care.

Another factor contributing to the widening gap in the risk of death between those who have insurance and those who don’t is the improved quality of care for those who can get it.

The research, carried out at the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, analyzed U.S. adults under age 65 who participated in the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) between 1986 and 1994.

Respondents first answered detailed questions about their socioeconomic status and health and were then examined by physicians.

The CDC tracked study participants to see who died by 2000.

The study found a 40 percent increased risk of death among the uninsured. As expected, death rates were also higher for males (37 percent increase), current or former smokers (102 percent and 42 percent increases), people who said that their health was fair or poor (126 percent increase), and those that examining physicians said were in fair or poor health (222 percent increase).

“The Institute of Medicine, using older studies, estimated that one American dies every 30 minutes from lack of health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. David Himmelstein. “Even this grim figure is an underestimate – now one dies every 12 minutes.”

The authors broke down the 44,840 deaths by state.

California leads the nation with 5,302 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas follows closely behind with 4,675 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas also had the highest rate (in 2005) of uninsured citizens — 29.7 percent.

         O, here
   Will I set up my everlasting rest
   And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
   From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
   Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, O you
   The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
   A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

Edward, a knighted, 85-year-old British music conductor, had serious health problems and was almost blind and deaf. Joan, a 74-year-old former dancer, choreographer and TV producer, had cancer.

Rather than suffer under the “yoke of inauspicious stars” or perish at the whim of their increasingly decrepit, “world-wearied flesh,” the Downes’ chose to pass on together with shared grace, dignity and courage. Unfortunately, they had to travel to Switzerland to do it.

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are banned in Great Britain as they are in most places here in the United States. The healthy majority generally believes it knows what’s best for the rest, and the chorus of misery that emanates from many of the terminally ill and the grotesquely suffering ultimately gets drowned out by a din of Christian rhetoric and ludicrous moral posturing.

In Romeo and Juliet, the abrupt, hardly weighed suicides of the protagonists are considered romantic. Almost 500 years later, the peaceful, deliberate passing of the Downes–a couple that had been together 54 years–is frowned on by many as selfish, immoral and damning.

Some say it’s a direct violation of God’s law. Others quote Corinthians 6:19, 20 (KJV): “Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own.” They believe God has proprietary rights and we mortal chattel dare not question His plans, even after His arguably having been asleep at the wheel for the last couple of millennia.

I couldn’t disagree with them more. Their stance suggests that terminally ill folks should voluntarily play Job, regardless of the pain and anguish that accompanies these often horrendous and hopeless deaths.

I think what God allowed to happen to Job was a sin and worse than a sin. The Book of Job reads like a bet between two sadistic guards at a Nazi concentration camp. If two human beings of sound mind choose to die quietly, bravely, and determine their time, their own end, to alleviate their sufferings or agony or induce their own demise before they’ve lost all semblance of their lives or themselves–if they decide they’ve played Job long enough, how can we fault them for cheating their torturers and how can any good god punish them for refusing to fulfill the wager?

Religion is not all that demands this abridgement of free will, this prohibition of peaceful oblivion. America used to be at the forefront of compassionate ideas. Now, we lag behind, hobbled by short-sighted conservatism and wide-eyed profit-mongers. The powers that be have no problem with us killing ourselves slowly with cigarettes or alcohol or their unnecessary drugs or the synthetic poisons they peddle or indirectly place in our food, air and water supplies. Each and every one of us is a captive consumer and even after we can no longer eat, drink or defecate their poisons on our own and we’ve forgotten who we are or were, they can still make money off us rotting away under hospice care or in a nursing home.

Who are we to take matters in our own hands? Who are we circumvent the burgeoning assisted “living” industry?

I’d like to think we’re human beings. I’d like to think we would be treated humanely. Unfortunately, only the states of Oregon and Washington have “Death with Dignity” laws in place.

Here in Texas, regardless of how identity-erasing, volition-robbing, life-transmogrifying, excruciating, needless or pointless a dying person’s wasting away may be, he or she is expected to grin and bear it.

What we want doesn’t matter. Even after there’s hardly anything left of us, they still place the cross, the yoke and the burden on our shoulders. It’s a state-sanctioned martyrdom for God and Capitalism.

“The FDA’s expanded marketing approval process for antipsychotics, highly toxic drugs, is unaffected by evidence uncovered by the US Justice Department showing that the studies submitted by drug manufacturers were often flawed, if not fraudulent,” says Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, in a June 8, 2009 infomail alert.

“Rather than focus on protecting children’s safety, FDA officials are doing their utmost to legitimize irresponsible, off-label prescribing of exceedingly toxic antipsychotics for children–thereby ensuring that far greater numbers of children will be victimized and die,” according to Sharav.

A recent report by the consulting firm Decision Resources found antipsychotics makers spent $993,000,000 in 2006, to promote these drugs to doctors and patients, she reports. In 2008, at more than $14 billion, antipsychotic revenues topped all other classes of drugs in the US, even cholesterol and diabetes medications.

On November 17, 2008, on the popular Furious Seasons website, Philip Dawdy reported that Zyprexa had killed 3,455 people between 1997 and early 2008, based on a review of an FDA staff document with a summary of adverse events in the agency’s database.

From 1993 through the first three months of 2008, 1,207 children on Risperdal suffered serious adverse events, including 31 who died, according to a report in the November 18, 2008 New York Times.

The deaths included a 9-year-old child, receiving Risperdal for the unapproved use of ADHD, who suffered a stroke twelve days after starting the drug. At least 11 of the deaths were in children whose treatment was for an unapproved use.

In May 2009, CBS News reported that Risperdal was causing boys to grow breasts due to increased prolactin levels caused by the drug. The news segment featured a boy who was prescribed Risperdal for ADHD, and had to undergo a double mastectomy to remove the breasts.

Philadelphia attorney, Steve Sheller, represents six boys who developed breasts after taking Risperdal, in lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson. Two have had mastectomies.

On June 3, 2009, Medscape reported that findings presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual Meeting, on the preliminary results from the “Metabolic Effects of Antipsychotics in Children” study, “show that 12 weeks of initial antipsychotic treatment was associated with significant mean increases in overall adiposity and percentage of body fat, as well as a decrease in whole-body insulin sensitivity.”

“Further,” Medscape said, “the investigators found antipsychotic treatment was also linked to significant increases in body-mass index (BMI) percentile and fasting plasma triglyceride levels, both clinically available indicators of adverse metabolic changes associated with increased adiposity.”

In terms of live-long health issues: “This is a serious problem,” says Dr Steven Nissen, chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, and past president of the American College of Cardiology.

“The substantial increase in body fat and increased insulin resistance will almost certainly lead to a higher lifelong incidence of diabetes,” he warns.

“Diabetes is a major cause of heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, and limb amputation,” Dr Nissen points out.

In an April 2008, editorial, in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, titled, “Irrational Healers,” Dr David Healy, author of the new book Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder writes:

For fifty years, the antipsychotics were viewed as too dangerous to use outside secondary care and were largely restricted to those with chronic psychotic disorders where the trade-off between hazards and benefits justified treatment.

Yet now a new generation of possibly even more problematic antipsychotics is being given to preschoolers, in North America, on the basis that they might have a disorder that most of the rest of the world does not believe happens in children.

“FDA officials are ignoring the real world tragedies–drug-induced deaths of children,” Sharav warns.

On June 6, 2009, the Topeca Capital Journal reported on the death of a Kansas toddler, Destiny Hager, and the confirmation by an autopsy that the child died of fecal impaction, after taking Seroquel and Geodon, with “antipsychotic drugs present in concentrations considered therapeutic in adults.”

Child psychiatrist, Vernon Kliewer, diagnosed Destiny with bipolar disorder and prescribed the drugs. State regulators recently “completed a two-year investigation of Kliewer that found the doctor violated Kansas law while treating Destiny and five other children,” the Journal reported.

A September 14, 2007 petition filed by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, says Kliewer diagnosed Destiny with Bipolar Disorder in March 2006, at 3-years-old, and she died on April 4, 2006.

The petition contains 6 counts and details the prescribing of multiple drugs by Kliewer to six children including two more 3-year-olds, one 4-year-old and two 2-year-olds. In one case, he began treating a child at 2-years-old and between January 2003 and November 2006, prescribed a total of 9 drugs for the girl, including Risperdal, Abilify, Seroquel, and Geodon.

“The doctor negotiated a settlement in February with the Board of Healing Arts that didn’t require him to admit wrongdoing,” the Journal said. “He voluntarily stopped treating patients under age 6.”

The Board placed Kliewer’s medical license on indefinite probation and ordered him to pay $13,079 to cover the investigation expenses, the Journal reported. Kliewer must also have another physician monitor his treatment of bipolar patients.

“Tragically, most physicians have not been trained or encouraged to think rationally about the hazards of monotherapy, let alone polypharmacy in children,” says Dr Grace Jackson, author of Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide to Informed Consent and the new book Drug Induced Dementia — a perfect crime.

“Mental health professionals have an ethical duty to inform parents about the potential lethality of drug combinations,” she advises.

On June 5, 2009, Dawdy posted a link to the FDA’s briefing package on Furious Seasons, available to members of the advisory panel, and posted portions of the introduction by FDA psychiatry products chief, Thomas Laughren, including the following comments on side effects caused by the drugs:

“Adverse reactions that can occur with drugs in the class of atypical antipsychotic drugs include, among others, somnolence, weight gain, increases in blood lipids and glucose, acute extrapyramidal symptoms, and tardive dyskinesia.

“These risks are of particular concern in pediatric patients because of the life-long nature of these disorders and the fact that these patients are considered particularly vulnerable, in part because they may be exposed for many decades, and in part because of possible effects on growth and development,” Laughren noted.

In April 2009, Gabriel Meyers, a 7-year-old Florida boy, committed suicide by hanging in the bathroom of a foster care home. In the last few days of his life: “He was told his mother no longer had visitation rights, that he would probably be going back to Ohio, where he alleged he had been abused; the doctor changed his medication, he changed foster homes and he got a new counselor,” George Sheldon, secretary of the Department of Children and Families, stated in the May 12, 2009 St Petersburg Times.

In the year leading up to his suicide, Gabriel had been on the stimulant drugs Adderall and Vyvanse, the SSRI antidepressant Lexapro, Zyprexa, and Eli Lilly’s Symbyax, a drug containing both Zyprexa and Prozac, recently FDA approved for “treatment resistant” depression.

Gabriel was on Symbyax and Vyvanse when he died and neither prescription had been authorized by either his parents, or a court order signed by a judge, in violation of Florida law. He was listed as being on only Adderall in the Department of Children and Families’ database.

“On six separate occasions, Gabriel’s caseworker, Lawrence Chusid, documented that DCF had “parental consent” for the child’s medications,” according the May 9, 2009, St Petersburg Times.

“But in the hundreds of records in Gabriel’s file released by DCF late last month, there is only one form signed by his mother, Candace, a blanket authorization for medical treatment for her son,” dated June 29, 2008, the Times reports.

The labeling on Prozac and Symbyax, contains a black box warning of an increased risk of suicide in children. Instead of discouraging the concomitant use of these two powerful medications, Lilly has encouraged such practices by “designing its own “combination” capsule which contains both Prozac and Zyprexa,” says attorney, Andy Vickery, of the Houston law firm, Vickery, Waldner & Mallia, who is involved in Zyprexa suicide litigation.

“The actual number and rate of completed suicides for patients in clinical trials on antipsychotic drugs, as submitted to the FDA, is higher on Zyprexa than on any of the other drugs in this class,” he reports.

“Specifically,” he says, “Lilly reported that, of 2500 patients on Zyprexa, there were 12 completed suicides, as compared to none on placebo.”

For several years, a system called the Medicaid Drug Therapy Management Program was supposed to be monitoring the prescribing habits of doctors for children covered by Florida Medicaid. However, Gabriel’s shrink, Dr Sohail Punjwani, had been red-flagged as having “problematic” prescribing practices in every quarter since the monitoring began in 2006.

According to the Miami Herald: “Punjwani defended the use of psychiatric drugs on children, even if they are not approved for such use, saying the lack of approval stems from the reluctance of drug makers and the medical establishment to launch clinical trials on children.”

“The anti-psychotic drugs, he added, are used routinely to treat mood instability and insomnia among children,” the Herald reported.

The doctor told the Herald that he did not even remember Gabriel. On May 12, 2009, the Herald reported that a “lawmaker who chairs a state Senate committee on children has asked the state to investigate the doctor who treated a foster child who killed himself.”

“In separate letters to the Florida Board of Medicine and the Agency for Health Care Administration, state Sen. Ronda R. Storms, a Brandon Republican who chairs the Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee, requested investigations leading to a “full report,” according to the Herald.

Following Gabriel’s death, DCF Secretary Sheldon directed a review of the files for every Florida foster child to ensure that any child prescribed psychotropic drugs was accurately recorded in the Department’s system. He also directed a verification of the existence of a parental consent, or a court order signed by a judge, authorizing each child to receive such medication.

The results of the review in a May 28, 2009 report indicate: “No record of consent or judicial order was found for 16.2% of the 2,669 children receiving psychotropic medication.”

On December 13, 2006, four-year-old Rebecca Riley died in a Hull, Massachusetts as a result of a drug overdose. At a mere 28-months-old, Dr Kayoko Kifuji, a psychiatrist at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, diagnosed Rebecca with ADHD and bipolar disorder, and subsequently prescribed, Seroquel, Depakote, an antiseizure drug, and clonidine, a blood pressure medication.

The medical examiner noted, “Rebecca’s heart and lungs were damaged and found that this was due to prolonged abuse of these prescription drugs, rather than one incident,” according to police reports.

The legal filings show the two other Riley children, ages 6 and 11 at the time of Rebecca’s death, were also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD, by the same doctor, and kept on the same 3-drug cocktail for years.

Rebecca’s parent have been charged with murder under the theory that they overdosed the child in attempt to sedate her and she did not bring in government disability payments.

On February 7, 2007, the day after the parents pleaded not guilty to the charges, Dr Kifuji entered into a voluntary agreement with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine to not practice medicine pending an investigation. “The Agreement entered into by Dr. Kifuji will remain in effect until further order of the Board,” the Board’s February 7, 2007 press release stated.

In April 2008, attorney, Andrew Meyer Jr, filed a malpractice lawsuit against Dr Kifuji on behalf of Rebecca’s estate. “This child was subject to mostly telephone prescriptions and a slipshod diagnosis,” he told the Boston Globe on April 4, 2008.

In an editorial titled, “How many more Rebecca Rileys?, in the January 9, 2009 Patriot Ledger, the author of, “From Difficult to Delightful in Just 30 Days,” Dr Jacob Azerrad, wrote: “To diagnose a 2-year-old as bipolar by adult standards is crazy.”

“A key issue is the misuse of psychiatric diagnostic labels to explain bad behavior in children,” he wrote. “This has resulted in the drugging of young children to a degree unprecedented in our history.”

“Our preschool children are far too young to defend themselves,” he said. “It’s up to parents to “say no to drugs” and teach their children that life is meant to be learned and experienced – it’s not just a pill to be swallowed.”

On March 5, 2009, Weymouth News reported that a “psychiatrist who prescribed drugs for the late Rebecca Riley, who was four at the time of her death, can be charged with malpractice.”

“A Suffolk County tribunal determined on March 5 that there was enough evidence to charge Dr. Kayoko Kifuji,” the News noted.

“Rebecca Riley’s doctor now the target of a grand jury,” was the headline in the May 1, 2009 Patriot Ledger. “Already the target of a civil medical malpractice lawsuit, the psychiatrist who prescribed the drugs that killed 4-year-old Rebecca Riley is now the subject of a grand jury criminal investigation,” reporter Lane Lambert wrote.

“If the grand jury does find the … psychiatrist criminally liable for Rebecca’s death, she could face involuntary-manslaughter charges,” Lambert noted.

Evidence of the grand jury investigation surfaced “amid fresh legal action in both the civil and criminal cases,” Lambert said. “Kifuji’s lawyers asked a Suffolk County judge to postpone her deposition in the civil case indefinitely, and close the entire court record to the public.”

Kifuji’s attorney “said a deposition would force the doctor to claim her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself while the grand jury was looking at the case,” according to the report. The judge denied both motions, it noted.

An attorney for Rebecca estate said Kifuji is scheduled to give a deposition in the civil case on July 6, 2009, after the grand jury is finished. In the March 5, Weymouth News article, Kifuji’s attorney said the murder charges against the Rileys make it difficult to decide if she can be faulted for Rebecca’s death.

“This is not something bizarre that she (Kifuji) did,” he said. “A number of fine doctors feel this was appropriate.”

Back on September 30, 2007, Katie Couric interviewed Dr Joseph Biederman, whose research Dr Kifuji has said influenced her, in a 60 Minutes segment tiled “What Killed Rebecca Riley?”

When questioned about the rise in young children with bipolar disorder, Biederman told Couric: “The average age of onset is about four.”

“It’s solidly in the preschool years,” he stated.

The results of an investigation led by Senator Charles Grassley, on behalf of the Senate Finance Committee, revealed that between 2000 to 2007, Biederman earned at least $1.6 million from drug companies but failed to report at least $1.4 to Harvard University.

On February 26, 2009, Biederman was questioned under oath in a deposition for litigation titled, In re Risperdal/Seroquel/Zyprexa Litigation, Case Code 274, Alma Avila as next fried of Amber Avila versus Johnson & Johnson Company et al, in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Middlesex County.

At one point, when questioned about his participation in medical education events as a paid speaker, he blamed a decline in invitations to speak over the past year on Grassley’s investigation and inferred that the investigation was brought on by media hype over Rebecca’s death.

When asked if he had any idea why he received fewer invitations, Biederman said: “There has been some accusations by Senator Grassley about issues of conflict of interest; and while the investigation is going on, I agreed not to speak.”

“What is the nature of Senator Grassley’s investigation of you?” attorney, Fletch Trammell, asked.

“Senator Grassley read, there was an article in The Boston Globe about a little girl in town that the parents are accused of first-degree murder,” Biederman noted.

“In fact, you may have seen it,” he told the attorney.

“The accusation has been upgraded from second-degree to first-degree murder,” he pointed out.

“But because the child was diagnosed with bipolar illness, it captured the imagination of the media and there was an article in The Boston Globe that talked about the diagnosis and how controversial that is and particularly as it pertains to preschoolers,” Biederman continued.

“And in the article the reporter got — I sent my standard disclosure forms, so he wrote that I have extensive relationships with fifteen or so pharmaceutical companies,” he stated.

“So Senator Grassley wrote a letter to the institution, to Harvard and Mass. General, asking for details,” he said. “And that has been the cascade of events.”

“So Senator Grassley became interested in you because of these people who were accused of killing their kid?” the attorney asked Biederman.

“Senator Grassley claims to be interested in issues of conflict of interest and is interested in making sure that the universities have tight conflict-of-interest rules,” Biederman said. “I have no dispute with that.”

“What interactions have you had with Senator Grassley or his staff?” the attorney asked.

“None,” Biederman stated. “Senator Grassley’s interactions are with Mass. General and with Harvard, not with me directly.”

Biederman said the hospital was paying a law firm to represent him in the matter of Grassley’s investigation and for the deposition.

He acknowledged having a professional relationship with Janssen, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca and Pfizer, the makers of atypical antipsychotics. “I have a professional relationship with dozens of manufacturers,” Biederman said.

“In the course of carrying out these relationships with all these drug manufacturers, does the relationship always involve them giving you money?” the attorney asked.

“Most of the time,” Biederman replied.

On March 27, 2009, the New York Times reported that, “Federal prosecutors have issued a subpoena seeking information about the work and statements of three prominent Harvard researchers who have been the focus of a Congressional investigation into conflicts of interest in medicine.”

The researchers, Doctors Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens “are named in the subpoena, which was sent … to Fletch Trammel, a lawyer who represents state attorneys general in lawsuits that claim makers of antipsychotic drugs defrauded state Medicaid programs by improperly marketing their medicines,” the Times noted.

Up until June 10, the researchers and doctors in the field of psychiatry identified by Grassley’s investigation included Charles Nemeroff from Emory University; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association, from Stanford University; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas; and Fred Goodwin, the former host of the radio show, “Infinite Minds,” broadcast for years by National Pubic Radio.

But on June 10, the name Zachary Stowe was added to the list, with a Wall Street Journal headline: “Emory Psychiatrist Cited in Conflicts of Interest.”

“Emory University has disciplined a prominent psychiatrist who was being paid by an antidepressant maker at the same time he was conducting federal research about the use of such drugs in pregnant women,” the Journal wrote.

Stowe is the director of the “Women’s Mental Health Program” at Emory. Its website says the focus his “clinical research is the use of psychotropic medications during pregnancy and lactation, the psychobiology of mood disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and the impact of maternal mental illness on fetal and neonatal exposures.”

The latest off-label marketing scheme in the works involves federal legislation expected to come up for a vote soon in the US Senate called the Mothers Act. This one involves a plan to screen all pregnant women for a long list of pregnancy related “mood” and “anxiety” disorders.

After covering the Pharma’s off-label marketing schemes using mental illness screening scams since mid-2004, beginning with TeenScreen, the Mothers Act is no different than the others, aside from the fact that a whole new treatment industry was built up around it, and more profiteers are involved. But then, Pharma could hardly expect to keep selling drugs through middle-man pushers forever, while keeping the massive profits to itself.

Amy Philo, the leader of “Unite for Life,” a coalition of 50 groups against the bill, warns that the Mother’s Act is: “Trolling for Mental Patients in a Maternity Ward Near You.”

“If you’ve never been ‘Teen Screened’ in high school, quizzed by a college counselor about your potential perfectionism, mood swings, or alcohol use- or told you might go crazy if you don’t start taking drug x, consider yourself among the fortunate, fading few,” Amy advises.

“Imagine yourself pushing a baby into the world in a hospital somewhere in America,” Amy says, “only to be greeted by a friendly, neighborhood-psychological-screener the very moment baby begins munching down on his first meal.”

“Would either of you like a DSM-IV Mental Disorder diagnosis code with that milk?”

With no psychiatric drugs FDA approved as safe for use by pregnant and nursing mothers and doctors rightfully reluctant to prescribe any drugs harmful to the fetus, a new customer recruitment scheme was needed and the Mothers Act fit the bill.

Opposition to the Act stems from the certainty that it will lead to more forced drugging of infants with no voice of their own to prevent it, with antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antiseizure drugs that cause birth defects, a withdrawal syndrome and many other serious health problems, through pregnant and nursing mothers.

The Act is modeled after a mandatory screening law enacted in New Jersey, the home state of the bill’s main sponsor, Senator Robert Menendez, and also the home state for many drug companies. Attempts to pass the federal version have failed for the past 8 years.

The postpartum websites strung out all over the internet to promote the bill, many run by people benefiting financially from the new treatment industry they created, argue that the Act does not call for mandatory screening, without mentioning that the screening language was removed last year due to strong opposition.

“There is NO MANDATED screening,” Susan Stone wrote in a blog on the website for her treatment center, PerinatalPro, on May 29, 2009.

On May 12, 2009, the Herald News reported that the Act “lacks one vote for approval” in the US Senate, citing a speech made by Menendez, during a press conference. Menendez told the Herald that the national bill would not mandate screening. “Hopefully, states would adopt screening,” he said.

This statement, in May of this year, clearly shows that the goal of passing the federal legislation is to set the stage for states to pass mandatory screening laws, like the one in New Jersey.

A June 16, 2006, press release, by Menendez and Senator Richard Durbin, announcing the bill stated, the “Act was introduced in response to a recently passed, first-of-its-kind New Jersey law requiring doctors and nurses to educate and screen expectant mothers about PPD.”

The Theraurus on my computer lists “require” as an alternate word for “mandatory.”

On June 8, 2009, New Jersey.com ran the headline: “E-mail: Drug lobbyist targeted Menendez to help with importation bill,” and reported that the subject line of the email said: “URGENT”

The email called for New Jersey drug companies to ask Menendez to be their champion on an amendment that would effectively kill any attempt to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from other countries, according to the report.

“We need to locate a Democratic lead cosponsor for the second degree amendment,” the e-mail said.

“Can … [Johnson & Johnson], Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and the other New Jersey companies coordinate and contact Senator Menendez’s office and ask him to take the lead?”

The strategy to pursue Menendez became known when the email from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group, ended up with Senator John McCain, a drug importation advocate. “And McCain read it on the Senate floor – twice,” the article notes.

“Menendez’s office said that while he supports the drug companies’ position, he did not act as their champion,” according to New Jersey.com.

The Mothers Act refers to “entities,” as being eligible for grants and participating in research and the development of screening methods and treatments and delivery.

The bill states: “The Secretary may make grants to eligible entities for projects for the establishment, operation, and coordination of effective and cost-efficient systems for the delivery of essential services to individuals with a postpartum condition and their families.”

Under definitions, it says the term ‘eligible entity’– “means a public or nonprofit private entity;” and “includes a State or local government, public-private partnership, recipient of a grant under section 330H (relating to the Healthy Start Initiative), public or nonprofit private hospital, community-based organization, hospice, ambulatory care facility, community health center, migrant health center, public housing primary care center, or homeless health center.”

“Lawmakers have not specified what constitutes an “entity” so it will be impossible to know if there are conflicts of interest between those who develop the screening tools and conduct research and the pharmaceutical companies who most certainly will benefit financially from the increased diagnosing,” according to Kelly Patricia O’Meara in May 7, 2009 article, “Stress Testing the Mothers Act.”

“Where is the guarantee that the “entities” are not pharmaceutical front-men?”, she writes.

“Given that this research will be used to develop questions or tests for screening new mothers for possible mental disorders, one might find it important to know that the research has integrity and has been validated by the scientific community, free of pharmaceutical largesse,” O’Meara points out.

The Act also calls for a “a coordinated national campaign to increase the awareness and knowledge of postpartum conditions.” Activities under such a campaign may– “include public service announcements through television, radio, and other means;” which will basically provide the new pregnancy-related treatment industry with a tax-payer funded mass advertising campaign.

It would be interesting to know whether “entities” would include the treatment centers owned by Susan Stone and Karen Kleiman, and whether their programs would be eligible for funding. At the “Postpartum Stress Center,” Kleiman teaches seminars for professional training with ads on her website and the heading: “Become an Expert in the Treatment of Postpartum Mood Disorders.”

The first sentence in “Highlights” for this training states: “This is a crash course on diagnosis, screening, assessment, treatment options.” The fee is $750 for a 10-hour course, but they do throw in a book titled The Postpartum Stress Center’s Guide to Enhancing your PPD Private Practice: A checklist for successful practice, for the $750.

For this gig alone, Karen could make $7,500 per seminar by simply recruiting 10 trainees. Nearly all the websites pitch in to promote conferences and seminars, so rounding up 10, or even 20, trainees would likely not be too difficult.

The website shows 4 seminars a year, meaning Karen could earn roughly $30,000 for 40 hours of teaching people how to “Become an Expert.” And if she could round up 20 trainees per class, she could make $60,000 a year, putting her up there with all the other highly paid speakers within the new industry.

In her May 29, 2009 blog, Susan mentions how the Act might help fund “inpatient maternal mental health” programs all across the US. “Just this morning,” she says, “I completed an interview with Parenting Magazine, which plans to feature an article about the nation’s first inpatient maternal mental health unit at UNC, Chapel Hill, NC, as well as focus on the federal legislation and how this bill might help fund other such programs across the country.”

Many sites provide links to “experts” and treatment programs. For instance, Katherine Stone runs “Postpartum Progress,” and in December 2008, she had links to the “Top Women’s PPMD Treatment Programs & Specialists.”

The first program on the list was Dr Stowe’s at Emory, which primarily focuses on “the evaluation and treatment of emotional disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period,” the website states.

In 2008, Dr Stowe was the primary investigator of an National Institutes of Health grant where the stated purpose was “to stimulate vigorous debate with the emphasis on the reproductive safety of antidepressant medications,” according to Grassley’s June 2, 2009 letter to the president of Emory.

During a 2008 deposition in a Paxil birth defect case, Stowe said that around “80% of his Emory salary ($187,000) comes from his NIH grants,” the letter notes. His total Emory salary was $232,000.

In 2007, Paxil maker, GlaxoSmithKline, paid Stowe $154,400 for 57 promotional talks. He also received $99,300 in the first ten months of 2008 for 38 promotional talks for antidepressant drugs, according to Grassley.

Stowe’s undisclosed income above was from one drug maker. In August 2007, he was listed as an author on a study titled, “Atypical Antipsychotic Administration During Late Pregnancy: Placental Passage and Obstetrical Outcomes,” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

According to the disclosure section, Stowe has received research support from Glaxo, Pfizer, and Wyeth. He has served on advisory boards for Wyeth, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Glaxo, and he has served on speaker’s bureaus and/or received honoraria from Lilly, Glaxo, Pfizer, and Wyeth.

Dr Jeffrey Newport is the associate director of Emory’s Women’s Program. Newport was also an author on the “Antipsychotic,” study. He has received research support from Lilly, Glaxo, Janssen, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, NIH, and Wyeth, and, he has served on speaker’s bureaus for AstraZeneca, Lilly, Glaxo, Pfizer, and Wyeth, according to the disclosures.

On June 14, 2007, Katherine Stone posted a blog with the headline: “Upcoming Event in Asheville Features My Psychiatrist!”, in an evening for prescribing clinicians called “Postpartum Mood Disorders: A Systemic Approach to Biopsychosocial Treatment.”

“The key speaker will be Dr. Jeffrey Newport, associate director of the Emory Women’s Mental Health Program here in Atlanta and also my psychiatrist!!!!”, she said. “I have firsthand knowledge that Dr. Newport rocks.”

An online announcement shows Dr Stowe gave a seminar titled, “Atypical Antipsychotics in Major Depressive Disorder: When Current Treatments Are Not Enough.” The moderator for the seminar was Charles Nemeroff, who earned more than $2.8 million from drug companies between 2000 and 2007, but failed to disclose at least $1.2 million to Emory, according to Grassley.

On July 23, 2008, an article by Nemeroff titled: “Weighing Risk and Benefit for Treatment of Depression in Pregnancy and PostPartum,” was available on Medscape. The Medscape website stated, “This article is temporarily unavailable,” on March 17, 2009.

Nemeroff stepped down as chair of the psychiatry department in 2008 after an Emory found he had failed to report more than $800,000 from Glaxo from 2000 to 2006. “That matter is now being probed by the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

How hip and independent is it, really, though, to shave your junk?

Not so much. Not so much at all.

Take a look at this viral marketing video from the Gillette Corporation.

Note the instructions to “make sure” to use shaving cream not soap, the very latest 5-blade razor (one wonders where this bit of the marketing race will end — 57 blades?), and, of course “moisturizer” (the substance formerly known as “lotion”). All these just happen to be products made by Gillette, so what might a rational soul make of its chummy, flattering, “hip” shaving “advice”?

The real story, of course, is that the existence of body hair has now become a great marketing vehicle for the shareholding class, complete with the standard tools of big business marketing: false promises (larger penises and more “fun” will result for those who do as they’re programmed to do by Gillette and the “viral” “culture” it is sponsoring) and threats (if you don’t use the newest Gillette Fusion razor, you might shave off your vitals).

As in so many areas, all this speaks to our howling need to make the 2010s into a new and improved 1960s.

Along the way, why not lose the shave-bot programming and the sponsored pseudo-hipsterism? Why not lose the chains of corporate babydom and cull the living, hairy, grown-up flower?

Determining what actually happened will require recovering and examining the remnants of the airplane, in particular the major fragments of the airframe, the engines, and most importantly the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder). Without the benefit of a pilot’s radio report, investigators would only have the flight histories of the selected components and parameters that are monitored by the flight recorders. One worry is that the flight recorders are submerged at between 9,000 ft (2744 m) and 14,000 ft (4268 m) and may be difficult to find; their casings are designed to withstand the pressure of 6000 m (19,680 ft) depth for up to 30 days.

Speculation about what may have happened centers on lightning causing a massive electrical surge that caused the failure of (fused, short-circuited, overloaded) the fly-by-wire flight controls; and severe buffeting in a thunderstorm, which disrupted the flight-path.

Pilots of fly-by-wire airplanes do not normally use muscles or hydraulics to move the many flaps and the rudder; electric motors controlled by computers do this to an extent set by the pilots’ manipulation of their control levers, pedals and wheels. The lightning-blackout scenario is unlikely because lightning strikes happen regularly in commercial and military aviation, and airplanes are designed to withstand them (by keeping the electrical charges outside the plane’s interior, because of the all-metal hull and wing surfaces). Also, pilots are trained (in simulators) to compensate for loss of the fly-by-wire system by using the mechanical control system of the trim tabs to push the bigger flaps and the rudder into place. Trim tabs the smallest of the many types of movable flaps, which act like the tails of weathervanes, pushing the larger flaps or rudders they are embedded in into new angles; in normal operation the trim tabs are an assist and a fine adjustment.

The lack of a distress call from the pilots suggests two possibilities: their radios were inoperative or had lost power (which would be odd since the automated data transmission system was functioning), or a very sudden breakup of the airframe in flight. Airframes of modern commercial airliners like the Airbus A330-200 are designed to withstand the buffeting of air turbulence and the stresses of the severe turns and dives that may occur in emergencies. If the airframe broke up prior to impact with the water, what was its cause? Obvious guesses are: missile, bomb and fuel tank explosion.

There is no evidence of a missile attack, so we eliminate that guess. Sabotage by bomb is also discounted, because that guess requires too many elaborate assumptions. Actually, any speculation is entirely unjustified at this point, since recovering evidence and systematic analysis have yet to begin. However, events like this inspire fear and cause minds to race, speculating on causes and meanings.

So, we are led to the question of a fuel tank explosion, could it have happened in AF 447 as either a natural event (electrostatic discharge into fuel-air vapors above liquid fuel in an agitated tank) or an unintended electro-mechanical failure (spark from wire exposed by damaged insulation, into fuel-air vapors) as in the TWA Flight 800 disaster of 1996.

The fuel tanks of airliners are fitted into the wings and the section of the hull below the passenger deck and along the length of the wing roots. The central fuel tank between the wings is usually the single largest volume fuel container. As a plane climbs to higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure drops and so the air originally contained in a fuel tank at the airport seeks to expand; if the tank were sealed this would cause the internal pressure to increasing exceed the external pressure and put great stress on the tank walls. Similarly, as fuel is pumped out of a tank to the engines, the space evacuated must be filled with ambient air to avoid creating a vacuum that would resist subsequent pumping. So, fuel tanks are designed with vents that allow air to flow in, and fuel-air vapors to flow out as needed to equalize pressures at any altitude. The vents are in the form of pipes that run from the central fuel tank through the wing tanks and out to the wing tips where an orifice, at each wing tip, allows for the exchange of air.

Because hydrocarbon liquids and vapors are very insulating electrically, and metals are excellent conductors, there is always a build-up of electrostatic charge between fuel flows and metal containers. This is why sparks can be generated when fuels are pumped into rapid flows or sprays near metal surfaces. There have been many accidents caused by electrostatic discharges into fuel-air mixtures, which were initiated by improperly grounded or excessively turbulent pumping procedures. The petroleum industry has long known about this phenomenon, and developed many standards for the design and operation of fuel pumping and storage equipment. Also, many fuels have chemical additives that enhance their electrical conductivity, to significantly reduce their ability to hold electrostatic charges (reducing the electrostatic build-up relative to the metal piping and containers during pumping and/or sloshing).

The fuel vent pipes of airliners are one type of fuel pumping system. These must be designed to minimize the electrostatic build-up between the flowing fuel-air mixture and the pipe walls. Larger diameter vent pipes will keep flow velocities low (electrostatic build-up and the possibility of sparking increase with flow velocity). Plenum chambers and baffles along the flow path can help prevent bursts of rapid flow in reaction to some mechanical jolt to the wing structure or some sudden drop in external air pressure (which would impulsively draw out fuel-air vapors). Using additives to significantly increase the fuel’s conductivity is also extremely helpful.

Because the airplane manufacturing, airline transport and fuel industries routinely do a good job of managing the fuel and fueling risks, it is rare that we hear about fuel fires and explosions on the tarmac or in flight. However, fuel vapor explosion accidents still do happen; a Boeing 737-400 parked at the gate in 2001 had its center tank explode, killing one person.

Despite the many airliners that experience lightning strikes without harm, it may be that the destruction of AF 447 was the rare instance of lightning igniting the fuel-air vent flow, which subsequently caused a major fuel tank explosion.

Whatever the cause of the loss of AF 447, the loss of 228 lives demands that it be found, and the lesson applied to improve air transport safety.

A closer look at the article revealed it wasn’t a Norm Coleman ploy to get folks in Minnesota to quit eating burgers and fries, nor a menu for the genetically obscene monster in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but an announcement by Germany’s Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner that Germany is banning the cultivation of MON 810, a genetically modified (GM) corn produced by US biotech giant Monsanto.

The GM Monster

It appears that MON 810 is also believed to be the “Frankenstein” of GM crops by at least five other European countries — France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg — all of whom have banned its use. MON 810 was approved by the European Union in 1998, and was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in Germany. Aigner said she had legitimate reasons to believe that the genetically modified Monsanto seed “presents a danger to the environment.” The plant produces a toxin that not only destroys the larvae of the corn borer moth, but other, beneficial, insects as well.

Andreas Thierfelder, spokesman for Monsanto Germany, responded that Monsanto would decide “as quickly as possible” whether to take legal proceedings. She said the “matter was very urgent as the planting season was about to start.” Just how urgent was evident days later when Monsanto filed a lawsuit against the German government, claiming that its ban on MON 810 is arbitrary and contravenes EU rules. Although Monsanto sued France in an effort to overturn its ban on genetically modified corn, and lost that battle in March when France’s highest court ruled that the corn “may” harm the environment and wildlife, the German government is justifiably edgy, as it must prove conclusively to the German court that MON 810 damages the environment.

But the feeder GM corn is just one tiny blip on the Frankenfood radar. And, it’s not just Europeans who should worry. As Jim Hightower, former two-time Texas agriculture commissioner warned way back in June 2004:

For some time, the likes of Monsanto have had their white-smocked engineers tinkering merrily and dangerously with the very DNA of food, genetically modifying the natural composition of things like potatoes so they contain a pesticide in every one of their cells, or altering rice so it contains a diarrhea drug in every bite. This is no mere lab experiment, for unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, Monsanto and a handful of other global biotech giants have quietly spread the seeds of these genetically altered Frankenfoods to so many farms over the past decade that about a third of the foods on U.S. supermarket shelves now contain organisms with tampered DNA — everything from baby food and milk to products made with soybean and corn. Thanks to well-placed campaign donations and powerhouse lobbying, this infiltration of our food supply has been done with practically no consumer awareness, since both Bill Clinton’s and George W’s administrations have let these foodstuffs be sold in America without so much as a label on them to tell us that we’re buying something that our families might prefer to avoid.

Kinda ruins the appetite, doesn’t it? Not just the fact that Monsanto has infiltrated the bulk of our food chain, but that it clearly believes it has the right to do so with or without our knowledge. It has fought oversight, regulation, labeling and scientific research for years. The arrogance with which multinational biotech corporations such as Monsanto are disrupting and modifying life’s natural genetic order — from seeds to food to animals to humans to the environment — is creepy. The Almighty must surely be watching in slack-jawed amazement.

The Profit Plan

These giants are “chemical” corporations, and one of their goals is to create seeds that will withstand more (and more and more) of their herbicides. Monsanto, which gave us the deadly Agent Orange and the toxic weed killer Roundup, is not alone in its quest to manipulate, or to control the world’s order. Germany’s chemical giant Bayer, well known for its popular and effective Bayer aspirin, and for Aleve and Alka-Seltzer, was the first to introduce heroin as well as mustard gas, and produces a series of neonicotinoids — insecticides that attack the central nervous systems of insects, such as bees. Other mega-corporations dealing in both pharmaceuticals and pesticides, to name a few, are Merck, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta — but Monsanto has been around for more than a century, produces 90-percent of genetically modified seed — and has many friends in high places. Many high places.

Last year, Vanity Fair’s Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele teamed up to present a well-researched background article, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” wherein they listed some, but not all, of these friends:

Monsanto has long been wired into Washington. Michael R. Taylor was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the F.D.A. commissioner before joining a law firm in Washington in 1981, where he worked to secure F.D.A. approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone before returning to the F.D.A. as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a senior vice president. Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. when she left the agency in 1993. She became a vice president of Monsanto, from 1995 to 2000, only to return to the E.P.A. as deputy administrator the next year. William D. Ruckelshaus, former E.P.A. administrator, and Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, each served on Monsanto’s board after leaving government. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies. Donald Rumsfeld never served on the board or held any office at Monsanto, but Monsanto must occupy a soft spot in the heart of the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale.

Bartlett and Steele go into some detail about the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its patent rights, not only against GM or GE (genetically engineered) farmers, but organic farmers as well. They write:

Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers — anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records.

Once you opt to buy Monsanto seeds, you are no longer a farmer, you’re a “grower” — a serf — and you must sign a Technology/Stewardship Agreement wherein you agree, among many other restrictions, to use Monsanto seed for planting only a single commercial crop…not to sell or give seeds to any other person for planting . . . to pay annual technology fees (in addition to the price of the seed) due Monsanto . . . to turn over your records and receipts anytime Monsanto asks for them. In short, you sign your life — and your livelihood — over when you become a “grower.” And, if you’re ever taken to court (and it’s likely you could be), and you lose (and it’s likely you will) — you will find you agreed to pay Monsanto and its attorney fees and all related court costs.

The End Game

This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life — whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control. As Henry Kissinger once said matter-of-factly, “If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.” Kissinger has long been obsessed with two things — depopulating the world and establishing a New World Order.

What better way to control the food than to ban seed saving — what better weapon is there to use against starving populations than food? The answer is laid out in detail in F. William Engdahl’s November 2007 critical book about genetic manipulation, Seeds of Destruction. Engdahl is no conspiracy theorist. He is a leading researcher as well as an economist and an associate and regular contributor for the Center for Research on Globalization.

In his extensive three-part review of Seeds, investigative journalist Stephen Lendman reveals “the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling.”

Lendman reminds us that Kissinger has been both at the forefront and behind the scenes since the 1960s when, as Engdahl wrote, “the Rockefellers were at the power center of the US establishment (and) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (was) their hand-picked protégé.” Kissinger was there as Nixon’s Secretary of State in 1973 when the food crisis hit and, as Engdahl said, he decided US agricultural policy was “too important to be left in the hands of the Agricultural Department so he took control of it himself.” Even back then, Kissinger’s goal was to go global and seize control of the agricultural food market. Kissinger’s “food diplomacy” was to use food to “reward friends and punish enemies.”

Lendman writes, “Food is power. When used to cull the population, it’s a weapon of mass destruction.” He says “One way or another, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to reduce population through human reproduction by spreading GMO seeds.” And the “world’s number one” in patenting seeds is Monsanto. He explains:

Like it or not, they’re advancing their agenda, and a 2004 Rockefeller Foundation report shows it. GM crop production achieved nine consecutive double digit year increases since 1996. More than eight million farmers in 17 countries now plant them, over 90% in developing nations. Far and away, the US is the world’s leader “with aggressive Government promotion, absence of labeling, and the domination of US farm production.” Here, “genetically engineered crops (have) essentially taken over the American food chain.” In 2004, over 85% of soybeans were genetically modified, 45% of corn, and since animal feed is mainly from these crops “the entire meat production of the nation (and exports) has been fed on genetically modified animal feed.” What animals eat, so do humans.

According to Engdahl, agribusiness giants, aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the US government and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are progressing relentlessly toward the second pillar of Kissinger’s end game — controlling food to control (and expunge) populations of lesser nations. In December 2007, Engdahl sounded the alarm about yet another seed venture (adventure?), “Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic,” a steel-reinforced concrete seed bank built deep inside a mountain on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. This “program” is funded by the Rockefellers, by such seed giants as Syngenta and Monsanto — and by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who knows a bit about monopoly.

The Way Out

Engdahl says that, since 2007, Monsanto and the US Government together hold the patent for a commercial seed called “Terminator,” designed to commit suicide after just one harvest, and farmers will be forced to return to Monsanto or other seed giants to purchase new seeds each year for crops needed to feed their populations. He said if they’re allowed to continue their reckless pursuit of power, in a decade or so, the small farmer will be but a memory and the majority of the world’s food producers would be little more than feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed corporations. “Those who say ‘it can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events,” he wrote. “The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.”

The good news is that Europe is fighting back against being forced to plant genetically manipulated seeds for plants and food. Countries like Austria and Denmark, France — and now Germany — are standing up, and standing together, to ban biotech products. As is always the case, when those who lust for power and control concoct their grand schemes, they fail to factor in the human response. Lendman says public opinion throughout Europe is strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients. He writes:

Several EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and Denmark, even ban some EU-approved biotech products to further cloud the outlook. Polls show why, with European public opinion strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients, with hostility levels in France as high as 89% and 79% wanting governments to ban them. This shows European consumers are far ahead of Americans and much better protected (so far) by their overall exclusion as well as having labeling requirements for those allowed to be sold. That provision is crucial as it empowers consumers to use or avoid eating these foods. If enough people abstain, food outlets won’t carry them.

It’s not that Americans don’t care that the Rockefeller-Gates-Monsanto plan to solve world hunger is but a ghastly scheme to cull the population of its nonproductive bottom-feeders. Thanks to conspiratorial US media, most of us are either blissfully unaware or are unable to make a sound because, as Hightower said, our “Congress and the White House (and the media) have Monsanto checks stuffed in their ears.”

The way out is to become informed — and just say no to having unlabeled, untested products crammed down our throats. If we do nothing, we will reap what we sow. We will, as Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of evolutionist Charles Darwin, wrote in his 1952 book The Next Million Years, be condemned to the status of workers in a beehive.

We must stand up and support Europe’s attempt to organize a ban on genetically modified crops and food. It is the way — the only way — out of this mess. Lendman, who maintains “the stakes are much too high — human health and safety must never be compromised for profit,” suggests that we read Engdahl’s book, which is a “wake-up call” for all of us.

I suggest we start by reading Lendman’s review of that book, which is a much louder wake-up call.

While it cites patent expirations of blockbusters like Lipitor, Effexor and Plavix for falling earnings — “patient” expirations from Vioxx, Bextra, Premarin/Prempro, Vytorin, Avandia, Chantix, Ketek, Baycol and fen phen have helped.

Forty years of marketing the “diseases” of menopause and aging — Over 35? You Might Be At Risk for Menopause! — ended when hormone replacement therapy was found to cause not prevent the symptoms women feared.

A decade and a half of osteoporosis profits collapsed when bone drugs Fosamax, Boniva and Actonel were found to cause not prevent fractures and jaw bone death in some cases. Nor did it help that Boniva czar Sally Field allegedly broke a bone. Oops.

And speaking of causing not preventing, SSRI/SSNI antidepressants are linked to so many suicides — 660 in newspaper reports alone — the pharma founded and operated American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is staging massive anti-suicide walks in June against an epidemic it largely created.

Even asthma inhalers are causing deaths they were supposed to prevent — nor are people rushing to inoculate their 11-year-old daughters with Gardisil. And let’s face it: the depression-with-pain and pain-with-depression fibromyaglia financial eddy can only last so long.

What’s a pharmaceutical industry in the middle of a recession with nothing in the pipeline but me-too drugs to do?

Say hello to monotherapy and treatment resistant conditions!

Expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t work are now said to not work as monotherapy. You need to add a second or third drug. Conditions that don’t respond to expensive and dangerous drugs (that don’t work) are now said to be treatment resistant — not conditions treated with the wrong drugs or assigned the wrong diagnoses.

“Monotherapy” and “treatment resistance” keep patients on their meds — including ones that fail as “monotherapy”–and insurers paying for them in the absence of any evidence they are working! (see: little light going out in the refrigerator.) They upsell patients who were on one med into increasingly common and perverse drug cocktails with several meds that require more drugs to treat the side effects. Best of all, they shift the emphasis from pharma’s failures to a patient’s “failures”: It’s not our drug that’s not working, it’s your treatment resistant condition! In other words, they’re a stimulus plan.

Of course even before the recession, pharma’s favorite payup was pediatric conditions covered by state disability tax dollars — also known as Claim Approved. No wonder pharma’s got new drug applications before the FDA for pediatric use of antipsychotics Seroquel, Geodon and Zyprexa this June. (Though judging from childhood diabetes cases in the US, the drugs are already in wide, off label use.)

But thanks to the recession, the pediatric diseases that surfaced when pharma debuted pills for them like social anxiety, passive-aggressive, oppositional-defiance and personality disorders now have “treatment resistant” varieties. Think children can’t have “treatment resistant” depression, ADHD, aggression, mania, anxiety and bipolar, obsessive compulsive and mood disorders because they’re too young? You haven’t been to clinicaltrials.gov lately.

And speaking of clinical trials, drugs are also being tested on children with schizophrenia — a condition that was rare in childhood until recently and the recession.

“Awareness of childhood-onset schizophrenia is rapidly increasing, with a more precise definition now available of the clinical picture and early signs, the outcome and the treatment strategies,” writes Gabriele Masi, MD, a Lilly funded doctor, in the journal CNS Drugs, lamenting the “hesitancy on the part of clinicians to make a diagnosis,” of schizophrenia.

Symptoms of childhood schizophrenia — “social deficits” and “delusions . . . related to childhood themes” — might look like symptoms of childhood itself (hello) but Zyprexa in conjunction with “social, scholastic, and familial interventions,” writes Masi — once called “bringing a kid up” — can turn the child around.

Of course Zyprexa has had a checkered past–at least as “monotherapy” — with manufacturer Lilly agreeing in April to pay the state of Georgia $6 million for hiding its diabetes, high blood sugar and excessive weight gain side effects in the latest in a string of damaging settlements. But in March it was granted a new lease on life when the FDA approved it in Lilly’s Zyprexa/Prozac combination drug, Symbyax, as the first treatment for adults with treatment resistant depression.

The April suicide of 7-year-old Gabriel Myers of Margate, FL who the Florida Department of Children & Families says was also prescribed Symbyax drew less attention.

The Act’s passage, after eight years of solid efforts, would set the stage for the screening of all pregnant women for a whole list of mental disorders. The bill has already passed in the US House of Representatives and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate.

The definition section of the Act specifically states that the term “postpartum condition” means “postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis.” There is not one word about perinatal “mood” or “anxiety” disorders in the bill.

The transformation of the postpartum language in the Act to further the formation of a new cottage industry for treating multiple disorders can be traced back to websites such as Postpartum Progress, Postpartum Support International, and a site called PerinatalPro, which leads directly to the treatment center owned by the site’s creator Susan Stone.

On January 26, 2009, Susan cranked out an announcement on the internet with the headline: “U.S. Senator Robert Menendez reintroduces important postpartum depression legislation in Senate today!!”

However, in Stone’s message to the pubic the “postpartum depression” in the headline suddenly transforms into “perinatal mood disorders,” and she warns of a crisis of epidemic proportions in stating:

“The statistics we have on the numbers of women suffering from perinatal mood disorders (which range from 12 – 22% in the research) easily exceed the incidence associated with a public health crisis.”

“And remember,” she says, “these statistics, do NOT include the suffering of women who miscarry, endure stillbirths, give up babies for adoption or terminate pregnancies, all of whom are also susceptible to these devastating disorders and whose circumstances are included in the furthering of research and support being sought.”

In her message, Susan reports: “Today, I had the joy of participating in a conference call with the office of Senator Menendez and the other organizational sponsors of The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act where we received a heads up that U.S. Senator Robert Menendez was hoping to reintroduce the bill today.”

While the Mothers Act refers to helping women with postpartum depression and psychosis only, the bill’s top promoters, obviously kept in the loop by the main sponsor in the Senate, clearly have a larger customer recruitment scheme in the works.

On a Postpartum Progress page with a heading, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!” the website’s creator, Katherine Stone, explains that the word perinatal “refers in this case to the period during and after pregnancy.”

“Among the mental disorders women face during this time, there are two main types: anxiety disorders and mood disorders,” she advises.

“Anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder,” she reports.

“Mood disorders include depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis,” she explains. Under the heading “Postpartum Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” she writes:

All you have to do to be at risk for getting postpartum PTSD is to have the perception of a traumatic childbirth — in other words, even if your doctors and nurses feel that everything went fairly normally, if it was upsetting and scary and unexpected to you that’s what counts.

She concludes with the misleading statement that, “all of these illnesses are completely treatable.”

Katherine’s bio claims she “is a nationally-recognized, award-winning advocate for women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.”

In the Menendez press release on January 26, 2009, there was no mention of “mood” and “anxiety” disorders. If he was not in on this disease mongering plot, he would have told these two broads to knock it off by now.

Drugging for Profit

Although no psychiatric drug has been FDA approved as safe for use by pregnant and nursing mothers, the treatment for all the perinatal mental disorders calls for the new generation of antidepressants, along with atypical antipsychotics and epilepsy drugs, now commonly referred to as “mood stabilizers.”
The atypical antipsychotics are Seroquel by AstraZeneca, Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson, Geodon by Pfizer, Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis’ Clozaril, and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa. The average price for these drugs on DrugStore.com is about $900 for a hundred pills.

The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer’s Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth’s Effexor and Pristiq, and Lilly’s Prozac, Cymbalta, and Symbyax, a pill with Zyprexa and Prozac combined. The price of these drugs, on average, is about $300 for ninety pills at DrugStore.com.

On March 23, 2009, Philip Dawdy reported on the popular website Furious Seasons that, “in a sign of just how bizarre things have gotten in DC, the FDA today approved Symbyax for treatment resistant depression, meaning depression that hasn’t responded to two anti-depressants.”

“So the FDA just approved a drug that’s known to cause diabetes, epic weight gain and suicidality to treat depression,” he said. “This makes so much sense!”

The antipsychotics are now the top money-makers. In overall prescription sales in the US, they led all classes of drugs in 2008, with sales of $14.6 billion, according to IMS Health. Anticonvulsants came in fourth with $11.3 billion in sales, followed by antidepressants at fifth with sales of $9.6 billion.

The Epilepsy Foundation estimates that one million women in the US have epilepsy, but the number of women taking anticonvulsants is reported to be two to three times higher than women with epilepsy. The prices for these drugs can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo’s Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of J&J’s Topamax.

Numerous recent reports have linked the use of drugs such as Depakote, Neurontin, Lamictal and Tegretol with not only suicide but also birth defects, including heart defects, brain damage, and mental retardation.

Big Pharma Funds Mothers Act Supporters

As of April 9, 2009, the groups supporting the Mother’s Act listed on PerinatalPro with Big Pharma funding traceable through their annual reports and the grant reports of Eli Lilly and Pfizer for 2007 and 2008, include the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Psychiatric Association, Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, Children’s Defense Fund, Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, March of Dimes, Mental Health America (MHA), National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), National Association of Social Workers, National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, and the Suicide Prevention Action Network USA.

Pfizer’s 2008 grant report shows the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, received $10,000 for “General Operating Support.” Florida’s Bureau of Maternal and Child Health received funding from Lilly and Pfizer to launch a three-pronged maternal depression awareness initiative consisting of education, screening and advocacy, according to the July, 2005 paper, Improving Maternal and Infant Mental Health: Focus on Maternal Depression, by Ngozi Onunaku.

Collaborating partners also included the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, University of Miami, and Florida’s Department of Mental Health, Onunaku reports. Public awareness efforts reached the Florida State Legislature, who passed a resolution to establish April as women’s depression screening month.

Onunaku listed the Lilly and Pfizer funded Florida project as an example of state and community efforts that may be useful in reaching the goal of increasing maternal depression awareness. In the paper, he reported the following:

Prenatal depression occurs during pregnancy when mothers-to-be experience hormonal and biological changes, stress, and the demands of pregnancy. Approximately 14-25% of pregnant women have enough depressive symptoms to meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis.

The use of medication to treat maternal depression is controversial; there is concern about mothers taking medication during pregnancy and after delivery, especially while breastfeeding. Research suggests that infant development is not adversely affected by certain kinds of medication.

There is equal consideration regarding the possible risks posed to a child whose mother is severely depressed and needs medication but remains untreated.

In 2008, Lilly gave the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists $16,000, and a $2,000 donation was made in the third quarter of 2007.

Lilly gave the American Psychiatric Association grants worth more than $600,000 in both the first and second quarters of 2008. In 2007, the group received over $400,000 from Lilly. The drug maker gave roughly $450,000 more to the American Psychiatric Foundation for the APA fellowship program. Pfizer donated more than $700,000 to the “non-profit” APA in 2008.

The National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare is described as “a non-profit association representing 1,300 mental health and addictions treatment and rehabilitation organizations,” on its website. This gang received $200,000 from Lilly in the first quarter of 2008, and another $215,000 in the fourth quarter.

Mother’s Act supporter, Suicide Prevention Action Network USA, has merged with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, according to a November 6, 2008 press release announcement.

A year earlier, Emory University reported that Charles Nemeroff had been elected president of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and would begin serving his three-year tenure in January 2008.

Emory’s press release noted that Nemeroff had served on the AFSP’s national board of directors since 1999 and had “been a member of the Foundation’s Scientific Council for more than 10 years and was named chair of the Council in 2007.”

In about the same time frame between 2000 and 2007, Senator Charles Grassley’s Senate Finance Committee investigation found that Nemeroff had earned more than $2.8 million from drug companies, but failed to disclose at least $1.2 million to Emory.

On November 3, 2008, Dr Bernard Caroll summed up Nemeroff’s fall from grace on the Healthcare Renewal website as follows:

The fallout to date includes his severance from several NIH-funded projects at Emory University School of Medicine, a freeze of NIH funding for a major center grant, and his stepping down from Emory’s chair of psychiatry while an internal investigation proceeds.”

Dr. Nemeroff’s credibility is under a cloud, to say the least, and his influence is rapidly waning. . . . In the hardnosed, commercial world of Continuing Medical Education, for instance, the signs are that Dr. Nemeroff is toast. Whereas he once coordinated multi-city traveling CME road shows and a parade of spots on CME websites like Medscape, his profile now is suffering. Go to this Medscape website, for instance. You will find that his current Expert Viewpoint spots are missing, replaced by the message, “This article is temporarily unavailable.

Nemeroff’s Bio on the Emory Website on December 22, 2008 listed his Clinical Interests as: “Depression and antipsychotic pharmacological therapy, social phobias, fetal effects of pre- and post-natal drug therapy, depression, mood disorders, antipsychotic therapy.”

Lilly’s 2008 grant report shows the Suicide Prevention Action Network USA received one $10,000 grant and another $70,000 grant. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention also received three grants worth $78,000.

Lilly’s 2007 report shows the Action Network received $10,000 in one quarter and $70,000 in another. The Foundation got $25,000 in 2007. The 2004 spring issue of USA’s Network News reports that: “Network News is funded by a grant from the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation.”

The Summer 2005 Network News noted that “Donations Sustain SPAN USA.”

The donor list shows Pfizer gave over $10,000. The group received more than $1,000 from Bristol-Meyers, Janssen, and Novartis. Forest Pharmaceuticals gave over $500.

The 2006 Spring Network News announced the “Friend for Life” sponsors. Forest and the industry’s trade group, PhRMA donated over $15,000. Pfizer gave between $10,000 and $14,999. Solvay was listed as giving between $6,000 and $9,999 and companies that gave between $2,000 and $5,999 were AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers. J&J, Lilly and Novartis each donated between $500 and $1,999.

As expected, the two most notorious front groups, NAMI and MHA, received the most money from psychiatric drug makers. NAMI’s annual reports list about every drug company on the planet as a corporate partner without specifying how much each donated. But the grant reports of Lilly and Pfizer for 2007 and 2008 show NAMI groups received millions of dollars from those two drug makers alone.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Pfizer gave NAMI a grant of $132,000 to fund a campaign that best describes the drug maker’s goal called the “Campaign for the Mind of America.” In the third quarter, Pfizer doled out another $225,000 to fund the same campaign.

Lilly is also funding the Campaign for the Mind, with grants of $450,000 in both 2007 and 2008. Lilly also provides extra funding to NAMI groups all over the country for the “Walk for the Mind of America.” In 2007, walking money totaled $17,000 in the first quarter, $11,500 in the second, and $13,000 for the third and fourth combined. In 2008, Lilly’s “Walk for the Mind” quarterly totals were $11,500, $24,000, $12,500 and $2,000.

In 2007, NAMI presented a $50,000 “Mind of America Scientific Research Award” to Dr A John Rush. He also landed on the Grassley hit list last fall for not disclosing drug company money to the University of Texas.

On April 6, 2009, Senator Grassley sent a letter to NAMI asking for the disclosure of all funding from drug makers and industry created foundations over the past few years.

Mental Health America groups also received millions of dollars from Pfizer and Lilly alone in 2007 and 2008. This group runs a “Campaign for America’s Mental Health” and received grants of $200,000 and $300,000 in 2008 from Pfizer to fund it. Lilly gave $300,000 to fund this Campaign in 2007.

MHA’s 2006 annual report shows the group received over $1 million each from Lilly, Bristol-Myers, and Wyeth. Janssen and Pfizer gave between $500,000 and $1,000,000, and AstraZeneca and Forest donated between $100,000 and $499,000. Glaxo gave between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2006.

The most troubling donation to this Mothers Act supporter is a $20,000 Pfizer grant to a Georgia group to fund: Project Healthy Moms: Education for Prevention/Treatment for Perinatal Depression Disorders, which apparently ended up, at least in part, in the pocketbook of Katherine Stone.

The Georgia group’s June 8, 2008 e-news said the grant was for: “Project Healthy Moms: What You Need To Know About Perinatal Mood Disorders.”

The $20,000 funded 1-hour speaking events with Katherine, “aimed at educating practitioners and the general public throughout Georgia about prevention of and treatment for such illnesses as ante partum depression, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety/OCD and postpartum psychosis,” the newsletter said.

Katherine was described as a “former postpartum OCD sufferer and author of Postpartum Progress, the most widely-read blog in the United States on postpartum mood disorders.”

E-news said attendees would learn: “One size does NOT fit all: Why postpartum depression is just part of a spectrum of mood disorders women may experience & what to look for.”

The newsletter only listed 5 scheduled events but told readers to contact Katherine directly by email or phone to schedule more. E-news did acknowledge that: “This special hour of learning is made possible by a grant from Pfizer,” but listed no amount.

The leaders of these “non-profits” are also making out like bandits. In 2006, NAMI’s top dog, Michael Fitzpatrick, had a salary of $212,281, and $10,090 in employee benefit contributions and deferred compensation plans, for a 35-hour work week.

MHA’s 2002 tax returns show the CEO and President, Michael Faenza, received compensation of $306,727, and another $35,275 in contributions to employee benefit plans and deferred compensation that year, for a 35 hour work week.

The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance received $37,510 from Lilly in 2007 and $20,000 in 2008. This group provides live links to form letters that can be filled in and sent to Congress members asking them to vote for the Mother’s Act. The two Stone gals provide links to the Mothers Act alerts put out by the Alliance on their websites.

The group’s 2007 Annual Report shows this non-profit received between $150,000 and $499,000 from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Wyeth. Abbott, Cyberonics, Lilly, Forest, Glaxo, Organon, and Otsuka American Pharmaceuticals gave between $10,000 and $149,999.

The report also notes that a “First-ever DBSA Hope Award” for lifetime achievement was presented to Frederick Goodwin. Back in August 2002, the speakers at the annual conference of the Alliance included three stars from the Grassley hit list, Goodwin, Nemeroff and Joseph Beiderman.

The front groups team up with a “non-profit” called “Screening for Mental Health,” to carry out mental illness screening days all over the country every year. Their websites also provide live links to internet screening programs set up by this firm.

Up to 2008, the SMH had received close to $5 million from drug companies. Lilly gave the firm $124,000 in 2007 and $100,000 in 2008.

Finally, the Children’s Defense Fund received a grant for $125,000 in 2003 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The March of Dimes got $6,500 from Pfizer in 2008, and the National Association of Social Workers also received $7,500 from Pfizer.

Amy Philo, a young Texas mother who survived what can only be described as a postpartum ambush by the psycho-pharmaceutical cartel, is at the forefront of the “Unite for Life” coalition fighting against the Mothers Act. As of April 25, 2009, the Unite coalition had thirty-five organizations signed on as opposed to the legislation. Needless to say, none of them were listed in the grant reports of Lilly or Pfizer.

Amy was screened and drugged because she got extremely concerned about her baby and had a panic attack after watching him nearly choke to death. “I lived through forced hospitalization, drugging, and four months of being homicidal, suicidal, and psychotic because of Zoloft,” she recounts on her website.

“No mother should have to live through what I have,” she states.

Over a recent three to four year period, Amy found there were 1,031 documented deaths of babies caused by psychiatric drug exposure reported to the FDA’s MedWatch system.

Amy recently learned that the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives has withdrawn their support from the Mothers Act. However, she reports a new addition to the list of supporters is the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition. A quick check of their website found the group’s corporate sponsors include Wyeth, Glaxo, J&J, Merck, and Sanofi Pasteur.

* This article was sponsored by the Pogust, Braslow & Millrood law firm in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania

Forget it. They’re baaack! Their greed and power are revving up big time to bring Washington and you the taxpayer, you the parent, you the consumer, you the worker, to your knees. Here is a sample of the appalling dynamics of corporate greed and continuing over-reach each day in your nation’s capital.

1. Just when people thought the taxpayer-subsidized corporate student loan racket was ended by the Democrats, Sallie Mae, its cohorts and lobbyists, like Jamie S. Gorelick of FannieMae notoriety, are descending on Congress. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that replacing these subsidized loans with direct Department of Education lending will save $94 billion over the next ten years.

It is long overdue to end this gouging, college payola giving, obscenely overcompensated industry, and give students an efficient and reasonable lending system. Still, Sallie Mae, Citigroup, Bank of America and others are swarming over Congress to retain a big piece of the action. “Why do we even need private lenders?” correctly asks Congressman Timothy H. Bishop, a former provost of Southampton College.

2. ABC News reports that banks are hiking already high credit card rates and other bank-related fees: “The Banks have been given billions of dollars of tax money and only lend it out if customers are willing to pay extortion rights,” said Tony Cesnik, a Concord, California, resident. Cesnik adds: “The banks need a legal spanking. They are acting like spoiled brats!” Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel agrees: “We’re asking taxpayers to pay twice.”

3. The big oil and gas companies are saturating the airwaves with ads warning about the Obama Administration’s alleged desire to tax them $400 billion. This will cost jobs and reduce the discovery of more oil and gas, they say. Where is this $400 billion figure from? Obama’s ambition is not much beyond repealing the tax breaks George W. Bush gave his oily friends for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico when oil was selling at less than $40 per barrel. Some of the oil industry’s own spokespersons admitted last year that their argument doesn’t hold water any more with such high oil prices and profits since then.

So what are the big oil corporations like Exxon doing with their excess profits that totaled a record $45 billion just for Exxon last year? They’re not even drilling on two-thirds of the acreage they have rights to explore. Instead Exxon is spending $35 billion to buy back its stock and hold in cash. When the next oil shock comes, Exxon will demand more tax breaks and other dispensations to fund its drilling. We’ve seen that game played out before at the gas pump.

4. Now comes Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh to report a private meeting recently between six senators and Obama in the White House where the president heard complaints that his proposed regulatory reforms were too weak and were being devised by his appointed officials who were part of the problem in Wall Street. Well, are you surprised that a new powerful lobby created by the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs is gearing up to stop adequate regulation of “over the counter” derivatives, to keep these transactions secret, and to continue to permit what Hirsh called the “systemic risk that led to the crash.” This brazen move by the incorrigible banks is underway after they received huge bailout money from Washington. Beware they may yet demand and receive another big bundle.

5. With workers losing millions of jobs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and virtually the entire business juggernaut are amassing tens of millions of dollars to stop the union-facilitating “card-check” legislation and any effort to bring the federal minimum wage up to what is was back in 1968, no less, adjusted for inflation. It is now about three dollars short of that modest goal for hard-pressed laborers, many without health insurance.

6. And oh, how these company bosses are fighting to keep their big bonuses going as a reward for tanking many of their own companies. Call it hubris, arrogance, disdain for common decencies of the American people, it all reflects too much corporate power over our lives-a judgment over 75 percent of Americans share.

All this lobbying of Congress and the White House year after year pays off. A study by three Kansas University professors found that a single tax break in 2004 earned drug, manufacturing, and other companies $220 for every dollar they spent in their cash register politicking. Presently, Lockheed Martin is spending millions of our taxpayer dollars to oppose Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and many other defense experts who want to finally shut down the price-skyrocketing F-22 fighter extravaganza designed for combat in the Soviet Union-era.

So, are you more upset than when you started reading this column? Feel frustrated and powerless? With your friends, ask your Senators and Congressperson during their frequent recesses for a three-hour public accountability session. If you can assemble 300 or more residents, after you rev up your community, you’re likely to have your elected representatives come to an auditorium where you live and work. If they think 500 people will show up, it is even more likely. Especially if you are organized and tell them this is just the beginning. Just the beginning!

Without the rumble from the people back home, a majority of the 535 members of Congress will continue to kowtow to about 1500 corporations and you’ll pay the price again and again. So, rumble, rumble, rumble!

The Hunter Valley was an extraordinary landscape of mines and vines: of pyramids of coal and slag, beyond which lay long green fingers of ripening grapes. My father left school at 14 and while he waited a year to go down the pit he went to work at Lindemans vineyard, now world famous, where he would bet young Ebenezer Mitchell he could beat him at tying down four acres of vines in a single day.

This is not to suggest that a bottle of “claret”, as all Australian red wine was then called, stood on the family table as I grew up. Beer in long-necked bottles was the national drink, and only the Belgians, I once read, drank more per head: a remarkable feat when you consider that Australians consumed most of theirs in the hour, or less, before the pubs closed at six o’clock.

I drank my first glass of red wine at La Veneziana restaurant in Sydney, then renowned for its clientele of journos, musos, refos (foreigners), unrequited artistes and women. The wine came with a sticking plaster as a label on which was written, in ball point, “red”. It was not highly regarded by those who said they knew about such things, but it launched me on a love affair with the red wine of my country that continued long after I sailed away. In my early days in London, I would yearn for the “sweaty saddle” of a great Coonawarra red from South Australia; and on my trips home, my father would greet me with a Draytons cabernet he had been keeping. He had grown up with the Drayton family in the Hunter. “It’s better than honest,” he would understate its fineness as we downed it.

Australia went on to conquer the world’s biggest wine markets, toppling even the French in Britain and the United States. Last year, Australia exported 62 percent of its wine. The average for France is 40 percent. Foster’s, the beer goliath, is now the world’s second biggest wine producer. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the other British supermarket chains sell labels like Hardys and Rosemount for less than you can buy them in Australia. Along with under-cutting and marketing, the whispered secret is high alcohol. In recent years, the alcohol content of Australian reds has leapt two and even three percent. Australian Shiraz (the Syrah grape) has soared above 15 percent. Pour this into a large glass, as many restaurants do, and you are soon on your ear. The deceitful euphemism is “full-bodied.” In his astute New Statesman column (“Grapes of Wrath,” 13 November 2008), Roger Scruton noted that, “to force Syrah up to an alcoholic content of 14 percent or more, tricking it into early maturation, so as to put the result on the market with all its liquorice flavours unsubdued, puffing out its dragon breath like an old lecher leaning sideways to put a hairy hand on your knee, is to slander a grape that, properly treated, is the most slow and civilized of seducers.”

So this is a lament for civilized seducers. It is also a tale of how we allow ourselves to be mistreated with industrial versions of good things, like wine and food. The world’s fastest bottling plant is run by Casella Wines in New South Wales. Casella Wines invented a brand called Yellow Tail, which has the tail of a kangaroo on the label. It is “sunshine in a bottle.” Inexplicably promoted by the grand American wine critic Robert Parker, this industrial plonk swept the US market. Yellow Tail is produced in Australia’s endangered food bowl, guzzling precious irrigated water from the basin of the Murray and Darling rivers, both of which are dying as global warming creates environmental havoc in the earth’s driest continent. The recent bush fires demonstrated this savagely.

The shortage of water is so serious that the nation’s basic food supply is threatened. Homegrown fruit such as oranges have vanished from many shops. The commercial success of Yellow tail and other vapid factory wines has seen off not only the delicious flavors and distinct variety of so much Australian red wine, but is a striking illustration of the greed and destructiveness of “global” cash cropping: a sacred ideology until Wall Street crashed. We need a Felicity Lawrence to expose cleverly-branded, essentially lousy wine as she has exposed cleverly-branded, essentially lousy food.

The good news is that people are beginning to drink less of the stuff. According to the Financial Times, the “Yellow Tail Effect” is one of the factors causing bulk Australian wine exports to Britain and the US to drop by as much as 23 percent last year. Bruce March, chief winemaker of a winery north of Canberra, says that following the success of “sunshine in a bottle” in Britain, he was advised by marketing people to sell into China at the lowest possible price and to think about quality later. (He declined). “They told us,” he said, “don’t worry, the Chinese don’t know what they’re drinking.”

Goldman Sachs is attempting to shut down a dissident blogger who is extremely critical of the investment bank, its board members and its practices. The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.

Unsurprisingly for a man who has conjoined the bank’s name with the Number of the Beast — although he jokingly points out that 666 was also the S&P500’s bear-market bottom — Mr. Morgan is unlikely to go down without a fight. He claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website — and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank.

On a special section of his blog entitled “Goldman Sachs vs Mike Morgan” he predicts that the fight will probably end up in court.

“It’s just another example of how a bully like Goldman Sachs tries to throw their weight around,” he writes.

Morgan agreed to answer a few questions about Goldman Sachs, the TARP and the ongoing financial crisis.

Mike Whitney: Is Goldman Sachs trying to shut down your web site?

Mike Morgan: Yes

MW: Why?

Morgan: The legal answer to that would be . . . you need to ask them the question. I would think it is because we are exposing the truth . . . and the truth hurts.

MW: Have you libeled them or published privileged information?

Mike Morgan: No.

MW: Could you tell us something about yourself so that readers can trust your criticism of G-Sax?

Morgan: I am 53 years old and believe all of the answers for how we should live are in the Bible . . . . God gave David the choice of paying the consequences at the hands of David’s enemies or at the hand of God. David chose God’s consequences. Hank Paulson and the thousands of wicked men like him deserve the wrath of the millions of lives they have destroyed. We must go after the crooks and make them pay the consequences for their greed and the total disregard for anyone other than themselves. We need to start with Hank Paulson, who as CEO of Goldman Sachs, was more responsible than any 10 men combined, for the violent Depression we are about to enter.

MW: Why was G-Sax given $10 billion out of the TARP funds before federal regulators checked their books to see if they were solvent?

Morgan: Because King Henry (Henry Paulson) said so. As former CEO of Goldman Sachs, the last thing he wanted to see was a collapse of Goldman Sachs. And as Treasury Secretary with a big stick, he could do whatever he pleased . . . and he did.

MW: It was widely believed that most of the five biggest investment banks were leveraged 30-to-1. If that’s the case, then G-Sax probably would not have survived the downturn in the market without government assistance. Do you agree with this analysis?

Morgan: I agree.

MW: After Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. defaulted, Merrill Lynch quickly sold out to Bank of America.

Morgan: Merrill was being run by John Thain, the former Goldman Sachs executive that helped Hank Paulson force out Jon Corzine who at the time was c-CEO with Paulson.

MW: That left Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the next likely candidates to be taken down by short sellers.

Morgan: Short sellers are not the issue. If short sellers drive down a stock below market value, then it becomes an opportunity for anyone that thinks the stock is a buy to bury the shorts.

MW: This is when SEC chief Christopher Cox — who had never intervened in the market prior to this — put emergency rules in place to stop the short selling of financial institutions. What was Cox’s action all about?

Morgan: The SEC is toothless and I still don’t know why Cox is not in jail. He not only looked the other way on the Madoff issue, but since he left, the SEC has gone after more than a dozen scams. Are you going to tell me everything was fine three months ago on Chrissy Cox’s watch? No, but I can tell you there is much more to this story….As for the SEC and short sellers, that was King Henry. Period. Full Stop.

MW: Was this mainly an attempt by Washington elites to pull G-Sax’s bacon out of the fire?

Morgan: Goldman Sachs and other companies affiliated with Goldman Sachs. Kinda like the old MCI Friends and Family Program.

MW: Recently it was revealed that G-Sax had been paid more than $12 billion for credit default swaps (CDS) it held with insurance giant AIG. Financial institutions that buy these CDS know that they are accepting additional risk because they are unregulated and outside government oversight. That said, Treasury’s payoff to G-Sax on these CDS was equivalent to paying off a gambler’s losses at the racetrack. Why was G-Sax compensated for their CDS? Why was it kept secret; and who authorized it?

Morgan: King Henry and his loyal lieutenant Neil Kashkari. Most people don’t realize, Neil Kashkari was King Henry’s lieutenant at Goldman Sachs. Neil is 35 years old with little experience other than being a very private executive assistant to King Henry when he was CEO of Goldman. Let’s ask ourselves . . . why exactly is Kashkari still on the job? Easy answer . . . because our President and Chris Dodd were both bought with Goldman Sachs’ money. These two men have received more money from Wall Street than any politician in the history of the United States. By the way, Obama was only around for two years, while Dodd was there for more than a decade. Obama received more money from Wall Street in two years than Dodd did in a decade.

MW: What is the nature of the relationship between G-Sax and the political establishment in Washington?

Morgan: If I answered that question I would need to increase the thickness of my Kevlar body suit.

MW: Why is Treasury a revolving door for investment bankers that are tied to Wall Street?

Morgan: Because the American public allows it. Benjamin Franklin said . . . Well done is better than well said. Too many Americans gripe and moan, but when it comes time to doing anything . . . they sit back on the couch with a bag of chips and the TV. We think it is cute to use the TV to amuse our toddlers. Do you think it is any different for 75 per cent of the American public?

MW: Are special interest groups dictating policy in the Obama White House?

Morgan: I can’t count that high. But if you just look at Wall Street and where the money came from, you will realize that Barack Hussein Obama is nothing more than a puppet of Wall Street.

MW: In an article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, had this to say:

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States… recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression we’re running out of time.”

Do you agree with Johnson that banks have a stranglehold on the political process and that “we are running out of time”? If so, how do we go about removing these people from office and replacing them with people who will operate in the public’s interest?

Morgan: First, I think guys like Simon Johnson are the guys that should be running the show. Simon along with William Black, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Paul. There are more, but if we had that trio at the helm, we’d be moving to a world of light, instead of a world of deep, violent darkness.

As to your question about how to remove these people from office, I believe it will be very violent . . . and very well deserved. We are two Biblical generations removed from the Great Depression of 1929. In 1969 we had race riots. We lost a true leader when we lost Martin Luther King, and the country paid the consequences. Here we are 40 years later . . . a Biblical generation, as we enter what I believe will be a period of violence beginning this summer. When you can’t feed your kids, and the folks at Goldman Sachs are sitting around the pool sipping cocktails and munching on snacks . . . that’s when those without go after those with.

The problem now is very simply . . . companies like Goldman Sachs created a financial system that was double stacked. One, they skimmed trillions of dollars out of our pension fund and other fiduciary money under their management. Two, like drug dealers they provided very creative financing to hundreds of millions of people around the world . . . which those folks can no longer afford to pay back. But the boys and girls and Goldman Sachs have already walked off with the money, leaving the people that bought the debt with little more than a piece of paper . . . and those that owe the debt, with the inability to ever pay it back.

MW: Will you fight Goldman in court?

Morgan: Yes. I’m prepared to fight them with several attorneys and law professors that are anxious to take this one on. I hope they do press the issue in court, but I kinda doubt it.

Women fought for years to gain acceptance of the fact that many female health problems were real and not symptoms of hypochondria. The psycho-pharmaceutical cartel’s profit-driven invention of an epidemic of pregnancy-related mental disorders will wipe out a century of work toward that acceptance.

Sadly, the end result of this latest marketing scheme will be that the relatively few women who truly do suffer from postpartum depression will not be taken seriously.

The Mother’s Act legislation has already passed in the US House of Representatives. A majority vote in the Senate would represent a major coup for a multi-billion dollar industry.

“Like many of the acts of Congress, the real beneficiary will not be the mothers and their children but the “mental health” workers who will be handsomely paid and the drug companies that are behind this legislation,” says Steve Hayes, the director of he Novus Medical Detox Center, in the center’s July 31, 2008 newsletter.

“The drug store chains will expand more because more people will be hooked on these dangerous drugs,” he points out.

“Doctor’s offices will be more crowded because we know that these dangerous drugs often lead to serious health side effects that will require medical treatment,” he writes.

The advocacy groups battling against passage of the Mother’s Act are nearly equal in number to the Act’s supporters, and include Unite for Life, AbleChild, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology; Alliance for Human Research Protection; International Coalition For Drug Awareness; Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, Mindfreedom International, and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

Same Old Song and Dance

The Mother’s Act technique has been used again and again in this country. A new sub-group of people is identified as not receiving enough treatment for mental disorders and the drug makers funnel money to front groups to fund the disease marketing campaign and set up screening programs.

The internet is now flooded with reports about the rise in pregnancy related disorders and the places to find treatment. Websites with names like “Postpartum Progress” and “PerinatalPro,” provide links to programs that claim women need screening for postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and eating disorders.

However, nowhere to be found, are reports about the sub-groups targeted in the past and all the depressed and anxious patients who became mentally healthy as a result of being screened and treated.

Dr David Cohen, a professor of Social Work at Florida International University and co-author with Dr Peter Breggin of the book, Your Drug May Be Your Problem, gave a keynote address titled, “Needed: Critical Thinking About Psychiatric Medications,” at the International Conference on Social Work in Health and Mental Health, in Quebec City, Canada in May 2004, and noted the following:

For the past 50 years, physicians in the West have been prescribing psychotropic drugs systematically to hundreds of millions of people to alter undesirable and disruptive emotions and behavior.”

“For the treatment of every single psychological affliction in men and women, in all ethnic groups, from the toddler to the aged, taking psychotropic drugs is now the cornerstone remedy, all other efforts secondary.”

“Despite the reliance on psychopharmaceuticals, however, not even modest improvements in the incidence, prevalence, relapse rate, duration, or long-term outcome of any condition routinely treated today with psychotropics, such as depression and schizophrenia, can be discerned.

Childbearing Years Represent Huge Market

Childbearing years cover women from roughly sixteen to fifty and the Mother’s Act proves the drug makers will go to any lengths to hold onto this market.

“The labels for antidepressants warn of the increased risk of SSRI-induced suicidality in youth and young adults, the women most likely to become pregnant,” Dr Breggin, author of the new book, Medication Madness, points out. “So the drugs not only threaten to cause the death of the mother through suicide but the death of the child through lethal birth defects as well,” he advises.

“The exposed fetus is at risk for a variety of potentially serious disorders, from cardiovascular anomalies to withdrawal symptoms at birth,” Dr Breggin warns.

“If pregnant women feel anxious or sad,” he says, “they should seek counseling or family therapy with the child’s father involved, along with other sources of emotional support.”

In February, with little to no fanfare, the FDA said it was once again evaluating the risk of birth defects of SSRI and SNRI antidepressants due to the number of adverse event reports.

Pregnant women and nursing mothers are rarely told that antidepressants take anywhere from three to six weeks to work, if they work at all. “We know that the natural history of depression means that many patients will improve within weeks whether treated or not,” says Dr David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac.

“The overwhelming majority of women who are prescribed antidepressants are at little or no risk for suicide or other adverse outcomes from their nervous state,” he points out

“Treatment runs the risk of stigmatizing the person,” he says, “as well as giving them problems that they didn’t have to being with.”

“Only one in ten women will likely have a true response to an antidepressant even if they are depressed, so nine women will be subject to the risks for the one who might benefit,” he states.

According to Jonathan Leo, an Associate Professor at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, whose website, Chemical Imbalance is focused on debunking the “chemical imbalance” in the brain myth, the public health argument goes something like this:

“Helping one out of every ten does not sound very good but if you give the medications to 10 million people then you are helping one million.”

“This may be of little consolation to the nine million people exposed to potential side-effects,” he points out.

In December 2008, the FDA announced that anticonvulsants, widely prescribed as “mood” stabilizers, would now carry a warning about an increased risk of suicidality. They are also known to cause serious birth defects.

New Best Sellers — Atypical Antipsychotics

For a decade and a half, the new antidepressants were not only the best selling psychiatric drugs in the US, they became the top selling class of medications.

However, in 2008, antipsychotic revenues, at more than $14 billion, topped all other classes of drugs in the US, surpassing even cholesterol medications. The rest of the world apparently has not gone mad because the US accounted for over $3 billion of the close to $4.5 billion of worldwide sales of Seroquel, the fifth top selling drug in the US last year.

Anticonvulsants were the fourth class of drugs in terms of revenue, with over $11 billion in sales. Antidepressants held the fifth position, earning their makers more than $9.5 billion in 2008.

Like the SSRIs before them, the atypical antipsychotics are now prescribed off-label for everything from mild depression to anxiety to sleep problems to PTSD and ADHD, and for one reason. They are the biggest money-makers. The prices at a middle dose as of April 2009 on DrugStore.com were: Abilify 90 tablets $1230, Geodon 100 capsules $787, Invega 100 tablets $1168, Risperdal 90 tablets $716, Seroquel 100 tablets $839, and Zyprexa 90 tablets $1195.

The drugs were originally approved only to treat schizophrenia and later the manic episodes in patients with bipolar disorder. The National Institute of Health estimates that schizophrenia effects 2.4 million adults in any given year and 5.6 million adults have bipolar disorder.

“The story’s pretty clear, and pretty embarrassing for the profession of psychiatry, which has allowed itself to be led by marketing,” Dr Robert Rosenheck, a psychiatrist at Yale who has studied the expanded use and effectiveness of the atypical antipsychotics, told the LA Times on April 13, 2009.

“We know now what these companies’ strategies are: The number of people with schizophrenia is limited, so the road to profitability goes through soccer moms. They need to market these drugs to ordinary people who have dissatisfactions in life,” he said.

Antipsychotics come with serious side effects, some of them lethal. “The atypicals can cause a severe metabolic syndrome consisting of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems,” according to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania psychiatrist, Dr Stefan Kruszewski.

Diabetes is a major cause of vascular disease and the number one cause of adult blindness, end-stage kidney disease and non-traumatic amputations, according to a 2006 report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.

“The atypicals have some of the same neurological side effects as SSRIs,” Dr Kruszewski says. “They also cause tardive dyskinesia, an often irreversible movement disorder.”

“Tardive dyskinesia looks so “strange” or “bizarre,” that it is often mistaken for a mental illness rather than a neurological disorder,” Dr Breggin reports.

“One variety,” he explains, “involves painful spasms of muscles that can literally torture the victim, and another involves an agonizing inner agitation that drives people to move their arms or legs, or to pace.”

“In some cases, the severe pain of tardive dyskinesia causes patients to become exhausted and ultimately disabled,” he reports.

“Tardive dyskinesia occurs at a cumulative rate of 4-7% per year in otherwise healthy patients treated with antipsychotics,” Dr Breggin says. “After taking the drugs for only a few years, 20% or more will be afflicted and older patient have an even higher risk.”

Helpless Children Harmed

There is no way to predict the adverse effects on the organs and bodies of children who receive psychiatric drugs filtered through pregnant and nursing mothers.

A study in the February 2004 journal Pediatrics reported abnormal sleep patterns, heart rhythms, and levels of alertness in babies exposed to SSRIs in the womb. The lead author, Dr. Philip Zeskind, told the Sunday Telegraph: “What we’ve found is that SSRIs disrupt the neurological systems of children, and that this is more than just a possibility, and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of babies being exposed to these drugs during pregnancy.”

“These babies are bathed in serotonin during a key period of their development and we really don’t know what it’s doing to them or what the long-term effects might be,” he warned.

A year and a half later, Christine K sat in a neonatal intensive care unit and watched and waited as her baby lie in an incubator with tubes and needles stuck all over his body for four days.

After a single bout of psychosis following a traumatic event in her life, a psychiatrist labeled Christine schizophrenic and kept her on Paxil, Risperdal and Depakote for five years. When she became pregnant, the shrink told her the drugs were safe for the fetus. In fact, she insisted that Christine keep taking them even when she asked to go off the concoction six months into her pregnancy after reading that Paxil could harm her baby.

After looking up more information on the internet, Christine decided to wean herself off the drugs in her seventh month against doctors’ advice. However, when she tried to explain that she quit taking the medications long before the infant was born, Christine was informed that he would still have to remain in intensive care due to the fact that he had been exposed to the drugs in the womb early on.

For the first two years of life, the baby would not sleep for any length of time — waking up every two or three hours. For the first three months, his whole body would jump at the least little sound even when he was asleep. He could not suck hard enough to nurse and resisted bottles. For the first year, he required hours of feeding attempts each day to make sure he received enough formula.

He was three last October and still has a strong aversion to eating — “including cake, cookies and all the things kids will normally eat even if nothing else,” his mother says.

“He was well over 2-years-old before he started sleeping through the night,” she reports.

In addition to the extra hospital costs for intensive care, “in the first three years of his life, this child has needed more medical care and doctor’s appointments than my other three children combined,” Christine reports.

In this case, the problems were nondescript. Doctors do not know enough about the effects of psychiatric drugs on the developing fetus to know if or how to treat them. “All I can do is watch and wait and hope they resolve on their own,” she says.

Christine is by no means a supporter of the Mother’s Act. She was scared and worried for a year after her son came home from the hospital but not from postpartum depression, she says. “It was mostly guilt and fear over what the drugs may have done to my baby.”

Drugged into Madness

The drugging cycle with women often starts with a loose diagnosis of postpartum depression. “My daughter was one of those poor souls prescribed an antidepressant for a “possible” case of mild postpartum depression with no warning about the adverse effects of the drug,” says Marcia Christensen of Australia.

“This caused a devastating cascade of events with further prescribing of multiple classes of antidepressants, atypical antipsychotics, Lithium and electro-convulsive therapy,” Marcia recalls.

“She made several attempts on her own life, developed type I diabetes and had her liberty denied over a 3 year period,” Marcia recounts.

Her daughter, Rebekah Beddoe, has documented the family’s ordeal in the book Dying for a Cure, in which she describes her decline from an ambitious, successful career women to a chronic mental patient as a result of being diagnosed with postpartum depression.

After a kick-off with Zoloft, Rebekah was on six different drugs within two years, diagnosed with a myriad of different disorders and feeling like a psychiatric hospital might be her permanent home. Electric shock treatment came in the midst of numerous suicide attempts.

She credits a BBC documentary on SSRIs with saving her life because she immediately recognized that the bizarre behaviors began shortly after she took the first drug. Rebecca decided they had to go and gradually weaned off each medication one by one. It took her 9 months to get off the antidepressant because the withdrawal problems were so severe.

Rebecca and Christine are not rare cases. Mixtures of antipsychotics, antidepressants and anticonvulsants, now used as “mood” stabilizers, are regularly prescribed for the all “anxiety” and “mood” disorders sought to be marketed via the Mother’s Act. Drug cocktails represent dollar signs. A woman like Christine, taking Depakote, Paxil and Risperdal, can easily ring up over $15,000 a year for the drug makers alone in the US.

The doctors make out like bandits as well. “Psychiatry has increasingly replaced psychotherapy with something called “medication management,” which largely consists of symptom assessment and prescription updates,” Dr. Bruce Levine, author of, “Surviving American’s Depression Epidemic,” reports in the August 13, 2008 Huffington Post.

“Medication management typically takes ten or fifteen minutes and is scheduled every two to three months,” he explains.

While psychiatrists bill about half as much as they do for a psychotherapy hour, they can conduct a minimum of four sessions for every one psychotherapy session, he says.

Many psychiatrists do five- or ten-minute sessions, so they can complete five or six in the same hour that it would take to do a psychotherapy therapy session, including preparation and note writing, Dr Levine reports.

“The bottom line,” he says, “is that psychiatrists who offer only medication management routinely make nearly triple the income as do psychiatrists who provide mostly psychotherapy.”

* Article sponsored by the Houston law firm of Vickery, Waldner & Mallia

For excruciating minutes the sow, hanging by a logging chain from a front loader, suffocates and convulses while authority figures look on. Photos even show a farmhand hugging the animal while she dies to mock an upset employee.

And when the perpetrators are brought to court and the video introduced as evidence? Not guilty! (See: Rodney King; Simi Valley trial.)

Even though the HBO documentary that grew out of the 2006 incidents, Death on a Factory Farm broadcast in March, feels like a victory — it documents the agony of pigs on Ken Wiles’ 6,000 sow farrowing operation and the trial that found him not guilty of cruelty — nothing viewers see is illegal or considered cruel.

Worse, Wiles, and his son Joe, still have their jobs, their pigs and their macabre way of putting pork on America’s dinner table.

Ken Wiles was a stickler for manure management says “Pete,” the Humane Farming Association (HFA) investigator/employee who shot the HBO video. Farm hands had to pressure wash every inch of manure from farrowing crates — sometimes using knives — while Wiles watched and corrected them.

He just wasn’t a stickler about animal care.

“There were two different ‘vaccines’ with different names and different colored labels we were supposed to give the pigs to prevent diseases,” says Pete in an exclusive interview. “I asked when we should be giving one versus the other and Wiles said it didn’t matter as long as the animals got one.”

Unfortunately “one” was nothing but sterile diluent.

Call it “triage” on an unmanageable 6,000-sow farm or the banality of factory farming says Pete but amid the rows of breeding sows — who bit and resisted their piglets removal — were pigs Wiles let starve to death.

“I’d watch them get thinner every day until they died,” says Pete noting that Wayne County Municipal Judge Stuart Miller threw out the starvation charges in the original indictment and refused to allow most of the video into evidence because “he didn’t want to watch it.”

Vaginal prolapses as big as two feet, encouraged by slippery floors and confinement crates say veterinarians, were ignored — as were ubiquitous bleeding and infected vulvas.

Hanging was considered cheaper than lethal injection and safer than shooting an animal especially since some farm hands were “convicted felons forbidden to use firearms,” said Ken Wiles in court. Yet Pete also witnessed Joe Wiles take a gun out of a pail and shoot a pig three times while never taking a break from his cell phone conversation or even taking aim. The wounded animal was still breathing minutes later.

Nor did “handling” make any sense.

“Shock poles were used on pigs even when there was nowhere for them to go or when they were so piled together they couldn’t stand up anyway,” says Pete. “They were even used when they would cause the animal to charge you. It made no sense at all.”

Of course, the court testimony from Iowa veterinarian Paul Armbrecht that acquitted Wiles — that hanging was an acceptable method of euthanasia — also made no sense. Aren’t veterinarians sworn to alleviate animal suffering?

Nor did the $10,000 the Ohio Pork Producers Council donated to the Wiles’ legal defense make sense in light of the National Pork Producers Council statement that the HBO’s documentary “shows practices at a hog farm that are not condoned and, in fact, are abhorred by responsible pork producers.” Make up your mind folks.

But most confusing is why agribusiness, the press and the eating public continue to view factory farm animal abuse as isolated instead of endemic and definitional.

And how the latter day “hanging judge” could view a sow suspended from a front loader and not see cruelty.

But what’s less known is the court’s new major function, which is acting as an institution of corporate power. Since Bush’s appointments, the court has begun hearing far more business cases, and in case after case has “pushed the law in a direction favored by business,” as the Wall Street Journal reports.² For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s most powerful business lobby, took a position on fifteen cases before the court in 2007, and its side won in all but two.³

That makes sense, since Roberts previously represented and filed briefs on behalf of the Chamber and other prominent business organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and other corporate clients.⁴ The Financial Times refers to Roberts and Alito as “pretty much the dream candidates of economic conservatism,” calling Justice Roberts himself “a white-shoe corporate lawyer” and noting “Justice Alito often sided with employers in his prior life as a judge.”⁵

The result is reviewed very well in Business Week, describing the views of Robin Conrad of the Chamber of Commerce’s litigation arm: “The judicial branch offers an alternative forum where business can seek changes it has failed to win from other branches of government. In the 1990s, the chamber and other business groups made this a vital part of their tort reform strategy, pouring money into local judicial campaigns to reshape state supreme courts…[now] the approach is playing out on a national level.”⁶ But “tort reform”—where barriers are raised to discourage suing companies—is only one part of what business expects from our court, in what will probably be decades of “business friendly” decisions.

Consider banking regulation, which is making a comeback these days with even the Federal Reserve Chair coming out for it. Our highest court recently ruled that national bank subsidiaries that extend mortgage loans, a major part of our current straits, can’t be regulated by state governments.⁷ Impressive, since mortgages and home equity loans were among the financial assets that were repackaged into forms that ended up bringing down the banks. The subprime legacy doesn’t seem to faze the court.

Additionally, the court ruled almost unanimously that banks, being “regulated” by the Securities and Exchange Commission, cannot be sued by investors—making them “generally immune from antitrust liability” as the International Herald Tribune describes.⁸ Companies face antitrust liability when they become large and powerful, so this decision looks great in our current environment of banking near-collapses. Because if there’s anything our “too big to fail” banks need, it’s to get even bigger.

The Supremes also decided that citizens have no right to legally challenge the tax breaks used by most of the U.S. states to “lure investment and jobs away from competing localities,” as the Financial Times reports. “Forty-six of the 50 states offer some form of investment tax credit. Big companies, many of them carmakers, get billions of dollars each year from states and cities in what critics call an ‘escalating arms race’ of tax incentives.”⁹ This is a big deal, since this type of tax concession is how firms drive the “race to the bottom” among states and countries—either you lower my taxes or I’ll build my plant somewhere that does. So for the Roberts Court, if the states want to oversee banks’ shady mortgage-issuing, no dice. But if they’re cutting taxes on Toyota so they’ll condescend to build a plant, no problem.

Business involvement in elections has been a recurring subject for the court. A 2007 ruling overturned a significant part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, finding that corporations, unions, and interest groups can run “issue ads” immediately before elections.¹⁰ The intention of the law had been to prevent a pre-election flood of campaign advertising, thinly disguised as advocating for a political issue, paid for by companies and other groups. The law was restricted to the period just prior to elections or primaries, and only to ads which were funded by corporations, unions, or other groups from their own general treasuries—a very limited restriction on how companies could use their massive financial advantages in an election environment.¹¹

The court set a very high standard for these sham “issue ads” to be found in violation of McCain-Feingold. The ads have to expressly urge a position on a candidate, or be subject to “no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate,” to be found illegal.¹² In other words, they won’t be, as described by Richard Hasen, Law Professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, in a paper on the court’s new ad-friendly stance. Noting that the “burden of proof is on the government to prove the advertisement is not subject to exemption” and that the decision expressly forbids considering the context of the election in interpreting the ad, he finds that most campaign ads of the issue-oriented variety “will comfortably fall on the permitted side of the line.”¹³ In fact, “Very few ads broadcast close to an election” directly push for a candidate, but “almost always mention a legislative issue, even if they are also attacking a candidate.” In other words, the 2008 flood of corporate and other campaign ads in battleground states owes a lot to our highest court.

And now, the court seems ready to overturn or seriously restrict even this weakened limitation on corporate campaign influence, as a combative film on Hillary Clinton from the primary season has fallen under the ban. Since the law could extend to any political speech, as long as it advocates a candidate and was paid for with general corporate or group funds, it’s conceivable that books or signs could be banned, if paid for by firms. This has lead to the conservative wing of the court issuing a good deal of weak-sauce posturing as defenders of the First Amendment.¹⁴ The poor corporations are being slightly limited in their massive dollar advantage over the unions and other groups, so their political speech rights must be defended. Of course, the court also found that students can be censored and punished by schools for mocking school policy, in the well-known “bong hits 4 Jesus” case.¹⁵ If it’s people instead of capital, this court has little salt for free speech.

Another overturned McCain-Feingold provision, the “Millionaire Rule,” raised the ceiling on individual campaign contributions for candidates facing a self-financed opponent, whose vast personal resources tilt the playing field in their favor.¹⁶ The court found that this was unfair for imposing more restrictions on one party in an election than another, but this doesn’t address the advantage held by rich candidates who can self-finance. In fact, the Rule itself was a response to a previous Supreme Court ruling overturning restrictions on wealthy candidates using their own cash to gain office. An outside observer might call all this a clear argument for publicly-funded elections.

Turning to elected judges, the Supreme Court ruled “an elected judge may rule on a case where one party spent $3 million to help get him elected,” the Wall Street Journal reports.¹⁷ The question was whether this violates the constitutional rights of due process and impartial trials. Notably, conservative Justice Scalia held that due process was not violated because the judge’s conflict of interest was “vague.” 3 million bucks sounds pretty specific to me, but I’m no lawyer.

But I am an economist, and I’ll tell you that you can thank the court for some higher consumer goods prices as well. By 5-4, the Court overturned a 1911 Supreme Court ruling outlawing “minimum-price agreements,” where a manufacturer requires that retailers not mark down the prices of its products. The business press describes the corporate rationale for legalizing this practice: “minimum resale price agreements, although raising prices within brands, could be good for consumers as price competition between brands would be stimulated…the loss of competition on price would be more than made up for by the way a price floor would allow retailers to compete on service rather than on price alone.”¹⁸ The Wall Street Journal describes them as “a means to enhance a brand’s image and for retailers to make enough profit on their merchandise to provide better customer service,” but they “have run into legal trouble in the past when federal officials found they resulted in higher prices for consumers.”¹⁹

This is essentially what economists call “price fixing,” where firms work together to increase markups on products, and thus the price paid by consumers. In spite of the companies’ argument that the MPAs will encourage price competition between brands, the Journal observes that similar video games Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 are being sold at the same mandatory retail price. And not a little one either, $189. The court’s opinion here is that when firms increase prices on us, the extra money will go into improving the product or customer service. Of course, it’s just possible that the higher markups will fatten the manufacturer’s profitability, instead. But at least the firm’s image is enhanced, in that you have to fork over more cash.

But the Roberts Court’s trademark has been its limitation of damages in corporate lawsuits and its moves to prevent firms from being taken to court at all. The court reduced the punitive damage settlement against Exxon for the 1989 Valdez oil spill by 80%, from $2.5 billion to $500 million.²⁰ It also reversed a jury decision against cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, which awarded $79 million to the widow of an Oregon smoker, on the grounds that the jury might have based that number on a desire to punish the corporation for harming other smokers (juries are silly that way).²¹ The court now seems eager to further reduce the limited extent to which companies can be held liable through lawsuits for costs they impose on others, or “externalize.”

The press describes the court as “closing the courtroom door,” preventing lawsuits against corporations, very often from the firms’ own investors. The court has found that class action lawsuits alleging fraud must be brought in federal courts, where they’re effectively barred;²² that investors can’t sue Wall Street banks over their losses from the cozy IPO agreements from the 1990s stock mania;⁷ and they face tighter standards for bringing suit for antitrust conspiracy. This series of decisions greatly reduced corporations’ liability to investor suits, leading Robin Conrad of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s legal arm to declare the Roberts Court in 2007 “our best Supreme Court ever.”²³

These aren’t ambulance-chaser lawsuits—the Roberts Court is essentially insulating corporations from suits from their owners and customers, when such suits are often the only recourse when firms “externalize” their costs in loose regulatory environments. Closing off that possibility of redress for victims of corporate destruction will save big firms millions and billions of dollars, hence Conrad’s grateful attitude. Interestingly, while many of these business cases have been won by the court’s five-justice conservative bloc, on these issues of limiting court damages the court has been more unanimous—even the other, “liberal” justices would see firms insulated from accountability for their behavior.

But there have been some cracks in the corporate lock on the court. One interesting example is the court’s treatment of employee discrimination cases. Businesses, of course, would like to see these restricted, and in the first such case the court heard, the now-famous Ledbetter case, the court ruled against the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter. Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear plant, learned that her employer had paid every male in a similar position more than her, to the tune of about a thousand bucks more per month. But the court threw out her case since she failed to meet a strict 180-day deadline in filing suit. This tightened statute of limitations meant that very few such cases could be filed. But this became a prominent national issue, after which the court changed its tune. As the press describes, Ledbetter lead to “loud protests…But since then, the court has consistently sided with employees who have alleged discrimination, and ruled…to allow lawsuits to go forward.”²⁴ This suggests that even the august Supreme Court can be made to feel the heat of public opinion, which is encouraging.

Another development suggesting incomplete commercial dominance of the Roberts Court is the recent decision on drug labeling. After having recently found that manufacturers of medical devices are shielded from lawsuits by their government-approved safety labels, the court found drug manufacturers aren’t, and that suits against them could go forward.²⁵ This reversal for corporate power before the court has lead some observers to conclude that the its reputation as a business plaything was premature and that “something of a reevaluation of the court is underway.”³ But it should first be noted that Bush’s conservative appointees in fact dissented from this decision, along with Justice Scalia. So the question is what happened to the other two conservatives, Thomas and Kennedy.

The answer lies in the doctrine of federal “preemption,” where government regulation prevents state lawsuits. Preemption has only recently been extended to drugs from medical devices, mainly in a late policy of the Bush Administration.³ Apparently that took obedience to corporate power too far for a few conservatives, but over the long series of business rulings reviewed here, it’s a drop in the water.

So, if you’re a consumer who believes in punishment for corporate fraud, or just competitive pricing, this court is no great shakes. But if you’re a millionaire running for office, or a stockholder of a oil-spilling corporation, or a multinational firm demanding a tax break before you’ll make a hire, this Supreme Court hands out enough justice to redecorate your whole summer estate. But it’s still heartening that the court seems to have backed off in the face of wide outcry after the Ledbetter decision, which suggests that the aroused public can still exert pressure, even on a firm instrument of capital like the Roberts Court.

Sure, the Supreme Court’s an inherently conservative institution, and always sympathetic to the wealthy and powerful, from whose ranks the Justices have historically been drawn. But the escalation of the number of business cases on the docket suggests that Corporate America has tightened its grip. As the Economist has noted, Bush’s only lasting success in his “domestic legacy” probably lies in “shifting the Supreme Court significantly to the right.”²⁶ And in keeping with the pattern of the Bush Administration, the court’s public approval rating is falling as it lines up with corporate demands on case after case.²⁷

Over the coming decades of corporate dominance of the highest court in the land, it will take a more thoughtful, organized and active version of the response to the Ledbetter case to make the court even approach the desires of American citizens, rather than the wet dreams of the Chamber of Commerce. But that popular organization and education is the only way to drag the Roberts Court, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century and points beyond.

1. Wall Street Journal, Partial Reversal, April 19, 2007. Wall Street Journal, Roberts Rules, June 26, 2007.
2. Wall Street Journal, Roberts Court Unites on Business, June 30, 2007.
3. Washington Post, Court Defies Pro-Business Label, March 8, 2009.
4. Financial Times, Trade Group Backs Supreme Court Nominee, August 11, 2005.
5. Financial Times, The Supreme Court Has Been Bad For Business, June 29, 2006.
6. Business Week, The Supreme Court: Open For Business, July 9, 2007.
7. Washington Post, Pro-Business Decision Hews To Patten of Roberts Court, June 22, 2007.
8. International Herald Tribune, Analysis: Roberts Supreme Court Is A Conservative’s Dream, July 1, 2007.
9. Financial Times, Supreme Court Backs US States’ Tax Breaks, May 16, 2006.
10. Wall Street Journal, Roberts Rules, June 26, 2007.
11. See for example Center For Responsive Politics, 2008 Overview.
12. Wall Street Journal, Justices Loosen Ad Restrictions In Campaign Finance Law, June 6, 2007.
13. Hasen, Richard. Beyond Incoherence: The Roberts Court’s Deregulatory Turn in FEC vs. Wisconsin Right to Life, Minnesota Law Review, April 2008.
14. Wall Street Journal, Justices Seem Skeptical Of Scope Of Finance Law, March 24, 2009.
15. New York Times, Vote Against Banner Shows Divide On Speech In Schools, June 26, 2007.
16. New York Times, Supreme Court Strikes Down “Millionaire’s Amendment,” June 27, 2008.
17. Wall Street Journal, High Court Split Over Case on Judicial Ethics, March 3, 2009.
18. Financial Times, Supreme Court Weighs Up Value Of Price-Fixing Against Discounts, March 27, 2007.
19. Wall Street Journal, Why Some Toys Don’t Get Discounted, December 24, 2008.
20. International Herald Tribune, Supreme Court Decision On Exxon Valdez Damages A Blow To Alaskans, June 26, 2008.
21. Financial Times, Court Narrows US Money Laundering Law, June 3, 2008.
22. Financial Times, Supreme Court May Limit Class Action Lawsuits By Investors, January 19, 2006.
23. International Herald Tribune, Analysis: Roberts Supreme Court Is A Conservative’s Dream, July 1, 2007.
24. Washington Post, Court Defies Pro-Business Label, March 8, 2009. Congress has since changed the law the undermine the Court decision; this will probably not be the only such episode.
25. Financial Times, Drugs Groups Fear Rash of Label Litigation, March 5, 2009.
26. The Economist, Supreme Success, July 7, 2007.
27. Wall Street Journal, Roberts Court United on Business, June 30, 2007.

My attention has been drawn to an article titled “Do GM crops increase yield?” on Monsanto’s web page, although I must confess that this is the first time I have visited their site.

This is how it begins: “Recently, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically-modified (GM) crops don’t increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops. Both claims are simply false.”

It then goes on to explain the terms germplasm, breeding, biotechnology, and then finally explains yield.

Here is what it says: “The introduction of GM traits through biotechnology has led to increased yields independent of breeding. Take for example statistics cited by PG Economics, which annually tallies the benefits of GM crops, taking data from numerous studies around the world:

* Mexico — yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybean of 9 percent.

* Romania — yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybeans have averaged 31 percent.

* Philippines — average yield increase of 15 percent with herbicide tolerant corn.

* Philippines — average yield increase of 24 percent with insect resistant corn.

* Hawaii — virus resistant papaya has increased yields by an average of 40 percent.

* India – insect resistant cotton has led to yield increases on average more than 50 percent.”

These assertions are not amusing, and can no longer be taken lightly. I am not only shocked but also disgusted at the way corporations try to fabricate and distort the scientific facts, and dress them up in such a manner that the so-called ‘educated’ of today will accept them without asking any questions.

Distorted Science

At the outset, Monsanto’s claims are flawed. I have seen similar conclusions, at least about Bt cotton yields in India, in a study by The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) — although I have always said that IFPRI is an organization that needs to be shut down. It has done more damage to developing country agriculture and food security than any other academic institution.

Nevertheless, let us look at Monsanto’s claims.

The increases in crop yields that Monsanto has shown in Mexico, Romania, the Philippines, Hawaii and India are actually not yield increases at all. In scientific terms these are called crop losses, which have been very cleverly masqueraded as yield increases. By indulging in a jugglery of scientific terminologies that take advantage of the layman’s ignorance, Monsanto has made claims based on evidence that does not exist.

As written in Monsanto’s article: “The most common traits in GM crops are herbicide tolerance (HT) and insect resistance (IR). HT plants contain genetic material from common soil bacteria. IR crops contain genetic material from a bacterium that attacks certain insects.”

This is true. Herbicide tolerant plants and insect resistant plants do perform broadly the same function as chemical pesticides. Both the GM plants and the chemical pesticides reduce crop losses. In fact, GM plants work more or less like a bio-pesticide – the insect feeds on the plant carrying the toxin, and dies. Spraying the chemical pesticide also does the same.

In the case of herbicide tolerant plants, the outcome is much worse. Biotech companies have successfully dovetailed the trait for herbicide tolerance in the plant. As a result, those who buy the GM seeds have no other option but to also buy the companies own brand of herbicide. Killing two birds with one stone, you might say.

GM companies have only used the transgenic technology to remove competition from the herbicide market. Instead of allowing the farmer to choose from different brands of herbicides available in the market, they have now ensured that you are only left with a Hobson’s choice. As several studies have conclusively shown in the US, the use of herbicide does not go down over time, but rather increases.

Here is the question that must now be asked: if the chemical herbicide used by Monsanto’s herbicide tolerant soybeans (so-called ‘Roundup Ready’) truly increases yields, then why don’t all the other herbicides available in the market also increase yields?

Surely, if all herbicides do the same job of killing herbs, then all herbicides should increase crop yields. Am I not correct? So why are we led to believe that only Roundup Ready soybeans (a GM crop) increase yields, whereas others do not?

When was the last time you were told that herbicides increase crop yields? Chemical herbicides are only known to merely reduce crop losses. This is what I was taught when studying plant breeding — a fact that is still being taught to agricultural science students everywhere in the world.

Cotton Lies

A similar story holds true for cotton. We all know that cotton consumes about 50 percent of total pesticides sprayed, and these chemical pesticides are known to reduce crop losses. I am sure that Monsanto would also agree without question that pesticides do not increase crop yields, and I repeat DO NOT increase cotton yields.

Monsanto’s Bt cotton, which uses a gene from a soil bacteria to produce a toxin within the plant that kills certain pests, also does the same. It only kills the insect, which means it does the same job that a chemical pesticide is supposed to perform. The crop losses that a farmer minimizes after applying chemical pesticide is never (and has never) been measured in terms of yield increases. It has always been computed as savings from crop losses.

If GM crops increase yields, shouldn’t we therefore say that chemical pesticides (including herbicides) also increase yields? Will the agricultural scientific community accept that pesticides increases crop yields?

This brings me to another relevant question: Why don’t agricultural scientists say that chemical pesticides increase crop yields?

While you ponder over this question (and there are no prizes for getting it right), let me tell you that the last time the world witnessed increases in crop yields was when the high-yielding crop varieties were evolved. That was the time when scientists were able to break through the genetic yield barrier. The double-gene and triple-gene dwarf wheat (a trait that was subsequently inducted in rice) brought in quantum jumps in yield potential. That was way back in the late 1960s. Since then, there has been no further genetic breakthrough in crop yields. Let there be no mistake about it.

Monsanto is therefore making faulty claims. None of its GM crop varieties increases yields. At best, they only reduce crop losses. If Monsanto does not know the difference between crop losses and crop yields, it needs to take some elementary lessons again in plant breeding.

But please, Monsanto, don’t try and fool the world by distorting scientific facts.

For the record, let me also state that when Bt cotton was being introduced in India in 2001 (its entry was delayed by another year when I challenged the scientific claims made by Mahyco-Monsanto), the Indian Council for Agricultural Research had also objected to the company’s claim of increasing yield. It is however another matter that ICAR’s objections were simply brushed aside by the Department of Biotechnology, and we all know why.

Interestingly, ISAAA and several consultancy firms (and how can we believe them anyway after their role in the economic collapse now facing the world) have been claiming that cotton yields in India increased after Bt cotton was introduced. Such claims are made about other crops too. I have seen this happening again and again over the past two decades; whenever the crop yields increase, the scientists and agribusinesses take the credit. But when the crop yields go down, the blame invariably shifts to weather conditions.

Which may make you wonder why agricultural scientists and companies never thank the weather at times of bumper harvest. As a former Indian Agriculture Minister, Mr. Chaturanand Mishra, always used to say, the only real Agriculture Minister is the monsoon.

This year, cotton production estimates in India have been scaled down by 14 percent. Using the same yardstick, does it not mean that the productivity of Bt cotton is also falling? But of course the blame cannot lie with Bt cotton. You guessed right — it must be the fault of inclement weather.

As Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck announces its purchase of Kenilworth, NJ-based Schering-Plough who remembers that it was a Merck/Schering-Plough combo that brought us Vytorin?

No one outside the scientific community had heard the term “surrogate endpoint” before Vytorin — a cholesterol drug that combined Merck’s statin drug Zocor (simvastatin) with Schering-Plough’s anti-hyperlipidemic drug Zetia (ezetimibe) — was marketed in 2004.

But it soon came to mean “the sun-was-in-my-eyes” as Merck/Schering-Plough sat on a Vytorin efficacy study for over a year tampering with its endpoints until Congress said time’s up in 2008. Surprise! Vytorin was no better at unclogging arteries than generic simvastatin at a fifth of the cost.

In fact Vytorin was so worthless, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the General Accounting Office to investigate why the FDA would approve a drug to reduce artery-clogging plaque that doesn’t reduce artery-clogging plaque.

Congressmen Bart Stupak (D-MI) and John Dingell (D-MI) asked why Schering-Plough executive VP Carrie Smith Cox unloaded $28 million stock between the end of the stonewalled study and release of its results. (Maybe her stint at fen phen and HRT plagued Wyeth taught her when to head for the exits.) And why the brat pack drug reps on Cafepharma seemed to know about the study’s results before the government!

States had questions of their own — especially as Schering-Plough paid $31 million to Missouri in 2008 for bilking Medicaid with a different drug three years earlier. Who can say incorrigible?

And New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wondered whether the $21 million his state paid for Medicaid Vytorin prescriptions in only two years was Vioxx all over again as he sought to recoup $100 million from the first Merck scandal.

And it got worse. A second Vytorin study testing the drug’s effectiveness in aortic stenosis showed Vytorin worthless in preventing aortic-valve and cardiovascular events but with a macabre dividend: it increased the chances of getting and dying from cancer.

When the study results were integrated with two others trials, Vytorin only increased the risk of dying of cancer not getting it–whew! — and the FDA sounded an all-clear. But the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) said a cancer risk could not be discounted in a Sept. 2008 editorial.

The Vytorin scam came less than four years after the Vioxx scam in which Merck’s superaspirin taken by 20 million was withdrawn from the market for doubling heart attack and stroke risk in 2004.

Court documents show that Merck researchers were well acquainted with Vioxx’s “cardiovascular events” when they supplied the NEJM with phony heart attack data for the 2000 article that led to led its popularity and medical credibility. Oops

No wonder the NEJM filed a supporting brief in the recent Supreme Court Wyeth v. Levine case.

Who realizes today that up to 139,000 people had heart attacks and strokes on Vioxx and 50,000 died? Think ten Iraqs or one Vietnam.

Nor did Fosamax (alendronate) Merck’s bone wonder drug have a happy ending.

Despite Merck’s “awareness” campaign which increased the diagnosis of osteoporosis sevenfold thanks to bone density measuring machines planted in doctors’ offices, Fosamax was found to cause esophageal cancer, osteonecrosis (jaw bone death) and the very fractures it was supposed to prevent. It was listed on the FDA’s second quarterly Potential Signals of Serious Risks list. (See: forgiveness easier than permission)

Singular, Merck’s asthma drug is also on the ropes for suicidal side effects and parents are saying you want us to vaccinate our daughter with WHAT about its $400 cervical cancer drug Gardasil. (Who do you think paid for all the HPV “awareness” campaigns?)

Many are saying the drug companies need a new business model, having dealt themselves out of the game with their crash-and-burn blockbusters and with third party and Medicaid benefits managers saying “you’ve got to be kidding” about extravagant patent drugs.

Nor will they be shielded from lawsuits because they have FDA approval thanks to March’s Wyeth v. Levine ruling.

Will patients pay hundreds for the vaccines and biologics which drug companies hope will become their new gravy train? If they say Trust Us?

Three Republican Senators voted against the bill, including Senate Majority Assistant Whip Gregory Bell. “I’m not comfortable with home brewing,” Bell said to the Deseret News. “It seems fraught with mischief to me. Maybe I don’t understand it.”

Why doesn’t Bell understand this delicious and empowering craft? Perhaps because corporations have taken over an industry that used to be rooted in the kitchens of the world.

It was in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, where first emerged the trade of beer and barley, according to Fermenting Revolution: How To Drink Beer and Save the World by Christopher O’Brien. The need to cultivate crops for this important product may have been the initial reason for the settlement of the world’s first large-scale community. In Babylonia, where beer was safer to drink than the canal water, barley and beer were used as a form of currency. The foundations of modern society appear to be built on, well, beer.

At the time of the American Revolution, rebels encouraged boycotts against English beer, chanting the phrase, “Homebrewed Is Best.” George Washington brewed his own beer in a house designated for the craft in his backyard. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson gave his friends beer-brewing lessons. In 1872, there were 3,421 breweries in the US. According to the New Yorker, during the Civil War, a member of the United States Sanitary Commission said beer was a “valuable substitute for vegetables.” Now there are more than 1,400 breweries, and over one million homebrewers in the US.

Yet during Prohibition, home brewers naturally took a hit. After Prohibition was lifted, wine was allowed to be produced legally at home, but beer was not. In 1978, NY Congressman Barbar Conable sponsored a bill that would legalize homebrewing. When introducing the bill to Congress, Conable said that Americans should not have to “rely on the beer barons” for their brew. It wasn’t until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter signed the Cranston Act, that home brewing was legalized in many states. At the time of the law’s passage, only forty-four breweries were in operation in the US.

However, the Cranston Act still allowed individual states to prohibit the production. Before the Utah Senate legalized homebrewing a few days ago, those who brewed at home had to get a license and post a $10,000 bond. Utah Senator Steve Urquhart said of the new law’s passage, “We’re dealing with adults and this simply isn’t a big deal. That’s the argument that persuades me.” Utah Governor Jon Huntsman now needs to sign the bill into law for it to be applied. Pending this passage, homebrewers will be able to brew legally starting on May 12.

This homebrewers’ victory in Utah is in part thanks to two years of grassroots activism and lobbying on the part of the American Homebrewers Association and Gary Glass, the Association’s director. Glass spoke to the Beer Examiner about the process. “Much thanks to all of the Utah craft brewers who have helped us in the effort to legalize homebrewing over the past couple of years . . . The huge response we’ve had from Utah homebrewers and beer enthusiasts contacting their legislators had a major impact. I was present and testified at the legislative committee hearings and was encouraged to hear from many legislators that they were surprised at the number of contacts from voters urging them to support the measure.”

Homebrewing is a wonderful pastime that can also help build community. In Burlington, Vermont my friends and I recently pooled our money together to buy brewing equipment, and started a collective that shares the equipment, recipes and the beer with other locals around town. In this way, homebrewing has built community and allows us to cut out the corporate middleman.

Similarly, the homebrewers’ victory in Utah is one step close to enabling the beer drinkers of the world to take back their brew from the corporations of the world.

Kaufman, of course, reports a corporate paper executive’s recitation of the industry’s standard public story of how and why this appalling waste happens:

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern.

That, of course, is a howling lie. The one and only reason for the advent of puffed-up toilet paper is the normal corporate capitalist sales imperative, not any kind of spontaneous clamoring from us ordinary ass-wipers.

Here is the real scoop, from a classic 1998 Wall Street Journal report titled “The Tricky Business of Rolling Out a New Toilet Paper,” by the excellent Tara Parker-Pope:

This [purportedly fancy toilet paper] is Kimberly-Clark’s biggest push ever in the $3.5 billion-a-year U.S. toiletpaper business, where it is a relative newcomer. Its original Kleenex toilet-tissue brand struggled after its introduction in 1990. The company merged with Scott Paper, maker of the Scott and Cottonelle brands, in 1995 and created Kleenex Cottonelle, which helped Kimberly-Clark gain a 23% share of the market. But it trails rival Procter & Gamble’s Charmin, which has 30%. Among premium tissues, Kleenex Cottonelle still ranks a distant fourth behind Charmin, Fort James’s Northern and Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft. Overall, bath-tissue sales are flat and premium brands are losing share to economy-priced tissue.

In other words, the real spur to all this environment-raping TeePee was stagnant corporate profits, not popular demand. Left to their own devices, people gravitate toward “economy-priced tissue.”

This, of course, meant that people simply could not be left to their own devices, them and nature be damned.

Pope conveyed the outlines of the usual consequent marketing procedures, which have since yielded the true course of events:

Kimberly-Clark hosted focus groups to talk to consumers about toilet paper, and asked them to compare leading brands with the new Kleenex Cottonelle textured tissue. They discovered that even though tissue advertising doesn’t talk about how well a toilet paper wipes, that is what customers are thinking about.

In the meantime, the company will launch a new, softer version of Kleenex Cottonelle in the rest of the U.S. Those more-traditional ads show a bubble drifting onto folds of toilet tissue. But the product package includes the “clean, fresh feeling” promise, in an effort to prime consumers for the eventual appearance of the textured tissue nationwide.

In similar fashion, the alleged proof of the alleged product benefit comes after, not before, claims about it are implanted into “the consumer”:

“If we have news that’s important for a consumer, then we can find a way to tastefully communicate it,” says Tom Falk, group president of Kimberly-Clark’s North American tissue, pulp and paper business.

The advertising solution is an anthropomorphic roll of toilet paper with a heavy British accent (the voice of London actress Louise Mercer from the old NBC sitcom “Dear John”). “I’m new Kleenex-Cottonelle toilet paper, and I understand you have a cleaning position available,” the tissue says. “I have a unique, rippled texture designed to leave you feeling clean and fresh. I’d love to show you what I can do.”

In another ad, the tissue brags that consumers prefer it to the leading brand. “Looks like all my bottom-line thinking is paying off,” the tissue says. For now, the ads will claim only that consumers say the new tissue leaves them feeling cleaner than other brands, but Kimberly-Clark is “working on a way to objectively measure cleaning better,” says Mr. Willetts. “There’s no method right now.”

Oh, there’s a method alright. George Orwell is spinning in his grave…