Inevitably, after peeling past the pre-programmed slogans Ron Paulistas bring with them, you will discover a person – generally white and overwhelmingly male – looking for some alternative to mainstream politics. Ever susceptible to slick marketing campaigns thanks to a solid diet of American television, these zealots have bought it hook line and sinker in a typical conspiratorial fashion. The lynchpin is the Federal Reserve, a seemingly mysterious institution, which in the world of Ron Paul politics stands in as a more acceptable substitute for the variety of other conspiracy theories floating through far-right America including the Bilderbergs, the rich as secret lizard people and the Masons.

Yet, the idea that Ron Paul offers a kind of alternative to mainstream politics falls apart quite easily upon inspection. There are three primary reasons for this – two relate to Paul himself and the other is a function of mainstream politics more generally. In the end, it is more accurate to say that Ron Paul is mainstream politics unmasked, a raw version of what both Democrats and Republicans desire to become if left to their own devices.

Key to this is seeing Ron Paul economics for what they are. Forget the Fed. Leave aside all the slogans about “living within our means” and “punishing generations with debt” for a moment. Ron Paul is the most pro-corporate politician in the Presidential race. His economic policies would further unleash multinational corporations and the 1% who own them onto American society – with absolutely no restraints. Paul is virulently anti-union in part because unions give workers a collective identity in order to regulate worksites. He opposes government regulation on employers since he connects their activity to his notion of “liberty.” And he has repeatedly associated taxation, even taxation of the corporate world, as an affront to freedom.

Taken together, Ron Paul’s notion of economic liberty is an only slightly disguised version of the hyper-neoliberal ideas that have been circulating since the 1980s. What is different now is that the circulation is taking place in the aftermath of an economic crisis that has unmasked the bankruptcy of the very idea Paul is promoting – capitalist economics. Although Paul presents his economic proposals as alternative non-mainstream notions, they fit perfectly inside the rise of the multinational corporations and the deep enrichment of the 1%. Albert Einstein offered the best bit of advice on how to deal with folks like Ron Paul when he said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Giving corporate America a free hand to rampage through our economy, our communities and our environment is more of the same.

Ron Paul supporters mix this pro-corporate economic package with a fairly typical set of reactionary social policies. He has opposed any legislation in support of gay marriage on the Federal level and was neutral on the “don’t ask don’t tell” seeing the problem as less one of discrimination and more of “seeing people as part of groups.” Paul’s positions on race are even murkier due to his frequent open associations with white supremacists and the general acceptance of his ideas amongst this repugnant community. But his most explicit reactionary position is reserved for gender, more specifically the issue of sexual harassment. Here, Paul claims that anything less than penetration does not qualify as sexual harassment – words don’t matter. Females who file sexual harassment suits are, according to Paul, oppressing others. They should, instead, just exercise their right to choose a different job. Misogynist victim blaming at its worst.

The final reason that Ron Paul is not an alternative is the very reason that links him to mainstream politics. Just like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, he offers no concrete plans to address the problems that most affect people’s everyday lives. He doesn’t have a serious plan for housing. He would, just as his counterparts, continue the failed capitalist housing policies, probably adding some rhetorical flair about the liberty and freedom built into the feelings of anxiety most Americans feel when it comes to housing. His education policy is similarly irresponsible. Paul chooses to devolve education decisions onto state and local government while giving private enterprises a strong hand in further commodifying education in America. And on health care, his policies are merely a pumped up version of the pro-market policies of his Democratic and Republican counterparts.

Although Paul’s foreign policy position is trumpeted as being far off from his Republican counterparts, it contains many mainstream elements. Paul himself is always quick to indicate that his “non-interventionist” position does not mean that he wishes to radically transform the US military. He constantly issues the call for a “strong national defense” which translates into a well-funded military. As he stated directly in a recent interview, “My Plan to Restore America does not cut one penny of defense.”

Unfortunately, Liberals and even some Greens have taken the anti-war bait and Ron Paul has been able to make coalitions with otherwise ideological opponents such as Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. This has given Paul some cred among anti-war types while creating confusion between having a position against military intervention and being anti-militarist.

While the “Ron Paul as alternative” charade rolls along, candidates carrying ideas clearly outside of the mainstream struggle to carve out some media attention. One is from my own organization, the Socialist Party USA – Stewart Alexander. Alexander is running campaign for President on a platform filled with radical ideas that would address many of the problems raised by the 2008 economic crisis. He has some new medicine for an old illness.

On economics, the Alexander/Mendoza campaign recognizes the destructive role of the 1%. Creating a progressive tax structure that captures the wealth at the top of society, designing a banking system that works like a highly regulated public utility and addressing the unemployment crisis by viewing a job as a human right means transforming an economic system that has failed the 99%. Similar proposals to open the education to all, to preserve our precious natural resources and to fund a worker owned and managed cooperative sector are clearly different than the re-hashed blather being served up by mainstream politicians.

Economic democracy is also connected to personal freedom. The Alexander/Mendoza campaign is one of the few that recognizes just how corporate power prevents Americans from fully exercising their civil rights. Corporations are not people and people need a voice – a voice that will be unchained as a result of electoral reform, the breaking up of media monopolies and the campaign’s support of people’s right to self-determination whether it be through marriage, adoption or alternative family structures.

Finally, Stewart Alexander is offering a radically different approach to the military. He is a passionate anti-militarist. Both he and his running mate, the ex-Marine, Alex Mendoza know the wasteful destruction that the US military has created. The pair call for a closing of all foreign bases, an end to security state measures and, unlike Ron Paul, an immediate 50% reduction in the military budget. They understand that anti-militarism is about more than opposing intervention – it is about re-thinking how our country relates to the rest of the world.

So, as the Presidential campaign heats up, it is important to see past the media spin – especially when the spinning is done in order to create false alternatives. The Obama campaign will certainly begin its own campaign to present their candidate as offering solutions beyond the mainstream. Such claims will be every bit as shallow as the notion that Ron Paul offers some new set of ideas worthy of the mantle of being alternative. There are some alternatives out there and their voices need to be heard. One of them will be running red, on the ticket of the Socialist Party USA and carrying with him the hope of moving past the miserable future created for us by capitalism.

“Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period.

“What vacation?” he said. “I’m setting up practice.”

“And give up catering to rich people with inflated bank accounts and deflated ethics?”

“Don’t have a choice. I’m getting laid off.”

Comstock had been a rainmaker for the Megabucks Happy Health Care Medical Center for the past decade. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d be laid off.

“Megabucks tired of paying your malpractice insurance?” I asked.

“Not just me,” he said. “Hospital’s laying off most of the staff, making the rest work overtime, and hiring outside contractors. They said it was hard to survive when the profit was down to only 20 or so million a year.”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” I said. “You planning to set up private practice to help the poor in Mexico?” I asked admiringly.

“Not a chance! Gonna get rich working for Megabucks!”

“You just said you were laid off.”

“Been laid off in the U.S.,” said Comstock while putting a frozen burrito into the microwave.

“Megabucks/Mexico just hired me. There’s cheaper labor down there.”

“You crazy?” I asked. “You’re the cheaper labor.”

“Obviously you don’t know American business,” said Comstock haughtily.

“Megabucks/U.S. closes its auxiliary operations, and then contracts with Mexican companies for a fifth of the cost in the U.S. They do the work, ship it back to the U.S., and Megabucks bills Blue Cross the full rate as if it was done locally.”

“So where do you fit in?” I asked.

“Just as before. Nose jobs. Breast augmentations. Tummy tucks. All the important medical procedures. But this time, I do it in Cancun.”

“To rich Mexicans,” I said disgusted.

“To rich Americans!” said Comstock. “If they want the best care, they’ll take their private jets to Mexico and then deduct the trip as a necessary business expense.”

“And what about the impoverished and middle-class Americans?”

“If they can sneak across the border, they can also get medical care.”

“What about prescriptions?”

“Megabucks contracted with some of the best drug dealers—I mean pharmacists and chemists—in Mexico. Quality is just as good and it’ll only be four or five times production costs. Unlike the U.S. there’s no TV advertising and six-figure MBAs and lawyers that require drugs to be 30 or 40 times production costs.”

“With prices that low, how do you know there won’t be mass rushes by Americans to grab everything they can?”

“Because there’s security! Every hospital and pharmacy has armed guards with the best automatic weapons smuggled through the God-fearing 2nd Amendment patriotic Southern states.”

“Is Megabucks outsourcing all its operations?”

“Keeping the ER. After tummy tucks and butt lifts, that’s the hospital’s ‘cash cow.’”

“So, then, it’ll have to keep some services like X-Ray and the lab,” I said. “Maybe even a doctor or two.”

“Too expensive,” said Comstock. “Megabucks will hire more residents and foreign-educated doctors, and work them 18 hours a day. More work, less time to complain. Residents will do anything to get experience to pass their boards. May even hire a couple of hospitalists. You know, the ones who graduated at the bottom of their class and can’t even get work in a Free Clinic.”

“I suppose they’ll also do the lab work?” I asked.

“Do you know some of those lab techs are making as much as $30,000 a year! Made sense to lay them off, too.”

“So how will the ER know a victim’s blood chemistry, or if there’s internal injuries?”

“Technology,” said Comstock. “They scan the blood here, and send digital X-Rays to Mexico. Mexican lab technicians—you know, the ones that don’t know about unions and will work for only a few bucks a day—will analyze everything, then text the results back to the U.S.”

“This sounds like it’s not only a way to maximize profits, but also a way to avoid dealing with the President’s health care reform program.”

“Obamacare!” spit out Comstock. “Nothing but socialized medicine.”

“Most countries have forms of socialized medicine,” I countered, “and they not only have good health care but affordable prices to their citizens.”

Comstock put his hands to his ears and began chanting, “We’re Number 1, We’re Number 1.”

“Number 37,” I corrected him. “The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. just below Costa Rico.”

“They’re all Commies,” replied Comstock. “Besides, that study is a decade old.”

“Last year, the independent Commonwealth Fund compared the nations of the United Kingdom against the U.S., and the U.S. ranked seventh of the seven.”

“Yeah, like Americans will go to Canada? It’s covered by snow and run by a queen who can’t even speak English.”

“You and Megabucks are crazy!”

“Possibly,” said Comstock, “but outsourcing is the American way. By the way, do you put ketchup or mustard on a burrito?”

If Dr. King were alive today, there is a good chance the 83-year-old civil rights icon would be standing side-by-side with the African American Harry Holt family in Dickson County, Tennessee, located just 160 miles east of Memphis, whose 150-acre farmland and well were poisoned with the deadly trichloroethylene (TCE) chemical from the leaky Dickson County Landfill.  The landfill is located just 54 feet from the Holt family’s property line.

In 2003, the Holt family and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) sued the city and county of Dickson, the state of Tennessee, and the company that dumped the TCE. And in 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sheila Holt Orsted and her mother Beatrice Holt filed a lawsuit against Dickson City and County governments seeking cleanup of alleged water contamination.  And after more than eight years of litigation, on December 7, 2011, a settlement agreement was finally worked out with the Dickson City and County governments. The county spent more than $3 million and the city almost $1.9 million fighting the black family.  However, the family’s legal battle did not end in December since the state of Tennessee, a defendant in the Holts’ civil rights case, did not settle. The case is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

Here are five reasons why on this MLK Day we should demand eco-justice for the black landowners in Tennessee.

The treatment of the Holt family is a clear civil rights violation of equal protection under the law. The discriminatory and differential treatment of the Holts at the hands of the state of Tennessee is a violation of their civil rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clearly, the U.S. is not yet in a post-racial era. Race still matters.

The right to clean water is a basic human right.  The poisoning of the Holt family’s well water and the failure of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect them from environmental harm are clear human rights violations. On July 28, 2010, the United Nations, through Resolution 64/292, recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights.

The Holts’ toxic nightmare on Eno Road is the “poster child” for environmental racism. The United Church of Christ 2007 Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty report describes the poisoning of the Holts’ well and the government response as the “poster child” for environmental racism.  The Dickson case conforms to the national trend in which African Americans and other people of color make up the majority (56%) of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities, nearly double the percentage in areas beyond two miles (30%).  They also make up more than two-thirds (69%) of the residents in neighborhoods with two or more clustered facilities. Nationally, African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Toxic racism steals black health.  Harry Holt died of cancer in January 2007.  His daughter, Sheila Holt Orsted is recovering from breast cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, even though Caucasian women are slightly more likely to develop breast cancer than African-Americans, African-American women are more likely to die of the disease. The industrial solvent TCE is widely known to be harmful to humans. A 2011 EPA study found that TCE is even more dangerous to people’s health than previously thought—causing kidney and liver cancer, lymphoma and other health problems. This new EPA study lays the groundwork to re-evaluate the federal drinking-water standard for TCE:  5 parts per billion in water, and 1 microgram per cubic meter in air.

Toxic racism robs black wealth.  Poisoning of black land with toxic chemicals robs blacks of their wealth and widens the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Today, the typical white family has 20 times the wealth of the typical black family. That’s the largest gap in 25 years. This theft has robbed African American landowners of wealth that would normally be passed down to their offspring. This phenomenon is not unique to Tennessee. The world learned of this stolen legacy in the discriminatory treatment of black farmers at the hands of the USDA and their long wait for justice. And in December 2010, President Barack Obama signed a bill authorizing $1.25 billion dollars in appropriations for the Pigford II lawsuit after Congress approved the legislation in November 2010. According to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, from emancipation to 1910, blacks amassed 15 million acres of land of which 218,000 black farmers are full or part owners.  A steady decline of black land ownership began after 1910 through theft, intimidation, discrimination, back taxes, and economic loss.

Finally, in the spirit of Dr. King, it is fitting that we lift up the Dickson, Tennessee case, a struggle that epitomizes the civil rights leader’s final campaign in Memphis involving garbage and human rights.

Of all the statistics that describe the devastation wreaked upon Iraq by the illegal war, I find the figures describing the plight of Iraqi children the most troubling and heart-wrenching.   These children are the ones who will determine what sort of future Iraq will have.  Their well-being, or lack of it, will impact on the lives of all Iraqis regardless of sect, religion, or ethnicity.

A study by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists in collaboration with the World Health Organization found that 70% of children (sample 10,000) in the Sha’ab section of North Baghdad are suffering from trauma-related symptoms.

Even if this study is not completely replicated in the whole of Iraq, it clearly shows that huge numbers of children are growing up with mental problems. Many of these childrenhave seen close family members killed; they have walked in streets where they have seen dead and mutilated bodies just lying around. If left untreated, what impact will these mental problems have on the future of Iraq?

First, of course, the suffering, the stress, and the depression that afflicts these children must be alleviated.  All of Iraqi society must see that providing expert medical intervention to help these children cope is a moral imperative.

The effect of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is bad enough for professional soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is hard to imagine the effects on a child growing up amongst such carnage.  In macho Iraqi society, such children, particularly the boys, tend to suffer in silence for fear of being labelled wimps. In any case, expertise to treat such cases is woefully inadequate in Iraq,

It is unfortunate that Iraqi society and possibly the entire Arab world is pervaded by a macho culture that sees people who express fear, anxiety and emotional distress as weak, particularly boys and men.  Education is essential to puncture this erroneous and destructive trait.   People need to be able to express these emotions, and be taught that these are expected reactions to the trauma they have experienced.

The Iraqi government must provide the necessary funds to train professionals to treat these children to relieve their stress and misery, of whom 4.6 million have lost one or both parents. Over half a million children live on the streets prey to physical and emotional abuse.

Surely politicians from whatever sect, supported by the intelligentsia and opinion-formers, could work together to make the goal of helping the children of Iraq a priority. Working collaboratively on such a project would, one hopes, generate trust across the ethnic and sectarian fault lines and may lead to further cooperation.

The West can help by providing scholarships to Iraqis to gain the expertise necessary to save Iraq from the consequences of mental impairments that could condemn Iraqi society to a bleak future, with its ripples fanning out well beyond its borders.

Iraqis need to start somewhere to work together, and what better goal to aim for than the future of Iraq’s children. All Iraqis, instead of continuously engaged in blaming each other, could focus on such a worthy, humane, and moral project, and with its success improve the chances of a peaceful, prosperous future to the benefit of all.

We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses and burros in the southwest, but were disappointed that the cattle industry used its money and influence to shelter politicians from Americans who asked for compassion and understanding of  breeds that roamed freely long before the nation’s “Manifest Destiny.”

We wanted to see the federal government protect wolves, foxes, and coyotes, none of whom attack humans, have no food or commercial value, but are major players in environmental balance. But, we knew that the hunting industry would prevail since they see these canines only as competition.

We wanted to see the Pennsylvania legislature stand up for what is right and courageously end the cruelty of pigeon shoots. But, a pack of cowards left Pennsylvania as the only state where pigeon shoots, with their illegal gambling, are actively held.

For what seems to be decades, we have written against racism and bigotry. But many politicians still believe that gays deserve few, if any, rights; that all Muslims are enemy terrorists; and publicly lie that Voter ID is a way to protect the integrity of the electoral process, while knowing it would disenfranchise thousands of poor and minority citizens.

We will continue to write about the destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater than a decade ago, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax, and mistakenly believe that the benefits of natural gas fracking, with well-paying jobs in a depressed economy, far outweigh the environmental, health, and safety problems they cause.Ee will continue to write against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. They will continue to exist because millionaire legislators will continue to protect those who contribute to political campaigns. Nevertheless, we will continue to speak out against politicians who have sacrificed the lower- and middle-classes in order to protect the one percent.

We will continue to write about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” Until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily mean “better,” we’ll continue to explain why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

The working class successfully launched major counter-attacks against seemingly-entrenched anti-labor politicians in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states. But these battles will be as long and as bitter as the politicians who deny the rights of workers. We will continue to speak out for worker rights, better working conditions, and benefits at least equal to their managers. We don’t expect anything to change in 2012, but we are still hopeful that a minority of business owners who already respect the worker will influence the rest.

There are still those who believe education is best served by programs manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality, and are more than willing to sacrifice quality for numbers. We will continue to write about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect for the tenets of academic integrity.

Against great opposition, the President and Congress passed sweeping health care reform. But, certain members of Congress, all of whom have better health care than most Americans, have proclaimed they will dismantle the program they derisively call “Obamacare.”

During this new year, we will still be writing about the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny Americans the basics of human life, essentials that most civilized countries already give their citizens.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home. The War in Iraq is now over, but the war in Afghanistan continues. The reminder of these wars will last as long as there are hospitals and cemeteries.

We had written dozens of stories against the Bush–Cheney Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. We had hoped that a new president, a professor of Constitutional law, would stop the attack upon our freedoms and rights. But the PATRIOT Act was extended, and new legislation was enacted that reduces the rights and freedoms of all citizens. At all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been minced by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement. We can hope that the man we elected will realize that compromise works only when the opposition isn’t entrenched in a never-ending priority not of improving the country, but of keeping him from a second term. Perhaps now, three years after his inauguration, President Obama will disregard the disloyal opposition and unleash the fire and truth we saw in the year before his election, and will speak out even more forcefully for the principles we believed when we, as a nation, gave him the largest vote total of any president in history.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal.  So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

But there I was, last Friday, in this hotel room in Atlanta, a city pretending there’s no Depression, chewing my complimentary morning donut, and Today is telling us about the “new face of American poverty.”

“More than 49 million Americans now live below the poverty line and a number of them like the family you’re about to meet propelled into bankruptcy by a one-two punch of job loss and a catastrophic health crisis.”

Wow! US television finally grabs the Big Issue.

This white suburban family called the Kleins have lost their home to eviction. They’re completely broke, because one of their kids got a tumor in her face. They have no insurance so the $100,000-plus medical bills wiped them out.

They live with neighbors and they hoped to at least get their kids a couple pair of underwear as a Christmas gift.

But if you think America doesn’t give a crap about the cancerous growth of poverty, just keep watching: The Today reporter takes the white family to WalMart where the bubbly journalist gushes, “The wonderful people of WalMart opened up their stores and their aisles and their hearts. The store is your oyster, Michelle!”

Then some WalMartian PR person tells the bankrupt mom to address the issue of long-term unemployment, “Let’s go shopping!”

And you thought America was cold-hearted, just because the Republicans tried to block unemployment insurance this Christmas for three million families.

On their free shopping spree, the Kleins got laptops and a Kindle, and a big-ass TV and all the good things that WalMart can provide.

And if you think WalMart has shown how selfless and caring Americans are, just wait until you find out what the Today show is giving America’s desperate poor: Simply the best-est gift ever …

“We saved the best for last!” The reporter tells the Kleins that NBC is flying them to New York, “to be on the Today show, to be on our set with Matt Lauer and Ann Curry!”

Matt and Ann! Both of them! Well, I bet they wouldn’t do that in North Korea or Sweden! Only in America!

Mr. Klein is so happy he’s meeting Ann that he doesn’t seem care anymore that he lost his job at Ford Motor. He just has his family. In some other family’s house, of course. But that’s a detail.

And if you thought this was just some cheap publicity stunt by WalMart, dig this, Mr. Cynical: WalMart is going to pay for all the Klein’s medical bills for a full year! And to pay for it, WalMart’s 1.4 million employees will not have all their medical bills covered for the year. Now, that’s generosity!

(This heartwarming segment of the Today show about the Klein kids, by the way, is sponsored by — no points for guessing: WalMart.)

But then I thought: wait a minute. What about ObamaCare? Once the plan is in place, no American can be denied insurance, even someone with a tumor in their face.

Americans love to hate ObamaCare. But isn’t that more valuable to the Kleins than a TV screen with no house to put it in?

Now, many of my friends will be surprised to hear me say this, as I’ve been quite skeptical about the accomplishments of the Pope of Hope. But let’s admit that Barack Obama tried to save the Kleins from medical-bill devastation, that he is trying to get them some unemployment insurance, trying (if on sketchy terms) to save the auto industry, all in the face of resistance of America’s hatred of Socialist Government.

Maybe we don’t need Santa Claus. Maybe we need Anti-Claus: A skinny ‘Muslim’ from Kenya squirming down your chimney!

America’s problem seems to be that it can only be cruel 364 days a year. Christmas is that time of year when the United States of Scrooge takes a vacation from heartless profiteering and the nasty joy Americans get, that “I’m-not-one-of-those-losers” frisson.

Listen to Rick and Newt and Mitt and Michele and Ron and what you get is the Great American F***’em! They lost their jobs? F***’em! Their kid has a tumor and they don’t have health insurance? F***’em!

Unless, of course, it’s Christmas and you have to look at the tumor on TV. Then, it’s like, Someone buy them a big-screen television so we don’t feel bad.

Santa’s erstaz elf, Bill O’Reilly, keeps talking about the “War on Christmas.” Because one day a year he has to dress up in Good Will to All Men drag. He can deck his halls with bags of bullshit make-believe kindness.

The rest of the year, he’s jerking off while talking dirty to his horrified female producers and raking in millions from the yahoos who haven’t lost their jobs yet.

So that’s it: for me, no more chestnuts roasting on an open fire. My chestnuts have gone down with my Lehman bonds, anyway. I’m declaring war on Christmas.

Don’t like that, O’Reilly? Then eat my shorts — with cranberry sauce.

Surgery for kids with cancer, a house to live in that’s not a relatives’ basement, and a job making something other than “financial products”… These are rights, not gifts. They don’t come down the chimney, they come from a community that can set aside its bred-in-the-bone meanness for more than one day a year.

And to all a good night.

Merry, um, Festivus, from the Palast Investigative Team.

In her book, Nelson writes that “the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological.” On a practical level, the BPP provided free community health care services, including preventative education. Simultaneously, the BPP railed against the medical-industrial complex, declaring that health care was “a right and not a privilege.” Ronald “Doc” Satchel, the minister of health for the Chicago BPP, wrote in the BPP newspaper that “the medical profession within this capitalist society…is composed generally of people working for their own benefit and advancement rather than the humane aspects of medical care.” A newsletter published by the Southern California chapter argued that “poor people in general and black people in particular are not given the best care available. Our people are treated like animals, experimented on and made to wait long hours in waiting rooms.”

By 1970, People’s Free Medical Clinics had become a requirement for every BPP chapter. In 1972, the BPP revised point six of the founding ten-point-platform, adding a demand for “completely free healthcare for all black and oppressed people…We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”

While citing Martin Luther King’s 1966 declaration that “of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane,” one chapter provides an important historical context for the BPP’s health activism by detailing what Nelson calls “the long medical civil rights movement,” that began long before the BPP. “Mobilized in response to the distinctly hazardous risks posed by segregated medical facilities, professions, societies, and schools; deficient or nonexistent healthcare services; medical maltreatment; and scientific racism, activism challenges to medical discrimination have been an important focal point for African American protest efforts and organizations. The Panthers were heirs to health activism that directly reflected tactics drawn from this tradition,” writes Nelson.

Nelson says the central focus of her scholarly work is on “the intersections of science, technology, medicine and inequality.” She has co-edited Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (scheduled to be released in March, 2012). To learn more, please visit Alondra’s web site.)

Angola 3 News: In our recent interview with Billy X Jennings from It’s About Time BPP, one theme explored was how, with rare exception, the mainstream media has misrepresented the BPP. However, it seems that even the radical and anti-capitalist media has generally underreported the health activism that is the focus if your book. How did the BPP’s health activism relate to their better-known stances against white supremacy, capitalism, and police violence?

Alondra Nelson: Yes, it’s true. The Black Panthers’ health activism has been under-reported across the ideological spectrum. Their critics obviously did not want to cast them in a positive light. And, as your question suggests, even the Party’s supporters said little about this important aspect of the BPP’s work. I think it’s plausible to say that many on the Right and some of us on the Left — in very different ways and for completely opposite reasons — were captivated by a vision of the Party that did not include its health politics. Depictions of African Americans working in their neighborhoods, wearing white medical coats, was unspectacular compared to images of Black radicals wearing leather jackets and carrying guns.

It is ironic that our collective memory of the Panthers remains so incomplete because their health activism — from their political writing about medical issues in The Black Panther newspaper to their practice of DIY healthcare — exemplified the anti-racist, anti-capitalist stance for which they are known. In fact, the reality of health inequality brought the BPP’s political perspective into sharper relief because it offered stark and specific examples of how economic and racial oppression literally damaged bodies, families and communities.

As you know, the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a name that reflected that protecting communities from police brutality was a primary motivation for the group’s founding. The BPP exposed the misuse of power whether it was at the hands of police officers or physicians. So, it’s also useful to think of the Panthers as being engaged in medical self-defense.

In Los Angeles, Party members Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, nursing professor Marie Branch, Dr. Terry Kupers, and others established that chapter’s People’s Free Medical Clinic. But, like all of the BPP’s health activism, this work extended beyond the clinic, including in this case, confronting police brutality. (Branch shared meeting notes with me from the 1970s from her personal archive where the formation of BPP health programs and prisoners’ protection from medical discrimination were seamlessly discussed). The LA Panthers advocated for, and provided health care for, incarcerated persons; some of these men and women needed medical attention because they had been abused while in police custody.

A3N: How does the story of the BPP’s health activism, as presented in your book, contribute to and challenge the traditional presentations of the BPP by both the mainstream and alternative media?

AN: Body and Soul offers an account of the BPP that moves away from the narrow confines of the so-called “culture wars,” in which the Party can only ever be a positive force or a negative element. Paying attention to the Party’s health activism calls into question the inaccurate stereotype of the activists as aimless thugs.

We also gain a different perspective on things we thought we already knew about the BPP; like the fact that the Panthers were avid followers of Fanon, Che and Mao, whose writings were required reading for all members. Through the prism of health, one can see very clearly the influence of Fanon’s dissection of colonial medicine in Algeria on the Panthers’ understanding of medical discrimination in the U.S. We can take seriously the fact that Fanon and Che were physicians as well as political thinkers. We can appreciate that Mao, who established the “barefoot doctors” lay health worker program, made available to the Party not only broad revolutionary principles, but also specific ideas about health care as political practice.

A3N: What do you think were the most successful tactics employed by the BPP as part of its health activism? Strategically speaking, what lessons from the BPP’s health activism do you think are most applicable for today’s activists to learn from?

AN: In addition to setting up their own clinics, they used legal approaches not dissimilar from the NAACP to voice their opposition to problematic biomedical research. The Party leadership realized early on that “policing the police” would not be the only method they used in their effort to topple racism and capitalism. The Panthers were pretty flexible tacticians.

One of the lessons that the BPP offers today’s activists is that they should be more loyal to the desired outcome than to the tactic. The sit-in came to be associated with the southern civil rights movement just as the mic check is now emblematic of the Occupy movement. But these groups also used other tactics: marching, occupying, sermons, etc. Social movements are dynamic phenomena; circumstances are constantly changing. So too should tactics.

One of the BPP’s more fascinating tactics was what I call, after sociologist Lily Hoffman, the “politics of knowledge.” Working in this vein, the Panthers engaged and reinterpreted scientific ideas about race and disease. They reinterpreted scientific theories about the causes of sickle cell anemia, for example, by placing the prevalence of the disease in the context of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the medical-industrial complex and contemporary racism.

The Panthers’ use of this tactic — the politics of knowledge — should remind today’s activists that “framing” matters. It is important to be able to translate political arguments — health-related ones and other ones — into language, into stories, really, that resonate with the broader public. The Party could be expert at this.

The Nixon administration and mainstream philanthropies would ultimately co-opt the issue of sickle cell anemia. But the BPP played a key role in raising awareness about the disease and in situating it in a powerful political language that could mobilize communities.

A3N: Along with chapters focusing on the BPP’s free medical clinics and the campaign to educate the Black community about, and test for, Sickle Cell Anemia, another chapter focuses on the BPP’s involvement with a diverse coalition that successfully organized against the formation of the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA in 1973. You write that BPP felt that the Center’s “biologization of violence” line of research would ultimately “craft a narrative of Black and Latino violent pathology” that would serve to “make already marginalized populations more vulnerable to medicine as a tool of social control,” and “effect the further criminalization of social groups—black males, the incarcerated—and in turn justify calls for increased surveillance and social control.”

While writing that the defeat of the Center was a “notable triumph,” you note further that it “was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory for Newton and his allies, as blocking resources to the center as an entity would not prevent individual researchers from pursuing other sources of support for their investigations.” With this in mind, how has biologization of violence research progressed since the 1970s? How much influence has it had on public policy?

AN: Attempts to attribute the causes of violence to biology (and closely related to this, criminality) are a very old story. In the late 19th century, the influential Italian criminologist, Lombroso, claimed that new methods (e.g., phrenology) and theories (e.g., social Darwinism) showed that the tendency toward criminal behavior was inherited.

More than one hundred years later, similar ideas persist. In the 1990s, during the first Bush presidency, Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, set-up a “violence initiative” to explore the biological models of social unrest in urban settings. Your readers may recall that around the same time another Bush official, referencing studies on violence among non-human primates, said that disproportionately black and brown “inner cities” were like “jungles.” (The initiative and controversial commentary around it would recall the heated debate the Panthers were engaged in over plans to form a “violence center” at UCLA in the 1970s that may have had an especially harmful impact on black and Latino youth and men).

Recently behavioral researchers have aimed to link the presence of what has been called the “warrior gene” to violent, criminal behavior. At a time when we are learning even more about the complexities of genetic inheritance, about the epigenome and the systems biology, it simply does not make sense that one single genetic marker could have such a dramatic, determinative effect.

A3N: What role has biologization of violence research played in justifying the mass incarceration explosion that began in the 1970s, increasing the prison population from 300,000 to 2.4 million today, giving the US the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prisoner population in the world?

AN: To the extent that the longstanding efforts that I have just described have kept in circulation the fallacy that there is a definitive link between human biology and violence, theses ideas have indeed served as a justification for the expansion of the carceral system.

This is where the policy implications of the biologization of violence come to the fore: If violence is “in your genes” or “in your blood,” then one can justify policies that lock people away because these people are “lost causes.”

And, in turn, the idea that there is a innate predisposition to violence contributes to the decline of support for rehabilitation and reparative justice programs.

A3N: Since the 1970s, has the US come any closer to realizing the BPP’s public health goals? If BPP co-founder Huey P Newton were alive today, what do you think he would say about President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act?”

AN: The revised ten-point platform was prescient in capturing one side of the recent debates about widening health inequality in the U.S. and what to do about it. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Newton and the Party would have appreciated the historic nature of what President Obama accomplished — a feat that many administrations before his had variously tried to accomplish and failed to do. Perhaps Newton would have even observed that the Affordable Care Act is a very small step in the right direction.

However, some journalists and pundits have noted the similarity between President Obama’s historic Affordable Care Act and the national insurance plan that former President Nixon backed unsuccessfully. Given the animus between the Party and Nixon, and the way this administration and its agents worked to destroy the BPP, it is hard to imagine that Newton would have been in strong support of recent healthcare reform legislation. There would have certainly been opposition to the fact that President Obama’s plan is a boon for insurance companies because the Panthers demanded, “healthcare for the people, not for profit.”

Bayer launched Yaz in 2006 as a pill that goes “beyond birth control” to treat acne and severe PMS, all the while avoiding the water retention of traditional birth control pills. But soon, previously healthy teenagers experienced “beyond birth control” effects they hadn’t expected. Fifteen-year-old Katie Ketner had her gallbladder removed after taking Yaz, Susan Gallenos had a stroke and part of her skull removed and Michelle Pfleger, 18, collapsed and died of a pulmonary thromboemboli, according to published reports.

The FDA could have held hearings into the safety of the Yaz ingredient, drospirenone, as early as 2002, instead of this month. That’s when the newsletter, Worst Pills Best Pills, warned that drospirenone, just approved in the pill Yasmin, “has never before been marketed in the US,” and could cause “serious heart and other health problems such as a change in acid balance of the blood and muscle weakness.”

But instead of investigating the drug nine years ago, the FDA decided to ban the newsletter’s editor, Sidney Wolfe, MD, head of the Public Citizen Health Research Group from voting at this month’s Yaz hearings, because the newsletter had termed the drug a “do not use.” The FDA accused Wolfe of an “intellectual conflict of interest.”

This is not the first time the FDA has silenced Wolfe. During 2010 hearings about Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ fibromyalgia drug Rekinla, Wolfe’s microphone was turned off when he asked why the manufacturer’s guilty plea and $20 million penalty for illegal marketing a different drug was never brought up at the hearings. Was it not relevant?

Jazz’s off-label marketing, “is a matter related to compliance and it’s not a matter that’s related to the topic under discussion today,” explained Bob Rappaport, MD, director of the FDA Division of Anesthesia & Analgesia Products. The only significance of bringing up the wrongdoing case would be to, “impugn the sponsor in the hopes that the committee would be punitive towards them in your deliberations and recommendations regarding this application,” said Rappaport. Why should a $20 million guilty plea affect future approvals?

Not only was the Jazz guilty plea irrelevant, the FDA did not even know about it before Wolfe’s disclosure said published reports.

Nor is this is the first time the FDA’s right hand does not know what the FDA’s left hand is doing. Just three months before a major label change for the antipyschotic drug Seroquel, Janet Woodcock, MD, head of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research told Project on Government Oversight a warning about mixing drugs would not happen.

“At this point, there is agreement within CDER that an interaction between quetiapine [Seroquel] and methadone that confers unreasonable risks to patients is exceedingly unlikely and, therefore, no further action is indicated regarding the labeling for these products or for related communication initiatives,” she writes in a rambling, defensive letter.  But the ink was barely dry on the letter before the FDA announced that Seroquel “should be avoided” in combination with at least 12 other medicines including heart rhythm drugs, synthetic opioids like methadone, antibiotics, anti-infectives and other antipsychotics. Families’ of soldiers and others who died while taking Seroquel had said exactly that for years.

When a reporter asked about the apparent egg on the FDA’s face, Sandy Walsh, an FDA spokesperson, said Woodcock’s letter was still correct, “because the F.D.A. had found no biological basis for a problem or unusual numbers of deaths at normal dosages.” In other words, the deaths were just from drug interactions and overdoses. Whew. The decision to suspend Wolfe’s voting rights was also agreed upon by Woodcock.

Of course, the FDA’s claim that Wolfe has an “intellectual conflict of interest” reduces anyone who believes in consumer rights or governmental justice to the level of a six-digit pharma lobbyist. Holding an opinion, holding a lucrative pharma consultancy–same idea right?

In fact, FDA advisory committees are so packed with pharma consultants, its Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee was actually chaired by a paid AstraZeneca speaker until 2009, even as it reviewed AstraZeneca drugs! The only reason AstraZeneca speaker Jorge Armenteros, MD was removed from voting and then his chairmanship  was because the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed the extreme conflict of interest. The FDA would probably call the Inquirer’s reporting an “intellectual conflict of interest.”

Bouldergrass had begun his health crusade more than a decade ago when he began reading more than the sports pages of his local newspaper, subscribed to his first magazine, and decided TV news could be informative if it didn’t mention anything about wars, famines, and poverty.

Based on what he read and saw in the media, Bouldergrass moved from smog-bound Los Angeles to a rural community in scenic green Vermont, gave up alcohol and a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and was immediately hospitalized for having too much oxygen in his body.

To burn off some of that oxygen, he joined America’s “beautiful people” on the jogging paths where the media helped him believe he was sweating out the bad karma. In less than a year, the karma left his body which was now coexisting with leg cramps, fallen arches, and several compressed disks. But at least he was as healthy as all the ads told him he could be.

To make sure he didn’t get skin cancer from being in the sun too long, he slathered four pounds of No. 35 sun block on his body every time he ran, and went to suntan parlors twice a week to get that “healthy glow” advertisers told him he needed. He stopped blocking when he learned that suntan parlors weren’t good for your health, and that the ingredients in the lotions could cause cancer. So, he wore a jogging suit that covered more skin than an Arab woman’s black chador with veil—and developed a severe case of heat exhaustion.

From ultrathin models and billions of dollars in weight-reducing advertising that told him “thin was in,” he began a series of crash diets. When he was down to 107 pounds, advertising told him he needed to “bulk up” to be a “real man.” So, he began lifting weights and playing racquetball three hours a day. Four groin pulls and seven back injuries later, he had just 6 percent body fat, and a revolving charge account with his local orthopedist.

Several years earlier, Bouldergrass had stopped eating veal as part of a protest of America’s inhumane treatment of animals destined for supermarkets. Now, in an “enlightened” age of health, he gave up all meat, not because of mankind’s cruelty to animals, but because the media revealed that vascular surgeons owned stock in meat packing companies. Besides, it was the “healthy” thing to do.

He gave up pasta when he saw a TV report about the microscopic creepy crawlers that infest most dough.

He gave up drinking soda and began drinking juice, until he read a report that said apple juice had higher than normal levels of arsenic.

He ate soup because it was healthy and so Mmm Mmm Good, until he learned that soup had more salt than Lot’s wife. When he found low-salt soup, he again had a cup a day—until last month when he gave it up because a Harvard study revealed that soup cans contained significant amounts of Bisphenol-A-, which can lead to cancer and heart disease.

For a couple of years, lured by a multi-million dollar ad campaign and innumerable articles in the supermarket tabloids, Bouldergrass ate only oat bran muffins for breakfast and a diet of beta carotenes for lunch, until he found himself spending more time in the bathroom than at work. He eliminated the muffins entirely after reading an article that told him eating oatmeal, bran, and hood ornaments from Buick Roadsters were bad for your health.

Bouldergrass gave up milk when he learned that acid rain fell on to pastures and was eaten by cows. When he learned that industrial conglomerates had dumped everything from drinking water to radioactive waste into streams and rivers, he stopped eating fish. For a while, based upon conflicting reports in the media, he juggled low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carbohydrate diets until his body systems dropped into the low end of inertia.

At the movies, he smuggled in packets of oleo to squeeze onto plain popcorn until he was bombarded by news stories that revealed oleo was as bad as butter and that most theatrical popcorn was worse than an all-day diet of sirloin.

When he learned that coffee and chocolate were unhealthy, he gave up an addiction to getting high from caffeine and sugar, and was now forced to work 12-hour days without any stimulants other than the fear of what his children were doing while he was at work.

Unfortunately, he soon had to give up decaffeinated coffee and sugarless candy with cyclamates since both caused laboratory mice to develop an incurable yen to listen to music from the Grand Funk Railroad.

He gave up pizza when the media reported that certain “health care investigators” claimed pizza was little more than junk food. But, he began eating several slices a day to improve his health when Congress, fattened by lobbyists campaigns, last month declared frozen pizza was a vegetable. He figured it made sense, since three decades earlier the Reagan administration had declared catsup to be a vegetable, and five years ago the Department of Agriculture decided butter-coated french fries were a vegetable.

Left with a diet of fruits and vegetables, he was lean and trim. Until he accidentally stumbled across a protest by an environmental group which complained that the use of pesticides on farm crops was a greater health hazard than the bugs the pesticides were supposed to kill. Even the city’s polluted water couldn’t clean off all the pesticides. That’s also when he stopped taking showers, and merely poured a gallon of distilled water over his head every morning.

For weeks, he survived on buckets of vitamins because the magazines told him that’s what he should do. Then, after reading an article that artificial vitamins shaped like the Flintstones caused dinosaur rot, he also gave them up.

The last time I saw Bouldergrass, he was in a hospital room claiming to see visions of monster genetic tomatoes squishing their way toward him. He was mumbling something about cholesterol and high density lipoproteins. Tubes were sticking out of every opening in his emaciated body, as well as a couple of openings that hadn’t been there when he first checked in.

In one last attempt to regain his health, Bouldergrass enlisted in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move army. But the only movement he was doing was when the nurses flipped him so he wouldn’t get bed sores.

Shortly before he died, he pulled me near him, asked that I write his obit, and in a throaty whisper begged, “Make sure you tell them that thanks to what I learned from the media, I died healthy.”

Well, Ambien is back with a new name for a new type of insomnia this holiday season.

Intermezzo is marketed for “middle-of-the-night” insomnia, one of many varieties of insomnia Pharma has rolled out to churn the insomnia drug market. Others are chronic, acute, transient, initial, delayed-onset, and terminal insomnia and don’t forget non-restful sleep which can co-exist with all of the above.

Of course, the only thing more lucrative to Pharma than a new variation on a disease is a new patent on an existing drug because no research and development is necessary. Remember how Prozac resurfaced as the PMS pill Sarafem? The antidepressant Effexor was tweaked into Pristiq? And most recently Neurontin resurfaced as Horizant, a treatment for restless legs (though many say Neurontin causes restless legs)?

Kennedy was not the only person to walk, drive and engage in purposeful behavior in an Ambien blackout. Law enforcement officials reported that traffic accidents increased under Ambien, with some drivers not even recognizing the police officers there to arrest them. (“Dude–where’s my car?”) Ambien’s manufacturer was forced to publish ads telling people if they were going to take Ambien, to get in bed and stay there after Kennedy’s over zealous parliamentarianism. (Or you’ll break out in handcuffs, added cynics.) The FDA issued warnings about the potential of “complex sleep-related behaviors” on Ambien and other sleeping pills which may include “sleep-driving, making phone calls and preparing and eating food (while asleep).”

In fact, it was EWI– eating while intoxicated or “preparing and eating food (while asleep)” — not DWIs that gave Ambien its worst rap. Fit and sexy people awoke amid mountains of pizza, Krispy Kreme and Häagen-Dazs cartons consumed by their evil twin, on Ambien. Weeks of dieting and treadmill time shot to hell.

The new sleeping pill also served to occlude three uncomfortable Big Pharma settlements right before Thanksgiving. Did anyone notice that Merck pled guilty to criminal marketing of the painkiller Vioxx and agreed to pay $950 million before the holiday? In addition to the $4.85 billion it has already paid to victims?

Vioxx was billed as a “super-aspirin” for everyday pain until it was removed from the market in 2004 for doubling heart attack risks and causing between 27,000 and 50,000 heart events and deaths. Merck knew the heart risks and pushed Vioxx for non-approved uses according to published reports, but no corporate executives ever went up the river. “There was no basis for a finding of high-level management participation in the violation,” Merck’s pre-Thanksgiving news release self-congratulates.

Then there’s Pfizer. The drug giant agreed to pay more than $60 million to resolve federal probes into alleged bribes to overseas doctors to use Pfizer drugs, reported the Wall Street Journal before the holiday. Penalties were probably reduced because Pfizer was willing to help the government by “ratting” on its competitors, says the Journal.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reported before Thanksgiving that Abbott is about to settle lawsuits that it illegally marketed the epilepsy drug Depakote to nursing home directors, geriatric doctors and other long-term care facilities and greased palms with kickbacks.  Abbott has set aside $1.5 billion for a settlement, says the Trib.

While the Merck, Pfizer and Abbott settlements may look sizeable, copping to a settlement allows drug companies to keep the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement which is their lifeblood. Profits from the alleged wrongdoing usually dwarf penalties, too. “Even with these large fines, it is still good business to promote drugs illegally,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a project at Georgetown University Medical Center.

The public barely noticed the million and billion dollar settlements. They were too busy eating, sleeping and maybe both.

In June, Pfizer announced it was ending arsenic-containing chicken feed which no one realized they were eating anyway but its arsenic-containing Histostat, fed to turkeys, continues. Poultry growers use inorganic arsenic, a recognized carcinogen, for “growth promotion, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation,” says the FDA. Yum.

And in August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation’s third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak, linked to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states. Even as it closed its Springdale, Arkansas plant, steam cleaned its machinery and added “two additional anti-bacterial washes” to its processing operations, 185,000 more pounds were recalled the next month from the same plant.

Since the mad cow and Chinese melamine scandals of the mid 2000′s, a lot more people think about the food their food ate than before. But fewer people think about the drugs their food ingested. Food animal drugs seldom rate Capitol Hill hearings which is just fine with Big Pharma animals divisions since if people knew the antibiotics, heavy metals, growth promotants, vaccines, anti-parasite drugs and feed additives used on the farm, they would lose their appetite. Besides, people aren’t Animal Pharma’s primary customers anyway and the long term safety of animals drugs isn’t an issue, since patients are supposed to die.

One of the late Sen.Ted Kennedy’s last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Because antibiotics make animals use feed more efficiently so they eat less and control disease in confinement farming’s packed conditions at the same time, they are practically the fifth food group. On a turkey farm with five million hens, antibiotics would save almost 2,000 tons of feed a year says an article in a poultry journal.

And when the FDA tried to ban cephalosporins in 2008, one type of antibiotic crucial for treating salmonella in children, it became apparent just what Kennedy was up against. Two months after the FDA announced a hearing about a cephalosporin “Order of Prohibition” in agriculture, the regulatory action had morphed into a “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry” thanks to lobbyists from the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries.

“Order of Prohibition”… “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry,” same idea, right?

At the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry hearings, the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt defended antibiotics as a cost savings to consumers. “The increased costs to raise turkeys without antibiotics is real,” he said. “Today at retail outlets here in the D.C. market, a conventionally raised turkey costs $1.29 per pound. A similar whole turkey that was produced without antibiotics costs $2.29 per pound. With the average consumer purchasing a 15 pound whole turkey, that would mean there would be $15 tacked on to their grocery bill.”

Conventionally grown turkeys are even a better deal when you consider the cost of antibiotics!

And antibiotic-based turkey farming is downright green, said Rybolt, calling 227 acre turkey operations, “small family farms.” Without them, more land would be needed to grow crops and house the animals because of the “decrease in density.” And, with 175,550 more tons of feed needed, there would be “an increase in manure.”

When the FDA capitulated to industry and turned the cephalosporin prohibition into a salute to animal “advances,” former Kansas governor and former dairyman John Carlin, asked, “What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn’t gone away.”

This month, the FDA also rejected petitions to ban human antibiotics like penicillins, tetracyclines and sulfonamides in livestock filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned scientists, some filed over 12 years ago. Why?  “FDA cannot withdraw approval of a new animal drug until the legally-mandated process,” said an FDA spokesman. The process includes an “evidentiary hearing,” perhaps like the cephalosporin advances.

Of course. germs in turkey and other meat, even antibiotic resistant germs, are neutralized by cooking–but drug residues are not. A report last year from the USDA’s inspector general accuses U.S. slaughter houses of releasing products to the public with excessive drug levels in them and charges that, “The effects of these residues on human beings who consume such meat are a growing concern.”

Nor are the antibiotics just in the meat! Scientists at the University of Minnesota found antibiotic residues in corn, green onions and cabbage after growing them on soil fertilized with livestock manure. The drugs siphoned right up from the soil in just six weeks.

A quick look at the Code of Federal Regulations for turkey drugs does not whet you appetite for Thanksgiving. There are several arsenic turkey drugs approved to provide an, “increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency,” say the official guidelines. But they are also “dangerous for ducks, geese, and dogs,” and must be discontinued,  “5 days before slaughtering animals for human consumption to allow elimination of the drug from edible tissues.” Whew.

Halofuginone, another drug given to turkeys to kill pathogens, “is toxic to fish and aquatic life” and “an irritant to eyes and skin,” says the Federal Code. “Avoid contact with skin, eyes, or clothing” and “Keep out of lakes, ponds, and streams.” Bon appetit.

Drug-based farming has cut the time to “grow” an animal almost in half while doubling the market size of the animal itself.  For example, chickens were once slaughtered at fourteen weeks, weighing two pounds and are now slaughtered at seven weeks, weighing four and six pounds.

But the brave new food techniques come at a price because the animals’ organs can not always keep up with the metabolic frenzy. Birds “fed and managed in such a way that they are growing rapidly,” are at risk of sudden death from cardiac problems and aortic rupture, say poultry scientists.

Growth drugs in turkeys may also “result in leg weakness or paralysis,” says the Federal Code, a side effect that a turkey slaughter house worker reports firsthand. Many turkeys arrive at the House of Raeford, in Raeford, NC with legs broken or dislocated, he told me in an interview and, “When you try to remove them from their crates, their legs twist completely around, limp and offering no resistance.” The turkeys, “must have been in a lot of pain,” says the worker, but they don’t cry out. “In fact the only sound as you hang them, he says, is the “trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load.”

The undercover employee’s reports of the “live hanger” culture at the House of Raeford, in which workers pulled the heads and legs off turkeys when they were stuck in crates and worse, led to Denny’s suspending its business from Raeford, the nation’s seventh largest turkey producer. The slaughter house is also infamous for a chlorine spill that killed a worker in 2003, an ammonia spill that evacuated  two towns the next year and a murdered worker in 2006.

Still, the mother of all turkey drugs is the asthma-like drug ractopamine, marketed as the “Medicated Tom Turkey Feed” Topmax. Approved for turkeys only two years ago, figures for Topmax use in turkeys are not yet available but the same drug is now used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

There are two reasons ractopamine has raised safety questions. One is that its label reads:

WARNING: The active ingredient in Topmax, ractopamine hydrochloride, is a beta-adrenergic agonist. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Not for use in humans. Keep out of the reach of children. The Topmax 9 formulation (Type A Medicated Article) poses a low dust potential under usual conditions of handling and mixing. When mixing and handling Topmax, use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask. Operators should wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. If accidental eye contact occurs, immediately rinse eyes thoroughly with water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. The material safety data sheet contains more detailed occupational safety information. To report adverse effects, access medical information, or obtain additional product information, call 1-800-428-4441.

The other reason is that ractopamine is not withdrawn at slaughter. In fact, it is begun as the animals near slaughter and started during turkeys’ last 14 days. It is actually pumping through their systems as they arrive on the killing floor.

Like antibiotics and arsenic, ractopamine is given to turkeys to make them grow faster. It is similar to clenbuterol, a performance enhancing sports drug that is banned in the US, for both humans and livestock, and elsewhere. But ractopamine is also banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, where 1,700 ractopamine “poisonings” were reported and ractopamine-produced pork was seized in 2007. (You have to worry when China calls a food unsafe.)

Ractopamine caused actual riots in Taiwan in 2007 when 3,500 Tawainese pig farmers, some carrying pigs, threw dung and rotten eggs at police and military soldiers over the rumor that a ractopamine ban would be lifted.  “Get out, USA pork” and “We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine,” they chanted for hours according to Taiwan News.

Reports of ractopamine’s lack of safety are not hard to find.  In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator. Ractopamine residues “represent a genuine risk to consumers,” wrote a medical  journal article, citing “long plasma half-lives, and relatively slow rates of elimination.” And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open eyelids and enlarged heart.

The FDA is well aware of ractopamine’s downside. In 2003, three years after the drug was approved for use in U.S. pigs, the FDA accused its manufacturer, Elanco, of withholding information about ractopamine’s “safety and effectiveness” and “adverse animal drug experiences” in a fourteen-page warning letter.

Elanco, said the FDA, failed to report furious pig farmers phoning the company about “dying animals,” “downer pigs,” animals “down and shaking,” “hyperactivity” and “vomiting after eating feed with Paylean,” and also suppressed clinical trial information. But, thanks to same probable lobbying that reversed the cephalosporin ban, the FDA approved ractopamine for cattle the following year and for use in turkeys in 2009! Last year, the FDA enlarged the approval for cattle.

Turkey meat produced with ractopamine is not the same as normal meat by Elanco’s own admission! “Alterations” in muscle were seen in turkeys fed ractopamine like an increase in “mononuclear cell infiltrate and myofiber degeneration,” says its 2008 new drug application documents. There was “an increase in the incidence of cysts,” and differences, some “significant,” in the weight of organs like hearts, kidneys and livers. (“Enlarged hearts” had been seen in test rats feed ractopamine in the Canadian studies.)

Still, ractopamine, like antibiotics, is being hailed as “green” and for lowering the carbon footprint. It has “positive environmental benefits for livestock producers in terms of decreased nitrogen and phosphorus excretions,” extols one journal article. It results in a “reduced amount of total animal waste,” unless, of course, you count the manure coming from Big Pharma.

While the 1% has trillions of dollars — more wealth than the bottom 90%! — the 99% struggles to get by with massive debt, high unemployment, mounting foreclosures, costly and deadly wars, declining social services, threats against Social Security, relentless bills, regressive taxation, crumbling infrastructure, rising tuition, crowded classrooms, predatory banks, an anemic democracy, and chronic anxiety. This level of gross inequality is patently unfair and must be remedied.

Wall Street is everywhere. Where are you?

In San Francisco, there is a bakery called Arizmendi, named after the founder of the Mondragón cooperative movement in the Basque region of Spain. It is a worker-owned collective, so instead of the profit being sucked out by someone of the 1% who doesn’t work there, the workers are paid well, have good benefits, treat themselves kindly, money is reinvested in the business, food is donated to shelters, and the workers make their own collective decisions, while producing high-quality vegetarian food, so there is no exploitation and no sense of alienation. Arizmendi is an anomaly, but it doesn’t have to be.

While average real wages are essentially flat and top marginal tax rates for people and corporations way down over the past couple of generations, there have been increases in hours worked, worker productivity, corporate profits, CEO salaries, financial speculation, the stock market, millionaires and billionaires, international free trade agreements, foreign investment, outsourcing, military spending, U.S. foreign military bases, imprisonment, debt, tuition, health care
costs, rent, homelessness, depression, and anxiety.

So, although the causes and demands of the Occupy Movement seem to vary, they all cluster around a core principle: support the need of the 99%, not the greed of the 1%.

Especially in this richest country in the world:

If we had economic policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have poverty, deprivation, and many of the social problems associated with poverty and deprivation.

If we had tax policies for the 99%, we would have steeply progressive taxation, as we did in the 1950s, to create a fairer, more stable, middle-class society without the extremes of obscene wealth and obscene poverty. Further, we would tax destructive activities the most, while lessening or eliminating taxes on necessities and productive goods and services. It is simply unjust that GE, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Boeing, Bank of America, Verizon, Citi, Goldman Sachs, FedEx, and about two-thirds of corporations paid less federal taxes — zero! — than any individual taxpayer in recent years.

If we had jobs policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have unemployment, there wouldn’t be involuntary underemployment, and we’d have many more meaningful jobs with living wages and safe working conditions. There is always much work to be done and many people who want to work, yet jobs are often scarce.

If we had housing policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have homelessness, unaffordable housing, and inadequate housing, while the elite have mansions and multiple houses. As with food, water, clothing, and other necessities of life, housing is a human right (UNHR, Art. 25), yet we treat it as just another commodity sold for profit.

If we had property policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have absentee ownership. Additionally, we would break up monopolies and oligopolies, disallow corporations that are too big to fail, revoke corporate personhood, and better devise and regulate corporate charters, while encouraging employee ownership, cooperatives, collectives, and communes. We would also have various lending libraries, not just for books, but also for tools, toys, and many other items that are either used
temporarily or infrequently.

If we had healthcare policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have 50 million Americans without health insurance, millions more underinsured, high monthly premiums, high co-payments, overpriced procedures and medicines, overcrowded emergency rooms, and people going bankrupt due to huge medical expenses. We would have high-quality universal single-payer healthcare.

If we had education policies for the 99%, we’d have free public education from preschool through graduate school for all who qualify and we would pay teachers more than stock brokers. Student loans would be less necessary, but would accrue at lower interest rates and could be repaid with various forms of community service. Further, education wouldn’t simply be geared toward tests, but would be oriented toward basic skills as well as critical thinking, problem solving, creative expression, sustainability, social movements and societal improvement,
people’s history, educational holism, and a whole range of relevant people’s education that focuses on the needs and interests of the 99%.

If we had energy policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have oil and coal companies making hundreds of billions in profits, while polluting the world and increasing global warming, or tax-subsidized, uninsurable nuclear plants that threaten health and safety, but would instead support an array of decentralized safe and renewable energies, including solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydrogen, biomass, hydroelectric, and others. We would also focus much more on conservation and efficiency.

If we had environmental policies for the 99%, we would clean up the plethora of Superfund sites, get dangerous chemicals out of foods and toys, minimize chemicals in our society, eliminate carcinogenic products, discourage carbon and methane emissions that increase global warming, raise efficiency standards for vehicles, appliances, and electronics, protect our air and water, restore forests and wetlands, encourage local, organic, and vegetarian eating (LOVE), institute the
Precautionary Principle, and ensure environmental justice.

If we had transportation policies for the 99%, we would support and subsidize many forms of public transportation and expand it, including high speed rail, as well as facilitating bicycle use, electric car sharing, and walkability.

If we had trade policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have so-called free trade agreements that facilitate the investments and capital transfers of multi-billion dollar transnational corporations, but instead would have fair trade agreements that mutually benefit workers, producers, consumers, and the environment. We would also substantially reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.

If we had legal policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t imprison people for non-violent offenses, would expand local and specialized courts, mediation, collaborative justice, alternative sentencing, restitution, community service, and would seek social policies, including all of the above, to prevent crime more than punish it. Legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, marijuana and hemp would be an important step as would strengthening and enforcing laws against corporate and environmental crimes.

If we had entitlement programs for the 99%, we would be preserving, strengthening, and expanding the very successful Social Security and Medicare, removing contribution caps for high income earners, with the 1% paying their fair share.

If we had investment policies for the 99%, there would be a tax on speculative investments, as the U.S. once had (perhaps 1%), and further disincentives for speculating in food, water, housing, healthcare, education, energy, and other necessities of life.

If we had banking policies for the 99%, there would be high capital reserve requirements, disincentives for banks to speculate, and incentives to lend money in local communities for local needs. States and other jurisdictions would have their own banks. There would be preferential treatment for non-profit credit unions.

If we had agricultural policies for the 99%, we would support small farmers, farmers’ markets, organic agriculture, and industrial hemp, instead of giant agri-business, the chemical industry, the livestock industry, the sugar industry, the corn ethanol industry, the cotton industry, and the tobacco industry.

If we had food policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t have hunger, crappy school lunches, and genetically engineered food. We also wouldn’t have fast food and processed food products that are cheaper than real foods and chemicalized produce that is cheaper than organic fruits and vegetables. Dangerous chemicals shouldn’t be sprayed on our farms and animals shouldn’t be tortured and killed to produce unhealthy food for profit. Healthy, compassionate, environmentally-sustainable food should be the norm, but it’s apparently not as profitable for the 1%. We would change that.

If we had electoral policies for the 99%, we would have one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote with the millions and millions of people’s voices much more influential than the thousands of highly-paid corporate lobbyists. Further, we would reduce barriers to voting and for third parties, while incorporating democratizing schemes, such as ranked choice, instant run off, none of the above, and proportional representation.

If we had foreign policies for the 99%, we wouldn’t be fighting oil wars costing trillions of dollars and way too many lives, maintaining a thousand foreign military bases, supporting foreign militaries and dictatorships, but instead would be supporting democracies, democratic movements, and sustainable development around the world. Helping to clean up the world’s water, for example, would cost a fraction of the bloated U.S. military budget, yet would provide much more hope to
hundreds of millions of people around the world, while providing substantially better national security for all. Likewise with building schools, hospitals, and clinics.

While this declaration is not comprehensive, it is a good start, though it needs you.

Like modern day Marie Antoinettes, the 1% tell us to go shopping and eat cake, while they continue to privatize massive profits and socialize exorbitant costs. We the 99% no longer want their bread and cake crumbs; now we have our sights set on the bakery. Our society can be modeled after Arizmendi Bakery with its democratic and participatory structure, which is a microcosm of how the 99% can become the 100%, how we can control our destiny and live more secure, fair, and meaningful lives.

If we had social policies for the 99%, we would support need not greed, people before profits and corporations, and we would get money out of politics, reclaim our democracy, reduce racism and sexism as well as other oppressive social divisions, and promote social justice with every policy and program from the local to the global and from the personal to the political.

I support the need of the 99%, not the greed of the 1%. Which side are you on?

Big Pharma and the FDA have known for years that formoterol fumarate, found in Symbicort, Dulera and Foradil, and salmeterol, found in Advair Diskus and Serevent Diskus, can paradoxically cause asthma deaths, especially in children and African-Americans. In fact, the FDA has heightened the warnings on the labels several times and convened several hearings about the drugs’ safety and some doctors have called for their complete ban.

But the drugs, called long acting beta agonists, or LABAs, are so lucrative — Advair was the fourth best selling drug in the US last year, making almost $5 billion — they are marketed despite their estimated US death toll of 4,000 a year. That’s equal to, or even more than, the number who die from asthma itself!

LABAs, whose aggressive marketing coincided with direct-to-consumer drug advertising, are billed as add-on drugs that treat asthma in a different way than traditional steroid asthma drugs. Traditional, inhaled corticosteriods like Flovent, Pulmicort, Asmanex and Qvar treat asthma’s inflammation, while LABAs, prescribed as maintenance or “control” drugs, expand constricted airways and protect against bronchospasm.

But study after study show the “bronchoprotective” effects have a downside. They can “mask” asthma that is actually getting worse though people feel fine, and they can produce “desensitization” or “down regulation” also known as tolerance, in which the more you use them the less they work.

In fact, Salmeterol, the drug in Advair and Serevent, is considered so unsafe, a huge trial called the Salmeterol Multi-center Asthma Research Trial, or SMART was terminated in 2003 after there were 16 deaths, 44 intubations and 369 hospitalizations on LABAs, mostly in African-Americans.

At FDA hearings after SMART, Pharma doctors tried to spin the results by saying the patients had been sicker to begin with, that they were too slow to seek medical care and that their self-reports of LABA use couldn’t be trusted because patients lie. They also said (somewhat contradictorily) that LABAs don’t mask worsening asthma because patients know if they are getting worse (not that they get worse!) — and the deaths can be explained by patients’ DNA types. Whew.

LABA defenders even said the SMART results couldn’t be trusted because the trial was stopped early.

Usually, the justification for unsafe drugs like LABAs is that their benefits outweigh their risk. But at FDA hearings three years later, David Graham, MD, an FDA official, said LABA “benefits, if any, seemed to be small compared to placebo.” He also blew the whistle on the widespread Pharma myth that a decline in US asthma deaths over the last decade is due to LABAs.

“It is true that trend for reported asthma deaths has declined over time, ” he said in the hearings. “But nobody has shown that the decline has anything to do with LABA use.” Fifty percent of the decline “is due to the change in classification coding from IC-9 to ICD-10,” said Graham, known for testifying before Congress about Vioxx dangers.

While the number of asthma deaths is down, the number of asthma sufferers is growing — and no one really knows why. Some cite more pollens in the air from global warming, an excess of allergy causing plug-in air fresheners and the “hygiene theory” that we have created such a germ and dirt free environment, our immune systems can’t differentiate real threats from harmless pollens or dust.

Others cite burgeoning prescription drug use. Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital found children given antibiotics within their first six months of life were more likely to develop allergies. Data presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology suggest children whose mothers took prescription acid-blocking drugs like Nexium during pregnancy are more likely to suffer symptoms of asthma. And research in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that Tylenol may be, “an important risk factor for the development and/or maintenance of asthma, rhinoconjunctivitis and eczema in adolescent children.” Meanwhile, a 1999 European Union report speculates about the role of sex hormones and meat additives in asthma.

To prove that LABAs are safe and effective, Pharma not only points to falling US asthma deaths rates, it points to LABAs’ inclusion in government asthma guidelines Even though Pharma doctors virtually wrote the government guidelines!

William W. Busse, MD, from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, chaired the expert panel which developed the government’s 2007 National Asthma Education and Prevention Program Guidelines — even though he is financially linked to GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer Genentech/Novartis, Schering and five other Pharma companies according to the guidelines themselves.

No wonder federal guidelines extol the “established beneficial effects of LABA for the great majority of patients who require more therapy than low-dose ICS alone to control asthma,” and call LABAs a “preferred option” that “improves lung function, decreases symptoms [and] reduces exacerbations!” Not that we have an opinion.

Why is a Pharma doctor writing federal disease treatment guidelines? And why, on top of 10 Pharma backers, does he have “research support from the NIH” which is our tax-dollars? Aren’t enough tax dollars buying Medicare and Medicaid-reimbursed LABAs thanks to the “guidelines”?

Since SMART and more reported deaths, the FDA has continued to hold hearings and tighten warnings. Currently, warnings say LABAs should only be used when inhaled corticosteriods don’t control asthma, and for the shortest time possible and should notbe used without corticosteriods or as a “rescue” medication.

Needless to say, if LABAs have to be used in addition to inhaled corticosteriods and in addition to rescue inhalers (like Proventil HFA, ProAir HFA, Ventolin HFA) what they are actually good for is not clear — even as Pharma sells a third, possibly surplus drug. No wonder Forbes magazine calls the LABA-containing Advair, “more a miracle of marketing than of science.” Many also question whether the addition of an inhaled corticosteroid, which Symbicort, Dulera and Advair have, even makes them safer.

Of course, LABA promoters are furious about the warning that LABAs should not be used long term. “Suddenly stopping medication that is providing a protection for individuals — without good literature experience to back it up — is something we’re very concerned about,” said William Busse at an asthma conference. And when the FDA announced this year it will retest LABAs, Busse cowrote an angry letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. New trials are unnecessary he said and calling them “‘safety’ studies suggests that LABAs have some direct toxicity that causes death or leads to hospitalization.”

Some people love LABAs and claim their asthma symptoms have gone away. But the longer they use them, the more likely they are to report Advair or Symbicort “poop-out” (like “Prozac poop-out”) in which the drug stops working and they feel worse than before.

On the drug-rating web site askapatient.com, patients also report feeling “addicted” to the drugs and that their lung capacity is changing. “My lungs feel different than normal, like my lungs are feeling dried out and sticky if that is possible, all at the same time, reports one person about Symbicort. “It seems they are becoming lazy, like now they cannot miss a dose.”

“When I sucked it in, it felt like I was collapsing my lungs,” says an Advair user in Forbes. The man’s doctor told him the drug “couldn’t possibly be making him worse,” but it was.

Twenty-five patients on Advair Diskus 100/50 also report racing and irregular heart beats, palpitations and the feeling of an imminent heart attack.

LABAs are not the only asthma drugs with questionable safety and effectiveness that have become billion dollar businesses for Pharma. Singulair, a leukotriene receptor antagonist or LTRA, was the nation’s seventh most popular drug last year, according to IMS health and earned more than $4 billion.It ranks only two places below Advair. Other LTRAs are Accolate and Zyflo.

Soon after Singulair was released to the market, FDA reviewers cautioned in the New England Journal of Medicine that adult studies of the drug “may not be predictive of the response,” in children. No kidding! In Singulair’s FDA approval documents reviewers note that Singulair levels in adolescents are different from “healthy adults” and that an infant monkey, four weeks old, had to be euthanized because “infants may be more sensitive to the toxicity,” of Singulair. (“Three out of five guinea pigs also died from “severe anaphylactic responses.” If animal tests do not extrapolate to human safety, why are they done?)

Scores of human subjects in the FDA approval documents withdrew from trials because of “worsening” asthma and reviewers even write that one study, “demonstrates that it is better to leave patients on beclomethasone [a corticosteroid] than to switch them to montelukast [Singulair]. There’s an asthma drug for you!

Approval documents include 10 blanked out pages, marked “This section was determined NOT to be releasable,” and the frequent phrase, “Portions of this review were excerpted directly from the sponsor’s submission,” as in we didn’t read it but we waved it through.

William Busse, the guidelines writer, was also an investigator in the Singulair approval trials though not the most compliant one. He was issued an FDA warning letter when an inspection of his facility revealed incorrect consent forms, incorrect patient enrollments, and drug inventory and labeling errors.

Singulair was heavily marketed for allergies, in addition to asthma, and to kids. Marketing included a partnership with Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Peter Vanderkaay, a basketball “skills challenge” for kids 9 to 14 and materials distributed through (and legitimized by)American Academy of Pediatrics said published reports.

Meanwhile, more than 100 parents on askapatient were reporting that Singulair caused hyperactivity, tantrums, depression, crying, school trouble, facial tics, strange eye movements and self-harm in their children, some as young as one. Many were put on the drug for sniffles, wheezing and early “symptoms” of asthma, in keeping with Pharma’s “early treatment” push.

“Last night was a complete meltdown over every single thing that could have possibly been a minor annoyance, such as not being able to squeeze enough toothpaste out of the tube, which culminated in a 30-minute screaming and crying bonanza,” writes the mother of a 7-year-old who has been on Singulair for six months. “I was reading stories to her tonight, and she must have popped her jaw open at least 40 times over the course of two books (mouth open wide like a yawn in fast-forward). I was keeping an eye on her, and a few times I asked her why she kept doing that and she said she didn’t know, and she thought maybe her mouth was ‘itchy.’”

But in 2009, after 15-year-old Cody Miller of Queensbury, NY was given Singulair for hay fever and took his own life 17 days later, the FDA gave Singulair a warning for “neuropsychiatric” side effects. And the next year, Fox TV reported that kids on Singulair are being diagnosed with ADHD, Tourette Syndrome and serious behavioral and neurological conditions. Most are “cured” when they go off the drug. Singulair is no doubt driving other pediatric drugs sales.

Even adults are put on the drug for minor reasons with major consequences. “I was perfectly healthy prior to taking this drug,” reports a 53-year-old woman about Singulair on askapatient.”Doc noticed I had a little wheeze and prescribed Singulair. I began to have the dreams, insomnia and depression after the first few days,” which led to “suicidal thoughts,” she says.

Could there be any more clouds over today’s blockbuster asthma drugs? Yes! Clinical trials on which many of the top asthma drugs were approved were so corrupted at least one researcher went to prison. William H. Ziering, MD was sentenced to six months in prison and lost his medical license for falsification of five drug studies according to government documents.

Ziering conducted trials on Salmeterol (the LABA), Flonase and other respiratory drugs and wrote medication-friendly papers like “Allergic rhinitis. Measures to control the misery,” and “Diagnosis and treatment of allergic rhinitis and asthma in infancy and childhood.”

During the same time period, clinical trials of Singulair and at least five other top asthma drugs conducted at Vivra Asthma & Allergy also came to the attention of federal authorities. A “patient mill” was operated at the Tucson facility to pocket the lucrative compensation paid per subject for trials, says Robert Davidson, MD, a sub-investigator at the facility, regardless of the appropriateness of the subjects. People who participate in drug trials are called subjects, not patients

The irregularities at the Vivra facility led to onsite FDA inspections in which witnesses told inspectors they were told to “NOT mention potential risks” to subjects to not “scare them away,” and subjects were pressured to participate despite risks to their heath. (One subject was hospitalized from the trials.) Enrolling inappropriate subjects risks both their health and future users of the drug, whose safety was “proved” from their participation.

In one study, conducted at Vivra and elsewhere, more than 40 percent of people on Singulair and Salmeterol (the LABA in Advair) had adverse events, two withdrew with –anybody? — “worsening asthma” and “one died as a result of bronchial asthma!” The drugs were “well tolerated,” write the researchers.

There is no evidence that approval of drugs “tested” by Vivra or Ziering was delayed or revoked nor do the related published papers appear retracted.

Among drugs tested at Vivra was the antibiotic Raxar® which was withdrawn from the market for fatal heart rhythm abnormalities and the genetically engineered Xolair which was investigated by the FDA for heart attack and stroke links and carries a severe anaphylaxis warning. Seventy-seven people who took Xolair had life-threatening allergic responses in a year-and-a-half, according to FDA reports.

Genetically engineered drugs like Xolair cost as much as $20,000 a year and cause TB, cancers and super infections because they suppress the immune system. But they seem slated to be the next big thing in asthma.

A study in May says Xolair can provide, “additional clinical benefit” for patients who are “inadequately controlled” on inhaled corticosteroids. That’s exactly what was said about LABAs. The study was funded by Xolair’s manufacturer and one of the authors is William Busse.

Is civil strife a good indicator?

What about wide-scale despair or a prevalent lack of hope for the future?

In 2003, I spent some time in Cambodia. I crossed the border at Poi Pet and traveled up the main, red dirt highway to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. It was one of the most uncomfortable journeys of my life.

I sat in the back seat of a cramped sedan and stared out the side windows. Every few hundred meters or so, on either side of the car, I saw warning signs indicating land mines. The hazard was communicated by a skull and crossbones symbol, and we passed hundreds if not thousands.

Cambodia is still dotted with six million land mines, remnants of the Vietnam War and the perilous reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The red dirt highway was relatively safe, and the communities that lie along it could be navigated by established paths, cleared by trial and error. But if you left the established paths, you took your life (and limbs) in your own hands. One in every 200 Cambodians is an amputee.

The ratio is staggering. And when you roam through local markets or bazaars, it is not uncommon to see begging double and triple amputees, dragging themselves along by their remaining limbs on the grimy pavement between market stalls.

Cambodia is a tragic, unsettling place. And the misfortune there is compounded by abject poverty, desperation and exploitation. It is not a healthy place to live; but neither is my country, though for far different reasons.

According to a recent report published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every 300 U.S. adults attempted suicide in the past year. That’s 2700 a day, 100 per hour and almost two per minute. There were almost as many attempted suicides as abortions last year.

The two biggest reasons people attempt suicide are depression and psychosis. There are, of course, folks who harbor a sober, philosophical desire to die, whether to control their own destiny or alleviate suffering, but most are simply depressed or psychotic.

There’s obviously plenty to be depressed or sick about in this country. We’re not healthy. We’re knowingly and willfully self-destructive in terms of our diets, our sedimentary lifestyles and our environment. We’re obsessively fixated on youthfulness and resort to injections and implants and try crèmes and pills to stay looking young—anything to avoid the appearance of wisdom.

We toil away at non-vital vocations that turn us into listless automatons. We’re surrounded by technologies that allow us to communicate with everyone, but we rarely have anything reasonable or meaningful to say. Our nation and our species are going down the proverbial tubes and we have very little idea of what can be done about it.

We’re obviously depressed. But when one in every 300 members of a nation’s citizenry tries to kill themselves in a given year, it’s time to consider whether individual depression isn’t simply a symptom of collective psychosis.

One of the chief symptoms of psychosis is delusion. Victims harbor false beliefs that are persistent and organized and resistant to correction or logic.

Doesn’t that describe us perfectly?

We believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. We deny evolutionary theory even though our understanding of our own biology is based on it. We deny climate change even though its effects are already changing our existence. We believe that America is a good place to live even though success in our society is based more on ruthlessness than responsibility, and real honesty, in general, is considered naïve. And we insist the United States is still a great nation even though it hasn’t been a positive force in the world for years.

Something is wrong with us.

We are depressed as a nation and psychotic as a people.

As the middle class—the chief bastion of normalcy and, arguably, decency, in our society—is slowly being amputated, our thought processes are confused. As our national glory fades, we talk now, mostly to ourselves. Our behavior is becoming strange and possibly dangerous, but we only absorb and process information that confirms our psychosis.

There needs to be intervention, but we protect our delusions with patriotic fervor. And we guard our dementia as if it were religion.

Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which sleep had fallen on you/Ye are the many—they the few.

– Percy Shelley

The Occupy Movement, now in myriad cities across the country and, indeed, the globe, is too big to ignore. Many thousands of people, frustrated with the current status quo but hopeful for another, have made their disgruntlement palpable by turning parks, streets, and capitols into a choir of complaint—complaint complimented, however, by a contrapuntal harmony of hope and aspiration. Although the catchy slogan “we are the 99 percent” is not literally correct—it would be more accurate to use the unfortunately cumbersome slogan “we are the 99.9 percent”—it does make clear a simple fact: inequality has exploded in this country and people no longer believe that the coterie of elites who possess much of the wealth earned it fairly or have used it to benefit the rest of the population.¹ Not surprisingly, the growth of the Occupy Movement has caused a concomitant critical reaction, mostly among media members who favor the status quo, plus or minus a few adjustments. This is a predictable pattern. A movement, either political or intellectual, begins and is ignored; it grows and is criticized; finally, it becomes appropriated by the mainstream, and many contend that they were a part of the movement from its inception. (A pattern followed by the civil rights movement, for example.) Although it is not clear if the Occupy Movement will progress to the third stage (and many within the movement would prefer, to one degree or another, that it does not² ), it is clear that it has progressed to the second.

In this article, I would like to briefly respond to a few of the most popular criticisms, criticisms that have almost become platitudes. The criticisms that I will respond to are not drawn from the extreme right (mostly dismissing the movement as a swath of unemployed parasites); but rather, from the mainstream center or left of center. This is useful, I think, because some of the criticisms are probably held or at least sympathetically considered by the populace, a populace that has consistently received a distorted portrait of the world and of the Occupy Movement. I should also note, as a caveat, that I do not—and do not presume to—speak for the Occupy movement. Opinions about the desires of the Occupy Movement are a result of discussions with members of Occupy Tallahassee and of reading and watching interviews. I do not feign to have any special insight into the heart of a diffuse movement.

The most common criticism of the Occupy Movement that I hear and encounter in the media is that it is composed of radical and ignorant people who fancifully believe that the government can be used as kind of magical wish fulfilling machine. Or as Fred Siegel, from the New Republic, put it “… these epigones seem to think of government as a black box: You put your wishes in at one end and a smoothly running government bureaucracy fulfills those wishes at the other end.”³ His evidence is that many in the Occupy Movement desire to live in a country with single-payer universal healthcare, free college education, and are meanwhile ignorant of the minutia of the “298 pages of explication” of the Volcker rule. The protestors, therefore, are oblivious to the labyrinthine complexity of bureaucracies, and to the dangers of the debt, substituting socialist fantasy for hard-headed, fiscally sound, realism. According to Siegel, protests should focus more on the machinations of the government than on the treacheries of Wall Street. An editorial at the Economist,⁴ generally agrees, noting that the protests are aiming for the wrong target because the economic woes of the world have “less to do with the rise of the emerging world than with state interference.” (The idea that protestors want some kind of parochial nationalism and fear globalization is utterly without merit, a point to which I return.)

Siegel’s “government as a black box” argument is fairly common and utterly without merit. Let’s start with the second half of his argument and work backward. He argues that many in the Occupy movement are ignorant of the voluminous details of the Volcker rule and its exceptions. True enough. And many mainstream authors on foreign policy have never read all of the declassified NSC documents that are available. In the case of foreign policy writers, the NSC documents are actually very important. For the Occupy Movement, the exceptions and exceptions to exceptions of the Volcker rule are relatively trivial. Most understand that the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and that the subsequent breakdown of the separation between investment and commercial banking has had deleterious effects on the economy. That is important. If Siegel’s argument is that the 298 page explication of exceptions et cetera indicates how cumbersome government bureaucracies can be, that is also well-known among the Occupy Tallahassee members that I have spoken to, some of whom are intimately involved in the legislative process.

Siegel’s other adduced evidence is that the Occupy movement wants “free education” and “free healthcare,” as if the government can just hand such things out without going broke. This is made clear, later, when he argues that the Occupiers are “oblivious” to our national debt. But precisely the opposite is true. As Siegel should know, two of the chief contributors to our deficits are our horribly inefficient and expensive health care system and our bloated military budget. Most in the Occupy movement would like to carve a significant amount of fat from the military budget; and, as Siegel himself asserted, most also desire single-payer universal health coverage. What Siegel apparently doesn’t know is that according to sound economic analysis by Dean Baker and others, if our health care costs were in line with the rest of the world’s, our deficits would be significantly mitigated.⁵ ,⁶ ,⁷ Finally, it is hardly utopian to believe that a country should have a decent, publically funded education system that runs through college. Nor is it a colossal strain on the budget, especially if properly funded through a reasonable tax system. Many intelligent commentators, including Noam Chomsky, believe that the exorbitant cost of college in the United States has less to do with economic issues than with issues of population control.⁸ ,⁹

Siegel and the Economist both argue that the Occupy Movement is confused about its target. It should be targeting the government, not Wall Street. First, in Tallahassee, we have been “occupying” the Capitol building, so we are “aimed” at the right institution. And second, the argument, although not entirely erroneous (the government’s subservience to financial interests is lamentable), and consistent with standard propaganda, misses a very important point: the government can, and is the only institution that can, provide a check on the power of corporations, a check that is absolutely necessary. Most in the Occupy movement aren’t thrilled about this pragmatic compromise. But, the question for any serious political thinker has to be, “what are the practical consequences of an action?” Reducing the size and power of the government may or may not be a future desideratum; but, as our system currently exists, reducing the size of government means increasing the power of corporations, corporations that are almost entirely impervious to public input (save for public purchasing) and therefore “tyrannical” in the classical liberal sense of the word. Given this state of affairs, it seems wise to protest the corporations, especially the financial corporations that were directly responsible for the economic collapse.

Finally, the Economist paints the Occupy movement as an insular group, a group that, although not as “mindless” and parochial as the Seattle protestors, is still confused and frightened by “the emerging world.” In other words, the Occupy movement is filled with people who fear “global integration.” This is standard propaganda that was perfected during the NAFTA debates. So, if one were against NAFTA, a radically unfree trade agreement,¹⁰ one was against globalization, regardless of whether or not one was in favor of increasing connections across the globe. Many are against unfair, investor rights’ agreements that force laborers to compete against each other while sedulously blocking competition amongst professionals. But the Occupy Movement is probably the most globally interconnected protest movement ever. Last week, Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher, both famous for their courageous stands against the Mubarak regime, came to New York and spoke to the OWS protestors. Signs across the globe declare unity with protest movements in countries far away. The Occupy Movement is not afraid of “global integration,” it is afraid of corrupt, corporate integration. And it is only parochial if one considers humans, as opposed to corporations, irrelevant.

I do not know what the Occupy Movement will accomplish or where its future lies. I do know that it is exciting to witness the aspirations and frustrations of thousands of people finally rise in a conflagration of protest against a corrupt system that is consistently becoming more unjust and more detached from the average citizen. If nothing else, the movement has vivified the souls of thousands, perhaps millions, of people and has contributed to a growing sense of unity among disparate peoples from around the globe.

1. Glenn Greenwald (October 25, 2011). Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land. TomDispatch.com.
2. That is, if being “appropriated” means sacrificing the substance of the movement to the interests the current system.
3. Fred Siegel (October 19, 2011). Occupy Wall Street and the Return of the McGovernites. New Republic.
4. Capitalism and its Critics: Rage Against the Machine. Economist.
5. Dean Baker (October 31, 2008). The Deficit and Health Care Costs. San Diego Union-Tribune.
6. Health Care Budget Calculator. Center for Economic and Policy Research.
7. Congressional Budget Office (June, 2009). The Long-Term Budget Outlook.
8. Noam Chomsky (August 9, 2011). Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault—What’s Next? Guernica Magazine.
9. This video contains a condensed synopsis.
10. Dean Baker (2006). The conservative Nanny State.

In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat.  So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environmentalists and antiwar protesters.  There is no choice in electoral politics but to side with the milquetoast moderates of the Democratic Party.

In this environment of winner-take-all and take it for granted politics, the most populous state in the union is also the most neglected and under-represented.  That is why a Democratic White House can get away with policies and programs that disregard the interests of California with a callousness that borders on disdain.

Things have gotten so bad in the golden state that even members of the Milquetoast Party are beginning to raise their voices:  Thirty two representatives of the California congressional caucus recently went public with their plea for effective relief from the foreclosure crisis, an ongoing catastrophe that blocks any chance of real recovery from the Great Recession.

On the heals of that failure to take effective action, the Obama Justice Department has actively declared war on the one segment of the California economy that shows great promise:  Medical Marijuana.

The Obama administration initially signaled that the federal government would not enforce drug laws against marijuana where voters had sanctioned it for medicinal purposes.  Then, without cause or reason, Attorney General Eric Holder woke up one day with a new religion.  He had seen the enemy and it was not Al Qaeda, it was not Mexican drug lords and the American gun dealers who supply them arms.  No, it was California pot growers, suppliers and anyone associated with the expanding industry, including media outlets that accepted advertisements.

It is time for Californians to unite behind the common interest of economic survival.  It is time for us all to speak out against the White House and its agents in the Justice Department.  It is time to deliver a simple demand:

Cease and desist!

We are already suffering the effects of your failure to bail out the poor, the dispossessed and what remains of a disintegrating middle class.  If you cannot help us and it is clear you have no intention of doing so, then at least get out of the way while we attempt to climb out of the ravine.

We have stood on the sidelines while your administration has churned out one Republican policy after another and called it victory.  We have stood by in near silence as you extended the Bush tax cuts for the elite, rolled back soft-core Wall Street regulation, peddled a health insurance mandate as comprehensive reform and offered up Social Security to the Republican god of deficit reduction.

That you are speaking out for jobs now when you know it has no chance of passing congress is pure political theater.  We know what follows:  Another temporary payroll tax reduction financed by creative cuts to so-called entitlement programs.  It will not be enough.  It will not even be close to enough.  You cannot plug the dam after it is broken.

As the Occupy Wall Street spreads and goes global, accomplishing more for the burgeoning victim class in four weeks than you will have been able to do in four years, what is your answer?  With enthusiastic Republican support and the applause of chief executive officers everywhere, you push through Free Trade agreements with North Korea, Columbia and Panama.

We can almost see the smirk on your face as you confront your critics on the left:  First comes the accusation of ingratitude, then the litany of alleged accomplishments, then the excuses, the endless excuses, a broken government, Republican obstructionism, the Senate filibuster rule, and finally, the ultimate rebuttal:  What are you going to do about it?

We can rebut the former until the cow comes home but until we can answer the ultimate challenge emphatically and decisively, we will never get anywhere with the president, with the Democratic Party or with congress.

What are we going to do about it?

The White House can attack the California economy with absolute impunity.  Wall Street is on the other coast and that is where the real money is.

What are we going to do about it?

Ask the president as he travels the land, his campaign for re-election already fully engaged:  Where do you stand on Occupy Wall Street?

When he gives the standard, patronizing answer full of empathy and passion, ask him:  What are you going to do about it?  Will you refuse to accept contributions from Wall Street power brokers and the corporate elite?  Watch him stammer like Rick Perry on the issue of immigration.

He gave his answer just last week.  A president who could not be bothered to keep his promise to labor in actively supporting the fundamental right to organize the workplace by majority vote (the Employee Free Choice Act), a president who could not spare a moment to oppose Wisconsin’s prohibition of collective bargaining for public employees while it was happening, now signals a return to the Free Trade juggernaut.

We are not fools.  We know what that means.  Whatever the short term gains in certain sectors of the economy, the long-term effect is a continuation of job loss, union busting and lower wages.

What are we going to do about it?

The best immediate answer is Occupy Wall Street.  The best long-term answer is to elect public officials who refuse to accept corporate contributions.  Remove money from the equation and the stench of corruption will slowly abate.

Until we as a people are willing to reject money politics outright, we will have no power, no influence and no control over what happens next.