25 January 10 - 05:19Because Marketing Drugs Pays More Than Being a Doctor.
It's frightening to consider that so many "Experts In Their Field" really weren't actually in "their field" to begin with.
Harvard, Brigham & Women's Doctor Paid by GlaxoSmithKline - Health Blog - WSJ
Starting this year, some high-profile Boston hospitals put new rules in place that prohibited their docs from being paid by drug companies to give speeches. One doc recently left one of the hospitals — and a job as an instructor at Harvard med school — in order to keep getting paid by the industry, the Boston Globe reports.
GlaxoSmithKline recently reported its payments to doctors for the second quarter of last year. One doc — Lawrence M. DuBuske, an allergy and asthma specialist affiliated with Brigham & Women’s Hospital — was paid $99,375 during those three months.
DuBuske recently “made decision between terminating the relationship with Glaxo and terminating his relationship with the Brigham, to do the latter,’’ an official at Partners HealthCare, a health system that includes the Brigham, told the Globe. One other doctor affiliated with the system has also left at least partly because of the new rules, but that doc hasn’t been identified, the Globe says.
DuBuske didn’t return calls from the Globe. We tried to reach him this morning through the Immunology Research Institute of New England, a nonprofit he directs, but we haven’t heard back.
We’ve been reporting for a while on moves to limit — or at least add transparency to — ties between doctors and the drug and device industries. Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck and Medtronic have all said they’ll start reporting at least some payments to doctors. And some lawmakers have been pushing to require broad reporting of payments by the industry.
- default -
-
§ ¶
21 January 10 - 05:04You Can Only give $2,500 To Election Campaigns But Sony Can Give All It Wants.
FOXNews.com - Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate, Labor Donations to Campaigns
In a stunning reversal of the nation's federal campaign finance laws, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Thursday that as an exercise of free speech, corporations, labor unions and other groups can directly spend on political campaigns.
American Love It Or Buy It! Fuck Ya!
- default -
-
§ ¶
15 January 10 - 05:00People are Broken.
Limbaugh: Obama Will Use Haiti To Boost Credibility With "Light-Skinned And Dark-Skinned Black Community" | Media Matters for America
LIMBAUGH: Would you trust the money's gonna go to Haiti?
CALLER: No.
LIMBAUGH: But would you trust that your name is gonna end up on the mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?
CALLER: Absolutely.
LIMBAUGH: Absolutely right.
CALLER: That's the point.
LIMBAUGH: Besides, we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax.
What can I say? The far right in this country has gone off the deep end.
- default -
-
§ ¶
14 January 10 - 04:19When it comes to elections, the corporations have won.
Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections - latimes.com
As 1st Amendment expert Linda Berger has pointed out, the Buckley and Bellotti cases planted the seeds of three new metaphors in election law: that money is speech; that corporations are people; and that elections are marketplaces. To equate corporate campaign spending with 1st Amendment-protected speech, you must accept all three. Each, however, is problematic.
- default -
-
§ ¶
07 January 10 - 06:14Supporting and facilitating non-violent civil disobedience is not protected speech.
OpEdNews - Article: Appellate Court: Encouraging Civil Disobedience is Not Protected Speech
The ruling was issued today and, although there are many aspects that deserve attention, I want to walk through what I think are by far the most dangerous and troubling implications of this rulingthose related to the First Amendment:
[PDF of the SHAC appeal ruling]
Supporting and facilitating non-violent civil disobedience is not protected speech.
As part of their campaign, SHAC supporters were emailed about "electronic civil disobedience." The email and message board posts included instructions on how electronically "sit in" on corporate web sites through emails, faxes and phone calls.
Now, one of the benchmarks in First Amendment law is what is called the Brandenburg standard. It holds that even the most controversial and inflammatory speech is protected as long as it not likely to incite "imminent and lawless action." That is a very high threshold. In this court ruling--which, to the best of my knowledge and the attorneys I have spoken with is the first of its kind--the written word can be construed as promoting, or resulting in, imminent and lawless action.
To put it more plainly: Vocally supporting civil disobedience, explaining what it involves, and encouraging/facilitating people to take part is not protected speech.
- default -
-
§ ¶
07 January 10 - 05:55Our economic and societal future.
Global Guerrillas: YOU ARE IN CONTROL
What am I talking about? Our economic and societal future. If it's not clear to you already after seeing a global economic meltdown caused by the gluttony of financial parasites, it should be. But it's worse than that. The entire system has failed to produce anything resembling improvement in our lives for years:
* Median male incomes today are the same as they were in 1974 in the US (and likely all over the western world). No progress has been made despite a doubling of productivity and massive top line GDP growth. Worse, given that female incomes aren't on par with male incomes yet, the typical American family makes much less per hour worked than in 1974.
* All of the requirements for entry into the middle class are now private expenses. From health care to a college education, if you can't afford the minimum (let alone high quality versions), you aren't allowed entry. Worse, those expenses are spiraling out of control at rates many times the rate of inflation. Nothing is being done to address this.
* The system is geared to make us fail. Not only has outsourcing/off-shoring just started (everything that can be moved offshore to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity in wage disparities between western and workers in developing countries will be) we are being laden with un-repayable debt. To wit: there's been NO job growth in the last decade (despite tens of millions in population growth) and total debt from all sources is still near ALL time historical highs.
- default -
-
§ ¶
28 December 09 - 09:56Poll Results Show that 47% of Politico's Readers are Reality Detatched, Complete Idiots.
Politics, Political News - POLITICO.com
Pollitico
Yay or nay
Who was the biggest winner of 2009?
Michelle Obama
5%
Hillary Clinton
10%
Barack Obama
17%
Sonia Sotomayor
8%
Sarah Palin
47%
Someone else.
9%
Results are based on 9618 votes
- default -
-
§ ¶
28 December 09 - 09:04Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression | Health and Wellness | AlterNet
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.
- default -
-
§ ¶
