Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1326
July 18, 2015
White House official in charge of Obamacare rollout hired as health insurance lobbyist
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Obamacare has turned out to be little more than corporate welfare for the insurance and pharmaceutical industry. Thus it’s no surprise that the former director of HealthCare.Gov is being rewarded with a high paying job lobbying for the health insurance industry. In reality, that’s what she’s been doing all along (lobbying for the health insurance industry), isn’t it?
Originally posted on Counter Information:
By George Gallanis
17 July 2015
Marilyn Tavenner, former director of HealthCare.Gov and administrator of theCenters for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was unanimously selected as the new CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a leading health insurance lobbying organization. Like her predecessors, Tavenner continues the trend of former White House officials joining the ranks of highly profitable corporate businesses.
The move comes after previous AHIP President Karen Ignagni announced her decision to step down. Prior to heading the organization, Ignagni was the director of the AFL-CIO’s Department of Employee Benefits.
The AHIP lobbies on behalf of some of the largest health insurance companies in America, including Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Aetna posted revenues of approximately $58 billion in 2014. Altogether, the companies represented through AHIP insure over 200 million Americans, or nearly two thirds of the population.
During her time with the Obama administration, Tavenner…
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July 17, 2015
Big Pharma At It Again: Disease Mongering for Profit
As shameless as ever, Big Pharma is aggressively medicalizing the problems of living as they pursue obscene profits. Their latest disease mongering campaign, promoting the drug Flibanserin, is aimed at women. Like cancer causing Premarin, hyped for its ability to slow aging, and Sarafem (recently linked to birth defects), hyped for its effectiveness in industry-created “premenstrual dysphoric disorder”.
Originally developed by Boehringer Ingelheim, this new drug has been acquired by Sprout Pharmaceuticals, a company launched in 2011 to develop products for female sexual health (i.e. to cash in on the $1.5 billion Viagra market). It allegedly treats “low sexual arousal disorder” in women.
Taken Everyday, Potentially for Years
Last week the Telegraph reported that two key FDA advisory committees are recommending approval of Flibanserin, also known as “pink Viagra.” Despite its nickname, Flibanserin is nothing like Viagra. While a man only takes Viagra when he wants to have sex, Flibanserin is more like an antidepressant and must be taken everyday, potentially for years.
Pink Viagra works by combining a Viagra-like chemical that stimulates blood flow to the genitals with a small dose of testosterone, which stimulates sex drive in women. According to the Guardian, early clinical trials indicate the drug is only slightly more effective than placebo. On average, women taking the drug have 0.8 more “satisfying sexual events” per month. Flibanserin also has some pretty nasty side effects, including dizziness, sleepiness, fainting, nausea, fatigue and insomnia. The other downside is that the drug’s concentration (and side effects) increase if the woman drinks alcohol, or takes birth control pills or medications for vaginal infections, migraine or depression.
Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals
The Telegraph article quotes journalist Ray Moynihan, author of Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals, who describes female sexual dysfunction as a clear example of “corporate-sponsored creation of a disease.” And gynecologist Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, who points out that low sexual desire, especially in women, is intricately linked to a person’s life and relationships. If a woman is depressed or stressed out from looking after kids and/or aging parents on top of her double role as breadwinner and homemaker, she’s very unlikely to be interested in sex – especially if her partner is unsympathetic and unsupportive.
Writing in the Daily Mail, psychologist and sex researcher Dr Petra Boynton complains that the corporate media promotes highly unrealistic expectations of sex (lots of it with mind-blowing multiple orgasms), just as they do about women’s appearance (thin, young-looking, with perfect faces and breasts).
My Own Clinical Experience
I totally agree with Boynton and Goldbeck-Wood. When I worked with women in Seattle, low sexual desire nearly always stemmed from unresolved relationship issues. Often when women felt totally dominated and controlled by their partner, saying no in the bedroom was their only opportunity to assert themselves. Other women complained they got nothing out of sex because their partner couldn’t or wouldn’t address their sexual needs.
Population studies suggest that approximately 50% of women require direct stimulation because they don’t climax through vaginal intercourse. The scientific literature is silent on the unwillingness of men to engage in oral sex. However based on what I read in social media, I suspect it remains a significant source of conflict among couples.
Astroturfing* Flibanseerin
Typically Big Pharma has created two Astroturf* groups, Eventhe Score and WomenDeserve. Both have accused the FDA of sexism for their reluctance to approve Flibanserin. According to the Daily Mail, EventheScore is claiming a biological lack of sexual desire negatively impacts 1 in 10 American women. This is pure corporate hype, as there is no biological marker or threshold for abnormally low desire.
My biggest concern is that FDA approval will lead to women being pressured to take a drug with potentially serious side effects – either by their partner or by the same phoney media marketing that induces them to spend millions of dollars on cosmetics, weight loss products and plastic surgery. In contemporary society, full equality and full control over their own bodies is still a long way off for most women.
* Astrotrufing is the creation of apparent public support by corporations who pay people or groups to pretend to be supportive. This false support can take the form of letters to the editor, postings on social media lobbying politicians in support of the cause.
photo credit: Prescription Prices Ver5 via photopin (license)
July 16, 2015
Cut the Crap and Give Me My Country Back
July 15, 2015
How Cuba is Revolutionizing Global Health Care
Salud! : What Puts Cuba on the Map in the Quest for Global Health
Connie Field (2009)
Film Review
Salud! Is about the global struggle to overcome health inequality and the vital role Cuba plays in this effort. Filmmaker Connie Field is totally open about her perspective that that health car is a basic right and not a commodity, as it’s viewed in the US.
In pre-revolutionary Cuba, only a small wealthy elite had access to health care. The poor, who comprised 90-90% of the population, died in droves of treatable conditions, such as malaria, respiratory infection, parasites and infantile diarrheal infections.
The Castro regime responded to this health crisis by training tens of thousands of doctors. At present, Cuba has 60,000 doctors for a population of 11 million, making their health system one of the best resourced in the world.
Ending Diseases of Poverty Worldwide
Cuba has been extremely generous in sharing this resource with other poor countries, especially in Africa and Latin America. Since 1963, over 100,000 Cuban health professionals have worked overseas. As well as performing direct patient care, they also train foreign health care professionals.
The film profiles their work in South Africa, Gambia, Honduras and Venezuela. In all four countries, the Cuban doctors have helped local health professionals establish community-based health delivery systems that focus on health promotion and disease prevention. This contrasts to health care in the industrialized north, which waits for patients to get sick and fights one illness at a time.
Cubans Healthier than Americans
Thanks to their phenomenal workforce and this common sense approach, Cuba is one of the few developing countries that has virtually eradicated malaria. Moreover Cubans experience better overall all health status than Americans. On average, Cubans live longer: 79.07 years compared to 78.74 years for Americans. Cuba also has a lower infant mortality (4.70 per 1,000 live births) than the US (6.2 per 1,000 live births).
In Honduras and Venezuela, Cuban doctors have played an essential role in setting up clinics in barrios and rural areas that are poorly served by Honduran and Venezuelan doctors – both for financial (their barrio patients can’t afford to pay them) and “lifestyle” reasons. Despite their refusal to serve these communities, local doctors responded to the presence of Cuban doctors with mass protests claiming the Cuban medics were threatening their livelihood.
Free Medical Education for International Students
In 1999, Cuba set up the Latin American Medical School, which offers free medical training to low income students from all over the world. In collaboration with the Congressional Black Caucus, they have also opened this medical school to African and Hispanic students from low income US communities.
July 14, 2015
Filmmaker Laura Poitras Sues US Over ‘Kafkaesque’ Harassment
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Poitras, who won an Academy Award last year for Citizenfour, the documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said she has been detained, searched without warrant, interrogated for hours, and had vital belongings confiscated more than 50 times over the course of six years—without ever being charged with a crime.
Originally posted on Tales from the Conspiratum:
July 14, 2015
by
Common Dreams
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Nadia Prupis, staff writer
Lawsuit requests records from intelligence agencies that have unlawfully detained, searched, and interrogated Citizenfour director for six years
‘We have a right to know how this system works and why we are targeted,’ Poitras wrote in her statement. (Photo: AP)
Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras on Monday filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. intelligence agencies for subjecting her to what she called “Kafkaesque” harassment at airports throughout the U.S. and the world on dozens of occasions.
Poitras, who won an Academy Award last year for Citizenfour, the documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said she has been detained, searched without warrant, interrogated for hours, and had vital belongings confiscated more…
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July 13, 2015
How Gut Bacteria Control Our Health
The Microiome Revolution: Why Microbes Control Your Life
Jack A Gilbert
The Microbiome Revolution provides a brief and user friendly introduction to the essential role the microbiome (the bacteria that colonize our gut) plays in human health. Through their research, Gilbert and other microbiologists have induced obesity, allergies, autism, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease and other illnesses by manipulating intestinal bacteria in mice. Gilbert contends that specific gut bacteria can even alter behavior.
He stresses that our current obsession with eradicating bacteria (ie prescription antibiotics, antibiotics used on factory farms, antibacterial soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc) has dire implications for human health. The human body is an ecosystem in which microbial cells outnumber “human” cells by ten to one. Doctors increasingly view the microbiome as a vital organ, like the liver or kidneys.
Thanks to Gilbert’s crowdfunding site*, his research team has collected the microbiome profiles of hundreds of thousands of people. This baseline has enabled them to identify specific bacterial profiles associated with good health. In general, rural third world residents have the most diverse and healthiest gut bacteria, while urban residents in the industrialized world have the least diverse and the most unhealthy.
Lecture starts at 3:15.
*Ubiome – for $89 you get a Ubiome gut kit to submit a sample of your feces for analysis
July 12, 2015
REBEL YELL: Did Anonymous Take Down The New York Stock Exchange?
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Demonstrating America’s extreme vulnerability to activist-driven hackers, the New York Stock Exchange was shut down for most of the day 3 days ago. The lying mainstream media, of course, has rolled out a pathetic (yet hilarious) cover story on all this, claiming there was no hack. Instead, the NYSE is just wholly incompetent and can’t run its own computer systems reliably.
Originally posted on RIELPOLITIK:
Source – naturalnews.com
– Demonstrating America’s extreme vulnerability to activist-driven hackers who are trying to make a point, the New York Stock Exchange was shuttered for most of the day yesterday, stalling out hundreds of billions of dollars in trades.
The lying mainstream media, of course, has rolled out a pathetic (yet hilarious) cover story on all this, claiming there was no hack. Instead, the NYSE is just wholly incompetent and can’t run its own computer systems reliably, we’re told.
Apparently, it would be far worse to admit that Anonymous hackers were able to shut down the NYSE at will, bringing Wall Street to its knees without even being anywhere near Wall Street. “International hacking group Anonymous wished Wall Street ill the night before the New York Stock Exchange temporarily suspended trading on all securities,” reports The Hill. “Anonymous has previously targeted Wall Street and made headlines in 2011 when…
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July 11, 2015
The Real Cause of the Revolutionary War: Preserving Slavery
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Black Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
Professor Gerald Horne
In this lecture about his 2014 book, African American history professor Gerald Horne exposes important events that triggered the so-called War of Independence. He makes a compelling case that the decision of the 13 colonies to declare independence in 1776 was a direct result of George III’s 1775 decision to establish all-black Ethiopian regiments to police white settlers in Virginia (the colony that produced Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other high profile members of the independence movement). Odd, isn’t it, that white historians neglect to mention this important fact in our high school textbooks?
According to Horne, there was a clear precedent for arming African troops in North America. In the 18th century, both the French (who occupied Quebec) and the Spanish (who occupied Florida) armed escaped slaves to attack the English colonies. Collaboration between the armed Africans and black slaves led to several major slave revolts in the 18th century. Two of the most important were the 1712 slave uprising in Manhattan (backed by the French) and the 1739 Stonewall’s Revolt in South Carolina (led by a coalition of Spanish armed Africans from St. Augustine Florida and Portuguese-speaking slaves from Angola).
Horne also believes the timing of the 1776 “War of Independence” also related to Britain’s decision to abolish slavery in 1772 – and fears King George would extend the ban on slavery to the 13 colonies.
In summing up, Horne traces how this willingness to go to war over the diabolical (but immensely profitable) institution of slavery would shape the ruthlessly greedy and mean-spirited character of the American nation. Unlike the US, Canada, which never adopted slavery nor fought two wars to preserve it, has made a genuine effort to look after its poor and underprivileged. Horne gives the example of the universal single payer health system.
Horne believes this hidden history also accounts for the special persecution of the descendents of slaves, as opposed to non-US natives with black skin.
There is a very long introduction. The actual talk starts at 9:24.
July 10, 2015
Missing From the Pope’s ‘radical’ vision of equality—women
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Curious how the head of the Catholic church could carelessly overlook the oppression of half the global population.
Originally posted on The Fifth Column:
attribution: CC-SABRINA FUSCO/ALETEIA
DAILY KOS
Roisin Davis writes—Something’s Missing From Pope Francis’ ‘Radical’ Vision of Equality—Women:
Pope Francis this week embarked on a seven-day “homecoming” tour of Latin America on his unstoppable quest to defend the planet and the poor.The continent—the most unequal region in the world, and the Argentine pontiff’s home turf—will likely provide fertile ground for more of his legendary sermons on poverty and inequality. After addressing a crowd of a million in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Monday, Francis is scheduled to attend a meeting of grass-roots political activists and visit one of the continent’s largest prisons, in Bolivia, as well as a slum and a children’s hospital in Paraguay.
While he advocates for South America’s impoverished and disenfranchised, its prisoners, its indigenous peoples and its children, one group is unlikely to feature in Francis’ apparently radical agenda: its women.
Despite his efforts to champion his constituency—the…
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July 9, 2015
China’s Air Pollution Crisis
Under the Dome: Investigating China’s Smog
Chai Jing (2015)
Mandarin with English subtitles
Film Review
This intriguing documentary concerns a Chinese journalist’s investigation into China’s longstanding problem with particulate air pollution. In addition to examining underlying causes and resulting health problems, Chai Jing reports on the total powerlessness of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (EMP) to force private or state-owned industries to comply with Chinese environmental laws.
Some two dozen major Chinese cities experience dangerous levels of particulate air pollution most days of the year. According to researchers, this air pollution causes 500,000 premature deaths a year. Pollution-related cancer deaths have increased more than 400% in 30 years.
China’s Over-reliance on Fossil Fuels
All agree that China’s air pollution crisis stems from over-reliance on fossil fuels. China’s rate of fossil fuel consumption is three to four times greater (per capita) than either the US or Europe. They burn more coal per year than all other countries combined.
According to Chai Jing, coal burning power plants and steel mills and over-reliance on improperly refined diesel and gasoline are the main source of China’s particulate air pollution.
Failure to Enforce Environmental Laws
China has strict laws requiring factories and coal merchants to wash brown coal (lignite), as well as regulations requiring coal burning plants to install chimney scrubbers. Neither are rigorously enforced. Chai Jing interviews Ministry of Environmental Protection officers who have no authority to shut down or penalize or recalcitrant factories. This authority rests with municipal officials who are too fearful of backlash from factory owners and their employees to take action. They claim manufacturers can’t afford pollution controls and that shutting factories down will hurt the economy and cause workers to be laid off.
Chai Jing challenges this attitude, owing to two years of overproduction of steel, houses, commercial buildings and highways. Heavy steel manufactures who are stockpiling steel they can’t sell still receive government subsidies. The head of the Chinese Central Bank refers to them as zombie companies. Worse still, they continue to expand and drive Chinese peasants out of their homes.
The Chinese construction boom is also a major factor in fossil fuel consumption and air pollution. Owing to corruption and lack of oversight, Chinese authorities have allowed 3.4 billion new homes to be built for a population of 1.3 billion.
Vehicular Pollution
Vehicular pollution is a major problem in China, owing to the government’s failure to develop adequate public transport and to the widespread use of high sulfur oil from Iran. Unlike Iran, Chinese refineries don’t have the technology necessary to reduce the sulfur content of the oil they use to manufacture diesel and gasoline. According to one government official, they can’t force Sinotec (China’s state-owned oil refinery) to upgrade because it “might interrupt the fuel supply and cause instability.” Likewise there is no effort to force vehicle manufacturers to comply with laws requiring them to install emission control devices.
China Needs to Cut Emissions by Half
Chai Jing estimates China needs to cut emissions by half to reduce air pollution to levels that don’t endanger human health. Yet for some odd reason the solutions she proposes make no mention of President Xi Jinping’s recent commitment to increase China’s reliance on solar and wind technology. Instead she calls for expanded natural gas exploration and the replacement of China’s single natural gas company with multiple private companies. This, she argues, will bring about reform through “free market competition.”
Background on Chai Jing’s documentary identifies it as “self-financed.” Given the recent assault of US fracking companies on New Zealand, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if one or more of them provided financial backing for this documentary.
Other recommendations she gives – for better monitoring and public disclosure of environmental crimes and increased public involvement in local environmental legislation and increased citizen monitoring – are clearly a step forward.
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