According to Cory Doctorow at bOING bOING, physicians often prescribe drugs that are ineffective or harmful because pharmaceutical companies provide misleading data, according to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, “The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal.” Goldacre is the author of the forthcoming book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Summary from the caption on the photo above Goldacre’s article: “Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits.”
It’s a tough problem: you depend on your physician’s authority, and the authority of the healthcare establishment, to guide your decisions about health. Even if you trust your physician, can you trust the voices persistently whispering in his ear, especially if those voices are motivated by profit as a priority. Do pharma companies place their profit above your health? Don’t assume an easy answer – it’s complicated, though Goldacre’s book blurb suggests a belief that pharma uses the complexity as a cloak (“All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite.”)
This has been noticed. Of course we have no direct knowledge.
US Army Training and Doctrine Command, The Army Operating Concept 2016 – 2028, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, dated 19 August 2010, p. iii. Hereafter cited as TD Pam 525-3-1. The Army defines full spectrum operations as the combination of offensive, defensive, and either stability operations overseas or civil support operations on U.S. soil.
In this paper, we posit a scenario in which a group of political reactionaries take over a strategically positioned town and have the tacit support of not only local law enforcement but also state government officials, right up to the governor. Under present law, which initially stemmed from bad feelings about Reconstruction, the military’s domestic role is highly circumscribed. In the situation we lay out below, even though the governor refuses to seek federal help to quell the uprising (the usual channel for military assistance), the Constitution allows the president broad leeway in times of insurrection.
Under Ben Bernanke, a more open and forceful Federal Reserve … In what might be his final years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke is transforming the U.S. central bank, seeking to shed its reclusive habits and make it a constant presence in bolstering the economy. The new approach would make the Fed's policies more responsive to the needs of the economy — and likely more forceful, because what the Fed is planning to do would be much clearer. A key feature of the strategy would be producing a detailed set of scenarios for when and how the Fed would intervene, which would mark a dramatic shift for an organization that throughout its history has been famously opaque. – Washington Post
Dominant Social Theme: The Federal Reserve is maturing with the times.
Free Market Analysis: More Fed promotions; it never ceases, of course. Control money and you control society. And those “in charge” have a vested interest in ensuring the social solvency of the Fed.
We were on record years ago with the idea that the Fed had lost its moral authority in this Internet era. And we see no reason to revise our view. The Fed and its leader, Ben Bernanke, are flagellated every day by both the mainstream and the alternative media, deservedly so. And yet in the 20th century this was not the case.
Of course, there was no outlet in the 20th century. The mainstream press controlled pretty much all the information when it came to central banking and thus there wasn't much launched that was critical of the current system.
That all changed in the 21st century with what we call the Internet Reformation and now information on the real role of central banking in the world's larger economy is fairly well disseminated.
My prediction: The eventual answer will turn out to be a distinction without a difference. Here’s why.
Both political parties and their candidates for President now accept neoliberal ideology as being the incontrovertible truth. This belief is more theological than scientific, because neoliberalism has a thirty year track record of not producing the high-paying jobs for the middle class its promisers say it will produce. Quite the reverse would be a more accurate description.
According to neoliberal dogma, the only way to stimulate the growth of high-paying jobs for Americans is to unleash the private sector by getting government off the back of business. Therefore, given this truism, the government’s economic purpose is simply to make it easier for the private sector to invest in productive capacity at home — or to use a popular but vacuous buzzword: to invest in the ‘supply side’ of the economy.
[A longer version of this essay appears in “Politics,” the Fall 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly; this slightly shortened version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
All power corrupts but some must govern. — John le Carré
The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavored sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.
Best of all, at least from the point of view of the commercial oligarchy paying for both the politicians and the press coverage, the issue is never about the why of who owes what to whom, only about the how much and when, or if, the check is in the mail. No loose talk about what is meant by the word democracy or in what ways it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people.
Dr. Steve Pieczenik, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in three administrations, who earned his Ph.D. at MIT, has revealed that he has been told by a high-ranking general–whom I believe to have been Gen. Richard Myers–that 9/11 was a “false flag” attack, which was done by the government in order to arouse the American people to support wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. On Alex Jones, he has now asserted that Israel is going to attack Iran on Yom Kippur, which begins on Tuesday, 25 September 2011 (sic). He insists that Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu are at odds over this, where Obama and the Pentagon are opposed to any such attack. I think Pieczenik is very honest and has run risks by revealing that he was told it had been a “false flag” operation to induce the public to support wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I wish that I could believe that the US “won’t be drawn into another unpopular war”. Given the coming November presidential elections, however, where a new war in the Middle East would be overwhelmingly unpopular with the American public, Obama needs plausible deniability, which means that it must appear to the public as though this engagement was initiated by Iran, where the most likely scenario has an Israeli sub torpedo the USS Enterprise, our first nuclear-powered carrier, and blame it on Iran. This would not be the first example of monumental hypocisy by Obama.
Everyone has an opinion of QE3. Almost all are wrong.
What has taken place here in its size, and in an almost simultaneous international unified approach has no precedent in economic history.
QE1 and QE2 were not failures. Do you have any idea what the world would have looked like if every major bank in the Western financial world broke?
It is easy to be a naysayer and say let the banks go broke, but you have no idea how hard it would have hit you and yours and maybe gold and silver. This is not to say that Debt Monetization, which QE represents, is correct, but it was the only tool available to central banks that would create infinite cash for the Fed and Treasury to use in a totally discretionary manner. Governments, because of the size of their debt, were incapable of applying the better tool for reviving economic activity, which is fiscal stimulation. One thing for certain is the infrastructure of the USA is collapsing in front of your eyes. Dar es Salaam airport looks better on approach than JFK. Dubai is beyond description. Roads from the Beijing airport are brand new. The USA infrastructure is disgraceful for a major power. New York City roads look like “Mad Max and the Day After.” However when you are the major debtor nation fiscal stimulation is simply not possible. It will not happen because it cannot happen.
Please stop listening to those that tell you QE will have no effect. They are “Ignorant to Infinity.” QE3 is going to have an unprecedented effect, as it is now simultaneous and global in scope.
Please make note of all the governments that screamed at the Fed for the use of QE1 and QE2 that are now applying QE to infinity.
There will be no QE4 because QE3 is going to go on continually with a month or two off now and then. Please recognize that it is hard for markets to discount what they do not believe in and therefore by definition do not anticipate.
Know within 90 days the economic effects of QE3 will be entering markets for money and therefore the markets for gold, silver, and most certainly the dollar.
Gold is going to at least $3500. Silver will certainly perform well also. The real support for the US dollar is .7200 on the USDX and it will trade there. The euro will trade at $1.35 and $1.40.
Ron McEwen of MUX fame said it correctly: “Patience is bitter; but the fruit is sweet!”
