Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1858 – Public Intelligence Blog

A prominent MD has been making the rounds on talk shows recently bashing vitamins with a new book that’s come out called Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (Harper, 2013).

“Now on the stump, he encourages thinking more critically about healthcare treatments. Too bad his is a one-sided view. And that his intended audience is unlikely to be convinced because health information has been increasingly available over the last 25 years. Nor do many physicians and prominent medical organizations subscribe to his views (although a few legislators do).

“People are systematically choosing to manage their own health in a way that is unprecedented,” points out James S. Turner, chairman of Citizens for Health, a health advocacy group with over 100,000 members. “The conventional treatments that Offit champions are often very helpful. The problem is that the industry has oversold them, and more and more people see that now.”

If Offit’s book had aimed to explore all health options even-handedly for their upsides and their downsides, it might have truly advanced the conversation about how to better health and lower healthcare costs. (And ranking below 16 developed nations across the lifespan and for all income levels, while stuck in the midst of a polarized debate over costs and coverage, the U.S. sorely needs that conversation.) But instead, in his book and media tour, Dr. Offit plays the predictable role of debunker, single-mindedly championing his own medical brand. Unfurling an arch skepticism about the use of herbs and other nutritional supplements, for example, Offit presents himself as the stalwart for science. But it’s instructive to see what happens when he encounters someone conversant with the health literature.

Continue reading “Owl: Big Pharma Attacks Alternative Medicine”

2013/07/182013/07/18

Chuck Spinney: Boeing Implosion a Case Study in Integrity Lost — Specific Decisions Leading to Plastic Flammable Planes with Explosive Batteries

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

Two and one-half years ago, on 11 February 2011, Pierre Sprey and I posted a blog entry on the Blaster, Why is Boing Imploding?. This post is still the fourth most popular since I began the website in 2008. It describes how the corrosive practices of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) spill over to weaken manufacturing competitiveness in the private sector. Included in this blog entry was a link to a very revealing internal 2001 Boeing report documenting perils of outsourcing production as a means of increasing profitability to Boeing. Increased outsourcing was and remains a central tenant of the plan for production of the Boeing 787 program.

The spillover of MICC’s dysfunctional manufacturing practices into the private manufacturing sector has a lot to do with America's economic stagnation. The uncompetitiveness of the defense sector and the dangers of spillover are themes I have addressed repeatedly — for example, here or here, esp. beginning with 2^nd paragraph of pg. 58.

That the MICC's disfunctional practices would contribute to deindustrialization and the eventual loss of high paying manufacturing jobs was first foreseen and written about in late 1950s by Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University. In his prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983), Melman explained why the growing militarization of our economy was one of the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness and the loss of high wage manufacturing jobs. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s. The introduction “How The Yankees Lost Their Knowhow” is worth the price of book.

Fast forward to July 2013: My good friend Andrew Cockburn has brilliantly updated the sorry story of Boeing's implosion in an important Harpers essay “How Boeing’s adoption of defense-related contracting practices led to the flawed Dreamliner 787” (also attached below).

Read it carefully, because without saying so, Andrew's case study reminds us of the prescient but ignored warnings in Melman’s pathbreaking work in identifying some of the real causes of America’s industrial decline, the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs (plotted in Figures 1 and 2 here), and the rise of inequality — and now the opportunity costs incurred when a manufacturing company uses DoD outsourcing practices to maximize profits by reducing its own production, while passing the increased risks of air travel onto the customer.

Chuck Spinney

Marina di Camp, Elba

Heart of Empire —

Boeing’s Plastic Planes

How Boeing’s adoption of defense-contracting practices led to the flawed Dreamliner 787

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Boeing Implosion a Case Study in Integrity Lost — Specific Decisions Leading to Plastic Flammable Planes with Explosive Batteries”

2013/07/18

SchwartzReport: US Public Contemp for Congress

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

As a result of the failure of both media and government to actually serve the interests of the people is it any wonder that more than three-quarters of the public holds the Congress in contempt?

U.S. Congress Approval Remains Dismal
ALYSSA BROWN – The Gallup Organization

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans remain down on Congress, with 15% approving and 78% disapproving of the job it is doing. This approval rating is similar to the low levels seen this year, and is five percentage points above the all-time low of 10%, last recorded in August 2012.

2013/07/172013/07/17

Owl: Tom Engelhardt Rogue Superpower –From Tragedy to Farce?

Corruption, Government

“Sooner or later, the architecture will determine the acts”: The Resurrection of the Totalitarian Beast in Washington D.C.

This is a long article well worth reading entirely, but if you have only for a small amount of timet, here's two key takeaways worth pondering:

“Consider, for instance, a superior piece of recent reporting by Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times. His front-page story, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of NSA,” might once have sent shock waves through Washington and perhaps the country as well. It did, after all, reveal how, in “more than a dozen classified rulings,” a secret FISA court, which oversees the American surveillance state, “has created a secret body of law” giving the NSA sweeping new powers. Here’s the paragraph that should have had Americans jumping out of their skins (my italics added): “The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.”

Second takeaway:

Continue reading “Owl: Tom Engelhardt Rogue Superpower –From Tragedy to Farce?”

2013/07/172013/07/17

Neal Rauhauser: The Pentagon’s Third Rail

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military

The Pentagon’s Third Rail

This came out of the morning Situation Report from @glubold of Foreign Policy magazine. The secret sauce, for those interested, is to read NightWatch for a mix of what might happen and what the news is too clumsy to cover, then check the various FP feeds to see what has actually come to pass.

This is a domestic rather than international issue, but it’s one that is liable to bite us hard.

The Pentagon is starting to touch the third rail of budgetary spending: military compensation, retirement and benefits spending. As Chuck Hagel completes his “listening tour” of troops and their families, a quiet effort has begun to review military retirement and compensation that will grow louder as its work begins to surface. Hagel is finishing up his domestic road trip today, visiting airmen at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C., and then Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Hagel, we’re told, wants to hear from troops and families about the challenges they face during a period of shrinking budgets. He’s listening but he’s also starting slowly to float the idea that compensation benefits and even retirement plans may have to be pared back in order to make the Pentagon’s ledgers add up. Personnel costs alone cost the services between 55 and 65 percent of their budgets and rising – a fact the Pentagon brass say they’ve been saddled with for years. But now as budgets tighten, it’s a fact that can’t be ignored.

Airmen, marines, sailors, and soldiers who served their time and were discharged with a clean DD214 are going to see their retirement benefits slashed. The 55% – 65% of budget being personnel was an eye opener for me – if I pay attention to domestic matters it’s almost always system costs, system life cycle, and changing military doctrine. This looks like a brewing battle between our veterans and defense contractors who are desperately trying to keep their nose in the Pentagon’s feeding trough as the normal 25% post war budget cuts begin.

But there is a ticking bomb out there:

Read full post.

2013/07/172013/07/17

Eagle: NSA Reason for Existence — Is It To Snoop? Or Is It to Waste Tens of Billions of Dollars without Accountability?

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

NSA Snooping: The War on Terror Is America's Mania

A Commentary By Klaus Brinkbäumer

The NSA spying scandal shows that America's pursuit of terrorists has turned into a mania. Spying on citizens is as monstrous and unlawful as Guantanamo Bay and drone warfare. The German government's response has been woefully weak.

America is sick. September 11 left it wounded and unsettled — that's been obvious for nearly 12 years — but we are only now finding out just how grave the illness really is. The actions of the NSA exposed more than just the telephone conversations and digital lives of many millions of people. The global spying scandal shows that the US has become manic, that it is behaving pathologically, invasively. Its actions are entirely out of proportion to the danger.

Read full article (see also reader comments).

Continue reading “Eagle: NSA Reason for Existence — Is It To Snoop? Or Is It to Waste Tens of Billions of Dollars without Accountability?”

2013/07/17

Neal Rauhauser: Are Syrian and Iraqi Conflicts Merging? Is Iran Gaining a Corridor to the Mediterranean?

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism

UN envoy: Iraq and Syrian conflicts are merging

That headline appeared in my inbox earlier and I have been dreading it. The Syrian civil war has spilled over into Lebanon, it’s encroaching on Turkey’s territory, and it’s set off troubles in neighboring Iraq, which are now merging into an end to end regional threat.

Let’s take a look at how things got this way. The Ottoman empire laid claim to Syria and Iraq between 1512 and 1566.

Phi Beta Iota: A well illustrated historical overview with an itemization of current country by country one liners.