Health/Medical

I was prompted to write this article when a twitter contact of mine wondered whether some of my writings about the corpocracy amounted to a conspiracy theory.  Having been a behavioral scientist most of my adult life I know a thing or two about what’s theory and what’s not.  I don’t know how anyone, scientist or lay person, could mistake the corpocracy for a theory. I doubt if any readers of articles published in the alternative news media would confuse the two. Nevertheless, I want to tell you what I have learned over the years.

Right-wingers have adopted the outrage-machine over the last several decades, with the unceasing intention of dominating the media and influencing public opinion with a right-wing bias. The highly-funded choral and print network they have built is impressive and relentless at the same time. Almost all are petty, embellished or fabricated, but many imagined.
The really outrageous – most causing or involving death or injury — seem to be presented perfunctorily, fitted with “corporate lenses,” or consigned to more obscure treatment, even by mainstream media. Here is a small sample:

The United Nations is becoming all too familiar with Michigan.  First, they learned of rampant water shut-offs affecting 40% of Detroit’s residents last year.  They will soon be informed of the plight of Flint, Michigan.  For nearly two years, Flint residents were forced to drink, cook and bathe in putrid, toxic water.

May of 2012, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s poor generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk.

Deadly invisible pathogens are on the march. Ebola, and now the Zika virus, the ongoing cholera epidemics and the enormous casualties from tuberculosis, malaria and varieties of avian Influenza—all of these should be waking us up to the global spread of disease and the public health challenges when it comes to dealing with mutational virulence. Millions die every year. But the political leaders of nations don’t seem to respect the warnings from our scientists. Pandemic, the important book by Sonia Shah, is a jeremiad, and should spark policy makers’ public concern.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
— Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina, 1992

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.
– Pope Francis I, Laudato Si

Just an hour before my wife and I landed in her native Puerto Rico last month, the island’s government had defaulted on $1 billion in bond interest payments. It was the second default in five months for the cash-strapped government whose debt now totals $72 billion. None of this was evident as we waded through the crowds in Rafael Hernández airport in Aguadilla, which had been converted into a civilian airport after the closure of Ramey Air Force Base 40 years earlier.

… do we provide training and advice and help in order to make sure that countries actually obey the norms of humanitarian law? Yes, we do.
— David Cameron, Prime Minister’s Questions, January 21st, 2016

Bernie Sanders is far too easy on Hillary Clinton in their debates. Clinton flaunts her record and experience in ways that Sanders could use to expose her serious vulnerabilities and disqualifications for becoming president. Sanders responds to Clinton’s points, but without the precision that could demolish her arrogance.