(KurtNimmo) - It is another example of the mindset of the Hollywood lib elite. Film director Woody Allen — who demonstrated his warped ethos a few years ago by marrying his adopted daughter — believes Obama would get more done if he declared himself dictator. “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him,” Allen said in an interview published by Spanish language monarchist newspaper La Vanguardia. “It would good… if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.” Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com May 18, 2010
Sort of like Mussolini’s idea of making the trains run on time?
Allen is frustrated with American politics and pines for the simplicity of a dictatorship. As a member of the intellectual elite, Woody Allen has no patience for the political demands of the little people who are currently flocking in droves to the Tea Party movement and embracing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Allen’s comment that the Republican Party should get out of Obama’s way is a demand that the people sit down and shut up. Establishment Republicans do not oppose the Obama agenda of large government. Establishment Republicans are merely miffed they are not able to impose a neocon version of leviathan government. Republicans prefer bloated and grotesque military budgets to drive the nation into unsustainable debt owed to bankers while Democrats prefer social programs to accomplish the same objective.
There is essentially no difference between Democrats and Republicans, as the insider Carroll Quigley noted. Obama is run by the same Wall Street crowd and Goldman Sachs functionaries as his predecessor. Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable with minor cosmetic difference to fool the plebs.
Socialist intellectuals invariably end up advocating and supporting totalitarianism. They are viscerally opposed to classical liberalism — the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets. Socialist intellectuals have nothing but contempt for the fact individual rights are natural, inherent, inalienable, and exist independently of government. Government is everything for the socialists, including the Hollywood limo lib variety of socialist. History is riddled with intellectuals who have supported communism and fascism, both derived from Marxist theory. Both strive for statist absolutism. Both end up in mass slavery and misery.
The comic director Woody Allen should take heed. Dictators invariably turn on their faithful ideologues and slogan chanting supporters. Hitler had his Night of the Long Knives and Stalin his endless purges that terminated in execution and disappearance into gulags.
Zbigniew Brzezinski giving the CFR branch in Montreal a presentation discussing world government and his fears of the mass global awakening that has taken place.
Video: Reality Report #45 Posted by sakerfa on May 19, 2010
(RTR) – Why do lawmakers really want to pass the Arizona Immigration Bill? Should the government be allowed to remove American citizenship? Why is the federal government trying to take land from an elderly Vermont farmer? Is the United States become a socialist state or a fascist state? Join us on this weeks edition to help answer thess questions. Plus, Alex Jones interviews host Gary Franchi, Tim O’Shea unveils the dirty truth about vaccines in America and we name this weeks Enemy of the State.
(DrMercola) – Dr. Beatrice Golomb, Associate Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Diego, masterfully exposes the corruption that has metastasized like a tumor throughout the pharmaceutical and medical industries, in the video above.
If you have any doubt about drug companies being riddled with conflicts of interest, those doubts will be shattered after seeing the evidence she presents.
The corruption has become so prolific that it has literally debased medical science.
In the above linked Chicago Breaking News article, Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is quoted as saying:
“Science is not a democracy where people’s votes decide what is right. Look at the data, look at science and make a decision based on science that has been published.”
What he is really advocating is for you to blindly believe in “facts” that may have been produced in the midst of MASSIVE conflicts of interest.
Before you assume the science in medical journals is credible, let’s take a look at what is going on behind the scenes of editing and publishing in medical science.
Bias #1: Unwanted Results are Not Published In order for scientific studies to happen, someone has to pay for them.
The top funder for any drug trial is the pharmaceutical company that makes it, since the manufacturer is most invested in “proving” how spectacular its drug is. Dr. Golomb uses the case of statins as an example, stating that all of the major statin studies have been funded exclusively by the drug industry.
The second-highest funder of drug studies is the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is not the group of neutral government experts you may have assumed them to be. In fact, NIH accepts a great deal of money from Big Pharma and is deeply enmeshed with the industry.
But drug companies publish only a fraction of the studies they fund — the ones that promote their drugs.
If a study does not have findings that are favorable to its product, it is unlikely it will ever make it into a journal for publication.
In contrast, studies that have favorable findings almost always make the cut.
There are simply thousands of scientific studies out there that have never been seen by you or your physician because they have been screened out by editors and reviewers who are being paid to uphold an industry agenda.
Published studies overwhelmingly favor the funding company’s drug. Whichever drug is manufactured by the study sponsor is the drug that comes out on top, 90 percent of the time!
Given this, how can medical journals be considered unbiased?
Bias #2: Bad Results are Submitted as Good When a scientific study has findings that cast doubt on the efficacy of a drug, oftentimes the negative findings are morphed into positive ones.
For example, in 2008, FDA officials analyzed a registry of 74 antidepressant trials, which included trials that were published and those that were not. The FDA’s findings were then written up in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
This is what they found:
•38 of the trials reported positive results, and 37 of the 38 were published. •36 trials had negative or questionable findings. Of the 36, 22 were not published at all, and 11 were published in a way that conveyed the results as though they were positive. So, if you just went to the published literature, it would look like 94 percent of the studies were positive, when in reality only about 50 percent were positive … equivalent to a coin toss.
For statins, the odds that the funding company’s drug will come out on top are staggering1:
•The odds that the funding company’s statin drug will come out looking better than anyone else’s statin in the “results” section of the article are 20:1. •The odds that the funding company’s statin will come out on top in the “conclusions” part of the article are 35:1. So, even if they can’t make the results look good, they can often find a way to twist the conclusions so that their drug appears favorable.
Selectively omitting negative trial results can be devastating to your health, as Merck & Co. proved when they concealed the fact that three patients suffered heart attacks from Vioxx during clinical trials. They conveniently omitted this data (along with other relevant findings) from the copy of the study they submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine for publication.
The omissions were uncovered years later during the 7,000 Vioxx lawsuit litigations.
Bias #3: A Favorable Study is Submitted Multiple Times When a study yields positive results, it is often submitted multiple times in a way that the reader doesn’t realize it’s the same study, obscured by different author lists and different details. Analyzers have had to look very carefully to determine which studies are actually duplicates because they are so cleverly disguised.
Not surprisingly, trials reporting greater treatment efficacy were significantly more likely to be duplicated, according to Dr. Golomb’s reporting.
In one analysis of the published reports about ondansetron (an anti-nausea drug), the same study was published 5 times. This duplication of data led to a 23 percent overestimation of ondansetron’s effectiveness when a meta-analysis was performed.2
Talk about good mileage!
Bias #4: Follow-Up Reviews Done by Biased Experts The editorials that follow from a study, submitted by so-called unbiased experts and then published in reputable journals, are often done by non-neutral parties who have a financial tie to the drug maker.
Dr. Golomb uses the case of calcium channel blockers (a type of heart medication) as an example. The connection between authors declaring their support for calcium channel blockers and those not in support of them was highly statistically tied to their affiliation with the drug manufacturer — in fact, the odds that their opinion was NOT due to their affiliation was more than 1,000:1.
Bias #5: Ghostwriting Many of the articles that appear in medical journals purportedly written by well-known academics are actually written by unacknowledged ghostwriters on Big Pharma payroll.
Consider the example of Parke-Davis and their drug Neurontin.
Parke-Davis contracted with a “medical education communication company,” or MECC, which is a company paid almost exclusively by pharmaceutical companies to write articles, reviews, and letters to editors of medical journals to cast their products in a favorable light.
In this case, MECC was paid $13,000 to $18,000 per article. In turn, MECC paid $1,000 each to friendly physicians and pharmacists to sign off as authors of the articles, making the material appear independent.
This was also done by Pfizer as a strategy for marketing Zoloft. A document was written that included 81 different articles promoting Zoloft’s usefulness for everything from panic disorder to pedophilia.
The only problem was, for some articles, the name of the author was listed as “to be determined,” even though the article was listed as already completed. They weren’t helping out an existing team of scientists who happened to be talentless at writing — Pfizer wrote the article, and then shopped around for scientists willing to claim authorship, to give it a veneer of credibility.
Wyeth-Ayerst employed a similar ghostwriting tactic to promote its “fen-phen” diet drug, Redux.
Bias #6: Journal Bias Medical journals are generally considered by medical practitioners to be a source of reliable information. But medical journals are also businesses.
Three editors, who agreed to discuss finances only if they remained anonymous, said a few journals that previously measured annual profits in the tens of thousands of dollars now make millions annually.
The truth is that Big Pharma has become quite adept at manipulating and brainwashing practitioners of conventional medicine. They influence the very heart and center of the most respected medical journals, creating dogma and beliefs that support the drug paradigm because it is blessed by the pinnacle of scientific integrity: the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.
Peer-reviewed medical journals contain advertisements that are almost exclusively for drugs, amidst articles that are biased toward promoting those drugs. If you have looked through a medical journal lately, you’ll see full-page Pharma glossies, cover to cover.
Pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on marketing as they spend on research!
In 2003, drug companies spent $448 million dollars on advertising in medical journals2. It has been calculated that the return on investment on medical journal ads is between $2.22 and $6.86 for every dollar spent, with larger and older brands at the higher end.
Long-term returns may be even higher when you consider that one ad viewed by a physician could result in hundreds or even thousands of drug purchases, based on the prescriptions he or she writes.
The term “peer-review” has come to imply scientific credibility. But the fact is that many of the peer-reviewers are on the drug company’s payroll, and those who are not are unlikely to detect flawed research or outright fraud.
Medical journals are the number one source of medical information for physicians. In fact, nearly 80 percent of physicians use medical journals for their education, which exceeds information from any other source3.
Do you really want to blindly take the advise of a physician whose only source of medical information is a medical journal engaged in such profound conflicts of interest?
Advertisements for drugs focus the “latest and greatest” drugs to hit the market, drugs which may not be superior to existing, less expensive alternatives. So physicians are seduced into prescribing the newest, most expensive drugs, which drives up your healthcare costs.
An excellent article in PLoS Medicine regarding drug advertising in medical journals concludes4:
“The scholarly nature of journals confers credibility on both articles and advertisements within their pages. By exclusively featuring advertisements for drugs and devices, medical journals implicitly endorse corporate promotion of the most profitable products. Advertisements and other financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies compromise the objectivity of journals.
The primary obligation of industry is to make money for its stockholders. The primary obligation of journals should be to physicians and their patients, who depend on the accuracy of information within these publications. Medical journals should not accept advertisements from pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, or other industries ‘relevant to medicine.’”
In 2004, Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, wrote, “Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”5
Bias #7: Drug Companies Masquerading as Educators The education of medical students and residents also comes through the filter of the drug industry, which seeks to groom them before they even finish medical school.
According to Dr. Golomb’s data, Big Pharma now spends $18.5 billion per year promoting their drugs to physicians. That amounts to $30,000 per year for every physician in the U. S.!
And drug companies are allowed to develop their own education curriculum for medical students and residents, lavishing them with gifts, indirectly paying them to attend meetings and events where they promote the company’s products.
Why is the Accrediting Commission for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) so permissive with industry involvement?
Almost half of the members are representatives of Big Pharma or are consultants for businesses that work directly with it to prepare these educational programs. Only a few represent academic CME institutions.
Any discussion of physician “seduction” would be incomplete without the mentioning of the 100,000 drug reps, who are groomed and trained to wine and dine and otherwise shower physicians in sweetness until they are handing out prescriptions like candy.
Reps are even taught tactics for manipulating doctors for industry benefit, as a standard part of their training.6
Hell Hath No Fury What happens if a physician or other person speaks up about these conflicts of interest? What happens to the proverbial whistle-blower?
Intimidating phone calls and direct threats, for starters.
In one case, Dr. Buse, an endocrinologist who is the incoming president of the American Diabetes Association, presented data in 1999 about his concerns about the risks of Avandia. Dr. Buse was intimidated with multiple phone calls by drug company officials. They suggested he could be financially liable to the company for $4 billion in lost revenues due to his “unscrupulous remarks.”
Other truth-tellers have had their reputations trashed or job offers rescinded for speaking the truths that Big Pharma works so hard to keep under wraps.
“Too Big to Nail” An individual truth-teller might be vulnerable to the wrath of an angry drug company, but drug companies are unlikely to suffer much of a consequence for their crimes.
A CNN report from April 2, 2010 reveals the truth about how shielded these huge drug companies really are.
Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, engaged in illegally promoting their drug Bextra for off-label use, despite their knowledge that it was associated with an increased risk of stroke and heart attack.
Bextra was pulled from the market in 2005, but not before many people were damaged by its use. When Federal prosecutors realized that convicting Pfizer would likely be a corporate death sentence (as any company convicted of major health care fraud is excluded from Medicare and Medicaid), they cut Pfizer a deal. Just as the big banks on Wall Street were deemed “too big to fail,” Pfizer was deemed “too big to nail.”
Why?
Prosecutors claimed to be concerned about the loss of jobs by Pfizer employees and financial losses to Pfizer shareholders as a result of being excluded from the Medicaid/Medicare programs.
So the prosecutors charged a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co., instead. In fact, this particular subsidiary company was created specifically for this purpose, as a sacrificial lamb, having been incorporated the very same day its lawyers filed a “guilty” plea in another case involving kick-backs, leaving Pfizer with the penalty equivalent of being sent to bed without supper.
In the end, all Pfizer lost was about three month’s profit, but all contracts, including those with Medicaid and Medicare, were spared.
This is just one more example of your federal government failing to protect you, and opting to protect big business’ interests instead.
The bottom line is, the drug companies aren’t going to protect you.
The government won’t protect you.
The AMA won’t protect you.7
And it is unlikely that your physician can protect you either — even a well-meaning one — when he or she is operating within a system that has become RIGGED for Big Pharma profit.
Only you can protect yourself.
So, until real systemic change takes place, your best health strategy is quite simply to employ and maintain a naturally healthy lifestyle that will optimize your body’s innate healing abilities and minimize your need for the drug companies’ latest concoctions.
(CampaignForLiberty) – I recently wrote two articles in which I criticized liberals for being two-faced and hypocritical when it comes to racial issues. The articles, which concerned the minimum wage, a longtime favorite government program among liberals whose negative effects fall disproportionately on blacks, were entitled “Why Do Daily Kos and Alternet Favor a Racist Government Program?” and “Free Teenagers: Repeal the Minimum Wage.”
Of course, I could also have written an article pointing out the decades-long liberal support of the drug war, another vicious government program whose adverse consequences have long fallen disproportionately on blacks and Hispanics. See, for example, this list of articles.
Thus, it’s not a coincidence that liberal icon Barack Obama, a drug user himself (he smoked dope and snorted cocaine when he was young and smokes tobacco today) and his Democratically controlled Congress are not only not ending the drug war but instead are ramping it up, even encouraging the Mexican government’s use of the military to wage the drug war in Mexico. Jacob Hornberger Campaign For Liberty May 22, 2010
I could have also pointed out the long-time hypocrisy of liberals’ purported concern for Hispanics, especially the poor among them, even while supporting immigration laws and their brutal enforcement, including raiding American businesses suspected of committing the dastardly crime of entering into mutually beneficial economic relationships with financially poor Hispanics of foreign origin.
This week, thanks to Rand Paul’s win in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, we are treated to another grand spectacle of liberal hypocrisy when it comes to race. The liberal community has gone into emotional hyper-drive over Paul’s opposition to the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned racial discrimination by private businesses. The liberals are just shocked and outraged that anyone would honestly suggest that private businesses should be free to discriminate. And, of course, underlying all this is the suggestion that anyone who advocates such a position must be a secret bigot.
To examine into this latest instance of liberal hypocrisy on race, let’s delve into a few basics.
Suppose a certain white homeowner in a community publicly announces that he is holding a weekly TGIF cocktail party at his home every Friday night. He publicly invites everyone who lives within a one-mile radius of his home to his parties, but with a big exception. He says: Blacks and Jews are not invited and will not be permitted into his home.
How would libertarians respond? We would say that that man has every right in the world to take that position. We might criticize him, we might condemn him, we might ignore him, we might boycott his parties. But we would defend his right to discriminate against anyone he wants, as a matter of principle. After all, we would argue, it’s his home — his private property. To paraphrase Voltaire, we might not agree with how he uses his property, but we would defend his right to use it any way he wants. That’s what private ownership and a free society are all about.
How would liberals respond to that hypothetical? They would take the same position as libertarians! They would say that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to keep anyone he wants, even on racial grounds, from his home. They would defend the homeowner’s fundamental right to associate with anyone he wants, even if his choices are abhorrent and offensive to everyone else. They would not call on amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to apply it to private homeowners.
What? Could this actually be possible? Could liberals actually be defending the right of a bigot to be a bigot in his own home? Wouldn’t this make a liberal himself a bigot? After all, isn’t that what liberals claim about people who call for the right of discrimination in private businesses — that their support of such a right makes them a closet or overt bigot?
Liberals would respond, “No, we’re not bigots simply because we support the right of homeowners to discriminate against blacks, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, the poor, and anyone else. We simply believe in the principle of private ownership of one’s home and we’re willing to defend that principle, even when homeowners make racist choices.”
Well, then why don’t liberals extend that reasoning to people who support the right of private business owners to discriminate? Why are they so quick to claim that they’re not bigots when they stand on principle when it comes to the right of homeowners to discriminate but so quick to label libertarians who call for the same principle to be applied to business owners as racists and bigots?
Like I say, two-faced and hypocritical.
Let’s delve into this two-faced liberal hypocrisy a bit further. For years, the ACLU has publicly patted itself on the back, especially in fund-raising letters, about how it heroically stood for the right of Nazi sympathizers to march down a (government-owned) street in Skokie, Illinois. This shows how principled we are, the ACLU liberals have long claimed, because we defend the right of bigots to exercise freedom of speech, especially when the speech is abhorrent or offensive.
Would liberals accuse the ACLU of being racists and anti-Semitic bigots for defending the right of Nazi sympathizers to express their views? Of course not. Liberals would praise the ACLU for having the courage of its convictions for standing up for the free-speech rights of those who express horrendously offensive views.
Then, why not the same consideration for libertarians who stand up for the right of business owners to run their businesses the way they want, even if in the process they discriminate against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else?
Like I say, two-faced and hypocritical.
Now, you might be asking the obvious question: Why don’t liberals apply the freedom to discriminate that they support for private homeowners to private business owners, as libertarians do? After all, on the face of it this inconsistency doesn’t make much sense.
Liberals would respond by saying that businesses are different because they’re open to “the public.” But isn’t that really a distinction without a difference? After all, what’s the difference, in principle, between a homeowner inviting the public (minus blacks and Jews) to his Friday night parties and a businessman who invites the public (minus blacks and Jews) to purchase his goods?
Why were liberals so intent on forced integration of private businesses? What was the real reason they refused to extend their principle of freedom of association and freedom of speech with respect to homeowners and Nazi demonstrators to private business owners?
After all, hardly anyone today questions whether segregation laws and laws that impeded voting rights for blacks were morally wrong. All that needed to be done was to repeal those laws, prohibiting government from discriminating and leaving homeowners, business owners, and other private people (e.g., Nazi sympathizers) free to discriminate on any basis they chose.
How would things have turned out if businesses had been left free to discriminate? Well, does anyone today get into an uproar over the fact that people are free to discriminate in their homes? And yes, people get into an uproar over a Nazi march in Skokie, just as they get upset over the periodic burning of the flag, but how many people lose sleep over the fact that people have such rights?
The same thing would have happened if private businesses had been left free to discriminate. In fact, the likelihood is that the bigoted businesses would slowly but surely have lost market share to businesses that would sell to everyone, especially given the power of social ostracism, boycotts, moral condemnation, and the like.
After all, ask yourself: If everyone in, say, Alabama was a bigot, why would it have been necessary for the government to enact a law requiring segregation? My hunch is that the bigots knew that a free market tends to put a price on discrimination and, therefore, that bigoted firms needed state protection from the competition of firms that would choose not to discriminate.
But the most important principle is the one involving freedom. The essence of a free society is one in which people are free to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. Freedom necessarily entails the right to make choices that other people find offensive, abhorrent, unpopular, and irresponsible. If people are free only to make the correct choices, then they are not truly free.
Liberals understand this principle, but only up to a point. That’s why they support the right of homeowners and Nazi sympathizers to discriminate. But they steadfastly refuse to extend their principles to private businesses.
Why?
I suspect that the answer lies in the long-time, deep antipathy that liberals have to the free market — to free enterprise — to capitalism — to profit. This of course raises the ugly head of socialism, the economic philosophy that has long attracted the liberal community.
In the ideal world of the liberal, there would be no private businesses, no more exploitation of the worker, no more consumer gouging, no more stolen profits. The government would own and operate all enterprises, and everyone would work for the government. The model, of course, for this socialist paradise is Cuba or North Korea.
But liberals instinctively know that they could never get away with converting America to a complete socialist system. Most Americans simply wouldn’t go along with it. So, long ago liberals decided to compromise and settle for less. They began socializing America with socialist welfare-state redistributive schemes, programs that would use the state to equalize wealth by having the IRS take from the rich and middle class to give to the poor. That’s what Social Security, Medicare, welfare, education grants, SBA loans, and so forth are all about.
But they went further than that. They also figured out if they couldn’t nationalize everyone’s business (except in certain instances, like Obama’s takeover of automobile companies and banks), they would use the state to control and direct private business operations. Here arises the ugly head of fascism, a way of life in which the state leaves businesses nominally in private hands but controls and directs them as if the state were the true owner.
The roots for this combined socialist-fascist economic system are found in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an economic program that every American is taught in public (i.e., government) schools “saved free enterprise.” It was actually straight out of the playbook of European socialists and fascists. Indeed, Roosevelt’s Social Security plan had originated within German socialists and his NIRA and Blue Eagle campaign could easily have been implemented in fascist Italy.
Read the following book for more on this: Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbush. If you don’t want to bother reading the book, read this review or this review or this review of the book. Or read Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism.
Now, let me say a word about conservatives. For a time, conservatives opposed the liberal movement toward socialism and fascism. Thus, many of them opposed FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well as Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act ban on discrimination by private businesses.
Over time, however, conservatives threw in the towel on all counts. Fearful that they would lose credibility, respectability, and, most important, political power, they ended up abandoning the principles of economic liberty and embracing the principles of socialism, interventionism, fascism, and big government. As part of that process, they ended up embracing liberals’ socialist welfare-state programs that came with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society and the federal control over private businesses that came with LBJ’s 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Thus, Americans who wish to see liberty restored to our land cannot count on either liberals or conservatives. Liberals are dead-set on moving our land toward more socialism, more fascism, more control over private enterprise, more interventionism, more imperialism, more war, and more infringements on civil liberties, all of which means more big spending, big debt, big taxes, and big inflation. Conservatives, fearful of losing political power, have embraced the entire liberal agenda and are especially dead set on fortifying the warfare state in America, leaving themselves with nothing more than their old 1950s irrelevant and hypocritical mantra “free enterprise, private property, and limited government” that they use in their speeches, on their stationery, and on their websites.
