MEDIA ROOTS – Pharmaceutical companies spend an astronomical amount of money on lobbying and advertising.  Sometimes a marketing campaign is so expensive that even if it’s discovered that a drug is ineffective once it hits the market, the money spent needs to be made back; instead of recalling the drug, they continue to push it. Risperdal, a drug designed to treat PTSD, is one such example; although proven equally as effective as placebo, it has cost the Department of Veterans Affairs $717 million dollars over the course of 9 years. 

Robbie Martin

***

COUNTERPUNCH – Pharma is losing so much money from rising co-pays and prescription abandonment, it has launched cagey, public service announcement-sounding campaigns about “patients not taking the drugs they need,” as if it is a health and not revenue issue. Pharma has even instituted arrangements with some pharmacies to send visiting nurses to patients’ homes to ensure “compliance,” Big Brother overtones notwithstanding.

Prescription abandonment is an especially thorny issue for Pharma when the drugs are taken on faith, to reduce patients’ “risks” and patients do not necessarily feel them working. It is also a thorny issue when studies suggest the drugs being abandoned may not be necessary to begin with or working.

One such expensive placebo is the drug known by the brand name Risperdal. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $717 million on the drug to treat posttraumatic stress disorder in Afghanistan and Iraq troops with PTSD over nine years, only to discover it worked no better than a sugar pill! Veterans Affairs doctors wrote more than 5 million prescriptions from 2000 through June 2010 for naught, says a 2011 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Last month, Johnson & Johnson also agreed to pay $1.2 billion in fines for minimizing or concealing Risperdal’s dangers. Many say unless a drug company’s chief officers go to prison or the company is banned from sales to Medicare and other government programs, penalties are a joke. 

Read more about When Big Pharma Writes The Laws.

***

Abby Martin Interviews Dr. Darcy Smith about Big Pharma’s Direct to Consumer Advertising for RT TV

***

Photo by Flickr US National Archives

MEDIA ROOTS – Early Monday morning, the controversial website WikiLeaks released a stunning collection of Global Intelligence Files from the private intelligence corporation Stratfor.

According to WikiLeaks:

“The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.

The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.”

Most mainstream media reports aren’t covering several important issues that these files bring up, like how Stratfor has been gathering intelligence and spying on journalists and activists all over the world for not only the government, but for private corporations like Coca-Cola.

Comedy/activist duo the Yes-Men found out they were being spied on by Stratfor because of their activism surrounding the Bopal Chemical Disaster.  Other media outlets that had intelligence gathering done on them include Rolling Stone, Wikileaks itself (over 4,000 emails alone), Sunday Star Times, The Hindu, Russia Reporter, Publico and an unknown amount more.  Wikileaks says that more information about journalist spying is yet to be revealed.

Activist Cosmos found an intriguing tidbit of information within the e-mails that uncovered how “out of Wikileaks’ release of 5 million Stratfor emails is the comment from Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President of Intelligence, that the Imam of the controversial so-called Ground Zero mosque is an “FBI operational asset.” Burton, who was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and the Deputy Chief of their counterterrorism division, made the comment on an email chain regarding a New York Observer article, Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque.  The controversy surrounding the “Ground Zero mosque” overwhelmingly dominated the news and discussion surrounding the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.”

At Media Roots, we recommend that you don’t rely on our or any other media outlet’s coverage of the recent leak.  Instead, you can watch the entire press conference with Julian Assange about the Stratfor leaks here:

Julian Assange Press Conference on Stratfor Leaks

***

Written by Robbie Martin for Media Roots

Photo by Flickr user Animantion Concept

MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin from Media Roots reports the news for Project Censored’s KPFA morning show about the Verizon worker strikes and the role that multinational corporations have in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The segment features an interview with Dalit Baum, founder of “Who Profits from the Occupation”, an activist research initiative of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel that provides information about corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine. She also directs Economic Activism for Palestine, which aims to support existing corporate accountability campaigns in the US.

Listen here or click to download below.

For more information about companies involved in the occupation visit http://www.whoprofits.org/

MEDIA ROOTS- The London riots were mostly summarized as an animalistic decline of civil society by the corporate press, with too little analysis as to what societal, political and economic factors could cause such a backlash to occur. Since there was no apparent political motivation behind the rioting, it was easy to discard the actions as indiscriminate herd looting and burning by “feral teenagers.” Counterpunch writer David Harvey writes about how this breakdown is an inevitable outcome of living under a broken system of “feral capitalism,” where corruption and profiteering are rampant in almost every corporate and political sector.

Abby

***

COUNTERPUNCH– “Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.

The word “feral” pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family. But then the word conjured up another association: Tony Blair attacking the “feral media,” having for so long been comfortably lodged in the left pocket of Rupert Murdoch only later to be substituted as Murdoch reached into his right pocket to pluck out David Cameron.

There will of course be the usual hysterical debate between those prone to view the riots as a matter of pure, unbridled and inexcusable criminality, and those anxious to contextualize events against a background of bad policing; continuing racism and unjustified persecution of youths and minorities; mass unemployment of the young; burgeoning social deprivation; and a mindless politics of austerity that has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the perpetuation and consolidation of personal wealth and power. Some may even get around to condemning the meaningless and alienating qualities of so many jobs and so much of daily life in the midst of immense but unevenly distributed potentiality for human flourishing.

If we are lucky, we will have commissions and reports to say all over again what was said of Brixton and Toxteth in the Thatcher years. I say ‘lucky’ because the feral instincts of the current Prime Minister seem more attuned to turn on the water cannons, to call in the tear gas brigade and use the rubber bullets while pontificating unctuously about the loss of moral compass, the decline of civility and the sad deterioration of family values and discipline among errant youths.

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

Read the full article about Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets.

Written by David Harvey

© 2011 Counterpunch

Photo by Flickr user 138_photo

PR WATCH– On October 23, 2009, Harrison “Harry” Kothari celebrated his second birthday by blowing out candles on a cake decorated with a giant airplane. At age two, Harry could ride a tricycle, stack blocks, and say words like “mama,” “airplane,” and “thank you.” A month earlier, surgeons at a Houston hospital had removed a benign cyst from Harrison’s head without problems. In follow-up visits, nurses drained cerebrospinal fluid to test for infection, and following normal protocol, wiped the area around the drain with what they assumed were sterile alcohol wipes. On December 1, Harry was dead, his tiny brain swollen by a Bacillus cereus infection apparently caused by contaminated alcohol wipes.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the wipes were produced by the Hartland, Wisconsin corporation Triad Group and its manufacturing subsidiary, H&P. Employees had long complained of hygiene and safety problems; one former quality control inspector told the newspaper that “we were told to keep things running at all costs,” and after one employee cut her finger when packing alcohol wipe packets, the wipes were nonetheless shipped with blood inside and outside the box. And for years, the Food and Drug Administration FDA) –- the regulatory agency tasked with protecting public health — had noted sanitation and manufacturing problems at the plant, but did not take serious action until it was too late.

Harry’s family has sued Triad for killing their baby boy with its negligence. Triad states its products met FDA regulations. Under a bill promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Regulatory Compliance Congruity with Liability Act, Triad’s “regulatory compliance” might be enough to absolve Triad from any and all responsibility to Harry’s family.

The Regulatory Compliance Congruity with Liability Act is part of a set of “tort reform” bills from ALEC that limit corporate responsibility at the expense of average Americans. ALEC, the corporate-funded national organization that lets Big Business hand state legislators “model bills” to introduce in their state, has been pushing “tort reform” since about 1986, with the support of Big Tobacco, the insurance industry, and other major corporations.

Read more about ALEC and “Tort Reform”

© 2011 Center for Media & Democracy

Photo by Flickr user