whitehouseprotest's shared items in Google Reader

“Free Market” Capitalism Gets Thumbs Down in 27 Countries, Including US

2009-11-09T08:33:48Z

What amazes me is how a vague and intellectually bankrupt (because it is so nebulous as to be used in ways that often wind up being contradictory) term like “free markets” nevertheless gets accorded respect it does not deserve in popular discourse in the US, particularly in the media.

Well it turns out that the public is not so easily swayed. A BBC survey of 29.000 people in 27 countries found that significant majorities, even in the US, thought more regulation and reform was needed to rein in capitalism gone amok. Only 11% said it was fine as is. By contrast, 23% of the total deemed it to be “fatally flawed”:

Protest Netanyahu at the Wardman Park Marriott

2009-11-09T16:38:14Z

Hardline right-wing Israeli Prime Minister

Benjamin Netanyahu

is featured as a guest speaker at the United Jewish Communities "General Assembly" meeting. We need to show him that we do not approve of his presence at our nation's capital, nor do we support the grave injustices against the Palestinian people in which his government is fully participating in.

The Insane Westboro Baptist Church

2009-11-09T17:40:28Z

These hateful nut jobs are from the
Westboro Baptist Church

They showed up while we were protesting Benjamin Netanyahu
at the Wardman Park Marriott. They travel all over the USA
spreading hate against virtually everyone. Just take a look at
their website.

http://www.godhatesfags.com

yes, they are serious

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

Cuba wins again at U.N.

2009-11-09T03:06:00Z

Cuba solidarity activists were invited to the Cuban Mission to the United Nations on Oct. 29 to hear from Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, who was in New York to attend the annual vote on a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

Will the militarization of the world by the Pentagon and NATO ever stop?

2009-11-09T08:35:09Z

"In 1989, no one could have foreseen that a decade later Western military expansion would begin a process that led to American bases in parts of the world where their presence was hitherto unimaginable: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Australia, Bulgaria and Romania. And the first permanent U.S. base in Africa, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, with a new regional military command, AFRICOM, covering the entire continent."

Obama-Netanyahu: rencontre sous haute tension

2009-11-09T06:17:39Z

Le président américain doit recevoir le Premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahu ce lundi après-midi. L'objectif: relancer le processus de paix au Proche-Orient, complètement enlisé.

Sweden slammed for UN rights failures

2009-11-09T07:24:00Z

Sweden has come in for harsh criticism from the country's United Nations association and 15 other organizations for failing to abide by a number of UN conventions.

Drug Marketing Continues to be Criminal

2009-11-09T06:38:12Z

One of my many pet peeves is drug marketing. Even though Big Phama likes to tout how much it spends on R&D as a justification for high drug prices, it spends more on marketing as a percentage of revenues than it does on R&D. Think about it: in what other industry are the margins high enough to support in person selling to small businessmen? And I read once (in the FT? I have been notably unsuccessful in finding the source, despite multiple efforts) that over 88% of the so-called “new drug applications:” in the last 10 year have not been for new drugs, but new uses for existing drugs, and to extend the patent on existing drugs.

Drug companies are masters of this art. At Pfizer, which sets the gold standard for drug selling methods, each salesman markets only three drugs in his territory. So if a doctor is a candidate for more than three, he has more than one salesman calling on him. The scripts are highly refined, with a 15 second pitch that rolls into a one minute pitch that rolls into a longer chat if the drug detailman can get the time. All drug companies keep current records on how much each doctor is buying of each drug. Another tactic is “You aren’t prescribing as much of XXX as your peers are….”

They also give lots of little goodies (pens, notepads, desk toys). There is ample research that shows that giving even minor gifts is effective (doubters please read Robert Cialdini’s classic, Influence: The Art of Persuasion). And drug companies do all kinds of small scale research on existing drugs (as in this has no medical benefit, it’s just a sales tool, but those studies no doubt get lumped in the R&D total) to give the salesmen something fresh to talk about with existing drugs.

Salesmen must also adhere very strictly to their sales pitches (unlike most other types of sales, where the reps have latitude and develop their own approaches) because the products are regulated (if a rep exaggerated the efficacy of a drug, that would be a regulatory violation). Many drug companies like to hire former military personnel, since they find they will comply with instructions but also be persistent.

And that’s before we get to TV ads, something I particularly despise….

So why the strict controls? Salesmen are permitted to pitch drugs ONLY for uses approved by the FDA. But doctors can prescribe drugs any way they fit. If some doctor had a theory that Viagra would treat schizophrenia, he’s free to give it to a patient for that reason. That sort of prescription is called an “off label use.” The biggest buyers of cannulas (plastic tubes, basically, to provide or remove fluids during surgery) is plastic surgeons for liposuction, and that is off label.

Now there are legit off label uses. For instance, many autoimmune diseases are pretty obscure. Most of the research is done on the most common one, rheumatoid arthritis, so a doctor might look and see if there were any new developments or treatments for RA and might use them on a patient that had scleroderma. But that still means it is absolutely not kosher to market them for unapproved uses.

So why is prosecutor Michael Loucks up in arms? Pfizer has in the past pled guilty to criminal charges for just this sort of behavior, paid substantial fines, and engage in the very same conduct on other products right on the heels of the 2004 settlement. Moreover, Pfizer has a new instance of alleged illegal drug sales practices. And as a Bloomberg story discusses, Pfizer has plenty of company.

It seems pretty clear, given its recidivist behavior, that even multi-hundred million dollar fines are no deterrent. In other words, it still must pay, even after the big fines, for Pfizer to flout the law. I bet they even have a financial analysis worked up on the tradeoff.

Maybe it’s time for the prosecutors to haul out RICO charges….

From Bloomberg:

Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when lawyers for Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn’t break the law again…Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One of Pfizer’s units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved…

New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and the company’s lawyers assured Loucks and three other prosecutors that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

What Loucks, who’s now acting U.S. attorney in Boston, didn’t know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice so-called off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea.

On the morning of Sept. 2, 2009, another Pfizer unit, Pharmacia & Upjohn, agreed to plead guilty to the same crime. This time, Pfizer executives had been instructing more than 100 salespeople to promote Bextra, a drug approved only for the relief of arthritis and menstrual discomfort, for treatment of acute pains of all kinds.

For this new felony, Pfizer paid the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: $1.19 billion. On the same day, it paid $1 billion to settle civil cases involving the off-label promotion of Bextra and three other drugs with the U.S. and 49 states.

“At the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct in 2004, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws,” Loucks, 54, says. “They’ve repeatedly marketed drugs for things they knew they couldn’t demonstrate efficacy for. That’s clearly criminal.”

The penalties Pfizer paid this year for promoting Bextra off-label were the latest chapter in the drug’s benighted history. The FDA found Bextra to be so dangerous that Pfizer took it off the market for all uses in 2005…

Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses…

In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drug maker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients.

In five company-sponsored clinical trials, 31 people out of 1,184 participants died after taking the drug for dementia — twice the death rate for those taking a placebo…

“Marketing departments of many drug companies don’t respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law,” says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston… “The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients.”…

“It’s an unbearable cost to a system that’s going broke,” says Avorn, who heads the pharmacology economics unit of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We can’t even afford to pay for effective, safe therapies.”

About 15 percent of all drug sales in the U.S. are for unapproved uses without adequate evidence the medicines work, according to a study by Randall Stafford, a medical professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California….

In pushing off-label use of drugs, companies find ready and willing partners in physicians. Under the fragmented system of medical regulation in the U.S., it’s legal for doctors to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for any use.

The FDA has no authority over doctors, only over drug companies, regarding off-label practices. It’s up to the 50 states to oversee physicians.

“I think the physician community has to take some ownership responsibility and do their own due diligence beyond the sales and marketing person,” says Boston’s former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan….

Pharmaceutical companies have showered doctors with cash to persuade them to use drugs off-label, according to their guilty pleas.

Pfizer’s marketing program offered doctors up to $1,000 a day to allow a Pfizer salesperson to spend time with the physician and his patients, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by John Kopchinski, who worked as a salesman at Pfizer from 1992 to 2003.

“By ‘pairing up’ with a physician, the sales representative was able to promote over a period of many hours, without the usual problems of gaining access to prescribing physicians,” Kopchinski says. “In essence, this amounted to Pfizer buying access to physicians.”

This is an excellent article, and the examples above are only the tip of the iceberg of the conduct it describes.

U.S. war crimes alienate peoples of Pakistan, Afghanistan

2009-11-09T03:27:00Z

Recent events in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan have again put the spotlight on U.S. imperialist designs to continue to subjugate and dominate these south-central Asian countries. They have also shown that the besieged peoples of these nations will not bow down to what the belligerent occupation forces have in store for them.

Chavez: US provoking all-out war in S. America

2009-11-09T14:51:06Z

President Hugo Chavez has threatened an all-out war in South America should the US want to provoke Colombia to launch an armed conflict in the region.

Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela troops to 'prepare for war' with Colombia

2009-11-09T06:51:25Z

Colombia and Venezuela drew closer to the brink of conflict today after President Hugo Chavez sent 15,000 Venezuelan troops to the volatile border between the two countries, claiming that the US planned to use Colombian bases to mount an invasion of his oil-rich nation.

Industrial Worker (IWW Newspaper) interviews Noam Chomsky (1/4)

2009-11-08T08:20:48Z

	Industrial Worker (IWW Newspaper) interviews Noam Chomsky (1/4) The editor of the Industrial Worker, Diane Krauthamer, spoke to Noam Chomsky at his MIT office in Cambridge, MA, on October 9th, 2009. The Industrial Worker is the official newspaper of the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World), a radical union. For more info, please visit: The IWW official website www.iww.org Listen to our online radio show, The Authority Smashing! Hour, Weeknights at 8pm Eastern http and the shows are archived at: authoritysmashers.wordpress.com	From: Chomskyan Views: 861 29 ratings
	Time: 05:48	More in Nonprofits & Activism

Blaze Foley singing Oval Room ft. Obama & other war criminals

2009-11-09T00:05:08Z

Kucinich on House Healthcare Bill: 'Bailout Under a Blue Cross'

2009-11-08T22:45:54Z

With the U.S. House having passed its version of a health care insurance bill (H.R. 3962 [PDF]) last night by a vote of 220 to 215, it may be instructive to take a very quick look at a couple of the outlier votes from each party. The bill passed with just ...

An Analysis of Warrantless Wiretapping-Part I

2009-11-08T02:01:13Z

Definition of Terms & Analysis of Klein’s Affidavit

This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.

Let me begin by defining some terms to help the reader understand the overall scope of Warrantless Wiretaps. These terms will give the reader an idea of the masses of data being monitored:

The basic building block circuit for our purposes is called a DS-3. Each DS-3 contains 28 T-1s, each containing 24 voice channels. So 1 DS-3 equals 24 times 28 or 672 voice channels. These DS-3s are multiplexed to the Optical Channel level and have a numerical value of 1. Therefore, an Optical Channel or OC-3 circuit contains 3 DS-3s capacity or 2016 voice channels. An OC-12 circuit contains 12 DS-3s or 8064 voice channels; an OC-48 circuit contains 48 DS-3s or 32,556 voice channels. These circuits are multiplexed to an OC-192 DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplex) level for long distance transport. What the last term means is anywhere from 24 to 36 OC-192 (192 DS-3s) modulated on a single fiber for long distance transport. So a single optic fiber can carry almost 5,000,000 individual phone channels at once. Most single mode fiber cables contain between 50 and 100 individual fibers providing a transmit and receive path for 25-50 OC-192 DWDM circuits. I am personally certified on equipment up to and including the OC-192 DWDM level.

Now we turn to Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, Hepting v A.T.&T. :

In it, Klein describes his tasks as an A.T.&T. data communications technician in general terms as well as a project he was tasked to perform at the A.T.&T. Central Office located in 611 Folsom St., San Francisco. He describes how he was charged with the installation, test and turn-up of optical hybrid splitters to tap off optical signals from an array of A.T.&T. and other OCC (Other Common Carrier) circuits for transport and analysis within secret rooms installed in Central Offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Seattle, among others, for the National Security Agency. Inside these rooms, the traffic was routed through a Semantic Traffic Analyzer provided by Narus, an Israeli-owned company affiliated with Israel’s counterpart agency to the NSA, as documented by James Bamford in his podcast interview available on this site. It was also routed to the main NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD where it was stored for further data mining as part of the WWP. The splitter circuit diagrams are included on page 24 of the affidavit with the circuit cutover diagram visible on page 15. Of particular interest to me is the engineering document on page 17 of his affidavit, listing the Other Common Carriers leasing A.T.&T. facilities whose circuits and customers were also being monitored. It reads like a Who’s Who of major telecommunications IXCs (Inter-Exchange Carriers) including Qwest, Level3, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing and a host of others. It also lists the size of each circuit routed to the NSA by it’s OC-x number as detailed above. Since Klein’s declaration only spotlights the West Coast central offices affected by this nationwide program, it is fair to assume it was also being carried out in corresponding offices on the East Coast as well.

The official justification offered by both the Bush and Obama administrations is that these circuits were only used for overseas traffic and, therefore, within the NSA’s lawful mandate to monitor overseas communications. The fallacy of that argument is that all the offices mentioned, while having some overseas circuits originating from them, primarily contained domestic telecommunications traffic. If the NSA wished to stay within its official mandate, this program could have been accomplished with far less cost by placing the NSA rooms with their equipment at overseas cable terminal offices such as the Transpacific Cable Terminal at Los Osos, near Morro Bay, CA.

Both Bamford and Tice, in their podcast interviews, speak of the two massive new NSA data storage facilities being built in Utah and Texas. Those locations are where all this information will be stored once they come online. Now consider the outsourcing of intelligence work to private contractors and security firms like CACI, Choicepoint and others who specialize in data mining from public sources as well and you begin to see the scope and impact of this program on ordinary citizens. Consider, also, Bamford and Tice’s revelations of a parallel National Telecommunications Traffic Control Center being constructed at Fort Meade identical to A.T.&T.‘s National Traffic Control Center in Bedminster, NJ. The eventual merging and sharing of this information between government and corporate entities is almost inevitable. Remember, as Benito Mussolini defined it:

“Fascism is the convergence of governmental and corporate power.”

So the questions I have are this.

1. Why is such an overarching, intrusive, draconian wiretap program necessary?

2. What mechanisms are there in place to prevent government-sourced private information from being shared with corporate entities?

3. Is the NSA positioning itself to take control of all telecommunications in the event of a national emergency?

4. What national emergency might provide a trigger mechanism for the assumption of such control?

Lula a Obama: "No necesitamos bases"

2009-11-08T09:17:24Z

08 de noviembre 2009. - El presidente de Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, advirtió ayer a su par estadounidense, Barack Obama, que América del Sur "no necesita bases norteamericanas" en Colombia para combatir al narcotráfico y le propuso "ocuparse de los consumidores de drogas" en su país. "Querido compañero Obama: No necesitamos de las bases americanas en Colombia para combatir el narcotráfico en América del Sur. Nosotros vamos a ocuparnos de combatir el narcotráfico en nuestras fronteras, y tu debes ocuparte de tus consumidores. Así el mundo queda mejor", afirmó Lula. El Mandatario s...(lea la noticia completa en Aporrea.org)

[Followup] Gaza, Goldstone, Jewish Ethical Cluelessness

2009-11-07T16:56:00Z

Please send critical letters to the Boston Globe and to Daniel Terris, who is the director of the Brandeis International Center for Ethics, Justice & Public Life.

In Re: At Brandeis, Israel's guilt and innocence on display

Dear Editor:

When Jeff Jacoby argues in At Brandeis, Israel's guilt and innocence on display that the Goldstone Report is flawed, he is correct but for the wrong reasons.

The Goldstone Report fails to mention Nuremberg Tribunal Law, which clearly criminalizes the territorial Judaization that Zionists have planned since the 19th century and that they have been perpetrating since 1947-8.

The Nuremberg indictment of the German Nationalist Socialist Government charges (International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, p. 63):

"In certain occupied territories purportedly annexed to Germany the defendants methodically and pursuant to plan endeavored to assimilate these territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. They endeavored to obliterate the former national character of these territories. In pursuance of their plans, the defendants forcibly deported inhabitants who were predominantly non-German and replaced them by thousands of German colonists."

If State of Israel replaces Germany, Zionist State replaces German Reich, and Jewish replaces German, this count applies to Zionist goals from the start of the Zionist movement until the present day.

In other words, the Historical Context section of the Goldstone Report (paragraphs 177-197) should have explicitly stated that Israel is hardly a law-abiding state by any stretch of the imagination.

Like the Report the Brandeis event was also flawed.

Limiting the podium to two Jewish Zionists without a voice representing Palestinians was unethical, unjust, and a distortion of political discourse to the point of harming American pubic life.

The Brandeis International Center for Ethics, Justice & Public Life acted shamefully to co-sponsor such an event, and Richard Goldstone would have refused to participate if he had any sense of decency.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

President

Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel

Boston, MA 02126

Kucinich: Why I Voted NO

2009-11-08T13:33:42Z

[Instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high... This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companie

House Passes Weak Public Option Health Care Bill, Selling Out Women's Rights. Includes Democrats Who Voted Against Bill

2009-11-08T12:59:52Z

[Giving a $1.2 trillion gift to the health insurance industry, betraying women's rights, the House gave the White House what it wanted. The question is, will the Democrats wake up with a hangover in 2010, facing a public enraged that the bill has strengthened the very industry that is causing economic pain to families, death to tens of thousands annually and damage to our nation's industries' ability to compete.

[uruknet.info] Obama Regime: Toss NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit

2009-11-08T09:23:47Z

November 7, 2009 - President Barack Obama instructed Justice Department attorneys to argue last week in San Francisco before Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker, that he must toss out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Shubert v. Bush lawsuit challenging the secret state's driftnet surveillance of Americans' electronic communications. This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring "unreasonable searches and seizures...