Monday, June 24, 2013

Liberating the People

Never trust a person over 30. All you need is love. Hell no, we won't go. These were the slogans of the last great manifestation against the system. That great flower power movement of the '60s, where American youth were burning draft cards and putting flowers in the rifle barrels of national guardsmen on college campuses.

It got intense at times. Four students killed at Kent State. The self-immolation of Norman Morrison underneath Secretary of Defense McNamara's office window. Anger and hatred mounting on both sides of the Vietnam War debate.

But slowly, as the war ended and the protestors got older and the lure of big money in Reagan's "let the bull loose" economy, the protest dwindled away.

But the ideals worth fighting for never really disappeared. And now, they're back in full flower in Arabia and Greece and Turkey. And, perhaps most interestingly, in Brazil.

In a resurgence of democratic idealism many thought lost, the youth and concerned people worldwide are marching. Liberating the People, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Thursday, June 13, 2013

Medicating Ourselves Into Oblivion

Eight or nine years ago, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, wrote a book called The Truth About the Drug Companies. It was an often searing critique of their deceptive research methods and business practices that really pulled back the veil on what Dr. Angell calls the marketing machine that the pharmaceutical industry has become.

This is important consciousness, because the pressure for profits above all other objectives of business has led to a state whereby we're medicating more and more Americans unnecessarily to feed the profit goals of shareholders and executives and not the health goal of the drug takers.

Fabricated diseases, diminished alternatives and multi-billion dollar advertising mean our medical system turns only in one direction now to alleviate suffering - towards the pharmacy. It's putting big money into drug company coffers, and deteriorating the medical education of doctors worldwide.

But it's doing something even more sinister. It's killing us.

Medicating Ourselves Into Oblivion, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

Click here to listen to this episode.