Support Issues, not Candidates

It's interesting to see people get excited about a political candidate. Especially the way Barak Obama's followers are excited about him. There is an emotional energy in his supporters that has not been felt in politics since, well, probably with Robert Kennedy in the last 1960s. You know, before somebody shot him dead. But anyways, I'm not talking about assassinations here, I'm talking about real public support behind a political candidate. People are throwing their support behind Barak Obama because they truly believe he is different than the rest. That he will lead us through some much needed changes to our corrupt and dying system.

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The only way to move up in any company is to become part of that company, right? That means that you start to believe what the company believes. You internalize their goals, beliefs and value system. I mean, it just makes sense, right? Why would some company want you moving up in their management structure if you didn't truly believe in what the company was doing? To promote somebody to a position of leadership that has goals and morals that differ from those of the company will serve only to create conflict within the company and eventually damage their image and their ability to reach their goals. This is basic Management 101 stuff, right?

Well, political parties are no different. The only way for a political candidate to move up within the power structure of a party -- no matter how democratic that power structure may appear -- is for that candidate to internalize all the values and goals of the party. You see, despite what you might like to believe, political parties are not made up of the people who vote for them. No, political parties are pretty much just giant corporate type structures that serve as an endorsing tool for political candidates.

So, obviously as a political candidate rises in ranks, pursuing higher and higher offices -- there being none higher in the United States than president -- it is extremely important to the party that this candidate have the same values and beliefs that the party holds. Which brings us to the parties themselves.

If you are a Barak Obama supporter it is likely you are not happy with where the current system, headed by our two political parties, has brought us as a nation. That's understandable, it's not a good place that we have reached as of late.

If you believe that Obama is going to be different, though, you probably start with the assumption since we have a Republican president, then the Republicans are in control, and that with a Democrat as president, things will be different. This assumes, however, that there are fundamental differences between the Democrats and Republicans. The truth is wildly less complicated, though. Other than on matters like means and methods, the two political parties we have here in this country just aren't all that different from each other. They have a lot of the same goals. Both parties are supporters of big government, and both parties are supporters of big business. Neither party (and if you question this, just do a little research into the subject) care all that much about the average American or the average worker. Sure, they have to make it seem like they do because they need votes from these people, but both parties have consistently failed to support the average American when given the chance – except when they have been forced to do so by a large scale public movement.

That should be plainly obvious to us from our recent, and not so recent, history. That is, if we care to look at it clearly. Likewise, it should be painfully obvious to us from our recent history that, no, we should not get excited about candidates who promise to be different than all candidates before them.

President George W. Bush ran on a platform of the 'compassionate conservative' and a smaller government. He then went on to start two pointless and bullying wars. Has cut social spending, to the bone and has given massive tax cuts to the rich with the promise that all that extra money will trickle down to us lower beings -- and, well, as Reagan asked, "Are you better of now than you were four years ago?" or eight years ago, for that matter. And Bush has managed to grow the federal government and our national debt more than probably all presidents before him, combined.

Before him we had a president that promised to look out for the little guys. President Bill Clinton, however, forcefully instituted the vile and destructive NAFTA treaty and, if we can be perfectly honest, didn't do much of anything else, except oversee the wildly absurd peace talks between Israel and Palestine that would have meant the end of Palestine.

And... I won't continue back through history. I hope we remember it all.

The truth is that politicians in the past have offered a new kind of leadership before, and it has never really happened. It has never happened because the idea is fundamentally flawed. Flawed in that you can never get to these positions of power within the existing framework of politics without taking on the values and beliefs of the existing framework. A framework that we have all seen to be quite destructive.

So, to all you Barak Obama supporters out there, I'm really sorry, but the truth is that the guy very likely does not have anything new to offer us. I understand the desire to be able to stand behind a leader that truly seeks change, a leader you can really believe in. However, I just don't think we are going to see that come out of our current political system. I have even talked to passionate Obama supporters about this, trying to get them to convince me that I am wrong, but none yet have begun to show me how he is going to be any different than the last few new kind of leaders we have had.

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So why waste all this time and energy attempting to destroy your dreams? Well, I think it is for the ultimate good. And I think it is especially useful to get this kind of thinking out to the young, energetic and conscientious followers of Barak Obama:

Think about all the energy -- physical and emotional -- that has gone into supporting Barak Obama and candidates like him in the past. What if, instead, the people of America took that same energy and used it to advance important causes instead of candidates. Fighting, with our voices united, for the very issues that these politicians give lip service to during elections, and then ignore once in office. Politicians, with all their power, still derive that strength from us, their voters and followers. If we make the issues -- which they have no time to think about because they are obviously too busy worrying about lapel pins -- our main concern, instead of charisma and leadership, then our representatives will be forced to lead this country in the direction in which we, the People, desire it to go.

Economics 101

I was reading Red Mars today, by Kim Stanely Robinson, and came upon this great explination one of the characters gives for economics...

"Anyway that's a large part of what economics is-- people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numberical things. And then pretending they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."

It seems especially fitting for our current times. Just a reminder that our current economic system is merely an arbitrary creation by us humans, to suit the purposes of those who created it. And if we want to change it... the only people who are going to be upset are the people at the top who are profitting from the arrangement.

Johnson & Johnson and laissez faire capitalism

Everyone once in a while you read a news story that just so blows your mind that you can't figure out which angle about it is more disgusting. You read the article over and over and you can't even talk to anybody about it because – I mean – where do you begin?

In case you missed the New York Times article yesterday, Drug Makers Near Old Goal: A Legal Shield, let me run down the facts for you here:

In the late 1990s Johnson & Johnson expressed their intention to the FDA to create a birth control patch that would have lower estrogen levels than pill based birth control. You see, lower estrogen levels are a desirable thing because high estrogen levels can often cause blood clots and heart and attack and stroke and other things that severely harm a human being – and, you know, kill human beings.

Johnson & Johnson went on to create the patch, called Ortho Evra, but found during testing that it actually released estrogen levels far greater than that of traditional birth control pills into the blood stream. Not wanting to not make a lot of money off of this invention, however, Johnson & Johnson kind of fudged the numbers a little bit when they reported their testing to the FDA, but just enough to get approval for the patch – which comes out to about half of the actual levels the patch releases. After receiving FDA approval for the patch, with their false data, Johnson & Johnson went on to market the patch, reporting this same low estrogen level to the public.

For the next five or six years at the beginning of this decade report after report was filed with the FDA of cardiovascular related deaths associated with this patch. During this time Johnson & Johnson was running their own tests and finding these same dangerous results, over and over again. Of course, Johnson & Johnson didn't really think it was quite their responsibility to report these findings to the FDA – not until the FDA finally started poking their heads around. Finally in 2005 the company began to publish the actual estrogen levels of their patch on the packaging and prescriptions soon fell by about 80%. Not before, however, this drug had already killed around 40 people and done who-knows-what other kind of damage to the women using the medication.

Now, a bunch of those people are suing Johnson & Johnson over damages. Things aren't going well, though. Some similar cases brought before the Supreme Court last year ended up being ruled in favor of medical device manufacturing companies, holding that if the FDA has approved a device then the company cannot be held responsible for any ill effects of the device. This is a legal concept called 'pre-emption.' President George Bush and his administration, in their ever continuing effort to protect the citizens of the United States are strong advocates and are fighting for drug companies to be protected by this kind of legal loopholing.

See what I mean by not knowing where to start? That took forever to write, I hope it wasn't too painful to read all that, for those of you still with me. Let's move on and talk about these facts before we go into fact-intake shock.

So, here we have a drug company purposefully lying to the government to get its drug approved, then proceeding to lie to the public about the harmful effects of the drug once they have received approval from the FDA. We have a company that obviously saw enough reason, over the years, to continue running tests on their drug to see if it is quite as dangerous as the deaths among those people taking the medication would seem to suggest, and then went on to hide the findings of these tests. This company, however, refuses to take responsibility for their actions, even going so far as to claim that they “acted responsibly” in these matters.

We have a public that wants to hold this company responsible for their actions. A public that, even if they were so inclined to do gobs of research to protect themselves from unsafe medication, could not make an educated decision about the product because the drug company did nothing short of lie about the estrogen levels of the drug and its possible side effects.

We have a court system that, in the very heart of laissez faire capitalism, refuses to regulate the destructive actions of companies and is willing to protect corporations from all responsibility for their actions. All of this in complete contradiction to the reason the courts were established: to protect the private citizens of this great nation.

All this brings us to the FDA. Why did they drop the ball on this? Well, that is a very interesting question. It doesn't take much research into the FDA (in fact, this New York Times article even talks about it) to find that even the FDA thinks they are doing a horrible job. The FDA is not a policing organization, you see. For a matter of fact, they are barely an organization at all. They themselves claim that they are underfunded, disorganized and impotent.

The FDA, my fellow readers, actually does not to much testing of new foods and drugs on their own – they just do not have the budget. The FDA actually relies on the individual companies that create these products to do their own testing. This, of course, assumes that those companies will accurately and truthfully report their findings to the FDA when seeking approval. This assumption, it would seem, is not one we should take for granted.

So, one has to ask themselves, why is there always enough money in the Federal budget to toss bombs at foreign countries, but not enough money to actually protect the citizens of America from the dangerous and destructive actions of those companies among us that will do anything to bring in more and more money? Are our congress and president so blind as to not see the dangers in this situation? It would seem to – or it would seem that these people we elect to protect us are profiting from this situation in some other form.

Which brings us to our compassionate, brave, and all round upstanding President George W. Bush. A man who, it seems, at every opportunity presented to him weighs his options carefully, does some serious soul searching on what path would be the best for the people of our country, and then chooses the most morally appalling option among his choices. If this was just one incident, I would not be so strong with my words. Our President, however, has demonstrated a will to cement his place as the most despicable president in the history of the United States – choosing over and over again to put the people of the United States second, and the interests of large corporations at the forefront of his policy.

Once again I am forced to come to you, fellow readers, and call on you to write your congressperson. I call on you, in all decency and humanitarianism, to use your voices to form a loud public outcry against these kinds of policies that literally sacrifice the citizens of our nation on the altar of the economy. I call on your to stand up and demand your voices be heard and to not surrender until we have a government for the people, by the people – instead of a government for corporate interests, by corporate whores.

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Respect and thanks to Gardiner Harris, Alex Berenson and Janet Roberts of the New York Times for bringing this issue to the attention of the public.