The Bather by Pissarro

Guest post by Jerry Fresia

(A response to my post “The Company That Owns Angelina Jolie’s Breast Cancer Gene”)

There’s an old joke from grade school that I still remember. It’s rather dumb, but the punch line turns on a thought that has relevance. Maybe that’s why I remember it. Two guys on an island. One is a millionaire smoker who has a ton of cigarettes but no matches. He’s freaking out. The other guy has a book of matches and says to the millionaire smoker, “I’ll give you my matches for $1,000.” The smoker jumps at the chance, hands over $1,000 and the guy with the book of matches rips out the matches from the book and hands them to the smoker. “That’s not fair,” implores the smoker. “I still can’t light a cigarette. I have no striker.” “So true,” says the guy with the empty book of matches containing the striker. “But I will sell you the striker for $50,000.”

Let’s call this the “striker phenomenon” or SP for short. SP occurs when someone controls, often a monopoly control, some single thing that substantially impacts the life chances of another. Okay, are you still with me? Enter Pissarro.

Pissarro, as you know, was the philosophical leader of the Impressionists. What historians wish us to remember is that the Impressionists broke the rules of traditional painting and came up with a new aesthetic. This isn’t wrong. But this emphasis trivializes, to say the least, the Impressionist contribution. The Impressionist contribution that is much more relevant to painters today was not their rule breaking aesthetic. Instead it was their brilliant way of avoiding the SP or to say it another way, they devised a way to sidestep what was an aristocratic-state controlled monopoly over exhibitions (think distribution) of their work, ie., the Salon. In short, the Salon of mid-19^th century Paris required that artists paint certain themes and in a certain way (in order to make noble and moral the vast accumulation of wealth by a few). If you didn’t, you would have a hard time surviving. The genius of Pissarro et al, was in devising an institutional response to an institutional constraint on the freedom of artists. The model that Pissarro came up with was based upon a baker’s union: the Impressionists (called “intransigents” at the time), launched a series of independent exhibitions, gained controlled over the exhibition/distribution of their work and, hence, the production of their work as well. Or to put it in plain English, they became free to paint whatever the hell they wanted in the way they wanted. Enter paintings of joy.

But alas, the story doesn’t end well. Yes, the control by the aristocratic state faded away, but a new control over the exhibition of their work (and hence their production) arose in the guise of the private entrepreneur or dealer, the most famous of which at the time was Durand-Ruel. To be sure, Durand-Ruel was credited with opening markets, especially internationally for the Impressionists and for a time, especially early on, was praised by the painters themselves. But the SP, unmistakably, reasserted itself. Pissarro, ever alert to the control by another over his direction, would lament, as he struggled financially, that he had “to please Durand.” Resigned to his fate, Pissarro wrote to his son when he was 68, “Durand-Ruel, who has given me the same prices for ten years….It is true that he takes all my work, but on the other hand, he has too much power over me.” The Impressionists, jumping out of the state controlled SP frying pan, jumped into the fire of the private enterprise SP.

And how does Angelina Jolie fit into this story? As noted above, she underwent a double mastectomy because tests showed that were she not to do this, she would have a high risk of developing either breast or ovarian cancer. The tests in question are tests that can identify the mutation of specific genes, and it is this mutation that could lead to life threatening cancer. But here’s the rub: the private SP is back in spades. There is private monopoly control over these tests:

 “A Utah biotech company Myriad Genetics owns the patent to BRCA1, the so-called “breast cancer gene” responsible for Angelina’s Jolie’s decision to have a preventative double mastectomy. They also on the patent on a similar breast cancer gene called BRCA2. Moreover these gene patents also give Myriad a monopoly on testing for these genes.

At present a suit cancer groups have filed to invalidate these patents is being heard in the U.S. Supreme Court. Cancer advocates argue that it’s illegal and unethical for biotech companies to patent nature. Joseph Stiglitz has written in Slate that allowing Myriad to hold exclusive patents for BRCA1 and BRCA2 removes the opportunity for other scientists to come up with better and cheaper tests. In this way, they make the tests less widely available and possibly prevent women from knowing they carry these genes and taking preventive measures.[i]“

 In the U.S. a full test for each of these genes costs about $3,000. Private insurance policies may (or may not) cover the cost. But this highlights the problem. Access to those things that give us life, be they medical tests for someone like Angelina Jolie or creative processes as in the case of Pissarro and painters, are less likely to be controlled by the state in the western world today, and more likely to be controlled privately by those seeking to maximize profit and market share. Myriad Genetics is the Durand-Ruel of the gene world. They seek, in all their creativity, to control the distribution of golden eggs so that they are able to control the goose that lays them.

So what’s the point of all this? The point is that painters today are quite aware of the great boogie-man of “censorship” when it is government doing the controlling. But what we totally ignore are the private enterprise controllers who shape what we do, how we do it, and who we are. Not long ago I was explaining to a painter the method of painting that I teach. One of its virtues, I offered, was that it affords the painter “a great deal of control.” My artist friend recoiled at the mention of the word “control.” It was as if I had said that the method I teach gives you a deadly bacterium. “Control” over what a painter does, painters will declare, is to be avoided like – well – like the plague. And so it goes: painters today, unknowingly –or perhaps I should say unreflectively – embrace practices that control the very creative processes that could give them life. “To be an artist today,” I heard someone say recently, “you really need to get into marketing.” No, I thought to myself; that would be an entrepreneur (who bends every creative urge to meet the schedule, aims, and interests of a myriad of agents and investors and consumers), not an artist (whose only interest is taking the next step in her unfolding). The entrepreneur is someone who plays the private enterprise game, establishes points of market control – monopoly control if possible, and is someone who is both market and profit driven. The artist is someone who seeks freedom from the control that market-driven entrepreneurs, market-driven investors, all those people who control exhibitions-exposure-competitions, and all those people who grab you by the short hairs require.

“Here’s the work I do to make money. And here’s my own work,” is the refrain of so many painters. Oh crapola. What kind of creative people are we if we slink along as a servile following half the day and during the other half hope to find ourselves? “Freedom” was the clarion call of the Impressionists, be it from public or private centers of power. But guess what? We are taught that the only source of censorship is public; private enterprise is always good. We are taught, too, that the Impressionists were about the end result, the brush strokes, or the mode: going outside. This is not surprising, but it is appalling history. Here’s the deeper truth: the Impressions said screw you to power – both to the state and the entrepreneur (whom they politely referred to as the bourgeoisie). We know our self-worth they declared and we will find an independent means of entering upon the scene of history. The scandal that still instructs us today was not about their paintings. It was about their disobedience. 

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The New York Academy of Medicine celebrated the second anniversary of Fukushima’s nuclear disaster with a two day Fukushima Symposium on March 11^th and 12^th. Sponsored by the Helen Caldicott Foundation and Physicians for Social Responsibility, the event consisted of presentations from a broad range of physician and non-physician researchers specialized in the effects of nuclear radiation on the environment and human health. It was videoed and can be viewed free on-line (see links below).

What the symposium makes crystal clear is that there has been a deliberate effort by Japanese government, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Obama administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) to minimize the long term health consequences of nuclear fallout, especially to children.  Instead of backtracking on the billions of dollars he approved to subsidize TEPCO to build more US nuclear power plants, Obama is participating in an international cover-up to conceal the serious long term dangers of this technology. See After 50 Years Nuclear Power Still not Viable Without Subsidies

I found the March 11th presentation by Dr Steven Starr of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri the most illuminating. The focus of Starr’s talk was the long term effects of Cesium-137, which is the main long term contaminant of soil and food following a nuclear accident.

The research Starr presents directly contradicts a study WHO published two months ago called The Health Risk Assessment From the Nuclear Accident after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The latter supports the Japanese government’s position that the radioactive contamination deposited immediately after meltdown has dissipated and there is no longer any risk of eating food produced there. Buoyed by the WHO study, the Japanese government has already declared Fukushima rice totally safe provided it emits less than 100 Becquerels (Bq) per kilogram (kg). (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second.)

Research conducted after Chernobyl contradicts this directive. According to Starr, children in the Ukraine and Belarus routinely exposed to more than 50 Bq per kg of Cesium-137 (from the Chernobyl meltdown) Chernobyl suffered irreversible heart damage.

According to Starr WHO and IRCP are guilty of four main scientific errors:

1. WHO and IRCP quantify radiation exposure in Sieverts or milliSieverts (mSv). This is extremely controversial because a Sievert isn’t a measure of actual radiation exposure but of presumed radiation “effect” based on mathematical modeling.
2. WHO and IRCP studies are based on an assumption that Cesium-137 is spread uniformly throughout the body, whereas their own research shows it bioaccumulates in specific organs.
3. None of the WHO and IRCP studies incorporate Dr Yuri Bandazhevsky’s detailed research into Belarusian children exposed to Cesium-137 following Chernobyl, which has only recently been translated into English.
4. None of the WHO and IRCP studies distinguish between external exposure and chronic internal exposure due to radionuclides that accumulate in vital organs.

Basic Scientific Facts About Cesium-137 and Fallout from Fukushima

Cesium-137 is released as a gas and has chemical properties similar to potassium. Thus it reaches highest concentrations in potassium-rich foods, like berries and mushrooms and in animal products at the top of the food chain (e.g. milk and meat). In the body it accumulates in the same organs in which potassium accumulates (heart, pancreas and other endocrine organs, intestine and kidneys).

Eight months after the Fukushima meltdown, the Japanese Science Ministry released a map showing that 11,580 square miles, 30,000 square kilometers, or 13% of the Japanese mainland, had been contaminated with Cesium-137. The official government map fails to designate any cesium-137 contamination in the Tokyo metropolitan area, unlike an independent survey done by Professor Yukio Hayakawa of Gunma University. (People may recall the government also tried to deny for two months that there had been any meltdowns.)

Somewhere between 4500 and 7700 square miles (an area approximately the size of Connecticut) was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s previous allowable exposure limit of 1 mSv per year. Rather than evacuate this area, Japan chose to raise its acceptable radiation exposure from 1mSv to 20 mSv per year.

Studies show that a dose of 20 mSv per year, will produce 1,000 additional cases of cancer in female infants and 500 in male infants (per 100,000 in their age group.). There will be also sn additional 100 per 100,000 cancer cases in 30 year-old-males.

The Effect of Chronic Cesium-137 Exposure

Based on Bandazhevsky’s research, Starr questions whether even 1 mSv (14,000 Bq) per year is safe in children, as WHO and ICRP claim. The figure is based on the assumption that absorbed Cesium-137 is distributed uniformly throughout the body.  

Research done by Dr. Yuri Bandazhevsky and his colleagues in Belarus between 1991 and 1999, found that children exposed to whole body radiation levels above 50 Bq per kg of body weight experienced irreversible damage to their heart and other vital organs.

Bandazhevsky summarized his nine years of research in s paper entitled “Radioactive Cesium and the Heart.” With the help of friends, Starr has just finished editing an English translation of this work. It has never been translated before because shortly after Bandazhevsky presented it to the Parliament and President of Belarus, he was arrested and imprisoned. Just as Soviet physicians were forbidden to diagnose radiation-related illness following Chernobyl, the Belarusian government vigorously suppressed the work of Bandazhevsky, who was protesting government efforts to resettle people back into land badly contaminated with Cesium-137.

Two million people in Belarus live on lands severely contaminated by cesium-137. Fourteen years following Chernobyl, most of the children there were in very poor health. 45 to 47% of high school graduates had physical disorders, including gastrointestinal anomalies, abnormal heart function and cataracts, and 40% were diagnosed with chronic “blood disorders” and malfunctioning thyroids.

Links:

You can watch a video of Stars presentation at Implications of Massive Cesium-137 Contamination and read the transcript at Cesium-137 transcript. You can watch the entire 2-day symposium at Symposium webcast.

The presentations on Day 2 focus more heavily on the distribution of the radioactive plume that reached the US (and not just the West Coast), and the growing Fukushima-related health problems in Americans.

The final event on the March 11 morning webcast is a presentation by two US sailors whose aircraft carrier was anchored off Fukushima. They describe how Navy negligence and disinformation caused both to be exposed to heavy doses of radiation – and the major health problems they’re dealing with. You can watch it at press conference and read all the gory details at More Vets Join Fukushima Lawsuit

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Ambassador Stevens

What Really Happened in Benghazi?

Americans (at least the ones who know where Libya is) are understandably confused and angry about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi. If they are looking to the current congressional hearings to clarify what really happened, they will be greatly disappointed.

Despite accusations by Republican leaders that Obama committed has treason and is trying to cover it up, they have no more interest than Democrats in bringing out the truth. No one wants the dirty little secret coming out that Stevens was involved in a covert CIA operation to funnel Libyan weapons and jihadists to Syria to fight the Assad regime.

The funding, arming and training of Al Qaeda terrorists for geopolitical ends is a well-established pillar of US foreign policy. (National Counterterrorism Center Report on Terrorism 2011). This isn’t a partisan issue, as CIA support for jihad has received equal levels of support from both Obama and his predecessor George W Bush.

The Road to Damascus Starts in Benghazi

The May 9^th Washington’s Blog provides a comprehensive summary of the factual details about September 2012 that have come out over the past eight months. Numerous official and mainstream sources confirm that Benghazi is a long time stronghold of Al Qaeda terrorists, who transferred their focus to Syria and the Assad regime after Gaddafi was overthrown. For example (specific sources shown in parentheses):

• The US-supported opposition which overthrew Libyan president Muammar Gadaffi was largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists (Telegraph interview with Libyan rebel commander).
• According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters and sent Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq prior to Gaddafi’s overthrow (West Point military academy).
• Al Qaeda is now largely in control of Libya, and the Libyan Provisional Government immediately ran up Al Qaeda flags at the Benghazi courthouse (the seat of their new government) after Gaddafi was overthrown (Daily Mail).
• Gaddafi, who always maintained Benghazi was an Al Qaeda stronghold, was on the verge of invading the city in 2011. However NATO planes stopped him, and protected Benghazi (Telegraph correspondent in Benghazi).
• CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times and many other mainstream sources confirm that since Gaddafi’s overthrow, Al Qaeda terrorists from Libya have been flooding into Syria to fight the Assad regime.
• Mainstream sources, such as the New York Times also confirm the Syrian opposition is largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists.
• Despite claims to the contrary, The U.S. has been arming the Syrian opposition since 2006. (Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, CBC News).
• The post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition. (Washington Post, Telegraph correspondent in Istanbul).

Was Stevens Running the Operation?

Mounting evidence suggests Stevens was assigned to run the covert CIA operation to funnel Libyan arms and jihadists to Syria via Turkey:

•  In 2011, Stevens was appointed to be the Obama administration’s liaison with the “budding Libyan opposition” (ABC News).

• Stevens and the State Department worked directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who has direct connections with Al Qaeda (Russia Today).
• The Wall Street Journal, Telegraph and other sources confirm that the US consulate (which wasn’t really a consulate but a “State Department Special Mission Compound”) in Benghazi was mainly being used for a secret CIA operation.
• Retired Lt. General William Boykin, former US Special Forces Commander and deputy defense undersecretary for intelligence (who worked with the CIA in the 1990s), stated in a January interview that it’s a “reasonable supposition” that Stevens was in Benghazi as part of an effort to arm the Syrian opposition. He draws this conclusion based on 1) the directive Stevens was given to support the Syrian rebels, 2) the logical assumption the Special Mission Compound would be the hub of that activity and 3) the absence lack of any other logical explanation for Stevens’ sudden reappearance in Benghazi on September 10, 2012 after a year’s absence. (CNS News)
• Egyptian security officials and US intelligence sources have confirmed Boykin’s hypothesis (WND Politics, CNBC)

Why Was Stevens Murdered?

 I have yet to see a plausible explanation anywhere for the terrorist attack on the Special Mission Compound or Stevens’ murder. Perhaps a genuine congressional investigation – in place of the soap operate we saw last week – could come up with some genuine leads. However so long as Congress refuses to examine the covert operation angle, they are unlikely to add much to what we already know.

I agree with Boykin that the Obama administration and Congress need to come clean, without necessarily revealing details, that Stevens was involved in a covert operation. The main problem (besides being illegal and morally bankrupt and undermining US standing internationally) with the existing US policy of covertly funding and arming jihadists is that it isn’t secret any more. This continuing duplicity on the part of the Obama administration and Congress only further undermines Americans’ confidence in government, as well as the major respect the United States used to enjoy abroad.

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Reposted from Veterans Today

John Stewart’s hilarious take on the Monsanto Protection Act, introduced as an amendment to the most recent continuing budget resolution (which keeps the federal government going until September). The amendment allows Monsanto to bypass judicial scrutiny, granting them virtual immunity to lawsuits based on adverse health or environmental consequences of their  GMO organisms.

For a more detailed analysis of the destructive consequences of this legislation, check out Is the Monsanto Protection Act the End of Food Democracy

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Reposted from Daily Censored

Below is an excellent 60 minute interview with FBI translator and whistle blower Sibel Edmonds.

In it she provides extensive background on the cold war CIA/NATO Gladio Operation, which apparently never ended in Turkey and the Caucasus. This background is essential in understanding how the CIA came to fund Islamic jihadists in the breakaway republic of Georgia and the turbulent Russian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan. This, in turn, is essential in understanding how Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to attend a CIA-funded Jamestown Foundation workshop in Dagestan.

Edmonds stresses that additional factual evidence is necessary to connect all the dots. However she poses an interesting hypothesis linking the Boston bombing with a recent switch in CIA attitudes towards Chechen separatists (they are suddenly being referred to as terrorists rather than freedom fighters). She believes this, in turn, may possibly relate to a convoluted scheme to pressure Russia to agree to a NATO invasion of Syria.

Enjoy.

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Originally posted at Daily Censored

According to Reuters, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales celebrated International Workers Day (May 1) by expelling the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mr Morales accused the agency, which operates under State Department auspices, of seeking to “conspire against” the Bolivian people and his government. USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades. According to its website, it dedicated $52.1 million to Bolivia in 2010 .

On previous May Days, Mr Morales announced the nationalization of key industries, such as hydroelectric power and the electricity grid. This year he announced he “would only nationalize the dignity of the Bolivian people”. Speaking at a rally in La Paz, the president said there was “no lack of US institutions which continue to conspire against our people and especially the national government, which is why we’re going to take the opportunity to announce on this May Day that we’ve decided to expel USAID”.

Morales explained the expulsion was in protest to a recent remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to Latin America as “the backyard of the United States”. The term evokes strong emotions in the region, which experienced several U.S.-backed coups during the Cold War. The Bolivian leader has threatened USAID with expulsion in the past, asserting that its programs have “political rather than social” ends. He has also accused it of “manipulating” and “using” union leaders.

USAID’s Unsavory Past

I and other veterans of the 1980s Central American solidarity movement are only too aware of USAID’s unsavory past. Its reputation of being used as cover, like many US embassies, for the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, was in large part responsible for President Putin’s decision to expel USAID from Russia last fall.* Many older activists vividly recall USAID’s heavy hand in suppressing domestic opposition (by destabilizing human rights and labor initiatives, meddling in local elections and  collaborating with right wing coups to overturn democratic elections) to US military intervention in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and maintaining South American dictatorships friendly to US corporate interests.

Bolivian present criticisms of USAID are far more nuanced. The main complaint seems to be that the US agency contrasts unfavorably with European development programs, which are totally open and transparent and consistently consult and collaborate with the Bolivian government. USAID differs significantly in its heavy reliance on private contractors and drug eradication (which is controversial among Bolivian farmers and a low priority for the government), who rarely collaborate with local officials and are generally extremely secretive about their activities.

Mr Morales, who heads his country’s union of coca growers, has also been critical in the past of US counter-narcotic programmes in Bolivia, repeatedly stating that the fight against drugs is driven by geopolitical interests.

In 2008, Mr Morales expelled the US ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for allegedly conspiring against his government.

The State Department Response

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as “baseless and unfounded”. He added “We think the programs have been positive for the Bolivian people, and fully coordinated with the Bolivian government and appropriate agencies under their own national development plan.”

A prepared statement from USAID further read: “Those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government’s decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment.”

Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first socialist and indigenous president in 2005. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2009,

*I was interviewed by Voice of Russia radio at the time of the Russian move to expel USAID. The transcripts unfortunately are in pigeon English, with Parts I and II on two separate sites. For this reason, I also include a link to the audio file of the entire interview:

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_10_16/USAID-CIA-supporting-dictators-and-stifling-democracy-exclusive-interview/

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/thread-803039-1-1.html

Download audio file

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Crossposted at Daily Censored

Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the last of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this last post, he makes the alarming revelation that corporations fund the bulk of university research in the US. This means future decisions about medical research will be based on profit considerations, rather than patient need.)

The human brain is next

President Obama knows all this history. He is not naïve. He is consciously opening up the privatization of the human brain. Let’s examine exactly what he said when announced the initiative:

 Today I’ve invited some of the smartest people in the country, some of the most imaginative and effective researchers in the country — some very smart people to talk about the challenge that I issued in my State of the Union address:  to grow our economy, to create new jobs, to reignite a rising, thriving middle class by investing in one of our core strengths, and that’s American innovation.

“Ideas are what power our economy.  It’s what sets us apart.  It’s what America has been all about.  We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it.  We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger.  When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.

“And because of that incredible dynamism, we don’t just attract the best scientists or the best entrepreneurs — we also continually invest in their success.  We support labs and universities to help them learn and explore.  And we fund grants to help them turn a dream into a reality.  And we have a patent system to protect their inventions.  And we offer loans to help them turn those inventions into successful businesses. (5)

“Investing in ideas”, “investing in their success”, “attracting the best entrepreneurs” and “supporting labs and universities” are all code words for corporate ownership. When Jonas Salk worked on polio, the federal government funded the bulk of scientific research as a subsidy to corporations. It still does so today, although they are reducing their contribution. In the 1950s, federal R & D went to universities, which turned their results over to the government as public property. Not so today.

The same year as the Chakrabarty Decision (what a coincidence!!), the Bayh-Dole Act was passed to allow universities and corporations to license and patent government-funded research. Then the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 permitted university labs to accept funding from corporations in exchange for intellectual property rights. Corporations are now authorized to commercialize inventions owned by universities through various leasing agreements. Further, they get massive tax credits for investing in university research. (6)

In other words, corporations now own the vast bulk of publicly funded university research in the US. This is a historic transition in how scientific inquiry is organized. Private funding increased 250% from 1985 to $2.4 billion in 2005. In the ‘70s, about 62% of government-funded research was basic research – science to investigate fundamental issues of science. (7) This is being increasingly replaced with “commercial research” that is driven by the market and the corporate demand for private profits. Universities are being warped into being a component of global capitalism.

Consequently corporations will make the choices over what is researched. This will be based on corporate interest and private profit, rather than the public interest. We see the results already. While there are dozens of animal diseases that are treated with immunizations, there is little research to find them for humans. It is far more profitable to find a medicine that treats the disease for life without eliminating it.

This trend isn’t going to stop with the BRAIN Initiative. However, there is one aspect of this that is still under public control. The project will be organized by the military (assuming the military is not privatized) through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s research arm. DARPA itself has a significant portfolio of companies that research biological and neuroscience.

How reassuring!

Back in the day (in the ‘80s), the happy, chirpy slogan was “GE – we bring good things to life!” Today it is becoming abundantly clear that the global corporatocracy – the organized power of the 1% – demonstrates the malign intent of a psychopath.

These corporate persons sell depleted uranium bullets to the army that spread radiation everywhere. They consciously let New Orleans flounder in Hurricane Katrina. They openly organize the pipelines so that they can burn the Canadian Tar Sands, which will release so much carbon dioxide that it will trigger climate collapse. They brag that they will continue to make a profit off the end of human civilization. Meanwhile they are addicting our children to high fructose corn sugar and producing an epidemic of diabetes in children. And if you don’t like it, corporations will use their private drones to enforce their will.

Corporations are a carcinogen, a cancer that grows at the expense of the human body, both publicly and individually. As they unleash crisis after crisis, they are systematically destroying the institutions of society. That means we have no choice but to build new institutions that benefit the public in all directions. We really don’t have much choice. This will require a historic political battle that will heal humanity and the planet.

The technology they claim as private property has the potential for the first time to free humanity from misery, yet they can only use it to degrade society even further. Corporate property no longer serves real people. The very intent is malign and destructive. The solution is to make it public property and to place its control in the cooperative hands of the public.

Notes

5) Remarks by the President on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-american-innovation

6) David Hill, “Corporate Sponsored Research and Development at Universities in the United States.” AIPPI Journal, June 2002

7) EastBay Express, April 10-16, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He hasbeen actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

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Crossposted at Daily Censored

Guest post by Steven Miller

This is the 2nd of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post Miller traces how decisions in the Supreme Court and US Patent office led to the patenting of bacteria and other life forms, human genes, blood and cancer cells and Taxol and other treatments originating from natural sources. 

Privatizing Life

In 1980, the Supreme Court, in the Chakrabarty Decision, held that the scientist could patent a bacterium that he had “invented”. Chakrabarty had taken an existing bacterium and inserted genes from another existing bacterium. The court said that since isolated genes did not exist in nature or in any cell (which is of course true), the scientist therefore created something new by isolating them. This opened the door to patenting life forms.

Patents traditionally have been for tangible, hard inventions, real human-created things like a device or a manufacturing process. Natural processes had never before been considered as private property. These were things like laws of nature, the force of gravity or the vibrations of atoms, or natural things like oceans or Antarctica. You could own a horse, but you couldn’t own the species.

Quickly corporations began to besiege the US Patent Office with patents on various life forms, including human DNA. The Supreme Court decision did not address human DNA, but the Patent Office did, in secret procedures since these are not open to public debate. They allowed the extension of patent rights to every form of life without any public debate whatsoever.

Privatization rapidly followed. Sequanna Therapeutics filed for patents on the cells and genes of indigenous tribes in New Guinea. Rice-Tec got patents on the famous Basmati variety of rice that has been grown in India for centuries. How can it be that a US company can patent crops created by farmers in another country, thousands of years ago? Well, US law allows patents for the party that registers first, not necessarily for the discoverers. Corporations will always beat you to that.

During the 1960s, scientists showed that the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, found in Oregon and Washington, contained a protein that could kill cancer cells. This was marketed as the drug Taxol. The next question obviously was…  what other marvelous proteins exist in Nature? Today corporations are rapidly privatizing every life form they can get their hands on, from frogs to herbs to insects… and to humans.

In the 1980s, an engineer named John Moore was treated for hairy-cell leukemia at the UCLAMedicalCenter. Doctors took cell samples of Moore from his blood, skin, bone and sperm. They then began to grow Moore’s cells in cell cultures for research. Though cells die inside of an organism in the ordinary life process, they can be kept alive indefinitely for years in a petri dish. The doctors recognized that Moore’s cells produced some unique proteins, so they sold them, for a profit, to a biotech company.

John Moore sued the doctors, Sandoz (a pharmaceutical company) and the Regents of the University of California. The California Supreme Court held in 1991 that John Moore had no right to his “discarded” cells, or to any profits made from them.

Try this yourself. If by chance you have to have your appendix removed ask the hospital to give it back to you. “Sorry”, they will respond, “You signed the papers. We keep it or there’s no operation.” They own your tissue, not you.

The recent book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, details the horrific story of how corporations harvested the cells of an African-American cancer patient before she died in 1951 to begin a highly profitable HeLa cell line. Trillions more HeLa cells exist today than there ever were in the body of Ms Lacks. “One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing.”  (2)

The HeLa cell line was even used in creating the polio vaccine! To this day, her family has received no compensation for anything, even though her cells changed the face of medicine.

Ownership of human life in the form of slavery was legal in the US from 1620 to 1865. Under the banner of private property, the slaves were denied access to all they produced. Today – under the banner of private property – humans are being harvested once again for what they produce. This might sound harsh and disconcerting, but there is truth here.

Every single person who was arrested or detained by the US military during the Iraq War (and no doubt everywhere the military is active) has been forced to give up cell samples in the form of a simple mouth swab with a Q-tip. Although it is “proprietary information” and therefore not readily available to the public, there can be no doubt that the infrastructure exists to culture these cells to see what is interesting.

In 2012, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a 2004 California law requiring officials to collect the DNA samples from prisoners does not violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches. Claiming that these are fingerprints for the 21st Century, California Attorney General Kamala Harris claimed this as “a victory for public safety in California.”  (3)

With corporations working night and day to privatize literally everything in the world, it is hard to imagine that they haven’t found a way to seize and profit from these potential cell lines. How far, are we, from an America of 315 million petri dishes, all tested and controlled by automated machinery that flag any unique chemical process for further investigation? The potential wonder of this technology is crippled by corporations that use it only for private corporate profit.

The sequencing of the Human Genome in 2000 kicked off the next bio gold rush. By claiming that they had discovered the function of a given gene, corporations then patented them. The classic, and highly notorious, case is that of the so-called Breast Cancer genes, BRCA I and BRCA II, which, if you have them, are associated with breast cancer. Here’s how Wikipedia describes what happened:

A patent application for the isolated BRCA1 gene and cancer-cancer promoting mutations, as well as methods to diagnose the likelihood of getting breast cancer, was filed by the University of Utah, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Myriad Genetics in 1994; over the next year, Myriad, in collaboration with other investigators, isolated and sequenced the BRCA2 gene and identified relevant mutations, and the first BRCA2 patent was filed in the U.S. by Myriad and the other institutions in 1995. Myriad is the exclusive licensee of these patents and has enforced them in the US against clinical diagnostic labs.

This business model led from Myriad being a startup in 1994 to being a publicly traded company with 1200 employees and about $500M in annual revenue in 2012; it also led to controversy over high prices and the inability to get second opinions from other diagnostic labs, which in turn led to the landmark Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics lawsuit. The patents begin to expire in 2014.” (4)

Their “business model” was to demand that anyone who wanted to be tested for the genes had to pay Myriad to access their “intellectual property”, even though the genes existed in their body. Strangely, the cost of access was… exorbitant.

Notes

2) Rebecca Skloot. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” New York Times, February 2, 2010

3) Terry Baynes. “U.S. appeals court finds DNA testing constitutional”, February 23, 2013: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/24/us-usa-dna-database-idUSTRE81N04020120224

4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRCA2

To be continued.

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: mknowles via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the 1^st of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post, Miller describes a parallel process in which Big Pharma used their relative monopoly on anti-retrovirals to exclude third world countries who were the most severely impacted by AIDS. )

On April 2, President Obama announced the next step in research of the human brain. This is the BRAIN Initiative – Brain Research through Advanced Neurotechnologies. The US government will finance research into the next generation of technology to map the human brain with $100 million in seed money. The next step is to develop new electrical, optical, computer-assisted technology to investigate how the brain works at the level of neurons to determine how they work and how they link up in neural networks.

The current level of brain research is already pretty amazing. Without invading the skull, scientists can map the areas of the brain, and even neural pathways, that respond to specific stimuli. For example, a given area of the brain will respond to stimulus by increasing the blood flow when it is being used. This area radiates more heat, which is easily detected.

When someone is shown a picture of their pet dog, for example, science can detect exactly which part of the brain activates. Scientists are thus able to detect which brain structures are involved when you dream, when you drive the car, when you fall in love or when you do your taxes. The brain, however, is perhaps the most complex thing in Nature. It has 10 billion cells that make 100 trillion connections. Getting down into the individual neurons and connections themselves offers the possibility of actually determining the structures of the mind, human personality and memory.

 These amazing advances will all be privatized. Corporations intend to claim parts of the brain as private property and sell access for a price. The privatization trend has been rampant in biology and medicine for 30 years.

Can You Own the Sun?

Polio epidemics swept the United States every summer in the early 1950s, terrifying families and entire communities. Sometimes whole birthday parties of kids would be affected, since bodily fluids in swimming pools could spread the virus. At the peak, in 1952, there were 58,000 new cases of children who were crippled or paralyzed.

 Dr Jonas Salk became an international hero in 1955 by proving that a killed virus could easily be made into medicine that could immunize people against the disease. By 1957, 100 million doses had been administered in the US. Treatment on a similar scale spread rapidly across the industrial world. In 2002, over 500 million children were immunized in almost 100 countries. Today the Americas are polio free and the disease is close to extinction around the world.

Salk was asked, in a television interview, who owned the patent. His famous response was, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

This response would be impossible today. Equally impossible would be the massive immunization rapid-response by the public. The single thing that prevents this sort of public health response is that corporations now control the development of science and medicine through patents. And, yes, they do intend to patent the sun!

 Fast-forward 40 years to the 1990s. Consider what happened with the next modern scourge, AIDS. After fighting the disease for 15 years, scientists had developed the cocktail of anti-viral drugs that would prolong life indefinitely by containing the virus. This time however the patents were all controlled by Big Pharma, the cartel of drug-makers like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKlein. By that time, drugs now were the considered private property of corporations; thus they were protected by international treaties over intellectual property enforced by the United States.

 The public no longer had the right to use the anti-virals without paying billion-dollar corporations for them. As AIDS swept across Africa, India and Asia, these corporations, demonstrating once again their great concern for the improvement of humanity, offered them for sale for a mere $15,000 a year. They claimed that the drugs were expensive to manufacture. Besides, they reported, Africans could not use them effectively. Maybe that was because they lived on less than $2 a day.

In India, Dr Yusuf Hamied broke the patents and began manufacturing the anti-virals so easily that they were available for only $350 a year. Big Pharma responded with the true compassion that only corporate-persons can evince. They used their political power to force governments across the world to criminalize anyone who dared to distribute the inexpensive drugs. Some ten million people died as a result.

The response of the public to these police actions was so massive that the governments of Brazil and India were forced to declare that they would break the patents. Corporations could no longer control the distribution of generic AIDS drugs. Thousands of lives were saved. Big Pharma still works actively today to prevent the distribution of life-saving generic drugs today. (1) They innocently strive to maximize profit, even at the expense of human life.

 This is a terrible crime against humanity, one committed by corporate-persons against real persons. Such crime is inevitable when corporations control the resources of health, medicine, science, research and, in fact, any and all forms of technology.

NOTES

1) Democracy Now, “Fire in the Blood”, January 13, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: krischall via photopin cc

Crossposted at  Daily Censored

According to Daniel Hopsicker in MadCow Morning News, it turns out Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two alleged Boston bombers, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Uncle Ruslan, in turn, had a decade-long business relationship with Halliburton, the oil company/defense contractor formerly run by Dick Cheney that awarded billions of dollars in no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the nineties, Tsarni served for two years as a “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. It’s been well-documented that USAID (which is funded by the US State Department) is often used as a front for CIA and other US intelligence operations.

In the early 1990s Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.

At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.

It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.

Coincidentally Graham Fuller is listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on FBI translator whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. According to Edmonds, the gallery features subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.

She asserts that these individuals engaged in criminal activities subsequently protected under the doctrine of State Secrets. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to silence her, she posted the twenty-one photos to the Internet with no names.

One photo has been subsequently identified as Graham Fuller.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Read full post here: MadCow Morning News

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Crossposted at Daily Censored