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7/15/2004
The Truth About the Drug Companies Every day Americans are subjected to a barrage of advertising by the pharmaceutical industry. Mixed in with the pitches for a particular drug—usually featuring beautiful people enjoying themselves in the great outdoors—is a more general message. Boiled down to its essentials, it is this: “Yes, prescription drugs are expensive, but that shows how valuable they are. Besides, our research and development costs are enormous, and we need to cover them somehow. As ‘research-based’ companies, we turn out a steady stream of innovative medicines that lengthen life, enhance its quality, and avert more expensive medical care. You are the beneficiaries of this ongoing achievement of the American free enterprise system, so be grateful, quit whining, and pay up.” More prosaically, what the industry is saying is that you get what you pay for.
Is any of this true? Well, the first part certainly is. Prescription drug costs are indeed high—and rising fast. Americans now spend a staggering $200 billion a year on prescription drugs, and that figure is growing at a rate of about 12 percent a year (down from a high of 18 percent in 1999).1 Drugs are the fastest-growing part of the health care bill—which itself is rising at an alarming rate. The increase in drug spending reflects, in almost equal parts, the facts that people are taking a lot more drugs than they used to, that those drugs are more likely to be expensive new ones instead of older, cheaper ones, and that the prices of the most heavily prescribed drugs are routinely jacked up, sometimes several times a year.
Before its patent ran out, for example, the price of Schering-Plough’s top-selling allergy pill, Claritin, was raised thirteen times over five years, for a cumulative increase of more than 50 percent—over four times the rate of general inflation.2 As a spokeswoman for one company explained, “Price increases are not uncommon in the industry and this allows us to be able to invest in R&D.”3 In 2002, the average price of the fifty drugs most used by senior citizens was nearly $1,500 for a year’s supply. (Pricing varies greatly, but this refers to what the companies call the average wholesale price, which is usually pretty close to what an individual without insurance pays at the pharmacy.) - This is an industry that in some ways is like the Wizard of Oz—still full of bluster but now being exposed as something far different from its image. Instead of being an engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights. Yet this industry occupies an essential role in the American health care system, and it performs a valuable function, if not in discovering important new drugs at least in developing them and bringing them to market. But big pharma is extravagantly rewarded for its relatively modest functions. We get nowhere near our money’s worth. The United States can no longer afford it in its present form. (The New York Review of Books)
Microchips implanted in Mexican officials Attorney general, prosecutors carry security pass under their skin - Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and 160 of his employees were implanted at a cost to taxpayers of $150 for each rice grain-sized chip. More are scheduled to get "tagged" in coming months, and key members of the Mexican military, the police and the office of President Vicente Fox might follow suit, Aceves said. Fox's office did not immediately return a call seeking comment. (Associated Press)
Crimes in Iraq “Regrettable” Statistics - The meticulous team at Iraq Body Count (IBC) is attempting to account for civilian deaths. As of July 12, 2004, 11,164 are recorded (Islam Online)
Bilderberg 'performance' key to Edwards VP pick 'He reported back directly to Kerry' said participant in super-secret conference - Among the attendees from the U.S., according to a list obtained by WND, were Senators John Edwards, D-N.C. and Jon Corzine, D-N.J., Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Melinda Gates (wife of Bill Gates), David Rockefeller, Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, and even Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition. (World Net Daily)
'We Never Got to a Short List', John Kerry VP pick Several people pointed to the secretive and exclusive Bilderberg conference of some 120 people that this year drew the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, Melinda Gates and Richard A. Perle to Stresa, Italy, in early June, as helping win Mr. Kerry's heart. Mr. Edwards spoke so well in a debate on American politics with the Republican Ralph Reed that participants broke Bilderberg rules to clap before the end of the session. Beforehand, Mr. Edwards traveled to Brussels to meet with NATO officials, brandishing his foreign-policy credentials. "His performance at Bilderberg was important," said a friend of Mr. Kerry who was there. "He reported back directly to Kerry. There were other reports on his performance. Whether they reported directly or indirectly, I have no doubt the word got back to Mr. Kerry about how well he did." (New York Times)
Kerry picks Gephardt Mo. rep to get Dem veep nod - Richard Gephardt, 63, a 28-year veteran of the House of Representatives, could be named by the presumptive Democratic nominee as the party's vice-presidential candidate as soon as today. (New York Post)
The Ties That Blind: How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war". The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.
While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan's Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.
A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein--in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration's "hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld--were up to their ears in Washington's efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past. - "The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted... US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein." -William Blum (Counter Punch)
GM Salmon Muscle In on Wild Fish When Food Is Scarce The advance of genetically modified crops and farm animals has opened up fears of ecological disaster if the engineered, or transgenic, organisms were to escape the confines of the farm. Assessing the environmental risk posed by transgenic populations requires an understanding of how they would compete with their wild counterparts under such circumstances. To that end, new laboratory research has found that wild salmon tend to experience reduced growth in the company of salmon engineered to attain a large body size. The presence of transgenic fish also increases the likelihood of population collapse when food is in short supply.
The study, published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved growth hormone (GH) transgenic coho salmon, which have greater appetites and can grow up to seven times bigger than wild cohos. (Scientific American)
Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7 Customers of the Bank of America branch at 3625 Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia, often wonder about the Arlington police car that is always parked in front of the building in the next block.
They also can’t help but notice the two armed guards from the private Cantwell Security Service who patrol the street in front of the building and eye each passerby warily.
“What’s going on across the street?” one woman asked while waiting in line to deposit her paycheck last Friday.
“Not sure,” said the man ahead of her in line. “Something to do with the government. The police cars and guards have been there since shortly after 9-11.”
“Oh,” she said. “No matter.”
Actually, if the woman knew what was happening inside the nondescript office building at 3701 Fairfax Drive, she might think it really does matter because the building houses the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness Program, the “big brother” program Congress thought it killed. (Capitol Hill Blue)
TRIPOD II and FEMA Lack of NORAD Response on 9/11 Explained - Since the Tripod II biowarfare exercise was a joint New York-Department of Justice exercise we now must ask: Prior to 9/11, under US government Executive Branch procedure, what part of the government or official was responsible for and had the authority to coordinate and act as liaison between the military, federal agencies and state and local agencies and private corporations so that they did not overlap or interfere with each other, or occupy enough essential assets at one time to jeopardize operational readiness or impair the national security of the United States? (From the Wilderness)
The Bilderberg group The Bilderberg group of the world's elite, currently meeting in northern Italy and celebrating its 50th anniversary, casts an extensive shadow on the net (London Guardian)
NIST WTC 7 Interim Findings and Accomplishments, page 28 "The building fire alarm system was placed on TEST for a period of 8 h beginning at 6:47:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Ordinarily, this is requested when maintenance or other testing is being performed on the system, so that any alarms that are received from the system are considered the result of the maintenance or testing and are ignored." (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
American Sought Had '97 Arrest, 'Extreme' Ideas "You see, I discovered that the beliefs and practices of this religion fit my personal theology and intellect as well as basic human logic," Gadahn wrote (FOX)
Videos Amplify Picture of Violence In a collection of hundreds of so-far-unreleased photographs and short digital videos, U.S. soldiers are shown physically and emotionally abusing detainees last fall in the Abu Ghraib prison (Washington Post)
Judge bars future raids of Christian reform school The latest court order bars Heartland children from being taken into protective custody without a hearing unless the child "is in imminent danger of suffering serious physical harm, threat to life from abuse or neglect, or has been sexually abused" or imminently faces such abuse (Associated Press)
Many Who Served on 9/11 Press Fight for Compensation There is the asbestos worker who developed asthma after working on the enormous tangle of debris that was the trade center; the city employee who takes medications for her frayed nerves because of what she saw that day; the construction worker who sees her doctor every other week because, she says, her lungs were scarred by the dust at ground zero. (New York Times)
Controllers' 9/11 Tape Destroyed the tape was never turned over to the FBI and another FAA manager decided on his own to destroy the tape, crushing it with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into several trash cans (Washington Post)
My Hell In Camp X-Ray Jamal al-Harith, 37, who arrived home three days ago after two years of confinement, is the first detainee to lift the lid on the US regime in Cuba's Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta (Mirror.co.uk)
Guantanamo Bay Camp X-Ray - With the opening of Camp Delta, Camp X-ray was closed on April 29, 2002. 300 detainees previously held at Camp X-Ray were transferred to Camp Delta on April 28, 2002 (Global Security)
Al Qaeda Aims At The American Homeland "To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance." (9/11 Commission)
Study reveals preschoolers fastest growing segment to be prescribed anti-depressants A recent study on the use of antidepressants revealed some alarming results. According to the study, published in Psychiatric Services, a journal published by the American Psychiatric Association, the use of prescribed antidepressants has increased 10% annually among children and adolescents.
The study looked at prescriptions written for approximately 2 million pediatric patients from 1998-2002 and found that 2.4 percent were prescribed antidepressants in 2002, up from 1.6 percent five years earlier which means a 49% increase.
The study also found that the increase was greater for children under five years of age, increasing by 64 %. In this age group use among girls nearly doubled, a 68% increase, while the increase among boys was around 34%. (Council on Chiropractic Pediatrics)
NORAD had drills of jets as weapons In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties (USA Today)
Hijackers fly into Pentagon? No chance, said top brass 'Unrealistic' war game pooh-poohed before 9/11 - "the Norad exercise developers wanted an event having a terrorist group hijack a commercial airline and fly it into the Pentagon. Pacom [Pacific command] didn't want it because it would take attention away from their exercise objectives, and joint staff action officers rejected it as too unrealistic." (London Guardian)
Pentagon crash 'too unrealistic' The NORAD proposal is the clearest sign yet that national security officials were worried before 9/11 about terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles, despite testimony that senior leaders (Boston Globe)
The Media Is The Enemy Find out why maverick, independent grass-roots media voices such as American Free Press have declared all-out war on the elite-controlled Big Media Monopoly in America and around the globe ... (American Free Press)
Saving money -- and gas 5 Tips: Saving money on your car - the AAA says the current national average for regular gas is a record $1.77 per gallon (CNN)
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