Friday, March 24, 2006

filthy lucre

Drug firms 'inventing diseases' My suspicions confirmed. How deep might this tendency run, in the medical-pharmaceutical industry? (f-ing industry!?) Use your imagination. Or, if you're really ready to shake your foundations, check out this or this.

"Property." "Equity." "Money." It all makes sense, in its own little sphere. It only falls apart when you try to find a rational source for it all, an original owner, but of course, there's no such thing. It's a con.
However, it's difficult -at best- to come up with another way of keeping everyone busy and fed and compensated for the time they spent doing things we'd rather not have been doing. And face it, we all like being busy and fed and fairly compensated, to some degree.

On a slightly different note...

This is precisely why private armies -what they're euphemistically calling security forces today-- should be stomped out like vermin. More generally, it's yet another excellent argument against outsourcing the military. What a dumb f*cking idea.

I've been wanting to say this for years. Laugh at me now, go ahead, but I'm telling you that the same people who orchestrated the wave of assassinations in the 60s, and imposed a blackout on research on psychotropics (LSD, mescaline, etc), also gave birth to the disparagement of the idea of conspiracy. Richard M. Dolan says this about the word:

The very label serves as an automatic dismissal, as though no one ever acts in secret. Let us bring some perspective and common sense to this issue.

The United States comprises large organizations - corporations, bureaucracies, "interest groups," and the like - which are conspiratorial by nature. That is, they are hierarchical, their important decisions are made in secret by a few key decision-makers, and they are not above lying about their activities. Such is the nature of organizational behavior. "Conspiracy," in this key sense, is a way of life around the globe.

Anyone who has lived in a repressive society knows that official manipulation of the truth occurs daily. But societies have their many and their few. In all times and all places, it is the few who rule, and the few who exert dominant influence over what we may call official culture. -All elites take care to manipulate public information to maintain existing structures of power. It's an old game.

America is nominally a republic and free society, but in reality an empire and oligarchy, vaguely aware of its own oppression, within and without. I have used the term "national security state" to describe its structures of power. It is a convenient way to express the military and intelligence communities, as well as the worlds that feed upon them, such as defense contractors and other underground, nebulous entities. Its fundamental traits are secrecy, wealth, independence, power, and duplicity.

By way of credentials, he studied at Alfred University and Oxford University before completing his graduate work in history at the University of Rochester, where he was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. Dolan studied U.S. Cold War strategy, Soviet history and culture, and international diplomacy. Not bad.

I'm not pretending to understand their motives, or their ways. All I'm saying is that critical observation suggests that a dynasty has been constructed on the backs of people who have been made to suffer. Remember what Donald Rumsfeld the apparently-invincible did between his stints in high-level diplomacy (for the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I administrations)? He drew a fat paycheck from the pharmaceutical industry.

Do not underestimate the opposition.