Corporatization, Globalization and Indian Farmer Suicides

Nero’s Guests

Directed by Dhepa Bhatia (2013)

Film Review

Nero’s Guests is about Indian rural affairs journalist Palagummi Sainath and his investigation of farmer suicides (see The Ugly Side of the Fashion Industry) in India and the neoliberal policies responsible for them.

Sixty percent of India’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Sainath has been one of very few journalists reporting on the brutal effect of neoliberalism and globalization on India’s rural sector – where 836 million people live on less than fifty cents a day.

He specifically blames the corporatization of agriculture, which has driven hundreds of thousands of farmers off their land, and “free trade” policies that allow Europe and North America to destroy local markets with cheap coffee, cotton and other commodities. All to increase the profits of a handful of western corporations.

Thanks to “fair trade” provisions enforced by the World Trade Organization, India exports twenty tons of grain a year to feed European livestock at lower prices than India’s poor are charged for grain.

When Indian farmers are driven off their land, they migrate to the cities for jobs that don’t exist. Since the 2008 economic downturn, more than one million urban jobs have disappeared due to “austerity” cuts.

The film provides poignant close-ups of rural families that have lost family members to suicide. These contrast starkly with cameos of Indian celebrities and their condescending superficiality in addressing poverty.

 

Menopause: Made in the USA

Part 2

Thanks to massive marketing by Premarin manufacturer Wyeth, the concept of menopause is pretty much limited to English speaking countries.

Historically 80% of Premarin sales have occurred in the US. Even in the US, the cessation of menstruation is a non-event in 75% of women, who experience no symptoms whatsoever. Most languages and cultures have no word for menopause. It’s actually quite common for women to experience improvement in their health and well-being when they stop having periods.

Cross Cultural “Menopause” Studies

There are interesting cross cultural studies of the “menopause” phenomenon. Non-western cultures typically view the cessation of monthly cycles asa milestone signaling transition to the role of community elder. The Filipino women Berger and Wenzel studied in Women, Body and Society: Cross-cultural Differences in Menopause were extremely pleased with their freedom from the inconvenience of menstruation. They saw it as an initiation into the joys of old age: better sex (estrogens suppress a woman’s sex drive, which is regulated by testosterone and oxytocin) and improved energy and mood.  Most of all they appreciated the new love and respect they enjoyed as elders.

As Berger and Wenzel’s and other cross cultural studies note, attitudes in the US and other English speaking countries are heavily influenced by a multibillion dollar PR industry that bombards women with messages glorifying youth, thinness and sexual attractiveness – and engendering frank terror of gray hair, facial wrinkles, weight gain and cellulite. Aggressive marketing preys on these insecurities to sell billions of dollars of plastic surgery, botox, wrinkle removing creams and lotions, age concealing make-up, hair coloring and diet products and programs.

Six Decades of False and Misleading Marketing

As revealed in internal documents uncovered in a few of the 5000+ lawsuits filed against Wyeth, the company’s culpability goes far beyond neglecting to inform menopausal women of cancer risks. They paint a very ugly picture of an aggressive public relations campaign to convince women and their doctors that estrogen replacement was the secret to eternal youth.

It was a win-win campaign. By 1992, Premarin was the most commonly prescribed drug in the US. Thanks to decades of marketing about the horrors of aging, post menopausal women were terrified of losing their sexual attractiveness without estrogen replacement. And because health “experts” were recommending it in medical journals, doctors were more than happy to overlook growing evidence that it causes cancer.

The NIH Shuts Down the WHI

Seventy percent of American women taking estrogen replacement discontinued it when the National Institute of Health shut down the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study in 2002 (see Wyeth and the Multibillion Dollar Menopause Industry). A year later this had resulted in a 7% decrease in new breast cancer cases – a total of  14,000 women spared the agony of a potentially fatal breast cancer diagnosis.

The study findings have also resulted in 5000+ cancer lawsuits against Wyeth for misrepresenting earlier cancer research to doctors – and their failure to inform women of the significant cancer risks associated with HRT.

Wyeth Fights Back

Wyeth’s response was to initiate a massive PR campaign discrediting the WHI study. They started with a letter to 500,000 doctors attacking the study, complaining that the women in the Premarin arm had other reasons for developing cancer – they were too old, too menopausal or weren’t checked for pre-existing heart disease.* This was followed by articles attacking the study in numerous medical journals. All were ghost written by the company and published under the names of doctors specializing in women’s health

Many of these doctors were affiliated with the notorious Council on Hormone Education at University of Wisconsin that Wyeth founded in response to the 2002 WHI study. In 2006 the Council was still offering a continuing medical education course promoting estrogen replacement called “Quality of Life, Menopausal Changes and Hormonal Therapy.”

Filing Suit: the Only Consumer Protection Against Big Pharma

Wyeth’s massive campaign to discredit the 2002 WHI study, at the expense of tens of thousands of women who would start or continue estrogen replacement, has clearly harmed their defense in the dozens or so of the 5000+ lawsuits that have made it through the courts.

The pharmaceutical company has yet to win a single lawsuit brought by women (or families of deceased women) who developed reproductive cancers as a result of taking Premarin or Prempro. Moreover there are still active information websites for affected women and/or families who have yet to file suit. If you or a loved one has developed breast, uterine or ovarian cancer as a result of taking Premarin or Prempro click here.

photo credit: DES Daughter via photopin cc

Wyeth and the Multibillion Menopause Industry

(Part I of a two part series on the dangerous and cancer causing campaign by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to “medicalize” menopause for profit),

I have written previously (see The Multibillion Dollar Depression Industry and Drug Companies: Killing Kids for profit)  about the ingenious – and deadly – strategy by pharmaceutical companies of inventing fictitious illnesses to market highly profitable drugs that allegedly “treat” them. The technical terms for this are “medicalizing” or “disease mongering.” In her 2004 The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It, Dr Marcia Angell talks about “generalized anxiety disorder,” “erectile dysfunction,” “premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” and “gastro-esophogeal reflux disorder (heartburn).” These are other common complaints that drug companies have reinvented as chronic illnesses requiring lifelong treatment.

Estrogen Deficiency Syndrome

Based on 30 years of research linking it to reproductive cancers, the marketing of so-called “estrogen deficiency syndrome” has been far more lethal. The condition is known as “menopause” in English-speaking countries. Other cultures have no word for it. The number of premature deaths from the so-called treatment – “hormone replacement therapy (HRT)” – is the millions.

In this case the culprit is a single company, Wyeth, which manufactures Premarin (conjugated estrogens extracted from pregnant mare urine) and Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progesterone (a second female hormone).

Estrogen, a hormone regulating the development and function of the female reproductive system, was first discovered in 1925. In the 1930s, the drug company Wyeth developed a process to extract conjugated estrogens from the urine of pregnant mares. They patented their product as the drug Premarin (PREgnantMAresurINe), which first appeared on the market in 1942.

From the beginning Wyeth marketed Premarin, not for temporary relief of menopausal symptoms, but as a lifelong treatment to help all women maintain “healthy” estrogen levels in later life. Obviously this is nonsense. A “healthy” or natural estrogen level in a post-menopausal woman is virtually zero.

Although the medical community (and Wyeth) have been aware of links between estrogen replacement and breast, uterine and ovarian cancer since the 1970s, this research was effectively concealed from the public. Until the frightening results of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study hit the front page in 2002. Between 1993 and 1995, the National Institutes of Health enrolled 161,809 women in the double blind WHI study. In 2002 the NHI shut down the study. Although it was originally scheduled to finish in 2005, it was painfully obvious that the women taking HRT were experiencing a 26% increase in breast cancer (with the risk doubling after five years), a 41% increase in strokes and a 29% increase in heart disease.

1975: the First Study Linking Premarin with Cancer

The first study linking Premarin with uterine cancer appeared in 1975. It was replicated by other researchers in 1977 and 1979. Wyeth responded to these worrisome studies by promoting a small 1980 study that taking progesterone, a second female hormone, reduced the risk of uterine cancer with estrogen replacement.

Sadly, most doctors fell for Wyeth’s slick PR campaign. Thanks to all the free pens, watches, clocks, lunches and trips to overseas conferences, they conveniently overlooked the failure of Wyeth’s 1980 study to at cancer rates in women who took no hormone replacement or to study the possible role of combined treatment in inducing other hormone sensitive cancers, such as breast and ovarian cancer. Wyeth’s success in selling doctors on combined treatment would lead them to launch Prempro, a combination of Premarin and progesterone, in 1995.

The earliest studies linking Premarin with breast cancer appeared in early 1980. According to Nik Ismail in “Hormone Replacement Therapy and Gynaecological Cancers,” between 1975 and 1995, there were at least fifty studies linking estrogen replacement (also known as HRT) with breast and uterine cancer. Some were cross cultural studies revealing American women had more than ten times the incidence of breast cancer than Asian women, who don’t take estrogen replacement.

The Multibillion Dollar Wyeth Cover-up

Wyeth responded to the breast cancer studies with a new PR blitz. In addition to flooding doctors’ offices with literature claiming studies linking Premarin to cancer were “contradictory,” they promoted numerous company-funded studies allegedly showing that estrogen replacement prevents osteoporosis and hip fractures, dementia and heart disease. The spin Wyeth gave doctors was that the effect of reducing cardiovascular disease (heart disease and strokes) — the most common cause of death in Americans – outweighed the somewhat lower risk of developing breast cancer.

Ultimately the claim that Premarin and Prempro reduce elderly women’s risk of cardiovascular disease proved to be false. This was one of the main reasons the WHI study was stopped: the women in the Premarin/Prempro arm of the study were developing significantly more heart attacks, strokes and dementia.

The WHI points to some role for estrogen replacement in reducing osteoporosis. However no studies have ever controlled for long term fluoride ingestion or epidemic Vitamin D deficiency in elderly Americans – which both have a documented role in high US rates of osteoporosis and hip fracture.

The marketing blitz aimed at doctors was accompanied by an even more powerful PR campaign in Harper’s Bazaar, the Ladies Home Journal and other women’s magazines. The goal was to appeal to American women’s (largely manufactured) terror of aging by emphasizing the value of estrogen replacement in preserving sexual attractiveness by preventing the skin changes and vaginal drying associated with aging.

To be continued.

photo credit: tejamen1947 via photopin cc

The NSA is the Tip of the Iceberg

Guest post by Steven Miller and Satish Musunuru

(Part 5 of a five-part post on the corporatization of Internet surveillance.)

The capitalist class deliberately distorts the class nature of the state. This is a scientific question, not an ideological one. Government is the administration of public money and resources in the name of society. The state is different. It is made up of the police, the courts and jails, the army, et al, and of course, the NSA. The capitalist class loves to present the state as a body that somehow stands above society, neutral to class interests, reigning with wisdom. One thing we have learned from Occupy, however, is that the police always seem to defend the corporations. They are hardly neutral. For both government and the state, law is simply the will of the ruling class, written down.

The purpose of the state is to defend the relations of production that are organized and imposed by the ruling class. Thus the state is a function of the relations of production, not the other way around. However, once established, it plays a formative role in organizing the relations of production for the class that rules the state.

In capitalism’s Industrial Era, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI collected dossiers on every politician, movement and individual that might pose a threat to state control. Today digital technology leads inexorably to the Surveillance State, actually only a small part of the entire state apparatus.

The US state has many manifestations: the military industrial complex, the media industrial complex that organizes the world’s most sophisticated propaganda war 24/7, the prison industrial complex, the corporate state, the surveillance state, the Migra, the militarized police we all saw at Occupies, open violations of the Constitution, the Department of Homeland Security, private prisons, secret ops, drones, extraordinary rendition, torture at every level, and so much more. Then of course we have the army, equipped with the world’s largest military budget, armed with some serious hardware, including the world’s largest supply of nuclear weapons. Corporations are inseparable from this. As they merge with the state, corporations today are rapidly developing police powers.

Social movements can sometimes reform the government, but state power does not permit you to reform the state. The idea that somehow the state will sit by passively while workers organize socialism is simply a fantasy. The state is programmed to intervene whenever the relations of production are threatened. Here and there, in relatively small-scale cases – Mondragon workers, for example, Kerala in India, Cuba, Nicaragua at one phase, etc – the nuisance is such that the state chooses not to intervene – but these are few and far between. The job of the state is to identify threats to capitalist control and move on them.

In the US today, the NSA works at one level; at another level, Homeland Security outsources police functions to corporations through contracts for profit. It’s budget for doing this has averaged over $30 billion a year since 2001. During Occupy, across the country, DHS has established “fusion centers”, often in corporations or banks, where police gathered surveillance and advised corporate leaders. Domain Centers (Oakland is the second, after New York City) are required for every port in the country.

The state’s response to the NSA scandal has been to go on a marketing campaign: “Resistance is Futile! We’ve got things coming at you that you can’t even imagine, way beyond Darth Vader!” This is a point worth considering. How can the American people possibly fight this?

The most basic step is to understand that things don’t have to be this way. Code can be changed and architectures can be re-designed. This is really an aspect of the tremendous battle of ideas that is breaking out in society. Every living system on Earth is in decline, except corporations. Corporations can be abolished by popular will if people are on the same accord, just as private property in slavery was abolished 150 years ago. These are historic times.

The American people have a long revolutionary history, but little recent experience with the process. Thus we don’t recognize the critical importance of these essential first steps of the battle that are appearing today. The future world will either be all corporate or all public. We can decide.

Here is how one of America’s great revolutionaries – John Adams, an outstanding exponent of capitalism – explained the process:

“The American Revolution was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to cease?

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced (emphasis added). The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations….

“The people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country; and while they thought her a kind and tender parent, (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a mother,) no affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel bedlam, willing like Lady Macbeth, to “dash their brains out,” it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased, and were changed into indignation and horror.

“This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”   (13)

Background and Notes

13)  John Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818

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Reposted from Daily Censored

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 nanodog2@hotmail.com

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Satish Musunuru draws upon his training as an engineer and his experience as a professional in Silicon Valley to understand the relationship between technology and corporate capitalism and how it has brought us to the ecological and societal crisis we find ourselves in. You can email him at guruji323@hotmail.com