What Really Matters, pt. I

¡Hola mi Gente!

Today I will be at a conference/ strategy meeting on how to address mass incarceration for most of the day. Have a great day, and when I come back, I want to know about at least one thing new you learned today. LOL!

I wrote the following over five years ago as part of my annual series on the holidays often posted under the heading, “What Really Matters.” In reading this, I see that I have been actively pursuing the #OccupyWallStreet ethos for quite some time.

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The holiest of all holidays are those… Kept by ourselves in silence and apart…

The secret anniversaries of the heart.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holidays were meant as an opportunity for us to set aside our work and routines – to give ourselves permission to put away, for the moment, our problems, and burdens. They were meant to be a time for joining with others to celebrate life. However, this is not such an easy thing to do. Maybe together we can re-learn from each other how to do it, who knows?

We live in different times from my childhood memories. I don’t think the loss of family is due to some in-born depravity of the current generation. I believe our times are intentionally designed to keep us busy and fearful. Among industrialized nations, Americans work the longest hours, often for the least amount of money. Corporations rule and often pay less in taxes than you and I. Labor organizing, weakened by laws (often written by corporate lobbyists), and propaganda, has resulted in a suppression of wages the like never before seen in this country. In real dollars, you make less today than you did 20 years ago and you work far longer hours. Corporate downsizing, which benefits the few at the expense of the many, keeps you in fear of your job because, in spite of the idiotic books proclaiming a nation of millionaires, you’re more than likely one or two paychecks away for utter homelessness.

So you make trades. You trade in time with your loved ones for longer work hours. Today, we might have several TVs but we just don’t have the time to watch it with our children or with each other. We create the concept of “quality time,” but you and I both know there’s no such thing. Time is time, don’t get all new on me, okay? Even our free time is spent running around like a nut, making meetings, shuttling kids between practices and functions. On vacations, we take our laptops and blackberries, answer emails, make conference calls. I have a bunch of vacation time piled up, but god forbid if I dared ask for three weeks vacation! There would be meetings I would miss and even if I demanded those three weeks and took them, people at my place of employment would shake their heads in shame.

We’re like the hamsters on the Wheel of Life, exerting a lot of energy but never getting anywhere, never having enough time.

But who said we have to have an economy based on such a lifestyle? Why should we fear for our jobs, take away time from our loved ones, worry that we might not have health insurance? Who said it has to be that way? Because, believe me, it doesn’t have to be that way. It isn’t “business,” it’s oppression and we’ve allowed the ten percent who own the 90 percent, dictate to us how we should live.

Most of us do not always see the connections between the personal struggles we may be facing and the changes in the larger economy, such as longer working hours, the necessity of working multiple jobs, and the inability to save money. In fact, we are encouraged to see our problems as purely personal. In today’s version of Corporate Christianity, if you’re poor, it’s because there’s something wrong with you. Furthermore, even when we do manage to see the link between larger economic forces and our daily lives, we don’t believe we can do anything to improve our circumstances. I hear it too often, “It’s the way things are,” “It ain’t personal, it’s business.”

Bullshit!

It is personal, and there are alternatives, contrary to what the naysayers might tell you.

The most prosperous period of this nation was during a time where wealth was more evenly distributed. While racism made it harder for people of color, prosperity was more easily accessible and better shared by the majority of people in society than it is today. There is no reason why this should longer be true in the present. During the last 30 years or so, the rules of the economic game have been changed by wealthy individuals and corporations -- and they can be changed by people like us.

They have to be changed, or it will all crumble. They can be changed if only you would stop believing the hype.

What to do? Well, I have long ago learned that the holidays don’t have to be perfect. The days of 704 E. 5^th St. -- of extended families living together -- are gone, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we throw away the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps we all can start by making that effort to turn within and share, not a material gift, but that piece of ourselves that connects us all: a small gesture, a smile, an attempt to reach out. We certainly need to question the wisdom of the economic policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many and that will not be changed by letter-writing and voting alone. We need to start talking to one another, getting the real information, creating dialog and demanding answers for our elected leaders. The media, owned by a handful of corporations, will not ask the questions that need to be asked. Democracy is not capitalism. Nor is it a spectator sport. The most important political office in this particular democracy my friend is you, the citizen. It’s all within our grasp. 

I’m not a Christian, but as I see it one holiday message is that a man -- really an ordinary man, a mere carpenter -- who never even owned his own home, who never wrote a book, or invented anything, a quite poor man, in fact, was able to change the world with a message of love. Now, that’s some shit!

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Anal Leakage and Death Panels

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m planning to get away this weekend. It’s a late replacement in my “Summer Flings” series necessitated when my latest co-star decided flings were detrimental to her attachment needs. The stand-in is a veteran Summer Flinger, but a dammed good one!

What?

LOL

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-=[ Big Pharma: The Real Death Panels ]=-

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

-- Ashleigh Brilliant (1933-) “street” philosopher

Almost no one points out that the insurance industry stands between you and your doctor. And while you might be one of the lucky few who can afford health insurance, you had better be sure that you don’t get sick. Health insurance is about profit, not health and the only insurance in health insurance is that profits will be placed before people -- all the time.

So, yes, Sarah, there is rationing going on at the rate of over 100,000 preventable deaths -- every year. The highest rate among advanced countries.

And yes, there are death panels, my good friends. They’re part of the most profitable industry in the US (and possibly the world), the pharmaceutical industry, or Big Pharma. Imagine, if you can, that you own a company. You sell widgets. Now imagine if the government spent billions of tax dollars innovating your widgets and then gave the patents to those widgets for almost nothing! I mean, that’s some gangsta shit right there. Well, I’ve just described the economic engine that drives the most lucrative business in America, my friends. Yup, Big Pharma capitalizes on government research, takes the fruits of the research, bends you over, and stretches your anal sphincter without so much as a kiss. I mean, you can lay a lot of fucked up shit at my doorstep, but at least I use lube (most of the time) and occasionally yell out “Yee-haw bitch!” while I’m doing it.

Yet, didn’t I just see your cousin from Texas at a town hall meeting advocating for Big Pharma?

::blank stare::

Actually, the shit Big Pharma does is much more heinous than merely robbing us blind. The collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, and the congressional oversight committee is downright deadly. I know, I know, you’re saying that the FDA and congressional oversight committees should protect the best interests of you and me, the Joe and Jane Six-pack, as that dimwit calls us. But remember when you voted for less “gub’mint,” as my cousins from Texas call it? Remember the neocon “let the markets solve all our problems, gub’mint is evil” rants? Well, you got it! We have fewer regulations and the rich welfare queens in three-piece suits own the FDA and damn near every congressional oversight committee you ever heard of. Shit, some of these people own your genes, you dumb muthafuckas!

The industry’s aggressive marketing tactics compound this lack of gub’mint oversight. You’ve seen the Claritin and Viagra commercials. They make it seem like these powerful drugs are like just any other consumer product. It’s a perception with deadly consequences. Big Pharma trots out its new drugs in the same way Hollywood opens summer blockbusters. They know how to build interest in a new drug. As a result, new, mostly untested drugs are being given to millions of people as soon as they’re a toothless FDA and the wholly owned prostitutes at congressional oversight committees okay them.

The thing is, when something goes wrong? The reverberations are felt throughout the country. I read somewhere that antidepressants are so widespread, traces of them are found in the drinking water of Texas and other localities. I am not shitting you! It seems like every other month, some new drug is being pulled off the market because heretofore “unknown” side effects (aside from the ubiquitous “anal leakage”) have been discovered. Yeah shit like suicide (as in the case of anti-depressants for children) and liver failure. Yeah, liver failure, you free-market sycophants. Duract, a painkiller that was shown to damage the liver, was prescribed to 2.5 million people in a ten-month period. That’s until Wyeth-Ayerst, Duract’s manufacturer, started yanking it off the shelves when the death totals started racking up. Under pressure from Wyeth-Ayerst, the FDA approved the drug, though there were concerns about its deadly side effects. It approved the drug with the caveat that it would provide a warning to physicians about its toxicity.

Yee-hawww! Bend ovah, muthafuckas!

What about legal consequences, you ask? Well, when you own the FDA, you don’t get punished. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, was “reprimanded” a remarkable fourteen times for misleading consumers about its asthma drugs Flovent and Flonase. I don't know about you, but my mother would only warn me a couple of times. My father had a strict “only two strikes” rule. Pfizer was ‘scolded three times in fourteen months for running deceptive ads hawking Celebrex, their arthritis drug.

There’s no turning back, people. Big Pharma covers its enormous arse by making generous contributions to both sides of the political aisle to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in the last election cycle alone.

And you wonder where they’re getting those goobers to rant and rave at town hall meetings?

Good luck with that...

Love,

Eddie