Rosemary Mathis - Post-Gardasil Syndrome - the new name for the spectrum of side effects following HPV vaccination

Rosemary Mathis, Vice President of Victim Support, SANE VAX, INC.

http://www.naturalnews.com/034338_Post-Gardasil_Syndrome_HPV_vaccines_side_effects.html

(NaturalNews) 2007 Ohio: 21 year old college student, Brittney (http://sanevax.org/brittany-from-ohio/), was told by her family doctor she needed the Gardasil vaccine to protect her from getting an HPV (human papillomavirus) infection via an accident at her college lab. Afraid that the doctor may be right and after being assured there were no risks involved, she consented to vaccination with Gardasil. New medical conditions began to appear almost immediately. After the second dose, Brittney lost the use of her legs. Four years and more than 40 medical specialists later, she has still not recovered from the extensive list of 'new medical conditions' aka adverse events she began to experience after Gardasil. She still suffers from PGS (Post-Gardasil Syndrome).

2010 California: A mother takes her 13 year old daughter for a routine check-up. When the doctor is informed that they have decided Gardasil is not right for her, the doctor asks to speak with the child alone. After taking the girl into a private room, she is told horror stories about cervical cancer from HPV and informed that she can have the vaccine right now and doesn't even have to tell her mother. The girl still refuses. The pediatrician then escorts mom and daughter to the waiting room and announces loudly that "Your refusal to take Gardasil puts you at risk of getting cancer and dying should you be raped."

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Michael Hudson - Debt and Democracy -- Has the Link been Broken?

By Prof. Michael Hudson 

Global Research, December 6, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28076

*This article was first published in German in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, December 2, 2011.

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts.[1] For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

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Martha Rosenberg - Seven Diseases Big Pharma Hopes You Get in 2012

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet

Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153332/seven_diseases_big_pharma_hopes_you_get_in_2012

It used to be joked that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. These days, the opportunist is Big Pharma, which raises your insurance premiums and taxes while providing you "low-priced" drugs that you paid for.

How did Pharma get a good third of the United States taking antidepressants, statins, and Purple Pills, albeit at low prices? By selling the diseases of depression, high cholesterol, and gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD. Supply-driven marketing, also known as "Have Drug — Need Disease and Patients," not only turns the nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs, it distracts from Pharma's drought of real drugs for real medical problems. 

Of course, not all diseases are Wall Street pleasers. To be a true blockbuster disease, a condition must (1) really exist but have huge diagnostic "wiggle room" and no clear-cut test, (2) be potentially serious with "silent symptoms" said to "only get worse" if untreated, (3) be "underrecognized," "underreported" with "barriers" to treatment, (4) explain hitherto vague health problems a patient has had, (5) have a catchy name — ED, ADHD, RLS, Low T or IBS — and instant medical identity, and (6) need an expensive new drug that has no generic equivalent.

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Ed Pilkington - NAACP Warns Black and Hispanic Americans Could Lose Right to Vote

Published on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/05/civil-rights-naacp-voter-warning

Civil rights group petitions UN over 'massive voter suppression' after apparent effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic people

by Ed Pilkington

The largest civil rights group in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is petitioning the UN over what it sees as a concerted efforted to disenfranchise black and Latino voters ahead of next year's presidential election.

The organisation will this week present evidence to the UN high commissioner on human rights of what it contends is a conscious attempt to "block the vote" on the part of state legislatures across the US. Next March the NAACP will send a delegation of legal experts to Geneva to enlist the support of the UN human rights council.

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George Lakoff - Conservative Frank Luntz Has Set a Trap for Progressives -- Here's How to Outsmart Him and Boost the Occupy Movement

By George Lakoff, AlterNet

Posted on December 6, 2011, Printed on December 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153348/conservative_frank_luntz_has_set_a_trap_for_progressives_--_here%27s_how_to_outsmart_him_and_boost_the_occupy_movement

Progressives had some fun last week with Frank Luntz, who told the Republican Governors' Association that he was scared to death of the Occupy movement and recommended language to combat what the movement had achieved. But the progressive critics mostly just laughed, said his language wouldn't work, and assumed that if Luntz was scared, everything was hunky-dory. Just keep on saying the words Luntz doesn't like: capitalism, tax the rich, etc.

It's a trap.

When Luntz says he is "scared to death," he means that the Republicans who hire him are scared to death and he can profit from that fear by offering them new language. Luntz is clever. Yes, Republicans are scared. But there needs to be a serious discussion of both Luntz's remarks and the progressive non-response.

What has been learned from the brain and cognitive sciences is that words are defined by fixed frames we use in thinking, frames come in hierarchical systems, and political frames are defined in moral terms, where "morality" is very different for conservatives and progressives. What lies behind the Occupy movement is moral view of democracy: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other and acting responsibly both socially and personally. This requires a robust Public empowering and protecting everyone equally. Both private success and personal freedom depend on such a Public. Every critique and proposal of the Occupy movement fits this moral view, which happens to be the progressive moral view.

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Alliance for Natural Health - Merck—Too Big to Prosecute?

Alliance for Natural Health On December 6, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/merck-too-big-to-prosecute/

There is a surprising reason why the government won’t go after drug companies for serious crimes.

It is because government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration would then be barred from doing business with them!

In 1999 the FDA approved Vioxx, a drug created by Merck and Co. to treat arthritis. Vioxx was pulled off the market in 2004 because evidence showed it greatly increased the risk of heart attack in the 25 million Americans who had taken the drug. Some 50,000 patients sued [1], and 27,000 of the plaintiffs received $4.85 billion in settlement of their claims.

Last week the Department of Justice announced that Merck has agreed to pay a $321 million criminal fine [2] and plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of illegally introducing a drug into interstate commerce. Merck also is paying $426 million to the federal government and $202 million to state Medicaid agencies. Those payments will settle civil claims that its marketing caused doctors to prescribe and bill the government for Vioxx they otherwise would not have prescribed.

Please note that these settlements are for rather minor infractions—not for deliberately concealing the danger of a killing drug from patients, the medical community, and their investors. Despite the serious consequences of Merck’s actions, the government won’t prosecute them for any serious charges—because, if they did and won, it would mean they would have to stop doing business with Merck in the future! Federal law makes it illegal for Medicare and Medicaid to do business [3] with “an excluded or debarred entity resulting from serious criminal charges.”

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Ian Traynor - Radical Eurozone Shakeup Could See Brussels Get Austerity Powers

Published on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/06/eurozone-shakeup-voting-rights-confidential-paper

Confidential paper from council president Herman Van Rompuy proposes empowering the commission to impose austerity

by Ian Traynor

The European commission could be empowered to impose austerity measures on eurozone countries that are being bailed out, usurping the functions of government in countries such as Greece, Ireland, or Portugal.

Bailed-out countries could also be stripped of their voting rights in the European Union, under radical proposals that have been circulating at the highest level in Brussels before this week's crucial EU summit on the sovereign debt crisis.

A confidential paper for EU leaders by the EU council president, Herman Van Rompuy, who will chair the summit on Thursday and Friday, said eurobonds or the pooling of eurozone debt would be a powerful tool in resolving the crisis, despite fierce German resistance to the idea.

It called for "more intrusive control of national budgetary policies by the EU" and laid out various options for enforcing fiscal discipline supra-nationally.

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TERRA DAILY - Abrupt permafrost thaw increases climate threat

by Staff Writers, TERRA DAILY.com
Fairbanks, AK (SPX) Dec 07, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Abrupt_permafrost_thaw_increases_climate_threat_999.html

As the Arctic warms, greenhouse gases will be released from thawing permafrost faster and at significantly higher levels than previous estimates, according to survey results from 41 international scientists published in the Nov. 30 issue of the journal Nature.

Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon as deforestation, say the authors, but the effect on climate will be 2.5 times bigger because emissions include methane, which has a greater effect on warming than carbon dioxide.

The survey, led by University of Florida researcher Edward Schuur and University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Benjamin Abbott, asked climate experts what percentage of the surface permafrost is likely to thaw, how much carbon will be released and how much of that carbon will be methane.

The authors estimate that the amount of carbon released by 2100 will be 1.7 to 5.2 times larger than reported in recent modeling studies, which used a similar warming scenario.

"The larger estimate is due to the inclusion of processes missing from current models and new estimates of the amount of organic carbon stored deep in frozen soils," Abbott said. "There's more organic carbon in northern soils than there is in all living things combined; it's kind of mind boggling."

Northern soils hold around 1,700 billion gigatons of organic carbon, around four times more than all the carbon ever emitted by modern human activity and twice as much as is now in the atmosphere, according to the latest estimate. When permafrost thaws, organic material in the soil decomposes and releases gases such as methane and carbon dioxide.

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Zoe Weil - Localization v. Globalization -- A False Dichotomy

Published on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/06-4

by Zoe Weil

The economic localization movement is growing. Locavores have become widespread, with the “100 mile diet” representing the new eco-conscious food trend. Author Helena Norberg-Hodge begins her TEDx talk, The Economics of Happiness, with this impassioned plea: “For all of us around the world the highest priority, the most urgent issue, is fundamental change to the economy,” and goes on to say, “The change that we need to make is shifting away from globalizing to localizing economic activity.” This, she suggests, is the economics of happiness. Even in my own town, a yoga studio has a sign on the wall urging yoga practitioners to shop locally.

As a humane educator who teaches about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental preservation and animal protection, I am uncomfortable with the fervor surrounding localization. While the farmer’s market and local food movements have certainly been beneficial – helping farmers, communities, and individuals alike – it’s not realistic, desirable, or responsible to reject global trade out of hand or to advocate localization as the urgent answer for our times.

A full commitment to local economies would mean that in Maine, where I live, people would need to give up coffee, citrus, rice, cotton and synthetic fabrics (among many other things) and rely on potatoes, wheat, lobsters and clams, canned food stored from our brief summers, and wear linen clothing and deer hides. It would also mean that medicines discovered and produced by scientists working in New England would no longer be exported to places where they are most needed. Perhaps they wouldn’t be discovered or produced at all, given that many ingredients and processes are derived across the globe.

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Alliance for Natural Health - “FDA is Violating Federal Law”—Emord

Alliance for Natural Health On December 6, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/fda-violates-federal-law/

Bolstered by a massive outpouring of support from you, we are asking the agency to withdraw its New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) draft guidance completely!

The period for comments to the FDA on the draft guidance on NDI notifications closed on December 2. Along with the hundreds of thousands of messages you sent and the 20,000 phone calls you made to FDA and Congress, ANH-USA also submitted formal comments [1].

The problem with the FDA’s draft guidance on New Dietary Ingredients is that it allows FDA to arbitrarily deny the sale of any supplement created (or modified) in the past seventeen years [2]. If you’re a supplement manufacturer or distributor or possibly even a health food store, and you don’t file a NDI “notification” (actually a request for approval) for each ingredient in each product developed since 1994 in just the way prescribed by the FDA, and the court later decides the FDA is right, then you are guilty of product “adulteration,” which is punishable by prison. With your favorite supplements off the market, it also would allow the drug industry to adapt and patent them [3], and sell them back to you—by doctor’s prescription only—for 10 or 100 (or even more) times what you’re paying now.

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