NEW ORIGINAL SERIES: American Veterans: Forgotten and Discarded - Episode 1: "Afflicted"

This Thanksgiving, remember our vets who have returned to a country that so easily forgets them. 

In a follow-up to the heart-wrenching series, "Who Is Killing Our American Veterans?", Dr. Gary Null exposes the continued epidemic of homelessness affecting our American Veterans today. Thousands of Veterans are mired in poverty, suffering with physical and psychological illnesses and are living on the streets and in the woods throughout America. See the tragic story of these forgotten men and women and the few dedicated people who are committed to helping them in their plight. 

Senior Executive Producer/Writer/Director: Gary Null Ph.D.

Executive Producer/Co-Director: Richard Polonetsky   

Producer: Shannon Burnett   

Editor: Michael Palmerio   

Camera: Florian Boehm

A Progressive Radio Network Original Series

We would like to give a very special thanks to the organizations listed below.  Please visit their websites to see how they are helping homeless Veterans and how you can help support their efforts.

National Veterans Homeless Support [http://www.nvhs.us/]

Veterans Transitional Facility

Vietnam and All Veterans of Brevard Inc. [http://www.vietnamandallveteransofbrevard.com/]

Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, Inc. [http://www.clsmf.org/index.php/services/vlap]

Daily Bread Inc. [http://www.dailybreadinc.org/]

Times of India - Desk job can send you early to grave

Times of India| Nov 14, 2011

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/Desk-job-can-send-you-early-to-grave/articleshow/10171967.cms

The study of more than 200,000 men and women in NSW has found that the longer people sit each day the greater their chances of going to an early grave.

Even when exercise was taken into account, it was often not enough to offset the effects of sitting for several hours.

Those who sat for more than 10 hours a day had a 48 per cent increased risk of death compared to more active people who sat for less than four hours a day.

Co-author of the study, Adrian Bauman, of the University of Sydney's school of public health, said people with physically active jobs such as gardeners, builders and childcare workers faced less of a problem than those chained to a desk.

"Your lowest risk of death is if you are physically active and don't sit," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Professor Bauman as saying.

"Your highest risk is if you don't do any physical activity and you sit a lot of the day.

"What's happening is when you sit, the meal you have just eaten is broken down into sugar and your blood sugar stays high.

"Sugar wants to be taken into muscles and the liver to be used but if you're sitting it's just circulating so your blood sugar stays high," Prof Bauman explained.

The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the 45 and Up Study, the largest ongoing health research project in the southern hemisphere.

Ed Silverman - AstraZeneca Is Indicted By Serbia Over Bribes

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/11/astrazeneca-is-indicted-by-serbia-over-bribes/

By Ed Silverman // November 8th, 2011 

Last August, AstraZeneca received a criminal indictment in Belgrade, Serbia, over allegations that local employees offered alleged bribes to physicians at the Institute of Oncology and Radiology, according to a filing made yesterday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (see this). The indictment, however, had actually been previously disclosed when AstraZeneca reported earnings late last month (see this).

The indictment follows the arrests last year of several officials at the Institute for Oncology and Radiology of Serbia, including director Nenad Borojevic and representatives from several pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca and Roche, on suspicion of accepting and giving bribes totaling about $1.4 million (read here and here).

An AstraZeneca spokesman writes us to say that “we intend to vigorously defend the matter and have filed a number of pending preliminary procedural objections that ask the Serbian criminal court to dismiss the indictment.”

The indictment comes amid widening probes by regulators in the US and the UK into alleged overseas corruption by the pharmaceutical industry. In late 2009, the head of the US Justice Department’s Criminal Division warned drugmakers that there will be more criminal enforcement against interactions with foreign officials as they seek violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In April, Johnson & Johnson was fined $70 million for bribing public doctors in several European countries - and paying kickbacks to Iraq - to illegally obtain business (read this). Three months ago, Pfizer provided the US Department of Justice and the SEC with info concerning “potentially improper payments” made by Pfizer and Wyeth personnel in connection with unspecified sales activities outside the US (see this). And over the past year, several other drugmakers, including Merck and Eli Lilly, received letters as the feds seeks to uncover any FCPA violations.

David Morgan - New Census Data Raise Number of Poor to 49 Million

Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by Reuters

http://www.reuters.com

by David Morgan

WASHINGTON - The number of poor Americans hit a record 49 million in 2010, or 16 percent, according to new data released on Monday that showed poverty rates for the elderly, Asians and Hispanics higher than previously known.

The figures were calculated by the Census Bureau under a broad new measure intended to supplement the official standard with a fuller picture of poverty in the United States. Results contrast with official poverty data, released in September, that put the number of poor Americans at 46.2 million.

The biggest rise occurred among people aged 65 and older who are being driven into poverty by out-of-pocket medical expenses, including premiums and co-pays from the federal government's Medicare program for the elderly.

The poverty rate for the elderly jumped to 15.9 percent, or a roughly 1 in 6 senior citizens, versus 9 percent under the official count.

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Rocky Kistner - As Dolphins Die, Gulf Residents Ask What About Us?

Tuesday 01 November 2011

by: Rocky Kistner, Southern Studies

http://www.truth-out.org/dolphins-die-gulf-residents-ask-what-about-us/1320695005

Willie Seaman of Irvington, AL, lays carpet and floors for a living. But last summer, as the BP well gushed thousands of barrels of oil daily into the Gulf, Seaman signed up with the BP cleanup program, working on a shrimp boat several miles off shore.

It was brutally hot and the smell of oil was putrid, Seaman remembers. His job was to use a net to try to pull in the thick, reddish BP crude that he says was up to a foot thick in places. Problem was, the white protective suits didn't do much to keep the oil off, Willie recalls. Instead, he says they acted like absorbent pads, soaking up the oil that would rub against his skin. 

Seaman says before long he started breaking out in blistery red hives on his hands and feet. The itching was so bad a coworker said Seaman would scrub his feet with a wire brush until his skin sloughed off like scales of a fish. Despite shots of steroids and numerous doctor visits, Seaman endured countless bouts of painful hives; and he still gets them, he says, especially after eating seafood from the Gulf. He also says he knows others who have broken out in hives after eating seafood.

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HOPE YEN and LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ - Poorest poor in US hits new record: 1 in 15 people

Poorest poor in US hits new record: 1 in 15 people

By HOPE YEN and LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ - Associated Press 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America's poorest poor have climbed to a record high — 1 in 15 people — spread widely across metropolitan areas as the housing bust pushed many inner-city poor into suburbs and other outlying places and shriveled jobs and income.

New census data paint a stark portrait of the nation's haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high. It comes a week before the government releases first-ever economic data that will show more Hispanics, elderly and working-age poor have fallen into poverty.

In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America.

"There now really is no unaffected group, except maybe the very top income earners," said Robert Moffitt, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. "Recessions are supposed to be temporary, and when it's over, everything returns to where it was before. But the worry now is that the downturn — which will end eventually — will have long-lasting effects on families who lose jobs, become worse off and can't recover."

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Center for Constitutional Rights - Gaza-Bound Humanitarian Flotilla Reaches International Waters

CONTACT: Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) press@ccrjustice.org http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/11/02-6

NEW YORK - November 2 - Two boats carrying twenty-seven human rights activists from five countries, including the United States, have made it to international waters and are headed to Gaza. Today, the flotilla set sail unannounced from Turkey with the aim of ending the siege and isolation of Gaza. The boats are carrying letters from people in the United States to the people of Gaza, as well as medicine.  This latest attempt comes less than six months after the “Stay Human Flotilla” was detained and sabotaged in Greece by local port authorities in response to mounting pressure from the United States and Israel.

In light of Israel’s attack on the May 2010 flotilla, which killed nine civilians including 18-year old U.S. citizen Furkan Doğan, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) calls on the international community to ensure the safe passage of the ships through international waters into Gaza and prevent a repetition of last year’s lethal assault by Israeli forces.

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Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges - on Class Struggle

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_and_robert_scheer_on_class_struggle_20111101/

Posted on Nov 1, 2011

Robert Scheer: I’m talking to Chris Hedges ... I want to say, you’ve played an incredible role in getting people to not focus so much on the electoral possibilities, the leading party, and to take their concern to the street. And long before there was any of this Occupy L.A. or New York or any other movement, Wall Street, somebody else who did it—and it really impressed me, I reread his article—is Joseph Stiglitz. Back in April, in Vanity Fair of all places, [he] had a statement. I’d just like to begin by reading something he wrote then, because people say oh, where did this come from, and it came from this website, or something—and quoting Stiglitz, he said: “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.” Are we at that moment now?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. We are.

Robert Scheer: And are they getting the message, or is it just too late?

Chris Hedges: No.

Robert Scheer: No.

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Cynthia Johnston - Prisoners - America’s New Cash Crop

By Cynthia Johnston

http://www.nationofchange.org/dispatches-field-prisoners-america-s-new-cash-crop-1319905137

A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt

At the 2011 dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, many speakers, including President Obama, quoted from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which King eloquently spoke out for freedom and justice. Yet almost fifty years later King’s son, Martin Luther King III, says his father’s dream has not been realized, that America has “lost its soul,” in part by “having more people of color in prison than in college.” He is not wrong. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in the last decade nearly one in three African-American men aged 20-29 was under criminal-justice supervision, while more than two out of five had been incarcerated.

At his 1963 March on Washington Dr. King said, “We have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” And so we have. Because today, with for-profit prisons a burgeoning growth industry, the incarceration rate of people of color can be extrapolated to the population at large. Indeed, one out of every one hundred adults in America today is incarcerated, and one out of every thirty-two is somewhere in the system – either on probation, on parole, or behind bars. Put another way, the United States has five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. And more than half of these arrests are for marijuana.

The FBI puts the number of marijuana arrests over the last decade alone at 7.9 million. This was not caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for weed. This was caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for prisoners and, hence, for profits. Since 1984, when privatization of prisons was made legal again, after having been stamped out in 1928 due to gross abuses against prisoners in the name of profit, the for-profit prison industry has moved quickly to expand into as many states as possible before enough resistance could be amassed to stop them. And with each new prison constructed, there is a need for more prisoners to fill it.

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Frank Rich - The Class War Has Begun

Published on Sunday, October 30, 2011 by New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/

And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

by Frank Rich

During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over—alone, in groups, with families—until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army—for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre–New Deal entitlement—especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist “Radio Priest” who became a phenomenon for railing against “greedy bankers and financiers,” framed Washington’s double standard this way: “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?"

The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, ­MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched “a mob”—albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the “mob” that had occupied the nation’s capital.

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