Monica Young: America conned -- Psycho pharma drug pushing empire under fire

by Monica G. Young
http://www.naturalnews.com/033133_psychoactive_drugs_Big_Pharma.html


(NaturalNews) Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the "mental health" industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The "New York Review of Books" two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell's review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, "psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed."

As an overview:

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"Ethan A. Huff" - Consolidation of seed companies leading to corporate domination of world food supply

by Ethan A. Huff, naturalnews.com  July 27, 2011

http://www.naturalnews.com/033148_seed_companies_Monsanto.html

(NaturalNews) Throughout the history of agriculture across the globe, farming has always been a diversified sector of the economy. Small, self-sustaining, family farms were the order of the day in most cultures. Even as small farms grew larger and more specialized over time, many of them still saved seeds or purchased them from other farmers, which kept control of farming in the hands of the people.

But today everything has changed, as large chemical and agribusiness firms have acquired or merged with seed companies and other agricultural input companies. They have successfully gained a foothold on genetically-modified (GM) crops with transgenic traits.

These primary factors and several others have facilitated a crescendo towards the global domination of agriculture by corporations, and thus the world's food supply.

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William Rivers Pitt: So This Is Despair

Tuesday 26 July 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/so-despair/1311620664

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

- Flannery O'Connor

It is difficult to describe this emotion. I’m used to disappointment, fairly comfortable with heartbreak, and am well acquainted with rage. Over the course of my lifetime, my presidents have been Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama…and each, in his own way, has been worse than the last.

How can I say that? Easy. The problems of Nixon are still with us, and have grown worse by orders of magnitude through each successive administration. Certain presidents have exacerbated the situation beyond their expected purview, but generally speaking, each one has adopted the worst ideas of his predecessor, and in nearly every instance, has made those problems worse.

But this…this is too much.

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Alliance for Natural Health USA: FDA Copies the European Union and Slips In One of its Deadliest Weapons

Alliance for Natural Health USA, On July 26, 2011

http://www.anh-usa.org/fda-copies-eu-slips-in-one-of-its-deadliest-weapons/

Are the NDI guidelines the ultimate FDA tool to freeze dietary supplement innovation? A special report by Robert Verkerk, PhD, ANH-USA Scientific Director and ANH-Europe Executive and Scientific Director.

(Note: Once again, please do not forget our two related Action Alerts—one on the FDA’s new NDI guidance ^[1], the other on the Durbin bill ^[2]—in the last paragraph of this article. We are emphasizing these Action Alerts so strongly because the guidance and the bill could have a devastating effect on your natural health freedoms.)

If the US natural products industry values its ability to keep a diverse range of products available for the benefit of the American public, and believes in not exposing the public to unnecessary costs, we strongly suggest that it look very closely at the latest guidelines from the FDA—with eyes wide open. We refer to the FDA guidelines ^[3] on so-called “new dietary ingredients” (NDIs) that we’ve been telling you about ^[4] over the past several weeks. These guidelines preempt a crackdown on ingredients used in natural products, one that appears to be coordinated closely with a similar clampdown happening currently in Europe. The guidelines bear an uncanny likeness to the European Union’s Novel Food Regulation ^[5].

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Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/debt_madness_was_always_about_killing_social_security_20110727/

Posted on Jul 27, 2011

By Robert Scheer

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy. 

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"Washington's Blog" - There's Only One Way to Avoid a Downgrade to U.S. Credit

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, July 27, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25796

According to Reuters, a majority of economists now think that U.S. credit will be downgraded.

The debt ceiling plans being proposed likely will not avoid a debt downgrade.

Indeed, as Zero Hedge notes, the cuts being proposed in the debt ceiling proposals would be offset by the costs of the downgrade:

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"Bob Fitrakis" - Court Filing Reveals How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was Hacked: "Unexpected Shift in Votes For George W."

By Bob Fitrakis

Global Research, July 26, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25786

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. 

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash. 

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Steve Breyman: Nuclear Power and the Nuremburg Code

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Nuclear-Power-and-the-Nure-by-Steve-Breyman-110726-310.html

July 26, 2011

By Steve Breyman

The German Parliament voted last week to phase-out nuclear power by 2022. Thus far lacking a legislative commitment, Prime Minister Naoto Kan says even resource-poor Japan should wean itself from nuclear power. Seventy percent of Japanese parliamentarians agree with him. What is it about World War II's losers and atomic electricity?

Predictable responses to the latest and possibly worst civil disaster of the Nuclear Age? The final victory for (surging) anti-nuke movements? I don't think so. There's more happening here. No Japanese government has ever been accused of over attentiveness to public preferences. Instead, they may know something the war's victors do not.

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Paul Craig Roberts: Is America Caught In The Closed Mind Trap?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-America-Caught-In-The-C-by-paul-craig-roberts-110727-582.html

July 27, 2011 By paul craig roberts A reader responded to my recent column about how the US president was becoming a Caesar with a question: "Wouldn't a Caesar be preferable to a democracy in which the people are too ignorant, disinterested, and stupid to engage in self-government?" Before I became a widely read columnist with many reader responses, I would have disagreed with the reader's characterization of the American people. Today, I cannot answer the reader's question with a "no" as confidently as I would like. I receive appreciative words from many readers who are well aware of what is going on. I also hear from many who are so partisan and have such strong emotional responses that they are unable to follow an argument. I don't know what percentage these groups comprise in the population, but there seem to be a number of Americans, both on the left and the right, who are prepared to censor and even to kill in order to defend their illusions and delusions.

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Ralph Nader: Ideological Inebriation on Capitol Hill

Published on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/26-7

by Ralph Nader

Legislating while under the influence of ideological inebriation is not yet a statutory offense. It is only a multi-directional menace to much of what anxious Americans hold dear for themselves and their children.

The dominant Republicans in Congress - both the new and many of the longer-term incumbents - are in heat. It is as if a mob psychology has seized them, starved them of facts, and deprived them of reality. Their chief mad dog is Eric Cantor - he of the sneering soundbites so memorably described in a recent Washington Post column by Dana Milbank.

Cantor is the big burr under Speaker John Boehner's saddle; Boehner himself is terrified of the young fanatic from Virginia and the even younger fanatics elected in 2010 on the Tea Party wave. The Republicans have suckered President Obama into a game of chicken, but fanatic Republicans don't blink. Why not raise the nation's debt limit to pay for debts already incurred by Congressional appropriations, as has been routinely done nearly 60 times since the 1930s? "No way!" say the self-styled Tea Partiers.

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