Excerpts from newspapers that may be of use for our readers. Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times, GW=Guardian Weekly, LAT=Los Angeles Times

Big pharma shapes health rules

Health & Healing, 3/2010 — The World Health Organization (WHO) started talking about the “pandemic of the century” last April, when fewer than a thousand cases of H1N1 had been diagnosed….

In any case, WHO pushed the pandemic button and recommended a new, patented, two-dose H1N1 vaccine. Immediately, America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and health agencies around the world jumped on the bandwagon, ordered vaccines to the tune of $7.6 billion, and did their best to scare people into getting vaccinated….

This “pandemic,” like all the other pandemics that never materialized, has been a gold mine for Big Pharma.

According to Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman of the Health Committee of the Council of Europe, an organization… that promotes human rights, there’s a tremendous amount of collusion between pharmaceutical companies and health care decision makers. “These large firms,” he states, “have ‘their people’ in the cogs and then they pull strings so that the right policy decisions are taken — that is to say, the ones that will allow them to pump as much money as possible from taxpayers.”

2015: 23m will still be uninsured

GW, 3/26 — The congressional budget office estimates that five years after the law comes into effect there will still be 23 million people in the US without insurance. One-third of these will be [undocumented] immigrants — many have lived in the US for years and their children are Americans.

Prisons keep US slavery alive today

NYT, 3/28 — With about 1.6 million people in our penitentiaries and an additional 800,000 in our jails, the United States locks up its citizens at a higher rate than any other country in the world.

Race and slavery lie at the heart of Perkinson’s [book on] American penology….

African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as whites, and “African-American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college….”

Between 1965 and 2000, the number of prisoners in the country rose by 600 percent….

Defeated in the Civil War, Texas and the Southern confederates were desperate to retain as much dominion as possible over their former slaves, and they found a way through law enforcement. Blacks seized for low-level crimes faced severe punishment… These new black prisoners were rented out to… businesses….

Even when convict [renting] came to an end in the early 20th century… the system was replaced by government-run plantations and chain gangs….

Much as emancipation brought on a penal backlash against Southern blacks, so did the civil rights movement — except that this later reaction was national. Equal protection, desegregation and… war on poverty were quickly followed by tougher drug laws and crackdowns on crime that… made blacks a target. Since the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the disparity between black and white incarceration rates has almost doubled. In the early 21st century, the country, Perkinson suggests, has in a sense become the late-19th-century South.

This is an alarming indictment, built on passionate and exhaustive research.

Don’t make teachers sole problem

NYT, 3/16 — To the editor: ….To hold… underpaid and overworked public school teachers solely responsible for the performance of students in a poor community with a large immigrant population is reprehensible and shortsighted. In virtually all instances school success in the United States is most closely tied to socioeconomic status, and the only thing that trickled down to poor communities and their schools… was hopelessness and devastation.

Book hits racist IQ theories

NYT, 2/7 — INTELLIGENCE AND HOW TO GET IT: Why Schools and Cultures Count, by Richard E. Nisbett. Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist, offers a meticulous critique of the theory so popular in the 1990s that I.Q. is hereditary. Recent research convinces him that… the racial I.Q. gap is “purely environmental.”

Wealthy US won’t help jobless kids

NYT, 3/30 — The administration and Congressional leaders have been touting some recent legislation as “jobs bills,” but they are small-bore initiatives that will accomplish little….

What is happening to young, out-of-work and poorly educated American kids — not just in the big cities, but increasingly in suburban and rural areas, as well — is tragic.

The United States is a rich nation. To say that we cannot afford to do the things necessary to shore up the quality of our lives and establish a brighter future for coming generations is absurd. We always seem to have money for warfare and to bolster the interests of the monied classes.

Big democracy, big in youth suicides

NYT, 3/31 — Suicide has become something of a phenomenon in India….

Suicides by indebted farmers are frequently reported in the news media….

Then there are politics. The number of ideologically motivated suicides in India doubled between 2006 and 2008…. Mental health experts say these deaths illustrate the increasing stress on young people in a nation where, elections notwithstanding, the masses often feel powerless.

“Young people see this as a way to give meaning to what seem like meaningless lives.”

He says capitalism leads to doom

GW — Every day the system in which we live tries to persuade us — via news, politicians’ speeches, corporate pronouncements, inducements to consume and so on — that our prosperity is intimately linked to whether or not gross national product is growing and whether stock markets are riding high. These are the main measuring sticks for the version of capitalism on which most countries base their economies today….

So what’s not to like about growth??

Tim Jackson states the challenge starkly: “Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must….

But the typical economist believes… capitalism… can grow our economies and reverse environmental degradation too.

Jackson argues compellingly that….

Capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies and threatening our children with an unlivable world.

UK cop posed as anti-racist

GW, 3/19 — An officer from a secretive unit of the [London] Metropolitan police has described how he spent years working undercover among anti-racist groups in Britain, during which time he routinely engaged in violence against members of the public and uniformed police officers to maintain his cover….

So convincing was he in his covert role that he quickly rose to become branch secretary of a leading anti-racist organization….

His decision to tell his story to the Observer provides the most detailed account of the shadowy police unit….

Officer A — with a long ponytail, angry persona and willingness to be educated in the finer points of Trotskyist ideology — was never suspected by those he befriended of being a member of… a secret unit within Britain’s Special Branch.

Immigrant felon? Agents don’t know

NYT, 4/3 — Top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement have said the program’s priority is to deport immigrants with serious criminal records. But the inspector general found that the program lacked measures to determine whether immigrants detained by local officers were serious offenders….

The protection of immigrants’ civil rights was “not formally included” in the training of local officers, the report found.

Free market no help to biggest ills

GW, 11/20 — To the editor: … “free market work…” “work for what?”….

Free markets can be considered to be working if the global benefits of economic growth outweigh the global costs of market failure — but this is clearly not the case today. Free markets will not help us to end wars… to end the obscene disparities in health and wealth between the developed and developing world, or to live sustainably on our planet….

Worse, market-based capitalism depends on ever-increasing economic growth for its survival and must relentlessly pursue this goal even when the effects are inimical to human wellbeing.

Pope: church critics are plotters

NYT, 3/29 — In a characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign… to discredit the church.”

That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now [Pope] Benedict XVI.

Best reform could be: no church

GW, 4/2 — To the editor: ….For decades the Catholic church repressed and covered up the shameful deeds perpetrated by their clergy, refusing to acknowledge the need to change, allow women to become priests and end its tradition of celibacy, which appears to have been a failure. Better still, perhaps the church should cease to exist.