Global

“The pharmaceutical companies are an amoral bunch. They’re not a benevolent association.  So they are highly unlikely to donate large amounts of money without strings attached. Once one is dancing with the devil, you don’t always get to call the steps of the dance.”—A psychiatrist, quoted in the Boston Globe, 2002.

The New England Journal of Medicine, under the editorship of Marcia Angell, MD, published a study in the May 18, 2000 issue whose principle author was the chief of Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry. The academic psychiatrist had reportedly made $500,000 in one year doing consultancy “work” for various psycho-pharmaceutical companies that marketed antidepressant drugs. In editing the article, Dr Angell discovered that there wasn’t enough room to print all the various co-author’s conflict of interest disclosures. Because of space limitations, Angell put the full list on the website rather than in the hard copy issue.

The House and Senate have rammed through Fast Track.

Here are the senators who voted for Fast Track: http://1.usa.gov/1GtAdTH

And the House members who voted for Fast Track: http://1.usa.gov/1GAl1TT

We always said this would virtually guarantee passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But it doesn't absolutely guarantee it.

One way to stop it would be to pull out a seldom-used tactic in the United States that is indispensible in other nations. We could threaten consequences at the polling place for TPP supporters.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know -- No, not kidding, I actually know -- that in some small percentage of cases this could end up meaning that you've committed to voting against someone who faces in a future election someone else who looks even worse. But fear of that has in fact produced a pattern of, in fact, worse candidates followed by even worse candidates for years now. How, pray tell, do you propose to ever get any better candidates?

Two days ago an email came from an Iraqi doctor in Baghdad in response to a brief greeting I sent for the month of Ramadan.

“Thanks so much for remembering us…In fact we are the same if not worse.  Our hearts are broken at the organized ruining of our country.  We are targeted by those criminals and gangs coming from everywhere, even from the west who are all witnessing this drama and, if not supporting it, are keeping silent.  We wonder what sin we committed to face this gloomy black fate.  In fact, what is going on is beyond words. “

This courageous woman doctor never left the side of gravely ill children despite the great exodus of doctors due to kidnappings, assassinations and threats to their lives and families.  Sadly she reports that another of her siblings has cancer, and she needs to leave the medical students for some days.  This happens she says regretfully in “the critical time of final exams.”   She herself is a cancer survivor and both her mother and sister had cancer.   They have no choice, she says, but to go on and try to survive.

Presidential elections should be limited to as short a time period as possible and are generally the biggest drain and distraction going. I have two excuses for looking into Jeb Bush. One is that I've been collecting the evidence that Hillary cannot be a lesser evil than any living human, and campaigning for No More Bushes or Clintons. The other is that I only read Jeb Bush: Outed because I've long liked the author, Stephen Goldstein.

People such as Molly Ivins and James Moore gave the U.S. lots of warning, from the wisdom of Texans, before the Supreme Court falsified the 2000 election results in what will always be falsely remembered as the American public electing George W. Bush president. Here comes Goldstein from Florida to warn us about Jeb. I don't see any reason why knowing about Jeb should make us take any interest in the election, as Hillary is just as bad. But I still see a problem with not knowing -- when it's all so easily known.

What’s your race?

Most of the discussion around the revelation that Rachel Dolezal, who resigned this week under pressure as head of the Spokane, Wash., NAACP, isn’t black, as she had claimed, and grew up as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl, seems to assume that this question is objective, uncomplicated and neutral. Come on, which is it? You’re either African-American, Caucasian or other. Check the box.

And when a question is objective, uncomplicated and neutral, the answer you give is either the truth or a lie. And Dolezal . . . gasp . . . lied. She darkened her skin. She braided her hair. She passed herself off as belonging to a race she did not, in fact, belong to. And because she passed in the “other” direction — from white to black — it’s national news. And she’s somewhere on the spectrum that runs from strange to crazy.

Actually, it’s also national news for another reason. Race is a national, indeed, human paradox of shocking volatility. Its reality is far more sociopolitical than it is scientific and objective — “in the blood” — and to disturb this paradox, as Dolezal did, is to activate a national fault line that sets everything shaking.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- After receiving loud and embarrassing complaints,
the U.S. Embassy has tried to defuse its diplomatic blunder by
publicly apologizing a second time for officially identifying a
prominent Thai as an enemy of one of Thailand's most popular former
prime ministers.

"To err is human! I delivered a properly addressed invite to Dr.
Pramote, apologized for our mistake. #HumblePie," tweeted U.S. Embassy
Charge d'Affaires W. Patrick Murphy on June 23.

https://twitter.com/wpatrickmurphy

The American diplomat also posted a photograph of himself -- dressed
in a dark blue suit with a tiny pin displaying a U.S. flag and a Thai
flag -- handing a white envelope to an unsmiling, gray-haired Pramote
Nakornthab, who is a former Thammasat University professor.

Mr. Murphy was trying to fix his gaffe which appeared during the
weekend when the Embassy mailed an invitation card to Dr. Pramote and
addressed the envelope:  "Dr. Pramote Nakornthab, Anti-Thaksin
Activist."

Last week CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling went to prison. If he were white, he probably wouldn’t be there.

Sterling was one of the CIA’s few African-American case officers, and he became the first to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency. That happened shortly before the CIA fired him in late 2001. The official in Langley who did the firing face-to-face was John Brennan, now the CIA’s director and a close adviser to President Obama.

Five months ago, in court, prosecutors kept claiming that Sterling’s pursuit of the racial-bias lawsuit showed a key “motive” for providing classified information to journalist James Risen. The government’s case at the highly problematic trial was built entirely on circumstantial evidence. Lacking anything more, the prosecution hammered on ostensible motives, telling the jury that Sterling’s “anger,” “bitterness” and “selfishness” had caused him to reveal CIA secrets.

Like most Americans, I woke up last week to the news of another attack on a Black church. Nine people were shot to death during bible study in Charleston, South Carolina. This time, the alleged shooter is a 21-year-old white male who looks like he wouldn’t harm a fly. 

While the motives for the attacks are still unclear, and under investigation, early reports indicate that this was another hate crime. FBI statistics from 2013 show, of 3,407 single biased hate crime incidents, 66% were motivated by anti-black or African American bias.

Black churches have been under attack for hundreds of years, dating back to slavery. Be it bombings during the civil rights movement, or Black churches being set on fire, the Black church has been under perpetual attack since its inception. Why is a place that is supposed to be a sanctuary constantly under attack by people who want to exercise their racial hatred? How can people be that evil to go to a house of worship to murder and vandalize?

At the bond hearing, grieving loved ones forgave Dylann Roof. This was reported as news, but it was so much more than that. It was the light embracing the darkness.

And white America absorbed this forgiveness through the eyes of the 21-year-old terrorist, who watched the proceedings on a video screen from his jail cell. Whatever he heard and felt is unknown, but beyond him, in the world he believed he was saving, something gave. The solidarity of whiteness — the quiet assumption of white supremacy — shuddered ever so slightly.

The flag, the flag . . .

The fate of this symbolic relic of the slave era is now the big story in the aftermath of Roof’s murder of nine African-Americans. He acted in such clear allegiance to the Confederate flag that politicians everywhere — even Republican presidential candidates — are demanding, or at least acquiescing to, its removal from public and official locations, such as in front of the South Carolina State House.

Not only that, “Walmart and Sears, two of the country’s largest retailers, will remove all Confederate flag merchandise from their stores,” CNN reported.

 Remember the World Trade Organization, which slipped into the shadows after massive Seattle protests in 1999? The same day last week that Congress initially blocked the possibility of fast track approval for the TPP trade agreement, the House voted to overturn rules requiring country-of-origin labeling for meat. Those supporting the vote said they were responding to a World Trade Organization ruling, judging US country-of-origin labeling unfair competition with meat coming from foreign countries like Canada and Mexico, and therefore a violation. They said they had no choice for fear of triggering sanctions or lawsuits from countries exporting meat across our borders.