Sunday, December 16, 2012

5 Lies The Gun Lobby Tells You


Sadly, it's time for another refresher.
America’s seems to be in for another debate over gun regulation after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School left 27 (mostly children) dead. So it’s worth reviewing five made against regulating gun ownership in the United States:          


                                                                                                                                      









MYTH #1: More guns don’t lead to more murders.  A survey by researchers at the Harvard University School of Public Health found strong statistical support for the idea that, even if you control for poverty levels,  more people die from gun homicides in areas with higher rates of gun ownership . And despite what gun advocates say, countries like Israel and Switzerland  don’t disprove the point .

MYTH #2: The Second Amendment prohibits strict gun control.  While the Supreme Court ruled in  D.C. v. Heller  that bans on handgun ownership were unconstitutional, the ruling gives the state and federal governments a great deal of latitude to regulate that gun ownership as they choose. As the U.S. Second Court of Appeals  put it in a recent ruling  upholding a New York regulation, “The state’s ability to regulate firearms and, for that matter, conduct, is qualitatively different in public than in the home. Heller reinforces this view. In striking D.C.’s handgun ban, the Court stressed that banning usable handguns in the home is a ‘policy choice[]‘ that is ‘off the table,’ but that a variety of other regulatory options remain available, including categorical bans on firearm possession in certain public locations.”
MYTH #3: State-level gun controls haven’t worked.  Scholars Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander  recently studied  state-to-state variation in gun homicide levels. They  found that  “[f]irearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation.” This is backed up by research on  local gun control efforts  and cross-border gun violence .
MYTH #4: We only need better enforcement of the laws we have, not new laws.  In fact, Congress has passed several laws that cripple the ability for current gun regulations to be enforced the way that they’re supposed to. According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, a  series of federal laws  referred to as the Tiahrt amendments “limit public access to crime gun trace data, prohibit the use of gun trace data in hearings, pertaining to licensure of gun dealers and litigation against gun dealers, and restrict ATF’s authority to require gun dealers to conduct a physical inventory of their firearms.” Other federal laws “limited the ATF compliance inspections” and grant “broad protections from lawsuits against firearm manufacturers and retail sellers.”
MYTH #5: Sensible gun regulation is prohibitively unpopular. Not necessarily. As the New Republic’s Amy Sullivan reported after the series of mass shootings this summer, a majority of Americans would prefer both to enforce existing law more strictly and  pass new regulations on guns  when given the option to choose both rather than either/or. Specific gun regulations are also often more popular than the abstract idea .

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Has Torture Simply Become Acceptable in the US?

The European Court of Human Rights condemns CIA torture and members of the US Senate intelligence committee calls it "a terrible mistake". But will such criticism be overshadowed by a film that falsely suggests that the use of torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden?








As the court noted, these procedures were part of a standard protocol used by the CIA at the time, described in numerous reports relating to the extraordinary-renditions process and covered by a secret CIA memorandum (PDF) dated December 30, 2004.  The court found that El-Masri had been tortured and sodomized as a result of these procedures. Although the Obama Administration banned torture and ended the extraordinary-renditions program under an Executive Order issued the second day of Obama’s presidency, it remains unclear whether the extraction protocol is still in effect.  In one rendition carried out by the Holder Justice Department in April 2009, similar procedures were used on a defendant in a petty corruption case, though no suppository was applied. The Justice Department vigorously defended the extraction protocol in that case and insisted that the procedures it authorized did not constitute torture. 
The El-Masri ruling is a watershed event principally because it reflects the first high-profile, binding judicial determination that the CIA used torture practices in connection with its renditions program. Thus far, litigation of the issue in the United States has failed as federal courts — deferring to the executive’s attempts to avoid scrutiny of well-documented and severe human rights abuses by invoking secrecy — have generally refused to allow cases to proceed to trial. In the El-Masri case, the government mounted similar defenses based on national-security concerns and secrecy, but the Court refused to prioritize these over well-documented claims of torture. El-Masri’s evidence had been corroborated by a German criminal investigation, and the Court also found that internal U.S. probes, as well as investigations conducted by human rights organizations, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe provided him substantial support.  The Court’s decision required careful cognizance of leaked classified U.S.-government documents, and of U.S. diplomatic cables that affirmed American conniving aimed at blocking criminal probes into the El-Masri case.

A Culture That Condones The Killing Of Children And Teaches Children To Kill


The Sandy Hook massacre isn’t just about the need for gun control laws, it is about a culture that condones the killing of children and teaches children that killing is okay.
It is about a country addicted to violence on television and movie screens.
It is about cuts in education spending.
It is about giving the military free access to our schools where they regale our children with romanticized delusions of military righteousness.
It is about environmental and health policies that expose our children to all manner of toxins in the air, land and water.
It is about thinking we have the right to kill children with drones or by dropping toxic munitions on their countries that cause birth defects and miscarriages.
It is about saddling our children with crippling education debt and no prospect for jobs.
It is about telling boys (and men) they have to be tough and to fight and kill for what they want or think is right.
It is about a national policy that denies children basic rights and systemically teaches them that violence is okay.
And it is about a media so insensitive that it thinks it is okay to shove a microphone in the face of young victims in the name of sensationalized 24/7 cable “news” while under-reporting the root causes of this tragedy.
Sandy Hook did not happen because of a lone, disturbed young man and it is not an isolated incident. It is an epidemic and we are all to blame. And today (and tomorrow and every day after that) is the time to confront this self-inflicted tragedy.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Necessary Illusions


Thought Control in Democratic Societies

by Noam Chomsky

South End Press, 1989


A 1975 study on "govern-ability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission concluded that the media have become a "notable new source of national power," one aspect of an "excess of democracy" that contributes to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a consequent "decline in the influence of democracy abroad." This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more "moderation in democracy" to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.

The charge that the Democrats represent the special interests has little merit. Rather, they represent other elements of the "national interest," and participated with few qualms in the right turn of the post-Vietnam era among elite groups, including the dismantling of limited state programs designed to protect the poor and deprived; the transfer of resources to the wealthy; the conversion of the state, even more than before, to a welfare state for the privileged; and the expansion of state power and the protected state sector of the economy through the military system-domestically, a device for compelling the public to subsidize high-technology industry and provide a state-guaranteed market for its waste production. A related element of the right turn was a more "activist" foreign policy to extend U.S. power through subversion, international terrorism, and aggression: the Reagan Doctrine, which the media characterize as the vigorous defense of democracy worldwide, sometimes criticizing the Reaganites for their excesses in this noble cause. In general, the Democratic opposition offered qualified support to these programs of the Reagan administration, which, in fact, were largely an extrapolation of initiatives of the Carter years and, as polls clearly indicate, with few exceptions were strongly opposed by the general population.


Benjamin Ginsberg

In the United States, in particular, the ability of the upper and upper-middle classes to dominate the marketplace of ideas has generally allowed these strata to shape the entire society's perception of political reality and the range of realistic political and social possibilities. While westerners usually equate the marketplace with freedom of opinion, the hidden hand of the market can be almost as potent an instrument of control as the iron fist of the state.


Like other businesses, [the media] sell a product to buyers. Their market is advertisers, and the "product" is audiences.


... the major media-particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow-are corporations "selling" privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms.


To confront power is costly and difficult; high standards of evidence and argument are imposed, and critical analysis is naturally not welcomed by those who are in a position to react vigorously and to determine the array of rewards and punishments. Conformity to a "patriotic agenda," in contrast, imposes no such costs. Charges against official enemies barely require substantiation; they are, furthermore, protected from correction, which can be dismissed as apologetics for the criminals or as missing the forest for the trees. The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to the right of deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms. One who attributes the best intentions to the U.S. government, while perhaps deploring failure and ineptitude, requires no evidence for this stance, as when we ask why "success has continued to elude us" in the Middle East and Central America, why "a nation of such vast wealth, power and good intentions [cannot] accomplish its purposes more promptly and more effectively". Standards are radically different when we observe that "good intentions" are not properties of states, and that the United States, like every other state past and present, pursues policies that reflect the interests of those who control the state by virtue of ,> their domestic power, truisms that are hardly expressible in the mainstream, surprising as this fact may be.


... the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.


In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that "the very essence of the democratic process" is "the freedom to persuade and suggest," what he calls "the engineering of consent." "A leader," he continues, "frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding . . . Democratic leaders must play their part in . . . engineering . . . consent to socially constructive goals and values," applying "scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs"; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is "socially constructive," to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society. The public relations industry expends vast resources "educating the American people about the economic facts of life" to ensure a favorable climate for business. Its task is to control "the public mind" ...


Across a broad spectrum of articulate opinion, the fact that the voice of the people is heard in democratic societies is considered a problem to be overcome by ensuring that the public voice speaks the right words. The general conception is that leaders control us, not that we control them. If the population is out of control and propaganda doesn't work, then the state is forced underground, to clandestine operations and secret wars; the scale of covert operations is often a good measure of popular dissidence, as it was during the Reagan period. Among this group of self-styled "conservatives," the commitment to untrammeled executive power and the contempt for democracy reached unusual heights. Accordingly, so did the resort to propaganda campaigns targeting the media and the general population ...


The model of media as corporate oligopoly is the natural system for capitalist democracy. It has, accordingly, reached its highest form in the most advanced of these societies, particularly the United States, where media concentration is high, public radio and television are limited in scope, and elements of the radical democratic model exist only at the margins, in such phenomena as listener-supported community radio and the alternative or local press, often with a noteworthy effect on the social and political culture and the sense of empowerment in the communities that benefit from these options. In this respect, the United States represents the form towards which capitalist democracy is tending; related tendencies include the progressive elimination of unions and other popular organizations that interfere with private power, an electoral system that is increasingly stage-managed as a public relations exercise, avoidance of welfare measures such as national health insurance that also impinge on the prerogatives of the privileged, and so on. From this perspective, is reasonable for Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger to describe the United States as "a model democracy," democracy being understood


Most [Western democracies] have not achieved the U.S. system of one political party, with two factions controlled by shifting segments of the business community.


... Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare demolished unions and other dissident elements. A prominent feature was the suppression of independent politics and free speech, on the principle that the state is entitled to prevent improper thought and its expression. Wilson's Creel Commission, dedicated to creating war fever among the generally pacifist population, had demonstrated the efficacy of organized propaganda with the cooperation of the loyal media and the intellectuals, who devoted themselves to such tasks as "historical engineering," the term devised by historian Frederic Paxson, one of the founders of the National Board for Historical Service established by U.S. historians to serve the state by "explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it." The lesson was learned by those in a position to employ it. Two lasting institutional consequences were the rise of the public relations industry, one of whose leading figures, Edward Bernays, had served on the wartime propaganda commission, and the establishment of the FBI as, in effect, a national political police.


The submissiveness of the society to business dominance, secured by Wilson's Red Scare, began to erode during the Great Depression. In 1938 the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers, adopting the Marxist rhetoric that is common in the internal records of business and government documents, described the "hazard facing industrialists". in "the newly realized political power of the masses"; "Unless their thinking is directed," it warned, "we are definitely headed for adversity." No less threatening was the rise of labor organization, in part with the support of industrialists who perceived it as a means to regularize labor markets. But too much is too much, and business soon rallied to overcome the threat by the device of "employer mobilization of the public" to crush strikes, as an academic study of the 1937 Johnstown steel strike observed. This "formula," the business community exulted, was one that "business has hoped for, dreamed of, and prayed for." Combined with strong-arm methods, propaganda campaigns were used effectively to subdue the labor movement in subsequent years. These campaigns spent millions of dollars "to tell the public that nothing was wrong and that grave dangers lurked in the proposed remedies" of the unions, the La Follette Committee of the Senate observed in its study of business propaganda.

In the postwar period the public relations campaign intensified, employing the media and other devices to identify so-called free enterprise-meaning state-subsidized private profit with no infringement on managerial prerogatives-as "the American way," threatened by dangerous subversives. In 1954, Daniel Bell, then an editor of Fortune magazine, wrote that

It has been industry's prime concern, in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by ... the depression. This 'free enterprise' campaign has two essential aims: to rewin the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism,

that is, the mildly reformist capitalism of the New Deal. The scale of business public relations campaigns, Bell continued, was "staggering," through advertising in press and radio and other means. The effects were seen in legislation to constrain union activity, the attack on independent thought often mislabeled McCarthyism, and the elimination of any articulate challenge to business domination. The media and intellectual community cooperated with enthusiasm. The universities, in particular, were purged, and remained so until the "crisis of democracy" dawned and students and younger faculty began to ask the wrong kinds of questions. That elicited a renewed though less effective purge, while in a further resort to "necessary illusion," it was claimed, and still is, that the universities were virtually taken over by left-wing totalitarians-meaning that the grip of orthodoxy was somewhat relaxed.

As early as 1947 a State Department public relations officer remarked that "smart public relations [has] paid off as it has before and will again." Public opinion "is not moving to the right, it has been moved-cleverly-to the right." "While the rest of the world has moved to the left, has admitted labor into government, has passed liberalized legislation, the United States has become anti-social change, anti-economic change, anti-labor."


Operations of domestic thought control are commonly undertaken in the wake of wars and other crises. Such turmoil tends to encourage the "crisis of democracy" that is the persistent fear of privileged elites, requiring measures to reverse the thrust of popular democracy that threatens established power. Wilson's Red Scare served the purpose after World War I, and the pattern was re-enacted when World War II ended. It was necessary not only to overcome the popular mobilization that took place during the Great Depression but also "to bring people up to [the] realization that the war isn't over by any means," as presidential adviser Clark Clifford observed when the Truman Doctrine was announced in 1947, "the opening gun in [this] campaign."

The Vietnam war and the popular movements of the 1960s elicited similar concerns. The inhabitants of "enemy territory" at home had to be controlled and suppressed, so as to restore the ability of U.S. corporations to compete in the more diverse world market by reducing real wages and welfare benefits and weakening working-class organization. Young people in particular had to be convinced that they must be concerned only for themselves, in a "culture of narcissism"; every person may know, in private, that the assumptions are not true for them, but at a time of life when one is insecure about personal identity and social place, it is all too tempting to adapt to what the propaganda system asserts to be the norm. Other newly mobilized sectors of the "special interests" also had to be restrained or dissolved, tasks that sometimes required a degree of force, as in the programs of the FBI to undermine the ethnic movements and other elements of the rising dissident culture by instigating violence or its direct exercise, and by other means of intimidation and harassment. Another task was to overcome the dread "Vietnam syndrome ...

It is beyond imagining in responsible circles that we might have | some culpability for mass slaughter and destruction, or owe some debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, or to the peasants who still die from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault, while the Pentagon, when asked whether there is any way to remove the hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel bomblets that kill children today in such areas as the Plain of Jars in Laos, comments helpfully that "people should not live in those areas. They know the problem."

Terry Anderson - historian and Vietnam veteran

The French still have 20,000 MIAs from their war in Indochina, and the Vietnamese list over 200,000. Furthermore, the United States still has 80,000 MIAs from World War II and 8,000 from the Korean War, figures that represent 20 and 15 percent, respectively, of the confirmed dead in those conflicts; the percentage is 4 percent for the Vietnam War.

The primary targets of the manufacture of consent are those who regard themselves as "the more thoughtful members of the community," the "intellectuals," the "opinion leaders." An official of the Truman administration remarked that "It doesn't make too much difference to the general public what the details of a program are. What counts is how the plan is viewed by the leaders of the community"; he "who mobilizes the elite, mobilizes the public," one scholarly study of public opinion concludes.

Atlantic Monthly editor Jack Beatty

"Democracy has been our goal in Nicaragua, and to reach it we have sponsored the killing of thousands of Nicaraguans. But killing for democracy - even killing by proxy for democracy-is not a good enough reason to prosecute a war.''

Senator William Fulbright observed in Senate hearings on government and the media in 1966

"It is very interesting, that so many of our prominent newspapers have become almost agents or adjuncts of the government; that they do not contest or even raise questions about government policy."

The most effective device [of thought control developed in democratic societies] is the bounding of the thinkable, achieved by tolerating debate, even encouraging it, though only within proper limits. But democratic systems also resort to cruder means, the method of "interpretation of some phrase" being a notable instrument. Thus aggression and state terror in the Third World become "defense of democracy and human rights"; and "democracy" is successfully achieved when the government is safely in the hands of "the rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations," as in Winston Churchill's prescription for world order. At home the rule of the privileged must be guaranteed and the population reduced to the status of passive observers, while in the dependencies stern measures may be needed to eliminate any challenge to the natural rulers. Under the proper interpretation of the phrase, it is indeed true that "the yearning to see American-style democracy duplicated throughout the world has been a persistent theme in American foreign policy," as Times correspondent Neil Lewis declared.

... it was only proper to subvert the first and last free election in the history of Laos, because the wrong people won; to organize or support the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua; to support or directly organize large-scale terror to bar the threat of democracy, social reform, and independence in Central America in the 1980s; to take strong measures to ensure that the postwar world would return to proper hands; and much else-all in our "yearning for democracy."

... a solicitous concern for democracy and human rights may go hand in hand with tolerance for large-scale slaughter, or direct participation in it. The Christian Science Monitor observed approvingly-and accurately- that after General Suharto's impressive achievement in eliminating the political threat in Indonesia by mass murder, "many in the West were keen to cultivate Jakarta's new moderate leader, Suharto"; here the term "moderate" is used with an appropriate casuistic interpretation. Suharto's subsequent achievements include extraordinary human rights violations at home and slaughter in the course of aggression in East Timor that bears comparison to Pol Pot in the same years, backed enthusiastically by the United States, with the effective support of Canada, Britain, France, and other guardians of morality. The media cooperated by simply eliminating the issue; New York Times coverage, for example, declined as atrocities increased along with U.S. participation, reaching zero as the atrocities peaked in 1978; and the few comments by its noted Southeast Asia correspondent Henry Kamm assured us, on the authority of the Indonesian generals, that the army was protecting the people fleeing from the control of the guerrillas. Scrupulously excluded was the testimony of refugees, Church officials, and others who might have interfered with public acquiescence in what appears to be the largest massacre, relative to the population, since the Holocaust. In retrospect, the London Economist, in an ode to Indonesia under General Suharto's rule, describes him as "at heart benign," referring, perhaps, to his kindness to international corporations.

In accord with the same principles, it is natural that vast outrage should be evoked by the terror of the Pol Pot regime, while reporters in Phnom Penh in 1973, when the U.S. bombing of populated areas of rural Cambodia had reached its peak, should ignore the testimony of the hundreds of thousands of refugees before their eyes. Such selective perception guarantees that little is known about the scale and character of these U.S. atrocities, though enough to indicate that they may have been comparable to those attributable to the Khmer Rouge at the time when the chorus of indignation swept the West in 1977, and that they contributed significantly to the rise, and probably the brutality, of the Khmer Rouge.

These achievements of "historical engineering" allow the editors of the New York Times to observe that "when America's eyes turned away from Indochina in 1975, Cambodia's misery had just begun,'' with "the infamous barbarities of the Khmer Rouge, then dreary occupation by Vietnam" (incidentally, expelling the Khmer Rouge). "After long indifference," they continue, "Washington can [now] play an important role as honest broker" and "heal a long-ignored wound in Cambodia." The misery began in 1975, not before, under "America's eyes," and the editors do not remind us that during the period of "indifference" Washington offered indirect support to the Khmer Rouge while backing the coalition in which it was the major element because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime.

U.S. relations with the Khmer Rouge require some careful maneuvering. The Khmer Rouge were, and remain, utterly evil insofar as they can be associated with the Communist threat, perhaps because of their origins in Jean-Paul Sartre's left-wing Paris circles. Even more evil, evidently, are the Vietnamese, who finally reacted to brutal and murderous border incidents by invading Cambodia and driving out the Khmer Rouge, terminating their slaughters. We therefore must back our Thai and Chinese allies who support Pol Pot. All of this requires commentators to step warily. The New York Times reports the "reluctance in Washington to push too hard" to pressure China to end its support for Pol Pot-with the goal of bleeding Vietnam, as our Chinese allies have forthrightly explained. The Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs rejected a congressional plea to call for a cutoff of aid to Pol Pot because the situation was "delicate." U.S. pressure on China "might irritate relations unnecessarily," the Times explained, and this consideration overcomes our passionate concern over the fate of Cambodians exposed to Khmer Rouge terror. The press explains further that while naturally the United States is "one of the nations most concerned about a Khmer Rouge return," nevertheless "the US and its allies have decided that without some sign of compromise by Vietnam toward a political settlement Eon U.S. terms], the Khmer Rouge forces must be allowed to serve as military pressure on Vietnam, despite their past"-and despite what the population may think about "a Khmer Rouge return."

The United States has no principled opposition to democratic forms, as long as the climate for business operations is preserved.

If the enemies of democracy are not "Communists," then they are "terrorists"; still better, "Communist terrorists," or terrorists supported by International Communism. The rise and decline of international terrorism in the 1980s provides much insight into "the utility of interpretations."

What Ronald Reagan and George Shultz call "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age," was placed on the agenda of concern by the Reagan administration. From its first days, the administration proclaimed that "international terrorism" would replace Carter's human rights crusade as "the Soul of our foreign policy." The Reaganites would dedicate themselves to defense of the civilized world against the program of international terrorism outlined most prominently in Claire Sterling's influential book The Terror Network. Here, the Soviet Union was identified as the source of the plague, with the endorsement of a new scholarly discipline, whose practitioners were particularly impressed with Sterling's major insight, which provides an irrefutable proof of Soviet guilt. The clinching evidence, as Walter Laqueur phrased it in a review of Sterling's book, is that terrorism occurs "almost exclusively in democratic or relatively democratic countries." By 1985, terrorism in the Middle East/Mediterranean region was selected as the top story of the year in an Associated Press poll of editors and broadcasters, and concern reached fever pitch in subsequent months. The U.S. bombing of Libya in April 1986 largely tamed the monster, and in the following years the plague subsided to more manageable proportions as the Soviet Union and its clients retreated in the face of American courage and determination, according to the preferred account.

The rise and decline of the plague had little relation to anything happening in the world, with one exception: its rise coincided with the need to mobilize the U.S. population to support the Reaganite commitment to state power and violence, and its decline with rising concern over the need to face the costs of Reaganite military Keynesian excesses with their technique of writing "hot checks for $200 billion a year" to create the illusion of prosperity, as vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen phrased the perception of conservative business elements at the 1988 Democratic convention.

The public relations apparatus - surely the most sophisticated component of the Reagan administration - was faced with a dual problem in 1981: to frighten the domestic enemy (the general population at home) sufficiently so that they would bear the costs of programs to which they were opposed, while avoiding direct confrontations with the Evil Empire itself, as far too dangerous for us. The solution to the dilemma was to concoct an array of little Satans, tentacles of the Great Satan poised to destroy us, but weak and defenseless so that they could be attacked with impunity: in short, Kremlin-directed international terrorism. The farce proceeded perfectly, with the cooperation of the casuists, whose task was to give a proper interpretation to the term "terrorism," protecting the doctrine that its victims are primarily the democratic countries of the West.

To conduct this campaign of ideological warfare successfully, it was necessary to obscure the central role of the United States in organizing and directing state terror, and to conceal its extensive involvement in international terrorism in earlier years, as in the attack against Cuba, the prime example of "the evil scourge of terrorism" from the early 1960s. Some "historical engineering" was also required with regard to terrorism in the Middle East/Mediterranean region, the primary focus of concern within the propaganda operations. Here, it was necessary to suppress the role of the United States and its Israeli client.

These tasks have been well within the capacity of the media and the terrorologists. The U.S. role is easily excised; after all, the phrase "U.S. terrorism" is an oxymoron, on a par with "thunderous silence" or "U.S. aggression."

Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked that "perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy." The point is well taken. There is a simple measure of hypocrisy, which we properly apply to our enemies. When peace groups, government :figures, media, and loyal intellectuals in the Soviet sphere deplore brutal and repressive acts of the United States and its clients, we test their sincerity by asking what they say about their own responsibilities. Upon ascertaining the answer, we dismiss their condemnations, however accurate, as the sheerest hypocrisy. Minimal honesty requires that we apply the same standards to ourselves.

John Dewey

The only really fundamental approach to the problem is to inquire concerning the necessary effect of the present economic system upon the whole system of publicity; upon the judgment of what news is, upon the selection and elimination of matter that is published, upon the treatment of news in both editorial and news columns. The question, under this mode of approach, is not how many specific abuses there are and how they may be remedied, but how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.

Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and 1 decision. As the privileged have long understood, it is necessary to ward off recurrent "crises of democracy." In earlier chapters, I have discussed some of the ways these principles have been expressed in the modern period, but the concerns are natural and have arisen from the very origins of the modern democratic thrust. Condemning the radical democrats who had threatened to "turn the world upside down" during the English revolution of the seventeenth century, historian Clement Walker, in 1661, complained:

They have cast all the mysteries and secrets of government ... ') before the vulgar (like pearls before swine), and have taught both the soldiery and people to look so far into them as to ravel back all governments to the first principles of nature ... They have made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.

Walker's concerns were soon overcome, as an orderly world was restored and the "political defeat" of the democrats "was total and irreversible," Christopher Hill observes. By 1695 censorship could be abandoned, "not on the radicals' libertarian principles, but because censorship was no longer necessary," for "the opinion-formers" now "censored themselves" and "nothing got into print which frightened the men of property." In the same year, John Locke wrote that "day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids" must be told what to believe. "The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe."

John Stuart Mill

"Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil. There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides."

The propaganda model does not assert that the media parrot the line of the current state managers in the manner of a totalitarian regime; rather, that the media reflect the consensus of powerful elites of the state-corporate nexus generally.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The end of a legend Macho Camacho died at 50 yrs.

Four days after being shot in the face, former boxer Hector "Macho" Camacho has passed away.
Camacho, who was 50, had been in coma since Tuesday, when he was shot in a parking lot outside Azuquita establishment in the town of Bayamón in Puerto Rico. His friend Alberto "Yamil" Mojica Moreno was killed instantly in the attack. Ten bags of cocaine were found in their car.
On Wednesday, doctors at Centro Medico hospital in San Juan had declaired Camacho brain dead, and had been kept on life support machines while his family made a decision whether to donate the organs.
Dr. Ernesto Torres, Director of Centro Medico, told reporters on Saturday that Camacho's official death took place on Thursday, November 22nd
On Saturday at 1:40 am, Camacho suffered a second cardiac arrest, and his heart stopped beating. None of his organs will be able to be donated.

Read about the life and times of Hector "Macho" Camacho

His former manager Ismael Leandry told members of the media outside the hospital that he considered Camacho like his "son" and that his greatest quality "was not all the the fights he won, or how he represented Puerto Rico, but something greater than that, what few people have: being loyal to his friends."
Camacho's mother, María Matías had flown to the island from New York City earlier this week, as well as his sisters and son, Hector Jr, also a boxer. They had not made public statements at press time.Born in Bayamón and raised in New York City's Spanish Harlem, Camacho became one of the most popular fighters of the 80s and 90s, winning world titles in the Super Featherweight, Lightweight, and Light Welterweight divisions.Camacho put up some dominant performances during his 30-year career, in which he won 88 fights, and only lost six.He knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard, and twice defeated Panamanian Roberto Durán, but also lost highly publicized bouts with Julio Cesar Chavez, and Oscar de la Hoya, who defeated Camacho in 1997.He was known for his flamboyant style inside and outside the ring.
Read about Macho Camacho's crazy costumes and forays into reality TV
Later in life, Camacho became famous for his erratic conduct and run-ins with the law. In 2007, he pledged guilty to a burglary attempt in Missisipppi in 2005 while being under the influence of drugs. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but was put in probation and served only one year. In 2011, he survived unscathed a shooting in Puerto Rico, and earlier this year, was involved in child abuse charges in Central Florida.
Camacho's fans however, will recall his confidence in the ring, and his wild boxing outfits and entrances.
Just as his life was troubled, Camacho stayed in the limelight by participating in the first edition of "Mira Quien Baila" dancing reality show in 2010 on Univision, and this year had started a web series "Es Macho Time!" on Youtube Channel Nuevon.

Police in Puerto Rico are still investigating the incidents that led to the shooting of Macho Camacho.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

7 Deadly Sins America Commits Against Its Own People

The US terrorizes millions all over the planet... here's what it does to its own citizens.
The list doesn't include our most grievous offenses, those of military and economic warfare against the rest of the world. Sinful enough is our behavior at home.














1. Sin against children
Perhaps "sanctity of life" ends at birth. According to  Census Bureau figures, one out of every five American children lives in poverty. For  blacks and Hispanics , it's one out of every three.
UNICEF has reported that the U.S. has a higher child poverty rate than every industrialized country except Romania.

 We are near the bottom in all  measures of inequality that affect our children, including material well-being, health, and education.

2. Sin against the poor
The U.S. poverty rate grew from  11.3% to 15.0%, a 33% jump, in just 11 years. The impact was felt primarily by minorities and women. The  median wealth  for single black and Hispanic women is shockingly low, at just over $100 (compared to $41,500 for single white women).
Another shock. For every dollar of  NON-HOME wealth  owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.
Despite the continued economic assault on already-poor Americans, the number of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) cases has  dropped by 60 percent over the last 16 years.

3. Sin against students
Students at all levels have been losing their nation's support. States reduced their  education budgets  by $12.7 billion in 2012, and in 2013 the majority of states will be  spending even less .
At higher educational levels, Americans are paying much more than students in other countries.  Only 38%  of college expenses come from public funding, compared to 70% across other OECD countries. While other nations continue to offer free tuition, with the recognition that education leads to long-term prosperity, the U.S. system has become more corporatized, to the point that expensive programs like nursing, engineering, and computer science have been eliminated to cut costs. The profit motive has blocked the path to academic excellence.

4. Sin against the middle class
The middle class is  shrinking. In 2011, according to a  Pew Research  analysis, 51% of the nation's households earned from two-thirds to double the national median income. In the 1970s it was 61%.
One-quarter of America's workers are now making  less than $22,000  a year, the poverty line for a family of four.
Thirty million Americans  are making between $7.25 (minimum wage) and $10.00 per hour.
With the transition of middle-class workers to low-income status, entrepreneurship is disappearing.  Innovation doesn't come from the upper class. A recent  study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. Small business creators come from the hard-working, risk-taking, nothing-to-lose middle of America, but their entrepreneurial numbers are down --  over 50%  since 1977.

5. Sin against the common good
A recent Tax Justice Network  report placed total hidden offshore assets at somewhere between $21 trillion and $32 trillion. With about  40% of the world's Ultra High Net Worth Individuals in the U.S., up to $12.8 trillion of untaxed revenue sits overseas. Based on a historical  6% rate of return , this is a tax loss of up to $300 billion per year, money that should be paying for the public needs of education and infrastructure.
Tax avoidance is so appealing that 1,700 Americans  renounced their citizenships last year. Like  Eduardo Saverin , who benefited from America's research and technology and security to take  billions from his 4% share in Facebook, and then skipped out on his tax bill.
Inexplicably, some have  defended Saverin's actions, apparently failing to recognize one's obligation to pay for societal benefits. A Forbes writer said, "When individuals resist governmental hubris, we should exalt their actions." The American Thinker blog argued that "the U.S. tax code is so oppressive that smart and successful people like Saverin are compelled to renounce citizenship in order to keep more of their own hard-earned wages." Hard-earned, in truth, by the thousands of contributers to his social networking success.

6. Sin against nature
A number of  studies show that investment in renewable energy will create many more jobs than the fossil fuel industry. And the investment will likely pay off. A  National Renewable Energy Laboratory  analysis determined that "renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today...is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050."
But now the prospect of  cheap natural gas  is leading us back to a dirty form of energy independence, with a continuing reliance on fossil fuels, and on the fracking technology that despoils our land and pollutes our water. The national commitment and political will needed for the long-term health of our nation is more elusive than ever.

7. Sin against common sense
The deception began, at least in the modern age, with Milton Friedman, who said "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people...He moves fastest who moves alone."
This unflagging adherence to free-enterprise individualism is consistent with  Social Darwinism , the belief that survival of the fittest (richest) will somehow benefit society, and that the millions of people suffering from financial malfeasance are simply lacking the motivation to help themselves. Social Darwinism is a feel-good delusion for those at the top. Or, as described by John Kenneth Galbraith, a continuing "search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
A tenet of progressivism is that a strong society will create opportunities for a greater number of people, thereby leading to more instances of individual success. This is the common sense attitude suppressed by conservatives for over 30 years.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Inevitable Consequences of Sending Special Forces on Missions in 120 Different Countries-- Blowback on U.S. Soil

The expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert warfare sacrifices long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain.
 
The United States has suffered three widely acknowledged military disasters since the end of the Second World War: in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The American public responded to each crisis by electing new leaders with a mandate to end the wars and avoid new ones. But in each case, our new leaders failed to make the genuine recommitment to peace and diplomacy that was called for. Instead, they allayed the fears of the public by moving American war-making farther into the shadows, deploying the CIA and special operations forces in covert operations and proxy wars, sowing seeds of violence and injustice that would fester for decades and often erupt into conflict many years later.

Six months after taking office, President Eisenhower signed an armistice agreement to end the Korean War. But three weeks later, he unleashed the CIA's first covert operation, to overthrow the elected government of Iran. The nationalization of Iran's oil industry was reversed and U.S. oil companies gained a substantial share of Iran's oil production. Problem solved, right? Not exactly -- the U.S. coup and its support for the Shah's despotic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and a hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy. Now the long-term breakdown of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran threatens to explode into a new American war.

A year later, the CIA followed up on its "success" in Iran by removing another elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala. The coup rescued United Fruit Company's ownership of 42% of the agricultural land in Guatemala from Arbenz's modest efforts at land reform, but the 42-year civil war that followed killed at least 250,000 people.
The U.S. defeat in Vietnam led to ten years of relative peace, in which the U.S. avoided open warfare anywhere in the world. But once again, this concealed what senior U.S. military officers have called the  "disguised, quiet, media-free"  approach to war in Central America and Afghanistan. Proxy forces armed with American weapons and supported by small numbers of American "advisers" once again plunged millions of people's lives into chaos.
In El Salvador and Nicaragua, the political parties the U.S. fought in the 1980s have eventually won elections and come to power anyway. And in Afghanistan, mujaheddin that the U.S. armed and supported in the 1980s produced the most dramatic act of "blowback" ever on September 11th 2001, plunging America into a decade or more of war, economic crisis and global chaos that we have yet to find our way out of.
President Obama fulfilled the U.S. commitment to withdraw from Iraq that the Maliki government wrung out of the Bush administration, and he stopped the CIA from kidnapping people and bundling them off to Guantanamo. But even after his much-vaunted "withdrawal" from Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many U.S. troops there as when he took office. And he halted the parade of men in orange jump suits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine in Cuba, not by restoring the rule of law, but by ordering the extra-judicial execution of terrorism suspects -- a national policy of cold-blooded murder.
Not a week goes by without news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, but the U.S. also conducts assassinations by helicopter-borne special forces like the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. The former head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Admiral Eric Olson, told an  Aspen Institute conference  that SOCOM conducts a dozen such operations every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The total number of night raids in Afghanistan escalated from twenty per month in early 2009 to  over a thousand per month  two years later, and senior officers admit that  at least half of them target the wrong person or house
  
Sixty thousand U.S. special operations forces now conduct assassinations, night-raids, training missions, joint operations and exercises in  120 countries around the world , twice as many as when Obama came to power, with deployments in about 70 countries at any given time.
In The Politics of Heroin, Alfred McCoy described how the CIA formed secret alliances with Nationalist Chinese generals in Burma and Thailand, Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, Afghan warlords, Haitian military officers, Manuel Noriega in Panama and Nicaraguan Contra commanders. In every case, the CIA's partners exploited their impunity as U.S. allies to become major players in the global drug trade. Now former Mexican special forces trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning run the Zetas drug cartel, and the  new police chief  installed by a U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in Afghanistan in 2011 reportedly earns  $60 million a year from opium smuggling .

The current expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert and proxy warfare sacrifices U.S. long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain, just as when U.S. "advisers" were sent to Vietnam in the 1950s and to Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But which of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate will become the next Vietnam or Iran or Guatemala?
Could it be India, which holds  50 joint training exercises a year  with U.S. forces, the most of any country in the world, as it battles separatists in Kashmir and Assam and a "people's war" by Naxalites or Maoists in 7 other provinces?
Or what about Uganda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Djibouti or Kenya, where U.S. forces are training African Union "peacekeepers" to fight the Al-Shabab militia in Somalia? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic or South Sudan, where U.S. special forces have been sent to track down Joseph Kony but are suspected of planning a covert war against Sudan?
The pervasiveness and perversity of America's military madness could produce severe "blowback" from any one of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate. So how will we respond when the inevitable blowback comes? Will we once again fall in line as our leaders lash out at some new enemy? Or will we know enough of our own history to look in the mirror and recognize the real source of the violence and chaos that our irresponsible leaders keep unleashing on the world?

Why Does America Love Gossiping About Young, Drug-Using Women Like Cat Marnell?

September 12, 2012  |  
 
 Beauty writer and self-proclaimed party girl Cat Marnell doesn’t give a shit. At least, that was the headline of a recent Vice magazine article about the “troubled drug-addicted beauty-queen.” A former beauty and health editor at the women’s lifestyle Web site xoJane, Marnell very publicly refused to enter rehab, got fired from xoJane and hired at Vice, where she continues to write shamelessly about her cocaine, Adderall and PCP binges.
Whether you love or hate her, Cat Marnell is unique because she not only accepts a role condemned by society, she actually flaunts this identity. As Sady Doyle writes, Marnell embodies the female “wreck” -- a hot mess of smeared lipstick, cigarettes and stumbling, perhaps best personified by the pop star Ke$sha, whose conflation of pleasure and downfall climaxes in her hit song “Your Love is a Drug.”  Marnell’s compliance with that role is what makes her different. It is also part of what so many find sad. Some envy Marnell’s talent, and her willingness to sacrifice health for excitement and attention. In the  New York Times magazine, former alcoholic Sarah Hepola wrote:
I would get these funny zaps of envy reading her prose. I should have done more drugs, I would stupidly think. I should have fallen deeper in the hole. I was just a garden-variety lush, so enamored of booze I didn’t even bother with hard drugs. And I saw in her drug use and her writing an abandon I never allowed myself, and it gave her articles that unmistakable thrill of things breaking apart.
After all, society loves, and loves to hate, a female whose life is spiraling out of control--and Marnell is well aware of this fact. “A blonde who's soaking wet and crashing down looks chic and trés Carolyn Bessette,” Marnell recently wrote.
What society loves most is the crash itself. Marnell’s readers and voyeurs anxiously await her demise as confirmation that, as Nathaniel Hawthorne taught us, bad girls are always punished with failure. This inevitable fiery end is presupposed, already written into the script. But what’s missing from the conversation about Cat Marnell is the idea that there could be a female drug user who doesn't end in a flame of self-destruction.
Drug use is an integral part of the ticking time-bomb party girl stereotype. The logic is as simple as it is puritanical: you can’t break too many social rules and still become successful; self-destruction punishes over-indulgence. But young girls need not be the perfect virgin nor the jezebel when it comes to both sex and drugs.
There has long been a double standard for substance use, and just as misogyny drives the fascination with female destruction, it is also the driving force behind the stereotyped female user. The supposed sanctity of women’s bodies has led society to frown upon women who “poison their temple” by participating in what are considered to be male vices. Women who use drugs are quickly scandalized in the tabloids as reckless party girls whose self-abandon is destroying both their personal and professional lives. But where are the male Paris Hiltons? Or better yet, the female Mick Jaggers?
“Where are the female Tommy Chongs, the Snoop Dog (Lion)s, and the Willie Nelsons?” Greta Gaines wrote in a recent AlterNet article. “They are out there, but they’re not talking.”
Would Marnell be a wreck if society did not insist on tearing her down? For women, the fears and stigmas of drug use often eclipse the reality. Women like Miley Cyrus may experiment with drugs without any problems, but they are nonetheless stereotyped as disgraced party girls, in part because a wreck is what many may wish upon them. To avoid the crash, women must create alternative endings for the drug-use narrative.

For example, mothers who smoke weed recreationally are “coming out” as stoned and proud, explaining to the public how smoking weed and being a good mom are not mutually exclusive. As many of the women point out, weed is safer than alcohol, and gets them buzzed just enough to relax, laugh and go about their day. Sick and tired of "being judged for doing something nontoxic and totally organic, enjoying a god-given plant, by moms who suck back two bottles of Chardonnay like sports drinks,” they are  taking to the Internet to defend their lifestyle choice.
“Anybody who thinks that weed makes parents ignore their children has clearly never been high around one,” an anonymous weed mom wrote on Jezebel . And she’s right; It’s not like moms are lighting up and getting reckless. To the contrary, pot-smoking moms say a little cannabis helps them focus and relax so that typically menial tasks like folding laundry become fun. Instead of “getting all crazy, hanging out of limo sun roofs,” wrote Anonymous, “I tend to ride out my buzz by giggling with my family, eating dinner, doing the dishes, putting the baby to bed and watching an episode of 'Friday Night Lights.'"
These kinds of stories about non-problematic drug use empower women to control their bodies and lives--from what they put into them to what happens after. As Anonymous wrote,
“...I know I'm not the only one , and I know I'm in good company , but I wish that more parents were open about smoking pot in order to reduce the stigma associated with it. You know, I'm a mom, but I'm also a person. Don't put me in a box. Unless it's a hot box.”
Opening up this conversation could benefit not just the Lindsay Lohans of the world, but society at large. The judgements and condemnation that afflicts celebrity female drug users extends far beyond the tabloid pages. The drug war gives the government room to meddle in women’s wombs, to take their children away for crimes as small as marijuana use and to chain imprisoned addicts giving birth to hospital beds (as if they would run away).
Rewriting this narrative, therefore, isn’t simply about saving Cat Marnell; it’s about protecting the basic liberties of millions of women in the United States. After all, as Marnell told Vice magazine , “I am a person in a woman’s body.”
The fact that she said those words when she was likely high on a cocktail of amphetamines doesn’t make them any less true.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Killing Cancer Cells With Weed Plant Anti-Cancer Drug

A new anticancer drug made from a weed-like plant that grows naturally in the Mediterranean region has been shown to effectively destroy cancer cells in mice, according to a study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The drug, developed by researchers at John Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, in collaboration with Danish researchers, is able to move - undetected by normal cells - through the bloodstream until activated by specific cancer proteins.

According to the researchers, a three-day course of the new drug, called G202, reduced the size of human prostate tumors grown in mice by an average of 50% in 30 days.

In addition, G202 was found to be more effective at reducing tumors than the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. They found that G202 reduced 7 out of 9 human prostate tumors in mice by more than 50% in 21 days, while docetaxel only reduced 1 out of 8 tumors by more than 50%.

Furthermore, in models of human breast cancer, bladder cancer, and kidney cancer, G202 was shown to produce at least 50% regression.

Physicians at Johns Hopkins, University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas-San Antonio then conducted a phase I clinical trial in order to evaluate the safety of G202 in 29 patients with advanced cancer. The researchers are currently planning a phase II trial to test G202 in patients suffering from liver cancer and prostate cancer.

G202 is made from a weed called Thapsia garganica that grows naturally in the Mediterranean region. The plant produces a product called thapsigargin, that has been known for thousands of years to be toxic to animals.

Samuel Denmeade, M.D., professor of oncology, urology, pharmacology and molecular sciences, explained:

"Our goal was to try to re-engineer this very toxic natural plant product into a drug we might use to treat human cancer. We achieved this by creating a format that requires modification by cells to release the active drug."


The researchers chemically modified thapsigargin and created a form that acts like a hand grenade with an intact pin. After G202 is injected, it moves through the bloodstream until it locates cancer cells and hits a protein called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). PSMA then "pulls the pin" on G202, by releasing cell-killing agents into the tumor and blood vessels that feed it.

Specifically, G202 inhibits the function of the SERCA pump, a protein that is vital for cell survival. According to the researchers, as G202 is targeted to the SERCA pump, it will be difficult for tumor cells to become resistant to the drug, as they cannot stop making the protein.

John Isaacs, Ph.D., professor of oncology, urology, chemical and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins said: "The exciting thing is that the cancer itself is activating its own demise."

Written by Christine Kearney

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PBS documentary sheds light on marijuana’s cancer-killing properties

The cancer-killing properties of marijuana were the subject of discussion in a PBS documentary that aired this week to little media fanfare.
While using marijuana to kill cancer may sound like a wild claim to some, it struck Dr. Prakash Nagarkatti as a great idea. In his studies as professor of pathology and microbiology for the University of South Carolina, he tested synthetic cannabis drugs on cancer cells and developed a formula that was able to completely eradicate cancer cells in a test tube.







A follow-up on mice afflicted with cancer found that up to 30 percent in the test group completely rejected their disease, while others had their tumors significantly reduced. The same drug is now being tested on humans with Leukemia.
But it’s not just Dr. Nagarkatti who sees the medical value of marijuana: it’s the whole pharmaceutical industry. And that’s another point the documentary makes, examining the patents various companies have filed, and what they claim marijuana-based drugs could one day be used to treat.
The video below is just an excerpt from the full documentary, which originally aired in Montana amid a debate about repealing that state’s medical marijuana law.