Bioethics Panel Appointees.

Also from Michael Cook at BioEdge, a bit on the new appointees to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues:

US President Barack Obama has appointed 10 more bioethics advisors, bringing membership of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues up to 12. The appointees join the current chair, Amy Gutman, and vice-chair, James Wagner.

They are a diverse group. Lonnie Ali is the wife of Muhammed Ali; Anita L. Allen is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Barbara Atkinson, a pathologist, is executive dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine; Nita A. Farahany, of Vanderbilt University, is an expert in the legal and ethical consequences of neuroscience; Alexander Garza is the Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Homeland Security; Christine Grady is head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center; Stephen L. Hauser is a neuro-immunologist at the University of California San Francisco; Raju Kucherlapati is a professor of genetics at Harvard; Nelson Michael is the head of the US Military HIV Research program; Daniel Sulmasy is a Franciscan priest who works at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.

News of the appointments was not an item which attracted much attention in the media. However Summer Johnson, of the American Journal of Bioethics, was disappointed by a distinguished, but unimaginative, selection:

“…if nothing revolutionary happens in the world of scientific research over the next 3 years, then this commission will do fine. But history tells us this is unlikely to be the case. Moreover, this list of members really lacks creativity in terms of what a bioethics commission COULD have done. What about a systems biologist or nanomedicine researcher (in any one of the many disciplines of nanomedicine)?”

Public vs. Private and Americans United.

Daniel Henninger, of course at the super pro-business Wall Street Journal, gets a great couple of things wrong in his opinion column today about the struggle that is taking place in the country between faith in government and faith in the free market.

Scoff at "the public good" all he wants, like the notion is some quaint nicety afforded "the help" by the country's true plantation owners, the noble, superior corporations, government's role is not to protect the public for corporations' use but from corporations' abuse. We've got three branches of government; we don't need a corporate branch.

Yet, that's exactly what we have. To the tune of paid-for politicians, a decimated middle class, an unworkable health care system, a barely-surviving minimum-wage class, and a warped social mythology that our businesses are what have made us great. To some extent, the rise of America's global corporations have aided American global dominance but for the most part I'm not sure that's something to brag about. Not when you consider what it's cost us.

Too many decades of letting these selfish, powerful entities run rough-shod over the world market should have taught us a lesson in the eighties. And the nineties. And the oughts. Yet, Republicans, Democrats and the courts have aided and abetted corporate gutting of citizen's pockets, standard of living, and rights.

It's a sad myth that market-running, unregulated corporations are our best national asset, a romantic myth akin to that of America's "greatest schools on earth" and "greatest health care system on earth" and "greatest God-fearing nation on earth."

As our economy sits in ruins and the good public suffer yet again with this recession at the hands of unchecked corporations, it's laughable that the myth still holds weight. If I could, I'd send Henninger and his fellow believers to work in a sweat shop in south east asia or a coal mine in Pennsylvania. Because what they fail to acknowledge is that the public is not just made up of corporate CEOs with private jets and multiple (un-foreclosed) houses. The public is not even made up of folks like me who have a college education and tap away at a "desk" job.

It's the hundreds of millions of forgotten Americans who have no ability to chose their way because they are slaves to the very same corporations who have just been given their vote. Bootstraps be damned; until we break the myth that corporations actually care about the public good - or are even above responsibility for it - we'll be using social program after social program to repair the damage they continue to do.

From the article:

America's Democrats and Republicans, crudely defined, are with this presidency and this Congress living today on opposite sides of a moon that they both call the United States.

In the universe inhabited by Justice Stevens and President Obama, corporations—the private sector—are a suspect abstraction, ever tending toward "the worst urges" which have to be "comprehensively regulated." The saints regulate the sinners.

If you think this way, what one does to the private sector, such as the proposed $90 billion bank tax, can never be wrong in any serious way, so long as the rationale offered is the "public good." Private-sector players are seen as barely more than paid galley slaves on the ship of state. So it is with the health-care bill's mammoth, comprehensive regulation of American medicine and insurance.

Mr. Obama seems genuinely perplexed that the opposition can't just, you know, sign onto it. What's their problem?

Evidently, the voters of Massachusetts have a problem with that and more.

In the past year, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus, seized banks and the auto industry, embarked on a $1 trillion reorganization of the private health-care system, and passed a fiscal 2010 budget that put spending as a percentage of GDP at 24.1%. These are very large claims for the public good.

This public-private tension is an ancient and never-ending debate in the U.S. But what we are seeing this year, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, is American voters arriving at a tipping point over the scale and role of government. Most Americans still go to work each day inside a private economy organized around tens of thousands of corporations. Their basic view of the world and that found inside Justice Stevens's dissent and this White House are out of sync.

Rational Distrust vs. Rational Fear.

From Smile Politely (Champaign-Urbana's online magazine) comes an article by Dan Schreiber on what capitalism can do and what government can do - and warns us not to confuse the two.

I understand distrust of government. I really do. Government does things like start dumb wars in Iraq. Government killed hundreds of thousands of people during Communist purges. Government sometimes allows lazy bureaucrats to ignore your well-being.

But I also don't trust capitalism to automatically provide for the common good. The purpose of a company is to make a profit, after all. In countries with weak governments and strong capitalism, the only choices most people have are to work for long hours in substandard working conditions for a pittance. In our country, if it is unprofitable to insure people who are likely to get sick, capitalism's answer is to not insure those people and let them die. Companies choose profit over the public good because that is what they are designed to do.

It should be evident at this point that capitalism without government becomes economic slavery and government without a free market (of ideas and goods) becomes tyranny. The problem isn't the existence of one or the other, but that either will encroach on our freedom if it is allowed to become too powerful. We need both to balance each other out, because too much power in one place is inevitably corrupting.

So who is more powerful in America in the 21^st century? An unwieldy but democratically elected government or multi-national corporations in search of the next quarter's profits? One way to answer this is to ask who is controlling whom. Government can tax corporations and put people in jail who don't follow laws. On the other hand, corporations can buy members of congress in order to enact favorable laws and gut enforcement of the laws that do exist. In the end, unjust laws can be changed with enough effort. But corporations are under no obligation to enact just labor practices or economic conditions unless government forces them to.

It is true that many liberals distrust capitalism. But it is not true that liberals naturally trust government. Liberals just recognize government as the only thing powerful enough to curb the excesses of capitalism. I suppose the important thing is to be able to differentiate between rational distrust and irrational fear, whether we are talking about government or capit

alism.

Mental Health Advocates or Big Pharma Groups?

From The Truth About Prone Restraint, another example of how "patients' rights" groups are often fronts for big pharma interests.

Makes you ask yet again where oversight of the medical profession is, no? The government has historically given undue authority to the medical industry at the expense of patients' rights. If they wish to treat health care as a human right, the government will have to undo the creep of free license and abuse the industry is accustomed to, with the collusion of doctors organizations (who do not want to be regulated) and the Conservative right which fears "socialism" or any government regulation of free markets.

According to the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights Internation (CCHRI) – A Mental Health Watchdog group. According to CCHRI, Mental Health Advocacy Groups the following MH organizations are paid front men for the pharmaceutical companies. All the companies in favor of banning a person’s right to defend themselves or others. Their solution — dope them up.

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)

Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA)

Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA)

Center for the Advancement of Children’s Mental Health (CACMH)

Children and Adults with ADD (CHADD)

Herbert Pardes: Creating The Front Group Pipe Line

Mental Health America (Formerly National Mental Health Association)

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

National Association for Research on Schizophrenia And Depression (NARSAD)

Screening for Mental Health, Inc

Signs of Suicide (SOS)

Suicide Prevention Action Network USA (SPAN)

TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups

The Jed Foundation

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups.

HOW IT ALL STARTED:

In the late 1970s and 1980s, prominent American Psychiatric Association (APA) psychiatrists, directors and researchers with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) were in need of more government funding, and devised a plan to create a “growth of consumer and advocacy organizations” with the intention of getting these groups to help lobby Congress for increased funding for psychiatric research.[i] Several groups emerged first on the scene during that period: The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADDA), National Depression & Manic Depressive Association (NDMDA, now called Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, DBSA) and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD).

In an incestuous relationship, many of these groups were formed by the directors or researchers from NIMH-the very organization that needed mental health advocacy groups to make demands on Congress for increased funding. All of them had board or advisory board members with financial ties to Pharma and the majority of them were heavily funded by Pharma. So this was a brilliant marketing/lobbying strategy – Set up patients rights groups to lobby for the funding needed for psychiatry and big Pharma while claiming to be “advocates” for the mentally ill.