Vaccination: Fraud & Dishonest Mistakes

One of the greatest lies of Big Pharma is finally being exposed – Don’t Expose Your Children to Vaccines!

Study Calls Into Question Primary Justification for Vaccines

 

by Sayer Ji

 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "Immunity to a disease is achieved through the presence of antibodies to that disease in a person’s system."[i] This, in fact, is the main justification for using vaccines to "boost" immunity, and a primary focus of vaccine research and development.

And yet, newly publish research has revealed that in some cases no antibodies are required for immunity against some viruses.

Published in the journal Immunity in March, 2011, and titled, "B cell maintenance of subcapsular sinus macrophages protects against a fatal viral infection independent of adaptive immunity," researchers found that mice infected with vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) can suffer fatal invasion of their central nervous system even in the presence of high concentrations of "neutralizing" antibodies against VSV.[ii]

The researchers found that while B-cells were essential for surviving a systemic VSV infection through the modulation of innate immunity, specifically macrophage behavior, the antibodies they produce as part of the adaptive immune response were "neither needed nor sufficient for protection."  These findings, according to the study authors, "…contradict the current view that B cell-derived neutralizing antibodies are absolutely required to survive a primary cytopathic viral infection, such as that caused by VSV."

The discovery that antibodies are not required for protection against infection, while counterintuitive, is not novel. In fact, not only are antibodies not required for immunity, in some cases high levels are found in the presence of active, even lethal infections.  For example, high serum levels of antibodies against tetanus have been observed failing to confer protection against the disease.  A report from 1992 published in the journal Neurology found severe tetanus in immunized patients with high anti-tetanus titers, one of whom died as a result of the infection.[iii]

These research findings run diametrically opposed to currently held beliefs regarding the process by which we develop immunity against infectious challenges.  Presently, it is a commonly held view that during viral infections, innate immunity must activate adaptive responses in order to achieve effective immunity.  It is believed that this is why the immune system has developed a series of innate defenses, including complement, type I interferon, and other "stopgap measures," which work immediately to lower pathogen burden and "buy time" for the much slower adaptive immune response to develop.  

This view, however, has been called into question by the new study:  "Although this concept may apply to other viral infections, our findings with VSV turn this view upside down, indicating that during a primary infection with this cytopathic virus, innate immunity can be sterilizing without adaptive immune contributions."

Does this strike a mortal blow to the antibody theory which underlies vaccinology, and constitutes the primary justification for the CDC's focus on using vaccines to "boost" immunity?

Indeed, in vaccinology, which is the science or method of vaccine development, vaccine effectiveness is often determined by the ability of a vaccine to increase antibody titers, even if this does not translate into real-world effectiveness, i.e. antibody-antigen matching.  In fact, regulatory agencies, such as the FDA, often approve vaccines based on their ability to raise antibody titers, also known as "vaccine efficacy," without requiring proof of vaccine effectiveness, as would seem logical.

The obvious problem with these criteria is that the use of vaccine adjuvants like mercury, aluminum hydroxide, mineral oil, etc.  – all of which are intrinsically toxic substances -- will increase antibody titers, without guaranteeing  they will neutralize the targeted antigen, i.e. antibody-antigen affinity.   To the contrary, many of these antibodies lack selectivity, and target self-structures, resulting in the loss of self-tolerance, i.e. autoimmunity.

Here is another way of understanding vaccine-induced antibody elevations….

Introducing foreign pathogenic DNA, chemicals, metals, preservatives, etc., into the body through a syringe will generate a response not unlike kicking a beehive. The harder you kick that beehive, the greater will be the "efficacy" (i.e. elevated antibodies), but the actual affinity that these antibodies will have for the antigen (i.e. pathogen) of concern is in no way ensured; to the contrary, the immune response is likely to become misdirected, or disproportionate to the threat.

Also, valuable immune resources are wasted by generating "false flag" responses to threats which may not readily exist in the environment, e.g. there are over 200 forms of influenza A, B & C which can cause the symptoms associated with annual influenza A,* so the seasonal trivalent flu vaccine only takes care of little more than 1% of the possible vectors of infection - and often at the price of distracting resources away from real threats, as well as exhausting and/or damaging the entire immune apparatus.

It is clear that one can create a synthetic immune response through vaccination, but it is not likely to result in enhanced immunity, insofar as real-world effectiveness is concerned, which is the only true judge of whether a vaccine is valuable or not.  One might view the basic criteria used by vaccine researchers, namely, that generating elevated antibody titers proves the value of the vaccine, oppositely: proving the vaccine is causing harm to the body, especially that of the developing infant and child, by generating unnecessarily elevated antibodies by any means necessary, i.e. throwing the chemical and biological kitchen sink at the immune system, e.g. aluminum, phenol, diploid (aborted fetal) cells, peanut oil, pertactin, etc. 

We leave the reader with a series of quotes addressing the inherent weaknesses of the antibody theory of immunity:

"Just because you give somebody a vaccine, and perhaps get an antibody reaction, doesn’t mean a thing. The only true antibodies, of course, are those you get naturally. What we’re doing [when we inject vaccines] is interfering with a very delicate mechanism that does its own thing. If nutrition is correct, it does it in the right way. Now if you insult a person in this way and try to trigger off something that nature looks after, you’re asking for all sorts of trouble, and we don’t believe it works."- Glen Dettman Ph.D, interviewed by Jay Patrick, and quoted in "The Great American Deception," Let’s Live, December 1976, p. 57.

"The fallacy of this (antibody theory) was exposed nearly 50 years ago, which is hardly recent. A report published by the Medical Research Council entitled 'A study of diphtheria in two areas of Gt. Britain, Special report series 272, HMSO 1950 demonstrated that many of the diphtheria patients had high levels of circulating antibodies, whereas many of the contacts who remained perfectly well had low antibody." - Magda Taylor, Informed Parent

"Human trials generally correlate "antibody" responses with protection - that is if the body produces antibodies (proteins) which bind to vaccine components, then it must be working and safe. Yet Dr March says antibody response is generally a poor measure of protection and no indicator at all of safety. "Particularly for viral diseases, the 'cellular' immune response is all important, and antibody levels and protection are totally unconnected."- Private Eye 24/1/2002

"Whenever we read vaccine papers the MD researchers always assume that if there are high antibody levels after vaccination, then there is immunity (immunogencity). But are antibody levels and immunity the same?  No! Antibody levels are not the same as IMMUNITY. The recent MUMPS vaccine fiasco in Switzerland has re-emphasized this point. Three mumps vaccines-Rubini, Jeryl-Lynn and Urabe (the one withdrawn because it caused encephalitis) all produced excellent antibody levels but those vaccinated with the Rubini strain had the same attack rate as those not vaccinated at all, there were some who said that it actually caused outbreaks. Ref: Schegal M et al Comparative efficacy of three mumps vaccines during disease outbreak in Switzerland: cohort study. BMJ, 1999; 319:352-3."- Ted Koren DC

*PubMed Health

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[i] CDC.gov, Basics and Common Questions: Immunity Types

[ii] B cell maintenance of subcapsular sinus macrophages protects against a fatal viral infection independent of adaptive immunity. Immunity. 2012 Mar 23 ;36(3):415-26. Epub 2012 Mar 1. PMID: 22386268

[iii] Severe tetanus in immunized patients with high anti-tetanus titers. Neurology. 1992 Apr ;42(4):761-4. PMID: 1565228

From Green Media Info @ http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/study-disproves-cdcs-primary-justification-vaccination

Vaccine failure admitted: Whooping cough outbreaks higher among children already vaccinated

by Mike Adams

 

For several years, NaturalNews has maintained that many vaccines actually cause the very infectious diseases they claim to prevent. Measles vaccines, for example, actually cause measles. And flu shot vaccines actually increase susceptibility to the flu. (See sources below.)

Now we have an open admission of precisely this point.

New research reported by Reuters reveals that whooping cough outbreaks are HIGHER among vaccinated children compared with unvaccinated children. This is based on a study led by Dr. David Witt, an infectious disease specialist at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael, California.

As Reuters reports: (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/03/us-whoopingcough-idUSBRE832...)

In early 2010, a spike in cases appeared at Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, and it was soon determined to be an outbreak of whooping cough -- the largest seen in California in more than 50 years. Witt had expected to see the illnesses center around unvaccinated kids, knowing they are more vulnerable to the disease. "We started dissecting the data. What was very surprising was the majority of cases were in fully vaccinated children. That's what started catching our attention."

This same article also admits that these vaccines have never been tested for long-term effectiveness:

"GSK has never studied the duration of the vaccine's protection after the shot given to four- to six-year-olds, the spokesperson said. Dr. Joel Ward at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute said it's still important for parents to get their kids immunized, even though it doesn't provide lasting protection from whooping cough."

Huh? So let me get this straight:

• Whooping cough infections are MORE common among children already vaccinated against whooping cough than unvaccinated children.

• The whooping cough vaccines have NEVER been tested for long-term efficacy.

• Doctors openly admit the vaccine "doesn't provide lasting protection" against the disease.

• But doctors and government authorities mindlessly push the vaccine anyway?!

That's essentially like saying, "We know these vaccines don't really work, but everybody should get vaccinated anyway."

 

 Whooping cough outbreak? Demand everybody be vaccinated!

 

Despite the fact that the whooping cough vaccines actually cause an increase in the risk of being infected with whooping cough, every time a whooping cough outbreak occurs, there's a mad rush of everybody screaming, "Vaccinate! Vaccinate! Vaccinate!"

For example, this mindless article in The Seattle Times typifies the kind of brain-dead journalism observed across the mainstream media: "Whooping cough spreading fast in state; vaccinations urged." (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017902210_whoopingco...)

This mindless, irrational cry for vaccinations utterly contradicts scientific truth, but it get published over and over again with zero skepticism and no intelligent questioning by anyone in the (whored-out) mainstream media.

Whooping cough vaccines, it turns out, do nothing to reduce the rate of whooping cough infections. But they do accomplish something else that's even more important for Big Pharma. Care to guess what that is?

You guessed it: Whooping cough vaccines keep whooping cough in circulation! The vaccines cause the very disease they claim to treat, so the more kids get vaccinated, the more outbreaks occur! This then results in more people calling for more vaccines, which causes even more whooping cough outbreaks to occur, and this sick profiteering cycle of vaccine quackery repeats itself over and over until children are pumped full of useless vaccines while the drug companies bank on record profits and all the parents are living in fear.

The drug companies figured it out a long time ago, see? The best way to SELL a vaccine that claims to treat a disease is to make sure the vaccine contains the disease! Thus, the vaccination itself becomes the pathway to re-infection and repeat business!

Want to make money in the cancer industry? Put cancer viruses into the vaccines! Oops, Merck already did that, didn't they? Here's an admission by a Merck scientist of exactly this point:
http://www.naturalnews.com/033584_Dr_Maurice_Hilleman_SV40.html

 

How the media is trying to spin these shocking revelations about the failure of vaccines

 

The media is trying to spin this revelation, of course, claiming that the whooping cough vaccine merely "wears out" or "fades over time." While that alone is an admission of total vaccine failure, it's actually much worse: The findings show that vaccines make children MORE vulnerable to infection than the unvaccinated children.

Virtually nowhere in the lamestream media will you see any real admission that whooping cough vaccines are based entirely on scientific fraud because they simply don't work. That simple truth is just not allowed to be printed anywhere except places like NaturalNews, where we haven't sold out to Big Pharma's corporate interests. The fact that even a hint of this has appeared in Reuters is astonishing, and I suspect they will pull their story as quickly as possible before it starts getting too much attention.

 

If vaccines "fade out" then they don't work!

 

The bedrock of vaccination theory is that when your body is exposed to a weakened virus, it will build up its supply of antibodies that will forever recognize that virus and defend your body against it. Sound familiar? That's the fairy tale told to every parent and child by a vaccine-wielding brainwashed doctor.

The key element of the story is that your body is supposed to keep those antibodies forever, right? Just like if you get the chicken pox one time, you won't ever get it again because your body is immune to the chicken pox, right?

But wait: Now they're saying vaccines fade out over time. Somehow your body "forgets" the antibodies, they now admit, so you need a booster shot, what else? (Repeat sales, anyone?)

So then, vaccines don't really invoke lifetime antibodies at all, do they? And if that's the case, then the entire vaccine mythology crumbles. No lifetime antibodies means the vaccines aren't really working like real infections (such as the chicken pox). Something doesn't add up here, especially when you figure that vaccines make children MORE susceptible to future infections.

 

Healthy kids are not vaccinated kids

 

Want to find the healthiest children in America? Find families who follow these rules:
#1) They live on small farms and their children play in the dirt (they have contact with nature).
#2) Their children are all home schooled.
#3) None of their children are vaccinated.
#4) They drink raw milk and eat farm fresh foods.

As you will readily find, these are the healthiest, smartest kids in America! They don't have problems with autism, allergies, cancer or ADHD. They are bright, healthy, and easily capable of surviving an infection of chicken pox.

The least healthy children in America are vaccinated children who eat public school food (GMOs) and never spend time in nature. These are the asthmatics, the diabetics, the ADHD cases, the suicidal psych drug takers. They're vaccine damaged and nutritionally depleted, and they catch every cold every winter, it seems, you know what I mean?

Media lies about vaccine effectiveness (written by brain-dead journalists)

The media, you see, is so steeped in lies about vaccines that they are now utterly unable to recognize the truth. In the Seattle Times article mentioned above, for example, you'll find this mysterious sentence in the story: "Pertussis vaccines are about 85 percent effective overall..."

And yet I'll bet you twenty bucks there's not a single journalist on the entire Seattle Times staff who even understands what that number means and where it came from. They probably think it means that for every 100 people vaccinated with the whooping cough vaccine, 85 percent of them will be completely protected against the disease even if they are exposed to it. (Insert laughter here...)

But it's nothing like that at all. This number is simply made up. It is invented from fabricated relative statistics cherry-picked out of distorted clinical trials funded by drug companies. It's sort of like the CDC's completely fabricated number of "35,000 people die each year from the flu" -- a bald-faced conjuration of pure fiction that's repeated as if it were fact across every paper in the country. And even if you believe the 85 percent number, it was probably derived from something more like this: For every 1,000 children in America, only 1 catches the whooping cough, but if those 1,000 children are vaccinated (says the corporate-funded study), then only 0.15 children out of 1,000 will catch the whooping cough.

Thus, in other words, using these numbers you'd have to vaccinate 1,000 children in order to prevent less than one child from getting the whooping cough -- and meanwhile, out of those 1,000 children perhaps 10 - 20 of them suffer vaccine damage in other ways that are far serious, including autism.

Lamestream media journalists who work for these rag papers just don't have any real ability to exercise critical thinking anymore. They don't know how to read scientific studies. They don't understand numbers. And you know why? Because they've been over-vaccinated! And vaccines cause neurological damage, which is why the most brain-dead people you'll find in the country are the ones who line up every year to receive annual flu shots.

When it comes to vaccines, the only thing mainstream newspapers know how to do is rephrase corporate press releases and spout vaccine propaganda that ends up harming, maiming and often killing more innocent children.

That's why NaturalNews continues to tell the truth about vaccine fraud -- because it saves lives by protecting children against bad science and stupid journalism.

 

From http://www.naturalnews.com/035466_whooping_cough_vaccines_outbreaks.html

 

 

Merck vaccine fraud exposed by two Merck virologists; company faked mumps vaccine efficacy results for over a decade, says lawsuit

 

by Mike Adams

 

According to two Merck scientists who filed a False Claims Act complaint in 2010 -- a complaint which has just now been unsealed -- vaccine manufacturer Merck knowingly falsified its mumps vaccine test data, spiked blood samples with animal antibodies, sold a vaccine that actually promoted mumps and measles outbreaks, and ripped off governments and consumers who bought the vaccine thinking it was "95% effective."

See that False Claims Act document at:
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Merck-False-Claims-Act.pdf

According to Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, both former Merck virologists, the Merck company engaged in all the following behavior:

• Merck knowingly falsified its mumps vaccine test results to fabricate a "95% efficacy rate."

• In order to do this, Merck spiked the blood test with animal antibodies in order to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies. As reported in CourthouseNews.com:

Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that "did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life ... virus neutralization in vaccinated people," according to the complaint. (http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/47851.htm)

• Merck then used the falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of "hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization."

• Merck's vaccine fraud has actually contributed to the continuation of mumps across America, causing more children to become infected with mumps. (Gee, really? This is what NaturalNews has been reporting for years... vaccines are actually formulated to keep the outbreaks going because it's great for repeat business!)

• Merck used its false claims of "95 percent effectiveness" to monopolize the vaccine market and eliminate possible competitors.

• The Merck vaccine fraud has been going on since the late 1990's, say the Merck virologists.

• Testing of Merck's vaccine was never done against "real-world" mumps viruses in the wild. Instead, test results were simply falsified to achieve the desired outcome.

• This entire fraud took place "with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck's senior management."

• Merck scientists "witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine's efficacy findings," according to court documents (see below).

 

US government chose to ignore the 2010 False Claims Act!

 

Rather than taking action on this false claims act, the U.S. government simply ignored it, thereby protecting Merck's market monopoly instead of properly serving justice. This demonstrates the conspiracy of fraud between the U.S. government, FDA regulators and the vaccine industry.

 

Chatom Primary Care sues Merck for Sherman Act monopolization, breach of warranty, violation of consumer protection laws

 

Following the unsealing of this 2010 False Claims Act, Chatom Primary Care, based in Alabama, smelled something rotten. Three days ago, Chatom filed a lawsuit against Merck. That lawsuit record is available here:
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Chatom-Lawsuit-Merck-Mumps.pdf

It alleges, among other shocking things:

[Merck engaged in] ...a decade-long scheme to falsify and misrepresent the true efficacy of its vaccine.

Merck fraudulently represented and continues to falsely represent in its labeling and elsewhere that its Mumps Vaccine has an efficacy rate of 95 percent of higher.

In reality, Merck knows and has taken affirmative steps to conceal -- by using improper testing techniques and falsifying test data -- that its Mumps Vaccine is, and has been since at least 1999, far less than 95 percent effective.

Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck's desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study's findings.

...incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results...

...destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator...

...threatened a virologist in Merck's vaccine division with jail if he reported the fraud to the FDA...

...the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection. And while this is a disease that, according to the Centers for Disease Control ('CDC'), was supposed to be eradicated by now, the failure in Merck's vaccine has allowed this disease to linger, with significant outbreaks continuing to occur.

Chatom Primary Care also alleges that the fraudulent Merck vaccine contributed to the 2006 mumps outbreak in the Midwest, and a 2009 outbreak elsewhere. It says, "there has remained a significant risk of a resurgence of mumps outbreaks..."

 

This investigation is only beginning

 

NaturalNews has only begun to investigate this incredible breaking news about Merck and the vaccine industry. We are pouring through the court documents to identify additional information that may be relevant to this case, and we plan to bring you that information soon.

For the record, Merck denies all allegations. Is anyone surprised?

Sources for this article:
NaturalNews wishes to thank CourthouseNews.com for its coverage of this story. Original article at: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/47851.htm

Chatom Lawsuit against Merck
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Chatom-Lawsuit-Merck-Mumps.pdf

2010 False Claims Act against Merck, by two Merck virologists
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Merck-False-Claims-Act.pdf

Announcement of the lawsuit in the media:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/lawsuit-claims-merck-overstated-mumps-v...

 

From http://www.naturalnews.com/036328_Merck_mumps_vaccine_False_Claims_Act.html#ixzz20BVtbUmQ

 

 

Vaccine bombshell: Baby monkeys given standard doses of popular vaccines develop autism symptoms

by: Ethan A. Huff

If vaccines play absolutely no role in the development of childhood autism, a claim made by many medical authorities today, then why are some of the most popular vaccines commonly administered to children demonstrably causing autism in animal primates? This is the question many people are now asking after a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (UP) in Pennsylvania revealed that many of the infant monkeys given standard doses of childhood vaccines as part of the new research developed autism symptoms.

For their analysis, Laura Hewitson and her colleagues at UP conducted the type of proper safety research on typical childhood vaccination schedules that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should have conducted -- but never has -- for such regimens. And what this brave team discovered was groundbreaking, as it completely deconstructs the mainstream myth that vaccines are safe and pose no risk of autism.

Presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London, England, the findings revealed that young macaque monkeys given the typical CDC-recommended vaccination schedule from the 1990s, and in appropriate doses for the monkeys' sizes and ages, tended to develop autism symptoms. Their unvaccinated counterparts, on the other hand, developed no such symptoms, which points to a strong connection between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders.

Included in the mix were several vaccines containing the toxic additive Thimerosal, a mercury-based compound that has been phased out of some vaccines, but is still present in batch-size influenza vaccines and a few others. Also administered was the controversial measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which has been linked time and time again to causing autism and various other serious, and often irreversible, health problems in children (http://www.greenhealthwatch.com)

"This research underscores the critical need for more investigation into immunizations, mercury, and the alterations seen in autistic children," said Lyn Redwood, director of SafeMinds, a public safety group working to expose the truth about vaccines and autism. "SafeMinds calls for large scale, unbiased studies that look at autism medical conditions and the effects of vaccines given as a regimen."

 

Vaccine oversight needs to be taken from CDC and given to independent agency, says vaccine safety advocate

 

Adding to the sentiment, Theresa Wrangham, president of SafeMinds called out the CDC for failing to require proper safety studies of its recommended vaccination schedules. Unlike all other drugs, which must at least undergo a basic round of safety testing prior to approval and recommendation, vaccinations and vaccine schedules in particular do not have to be proven safe or effective before hitting the market.

"The full implications of this primate study await publication of the research in a scientific journal," said Wrangham. "But we can say that it demonstrates how the CDC evaded their responsibility to investigate vaccine safety questions. Vaccine safety oversight should be removed from the CDC and given to an independent agency."

Be sure to read this thorough analysis of the study by Catherine J. Frompovich of VacTruth.com:
http://vactruth.com/2012/04/29/monkeys-get-autism/

From http://www.naturalnews.com/035787_vaccines_autism_monkeys.html

Vaccine Exemptions: Do They Really Put Others at Risk?

by Alan Phillips, J.D. Attorney and Counselor at Law

     
Parents who exercise a vaccine exemption for their children are often ridiculed for putting their own children and others at risk. However, legally and medically, unvaccinated children do not pose a significant health risk to themselves or anyone else. Alternative vaccine views support this assertion, but the reasoning in this article comes straight from mainstream vaccine beliefs, accepted medical practice and current law.

     First, from the legal perspective, forty-eight state legislatures, federal agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services), and all U.S. territories offer religious exemptions to immunizations. The state legislatures and federal agencies providing these exemptions are presumed to have considered whether or not the exercise of these exemptions would pose a significant health risk. They would not have enacted these exemption laws if their exercise would pose a significant health risk. Thus, there is a legal presumption that the exercise of a vaccine exemption does not pose a significant risk to anyone.

     This legal presumption is not a mere exercise in semantics or logic. It is based on the widely accepted herd immunity theory, which tells us that so long as most of the members of a population are immune, all members of the population are protected. Indeed, current vaccine policy necessarily depends on this theory. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says: "No vaccine is 100% effective. Most routine childhood vaccines are effective for 85% to 95% of recipients. For reasons related to the individual, some will not develop immunity." (It’s curious that they blame the "individual" and not the vaccines. Regardless, the CDC admits that this is why the majority of outbreaks occur in vaccinated children.) In contrast, national exemption rates run about 1% - 2.5% on average. Furthermore, just as vaccinated children are not necessarily immune, exempt children aren’t necessarily lacking immunity. Many exempt children develop natural immunity, and according to the CDC, they don’t have to get sick for that to happen. The bottom line is, you can’t determine the immunity status of any given individual child by the child’s vaccination status alone. But with the herd immunity theory, we don’t need to; we need only be concerned with a populations’ immune status collectively.

     Not only do non-immune children (vaccinated or not) not pose a significant health risk now, they pose no potential future risk, as protective laws and procedures have been put into place to account for them. For example, most states require exempt children to stay home from school during a local outbreak, for the duration of the incubation period of the outbreak disease. (Of course, since most non-immune children are vaccinated and they are not required to stay home, this practice discriminates against exempt children, but it is common policy around the U.S.) Most states also have laws that can require emergency vaccines and throw exemptions out the window and/or quarantine of unvaccinated persons in a declared, infectious disease emergency. So, neither exempt children nor their non-immune, vaccinated peers pose a significant health risk—now, or at any time in the future.

     A related issue concerns school administrators who fear that they risk liability if they allow exemptions, particularly in private schools. The short answer is that parents do not place themselves or anyone else at risk of liability for exercising a lawful exemption. By definition, liability occurs only when a law is breached. If all concerned are complying with the law, there won’t be a liability risk. Again, there is a legal presumption; here, that the proper exercise of a legal exemption does not create a significant liability risk—or else the exemption law would not have been enacted in the first place.

      Myths about vaccines and infectious disease persist, despite voluminous information refuting them, probably because fear is more powerful than reason. As the above reveals, this is true even within the world of vaccine mainstream beliefs. One of the more common mistakes comes from trying to apply concepts to individuals that really only apply to groups—that is the flawed basis for discriminating against exempt children and their parents. Those uncomfortable with this article have recourse with the state legislatures and promulgating regulatory agencies; that is, they can pursue changes in the law. Absent that, legally and medically, the exercise of a lawful vaccine exemption is, necessarily, a reasonably safe option that poses no significant health risk to anyone.

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This article is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to constitute medical or legal advice.

For the purposes of this article, I am putting aside the fact that the herd immunity has been disproven many times over in the medical literature, and the fact that antibody production, the measure of vaccine immunity, is not a reliable indicator of actual immunity, according to the medical literature. For cites, see Dispelling Vaccination Myths, http://www.vaccinerights.com/pdf/DispellingVaccinationMythsx.pdf

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines and Immunizations, Misconception #2. The majority of people who get disease have been vaccinated, http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

Non-medical Exemptions to School Immunization Requirements, The Journal of the American Medical Association, http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/296/14/1757.full.

See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines and Immunizations, Glossary, "Asymptomatic infection: The presence of an infection without symptoms. Also known as inapparent or subclinical infection," http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/about/terms/glossary.htm

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For additional related research on GreenmedInfo.com read "The Shocking LACK of Evidence Supporting Flu Vaccines," and peruse our Vaccine Research Database which focuses on collating data from the National Library of Medicine on the underreported, adverse effects of vaccines.

Alan Phillips, J.D. is a nationally recognized legal expert on vaccine rights issues. He helps clients, activists and other attorneys nationally with vaccine rights issues and legislative initiatives. Learn more at www.vaccinerights.com
From http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/vaccine-exemptions-do-they-really-put-others-risk



 
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Perverted Priorities: Obama One Year Later

The Empire and Inequality Report

By Paul Street

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

- Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967

REDUCED EXPECTATIONS

One year after President Barack Obama's historic election in the name of "change" and "hope," Gallup and USA Today report that the U.S. citizenry's initially high expectations of the Obama presidency have fallen along with the president's popularity.

In November of 2008, 67 percent of the American population thought that the Obama administrations would be able to reduce unemployment.  By mid-October of 2009, just barely more than half (51 percent) believed that. 

In the month of the president's election, 64 percent of Americans told Gallup and USA Today that the next White House would be able "to improve the health care system." Fifty-eight (58) percent thought President Obama would be able to "bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan in way that's not harmful to the U.S."

Eleven and a half months later, just 46 percent believed that Obama could improve health care.  The same exact percentage (46) thought the same way about Obama and Afghanistan (Susan Page, "Obama's Election One Year Later," USA Today, October 28, 2009, pp. 1A, 5A).

At one level, we might consider these reduced expectations something of a victory for the American corporate and imperial power elite.  Realistically or not, much of the majority U.S. working class populace wanted certain things from the Obama presidency. The things hoped for included increased employment opportunities and wages, a roll back of war and militarism, universal and adequate health care, rebuilt infrastructure, serious efforts to fix the environmental crisis, reduced inequality, and generally improved life circumstances for ordinary people.

The corporate and imperial ruling class that backed Obama's campaign and staffed many of his key cabinet and other policymaking positions had different priorities for America. They wanted Obama to foster an illusion of democratic change that worked to prevent popular rebellion. They wanted the new administration to save and restore legitimacy to their damaged profits system and empire. They desired a public relations makeover along improved governance for American Empire and Inequality in the wake of the grossly incompetent, unpopular, and messianic-militarist Bush-Cheney administration and the related epic financial meltdown of September-October 2008.  They wanted the Obama's "progressive" triumph to cloak a deeper underlying triumph of conservatism.  They wanted new and deceptive clothes for the persistence of the old regime.  They wanted a re-branding without a restructuring - without any serious questioning of underlying institutions, and ideologies. 

WHAT THE ESTABLISHMENT WANTED AND EXPECTS

"Towards Making the Burdens Yet to Come More Bearable"

Two good places to get a sense of what the American establishment has expected from Obama are the editorial pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post   The real world ideological orientation of these two leading citadels of corporate-imperial ideology have nothing to do with the "leftist" project to which both papers are routinely and absurdly connected by fanatical right-wing propagandists like Bernard Goldberg, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh.  Strongly committed to the preservation of existing power relations, that orientation is suggested in a statement from the Times' editorial board three weeks before Obama's Inauguration. In a December 22, 2008 editorial entitled "The Printing Press Cure," the Times explained that Obama had to walk a fine line in relation to the damaged domestic business order he was inheriting from George W. Bush. The next president needed, the Times felt, to embrace a level of government intervention that was adequate to save the profits system while distancing himself from promises that might encourage the citizenry to resist. "As president," the Times lectured, "Mr. Obama will have to convey optimism without over-promising. He will have to inspire confidence, even in the absence of a dramatic turnaround - which is simply not on the cards." The editorial ended on an interesting note: "While Mr. Obama must continue to level with the American people - the economy is unlikely to turn up until 2010 at the earliest, and even then it will probably rebound slowly - his near term moves will go a long way towards making the burdens yet to come more bearable."

Translation: it was Obama's job - on the model of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1930s - to prevent the citizenry's anger and struggles (under a dramatically failing capitalism) from coalescing into a popular rebellion. The Times' editors felt that Obama's proper role would be to stop potential "populist rage" and the deepening economic crisis (imposed by capital) from sparking a powerful new working class movement. To repeat the words of the Times' editorial, it was all about "making the burdens yet to come more bearable."

"A Military Large Enough and Mobile Enough" to Rule "A Dangerous World"

Interestingly, however, the Times had a different take on Obama's duties to Empire. The editors' emphasis on Obama's need to "realistically" downsize popular hopes in regard to domestic policy stood in curious contrast to the grandiose expectations the paper's opinion authorities held for Obama's obligation to repair and expand the power of America's military. In a November 16, 2008 editorial entitled "A Military for a Dangerous World," the Times' editors explained that:

       

"As president, Barack Obama will face the most daunting and complicated national security challenges in more than a generation — and he will inherit a military that is critically ill-equipped for the task."

"Troops and equipment are so overtaxed by President Bush's disastrous Iraq war that the Pentagon does not have enough of either for the fight in Afghanistan, the war on terror's front line, let alone to confront the next threats."

"This is intolerable...To protect the nation, the Obama administration will have to rebuild and significantly reshape the military. We do not minimize the difficulty of this task. Even if money were limitless, planning is extraordinarily difficult in a world with no single enemy and many dangers..."

        

The Times editors recommended:

* Provision of "sufficient troops, ships and planes to reassure allies in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe."

* Efforts to "ensure [the Pentagon's] ability - so-called lift capacity - to move enormous quantities of men and material quickly around the world and to supply then when necessary by sea."

* "A military that is large enough and mobile enough to deter enemies."

* "A significantly larger ground force."

* Provision of "new skills" to fight not just "traditional wars against hostile regimes" but also "guerilla insurgencies wielding terror tactics or possibly weapons of mass destruction."

* "Hiring more linguists, training more special forces, and building expertise in civilian affairs and cultural awareness" so to more effectively conduct "counter-insurgency" wars and occupations that "protect the civilian population and legitimize the indigenous government" abroad.

* The training of military forces to be "prepared to sustain long-term operations [occupations, P.S.]."

Taken together, these two post-election Times editorials were a striking example of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the middle and late 1960s called the "perverted national priorities" of the American empire. The nation's leading newspaper called for cautious, conservative, and hope-chilling modesty when it came to addressing domestic pain and inequality.  At the same time, it advocated the expansion of Superpower's already gargantuan capacity to deliver death and destruction across the planet, described (in the standard paranoid parlance of the imperial militarist) as "dangerous."   

"Universal Health Care...is Not ‘Fundamental to the Defense of Our People'"

       

Now let's look at the Washington Post ten months later. Another example of the same seeming inconsistency and of the same continuously conservative, corporate and imperial world view has recently been given by the editors of that other leading establishment newspaper. In an unusual move on Saturday, October 24th, the Post's editorial page condescended to address a critical response from a reader who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in our editorial positions."  The reader had raised an interesting question.  He had wondered how the Post could justify (A) demanding that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money while at the same time (B) strongly supporting U.S. escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how to pay for it.  "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

The Post's editors gave three answers.  Their first claim was misleading and false. It held that Obama was saving money by cutting defense spending and withdrawing from Iraq.  But Obama is doing none of these things. Iraq remains occupied and Obama has actually increasing the Pentagon budget.  By "cutting defense," The Post really meant that Obama is merely decreasing the rate at which defense spending increases ("from 2008 to 2019, defense spending would increase only 17 percent").  And of course, the president is escalating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, adding thereby the ballooning federal deficit.

The Post's second claim was also deceptive. It argued that "wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end."  But do they, really?  As the noted U.S. military historian and former U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich told PBS' "Frontline" last September, dominant U.S. military doctrine does not support that argument. "Post-Vietnam," Bacevich noted, "the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome. What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that. War has become a permanent condition." ("Interview: Col. Andrew Bacevich [Ret.], Frontline/PBS, September 21, 2009, read at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/interviews/bacevich.html). Full truth told, massive and vastly expensive federal preparation for war became an undeviating aspect of U.S. government during and after World War II.

The Post's third and deeper answer was darkly revealing and emblematic of the deeply distorted priorities and perverted values of the nation's political class. It held that escalating in Afghanistan was an unqualified national obligation while providing Americans universal health coverage was basically an extra that could be put on hold. According to the Post's editors:

"All this [the troubled reader's sense of contradiction between open-ended war funding and limited health-care funding, P.S.] assumes that defense and health care should be treated equally in the national budget. We would argue that they should not be . . . Universal health care, however desirable, is not ‘fundamental to the defense of our people.' Nor is it a ‘necessity' that it be adopted this year: Mr. Obama chose to propose a massive new entitlement at a time of historic budget deficits. In contrast, Gen. McChrystal believes that if reinforcements are not sent to Afghanistan in the next year, the war may be lost, with catastrophic consequences for U.S. interests in South Asia. U.S. soldiers would continue to die, without the prospect of defeating the Taliban. And, as Mr. Obama put it, ‘if left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.'"

This was a remarkable proclamation. Besides its abject repetition of the White House's highly problematic "safe haven" argument in defense of the brazenly illegal and unjust occupation of Afghanistan, it was remarkably indifferent to the shocking domestic death toll imposed by the United States' corporate-ruled health insurance regime. That regime kill[s] more Americans each month than al Qaeda did on September 11, 2001.  A study released by the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance in September of 2009 demonstrated that "nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance" in America. According to one of the study's authors, "Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease. An increase in the number of uninsured and an eroding medical safety net for the disadvantaged likely explain the substantial increase in the number of deaths, as the uninsured are more likely to go without needed care." (David Cecere, "New Study Finds 45,000 Deaths Linked Annually to Lack of Health Insurance," HarvardScience, September 17, 2009, read at www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-lack-health-coverage). 

No doubt the Post editors who explained why the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan was a higher national priority than universal health care for Americans are all enrolled in gold-plated health insurance plans. It is all too easy for them to dismiss tens of thousands of annual deaths in the imperial "homeland" as "not fundamental" - as something that does not need to be overcome as quickly as possible.

"No matter your views on Obama's health care reform plan," the incisive left-liberal writer Glen Greenwald notes, "does it really take any effort to see how warped [their] dismissive mentality is?" As Greenwald adds, "it becomes ...much worse when one considers" that the Obama administration's "venerated ‘counter-insurgency' mission in Afghanistan" entails an open-ended commitment to "securing the population" through years and perhaps decades of military, social, and political intervention guided by "an enormously ambitious project of nation-building." The cost of that project would certainly run well into the trillions.

Greenwald aptly summarizes and criticizes the "warped" priorities of The Post's editors:

"So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and occupying Afghanistan -- all while simultaneously ensuring ‘effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of women's rights' to Afghan citizens in Afghanistan -- is an absolutely vital necessity that must be done no matter the cost.  But providing basic services (such as health care) to American citizens, in the U.S., is a secondary priority at best, something totally unnecessary that should wait for a few years or a couple decades until we can afford it and until our various wars are finished, if that ever happens.  ‘U.S. interests in South Asia' are paramount; U.S. interests in the welfare of those in American cities, suburbs and rural areas are an afterthought."

"As demented as that sounds, isn't that exactly the priority scheme we've adopted as a country?  We're a nation that couldn't even manage to get clean drinking water to our own citizens who were dying in the middle of New Orleans.  We have tens of thousands of people dying every year because they lack basic health care coverage.  The rich-poor gap [inside the U.S.] continues to expand to third-world levels.  And The Post claims that war and ‘nation-building' in Afghanistan are crucial while health care for Americans is not..."

"Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don't are abstract, distant and irrelevant.  Identically, with very rare exceptions, they and their families don't fight the wars they cheer on - and don't even pay for them - and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever." 

The Post's October 24th editorial rightly reminds Greenwald of a notable passage in Adam Smith's much-misunderstood Wealth of Nations (1776): "In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies..." It's as if Smith had seen into the posh corridors of the Post 233 years later.  "Lounging around in the editorial offices in the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine. It's exactly what Adam Smith denounced.  And it's exactly what our political and media elite are," Greenwald writes (Glen Greenwald, "‘America's Priorities,' By the Beltway Elite," Salon, October 24, 2008 www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/?page=2).

It is repugnant indeed - no less when the argument is deployed in service to an urbane, eloquent black president from Chicago than when it supports the adventurism of a clumsy and boorish white president from Texas.

OBAMA IN THE REAL WORLD OF POWER

There should be little doubt as to who has prevailed under the first nine months of the Obama White House.  The "perverted national priorities" of the Beltway and Wall Street elite have trumped the progressive hopes and needs of "democracy's" purported masters the citizenry. President Obama has lectured Wall Street chieftains on the immorality of their bonuses and visited hard recession-hit towns like Elkhart, Indiana and Pomona, California to show solidarity with downtrodden working people. He has occasionally pounded his chest at excessive executive compensation and the evil behavior of insurance corporations. And then he has given yet more of the public treasury and commons away to the Privileged Few, justifying the handouts and protection proffered to the elite as a noble expression of "sensible," "realistic," and "pragmatic" commitment to "rising above ideological divisions" to "get things done" for the American people. 

"Tinkering Around the [Financial] Edges" While "the Wise Guys of Wall Street Lick Their Fat-Cat Chops"

Obama and the Democrats' "financial reform" efforts "tinker around the edges" in ways that do little to prevent another financial meltdown on the model of September-October 2008. If anything, they increase the likelihood of another disaster, for they fail to address what Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson (no leftist) calls "the most significant issue of all: how to make sure that companies do not grow to the point where they become too big or interconnected to be allowed to fail."  This dark reality goes largely unacknowledged in "mainstream" media reports that focus heavily on Obama's superficially progressive proposal to briefly temper politically volatile executive pay levels  at seven companies that together received hundreds of billions in federal taxpayer assistance over the last year (G. Morgenson, "Wall Street Follies: The Next Act," New York Times, October 25, 2009).

       

Liberal Times columnist Bob Herbert writes of his shock at "another orgy (with taxpayers as the enablers) of [Wall Street] bonuses" inflicted while a rising sea of Americans struggled to keep jobs and homes and their health coverage. "Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads," Herbert noted, "the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses — this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached...Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent..." Herbert is struck by a sense of "deja voodoo" as he recalls a column he wrote on the same topic - Wall Street big shots "harvesting a record crop of bonuses" and "ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar" while working families struggled to survive - three days before Christmas in 2007. (Bob Herbert, "Safety Nets For the Rich," New York Times, October 20, 2009). 

       

Sick Joke

       

Meanwhile, "health reform" has become a sick, plutocratic joke under Obama.  As tens of thousands of Americans die each year in connection with the lack of insurance coverage, Obama's overly complex and corporate-captive "reform" efforts are a great gift to the Democratic Party's ' "frenemies" atop the big insurance and drug corporations and those firms' Wall Street investors.

Five weeks go, 65 percent of more than 1000 Americans randomly surveyed by the CBS and The New York Times responded affirmatively to the following question: "Would you favor the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan - something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and over get - that would compete with private health insurance plans?" (CBS-New York Times, September 23, 2009). In the same month that Obama was inaugurated, 59 percent told same pollsters that they supported a Canadian-style single-payer health insurance system.

       

But so what? The most that a Democratic president (Obama) and a majority Democratic U.S. Senate seem ready to advance as I finish this essay (on the first anniversary of Obama's election) is a strictly limited, deeply conservative version, and hopelessly weakened and ghettoized, high-cost version of "the public option" - one that would be available only to those without access to private insurance and only in certain states.  President Obama, who once (as a state senator in 2003) argued passionately for an "everybody in, nobody out" single-payer system, is reported to prefer a "public option" with a "trigger," meaning a small and weak program for the otherwise uninsured that would only be activated at some time in the future, if it was determined that the private insurers had failed to meet certain benchmarks. And Obama's plan will hand the insurance companies millions of new customers, who will now be required to purchase health insurance or face government fines. 

The president's former willingness to acknowledge the superiority of single-payer dates from the period right before he knew he had a shot at national office and therefore fully subordinated himself to America's "unelected dictatorship of money," which "vets the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties, reducing the options available to U.S. citizens to two candidates, neither of whom can change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime." (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Riding the ‘Green Wave' at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond," Electric Politics, July 22, 2009)

        

The Pentagon Reports: "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security"

Also in a sickening corporatist vein, Obama's auto restructuring plan gave the big U.S. carmakers a green light to further dismantle the lives of American working people by building more vehicles and parts in lower-wage countries.  American unions' hopes for an overdue and urgently required labor law reform have been kicked to the curb with no meaningful resistance from the "pro-labor" White House, which has failed to push for an economic stimulus remotely close to what would be required to stem a rising unemployment rate that (by the way) has recently helped the Pentagon meet all of its recruiting goals for the first time in many years.

         

The Obama administration has won accolades from environmentalists for acknowledging the legitimacy of global warming science. But again, the sad question arises: "so what?" The new White House has rewarded the top energy firms by leading a retreat from the imposition of serious carbon emission controls on the rich nations just months after leading climate scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of showed that "without rapid and massive action, the problem [of global warming]  will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse [since] the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks than can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane."  A prominent earth scientist heading the report said that, "There's no way the world can or should take these risks" and argued that "the least-cost option to lower the risk it to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies." ("Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought: New Analysis Shows Warming Could be Double Previous Estimates," MIT News, May 19, 2009, read at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html#).There has been no indication of any serious movement in that direction by Obama, who branded himself a candidate to be "a green President" and spoke eloquently on the problem of global warming to enthusiastic liberal and progressive audiences in 2007 and 2008. 

In a macabre and surreal front-page story titled "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security" last August, the Times reported on the conclusions of a recent study from Obama's Pentagon: "The changing global climate will pose profound changes to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics" (John Broder, New York Times, August 9, 2009, A1). Notwithstanding the interesting facts that American petro-capitalism (subsidized, protected, and advanced by a largely oil-focused and oil-fueled U.S. global hyper-militarism) is the leading force driving climate change in the first place (!) and that the leading early victims are concentrated in poor nations that contribute only minimally to global warming, the Pentagon is making sure to "war game" the Earth's rising temperature, treating that development as an external threat to freedom in "the homeland." (At least the Pentagon has yet to claim that Islamic extremists are the real force behind global climate change)

There was no comment reported on this remarkable story and the Pentagons fascinating new research from Obama's National Security Advisor, the retired Marine Gen. James Jones. Jones is the former supreme allied commander of NATO. Before his selection as Obama's top military brain, was president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy, which called for the immediate expansion of domestic oil and gas production and issued reports that criticizing application to the Clean Air Act to fight global warming. "Recently retired from the military," Amy Goodman noted last December, "Jones has parlayed his 40-year military career into several corporate directorships. Among them is Cross Match Technologies, which makes biometric identification equipment. More germane to Jones' forthcoming role in Obama's inner circle, though, might be Jones' seat as a director of Boeing, a weapons manufacturer, and as a director of Chevron, an oil giant" (A. Goodman, "Chevron in the White House," Truthdig, Dec. 2, 2008, read at www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081202_chevron_in_the_white_house). 

Orwell would be impressed. So would Kafka, Vonnegut, and perhaps Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22.

"No Peace Dividend"

Speaking of the Pentagon, Obama's record-setting "defense" budget and related colonial war expansion in South Asia have naturally rewarded the giant military industrial complex, including such key state-subsidized firms as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Unlike the administration's "health reform," Washington's war spending is unburdened with the requirement that it (as Obama promised in his health care speech to a joint session of Congress in September) "not add a dime to the federal deficit."

"As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend...In addition, we believe, based on discussions with industry sources, that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget at least until the first 18 months of his term as the national security situation becomes better understood."

These last two sentences come from a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm and Bush-Obama bailout recipient Morgan Stanley one day after Obama's presidential election victory.   "The Democrats," Morgan Stanley's researchers noted, "are sensitive about appearing weak on defense, and we don't expect strong cuts."

"Defense" is an interesting label for a giant military budget that pays for two mass-murderous occupations (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and 770 military bases located in more than 130 countries. The United States accounts for nearly half (48 percent) the military spending on the planet. Coming in at $1 trillion (by the measure of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's National Income and Product Accounts) in 2007, American "defense" (empire) spending outweighs domestic U.S federal expenditure on education by more than 8 to 1; income security by more than 4.5 to 1; nutrition by more than 11 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; and job training by 32 to 1. The military accounts for more than half of all discretionary federal spending.

The "peace dividend" refers to the notion of reversing such "perverted national priorities" by taking money spent on war and the preparation for war and using it to address human problems like poverty, ecological crisis, crumbling infrastructure, joblessness, and inadequate education, health, housing, and schooling. This happens to have long been a very popular idea with the U.S. citizenry.  A 2004 poll by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations found, for example, that just 29 percent of Americans supported the expansion of government spending on "defense."  By contrast, 79 percent supported increased spending on health care, 69 percent supported increased spending on education, and 69 percent backed increased spending on Social Security.  

TOWARDS A NEW DEFINITION OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION BEYOND THE MASTERS' "ELECTION MADNESS"

But, again, so what? Such mere public opinion does not go very far under the aforementioned "unelected dictatorship." As the venerable left-liberal political scientist Sheldon Wolin predicted last year in his chilling book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton 2008), "Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors [will] make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society." In the United States' corporate-managed political culture, Wolin elaborated, "the parties set out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote.  Afterwards, post-election politics of lobbying, repaying donors, and promoting corporate interests - the real players - takes over  The effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their efficacy....The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working-class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf."

Citizens must and can mobilize themselves as something more than voters in corporate-coordinated, candidate-centered electoral burlesques every four years. There have been some examples of a deeper, more radical popular engagement since the election, including two in Obama's "home city" Chicago: the remarkable workers' factory occupation at the Republic Door and Window plant in December of 2008 and the protest of thousands against financial parasites and their taxpayer bailouts in Chicago just two weeks ago. We can and must form and expand grassroots worker and citizen power beneath and beyond the pathetically narrow, elite-imposed definition of political obligation that reigns in the U.S. That definition offers little more than the chance to occasionally choose from a painfully thin, ideologically tapered menu of corporate-imperial candidates selected in advance by the business class.

As Howard Zinn reminded us in the spring of 2008, reflecting on the "election madness" he saw "engulfing the entire society, including the left" with special intensity in the springtime of Obama's election year:

"The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us."

    

"...Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth."

"But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice."

   

"Let's remember that even when there is a ‘better' candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore..... (Howard Zinn, "Election Madness," The Progressive, March 2008). 

    

One can bemoan and feel (like the liberal-left filmmaker Michael Moore) "betrayed" by Obama's predictable service to the corporate and military power elite and by his failure to act in accord with the more progressive-sounding aspects of his stirring campaign rhetoric.  But candidate Obama made his centrist (right-wing by global and historical comparisons), business- and military-friendly commitments clear to those willing to do a bit of due-diligence research on his background, values, and world-view (see Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics [Paradigm 2008] for a reasonably comprehensive account). It was and is foolish, childish even, to expect progressive change from a carefully corporate-choreographed bourgeois election in the headquarters of world imperialism. "Do not," The Bible counsels, "put your faith in princes" (Psalms, 146:3). 

More relevant than Obama's values or character and history is the simple cold fact that progressive forces have not developed the strength to hold Democratic or other elected officials' feet to the fire in ways that the political class feels forced to respect.  We lack the capacity to compel politicians to reconsider their soulless service to concentrated power.  

We need to build a progressive revolutionary movement before the establishment's perverted priorities finally poison the Earth and society beyond all hope of democratic renewal.

Helpfully enough for clearing away electoral illusions that obstruct that building project, the Obama presidency and the current Democratic Congress are great demonstrations of the richly bipartisan nature of the proto-totalitarian corporate-imperial system of American governance, in which, as C Wright Mills noted fifty-three years ago, "Public relations displace[s] reasoned argument; manipulations and un-debated decisions of power replace[s] democratic authority" (Mills, The Power Elite [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956], p. 355). The change we need isn't about electing and defending Democrats every few years, that's for sure. The last year has made that clear enough.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is an author, writer, and speaker based in Iowa City, IA.  His many publications include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008: www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)

November 05, 2009

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http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/b/O/propaganda_attackiraq.jpg

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/.Pictures/fairshare.jpg

http://skreened.com/render-product/s/s/n/ssnqcaacmbadwujggiew/image.w174h200f3.jpg

 

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