Pharma Funded “Patient” Groups Keep Drug Prices Astronomical

Martha Rosenberg

It happens with regularity during citizen open-mike sessions at FDA drug advisory committee hearings. A queue of “patients” materializes out of nowhere to testify, often in tears, about the crucial need for a new drug or new use approval. Some are flown in by Pharma.

It can’t be a generic drug, cry the “patients” because, they are just not the same. It has to be the $1000 a month drug or even the $1000 a pill drug  so that taxpayers and the privately insured prop up Pharma’s cred on Wall Street.

While more than 80 percent of patient groups are Pharma funded the New York Times reported this week including the National Hemophilia Foundation, the American Diabetes Association and the National Psoriasis Foundation, mental health front groups which include the National Alliance for Mental Health (NAMI) and Mental Health America are the most insidious.

Not only do psychiatric drugs represent four digit outlays per month per patient  and sometimes much more, patients are kept on them for decades or life—with few medical attempts to determine if patients still need them or ever needed them.  Side effects of the drug cocktails are viewed, thanks to Pharma spin, as confirmation of the “mental illness” not the side effects they almost always are. The use of such drugs in the elderly, despite their links to death in those with dementia, has become epidemic and is an underreported cause of falls.

“Mental illness” is a category deliberately “grown” by Pharma with aggressive and unethical million dollar campaigns. These campaigns, often unbranded to look like a public service, convince people with real life challenges they are “depressed” or “bipolar” and that their children have ADHD. Despite the Pharma marketing, the New England Journal of Medicine recently reported that the rate of severe mental illness among children and adolescents has actually dropped dramatically in the past generation.

The tactics of these front groups have been widely reported. “When insurers balk at reimbursing patients for new prescription medications, these groups typically swing into action, rallying sufferers to appear before public and consumer panels, contact lawmakers, and provide media outlets a human face to attach to a cause,” reported the Los Angeles Times .

Targeting poor people on government health plans is Pharma’s marketing plan. “For years, the alliance [NAMI] has fought states’ legislative efforts to limit doctors’ freedom to prescribe drugs, no matter how expensive, to treat mental illness in patients who rely on government health care programs like Medicaid, says the New York Times . “Some of these medicines routinely top the list of the most expensive drugs that states buy for their poorest patients.”

Thanks to the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act, it is possible to see what Pharma is paying patient front groups and the numbers are astounding. Last year Eli Lilly, one of the primary makers of psychiatric drugs, bestowed an astonishing 22 grants on NAMI including $25,000 for its “Healthy Americas Briefings.” How objective are those “briefings”? Pfizer gave NAMI $32,500 during one quarter last year.

Lilly also greased the palms of Mental Health America to the tune of $35,000 last year. Government is increasingly funding Mental Health America, adding to the Pharma exploitation and heisting of our tax dollars. Last year, Counterpunch reported that Walgreens had announced a partnership with Mental Health America. The plan empowered Walgreens to “screen” customers to see if they might need expensive psychiatric drugs but not know it–until Pharma magnanimously told them.  Screening is widely viewed, even by the medical establishment, as shameless Pharma marketing that leads to over-diagnosis, over-treatment and over-medication even as people who actually need medical treatment are ignored.

The Pharma business model actually wants people sick. Currently, in radio campaigns, Pharma is trying to convince people they have “exocrine pancreatic insufficiency” and “Non-24 Sleep Wake Disorder” two conditions so rare as to be laughable as radio campaigns.

How much do the drugs Pharma, NAMI, Mental Health America and Walgreens push cost?  If a “bipolar” child is prescribed a middle dose of the mood stabilizers Topamax and Lamictal, the yearly cost would be $23,220. If Seroquel is added, at a cost of $24,000, along with the ADHD drug Concerta at $7,812, and Neurontin at $4,860, one bipolar child would make Pharma $59,892 a year. Remember, you can’t substitute a generic.

Sweat Shops, GMOs and Neoliberal Fundamentalism: The Agroecological Alternative to Global Capitalism

Colin Todhunter 

Much of the argument in favour of GM agriculture involves little more than misrepresentations and unscrupulous attacks on those who express concerns about the technology and its impacts. These attacks are in part designed to whip up populist sentiment and denigrate critics so that corporate interests can secure further control over agriculture. They also serve to divert attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty and genuine solutions, as well as the self-interest of the pro-GMO lobby itself.

The very foundation of the GMO agritech sector is based on a fraud. The sector and the wider transnational agribusiness cartel to which it belongs have also successfully captured for their own interests many international and national bodies and policies, including the WTO, various trade deals, governments institutions and regulators. From fraud to duplicity, little wonder then the sector is ridden with fear and paranoia.

“They are scared to death,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds: “They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

War against reason

Global corporations like Monsanto are waging an ideological war against not only critics but the public too. For instance, consider that the majority of the British public and the Canadian public have valid concerns about GM food and do not want them. However, the British government was found to have been secretly colluding with the industry and the Canadian government is attempting to soften up the public to try to get people to change their opinions.

Instead of respecting public opinion and serving the public interest by holding powerful corporations to account, officials seem more inclined to serve the interests of the sector, regardless of genuine concerns about GM that, despite what the industry would like to have believe, are grounded in facts and involve rational discourse.

Whether via the roll-out of GMOs or an associated chemical-intensive industrialised monocrop system of agriculture, the agritech/agribusiness sector wants to further expand its influence throughout the globe. Beneath the superficial façade of working in the interest of humanity, however, the sector is driven by a neoliberal fundamentalism which demands the entrenchment of capitalist agriculture via deregulation and the corporate control of seeds, land, fertilisers, water, pesticides and food processing.

If anything matters to the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry, contrary to the public image it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts and displacing existing systems of production: economies are “opened up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished” (Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty, p16).

Critics are highlighting not only how the industry has subverted and debased science and has infiltrated key public institutions and regulatory bodies, but they are also showing how trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small/peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

Critics stab at the heart of neoliberalism

By doing this, critics stab hard at the heart such corporate interests and their neoliberal agenda.

Eric Holt-Giménez:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food… The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

The geopolitics of food and agriculture has played a significant role in creating food-deficit regions. For instance, African agriculture has been reshaped on behalf of the interests described in the above extract. The Gates Foundation is currently spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness. And in India, there has been an ongoing attempt to do the same: a project that is now reaching a critical phase as the motives of the state acting on behalf of private (foreign) capital are laid bare and the devastating effects on health, environment and social conditions are clear for all to see.

Any serious commitment to feeding the world sustainably and equitably must work to challenge a globalised system of capitalism that has produced structural inequality and poverty; a system which fuels the marginalisation of small-scale farms and their vitally important cropping systems and is responsible for the devastating impacts of food commodity speculation, land takeovers, rigged trade and an industrial system of agriculture.

And embedded within the system is a certain mentality. Whether it is the likes of Monsanto’s High Grant, Robb Fraley or Bill Gates, highly paid (multi-millionaire) white men with an ideological commitment to corporate power are trying to force a profitable but bogus model of food production on the world.

They do so while conveniently ignoring the effects of a system of capitalism that they so clearly promote and have financially profited from.

It is a capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose.

Genuine solutions: agroecology, decentralisation and localism

However, what really irks the corporate interests which fuel the current GMO/chemical-intensive industrialised model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives and solutions. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

This represents a challenge to all good neoliberal evangelists (and outright hypocrites) with a stake in corporate agriculture who rely on smears to attack those who advocate for such things.

To understand what agroecology involves, let us turn to Raj Patel:

“To understand what agro-ecology is, it helps first to understand why today’s agriculture is called “industrial.” Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… Agro-ecology uses nature’s far more complex systems to do the same thing more efficiently and without the chemistry set. Nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of inorganic fertilizer; flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests; weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture—that is, it produces many crops simultaneously, instead of just one.”

And it works. Look no further than what Cuba has achieved and the successes outlined in this article. Indeed, much has been written about agroecology and its potential for radical social change, its successes and the challenges it faces (see this, this and this). And now there a major new book from Food First and Groundswell International: Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up.

Executive Director of Food First Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system (also see this) of GM/chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.

He adds that the scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change. By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that has devastated the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.

When you fail to understand capitalism and the central importance of agriculture, you fail to grasp many of the issues currently affecting humanity. At the same time, when you are part of the problem and fuel and benefit from it, you will do your best to attack and denigrate anything or anyone that challenges your interests.

The Curious Story of Kim Jong Nam’s Death

Stansfield Smith

In the West, even among people who consider themselves not susceptible to government-corporate media propaganda, any wild story about North Korea can be taken as credible. We should ask ourselves why that is the case, given what we know about the history of government and media fabrications, often related to gaining our acquiescence to a new war.

The corporate media reports North Korean agents murdered Kim Jong Nam with a banned chemical weapon VX.   They fail to add that the US government is one of the few countries with a stockpile of this banned weapon. They rarely note the Malaysian police investigating the case have not actually said North Korea is connected to his death.

The story of his death or murder raises a number of serious questions. North Korea says Kim Jong Nam was not murdered, but suffered from heart problems, high blood pressure and diabetes, required constant medication, and this caused his death. The North Korean diplomat in Malaysia Ri Tong-il “cited the postmortem examination conducted by Malaysian health authorities, claiming that the postmortem showed Jong-nam died of a heart attack.”

Malaysian authorities conducted two autopsies, the second after the first said to be inconclusive in identifying a cause of death, before announcing well over a week later that VX was involved.

What was going on here? And why weren’t the autopsies made open to others besides Malaysian officials?

Why was the South Korean government the first country to come out quickly after Kim’s February 13 death to blame North Korea for murdering him with the VX nerve weapon – before Malaysia had determined anything? The Malaysian autopsy was not complete until February 23, ten days later.

Why did these two women charged with murder travel several times to South Korea before this attack occurred?

Why was the only North Korean arrested in the case released for lack of evidence?

The two women did not wear gloves, but had the liquid directly on their hands.  “The police said the four North Korean suspects who left the country the day of the killing put the VX liquid on the women’s hands.” They later washed it off.  Why did none of them die or even get sickened by it? No reports say they went to the hospital.

“Malaysian Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu  Khalid said the women knew they were handling poisonous materials during the attack…. leading forensic toxicologists who study murder by poison… question how the two women could walk away unscathed after deploying an agent potent enough to kill Kim Jong Nam before he could even make it to the hospital.”

“Tens of thousands of passengers have passed through the airport since the apparent assassination was carried out. No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken.”

Why, if a highly deadly VX used to kill Kim, did the terminal remain open to thousands of travelers, and not shut down and checked for VX until February 26, 13 days later?

Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said “VX only requires 10 milligrams to be absorbed into the system to be lethal,” yet he added that there have been no reports of anyone else being sickened by the toxin.

DPRK’s Ri Tong-il said in his statement, “How is it possible” the two ladies survived? “How is it possible” no single person in the airport got contaminated? “How is it possible” no nurse, no doctor, no police escorting Kim after the attack were affected?

Why does Malaysia, which acknowledges Kim Jong Nam is Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, make the outrageous demand that Kim’s body won’t be released to North Korea until a close family member provides a sample of their own DNA?

From what we are told, the story does not add up.

Ri Tong-il asked in his same statement “Why is South Korea trying so hard [to blame the DPRK] in this instance? They have a great political crisis inside South Korea [which is quite true] and they need to divert people’s attention,” noting also that the two women involved traveled to South Korea and that South Korea blamed the North for murder by VX the very day it happened.

Stephen Lendman also gives a plausible explanation:

“Here’s what we know. North Korean senior representatives were preparing to come to New York to meet with former US officials, a chance for both sides to discuss differences diplomatically, hopefully leading to direct talks with Trump officials.

The State Department hadn’t yet approved visas, a positive development if arranged.

Reports indicate North Korea very much wanted the meeting to take place. Makes sense. It would indicate a modest thaw in hostile relations, a good thing if anything came of it.

So why would Pyongyang want to kill Kim Jong-nam at this potentially sensitive time, knowing it would be blamed for the incident, talks likely cancelled?

Sure enough, they’re off, Pyongyang accused of killing Kim, even though it seems implausible they planned and carried out the incident, using agents in Malaysia to act as proxies.”

Is possible that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un decided to murder his apolitical brother, choosing to do so by using a banned highly toxic agent in public, under video cameras in a crowded airport of a friendly country? Instead of say, doing it by easier means in the North Korean Embassy’s guesthouse in Kuala Lumpur, where the New York Times said his brother sometimes stayed?

We are not supposed to doubt what we are spoon fed, that Kim Jong Un is some irrational war-mongering madman who has instituted a reign of terror. A safer bet is this is a new attempt to beat the drums of war against North Korea and its allies.

India’s Gender Reforms Need Greater Bite

Moin Qazi

Of all the world’s major ills – such as war, hunger, and natural disasters – none can quite compare to the millions of baby girls and female fetuses killed by parents  .The  National Family Health Survey 4 data for 2015-16  indicates that the practice of aborting female fetuses and murdering girls after birth is being contained  efforts

The   sex ratio at birth (number of females per 1,000 males) improved from 914 to 919 at the national level over the last decade with the highest in Kerala (1,047), followed by Meghalaya (1,009) and Chhattisgarh (977).Haryana also witnessed a significant increase from 762 to 836.while this has shown only marginal improvement   sates like Haryana which had bad records have shown very significant progress.

Life’s women with electricity, clean cooking fuel, toilets and improved drinking water reaching more homes than before, but improved infrastructure does not find a reflection in improved health.

Women’s health has improved, but only marginally. There was a slight fall in the number of women with anaemia — from 55.2% in 2005-06 to 53.1%. The number of underweight women fell by close to 13%, while those who are overweight and obese have risen sharply.

Violence against married women has come down. The percentage of women facing marital violence has dropped from 37.2% to 28.8%.over the decade. The number of women facing violence during pregnancy is now at a low of 3.3%. This indicator seems to reflect a better awareness of   rights and improved social standing among women.

Female literacy rate that has gone up to 68.4% as compared with 55.1% in the previous survey. The female literacy rate, however, continues to lag men who have a literacy rate of 85.6%. The number of females having attained more than 10 years of schooling also grew from 22.3% to 35.7% between NFHS3 and NFHS4.

India is home to 586 million women, just over 17% of the total number of women in the world. India is also home to 173 million women below the age of 15, which is about 20% of the world’s young women. So the developments and changes in the lives of these women socially and economically are of import, not only to India, but to the world at large.

Between 1981 and 2011, women’s literacy in India increased from 29.8% to 65.5%. In 1990, only 60% of 21-year-old women were literate and, in 2011, this figure had improved to 85%. The 2011 Census was a landmark because for the first time, out of the total number of literates added during the decade, females outnumbered males.

Between 1980-81 and 2000-01, the percentage of girls who were in school at the primary level (classes I to V) increased from 64.1% to 85.9%. In urban India, women’s literacy levels increased from 58.1% to 79.9% over the last three decades. In rural India, women’s literacy levels improved from 21.4% to 58.8%. Statistics for urban India are expectedly better than the all-India average. But rural India is not far behind in terms of decadal improvement although there is still a long way to go.

The NFHS shows that India has witnessed an impressive jump in financial inclusion of women+ , with 53% of the female population now having bank accounts as compared to a mere 15% a decade ago,

The 38% jump in women with bank accounts is complemented by the survey finding that 84% married women in the age of 15-49 years are increasingly participating in decision-making as compared to 76% in the third round of NFHS conducted in 2005-06. The data also show 38.4% of women own a house and or land — alone or jointly with others.

Not surprisingly, improvements in banking and an enhanced role in the household are accompanied by an increase in the female literacy rate that has gone up to 68.4% as compared with 55.1% in the previous survey. The female literacy rate, however, continues to lag men who have a literacy rate of 85.6%. Women with more than 10 years of schooling also grew from 22.3% to 35.7% between NFHS3 and NFHS4.

.The national trend of improving literacy is also reflected in rural areas among the 11–14 year old cohort. However, in the age group of 11–14 years in rural India, 6% of the girls were not in school while the comparable number for boys was lower at 4.8%. While on the face of it, these numbers may be discouraging, in 2006, 10.3% of the girls in the 11–14 years age group were out of school and the comparable number for boys was 7.5%. Clearly, even in a short period of five years, between 2006 and 2011, the enrolment of girls and boys is converging even in rural areas

According to a Harvard Business Review study, women in emerging markets reinvest 90% of every dollar earned into “human resources”— their families’ education, health and nutrition — compared to only 30 to 40% of every dollar earned by men.

India‘s achievements are heartening but a lot has to be done to undo decades of discrimination of women on account of entrenched patriarchal traditions.   When compared to other countries the picture of India’s gender domain is still grim .The status of women has long served as a civilization index. In our times, organizations like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) measure it according to specific indices such as reproductive health (measured by maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates), empowerment (measured by proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males with at least some secondary education), and economic status (measured by the labour force participation rate of adult female and male populations). India ranks a dismal 130th (out of a total of 188 countries ranked) on the Gender Inequality Index devised by the UNDP, according to the latest report.

Thus  while India has substantially improved its rank in the Global Gender Gap index — moving from 108th to 87th position  according to   released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) it  ranks 142nd in terms of ‘health and survival’ of women’ according to its parameters.

Supported by government’s policies, women are using whatever their levers of agency provide to bring about change in their societies.    Ela   Bhatt, founder of SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) whose  trade union movement  has helped realize the dreams of thousands of women at the grassroots level-vendors, agricultural labour, rag pickers, embroiderers, construction workers and countless other women toiling in rural and urban areas-has always believed in the enormous  potential of India’s  women.

“She has a name, an address, a bank account number. She has learned who the exploiting forces are. She is more aware that poverty is not destiny: that she does not have to accept that as her destiny. You see that transformation all the time. The macro forces change, but what the women have gained is self esteem, a sense of mutuality that is strength giving.

“But what makes me happiest is that they see that they are more self-reliant, and they are fiercely independent. This is very much the Gandhian approach.”

From a Free Society to a Surveillance Society

T. Navin

Gorge Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four depicts a situation of extreme state power in which the super state is controlled by a privileged few of the Inner Party. It is overseen by Big Brother who enjoys intense cult of personality. In this state there is omnipresent government surveillance. The government persecutes those with independent thinking which is considered as thought crime and enforced by the thought police. Those in outer party are expected to rewrite everything according to the party line.

The situation that is emerging in India seems to be taking us in that direction. We are moving from a free society to a Surveillance Society. The reason which guides the State to assume this supra power is to move in the direction of setting up Hindu Rashtra. The role of State is assumed to be to enable this process. The State assumes the need to have a fresh Social Contract between the State and the Citizens. In this new contract, the citizens need to give up their respective Social and Class identities and become what is considered as ‘Hindu’ identity which is again equated with ‘Nation’.

The State knows that there would be constant threat and opposition to the idea of Hindu Rashtra. There are inherent opponents to the same. There are opponents who come from various segments of Society and come with various ideological leanings. There are Minorities, Women, Dalits, Adivasi and Workers who are opposed to this idea of Hindu Rashtra. There are Marxists, Ambedkarites, Gandhians and Liberals who tooth and nail oppose the idea of Hindu Rashtra. Such segments and ideologies become a threat to the idea of setting such a State. In this situation, the State assumes the need to achieve the Social contract between the citizens and the state by hook or crook.

This desire of achieving the same makes them to open up avenues to those who are considered as part of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ party. All the powers are concentrated in small elite consisting of the Prime Minister and close confidantes such as Amit Shah with ideological allegiance to Nagpur RSS headquarters. The small elite are overseen by a Big Brother (the Prime Minister). In the process of overseeing, all the thoughts considered contrary to the idea of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ are considered as ‘thought crimes’ and branded as anti-national or pro-terrorist. There is thought police who are constantly into identification of ‘thought crimes’ or ‘thought criminals’.   This is monitored by an inner party which consists of key figures of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and other organizations affiliated to RSS. The outer party consists of Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Bajrang Dal and other entities of RSS. The attempt is to identify those with ‘thought crimes’ which contradict with the idea of Hindu Rashtra and persecute them.

The acts committed by members of ‘inner’ or ‘outer party’ such as killing of the rationalists, incidents such as Dadri lynching and giving clean chit to the perpetrators, events related to the acts of violence by Gau Rakshaks (Cow Protectors), hate spreading against minorities, constant tracking on valentine’s day and enforcing forced marriages, targeting students of opposite ideological fronts and branding their resistance as anti-national, targeting ‘thought leaders’ of opposite camp as ‘thought  crimes’, trolling the ‘thought leaders’ of the opposite front and constantly abusing them, creating fake images stories around those resisting are part of the process of exercising ‘thought control’ against those involved in what it considers ‘thought crimes’.

The increasing spaces being provided to Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in University and College campuses and its assuming responsibility as to what events should or should not be held in campuses, RSS deciding on what should or should not be written or spoken, Bajrang Dal taking up the role of deciding as to what is Indian culture and imposing it on people, saffron coterie deciding as to what is or is not an anti-national act, the ones with leanings to the saffron ideologies being provided spaces in top leadership of academic and non-academic bodies are part of an attempt at achieving ‘thought control’ and identifying ‘thought crimes’ by members of ‘inner’ and ‘outer party’.

This emerging scenario demands resistance to the idea of Surveillance Society. More than the opposition to the emerging surveillance society, exposing the hollowness of the concept of Hindu Rashtra may be the need. A society based on an idea of a religious identity and supposed religious supremacy is an artificial construct which work against the demands for equity and equality for all. It can never meet the material, human and spiritual aspirations of human beings. It is important to expose that those inflicting this surveillance are the ones who are involved in ‘thought crimes’.

Australia: Three homeless people killed in arson attack

Chris Sadlier 

Three homeless people were burnt to death last week in a disused factory where they were squatting in the inner-western Melbourne suburb of Footscray. The horrific deaths have again focused attention of the dangerous and nightmarish conditions facing thousands of people who are sleeping rough throughout Australia.

Emergency services were called to the rear of the old Kinnear’s rope factory at 11.30 p.m. last Wednesday after reports of a fire and explosion. After the fire was extinguished, about 45 minutes later, three bodies were found inside.

Five days later police revealed that two of the victims were a mother and daughter—Tanya and Zoe Elizabeth Burmeister—aged 32 and 15. A third person, a man, has yet to be formally identified but is reported to have been known as Bluey. He had been living in the empty factory for more than a year.

A 52-year-old man, Darren Patrick Clover, who is accused of starting the fire, has been charged with three counts of murder, arson causing death and arson. He allegedly set it alight after dousing the dwelling with petrol purchased from a nearby petrol station. The occupants, who often padlocked themselves into the building to protect themselves from intruders, were unable to escape.

Nothing is known about any relationship that Clover might have had with the three living in the factory and therefore the immediate reasons for the alleged arson. However, the roots of this tragedy lie in the growing poverty and unemployment, lack of affordable housing and inadequate social welfare and mental health care facilities. These circumstances are the outcome of policies imposed over the past three decades by successive Australian governments—state and federal, Liberal and Labor alike—on behalf of the corporate elite that has further enriched themselves during this period.

According to media reports, Tanya Burmeister had a long history of substance abuse and was still a teenager when she gave birth to her daughter. In 2012, after a series of partnerships with violent men, she lost custody of Zoe with the Department of Human Services (DHS) placing the child in a home with a carer.

Zoe had recently been reported as missing and had gone to the empty Footscray factory to be with her mother. She had just enrolled in a new high school a few weeks before she was killed.

Tania Burmeister’s sister, Shaylee Tennyson told the media, that Zoe’s death could have been prevented if the DHS had intervened and put the teenager into secure welfare. She pointed to the rundown of welfare services, telling the Herald Sun that she had raised concerns about Zoe’s welfare with child protection services on a number of occasions but nothing was done.

“How many families have to go through this before you change your system?” Tennyson said. “It’s broken, it’s fractured and it’s traumatised and it’s not working. The procedures need to be overhauled and more staff hired. If it was effective Zoe would still be here in secure welfare, not dead in a squat she was living in.”

A nearby milk-bar owner told the Fairfax Media that Tanya and Bluey regularly used the pay phone and ATM at her shop. “They were always nice, here every day. He used to sleep in his car but he had too many fines and the government took it so then he was sleeping in there [the factory],” she said.

It is not clear what motivated the arson attack but the legal aid lawyer for Darren Clover told the Melbourne court that her client needed an urgent mental-health assessment and was a “significant” risk of self-harm. Clover suffered from depression and was on medication, refused to appear at the initial filing hearing, remaining in his cell, and did not apply for bail. The committal hearing will commence on June 9.

A day before the fire, the Maribyrnong Council approved plans for a multi-million dollar redevelopment of the 3.3-hectare disused factory site. Kinnears, which was established in Footscray in 1903, became the state’s largest rope works, employing at its peak about 1,000 people in round-the-clock shifts. It closed in 2002.

The site was sold in 2002 to a property developer for $8 million and five years later the AXF Group purchased it for $16 million. In 2012 the Victorian government approved plans for over 1,000 apartments: but construction has never begun. Two years later AXF sold it to another property developer, R&F Estate for $60 million.

R&F Estate plans to build up to 1,400 apartments in several multi-storey blocks on the site; reportedly it will be one of the largest privately-owned apartment complexes in Melbourne. The state Labor government has mandated that only 5 percent of these properties are required to be what is officially defined as “affordable.”

According to the latest figures, Maribyrnong and neighbouring Braybrook are the fourth most disadvantaged municipality and suburb respectively in the Melbourne metropolitan area. The official unemployment rate in Maribyrnong is 7.9 percent and in Braybrook 13.3 percent, compared to a national average of 5.7 percent.

The corporate media in Melbourne responded to Wednesday’s attack with feigned concern over the horrific death of the homeless using photographs appropriated from Tanya and Zoe Burmeister’s Facebook accounts and testimony from relatives.

This reportage is thoroughly disingenuous and designed to cover up their own role—the demonisation of the homeless and cover-up of government cutbacks and other retrogressive decisions—in creating the conditions that led to the murders.

The Murdoch-owned Herald-Sun, for example, working in tandem with the police, Melbourne’s city council and the state Labor government, has been running a vicious year-long campaign aimed at driving the homeless out of Melbourne’s central business district.

Earlier this year the newspaper published a series of sensationalist front-page stories accusing homeless people of harassment, drug-taking, and of faking their poverty. Such has been the media and police harassment that last June homeless people staged a demonstration in the city centre.

In January, large contingents of police used “move on” powers to shift groups of homeless from busy areas within the city’s central business district. The operation was timed for the beginning of the Australian Open tennis tournament, a significant tourist draw card.

The growing homeless crisis is a sharp indication of mounting social distress in working-class areas. The number of people sleeping rough in Melbourne’s central business district has risen by 74 percent in two years, from 142 in 2014, to 247 in the middle of 2016. One welfare agency has reported that eight new people were arriving on Melbourne’s streets every week.

The lack of affordable private accommodation has been exacerbated by the closure of a number of caravan parks and inner-city boarding houses that were bought up by property developers.

State and federal governments have systematically slashed funding for public housing and opened up the market to private developers. As a consequence, there is now more than 32,000 people on the waiting list for public housing in Victoria. This figure, however, would be far higher if it were not for people choosing not to apply due to the lengthy wait involved.

Doctors strike highlights catastrophic health care crisis in Kenya

Eddie Haywood 

Since December of last year, 5,000 doctors employed in public hospitals across Kenya have been on strike, citing low pay and dreadful working conditions. The strike has highlighted the sharp crisis afflicting the health care system in the East African country.

The strike was called by the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) to demand the implementation of an agreed-upon 2013 collective bargaining agreement with the Ministry of Health, which guarantees a 300 percent pay increase for doctors as well as funding for new medical equipment and new facilities. The Kenyan government claims there are no funds to implement the 2013 agreement.

Striking doctors have described via social media the horrid conditions afflicting public-run hospitals. These include power outages during surgeries with patients still on operating tables, not being able to run proper protocols in post-exposure prophylaxis, preventing the spread of HIV due to lack of equipment and being made to stand by helplessly while critically wounded patients die due to a lack of ambulances to take them to another hospital specializing in intensive care. Doctors also described being forced to work without drugs, gloves and other instruments critical in delivering care to patients.

For many years, Kenya’s public health care system has been starved of funding from the annual budget and beset by corruption in the Ministry of Health. The last several years have seen an exodus of medical personnel to the private sector due to the appallingly low pay in the public-run system. Many Kenyans must use the public-run medical system because they cannot afford the high cost of private care.

Also afflicting public hospitals is the lack of funding for new medical equipment essential for delivering adequate care. Shortages in funding for neglected facilities have left public hospitals in a dilapidated state, posing serious sanitation risks to patients and staff.

Dr. Judy Karagania, an ophthalmology resident at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi taking part in the strike, described the horrid conditions to the Guardian in an interview last month: “The machines break down frequently, the doctors are overwhelmed. The patients, they are so many that they are lying on the ground.”

Another participant in the strike, Dr. Cynthia Waliaula, told the Kenyan Daily Nation of the heart-wrenching experience of losing a newborn infant, due to the hospital at which she was employed in the town Isiolo having only two oxygen tanks. “I think every Kenyan doctor has had to decide who gets oxygen. You are forced to play god,” Waliaula lamented.

In February Dr. Davis Ombui, spokesperson for the KMPDU, expressed the health care catastrophe to Voice of America: “We know many Kenyans are losing their lives. Even us as doctors, we have relatives, we have friends, we have family and it has affected us all. But the narrative we are sticking to is that we cannot go back and supervise deaths as it were.”

In the more than three months since the strike began, public hospitals across the country have seen delivery of medical services come to a standstill, leaving millions without health care. The Kenyan media has resorted to a campaign of blackguarding the doctors, blaming them for the crisis sparked by criminal underfunding.

Despite the efforts of the media, there is broad favorable sentiment within the Kenyan masses for the doctors’ grievances. The government is widely perceived and despised by the masses as the guilty party for its refusal to adequately fund the health care system.

The government of President Uhuru Kenyatta is keen to put an end to the strike, fearing a wider explosion of social outrage by workers throughout the country. On February 13, the government jailed seven union officials for a month for refusing to end the strike. This provoked a 48-hour solidarity strike by medics in the private sector. A Kenyan appeals court ordered the release of the union officials to carry negotiations.

In a statement to the press in January, Kenyatta denounced the striking doctors: “I have noted, with deep concern, the suffering of Kenyans as a result of the ongoing strike by health workers in government facilities. This strike is totally unacceptable and goes against the Hippocratic Oath and basic principles of humane consideration for fellow Kenyans.”

This cynical appeal to principle is particularly offensive, given the record of the Kenyan government’s refusal to increase government spending for health care.

Overseen by the Ministry of Health, public hospitals accounted for around 4 percent of government spending. The Kenyan government budget for the 2016 fiscal year was nearly $20 billion, of this a mere $228 million was allocated to Kenya’s public health care system. This paltry amount allocated for the health care of a nation of 46 million underscores the depth of the current crisis.

In addition to the paltry amount of funding for the public health care system Kenya’s government is beset by nepotism and corruption. An internal audit of the Ministry of Health leaked last year revealed that nearly $50 million was looted by Ministry of Health officials, accounting for a whopping 21 percent of the entire funds earmarked for the 2016 fiscal year.

The auditors stressed that the amount may be just a fraction of the total stolen, as the audit had not yet been completed for the entire account of the Ministry’s transactions for 2016. According to Business Daily Africa, the audit report to Secretary of Health Cleopa Mailu explained, “The small sample covered is an indicator that there could be a wider scheme wherein the ministry incurred huge losses to the detriment of service delivery to the public.”

The current crisis underscores the fact that capitalism cannot provide decent and humane health care to the Kenyan masses.

Kenya is home to some of the wealthiest Africans, including current President Kenyatta, who is worth $500 million. While the total accumulation of wealth by the top 10 richest individuals in the country totals nearly $3 billion dollars, the majority of Kenyans survive on only $2 or less a day.

According to UNICEF, some 44 percent of the Kenyan population lives below the poverty line, and access to decent health care is a luxury that they cannot afford. Kenya has one of the African continent’s worst HIV rates at 7.8 percent. Infant mortality stands at an appalling 74 out of every 1,000 births.

The cutting of basic services for the Kenyan masses fits with the broader overall pattern of governments worldwide in the wake of the crisis of capitalism which manifested itself with the economic breakdown in 2008, which are busy rolling back hard-won social gains attained by the working class over decades of struggle. Their aim is to make the world’s working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system.

By comparison with the budget for health care, Kenya gave far more of its annual budget to its military, some $2.6 billion; 12 times the annual budget amount allocated for the public health care system.

A strike by university lecturers has deepened the government’s political crisis ahead of parliamentary elections in August. While the KMPDU has limited its appeals to the government, the courts and oppositional parties, the strike, above all, poses the need for the political mobilization of the working class against the demands of the international banks and their domestic servants.

Kenya is carrying out a nearly five-year proxy war in Somalia on behalf of Washington, which has resulted in a catastrophic famine and refugee crisis. The aim of this brutal invasion is to subjugate Somalia under the control of US imperialism, as a significant portion of the world’s ship borne oil supply passes its eastern coast moving from the Middle East through the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden.

The Kenyan strike is part of the growing wave of class struggle in Africa. On February 20, at least five people were killed in Guinea’s capital of Conakry during protests sparked by a three-week teachers strike against the government’s decision to dismiss or cut the salaries of many junior teachers after the latest civil service exams. Many students in the West African country took to the streets to defend their teachers.