The Democratic Party is an absolute marvel of hypocrisy . . . .

                Just as Rajjpuut marveled at how all the feminists that supported and elected Bill Clinton were nowhere in sight when Monica Lewinsky raised her head and Bill raised his cigar; and how all the feminists and other detractors with internet websites detailing the crooked tactics that won Obama the nomination (busing non-residents from one state to another to vote illegally, and using gangland tactics to win caucus states) by winning 13 of the 14 caucus states although in many the concurrent popular vote showed a clear majority for Hillary Clinton . . . how those feminists and others have embraced Barak, the Beloved. The Ol’ Philosopher cannot help but stand in awe at how the Dems who nightly roasted Bush for running a "closed administration" are now raising champagne glasses to Obama for much worse. To wit: lets get some of Obama’s promises of “openness” out in the open where we can discuss them:

                In his race to institute every possible liberal boondoggle on the road to out-and-out socialism, Barak Obama has been extremely diligent also to break every “moral” promise he made during the campaign.   The fanciful idea of a squeaky-clean outsider who would not be bound by old corrupt ways and “politics as usual” is clearly not being allowed to interfere as Mr. Obama raises corrupt Chicago machine politics to new heights, ‘er depths at the federal level.  This was to be a just and fair, open and accountable and transparent administration, was it not?

                And all that openness, accountability, fairness and transparency is . . . where? 

·         How come the press is denied access to Obama’s White House visitor logs?

·         Where and exactly how is the bailout, stimulus money being spent? 

·         How come, if it takes $16,000 to make a profit on an average Chrysler model and federal bailouts to Chrysler amount to $14,000 per automobile, it’s necessary to shut down any PROFITABLE dealerships especially ones that donated money to John McCain’s campaign? Or neutral profitable ones that compete within 40 miles with dealerships which supported Obama’s run for the presidency?

·         How come insurance offering employers and small businesses, in particular, have been left out of the crafting of the health care legislation?

·         How come Obama comes forward with an “agreement” from the hospitals; and from the drug companies and Americans aren’t let in on exactly what that agreement entails?

·         Both hospitals and pharmaceutical companies agreed to hold down costs in return for some sort of “expanded base” – what does that mean? Why is it profitable to those two entities to do so?

·         How come the UAW union which supported Obama’s bid is cut in for 16% ownership of the Chrysler stock ahead of secured creditors (a practice that 223 years of bankruptcy laws and bankruptcy precedent would refute) thus bankrupting three different state of Indiana pension plans? Can we doubt that the GM bankruptcy will cut GM’s creditors the same raw deal?

·         How come, despite his promises to eliminate the effect of lobbyists on government, Obama has invited so many lobbyists into his campaign, his inner circle and even onto his staff?

·         How come 20-some Czars have been created to run broad aspects of the nation’s business but we’re not privy to any details about them and congress is left out of the examination and approval process that is theirs by constitutional law?

·         How come the Democrats in both houses pushing forward Obama’s agenda create bills and them run them to a vote without allowing reasonable time to study the details? 1000-page plus bills cannot be created and voted on intelligently in three days.

·         How come the Democrats in both houses add amendments to these huge bills while pushing Obama’s agenda and the amendments are NOT offered for reading, period?

·         How come Obama is open about showing supposed Bush administration misdeeds, CIA interrogation by water-boarding comes to mind, but refuses to open up the counter-balancing information about the benefits of interrogation when Vice President Cheney demanded fairness?

·         How come Obama, who as a Senator sponsored the bill that became the present law protecting Inspector Generals has now fired three IGs who got too close to his friends and given those IGs no recourse in direct opposition to the requirements of his own law?

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

No Drug Too Deadly for Approval

and Continued FDA Backing

            Many Americans find it difficult to believe that the FDA is a corrupt agency. Well “blatantly corrupt” is the mildest term appropriate for the FDA. As Rajjpuut has been saying all along through the eleven earlier anti-FDA rants, we know that health care change is coming this summer . . . if they only make one change let it be wholesale radical elimination or total reform of the Food and Drug Administration. The outrages continue to mount: Ritalin, Celebrex, Avandia . . . Thalidomide is back again approved by the FDA (Rajjpuut does not make these things up) despite the horrendous birth defects it instigated in the 60’s. COX-2 inhibitors are allowed again despite 60,000 deaths according to the British Journal of Medicine evaluating the FDA advisory panels decision. The online website naturalnews.com put it this way:

“The fact that a single COX-2 drug has reportedly killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War is apparently not sufficient for the FDA to characterize it as unsafe.

“With this decision, a ‘ full safety approval’ by the FDA has now become meaningless. If the agency can put its stamp of public safety approval on a drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans and that was removed from the market by its own manufacturer following the revelation of studies showing alarming increases in heart attack risk, then what, pray tell, could possibly be the FDA's definition of a dangerous drug?

“For the FDA to consider a drug dangerous, it apparently has to kill more than 60,000 Americans. I'm curious what threshold must be reached before the FDA actually does its job and seeks to protect the U.S. public. Do 250,000 people have to die before the FDA calls a drug unsafe? 500,000 people? How about a million people?”

“There can no longer be any doubt whatsoever about the FDA's true purpose. Regardless of what the agency publicly states, when it comes time to make key decisions about the safety of U.S. consumers, the FDA will side with drug companies every time. We've seen it time and time again: with the FDA's reluctance to pull obviously dangerous drugs off the market in a timely fashion (Rezulin, for example), with the FDA's attempts to silence its own drug safety scientists (censorship of Dr. David Graham, for example), and with the FDA's collusion with drug companies in suppressing clinical trials and other forms of evidence that raise safety questions about prescription drugs. Corruption runs deep at the FDA, it seems.

“This decision with Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors was a defining moment for the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration. It was a moment where the agency could have sided with public safety and held fast to a position of responsibility and ethics. Instead, it chose to favor drug company profits and put its stamp of approval on a class of drugs that is arguably the most deadly drugs ever to hit the open market.

“A sane, ethical FDA would have not only banned COX-2 inhibitors outright, it would have put an end to direct-to-consumer advertising that ultimately led to the over-hyping and over-prescribing of these painkillers in the first place.”

Well said. The FDA does not even appear to be even making a pretense of doing the job it was created for. This once proud federal agency created immediately after the outcry following Upton Sinclair’s novel expose` “The Jungle” outraged the public in 1906 to demand protection from business charlatans in the food and drug industries. Nsaids, as a class are among the most dangerous, least necessary, most expensive and most hyped of any class of drugs.   COX-2 inhibitors are easily the most dangerous of the Nsaids.  Attacking nutrient supplements, FDA always claims “not enough evidence they’re safe;” when defending drugs they’ve let wallow onto the shelves “there’s never enough evidence to prove they’re dangerous” . . . regardless of all the deaths they cause.  This is one dozen rants now . . . the story ought to be clear.  Defend yourself from the protection of the FDA.

If the citizens of America with all the wealth of information about this most corrupt of agencies continue to stand for it, then they deserve the fruits of FDA decadence heaped upon them. Rajjpuut hopes we are a better more alert and informed people and will rise up and contact our elected officials about this most corrupt evil empire in our midst: The FDA.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

            Regular readers of Rajjpuut’s little rants will recognize a strong personal antipathy toward the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). That once great organization created in 1906, the very year that Upton Sinclair’s monumental novel/expose` “The Jungle” hit the bookstore shelves, has degenerated into the most corrupt federal organization in America. Rajjpuut, health educator he, believes that only a complete top-to-bottom remake of the FDA will allow any health care plan, now or in the future, any hope of success.

Americans believe health comes in drug bottles and the few in the medical community who know differently (they ALL should but are hypnotized by drug claims) aren’t advertising the truth.

 At the FDA they’ve long forgotten it’s the public they’re supposed to be serving.

Drug Culture Created by the FDA

and Big Pharmaceutical Companies

Costs Government Programs Heavily

Obama plans to put a new health care system in place doomed to failure at huge expense, personal-healthwise and economically to the country . . .  as we mentioned in rant #4, there are four main reasons why: 

A.    Government spending programs seldom work. 

B.     The two earlier programs, Medicare and Medicaid, did not help and only made health and cost trends already in place much worse.

C.    And mostly because, the President is NOT expected to address FDA re-organization or clean up in his new program: huge mistake, HUGE!

D.    Additionally, as far as is known, the President is not expected to address a single one of the points brought up by health educator Rajjpuut in his blog series “A Far Better Health Care Alternative.”

          American medical scientists have time and time again concluded research that underlines the simple fact that there is absolutely NO need for new drugs that mask pain but do not help cure the underlying problems. There are enough old pain medications at large, and the newer ones are just far more expensive and much, much more dangerous. But the drug companies keep cranking them out and despite the best medical advice ever known (First Do No Harm!), the FDA keeps approving them. The pure cost in money; the cost in iatrogenic ailments (problems caused my errors from doctors, nurses or the hospital itself; or by reactions to medicine) in money and lives; and the cost to the U.S. government all demand that the FDA deny approval to about 90-95% of all such drugs.

          However, the FDA in its inanity and corruption (see Rajjpuut’s earlier FDA rants) doesn’t even deny approval to 10% of these dangerous new concoctions. Year after year the list of horrendous side-effects for new medications we hear advertised on TV grows longer and more virulent. 

          Drug companies then go out of their way to see that their dangerous, expensive concoctions become popular:

A.      Nurses are paid by drug companies for using their products when they have that discretionary power

B.      Schools get paid thousands of dollars monthly for every child they help get prescribed for psychiatric drugs like Prozac or Ritalin.

C.      Doctors routinely get visited by drug sales men with huge amounts of literature “pushing” their drugs and even kickback offers and bonus offers if certain “quotas” are

 met

D.      A, B, and C above are clearly abuses that endanger the patients and the government’s coffers. The FDA which has the power to stop A, B, and C above from happening

never does anything . . . never.

The biggest abuse of all, however, is that drug companies routinely pay scientists and doctors on government advisory panels to recommend their drugs. And often the payments even come for recommending their drugs in front of FDA evaluation hearings and the FDA condones the practice.

Drug companies can now legally bribe** the FDA to hasten their drugs onto the market. 

It’s all a huge pack of lies, deceit, shady practices and outright corruption that endangers the public and costs the government immense amounts of money every second of every day. The FDA knows but will not tell you that:

A.      An aspirin a day makes strokes much more likely

B.      Almost all sunscreens cause cancer but don’t do much to prevent skin cancer (since sunscreens have become common, American skin cancer rates have risen dramatically, far worse than people under the tropic sun typically encounter)

C.      Lowering cholesterol does nothing to stop heart attacks.  The 33-year old high-cholesterol lie is the most profitable charade in the history of medicine making all the quack medicine salesmen ever known look like Honest Abe.

D.      Estrogen therapy is an extraordinarily dangerous practice.

E.       Roughly 60% of the most frequently prescribed drugs for the elderly are found on lists of drugs NOT to be given to elderly persons.

F.       Every prescription drug has dangerous side effects, nevertheless 20% of them have NO printed warnings on the packaging.

G.      Average Americans consume fifty pounds worth of prescription, non-prescription, and over the counter drugs every year (400 times more than Rajjpuut does!)

H.      People who don’t need drugs are now going into their doctors and demanding certain drugs they’ve seen advertised on TV.

J.        The FDA could IMMEDIATELY stop every one of these sad situations, the FDA does nothing!

            At the FDA they’ve long forgotten it’s the public health they’re in the business of protecting; and the public they’re supposed to be serving but the President, congress, and the American Public needs to remember that key fact RIGHT NOW!

The first necessary step in any health care change is to UNDO, REDO and UNcorrupt the FDA.

Live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut   

**   the correct term is "bribe" but the FDA calls them "expedited evaluations" or "expedited reviews"

Regular readers of Rajjpuut’s little rants will recognize a strong personal antipathy toward the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). That once great organization created in 1906, the very year that Upton Sinclair’s monumental novel/expose` “The Jungle” hit the bookstore shelves, has degenerated into the most corrupt federal organization in America. Rajjpuut, health educator he, believes that only a complete top-to-bottom remake of the FDA will allow any health care plan, now or in the future, any hope of success.

The Hippocratic Oath says, “First Do No Harm” . . . indicating that 90% of the time, doctors could be sued for malpractice for prescribing drugs they know can do enormous harm according to the official list of side effects.

Drug Culture Created by the FDA

and Big Pharmaceutical Companies

Endangers Citizen’s Health

            We all know that Obama plans to put a new health care system in place. Most of us know that it’s doomed to failure at huge expense, (personally and economically) to the country . . . here are the reasons why: 

A.    Government spending programs seldom work. 

B.     The two earlier programs, Medicare and Medicaid, did not help and only made health and cost trends already in place much worse.

C.    And mostly because, the President is NOT expected to address FDA re-organization or FDA clean up in his new program: huge mistake, HUGE!

D.    Additionally, as far as is known, the President is not expected to address a single one of the points brought up by health educator Rajjpuut in his blog series “A Far Better Health Care Alternative.”

The Hippocratic Oath, which doctors swear to, says “First Do No Harm” . . . since study after study indicates that 70% of the expensive drugs Americans take actually have “no effect,” and all drugs created, that means 100% of them, have proven and listed side effects: arguably from 90%-100% of instances when a doctor prescribes a drug for a patient, he is at least technically, if not in fact, breaking the Hippocratic Oath. America is a drug culture. People believe health and happiness comes in bottles. The information found in this paragraph is highlighted because of whistle-blowers who in study after study say that internal memos and other documents generated by the drug companies themselves reveal pretty much those same two sad statistics.

            When it’s also considered that a huge percentage of drugs are only designed to mask or alleviate symptoms but NOT to cure any underlying conditions and all these drugs too have annoying, dangerous and/or deadly side effects . . . the magnitude of the problem becomes clear. The FDA, by approving these palliatives and their side effects is making America’s health problems worse. The fact that drug companies now have the option to legally bribe** the FDA to expedite putting the drugs on the market has exacerbated an already horrendous problem. 

Need Rajjpuut mention that statins are the single most profitable drugs of all time and PPIs are very nearly as profitable?????? Of course a more horrendous example of FDA corruption is the conflict of interest that lead to the Celebrex (used for osteoarthritis; rheumatoid arthritis and painful menstruation) disaster in the first place and that same conflict of interest has kept that deadly drug on the market right up to the present moment with extra warnings added to its packaging. “First Do No Harm,” indeed!

Live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut   

**   the correct term is "bribe" but the FDA calls them "expedited evaluations" or "expedited reviews"

Regular readers of Rajjpuut’s little rants will recognize a strong personal antipathy toward the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). That once great organization created in 1906, the very year that Upton Sinclair’s monumental novel/expose` “The Jungle” hit the bookstore shelves, has degenerated into the most corrupt federal organization in America. Rajjpuut, health educator he, believes that only a complete top-to-bottom remake of the FDA will allow any health care plan, now or in the future, any hope of success. 

At the FDA it’s not considered “conflict of interest” if the public doesn’t know

At more than 90% of evaluation and recommendation meetings at least one member has a conflict of interest

is NO Concern of the FDA

            Before a drug is approved for the public the FDA will listen to a presentation by the drug manufacturer and then listen to expert witnesses.  Federal law prohibits the FDA use experts with financial stakes riding on the FDA decisions. According to NY Times Best-selling author Kevin Trudeau, however, this is a rule that is quite commonly waived.  Trudeau says that the FDA keeps these meetings secret as well as which companies are involved, what the nature of the conflict is, and how much money may be involved. Your tax dollars at work protecting you!  Rajjpuut has heard that waiving the conflict of interest rule might happen nine or ten times a month. Reuters and USA Today has run articles that imply a far greater degree of financial involvement than that, however -- that well over half the experts the FDA calls upon for testimony have a direct financial interest in the drugs or subject matter being evaluated. With stock ownerships, grant money, consulting charges or other incentives involved, Rajjpuut believes that if three times in every hundred instances the “expert” testified against his own best financial interests that would be very surprising. 

At the FDA what the public doesn’t know, can’t hurt them (“them” being the FDA). According to Trudeau, once the experts have been heard from (and there’s only one side represented in 85% of instances) it’s very rare that the FDA rules against their advice in broad general matters. If a specific drug is the subject of evaluation, the FDA appears far less biased: at these meetings only 30% of the experts on average have financial conflicts.

            Does this “unbiased” FDA evaluation process work? Listen to the extensive list of side effects that get mentioned every time some drug is advertised on the air. And what happens when the side-effects are truly dangerous or even deadly? The FDA very seldom “pulls” a drug from the market. Instead they typically recommend including another warning on the packaging. Before 1990 less than 60% of drugs were approved today it’s over 80%. Before 1990 about 5% of the drugs approved by the FDA were brand new to the world. Since 1998 the FDA has made enormous amounts of fees approving drugs, 2/3 of them first-time drugs on the market. It is now also considered part of doing business normally for the drug company to legally bribe** the FDA to conclude it’s business much faster than unbribed examinations take. 

            The Celebrex story is one of the most infamous of FDA approved drug debacles, Celebrex is still on the market despite a horrendous record with deaths and injuries. Despite this when it was reviewed the FDA recommended it stay on the market.  According to Kevin Trudeau virtually every advisory panel member profited from the decision to keep it on the market. Statins (cholesterol lowering drugs) are dangerous, expensive and amount to a virtual life-subscription. Guess what? Only 47% of the people who die from heart attacks have elevated cholesterol readings.  The FDA was aware of studies showing that cholesterol had no cause-effect relationship with heart attacks back in 1976. For several years the FDA allowed eggs to be attacked as dangerous causes of high cholesterol and to this day allows drug companies to sell dangerous, expensive statins with utter impunity.

Acid Reflux medicines (proton pump inhibitors) are potions without a real disease. 90% of the time when heartburn strikes, the cause is too little acid, not too much. Acid reflux medicine actually makes heartburn worse.

Rajjpuut wants to puke when he thinks about the FDA and its horrendous corruption, but he’s afraid someone might give him some FDA recommended medicine – oh no!

Regular readers of Rajjpuut’s little rants will recognize a strong personal antipathy toward the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). That once great organization created in 1906, the very year that Upton Sinclair’s monumental novel/expose` “The Jungle” hit the bookstore shelves, has degenerated into the most corrupt federal organization in America. Rajjpuut, health educator he, believes that only a complete top-to-bottom remake of the FDA will allow any health care plan, now or in the future, any hope of success. 

            Today, the single-worst enemy of individual Americans’ health is the Food and Drug Administration. This corrupt bureaucratic dinosaur has not been a positive force on this nation’s health scene for a minimum of 43 years.  If ever the fox could be said to be in charge of the henhouse:  the FDA  epitomizes it.  Populated by employees from the very food and drug industries they're supposed to monitor (who often return to their original companies when their FDA stint is through) . . . the FDA acts to protect corruption and corrupt people in those industries to the degradation of public safety and health.  Here is an agency which makes police-state-like raids on doctors and health food stores that dare to care for you and me.  Pathetic excuse for our taxpayer dollars  . . . .

Just a bit over a century ago Upton Sinclair wrote his monumental expose, “The Jungle.” The Jungle was nominally a novel, but really just an intriguing catalog and description of the corruptions and horrific willful sanitation atrocities found in the American meat-packing industry in 1906. The FDA was created that same year, 1906, and performed wonder after wonder in cleaning up this disgraceful situation and protecting the public from evil people who put profit above public safety. Today, that once highly laudable FDA is nowhere in sight: the modern FDA motto is surely Pogo’s “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us!”  Somewhere along the way the FDA badly lost its way.

Today, the FDA seemingly has abdicated the role it was created for: protecting our food. Large scale recalls of salmonella- and e.coli-infected food are in the news at least once a month. The FDA has become an agency which is causing more harm than good . . . It now allows drug companies to control how long the approval testing process takes by collecting legal “bribes” from them to shorten the testing processes. The FDA whose employee rolls are dominated by castoffs from the very companies it monitors, is seemingly in league with the large pharmaceutical companies and even after repeated deaths from drugs approved by the FDA itself, those poisons are allowed to continue on the market. 

The surest way to help create the proper and helpful climate for health care in this nation would be to scrap the FDA immediately and replace it with a brand new agency which is not allowed to hire anyone who’s worked in any food or drug business monitored by the FDA. Since that won’t happen, the FDA will not change and it will continue to be a negative force on the American health care scene.  Something needs to be done, but short of a complete annihilation of the agency and refusal to rehire a single one of its present management and executive people . . . nothing else makes sense.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Bob

Too Big to Fail -- Childish Strategy

            By his direct personal sabotage of secured creditors of Chrysler Automotive; and elevating lesser parties (the union workers of the auto maker who had no such status) above them . . . and personally serving as judge, jury and executioner on one bankruptcy case and preparing to do the same on a second:  Barak Obama showed the country his twisted sense of values. Yes, yes, Rajjpuut realizes that Barak Obama is a child of God, too – but the President of the United States should be an adult of God, don’t you think? On the one hand invoking the “Too Big to Fail” doctrine for an incompetent minor league auto company that’s had to be rescued twice in thirty years from oblivion and for a union that played a monstrous role in bringing about that failure . . . and yet curiously enough the State of Indiana is clearly NOT too big too fail since they were one of the secured creditors that Barak put the torch to. But presumably California is way too big to fail? But, wait a minute!  Since everything Barak the BelovED has done so far illustrates his devotion to huge central government, perhaps if all states are allowed to fail, there will be no states’ rights issues to obscure the socialist playing field?

            Since Obama campaign donors who own Chrysler and GM, even unprofitable dealerships, are seeing some nearby local more profitable rivals closed forever; and McCain suitors, even those among the most profitable GM and Chrysler dealerships are being told they’re closing . . . perhaps “too big to fail” actually means too connected to Barak?

Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,

Bob