From Persuasion to Coercion: PsychoPharma’s “Priesthood of the Mind”

Global Research
James F. Tracy

The “psychopharmaceutical complex”[1]— modern psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, and an accommodative regulatory apparatus–sustains itself through a public belief in its medical scientific expertise and legitimacy realized through marketing and public relations. Now a combination of more direct government involvement in medicine via the Affordable Care Act, the 2013 release of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) new and expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Volume V (DSM), alongside more comprehensive systems of federal health surveillance and biometric identification technologies suggest how psychiatry’s behavioral norms and protocols will be more and more integrated into everyday life. Overall, the psychopharmaceutical complex appears poised to abandon a paradigm based on persuasion and belief and move toward a model encompassing coercion and decree to enforce its normalcy ideal.

“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”—Erich Fromm[2]

Since the 1950s psychotropic drugs comprise the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex’s lucrative masterstroke of public relations and marketing. Heretofore the prevalence and use of such substances have been constructed in the public mind through a conditioned cultural obeisance toward professional expertise and its amplification in advertising and related promotional discourse. Twenty percent of Americans now take at least one drug to treat one or more psychiatric disorders. Usage among women and children under ten doubled between 2001 and 2010.[3] According to the Centers for Disease Control the “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) class of antidepressants marketed under the now common brand names Zoloft, Celexa, Effexor, and Paxil, are among the most heavily prescribed drug types, with 11% of Americans over the age of 12 now on such treatment.

Pharmaceuticals are widely prescribed by psychiatrists and general practitioners alike as treatment of conditions delineated in the DSM, through which the psychiatric profession exerts worldwide authority in defining what mental illness is in a sweeping array of behavioral designations applicable to thousands of subjectively interpreted behavioral abnormalities. The APA recommends antidepressant medication for a large proportion of alleged maladies, such as what it terms “moderate to severe depressive symptomatology.”[4] Yet as historian David Healy notes, the current DSM IV has “conveniently made it impossible to define dependence on SSRI’s antipsychotics, or benzodiazepines as a disorder.”[5]

Between 1988-1994 and 2005-2008 antidepressant use in the US increased by close to 400%.[6] If usage were to expand further along this trajectory by the early 2020s two in five people will be taking antidepressants alone. Antidepressant sales peaked at $15 billion in 2003, yet expiration of drug patents, the pharmaceutical industry’s inability to produce new “blockbusters” to take their place, and increasing reports that such drugs are useless and often dangerous may reduce sales to as little as $6 billion by 2016.[7]

The four-fold expansion of antidepressant consumption demonstrates how “depression” and the introduction of SSRIs have no doubt been a tremendous boon for pharmaceutical companies. Yet how depression and antidepressants have become such a taken-for-granted element of the public mind is a far less interrogated social phenomenon. Pharmaceutical companies wield tremendous power over discourse and belief through a carefully crafted advertising and public relations agenda that exceeds the often useless and dangerous products they sell.[8] Such effects have capitalized on the cultural inclination toward deference to expert opinion—in this case toward psychiatry.

Constructing the Profession and Its Object

In 2006 investigative journalist Jon Rappoport conducted a series of interviews with Ellis Medavoy, an alias provided to a high-level public relations expert who played a major role in orchestrating and manipulating public perceptions of major health crises, including HIV/AIDS. Among the PR man’s revealing observations is how psychiatric expertise is largely the result of propaganda technique. “Problem equals mental disorder equals diagnosis equals drugs,” Medavoy explains.

The PR job is to dress that up and give it scientific sounding context and you throw in all sorts of stuff about “the research”—and you have an industry. But in the larger frame, you have a priesthood of the mind. An official priesthood. Licensed. And you sell that, too, using other words. You REALLY sell that. “No one else knows anything about the mind. Only the psychiatrists have the knowledge.” You sell “needs professional help” and “is going in for treatment” and “new breakthroughs” and all that crap. You sell it six ways from Sunday.[9]

The intricacies of building a public creed around the twofold deity of pharmaceuticals and psychiatry involves several processes specific to advertising and public relations. For example, linguistic specialists fashion brand names to “tap different synapses in their customers’ brains: those linking the raw sounds of vowels and consonants known as phonemes to specific meanings and even emotions.”[10] In this way the name for the archetypal SSRI Prozac was designed to have a specific resonance in consumers’ minds. “Prozac: Pro is a rather pedestrian beginning, but the sounds p, z, and k all score high for the qualities active/daring.” The name of Prozac’s close relation Zoloft involves the same method of linguistic engineering. “Zoloft: Zo means life in Greek and loft elevates the concept.” Like Prozac, the SSRI Paxil includes the sounds z and k, along with “crackling, buzzing sounds [that] may subliminally suggest activity to back up the sequence ac, which suggests the word action.”[11]

Japan is the world’s third largest market for pharmaceuticals and provides an illustrative example of the pharmaceutical industry’s capacity to manipulate and seduce a society into the wide-scale use of specific psychoactive substances. Beginning in 1998 the country loosened its regulatory requirements for drug sales and advertising. By 2001 US-style direct-to-consumer drug advertising proliferated and US-based companies controlled close to 50% of Japan’s $364.2 billion of pharmaceutical sales. The increased popularity and availability of branded drug products within a non-Western cultural milieu set the stage for marketing strategies involving the brisk construction of public perception to overcome cultural barriers and generate demand.

In the 1980s when Japanese pharmaceutical corporation Meiji Seika was in the process of having a drug to treat “obsessive-compulsive disorder” approved by Japanese regulators, company officials realized that Japan had no standard diagnostic test for OSD. The company therefore proceeded to write its own definition, using US descriptors as a template. In the late 1990s Meiji Seika took this practice to an entirely new level when it obtained the go-ahead from regulators to market its own SSRI, Luvox.[12] After receiving approval the company faced an uphill battle of having the drug accepted in a country where, according to a survey conducted by the World Health Organization in the early 1990s, the most common prescription for a “mood disorder” was a mild tranquilizer.[13] In light of this, Meiji and several other interested corporate partners proceeded in “effecting nothing less than a sweeping cultural change,” as one observer explained.

One crucial step: altering the language people use to discuss depression. The Japanese word for clinical depression, utsu-byo, had unpleasant associations with severe psychiatric illness. So Meiji and its partners began using the phrase kokoro no kaze, which loosely translated means “the soul catching a cold.” The message was clear: If you take pills to alleviate a stuffy nose in the wintertime, why not do the same for depression? The marketing director for Meiji and its affiliates says he would regularly make use of the kokoro no kaze line when explaining to Japanese reporters why the taboo surrounding the disease should be lifted.[14]

America was far ahead of Japan in its recognition of pharmaceuticals to address mental illness. The notion that depression was a potential epidemic requiring “treatment” was placed in the public mind several years before the immensely popular SSRI Prozac was introduced in 1988. The idea nevertheless requires continual reinforcement. So too does the questionable concept of “screenings” to assess potentially injurious “moods” or behaviors, a practice currently underway at some US healthcare facilities using DSM V classifications.

The Architecture of Psychiatric and Police State Surveillance

“Science does not possess the technology to measure biochemical imbalances in the living brain” physician and author Peter R. Breggin observes. “The biochemical imbalances speculation is actually a drug company marketing campaign to sell drugs.”[15] In this way, mental health “screenings” lack the objective scientific gauging and assessment of physical indications to determine the existence of a disorder. Rather, the opinion is based on the subject’s response to a series of questions.

Over the past several years marketing methods have been implemented in earnest on American college campuses to condition a generation toward accepting the routine nature of mental health screenings. In the early 2000s Wyeth, maker of the antidepressant Effexor, sponsored “mental-health educational campaigns” on 10 college campuses. The 90-minute program, titled “Depression in College, Real World, Real Life, Real Issues,” took place in campus theaters and was hosted by MTV star and Effexor user Cara Kahn. The program’s associated depression “screenings,” now a commonplace feature of the public health regimen, were given upbeat sounding pitches, such as, “Stressed? Come find out how much,” and “Come test your mood.” Industry representatives observed how such solicitations meet with higher interest among potential participants than would a more prosaic-sounding, “depression screening.”[16]

If the allure of psychotropic nostrums is wearing thin, as some industry and market trends suggest creating a need, by whatever means, for psychopharma’s corresponding therapies and products is essential. The anticipated dearth in antidepressant sales alongside Western governments’ broad acceptance of psychiatry’s superficial articulation of aberrant human behavior and its remediation may go a long way in explaining recent widely publicized studies alleging a growing epidemic of mental illness and government programs decreeing obligatory mental health screenings of youth and attendant pharmaceutical treatment.

What exactly constitutes a mental disorder requiring treatment? Again, the DSM V’s forthcoming expanded assortment of peculiarities provides some indication of what future screenings may look for. An individual divulging her enjoyment of an occasional cigarette will be classified as suffering from “tobacco use disorder.” A social drinker may be designated with “alcohol use disorder.” Someone regularly imbibing too many cups of coffee or iced teas may undergo “caffeine intoxication,” or, worse, “caffeine-induced anxiety disorder.”  Spending too much time browsing the web, visiting online gambling sites, porn sites, or shopping too frequently may be respectively judged as “internet addiction,” “gambling disorder,” “hypersexual disorder,” and “compulsive shopping disorder,” and accordingly prescribed treatment regimens.[17]

Further, the expansion of psychiatry under federal auspices increases the potential for its Soviet-style abuse to silence political dissidents, as the recent case of former US Marine Brandon Raub illustrates.[18] Taking an insistent stance that weather modification exists or discussing World Trade Center Building 7’s inexplicable September 11 collapse may be grounds for a diagnosis of “paranoid delusional disorder.” Activist overtures calling attention to the precarious rationales of the “war on terror,” the Federal Reserve, or an overreaching police state could be easily classified as having unresolved “oppositional defiant disorder.”

With such a broad array of maladies which are themselves subject to the psychiatric practitioner’s interpretation, nearly everyone is susceptible to the psychopharmaceutical combine’s scrutiny, especially as it expands its purview to younger age groups. “The [ACA] is designed to help increase incentives to physicians and other health and mental health professionals to look after people across the entire continuum of care,” psychologist John M. Grohol points out, editor of the popular website PsychCentral. “Research suggests that this sort of integrated, coordinated care is ultimately beneficial to the patient. It can help catch health issues before they become more serious concerns.”[19]

The growing mental illness epidemic—or the psychiatric profession’s contention of such—has severe consequences not only in terms of personal anguish, but also for entire economic regions. Mental health experts assert that close to forty percent of Europeans are mentally ill, a problem estimated to cost the European economy alone several hundred billion euros annually. A 2011 study concludes 165 million EU residents are afflicted with some form of mental illness. “The immense treatment gap ... for mental disorders has to be closed,” the paper’s lead author asserts. “Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life ... Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill ... patients in the future.”[20]

In the US, where the ACA stresses “the importance of integrating and coordinating the delivery of physical and mental health services and provides incentives to providers to integrate care”[21] an individual who may even have private insurance and visits the hospital for a physical sickness or injury will be increasingly subject to surveillance and evaluation in accordance with standards established by the DSM.

The Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 Mental Illness Surveillance Report stresses that 25% of Americans are mentally ill and one in two will develop a mental illness sometime in their lifetimes. Thus a program of “public health surveillance” comprised of “public health officials, academicians, health-care providers, and advocacy groups” will constitute “multiple surveillance systems” to “reduc[e] the incidence, prevalence, severity, and economic impact of mental illnesses ... assess associations between mental illness and other chronic medical conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and alcohol and substance abuse); identify populations at high risk for mental illness and target interventions, treatment, and prevention measures; and provide outcome measures for evaluating mental illness interventions.”[22] The project uses the DSM to identify and diagnose such illnesses.

“The public health importance of increasing treatment rates for depression is reflected in Healthy People 2020,” the CDC notes elsewhere, a ten year plan of the Department of Health and Human Services “which includes national objectives to increase treatment for depression in adults and treatment for mental health problems in children.” To aid the program the US government has established a Preventative Services Task Force that now recommends “mental health screenings” for children ages 12 thru 18. Like the Mental Illness Surveillance program, the Task Force uses the DSM as a template for its diagnoses.[23]

Conclusion

Given that the US federal government and insurance industry now have a combined investment in mitigating risk attached to the DSM’s classificatory scheme over myriad personal behaviors, individuals and the broader society must collectively ask, “Where does such surveillance end?” At present the individual may still exert some degree of control over what medical information s/he wishes to disclose to the medical surveillance apparatus. However, the increasing deployment of biometric technology and the rapid move toward an electronic “cashless” base of financial transactions all but ensures the end of this modest sphere of privacy and the complete realization of a far-reaching panoptic grid by which to locate and identify private idiosyncracies and thereby produce candidates for “interventions” and treatment.

An imperative for calling out and resisting the psychopharmaceutical complex’s ever-expanding grip on society is to understand and recognize its intertwined history with advertising and public relations of largely constructing public perceptions and what now constitutes a widely accepted set of beliefs toward mental wellness and disease. The fact that this enterprise will now be more closely allied with a national healthcare armature and a central component of the government-controlled medical stratagem suggests the coming fulfillment of a full-fledged pharmacological technocracy where through continued mass persuasion and government edict phony medicine and drugs will fill the vacuum of misspent and unfulfilled existence.

Organs taken from patients that doctors were pressured to declare brain dead: suit

Washington Post
Jamie Schram

The New York Organ Donor Network pressured hospital staffers to declare patients brain dead so their body parts could be harvested — and even hired “coaches” to train staffers how to be more persuasive, a bombshell lawsuit charged yesterday.

The federally funded nonprofit used a “quota” system, and leaned heavily on the next of kin to sign consent forms when patients were not registered as organ donors, the suit charged.

“They’re playing God,” said plaintiff Patrick McMahon, 50, an Air Force combat veteran and nurse practitioner who claims he was fired as a transplant coordinator after just four months for protesting the practice.

Patrick McMahon

The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, cited four examples of improper organ harvesting.

In September 2011, a 19-year-old man injured in a car wreck was admitted to Nassau University Medical Center. He was still trying to breathe and showed signs of brain activity, the suit charged.

But doctors declared him brain dead under pressure from donor-network officials, including Director Michael Goldstein, who allegedly said during a conference call: “This kid is dead, you got that?” the suit charged.

The patient’s family consented to have the organs harvested.

“I have been in Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan in combat. I worked on massive brain injuries, trauma, gunshot wounds, IEDs. I have seen worse cases than this and the victims recover,” McMahon told The Post.

That same month, a woman was admitted to St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx still showing signs of life, the suit said.

She had a kidney transplant earlier in life and network officials used that to pressure her daughter into giving consent.

“They say to her, ‘If you give us permission we will use your mother’s organs and we will help many, many people who need them,’ ” he said.

McMahon’s objections were ignored by a neurologist, who declared her brain dead — and her organs were harvested, according to the suit. McMahon even claims he tried to get a second opinion.

A month later, a man was admitted to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, again showing brain activity, the suit said. McMahon claims his protests were again blown off by hospital and donor-network staff, and the man was declared brain dead and his organs harvested.

In November 2011, a woman admitted to Staten Island University Hospital after a drug overdose was declared brain dead and her organs were about to be harvested when McMahon noticed that she was being given “a paralyzing anesthetic” because her body was still jerking.

When he objected, another network employee told hospital personnel McMahon was “an untrained troublemaker with a history of raising frivolous issues and questions,” the suit charged.

“I had a reputation for raising a red flag,” he said.

In order to harvest organs, the network needs a “Note” — an official declaration by a hospital that a patient is brain dead — and consent from next of kin.

The network hired marketing and sales professionals to “coach” workers to tailor their pitches based on the family’s demographics, said the suit, filed by McMahon’s lawyers Michael Borrelli, Alexander Coleman and Bennitta Joseph.

The suit said that on Nov. 4, McMahon told Helen Irving, president and CEO of the network, “one in five patients declared brain dead show signs of brain activity at the time the Note is issued.”

Irving, the suit said, replied: “This is how things are done.”

Network spokeswoman Julia Rivera said she hadn’t seen the suit, but noted that only doctors can declare a patient brain dead.

She called McMahon’s claims of a quota system “ridiculous. There are no quotas.”

A Staten Island University Hospital spokeswoman declined comment. Reps for the other three hospitals could not immediately be reached.

Additional reporting by Bob Fredericks

Drug giants fined $11bn for criminal wrongdoing

The Independent 
Jeremy Laurance

Fines are not enough to reform drug industry, warn lawyers

The global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than $11bn in the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions.

In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress, according to two papers published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Leading lawyers have warned that the multibillion-dollar fines are not enough to change the industry's behaviour.

The 26 firms are under "corporate integrity agreements", which are imposed in the US when healthcare wrongdoing is detected, and place the companies on notice for good behaviour for up to five years.

The largest fine of $3bn, imposed on the UK-based company GlaxoSmith-Kline in July after it admitted three counts of criminal behaviour in the US courts, was the largest ever. But GSK is not alone – nine other companies have had fines imposed, ranging from $420m on Novartis to $2.3bn on Pfizer since 2009, totalling over $11bn.

Kevin Outterson, a lawyer at Boston University, says that despite the eye watering size of the fines they amount to a small proportion of the companies' total revenues and may be regarded as a "cost of doing business". The $3bn fine on GSK represents 10.8 per cent of its revenue while the $1.5bn fine imposed on Abbott Laboratories, for promoting a drug (Depakote) with inadequate evidence of its effectiveness, amounted to 12 per cent.

Mr Outterson said: "Companies might well view such fines as a quite small percentage of their global revenue. If so, little has been done to change the system. The government merely recoups a portion of the financial fruit of firms' past misdeeds."

He argues that penalties should be imposed on executives rather than the company as whole. He cites a Boston whistleblower attorney, Robert Thomas who observed that GSK had committed a $1bn crime and "no individual has been held responsible".

Following GSK's admission that it had withheld safety data about its best-selling diabetes drug Avandia, the company pledged to make more clinical trial information available. But the pledge has "disturbing exceptions", according to Mr Outterson, and in any case is made under the corporate integrity agreement, which expires in five years.

Trust in the industry among doctors has fallen so low that they dismiss clinical trials funded by it, even when the trials have been conducted with scientific rigour, according to a second paper in the journal by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. This could have serious implications because most medical research is funded by the drug industry and "if physicians are reluctant to trust all such research, it could hinder the translation of … research into practice," said Aaron Kesselheim, who led the study.

Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GSK, said at the time of the $3bn settlement last July that it had resolved "difficult, long-standing matters" for the company and that there had since been a "fundamental change in procedures" including the removal of staff engaged in misconduct and changes to incentive payments.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said practices in the industry had improved and more changes to "build greater levels of trust" would be made. The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said it monitored the conduct of companies and took "appropriate action" when it uncovered malpractice.

Alzheimer's funding 'must continue'

Governments, universities and charities should step in to ensure funding is maintained for research into Alzheimer's disease, following a series of failed drug trials, experts said yesterday.

They were responding to a report in The Independent that the world's leading drug companies are giving up on the search for a cure, scaling back their neuroscience departments and focusing on symptomatic, rather than disease-modifying, treatments.

A spokesman for the Alzheimer's Society said: "This is not the time to back away from dementia research. Despite costing the economy more than cancer and heart disease, funding for research into dementia is only a fraction of these conditions. More funding is urgently needed if we are to defeat it."

Aspartame: Safety Approved In 90 Nations, But Damages Brain

GreenMediaInfo
Sayer Ji

A new study on aspartame has the potential to reignite the decades-old controversy behind this artificial sweetener's safety, or lack thereof.  As far back as 1996, folks were writing about the potential link between aspartame and increasing brain tumor rates.[i] Indeed, its intrinsic neurotoxicity and carcinogenicity has been confirmed in the biomedical literature. And yet, aspartame has been approved for use in thousands of consumer products in over 90 countries, [ii] and is still being consumed by millions worldwide on a daily basis – despite the fact that over 40 adverse health effects of aspartame have been documented.

The new study, published in the September edition of the Journal of Bioscience and titled, "Effect of chronic exposure to aspartame on oxidative stress in the brain of albino rats," aimed to test the hypothesis that chronic consumption of aspartame may be causing neurological damage in exposed populations.
They found that chronic (90 day) administration of aspartame to rats, at ranges only 50% above what the FDA considers safe for human consumption, resulted in blood and brain tissue changes consistent with brain damage.

Aspartame is metabolized into three distinct components: aspartic acid, methanol and phenylalanine. While aspartic acid is a well-known excitotoxin, phenylalanine only presents a serious health concern to those with a genetic disorder known as phenyletonuria. Methanol, on the other hand, is far more problematic, as it is not naturally found in significant quantities in the human diet.

According to a recent review

Until 200 years ago, methanol was an extremely rare component of the human diet and is still rarely consumed in contemporary hunter and gatherer cultures. With the invention of canning in the 1800s, canned and bottled fruits and vegetables, whose methanol content greatly exceeds that of their fresh counterparts, became far more prevalent. The recent dietary introduction of aspartame, an artificial sweetener 11% methanol by weight, has also greatly increased methanol consumption.[iii]

Moreover, the aspartame metabolite methanol (also known as wood alcohol) is highly toxic and is metabolized into the known human carcinogen formaldehyde and formic acid,[iv] which is known to be highly toxic to the central nervous system. Considering the fact that the normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 degrees Farenheit, and that aspartame will convert to its toxic metabolites at temperatures as low as 86 degrees Farenheit, the finding that aspartame is neurotoxic to animals is not a surprise. The authors of the new study surmised that the observed adverse brain changes were due to the generation of oxidative stress in brain regions.

Aspartame, of course, is a proprietary synthetic chemical not found in nature, and exists primarily because plants like stevia, which have significant, clinically-substantiated healing properties, can be grown in your back yard for free and are therefore not profitable commodities that can be produced and controlled only by a few.
But, aspartame is not the only toxic sweetener on the market. A growing body of research now shows that sucralose, known by the brand-name Splenda, is also capable of suppressing the immune system, causing inflammatory bowel conditions such as Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, migraine headaches, and DNA damage.[v]

The trick is to stick with naturally occurring compounds, whose sweetness is not associated with adverse health effects. Below is a list of natural alternatives, along with the number of potential health benefits associated with each, as indexed on our website.

Mainstream Doctors Say Supporting the 2nd Amendment is a Mental Disorder

Occupy Corporatism

Susanne Posnell

The medical industry in conjunction with Big Pharma want to classify the right to keep and bear arms as a mental disorder in another power grab to circumvent and eventually destroy our Constitutional 2nd Amendment.

More and more doctors are forcing the idea that we need a national healthcare approach to the problem that the recent shootings provide. While tobacco and alcohol is regulated, why not include the right to bear arms?

Dr. Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine at the Prevention Research Program speaking about the installing of public guardrails, said : “People used to spear themselves and we blamed the drivers for that.”

The staged shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin are being used by some scientists to declare gun violence be treated like any other mental disease – and perhaps by popping a pill, American citizens would forget to fight for their 2nd Amendment rights.

Dr. Stephen Hargarten of the Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin claims : “What I’m struggling with is: Is this the new social norm? This is what we’re going to have to live with if we have more personal access to firearms. We have a public health issue to discuss. Do we wait for the next outbreak or is there something we can do to prevent it.”

Hargarten supports the limiting of access to all firearms in his advocacy with the Firearms Injury Center at the Medical College in Wisconsin which is funded by a US government grant to lobby taxpayers into believing that removing the 2nd Amendment will stop gun violence.

An estimated 260 to 300 million firearms are owned by American civilians which equals 1/3 of US households. While gun-related deaths are not raising according to police records, the fear-mongering continues as a supposed trend with no justification.

Propaganda studies into gun ownership claim that alcohol abuse causes the likelihood of gun-related violence to rise, according to Wintemute. Banning assault weapons would control the amount of rounds a person could shoot, while the police officers would still be allowed to tout automatic pistols. By restricting gun sales to include minor misdemeanors as well as convicted felons, 40% of gun sales would be curbed. And with the classification of gun support as a mental disorder, more control could be placed on who ultimately can own a gun.

By devising tactics to reduce shootings, experts are trying to legitimize profiling so that they can identify who would be most likely to commit such a crime. Combining the psychiatric industry with pre-crime seems to be a relationship conceived by the global Elite.

More mainstream support for mixing gun control with pharmaceuticals come from Paul Barrett who has authored a book that coincidentally claims that current gun laws are ineffective and need to be stricter to prevent more deaths. Barrett says: “Criminologists have studied it, and the consensus is that those laws simply did not have a statistically meaningful effect on crime rates.” He also feels that the mainstream media focus on the shootings themselves ignore the actual problem which is actually a “social problem” which is subverted by “the overall gun homicide rate.”

Daniel Webster, co-director of the anti-firearm John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, asserts that “gun ownership—a precursor to gun violence—can spread ‘much like an infectious disease” and wants healthcare professionals to have influence over whether or not American citizens are legally allowed to possess firearms. Webster would like to see Obamacare have ultimate control of the classification of mental states with regard to purchasing and obtaining FBI clearance for a gun.

As Obama has done in the past, an executive order could be signed to force the issue through compliance with Obamacare restrictions on those deemed mentally defective and unable to own firearms. As with the mandate through EO on religious institutions to provide birth control, Obama’s executive power can again be abused to ensure his bidding is done – like any good Fascist Dictator would do.

The blurring of the line between Liberal Democrats and covert Socialists is confusing the perception of the 2nd Amendment in the social meme being purveyed by the mainstream media. By aligning Constitutional authority with the convoluted power grabs of the Obama administration, our Republic for the people and by the people is quickly descending into a control grid of which there is no escape.

The link between gun control and health care is a coercive way to equate fear brought on my recent shootings and removal of Constitutional rights that stand in the way of the US government’s tyrannical declarations.

IQ Foods: Processed Food Lowers IQ in Children, Nutritious Food Raises It

Natural Society
Anthony Gucciardi

Processed foods are the staple of far too many diets, particularly in the United States where 105 million people have either diabetes or prediabetes. These processed foods are filled with white sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, artificial food colorings, and a wide variety of other toxic substances. Interestingly enough, research shows that these are some of the worst IQ foods. Given the makeup of processed foods, is it any wonder that children are suffering from IQ reduction upon introducing these foods into their diet?

IQ Foods: The Findings

British researchers uncovered the connection between processed foods and reduced IQ. They followed what 14,000 children ate and drank at the ages of 3, 4, 7, and 8.5 years of age, with answers submitted via parents through questionnaires. The researchers found that if children were consuming a processed diet at age 3, IQ decline could begin over the next five years. The study found that by age 8, the children had suffered the IQ decline.

On the contrary, children who ate a nutrient-rich diet were found to increase their IQ over the 3 year period. The foods considered nutrient-rich by the researchers were most likely conventional fruits and vegetables. If children were to eat a wide variety of organic produce, superfoods, mineral-rich plants, and perhaps even consume a food-based multivitamin, the researchers would most likely see a substantial IQ increase. This eating plan would also benefit the children — or even adults — in other aspects of their lives as well, such as better overall health & well-being.

Processed foods have been known to wreak havoc on the body for quite some time. One joint American and Spanish study has even found that junk food products, particularly those containing trans fats, can make healthy young men infertile by damaging their sperm. Another study, conducted by scientists from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada, reported that both junk food and fast food consumption can bring on depression. The link was so strong, in fact, that those who consumed fast food were 51% more likely to be depressed. It isn’t surprising that some of the worst IQ foods are the same foods that cause numerous health complications.

World Bank Nominee Tied to Monsanto Shareholder Bill Gates, Soros

Natural Society
Tim McCoy

Obama nominated Dartmouth University president Jim Yong Kim, M.D. to head the United Nations World Bank.  Most people think that UN agencies benefit poor people, but this is far from the truth.

The UN World Bank claims to fight poverty in developing nations by financing infrastructure projects. But the UN World Bank is really a tool used to acquire Third World natural resources through conditions on loans that are extremely difficult to repay. The raw resources are then privatized by insider multi-national corporations.  The World Bank actually creates more poverty.

The nomination of Jim Yong Kim indicates that the World Bank may shift away from focusing on infrastructure and will instead turn toward providing health care in Third World countries.  Jim Yong Kim’s areas of interest include vaccines for tuberculosis as well as drugs for HIV and AIDS.

Kim brokered a deal with Big Pharma and the UN World Health Organization for expanding the pharmaceutical drug market to a larger populace in exchange for lower drug prices for second-line tuberculosis drugs.  Second-line drugs are used when basic treatment fails because of drug resistance.  Drug resistance similar to the new ‘resistant White Plague‘ brought about by big pharma’s drugs. Many in the medical community believed it would be dangerous to distribute second-line drugs widely.  Kim is also responsible for pushing HIV/AIDS retroviral drugs in developing nations.

HIV/AIDS drugs used in the Third World have profound side effects that include eye, kidney, liver and heart problems.

Jim Yong Kim says that the highest point in his career was when George Soros donated to Kim’s tuberculosis vaccine program, which was followed by a a huge grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for $44.7 million.  Monsanto shareholder Bill Gates, who has repeatedly stated that Monsanto’s GMOs are the answer to starvation despite scientific proof of the contrary, gave a controversial speech at a Ted conference outlining the controversial population reduction plan through ‘healthcare’:

“The world today has 6.8 billion people… that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

Additionally, Kim is the co-founder of Partners in Health along with Paul Farmer who is famous for saying that healthcare is a right.  Healthcare as a “right” disables health freedom to escape the medical health paradigm and choose your own methods of healing.  In addition, it also enables the government to determine whether or not an individual may receive care — the ‘right’ to live or die.  Therefore, this shocking and disturbing program falls into the category of a eugenics-based plan.

Conclusion:

The objective of Jim Yong Kim heading the UN World Bank appears to be to promote ludicrous policies by expanding healthcare through dangerous drugs.  Kim’s support for redistribution of wealth and socialized medicine may come with a tremendous price tag for developed countries (especially the US).  If the UN World Bank was truly a benevolent organization, the focus for the Third World would be on support for independent farming, clean water and food.

Physicians Received 760 Million from Pharmaceuticals in Past Two Years

(CBS News) A dozen pharmaceutical companies have given doctors and other healthcare providers more than $760 million over the past two years - and those companies' sales comprise 40 percent of the U.S. market.
The numbers come from the non-profit journalism organization Pro Publica, which assembled and continues to update a database on the payments.

The payments, says Pro Publica, are for consulting, speaking, research and expenses on the part of the providers.

Drug companies have traditionally been very tight-lipped about those payments, Pro Publica notes, but, "Over the past two years, companies have begun posting this information on their websites, some as the result of legal settlements with the federal government."

What's more, Pro Publica points out, "Federal law requires that all companies publicly report this data beginning in 2013. That information will be posted on a government website."

With bucks that big flying around, is the quality of care offered by providers accepting them compromised? "Absolutely," said Dr. John Santa, head of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center.

"Money works," Santa told "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Russ Mitchell. "Doctors are human. Doctors who take money from drug companies are more likely to give you an expensive drug or more likely to give you a drug you may not need."

A recent Consumer Reports survey had 72 percent of respondents saying they believe pharmaceutical companies have too much influence on the drugs that doctors prescribe; 85 percent saying they were concerned about drug companies rewarding doctors who write a lot of prescriptions for their drugs; and 76 percent saying they were concerned about doctors providing testimonials or serving as a spokesperson for a drug.

Useless Studies, Real Harm

New York Times
Carl Elliott

LAST month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and was carried out by Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer), was notable for how poorly it was conducted. The investigators were inexperienced and untrained, and the design of the study was so flawed it generated few if any useful conclusions. Even more alarming, 11 patients in the study died and 73 more experienced “serious adverse events.” Yet there have been few headlines, no demands for sanctions or apologies, no national bioethics commissions pledging to investigate. Why not?

One reason is that the study was not quite what it seemed. It looked like a clinical trial, but as litigation documents have shown, it was actually a marketing device known as a “seeding trial.” The purpose of seeding trials is not to advance research but to make doctors familiar with a new drug.

In a typical seeding trial, a pharmaceutical company will identify several hundred doctors and invite them to take part in a research study. Often the doctors are paid for each subject they recruit. As the trial proceeds, the doctors gradually get to know the drug, making them more likely to prescribe it later.

In an age of for-profit clinical research, this is the new face of scandal. Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit, and patients naïvely sign up, unaware of the ways in which they are being used. Nobody really knows how often companies conduct such trials, but they appear with alarming regularity in pharmaceutical marketing documents. In the marketing plan for the antidepressant Lexapro for the 2004 fiscal year, Forest Laboratories described 102 Phase IV trials — the classification under which seeding trials fall — in a section labeled “Marketing Tactics.”

Oversight bodies like the Food and Drug Administration generally don’t view seeding trials as research scandals: seeding trials are not illegal, and the drugs in question have already received F.D.A. approval. But even after particularly egregious seeding trials have been exposed, the F.D.A. has not issued sanctions. Take the notorious Advantage study, a seeding trial of the pain reliever Vioxx conducted by Merck. According to a 2008 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine, litigation documents show that the Advantage study was conceived and managed by Merck’s marketing department. Three subjects died in the Advantage trial; five more subjects experienced heart attacks. Oversight bodies should treat the Advantage study as a violation of research ethics.

How can studies that endanger human subjects attract so little scrutiny? Forty years ago, when most clinical research took place in academic settings, the main dangers to research subjects came in service to genuine scientific aims. A large regulatory apparatus was developed to protect human subjects from the ambitions of overweening academic researchers. In the early 1990s, however, pharmaceutical companies realized that it was faster and less expensive to conduct trials in the private sector, where the driving force is not knowledge, but profit. And the regulatory apparatus designed for the old era has proved woefully inadequate for the new one.

Health Care Battle Reaches Supreme Court

Legal Times
Tony Mauro

The titanic battle over federal health care reform is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Thomas More Law Center today announced that it had filed its petition for certiorari in Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, its challenge to a June 29 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that upheld the so-called "individual mandate" under the landmark health care legislation. That provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires individuals to purchase at least minimum health care insurance coverage.

"Review is necessary to establish a meaningful limitation on congressional power under the Commerce Clause," the petition argues. "If the Act is understood to fall within Congress’s Commerce Clause authority, the federal government will have absolute and unfettered power to create complex regulatory schemes to fix every perceived problem imaginable and to do so by ordering private citizens to engage in affirmative acts, under penalty of law."

As examples, the brief asserts that if the individual mandate is upheld in the health care arena, government would feel free to order citizens to take vitamins, join health clubs, or buy General Motors cars.

The petition may be at the leading edge of a wave of litigation over the controversial legislation, challenging the first of several expected appeals court rulings in coming months.

Because the 6th Circuit is the only appeals court that has ruled thus far, the petition could not make what is usually the strongest argument for review by the Supreme Court: the need to resolve a split among circuits.

Instead, the brief cites a rule of the Supreme Court suggesting that review is appropriate when "a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not, but should be, settled by this Court."

Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review

CBS News
Sharyl Attkisson

For all those who've declared the autism-vaccine debate over - a new scientific review begs to differ. It considers a host of peer-reviewed, published theories that show possible connections between vaccines and autism.

The article in the Journal of Immunotoxicology is entitled "Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes--A review." The author is Helen Ratajczak, surprisingly herself a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm. Ratajczak did what nobody else apparently has bothered to do: she reviewed the body of published science since autism was first described in 1943. Not just one theory suggested by research such as the role of MMR shots, or the mercury preservative thimerosal; but all of them.

Ratajczak's article states, in part, that "Documented causes of autism include genetic mutations and/or deletions, viral infections, and encephalitis [brain damage] following vaccination [emphasis added]. Therefore, autism is the result of genetic defects and/or inflammation of the brain."


The article goes on to discuss many potential vaccine-related culprits, including the increasing number of vaccines given in a short period of time. "What I have published is highly concentrated on hypersensitivity, Ratajczak told us in an interview, "the body's immune system being thrown out of balance."

University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Brian Strom, who has served on Institute of Medicine panels advising the government on vaccine safety says the prevailing medical opinion is that vaccines are scientifically linked to encephalopathy (brain damage), but not scientifically linked to autism. As for Ratajczak's review, he told us he doesn't find it remarkable. "This is a review of theories. Science is based on facts. To draw conclusions on effects of an exposure on people, you need data on people. The data on people do not support that there is a relationship. As such, any speculation about an explanation for a (non-existing) relationship is irrelevant."

Ratajczak also looks at a factor that hasn't been widely discussed: human DNA contained in vaccines. That's right, human DNA. Ratajczak reports that about the same time vaccine makers took most thimerosal out of most vaccines (with the exception of flu shots which still widely contain thimerosal), they began making some vaccines using human tissue. Ratajczak says human tissue is currently used in 23 vaccines. She discusses the increase in autism incidences corresponding with the introduction of human DNA to MMR vaccine, and suggests the two could be linked. Ratajczak also says an additional increased spike in autism occurred in 1995 when chicken pox vaccine was grown in human fetal tissue.

Why could human DNA potentially cause brain damage? The way Ratajczak explained it to me: "Because it's human DNA and recipients are humans, there's homologous recombinaltion tiniker. That DNA is incorporated into the host DNA. Now it's changed, altered self and body kills it. Where is this most expressed? The neurons of the brain. Now you have body killing the brain cells and it's an ongoing inflammation. It doesn't stop, it continues through the life of that individual."

Dr. Strom said he was unaware that human DNA was contained in vaccines but told us, "It does not matter...Even if human DNA were then found in vaccines, it does not mean that they cause autism." Ratajczak agrees that nobody has proven DNA causes autism; but argues nobody has shown the opposite, and scientifically, the case is still open.

Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice

Hubpages

Canadian researchers find a simple cure for cancer, but major pharmaceutical companies are not interested.
 
Researchers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada have cured cancer last week, yet there is a little ripple in the news or in TV. It is a simple technique using very basic drug. The method employs dichloroacetate, which is currently used to treat metabolic disorders. So, there is no concern of side effects or about their long term effects.

This drug doesn’t require a patent, so anyone can employ it widely and cheaply compared to the costly cancer drugs produced by major pharmaceutical companies.

Canadian scientists tested this dichloroacetate (DCA) on human’s cells; it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells and left the healthy cells alone. It was tested on Rats inflicted with severe tumors; their cells shrank when they were fed with water supplemented with DCA. The drug is widely available and the technique is easy to use, why the major drug companies are not involved? Or the Media interested in this find?

In human bodies there is a natural cancer fighting human cell, the mitochondria, but they need to be triggered to be effective. Scientists used to think that these mitochondria cells were damaged and thus ineffective against cancer. So they used to focus on glycolysis, which is less effective in curing cancer and more wasteful. The drug manufacturers focused on this glycolysis method to fight cancer. This DCA on the other hand doesn’t rely on glycolysis instead on mitochondria; it triggers the mitochondria which in turn fights the cancer cells.

The side effect of this is it also reactivates a process called apoptosis. You see, mitochondria contain an all-too-important self-destruct button that can't be pressed in cancer cells. Without it, tumors grow larger as cells refuse to be extinguished. Fully functioning mitochondria, thanks to DCA, can once again die.

With glycolysis turned off, the body produces less lactic acid, so the bad tissue around cancer cells doesn't break down and seed new tumors.

Pharmaceutical companies are not investing in this research because DCA method cannot be patented, without a patent they can’t make money, like they are doing now with their AIDS Patent. Since the pharmaceutical companies won’t develop this, the article says other independent laboratories should start producing this drug and do more research to confirm all the above findings and produce drugs. All the groundwork can be done in collaboration with the Universities, who will be glad to assist in such research and can develop an effective drug for curing cancer.

You can access the original research for this cancer here.

This article wants to raise awareness for this study, hope some independent companies and small startup will pick up this idea and produce these drugs, because the big companies won’t touch it for a long time.

Top Government Vaccine Researcher Indicted For Fraud, Austism Research Now In Question

The Intel Hub
By Alexander Higgins and Alex Thomas

A federal government scientist, whose research the CDC and other federal government agencies have relied on to assure the public that the mercury filled vaccines that we are forced to give to our children are safe has been indicted for money laundering and mail fraud.

In the wake of widespread breakouts of autism, immune defects, cancer and cell damage being suffered in many people who have been forced to give vaccines to their children, various independent citizen groups have launched community awareness campaigns and conducted their own independent research into the safety of the vaccines.

All research carried out by Dr. Poul Thorsen is now in question. The fact that this man has been exposed as a complete fraud should essentially discredit his research which the CDC has used to strengthen their claims that Thimerosal is safe and has no link to autism.

The actual indictment states the scientist was “aided and abetted by others known and unknown to the grand jury”.

However, it does not take a rocket scientist to read between the lines and realize those unknown others may very well be the giant pharmaceuticals companies and corrupt government officials in the CDC and the FDA who are on Big Pharma’s payroll and seem quite happy to force poison and murder upon the masses in exchange for a fat paycheck and their cozy lifestyles.

A press release on PR News wire points us to an indictment of the CDC vaccine research.

Vaccine-Autism Researcher Indicted for Fraud

SILVER SPRING, Md., April 19, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Based on last week’s indictment of vaccine-autism researcher Dr. Poul Thorsen for money laundering and mail fraud, the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD), a Maryland-based non-profit organization, is calling for further investigation related to the incident.

Thorsen, a Danish scientist, has already been cited for academic misconduct by Aarhus University in Denmark and is now charged with embezzling a $1 million grant for autism from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  For several years, Thorsen was involved in influential studies defending the controversial use of Thimerosal (about 50% mercury by weight) as a preservative in several vaccines.

Thimerosal has been linked to autism and other neurological diseases by numerous studies.  Dr. Paul G. King, Scientific Advisor for CoMeD, explains, “We need to consider the ever-growing body of toxicity studies linking the mercury in Thimerosal to severe neurological deficits, like autism, and to immune-system and mitochondrial damage. Such studies have shown that the level of Thimerosal in vaccines is not safe.”

As U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said, “Grant money for disease research is a precious commodity. When grant funds are stolen, we lose not only the money, but also the opportunity to better understand and cure debilitating diseases.”

According to CoMeD, U.S. health agencies have relied upon these now questionable Danish studies to sanction the use of Thimerosal.  CoMeD registered its concerns about Thorsen and his influence on these studies in a groundbreaking letter to Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General the Department of Health and Human Services, on September 15, 2010. An international community of researchers and advocates signed onto the CoMeD letter.
…..
Now, CoMeD is calling for an independent investigation into the scientific validity of all Danish vaccine-autism studies conducted during Thorsen’s tenure and into the possible inappropriate involvement of employees at the CDC.  Further, CoMeD is calling for the retraction of the 2004 Institute of Medicine report rejecting the causal relationship between Thimerosal and autism, which relied upon the Danish studies in which Thorsen participated.Read The Entire Article

Mercury Free Drugs has published the full indictment which starts of as follows:

Beginning on a date unknown, but at least by in or about February 2004, and continuing until in or about February 2010, in the Northern District of Georgia and elsewhere the defendant, POULT HORSEN aided and abetted by others known and unknown to the Grand Jury, did knowingly devise and intend to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud, and to obtain money and property by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and by omission of material facts, well knowing and having reason to know that said pretenses, representations, and promises were and would be false and fraudulent when made and caused to be made and that said omissions were and would be material.

Beginning in or about 2000 1 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilit awarded grant money to Denmark for research involving infant disabilities, autism, genetic disorders, and fetal alcohol syndrome. The CDC awarded the grant to fund studies of the relationship between autism and the exposure to vaccines, the relationship between cerebral palsy and infection during pregnancy, and the relationship between developmental outcomes and fetal alcohol exposure.

Defeat in Victory: the Democrats' Health Care Bill

by Shamus Cooke

Global Research

What looks like a big victory for Obama and the Democrats may be their greatest undoing. It’s true that the passage of Obama’s health care bill represents a significant political victory for the Democrats. But sometimes a battle won could equal a lost war.

It’s telling that Obama had so much trouble in getting his own party to pass the bill on a simple majority basis: the bill was so blatantly watered down with the corporate hose that anyone with their name attached to it feared future electoral doom.

This kept the Democrat’s left wing — the so-called progressive wing — from initially giving their seal of approval. It must be remembered that some of the left Democrats initially claimed support for single payer health care. After being scolded by the Party leadership that this demand was “off the table,” the lefts moved to the right and demanded a “strong public option.”

The public option grew weaker and weaker as the health care bill evolved. The left Democrats pinned all their hopes on it; they ignored the rest of the health care bill, which slashed Medicare and taxed the “Cadillac” health care plans of union workers, all in the hopes that a miniscule public option would give the lefts some political cover.

It wasn’t meant to be. The final health care vision is the brainchild of the monopoly corporations who dominate health care in America. Their power will remain untouched. Indeed, it will only grow.

Dennis Kucinich, the most “radical” of the progressive Democrats, waited until the last round before he threw in the towel to the health care industry. His capitulation is especially symbolic, as many progressive activists around the country remained in the Democratic Party solely because he was there. His inglorious surrender signals what many progressives already knew: the Democrats are a corporate dominated party, where liberal ideas are tolerated so long as they have no actual effect on policy.

Full Article

A Remnant of Reform

New York Times

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author, most recently, of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”

The health insurance legislation is a major political symbol wrapped around a shredded substance. It does not provide coverage that is universal, comprehensive or affordable. It is a remnant even of its own initially compromised self — bereft of any public option, any safeguard for states desiring a single payer approach, any adequate antitrust protections, any shift of power toward consumers to defend themselves, any regulation of insurance prices, any authority for Uncle Sam to bargain with drug companies, and any reimportation of lower-priced drugs.

Most of the health insurance coverage mandated by this legislation does not come into effect until 2014, by which time 180,000 Americans will die because they were unable to afford health insurance to cover treatment and diagnosis, according to Harvard Medical School researchers.

The bill’s 2,000 pages afford many opportunities for insurance companies to further their strategy of maximizing profits by denying claims, restricting the benefits of their present customers, and the benefits of the new customers who are mandated to buy their policies, all backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of federal subsidies.

Its main saving grace is that it is so inadequate and so delayed in implementation that the position supported by the majority of people, physicians and nurses –- full Medicare for all –- will have abundant opportunities to build around the country. The spiraling price hikes by the insurance industry are sure to spur the single payer movement to new popularity. (See singlepayeraction.org)

The Cost Of Defying Obamacare: $2,250 a Month And IRS Goons Pointing Guns At Your Family

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The cost of defying Obamacare by withholding compliance on your income tax return will not be for the faint hearted – families will be forced to cough up $2,250 a month while being closely scrutinized by an army of new IRS agents with fresh “combat training,” armed to the teeth with 12 gauge pump action shotguns.

“The Internal Revenue Service will function as the government’s chief enforcer for health care reform, should President Obama sign the bill into law as expected, monitoring both businesses and individuals to certify whether they have the insurance coverage the government requires,” writes Matt Cover of CNS News.

The penalties associated with defying mandatory health care are staggering. From 2014 onwards, for every month that individuals or businesses with over 50 employees fail to carry a minimum level of health insurance, they will be hit with fines of up to $750 a month for individuals and $750 per uncovered employee for businesses. For a family of four, this could amount to a whopping $27,000 a year ($2250 a month for each household).

“Because these new mandates and taxes are under the purview of the IRS, taxpayers and businesses could incur additional penalties normally reserved for normal income tax cheats, paying fees over and above those for not complying with Congress’ new mandates,” writes Cover.

The health care bill requires the IRS to monitor individuals and businesses via mandatory reporting on income tax returns. If you don’t pay up, the IRS will let loose one of their estimated 16,500 new agents, armed with shotguns and fresh “combat training,” to convince you otherwise.

The increasing transformation of tax collectors into heavily armed SWAT-like goons coincides with the passage of Obamacare, legislation which will rest entirely on its aggressive enforcement by thousands of new IRS agents sent out to harass individuals and small businesses.

Many people raised an eyebrow or two last month when the Drudge Report posted a request for quotes from suppliers for 12 gauge pump action shotguns to be submitted to the IRS. The request also mentioned the fact that IRS agents now receive “combat training”.

It seems that the increasing militarization of IRS agents isn’t simply to prepare for fleecing the many Americans who would undoubtedly stop paying their taxes should draconian austerity measures be imposed to deal with a deepening economic decline, but also to physically enforce the reality behind Obamacare – the fact that if you don’t comply with it then you’ll be treated as a tax cheat and a criminal.

When Obama’s own policy czars, people like Ron Bloom, say things like, “We kinda agree with Mao (Tse Tung) that political power comes largely from a gun,” as the federal government – even the Department of Education – arms itself to the teeth in order to enforce blatantly unconstitutional policies – is it any wonder that American citizens are purchasing firearms at record levels to defend their families from a government gone wild?

Not only will the IRS be tasked with enforcing penalties against Obamacare resistors, but they’ll also be kept busy monitoring over a dozen new taxes that will be created by the bill.

“The bill is littered with tax increases in order to fund the expansion of health coverage for Americans,” points out Business Insider, who identified 15 such increases, things like an excise tax on high cost employer-sponsored health coverage, tax surcharges on people making over $350,000 a year, as well as control freak measures like a 10% tax on payments for indoor tanning treatments.