How did Abbott Laboratories’ Humira become an $8 billion a year drug, capable of anchoring an entirely new drug company as Abbott splits into two?
How did it become a blockbuster even though such drugs (which include Remicade, Enbrel and Cimzia and are called TNF blockers) are linked to TB, rare cancers and lethal infections like histoplasmosis?
How did it become a blockbuster even though Humira is only approved for the rare conditions of rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis adults, Crohn’s disease, psoriatic arthritis and chronic plaque psoriasis?
The same way all expensive, dangerous drugs become blockbusters: an easy touch FDA, bought doctors and doctor groups, PR firms to establish diseases as “public health threats” and massive direct-to-consumer advertising!
The FDA approved Humira, the first TNF blocker to use human, not mice and hamster cells, three months early, in 2002, and its Arthritis Advisory Committee announced the following year, that TNF blockers do not, repeat not, increase the risk of lymphoma.
Abbott enlisted the public relations giant Edelman to “educate” doctors about the exciting new drug and to team with the Arthritis Foundation. It also enlisted the PR giant Young & Rubicam, and the healthcare advertising heavy, Harrison and Star to let the world know about their Humira deficiencies.
And Abbott gave out free samples of Humira to seniors in 2003 while it lobbied Congress to get the drug’s $15,000 to $20,000-a-year costs on the Medicare dole. It wasn’t even Halloween. (PS–it worked!)
In fact, Abbott advertised Humira so widely, pharmaceutical reporters asked why since the general public can neither afford the drug nor does it need it. “Rheumatoid arthritis is a market where people often don’t know what they have for a while,” and it is often “misdiagnosed,” said Abbott Vice President of Specialty Operations, Heather Mason in classic disease-selling Pharma language.
When Pharma sells a disease to justify a drug, the disease is always “under-recognized,” with “barriers” and “stigmas” preventing treatment and with under-recognized social costs and “burdens.”
Sure, Humira is expensive, Joel M. Kremer, MD, an Abbott consultant, told the New York Times in 2008 but there are unrecognized social burdens. “Inadequately treated rheumatoid arthritis typically leads to multiple joint replacements, lost productivity, lost tax revenue and a greatly diminished quality of life, as well as an increased risk of life-threatening infections and cardiovascular disease,” he said. “You have to consider what it costs to fix a bridge against what it will cost when the bridge collapses.”
In Reviews in Gastroenterological Disorders in 2007, Abbott consultant Stephen Hanauer, MD echoed the cheaper-to-treat argument. Humira treatment reduces “overall costs” and enhances “patients’ quality of life,” he says.
But is it really cheaper to give patients Humira when they could use less expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t suppress the immune system?
The Cochrane Collaboration, an international, not-for-profit drug review organization says, “Overall, in the short term biologics were associated with significantly higher rates of total adverse events, withdrawals due to adverse events and TB reactivation,” and stresses that, “There is an urgent need for more research regarding the long-term safety of biologics and the comparative safety of different biologics.”
In 2008, the FDA announced that 45 people died from fungal diseases from taking Humira, Enbrel, Remicade and Cimzia–20 percent of those who got sick! People who lived near the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys were especially at risk. The same year, the FDA investigated Humira for thirty reports of childhood cancer and its links to lymphoma, leukemia and melanoma in children. Yes, lymphoma.
This year, the FDA warned that Humira can cause, “a rare cancer of white blood cells,” in young people and five patients died during Humira trials in Italy. In the October 5 JAMA, an article warns that “potentially fatal Legionella and Listeria infections are the latest opportunistic infections to be added to the boxed warning for medications that block tumor necrosis factor (TNF),” such as Humira. The FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System discloses 80 cases of Legionella and 14 deaths and 26 cases of Listeria and 7 deaths in people on TNF blockers. Other articles, this year, link drugs like Humira to heart problems.
Still, the Humira’s spin machine is humming as Abbott prepares to found an entire company on the blockbuster drug. An investigator with the Italian trials called the deaths “bad luck” and not necessarily Humira-related. (Trials were not stopped.) An avalanche of Pharma planted articles dispute the heart findings. And Abbott is seeking approvals to market Humira for ulcerative colitis and pediatric Crohn’s disease.
Maybe there will be free samples.
Martha Rosenberg’s first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, will be published by Prometheus Books next year.
Written by Kari Ann Rinker for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Governor Brownback has some serious control issues. There have been closed door discussions on faith based marriage initiatives, a lack of transparency with proposed tax restructuring and a refusal to comply with an open records request regarding the drafting of proposed abortion clinic regulations.
Beyond these examples of governmental control and secretive actions, his state agency henchmen actively foster a climate of fear within their ranks. People who have legitimate complaints or concerns with the paths that are being taken are scared. These are everyday people, non-political average everyday working Janes and Joes who hold their tongues for fear of reprisal. Heads of local agencies reliant on government funding, find themselves in constant anticipation of the next cut, which could potentially endanger their very existence.
Earlier this month when Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt sent out a letter urging every Catholic church in the state to create ad-hoc committees which would work to pass a constitutional amendment against marriage equality, he caused a deserved uproar regarding the idea that a tax-exempt entity would take such an aggressive role in a political issue.
However, there is another issue in this situation which needs more attention:
According to Nienstedt’s letter, the church captains will be organized by the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the Catholic church, which will in turn report to the Minnesota for Marriage coalition for statewide efforts. Minnesota for Marriage is made up of the Minnesota Family Council, MCC and the National Organization for Marriage.
We all know the exploits of the National Organization for Marriage – how the group moves from state to state scaring up the populace against marriage equality via lies and scare tactics such as claiming that gays are “corrupting” children while fighting state laws demanding that it reveal its donors.
However, let’s focus more on the Minnesota Family Council. People should be reminded that group has a sordid history of homophobia. According to People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch:
Tom Prichard, the MFC’s president, maintained that LGBT youth commit suicide because they live an “unhealthy lifestyle” and that anti-bullying programs are ways to have children “indoctrinated in homosexuality.” Prichard also criticized Gay Straight Alliances, saying “it’s sad and harmful for kids to celebrate homosexuality when in fact it’s not a healthy lifestyle;” he went on to claim that Matthew Shepard’s murder wasn’t a hate crime and that his “death served an important ideological purpose for homosexual activists.”
Earlier this year, MFC was called out for having materials on its webpage which accused gays of pedophilia, bestiality, and the consuming of bodily wastes. Prichard later actually defended the inaccurate data. However after much outcry, the materials were removed from the webpage without any comment.
The Minnesota Family Council is scum. It is a group devoted to demonizing and stigmatizing the gay community through junk science and ugly propaganda.
Yet it is the same group which Archbishop Nienstedt seems no problem in teaming up with in order to stop marriage equality in Minnesota.
There is a great deal more at stake than talk of tax-exempt status. The question has to be is Nienstedt ready to barter the integrity of his Catholic diocese in order to stop marriage equality?
Could it be that Nienstedt is so concerned with the verses of the Bible which supposedly speak against homosexuality that he is abandoning the ones which speak against lying and bearing false witness?
How reliable, really, is Al Jazeera? A lot of people, sick of the superficial and officially-inspired “reporting” found in the Western corporate media, have turned with enthusiasm to the news newcomer¸ a Middle East based tv outfit that employs feisty journalists and often produces on-the-ground reporting not found elsewhere.
That’s great, as far as it goes. But what is Al Jazeera, who is behind it, and to what extent should we count on it to report the news with neither fear nor favor?
First thing to note is that the network is the creation of the royal family of the tiny, natural gas-rich emirate of Qatar, one of the most affluent countries in the world. Next, let’s look at the actions and aims of Qatar itself, and then at how Al Jazeera coverage does or does not deviate from those aims.
We start with Libya. Qatar, which is already known to have helped fund the Libyan rebels by marketing their oil, has just publicly announced that rumors it had troops and special forces operating in Libya were true—basically bragging that it had a central role in bringing Qaddafi down.
Qatar has admitted for the first time that it sent hundreds of troops to support the Libyan rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
The Gulf state had previously acknowledged only that its air force took part in Nato-led attacks.
The revelation came as Qatar hosted a conference on the post-Gaddafi era that was attended by the leader of Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who described the Qataris as having planned the battles that paved the way for victory….
It also has emerged that now the fighting is over, Qatar is to lead international efforts to train the Libyan military, collect weapons and integrate often autonomous rebel units into newly established military and security institutions – seen by the UN and western governments as the key challenge facing the NTC.
Qatar played a key role in galvanising Arab support for the UN security council resolution that mandated Nato to defend Libyan civilians in March. It also delivered weapons and ammunition on a large scale – without any clear legal basis.
Why is Qatar making this public? Because it’s all about hearts and minds—the corporations behind the land grab know that it is important to sell this to the public as an indigenous Middle Eastern thing with the West just “helping out” for “humanitarian purposes.”
Indeed a leaked plan from months ago for post-Qaddafi Libya includes a carefully thought-out proposal for avoiding the mistakes made in the Iraq occupation—including an initial occupying force “resourced and supported” by the United Arab Emirates, with essentially no (visible) Western “boots on the ground.”
What’s interesting about Qatar’s role is that it had no actual beef with Qaddafi—nor any direct national security motivation for doing what it did. No, it did it as a favor to the Western countries that wanted Qaddafi out. Because with Qaddafi out, and Arab Spring making things dicey, the Western militaries that protect the families that essentially own entire countries and their oil supplies get a new place to base their troops. This, of course, is crucial to the survival of the Qatari emir and similar dictators.
What then of Al Jazeera, which was started and funded under the emir’s authority and operates from Qatar?
If you look carefully at its recent coverage, you can see the extent to which it operates with the Emir’s interests in mind—more often than not, also in accord with Western objectives when they don’t seriously conflict with the Emir’s.
Perhaps you’d like examples? The biggest is Al Jazeera’s compliance with the sheep-like behavior of nearly all major Western news organizations in falsely describing the Libyan intervention as humanitarian in nature—and fully participating in disinformation designed to weaken Qaddafi and build international support for his ouster. (For more of what you did not see on Al Jazeera, see our Libya Primer. Then, if you’re motivated enough, check out Al Jazeera’s website and see what the thrust of their Libya reporting was. Almost no questioning of the NATO line—indeed, hook, line and sinker. Bingo! A lot like CNN’s.
Meanwhile, consider the extent to which it ignores anything that could give problems to the Emir’s fellow dictators over in Saudi Arabia. For example, WhoWhatWhy had a p.r. firm send our big story with major new revelations on ties between the Saudi royal family and the 9/11 hijackers, to dozens of Al Jazeera reporters and producers. Not one of them followed up. It can’t be the content–which is surely of great interest to its core audience. (We know that because we see visitors from the Arab and Muslim world coming to our site with growing frequency—hungry to know what is really going on in their own countries, and why. In that sense, they’re just like Americans.)
Qatar-run Al Jazeera is not going to mention anything that could raise questions about the Saudi elite, which is a parallel of its own elite as oil producers and non-democratic rulers.
Similarly, Al Jazeera did not properly cover the uprising in nearby Bahrain, another oilagarchy, where Qatar helped Saudi Arabia put down democratic protests that threatened Bahrain’s royals. And it did not properly investigate the wild inconsistencies and outlandish claims in US accounts of the raid that purportedly killed Osama bin Laden—including the odd, little noticed claim that the US dumped Osama’s body into the ocean in part on advice from Saudi intelligence.
As if Al Jazeera was not already dancing to the Emir’s tune, consider seemingly reliable rumors that the next head of Al Jazeera will be….the Emir’s eldest son. Don’t tell us controlling information and public perceptions is not crucial to that family’s survival.
More important than the self-serving purpose of Al Jazeera for its royals, we might ask to what extent Al Jazeera (and Qatar itself) serve as just another front for Western oil producers’ efforts to make sure they remain the “one percent”? Al Jazeera is itself a brilliant stroke in the disinformation battles—an “alternative” to Western news that is still controlled ultimately by the same interests.
As The Guardian noted (without bringing Al Jazeera’s coverage into the mix—The Guardian and Al Jazeera appeal to a similar audience):
For some analysts the emir’s strategy is to support democratic forces selectively in the Arab world, partly to improve the country’s international standing while diverting attention from the Gulf, where anti-regime protests have been crushed in Bahrain and bought off in Saudi Arabia.
We can root for Al Jazeera’s journalists to do their best, while remaining wary of the sponsorship of this outlet.
WhoWhatWhy.com is a non-profit, non-partisan investigative journalism website founded by Russ Baker. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or read more on WhoWhatWhy.com
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.
With the Occupy Wall Street protests reverberating from America, tens of thousands of protesters marched in cities across Israel, reigniting their struggle for social and economic justice.
Over 20,000 gathered in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to demand social and economic justice, with many echoing refrains now heard at Occupy Wall Street protests.
Protesters railed against a host of social and economic issues, including the growing gap between the rich and poor in Israel, with many protesters echoing refrains now heard at Occupy Wall Street protests in America. Many held signs that read “We are the 99 percent,” and several protesters mirrored the occupation language that has become synonymous with Occupy Wall Street. One particularly poignant sign read “Occupy Tel Aviv, Not Palestine.”
The rallies across Israel were held against the backdrop of tragic escalations of violence in the southern portion of the country. Rockets fired by Islamic Jihad in Gaza struck several southern cities, killing one Israeli civilian, and an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza killed at least seven Palestinians. In spite of the intense security situation, remarkably, approximately 20,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv, another 5,000 in Jerusalem and thousands more in locations across the country.
In the midst of such a tragic and emotional security event, these types of numbers would not have showed up for a protest of this nature in the past. The security situation – the rockets falling in southern Israel – would have likely trumped all else. However, as is the case in countries throughout the world, difficult economic conditions precipitated by government corruption and corporate greed are changing the game.
This is a new generation of Israelis – a generation which seems unwilling to allow security situations to paralyze them, a generation which can simultaneously address social inequities while acknowledging national losses.
A protester in Tel Aviv with a clear message of economic frustration directed at Israel's leadership.
Social justice protesters plan to continue their struggle with the nation’s first citizen-led general strike, called “The People’s Strike,” set to take place on November 1. Nearly 5,000 Israelis have pledged so far to participate on the protest leaders’ Facebook page.
Daphni Leef, the iconic figure who began Israel’s tent protests on July 14 when she encamped along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as an act of civil disobedience, spoke to the crowd in Rabin Square. Among many of her messages was the following:
“The politicians and people in power cannot decide when this struggle ends. We are the only ones who can make this decision, we are all responsible for this.”
Indeed, when and how this struggle ends will be up to the new generation of Israelis now leading it.
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My friend Marla is turning 50 this year. As she approaches Menopause, this savvy fitness buff decided to explore acupuncture as a way to moderate her hormonal swings. When I learned that acupuncture is a practice that stems back to China’s Neolithic Age, (c. 8000-3500 BC), I was fascinated and asked Marla to teach me more.
First, Marla explained the role of Meridians. Simply put, Meridians are pathways in our bodies that life-energy (often called “Chi” or “Qi”) flows through. There are 20 overall Meridians. 12 of these Meridians are associated with specific bodily organs and the remaining 8 are considered “extraordinary vessels.” These 8 are the reservoirs of energy associated with our overarching “spiritual axis.” The goal of Acupuncture is to address any blockages in your Meridians, so that your Chi can flow more fluidly through your body and create spiritual harmony.
What do Acupuncture and Meridians have to do with making your financial life less stressful?
I’ve been talking about the left brain mechanics of personal finance for years. Over and over I am asked the same 20 basic financial questions. In response, I (along with many other money experts) give the same 20 core answers. Yet financial anxiety remains high around the country. I began to wonder: Could these 20 basic money questions correlate to the body’s 20 meridians?
The most common financial concerns I hear tend to fall into these 8 buckets: earn, save, spend, give, invest, protect, reflect, reconnect.
That led me ask whether these 8 financial buckets might correlate to the 8 extraordinary vessels.
Since starting this MoneyZen quest, I’ve been blown away by the heartfelt comments readers have shared. A common theme I’ve noticed is a desire for a more balanced relationship with money.
Is it possible that an imbalance in our financial meridians – and particularly within our 8 extraordinary (financial) vessels – keeps us from experiencing financial peace of mind?
In my own life, I’ve felt financial tension in different areas at different times. During the first 15 years of my corporate life, my Financial Chi was flowing strongly through the areas of earning, saving, investing, protecting, and reflecting. But I was blocked in spending and reconnecting. I needed to learn how to experience joy rather than just saving voraciously. I also needed to reconnect with my Self and loved ones rather than hiding in workaholism.
When I became an entrepreneur, my biggest block shifted to earning. I struggled with both wanting to help women AND earn a healthy living in exchange for my work. I questioned whether it was fair for me to earn a profit from my current work when I was already financially blessed thanks to my first career. (For more on this common blockage, read this delightful piece by my creative writing coach, Brooke Elise Axtell called “What Is A Woman Worth?”)
Gandhi famously advised us to be the change we desire to see in the world. When I apply this concept to receiving money for my work, I find the block around earning starts to clear up. I begin to feel connected to money from a very different place. For a brief moment, my focus shifts from guilt or fear to wanting to complete the energy loop – contributing value to others and naturally allowing financial reciprocity to flow back. I want to stand tall in this place, lead by example, and earn a healthy living in alignment with my values.
It is this feeling of financial completion that I wish for all of us. I want this especially for women, who have far too long a history of putting other-care ahead of self-care, blocking the natural exchange of financial energy.
What about you? Are there places where your Financial Chi is currently feeling blocked? If so, what small step can you take today to begin the unblocking process?
[This post originally appeared at ManishaThakor.com.] Want to join the journey to MoneyZen? You can follow personal finance expert & author, Manisha Thakor, on Twitter at @ManishaThakor or sign up to get her MoneyZen email updates delivered right to your inbox by clicking here.
Populist movements are exciting; they are quintessentially “American” moments that validate our national mythos. This sentiment appears on both sides of the ideological divide.
Although they are an AstroTurf organization funded by the Koch brothers, the Tea Party believes that they are “of the people,” and in turn represent the authentic voice of a disaffected silent majority.
Occupy Wall Street, a spontaneous, unfocused, sit-in movement, speaks for an aggrieved and upset public who are disgusted by robber baron gangster capitalism, and an ineffective government that has abandoned the Common Good to the interests of the American kleptocracy.
The Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street, are united in a belief that their respective struggles are in keeping with the best traditions of American democracy and citizen activism. In all, they imagine themselves to be fulfilling the cornerstone values of American civil religion; moreover, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are (in their own eyes, and however problematic the assumption) ideal-typical examples of American exceptionalism in action.
While the former is more explicit in this regard (with their fetish-like worship of the Constitution and love of period regalia), both have embraced freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government for the redress of grievance, as values which are central to their respective “movement cultures.” Implicit here, is a belief that the framers of the Constitution would support their efforts and goals.
As it often does, and once more, history complicates matters.
The Constitution, while extremely radical for its era, is in many ways an anti-democratic document that is designed to subvert and prevent mass democracy. The framers represented a particular set of regional, economic, class, and racial interests. The Constitution was a compromise document that reflected those realities. For example:
1. The Constitution is an explicitly pro-slavery document which protected the interests of the Southern planters and those of the landed classes;
2. The Senate, founded as an American version of the House of Lords, was a representative body explicitly designed as a check on the House of Representatives. Senators would finally be subject to direct popular vote, as opposed to nomination, in 1913;
3. In order to exercise the franchise to vote, citizens had to be white, male, and own property, a requirement that would not be changed until the era of Jacksonian democracy. The practical effect of these rules was that a significant portion of the American public were ineligible to vote from the time of the founding through to the first decades of the 19th century (with white women being granted the right to vote in 1920);
4. James Madison and others expressed a deep anxiety about factions, the passions of a mass democratic public, and how infectious differences over property and wealth could usurp American democracy–and therefore ought to be protected against by the Constitution.
In total, the long arc of the American experience has been a broadening of rights, liberties, and freedoms, as well as the enfranchisement of whole categories of citizens originally left out of the Constitution’s vision of democracy. Ultimately, mass democracy has meant working against the elite democracy imagined by the framers.
While certainly not possessed of a lockstep unity of belief on matters of public and social policy (this flattening of history and mythologizing of “the founding fathers” was a product of the 1950s and the Cold War), the framers were, in many ways, the “1 percent” of their era.
Of course, one needs to be cautious in reading back to a specific moment more than two hundred years ago and importing the framer’s sensibilities to the present (What would they say about globalization? Would they be aghast that Corporations are now legal persons? How would they respond to an America that is extremely diverse and a global power?).
But, as Occupy Wall Street works in the best tradition of citizen-activism to reclaim the power of transformative, radical democratic action, it behooves us to ask just who the “1 percent” were in the past, and how their interests may (or may not) echo into the present.
Thus the question: What would James Madison, one of the most “elitist” of his peers, think about the 99 percent? What of the framers more generally? How would they respond to Occupy Wall Street?
It’s not easy to speak truth to power or long-form birth certificates. But Rick Perry is up for the challenge. Last week, when he was asked if he believed the president’s birth certificate was real, Perry responded, “”Well, I don’t have a definitive answer… I don’t know.” Perry substantiated his doubt by citing scholar and intellectual heavy weight Donald Trump: “I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night… That came up… He doesn’t think it’s real.”
Hallelujah ! We are witnessing… a revival… a reawakening… a renaissance… a rebirth of birtherism! Birtherism is being reborn. We are living a rebirtherism. And it is a fun rebirth! Perry himself explained this week that “It’s fun to — to poke… him a little bit and say, ‘Hey, how about — let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’” Let the good times roll!
Like birthers, these rebirthers are dismissed as using smear tactics. But people like Perry and Trump are the midwives of freedom, delivering a rebirth of birtherism, helping birtherism re-rear its beautiful head. The only thing these rebithers are smearing is a placenta of patriotism, all over the country.
Birthers are marginalized as racists. But when it comes to Perry and Trump, race-card dealers are barking up the wrong and totally not racist tree. Just ask Donald Trump, who is keenly aware of his excellent rapport with black people: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.” He’s so down with black people, he gets to call them “the blacks.” Though he can’t make the claim that some of his best friends are black, Trump can state that some of the people with who he has and has had a great relationship are black. And if that’s not proof of non-racism, I don’t know what is. Rick Perry’s relationship with “the blacks” blows Trump’s out of the (Wade in the*) water! Only a man with a lot of black friends gets away with calling his hunting camp “N*^#&$ Head Rock”! This guy has cred! And though he’s too modest to say it, Perry has a very special relationship with “the blacks,” and offers them that special southern hospitality; he provides them with shelter, food, routine and structure as they await their executions! Of the 321 people on death row in Texas, 126 are black. That’s 41%, even though African Americans make up 11.8% of the population of Texas! Perry makes sure the blacks, disenfranchised and under-represented in so many ways for so long, are finally over-represented on death row.
*Some of my favorite songs are black!
Written by Masum Momaya for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Cross-posted with permission from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).
As another June 12th – Russia’s “National Day” – passed in Moscow, the Kremlin calculated how successful its efforts have been to encourage Russia’s women to have more babies. Worried about declining population numbers, the Russian government has introduced a host of measures designed to encourage procreation.
Incentives include a dedicated ‘day of copulation’ that releases citizens from work for one afternoon to have sex; an all-expense-paid summer camp for young adults complete with private tents – and no condoms – and cars and cash payments for parents with newborns.
Fears of declining birth rates and population numbers are rampant not only in Russia but throughout Eastern Europe,[1] spurring interventions and bolstering anti-reproductive rights and nationalist campaigns by right-wing forces, who lament that that women are not fulfilling their responsibilities as child-bearers and that “native stock” are disappearing.
Right-wing forces have been gaining sway in the two decades since the fall of communist regimes in much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Anti-reproductive rights rhetoric from these groups has been given extra backing by the interrelated currents of the 20-year-and-counting economic crisis, mass emigration for study and work, growing xenophobia, and falling birth rates, whose decline pre-dates the fall of communism.
As these currents collide, the cultural and social directive for young women – as long as they are not members of poor, ethnic minority or immigrant communities – is “to have more babies.” Such directives, though, entrap young women, who find their choices limited and their rights violated amidst persistent patriarchy, racism and xenophobia.
Here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), we get a constant stream of emails from service members telling us about chaplains who just can’t seem to uphold the oath they took to the Constitution, and see their position as a chaplain as a vehicle to fight secularism in what is supposed to be — ummm — a secular military.
Earlier this week, we heard from an Air Force Academy professor and active duty officer who had attended a new faculty orientation at which the Academy’s head chaplain, Colonel Robert Bruno, informed over a hundred new faculty members that there is no wall of separation between church and state.
Here’s what the faculty member wrote:
“I saw the recent MRFF release about the USAF Academy (USAFA) Chaplain’s office publicizing books for evangelical Christian authors and, frankly, I’m not surprised. After all, what can you expect from an organization headed by a callous, unprofessional and uneducated individual who doesn’t even understand the Constitution his organization defends? During new faculty orientation this summer, this same Chaplain (USAF Academy Head Chaplain, Col. Robert Bruno) stood up in front of over a hundred new USAFA faculty and told them that ‘there is no wall’ between church and state! Maybe for him there isn’t, but for the rest of us, it’s a pretty clear concept. He then railed against the ‘increased secularization’ that has eroded morality in our society and proceeded to deliver a 15-minute ‘homily’ on why USAFA has only the ‘perception’ of religious intolerance, despite documented instances of proselytization and even ‘HR decisions influenced by faith affiliation!’ Seriously! If this is the individual that the leadership is relying on for counseling in religious toleration matters, no wonder the institution has completely lost the bubble!”
But was that the worst display of a U.S. military chaplain flagrantly deriding the Constitution that they swore an oath (presumably to God) to protect and defend? Hell no!
We got in one today that may just take the prize. This one came from the U.S. Army’s 1st Recruiting Brigade. At last count, forty-one Army recruiters — thirty-four of them Christians — have contacted MRFF, stunned and appalled by a “Thought For The Day” email sent out by Major Wayne Keast, the 1st Recruiting Brigade’s chaplain.
This is the email from the chaplain, sent out this morning to all Army recruiters up and down the eastern seaboard.
“I was reading an article yesterday about those being trained as officers in the service academies. Those who chose not to go to religious services when they were held were encountered by cadre and put on detail. They were seen as being punished for not going to chapel. Now there is the Atheist and Freethinker groups that are holding their separate meetings. We have equated agnostic, atheistic and other ideas to stand alongside Christendom as a viable belief system. We have freedom to believe or not believe presently in our country. What I wonder is how will this affect our future officer leadership and where will we go in our ethic? Christianity has been the ground and foundation for our Ethical Core Value system ever since George Washington. The further we move away from Christianity in our ethic and practice the greater the problems will get within the infrastructure of our military, (If you haven’t noticed). We are removing the foundation for all behavior for all other belief system are based on relativism and nothing objective and unmovable. We are in a constant flux in our values. We will soon remove all GOOD reason for having a workable ethic.”
MAJ Wayne Keast
United States Army 1st Recruiting Brigade Chaplain
WAYNE.KEAST@usarec.army.mil
(301) 677-2943
Major Keast might just as well have come right out and told all the recruiters he emailed to be careful not to recruit any atheists or agnostics, or, for that matter, any other non-Christians! The message would have been the same. The hell with that pesky “no religious test” clause in that pesky Constitution that the major swore an oath to protect and defend.
After hearing from over three dozen recruiters who received Major Keast’s email, MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein responded in his usual understated manner:
“DO SOMETHING, Air Force and Army! But we all know you won’t, will you? You NEVER do. Which is precisely why your afflicted come to MRFF by the multiple thousands. The time for action is now! US Air Force Chaplain Colonel Bruno and U.S. Army Chaplain Major Keast should face immediate criminal charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for these disgusting, prima facie examples of dereliction of duty by flagrant violations of the solemn oaths they took; oaths NOT to Jesus or the New Testament but to our clearly secular United States Constitution. They are both heinous Poster Children of unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian supremacy and exceptionalsm. Thus, they are base and vile criminals and religious predators. Try them both by courts-martial immediately!”
