Profit

Psychiatry’s Manufacture Of Consent: The Antidepressant Explosion

June 20, 2014 Bruce Levine, www.brucelevine.net Educate! Corporatism, Depression, Mental Illness, Profit, Psychiatry

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book title Manufacturing Consent derives from presidential advisor and journalist Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who does know what’s best for them. Starting in the 1990s—despite research findings that levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin were unrelated to depression—Americans began to be exposed to highly effective television commercials for antidepressants that portrayed depression as caused by a “chemical imbalance” of low levels of serotonin and which could be treated with “chemically balancing” antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Why has the American public not heard psychiatrists in positions of influence on the mass media debunking the chemical imbalance theory?

Top 10 Reasons Why Corporate Social Media is Not Your Friend

June 19, 2014 Bruce A. Dixon, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Corporatism, Facebook, Profit, Social Media, Surveillance

It's new, it's now, it's cool, learn how... everybody's on it, everybody's doing it. For some time now, we've been told you cannot build a business, find old friends or organize much of anything without the indispensable aid of corporate social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. But what if this is about as true as other stuff the supposedly wise and informed told us in recent years, like that real estate prices could be counted on to always go up? Human societies are based on lots of horizontal communication. What if corporate social media is little more than a gigantic scam to extract revenue from the otherwise ordinary communication the internet permits between groups and individuals, between people and businesses, and among communities of interest. What if corporate social media ultimately aims not to open up but to throttle and restrict those conversations to make them artificially scarce and valuable commodities. What if corporate social media's business model is to thrive on content its proprietors don't create, and to place itself between that content and prospective audiences, even to substitute itself for the web sites, email lists and media offerings of content creators?

Repressing World Cup Protests: A Booming Business For Brazil

June 19, 2014 Anna Feigenbaum, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Brazil, Corporatism, Profit, Protest, world cup

On June 12, Brazilian police fired tear gas on a group of 50 unarmed marchers blocking a highway leading to the World Cup arena in São Paulo. On June 15 in Rio de Janeiro another 200 marchers faced floods of tear gas and stun grenades in their approach to Maracana stadium. Armed with an arsenal of less lethal weapons and employing tactics imported from U.S. SWAT teams in the early 2000s, police clad in riot gear are deploying forceful tactics, wielding batons and releasing chemical agents at close range. In Brazil, this style of protest policing is not only a common form of political control, but also a booming business. World Cup and related economic protests occurring across the country are bringing in big profits for Rio-based company Condor Nonlethal Technologies. As part of the World Cup’s massive security budget Condor scored a $22-million contract, providing tear gas, rubber bullets, Tasers and light and sound grenades to police and private security forces. Selling riot control and public order weaponry to law enforcement, military and United Nation buyers, Condor’s business has grown by over 30 percent in the past five years.

Lives Of Students Ruined By For-Profit Colleges

May 29, 2014 David Halperin, www.republicreport.org Educate! Corporatism, Education, Profit

Dear Secretary Duncan: I participate in the work of the coalition of more than 50 organizations, from the AFL-CIO to Consumers Union, the NAACP to National Council of La Raza, Paralyzed Veterans of America to Young Invincibles, who have today submitted a comment urging you to strengthen the gainful employment rule with specific changes, and I join that comment. I also strongly endorse the comments submitted by coalition participants, including The Institute for College Access and Success, the Center for Responsible Lending, the National Consumer Law Center, New America Foundation, the Mississippi Center for Justice, a comment by ten veterans groups, and a joint comment from Consumer Federation of California, Consumers Union, and negotiated rulemaking participant Margaret Reiter. I write separately to stress a few points, all of which are driven by the principle embodied by the gainful employment provision that Congress enacted in 1965: Federal aid should go only to those career education programs that actually help students to train for and build careers. Your Department must stop delivering billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to programs that consistently leave a large percentage of students worse off than when they started.

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