Majikthise : Carnival of the Un-Capitalists

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Step right up, step right up! Come one, come all the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists--Markets and Health Edition. I'm Majikthise and I'm very pleased to be your carnie. Do we have a treat for you today, folks. Progressive commentary for the four corners of the blogosphere. Horrors, marvels, and wonders abound!

Step into the big tent and prepare to be AMAZED.

C-un-C editor Charles Todd on The Right to Eat Enchiladas at Freiheit und Wissen. Read about Big Food's assault on the consumer's right to sue the manufacturers of harmful products.

"It is a bit like farming . . . . " wherein Revere has an adventure and learns a valuable lesson about Big Pharma. Revere is a public health scientist blogging under deep cover at Effect Measure.

Brains in vats! Brains in vats! Ironman of Political Calculations does a post mortem on the brains-for-bucks scandal that rocked King County, WA.

Manufactured Uncertainty Kills Workers writes Jordan Barab. Click to hear the awful truth from this former Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for OSHA at Confined Space:

[The] conclusion is something that every American worker needs to understand: Our system of regulating and controlling workers' exposure to toxic chemicals is broken, kaput, dead.

John Dursi of No More Shall I Roam explains why the free market doesn't work for health care. Two parts for the price of one, folks: I and II.

Extra, extra, read all about it: Rich live longer, Forbes blames poor! Get all the details from Eli at Left I on the News

Stayin' Alive tells the shocking tale of the COX-2 debacle--the marketing phenomenon that wasted billions of dollars and killed a lot of people, many of whom would have been better off on plain old, unpatented aspirin.

After throwing a fabulous C-un-C2 at Green Lantern, Gretchen Ross follows up with a hair-raising hypothesis: Population Drugging For Profit & Control.

At The Mutualist Blog author Kevin Carson explains how pharmaceutical companies game the system with expensive me-too drugs:

The central factor in this process is the state's patent policies, which drastically inflate the profitability of the newer "me, too" drugs against much cheaper competitors that do very nearly the same thing. Indeed, the patent process has a huge distorting effect on R&D, since it results in so many resources being channelled into tweaking existing drugs just enough so that they can be re-patented as "new."

A dispatch from the trenches: Can't History Ever Do Anything Different? by Andru Ziwasimon MD who's blogging at Too the Teeth "a weblog devoted to issues of health justice, medicine public and private, race in America, public health in its broadest sense, globalization, innovations, and honest discussions around strategies in advocacy."

Our public hospital may well go bankrupt, but not because of poor people, it's because of poor leadership, really bad decision-making and a cynical political process that allows cynical people to exercise their bigotry by scapegoating the poor and people of color as the problem

How bad is business ethics in the health care sector? Majikthise learns that it's so bad it's even freaking out the executives.

That's our show for this week. Bloggers, if you like what you saw, please tell your friends with a link to our little production:

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/04/carnival_of_the_1.html

The redoubtable Red Harvest will host the fourth edition of the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists on April 25th.

If you have some un-Capitalist blogging you'd like to share, send your submissions to [email protected] The deadline is Sunday April 24th at 4:30 Eastern. Visit the Carnival of the Un-Capitalists' homepage for more details.