Surviving Capitalism (Not) : America frets over foreign clinical trials

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

America frets over foreign clinical trials

from The Great Beyond. Government regulation, whether it is over wild betting schemes on Wall Street, or pharmaceutical experiments on humans, or genetically modified food experiments, or deep-water oil drilling, will almost always lose out to those who profit from these activities because they own and control our government and its regulatory systems.