Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Fredom Quotations Of The Week 795-797

If you spend your days at a soul-numbing repetitious job with a brain simmering in anti-depressants, a belly stuffed with high fat, supercarb comfort food, and evenings half drunk or recovering on the couch from work . . . well . . . when the heck are you supposed to find time or mind to grasp the implications of global warming even as you contemplate being one payday ahead of homelessness? A while back I watched this bar full of people stare at a game of Afghani dead goat polo in silent, rapt attention. If that isn't brain dead I don't know what is. The relentless autocratic, blue collar American workplace has ground my people down, smashed 'em right into the couch. There they are force-fed the huckster's hologram of "personal freedom" in advertisements for off road vehicles. Getting a lousy public education, then being played against your fellow workers in Darwinian fashion by the free market economy does not make for optimism or open mindedness. It makes for a kind of bleak meanness nobody is openly talking about in the American political dialogue today.
Let's Drink to the Slobbering Classes

Joe Bageant

…Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance with authorities, even those authorities one lacks respect for.
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Degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities.

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I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience.…

a

aWhat better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society?

Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem

Bruce E. Levine
AlterNet(emphasis JS)

I am a Radiation Therapist and have seen hundreds of patient die after being burned up and shot up with chemo. I managed two different cancer centers during a ten year period.
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One thing that really opened my eyes: we would get patients (on their “death bed”) and would be forced to rush to start them on radiation that same day. I ask the doctor why it was necessary to start the patient on radiation so quickly, when they were so weak, because it seemed to me that it would do more harm than good. He blew my mind when he said: “I know this will sound morbid, but if the patient dies before they receive three treatments, then we do not get paid.”

CancerTruth
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March 2012