Disinformation Book of Lists (36 page)

10

Joseph E. Stiglitz

At one time, Joseph Stiglitz was a leading force in economic globalization. As a senior vice president and the chief economist of the World Bank, this Nobel laureate thought he was helping undeveloped and underdeveloped countries to grow and prosper. Then he realized he wasn't. “And you know what the problem with globalization and the program of privatizations, deregulation, liberalization of capital markets is?” he asked in an interview. “They don't work”

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund loan scads of money to Second and Third World nations with an average of 111 conditions—often suicidal conditions—attached. The countries are forced to change their political and economic systems in ways that allow First World “vulture capitalists” to massively profit from the situation while the masses get screwed. Stiglitz calls it “briberization,” not privatization.

Beyond that, he admits that every single nation that has gotten onboard the World Bank/IMF's globalization scheme has gotten trashed. China and Botswana have achieved growth, he says, because they told the globalizers to shove their money and conditions.

In his call to arms,
Globalization and Its Discontents
, Stiglitz confesses that “the policies of the international economic institutions are all too often closely aligned with the commercial and financial interests of those in the advanced industrial countries.” He writes:

Modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact; dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not “feel” what one does. Modern economic management is similar: from one's luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was destroying.

11

Katharine Gun

In spring 2002, the US and UK were trying to convince the United Nations Security Council of the need to invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that no longer existed. Six countries were seen as sitting on the fence, so, in order to figure out how to manipulate them, the National Security Agency was told to spy on their delegates. Phone calls and email of the representatives from Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, and Pakistan were intercepted.

We know about this shameful episode because Katharine Gun—who worked as a translator in Britain's eavesdropping facility, GCHQ—bravely leaked a classified NSA memo to the London
Observer.
Right-wingers insinuated that the document was fake, but when the British government arrested and prosecuted Gun for leaking state secrets, it became obvious that this was for real and that America was spying on UN delegates. She says that she leaked the memos “because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US Government who attempted to subvert our own security services,” as well as “to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.” In late Februrary 2004, Gun's trial for violations of the noxious Official Secrets Act was abruptly called off, the British government saying that it would have to reveal sensitive information in order to prosecute her.

 

Most people who don't have their heads in the sand realize that the US government, military, and intelligence agencies have been medically experimenting on citizens since World War II. And it's no secret that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese performed hideous human experimentation during the 1930s and 1940s. Except for the notable case of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (1932-1972)—in which poor black men in Alabama went untreated for the venereal disease so doctors could observe the effects—human experimentation before the WWII era is still shrouded in obscurity. Digging through mountains of primary documents, professor Susan E. Lederer uncovered this hidden history and presented it in the Johns Hopkins University book
Subjected to Science
, which focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the United States.

1

Lederer writes: “Before the civil war some southern physicians had actually used slaves as experimental subjects, advertising from time to time their wish to purchase Negroes with particular complaints in order to test new remedies.”

2

In the latter part of the 1800s, Lederer found over 40 instances in which unknowing people—including toddlers and teenagers—were
deliberately
injected with gonorrhea or syphilis in order to see if they would develop the diseases.

3

A medical journal from 1874 reveals that some doctors injected children with smallpox to test whether a previously applied vaccination was effective.

4

In 1874, Dr. Roberts Bartholow stuck electrodes into the brain of a cancer patient (who happened to be an Irish domestic servant). His report documents her blue lips, frothing at the mouth, spasms, and convulsions. When she died days later, the autopsy showed that her brain had been trashed.

5

The doctor who codiscovered the cause of leprosy was drummed out of the profession in 1880 for putting the mycobacterium in a patient's eye.

6

In 1883, the resident physician at a Hawaiian leper colony injected around 20 men, women, and girls with syphilis.

7

In the 1890s, Italian doctor Giuseppe Sanarelli jabbed at least five patients with yellow fever.

8

In 1891, a physician—apparently in Germany—removed cancerous tumors from the breasts of two women. Each time, he inserted some of the tumor into the patient's healthy breast to see if the cancer would take root.

9

Two doctors in 1895 vaccinated, then infected with smallpox, numerous boys at orphanages in Brooklyn.

10

In order to see if spinal taps were dangerous to kids, a Harvard researcher performed the agonizing procedure dozens of times on toddlers and babies fresh out of the womb in the early to mid-1890s.

11

In 1897, a Johns Hopkins researcher studied the toxicity of thyroid extract on eight mental patients.

12

In 1901, a doctor studying hookworm infection saw a patient who wanted a circumcision. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, the doc put dirt containing hookworm larvae on the man's foreskin, implying that this was part of the procedure. The patient's penis was soon infested with the worms.

13

In the first decade of the 1900s, several physicians performed hundreds of experimental tests for tuberculosis on babies and children. One method of administration was in the eye, which caused severe pain for the youngsters.

14

A Rockefeller Institute physician gave an experimental test for syphilis—which contained the dead germs of the disease—to 400 hospital patients, including children, in 1911.

15

From 1913 till at least 1915, two doctors exposed infants—aged two days to 20 months—to repeated X rays to see how their digestive systems handled food.

16

To test his theory that syphilis bacteria were to be found in living brain tissue, a doctor used a dental drill to bore through the skulls and into the gray matter of six patients at Pontiac State Hospital in 1915. Needless to say, they had not been informed of the procedure.

17

Doctor L.L. Stanley was into the quackery of testicular transplantation. In 1920, he published an article about taking the balls from executed prisoners and putting them into still-breathing convicts, not to mention sewing ram testes into 23 other prisoners.

18

In 1921, three pediatricians deliberately induced scurvy and rickets in babies at an NYC orphanage.

19

While researching spinal taps, a physician performed lumbar punctures on 423 African American babies in Atlanta in the mid-1920s. None of them needed the excruciating procedure.

20

Germany, 1930: 76 children died from a contaminated experimental vaccine for tuberculosis.

21

In 1932, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos published a manuscript about an experiment in which Puerto Ricans had been injected with cancer cells to study the disease's progression. At least thirteen eventually died from cancer. In his book
In the Name of Science
, professor Andrew Goliszek quotes lifelong human experimenter Dr. Cornelius Rhoades, who ran the experiment for the Rockefeller Institute: “The Puerto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere.”

22

In 1934 and 1935, over 20,000 children across the country received one of two experimental polio vaccines, one of which contained the live virus.

23

A 1942 issue of the
Journal of Pediatrics
features an article by a doctor who deliberately infected a 12-month-old baby with herpes.

 

1

“I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” -President George W. Bush

2

“See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.”
–President George W. Bush

3

“No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.”
–President George W. Bush

4

“We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”
–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

5

“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”
–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

6

Senator Rick Santorum (Republican - Pennsylvania):
“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever, to my knowledge, included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality—”

Associated Press reporter:
“I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog' with a United States Senator. It's sort of freaking me out.”

7

Regarding an invasion of Israel: “If Iraq came across the Jordan River…I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die.”
–former President Bill Clinton at a Jewish fundraiser, July 30, 2002

8

“I know a little bit about how White Houses work. I know somebody picked up a phone, somebody got on a computer, somebody sent an email, somebody called for a meeting, somebody in that White House probably under instructions from somebody further up the chain told the EPA: ‘Don't tell the people of New York the truth.'”
–Sen. Hillary Clinton, ostensibly talking about the Bush Administration covering up the health effects of the WTC collapse, but actually explaining how the executive branch
really
works