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Profits Über Alles?

Posted on December 19, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

By Gonzalo Lira.
Neoliberal economics has been a wonderful driving force for progress and material prosperity—but it cannot be the single ruling principle of our lives, of our government, or of our society.
If we allow the profit motive to be the only motive, then we and our society are doomed.
We are already seeing the shape of that doom, in our health care, our government, and our industry.

Isn’t this blasphemous? Dear God, is this us???

So this morning, I woke up to a piece by Michael “Mish” Shedlock—a piece that, being a fellow middle-aged man, scared the ever-living shit out of me.
Mish opens his piece describing how last October 2012, he took a standard prostate cancer test and came up positive. What follows is his no-nonsense journey of beating his cancer. The whole piece is a must-read; here is the link.
(Refreshingly, Mish doesn’t inflict the needless emotional bullshit on us. I’m sure he felt scared out of his wits, and I’m sure he had quite a few dark-nights-of-the-soul, especially as he had only recently lost his wife. I have nothing but compassion for him as a human being—but as a reader, I’m so glad he didn’t roll around in the emotional muck, which is such the fashion today.)
The thing that struck me about Mish’s piece was how one of his doctors, the surgeon who performed the initial biopsy, wanted to do surgery right away. Mish adopted a wait-and-see approach, coupled with a cocktail of drugs, to see if this counteracted the cancer. And rather than another biopsy, Mish wanted more and more-frequent blood tests. The surgeon, “Dr. G.”, insisted on biopsies instead of blood tests—he wanted to perform surgery so badly that he effectively gave Mish an ultimatum: My way (biopsies/surgery) or the highway.
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