Martin Freed Quotes

This instruction referred to the illegal COINTELPRO program whereby FBI Director Hoover not only ordered the FBI to illegally spy on African American organizations, but actually interfere with their operations and by leaking personal sexual information and trying to ruin the reputations of numerous Black leaders including Rev. Martin Luther King. See {584581}. This illegal program actually specifically named and targeted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Nation of Islam. Hoover ordered that the program be kept secret. However, in what is a humorous historical twist, a civil rights organization organized a “black bag” burglary—the same kind of illegal break in that the FBI had been practicing against Black groups and others—broke into an FBI field office and stole this and other documents which they then made public. Otherwise the contents of this program might never have come to light.

At the time The Patriot Act was being hotly debated—especially the section which allowed Federal authorities to inspect the patron records of any library while a gag order prohibited the library staff from even telling the patron that their records were being inspected. Most librarians mentally opposed this provision as an over balance, compromising the call value of library privacy.

Feynman was then a young brilliant graduate students working with colleagues far senior to him. He not only criticized the lax security of the safes, but when combination safes were later installed, he would infuriate the army security people by “hacking” the safes when scientists had lost their combinations.

The “wrong” people to Helms. Were Americans who disagreed with his methods and politics—especially members of Congress who wanted to make the CIA more accountable for its actions. If nothing is ever written down and everything is secret, there is no practical way of holding the agency accountable in a democracy. Helms was later convicted to perjury for lying to Congress.

This quotation is notable as it shows that problems that are not dealt with in one generation can continue for generation after generation. Today we have the exact same problem with overly expensive drugs. In a capitalistic system, every business with good products and sales should make profits. But products that people need to say alive, most people think, should not make larger profit percentages than almost any other business. But this problem is over half a century old in America.

1st Baron Macaulay. This issue is still debated in America. Until the latter part of the 20th century, businesses could sell supposed medicines without any proof of efficacy or safety. The Government or others had to prove that there was something wrong with the product. Then, that shifted, and the burden of proof fell on the developer and seller of medicines as Macaulay favored, but sellers of vitamins and dietary supplements were exempted and operated under the previous American (anti Macaulay) position. Ironically, political opponents of requiring the drug company to prove safety and efficacy claimed that this was a radical new, untested idea that would inhibit development of medicinals. They did not realize that 150 years earlier, this was a standard, accepted point of view in England. Even into the 21st century, America operated with the inconsistent difference between vitamins and supplements, many of which have no beneficial effect whatsoever, and medicines.

The large credit reporting and data gathering companies collected information on Americans without their consent and then sold their information through “data brokers” to companies who would then try and sell products and services based on the information they obtained. In many cases the brokers sold the information to fraudulent operations who swindled or committed fraud against the names they bought. When members of Congress investigated the industry, the companies who collected the data claimed that they had no idea that there were consumer rip offs they were facilitating and claimed to have “rules” that prevented such use. But they said that they could not possibly know what the data brokers were doing as they were independent companies.

The immediate trigger for this statement was the Mylan Company’s price increase of 500 percent for Epi-pens which people—frequently children—needed to carry to contact a bad allergic reaction that would other wise put them into anaphylactic shock which could be fatal. One of the reasons the company gave for the increase was that their marketing costs were very high. The practice of paying physicians to use a drug and then give testimonials and pitch the drug had long been controversial, but in 2016 the public learned that the practice was much more widespread than anyone had known. Making the situation worse was the fact that physicians would prescribe the drug for their patients and had no obligation to tell the patient or his/her family that he was being paid by the drug company. The Congress held hearings but did nothing at the time.