OWS. And my attendance at the Epilepsy Consumer conference.

The blatant cruel attack with biological weapons on the Students in California has to be seen to be believed. The corporations and their state remain convinced they can drive the OWS movement of the streets and crush it. Just as they believe they can maintain their world dominant position by sending more troops into new areas such as Australia, maintain their forces in the close to 200 locations in which they already exist throughout the world and at the same time maintain their gigantic debt and borrowing from such sources as China which they at the same time are trying to encircle and undermine. As I have written before US capitalism while they have a "plan" it is a plan that has built into it a madness, a fundamental contradiction, many fundamental contradictions, many unachievable objectives. The way in which these express themselves, will surface, will determine world events in the next years. The leadership role or non leadership role of the working class will be crucial. As we consider this we need to see that the dominant feature in US politics and developments in the years ahead will be US capitalism moving to reduce the US working class to mass poverty and the response of the US working class to this. The OWS is the first signs of the movements that will arise out of this process.

But I want to share an experience I had yesterday when I attended what was billed as an "Epilepsy Consumer Conference." The name is interesting. Were I and my fellow attendees, fellow "consumers", there to purchase epilepsy? This and my experience there got me thinking about corporate methods and ideology and how these penetrate into every aspect of our lives. Also how undemocratic they are.

I suffer from epilepsy. I have had several life threatening seizures just recently. My neurologists urged me to attend this conference. Its various sessions were addressed by various doctors and big shots with a small truck load of PHds and who are in charge of neurology departments such as at Northwestern University. The way the conference was run using corporate methods from beginning to end.

The doctors addressed the sessions. Then we were allowed to ask questions. But how were we allowed to ask questions? We were not allowed to just put our hands up and be called in order. No we had to submit our questions on paper and these were then looked at and selections made as to what would be answered and what not. So the content of the discussion was, actually there was no discussion only questions and answers, we the sufferers from epilepsy were too dumb to discuss the issue, so the content of the conference was totally determined by the organizers who were the big for-profit hospitals and their doctors.

I have poly glandular failure as well as epilepsy so I take a number of medicines and worry that they interact negatively with each other and also I wonder could my hypothyroidism and Addison's disease possibly contribute to my epilepsy. Angrily and grating my teeth But dutifully I wrote these down on a paper and handed them to the lady collecting the questions. I recognized the paper I was using and saw it was third on the stack. It came to questions. The doctor came to my paper, stopped speaking, read it, and then put it aside and answered all the other questions and never answered mine.

I was getting pretty annoyed at this stage so in the next session again using my distinctive paper I handed my question in right at the start. It was first. This time the same thing happened even though it was a different doctor. He read it and set it aside and answered all the other questions except mine.

What was going on here? We were seeing a couple of things. The corporate method in all its undemocratic glory and the limits of approaching medicine from the corporate method. First the organizers wanted to control the content of the conference so all questions would be vetted in advance. The last thing they wanted was any talk about the cost of health care an alternative form of health care profit in medicine etc. And they achieved this. Not a single doctor spoke of the staggering cost of drugs and private health care and the 50 million with no health care in the US. Of course one doctor did manage to sneak in the supposed long waiting lists for health care in Canada. The usual corporate lie.

Then there was the other issue involved here. One of the reasons my questions were not answered was because of the extreme compartmentalization, extreme specialization, of medicine and the sciences under capitalism and the profit system. My health issues involve the fields of both endocrinology and neurology. Bourgeois medicine is based in the main on extreme specialization. The specialists in epilepsy/neurology who were there did not want to, were not confident to, venture into the field of endocrinology. So complicated cases like my own were not dealt with.

Capitalism and its dirty undemocratic and inefficient methods enter every aspect of our lives. I felt unclean when I left that corporate conference.

Sean.