By Michael Collins

Wall Streeters, big banks, and their proxies in political office are all reaching for the Xanax tonight. The Greek left, led by Alexis Tsipras, is saying that there's no obligation to pay back the rotten deal handed down to the Greek people. (Image: Oneiros)

"After accepting a mandate to create a multiparty administration following inconclusive elections, Alexis Tsipras sent shockwaves through financial markets by announcing the pledges Athens had made to secure rescue funds from the EU and IMF were null and void.

"The popular verdict clearly renders the bailout deal null," said the politician, whose stridently anti-austerity coalition of the radical left, known as Syriza, sprung the surprise of the weekend's poll, coming in second with 16.8% of the vote. "This is an historic moment for the left and the popular movement and a great responsibility for me." Guardian, May 8, 2012

And what does this mean?

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Larry Pinkney

“I freed a thousand slaves - I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” - Harriet Tubman

Are we hamsters running endlessly on a spinning wheel, oblivious to the fact that we are substantively going nowhere but backwards? Or, are we reasoning, critically thinking human beings who have enough sense to comprehend the enormous difference between being on a perpetually spinning wheel, and making real systemic change that serves the needs and aspirations of ordinary people? The time is here and now for everyday, ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people to address and honestly answer this question. We must take responsibility for our collective destinies.

The political system of the United States really is one wherein the following words, attributed to Charlie King, so thoroughly apply: “America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.” The obvious question is why? Why is this allowed to continue? The answer is not complicated. It is the denial, self delusion, lethargy, and hypocrisy on the part of far too many people in this nation -- stoked and perpetuated -- by the corporate-owned Democratic and Republican parties, the corporate-stream ‘news’ media, and their concomitant systemic ‘educational’ institutions. The scum does not float to the top by osmosis. It is quite deliberate.

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By Gary G. Kohls, MD

For the last decade of my 40-year career as a family physician, I practiced what was best termed holistic mental health care (ie, utilizing non-drug approaches, gradual psych drug withdrawal, nutritional therapy for he brain and psychoeducational psychotherapy to achieve mental wellness).

My interest in mental health had came about during a time when I was employed at a mental institution, providing medical health care to the poorly nourished, hopeless, incarcerated patients who had been labeled chronically mentally ill (not to mention totally disabled). Virtually all of them had been on two or more powerful psych drugs, the combinations of which had never been FDA-approved for safety or effectiveness long term.

In that particular mental institution I had observed that virtually all of the patients that I had personally interviewed and examined (when these psychiatric patients had developed non-psychological illnesses) easily qualified for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I also noted that essentially none of the patients that I encountered actually had a diagnosis of PTSD listed on their charts. Instead they had all been labeled with multiples of any number of other “mental illnesses of unknown origin”.

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