CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs Department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit University in San Francisco. To find out more about CIIS, and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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We're here tonight to talk about the biopolitics of the medical industrial complex in pandemic times and why it’s truly imperative to transform the medical industrial complex in these times and to really be able to understand it and position it as a site of major systemic change and re-making, and to understand it and identify it as a site of mass mobilization and organizing. Before I proceed any further, I just want to let people know that a lot of the content that we’ll be exploring this evening is intense and it’s painful, and for many of us who are listening or watching, it may impact us or our communities, our families, our ancestors really personally. So, to really honor the intensity of it and what people have survived, or not survived. I just want to invoke that. 

I think one of the ways that we can best disrupt and position ourselves to transform the medical industrial complex is to acknowledge the pain so we don't participate in the logic of denial, or invisibilization, or the normalization of suffering or systemic oppression. And I will unpack some of those things as we talk further this evening.  

So, the medical industrial complex puts profit and social control above saving lives and true health and healing. Many may claim, "well, you know health and healing is hard to define, Mordecai." And I'm actually going to make a rather simple counter argument for you to consider, which is that with health and healing you know it when you see it. Or more importantly, you know it when you experience it.  In some ways, because the medical industrial complex so strongly produces and amplifies ableism, it's really occupied even our collective imagination of what real health and healing is.  And ableism, like so many other types of systemic oppression, it can be internalized. Then in turn, it becomes normalized and that results in its invisiblization.  You know, it's very hard to tell that it's there. So if we can realign to these truths of what health and healing is, and reclaim our right to know, you know be experts in our own skin.  

In the so-called 'laboratories of our lived lives' and know that we have the power and right to know, and define what health and healing is for ourselves, our communities, our planet. You know, this is really among the most crucial liberatory work we can be engaging in now.  And I see it as a labor of love, profoundly generative and inherently healing.  It is work that will build our collective autonomy and capacity to co-create viable and self-sustainable alternatives to the medical industrial complex.  

So I'm really grateful and humbled to be here with all of you tonight, so we can begin to act as catalysts in our own lives and community. To start or continue this work, because certainly many of you are already engaged in this in so many ways.  And in so many ways, our survival is this work and uplifts these aims in such profound ways.  That's crucial, do not forget that.  

So in these specific pandemic times, how do these pandemic times urgently demand this work of us? So the pandemic has been exploited in highly calculated and strategic ways, to further mobilize and cement the power of the alt-right in this country, in the US, otherwise referred to as Turtle Island by Indigenous people. And historically and currently, medical institutions and practices have been deployed to enforce and carry out far-right fascist and genocide agendas. In this talk I will reveal how the medical industrial complex was actually designed for this, and co-evolved with this, and has been intended to justify and advance the aims of white supremacy, ableism, patriarchy, Christian supremacy, and capitalist expansion. And they really all work together to ensure their success and a kind of choke hold over power and resources. So I want to take you through some information to really begin to give you all a sense of how this out-out pictures and manifests, and this is part of what the biopolitics of the MIC (medical industrial complex) really are.  

So I'm going to begin by actually talking through some cancer prevalence statistics and then look at how the MIC, the medical industrial complex, organizes treatment around cancer and other diseases, especially with the engagement of big pharma and other multinational corporations connected to big pharma corporations. So we'll be able to see patterns emerging of how one of the ways in which the medical industrial complex functions to engage in this social control, is that it's actually playing a significant causative role in the diseases and illnesses; that it is actually making money huge amounts of money in treating.  So this is one of the first dynamics that we'll be looking at and you'll see that that ties into many of the other themes that I've already invoked.  

So according to the National Cancer Institute's 2020 statistics, 40% of the people in the U.S. will get cancer in our lifetimes. The MIC profits hugely from this. The National Institute of Health estimates that direct cancer treatment alone in 2020 cost a hundred and sixty million dollars. Evaluate Pharma, which is a financial analyst firm, estimated that the total ‘oncology sales’ in 2008 was nearly a hundred and twenty-five billion dollars, and that's out of a total prescription market of eight hundred and sixty-four billion. Another big pharma analyst projects that Global sales of pharmaceuticals will exceed nine hundred billion this year. So that's nearly a trillion dollars. So between 2010 and 2020 the cost of cancer care in the U.S. has increased by 27%, and Evaluate Pharma also projects that oncology will have close to a twenty percent market share of pharma sales by 2024, exceeding 240 billion.  

So there's a way in which multinational big pharma corporations are really tied to chemical polluters, and how their very models are designed to create these types of vertical markets—those that I just mentioned— are designed to ensure profit and that they glean from producing pharmaceuticals to treat diseases. It’s very very high, and simultaneously their business models are organized so that they're actually manufacturing products that are evidence to cause cancer, and the other types of illnesses that they are creating huge revenue streams for treating.  

So Bayer Monsanto is actually a perfect example of this. As many of you may be familiar, Monsanto makes glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, and one of the most prevalent broad-spectrum herbicides on the planet.  In 2015 it was designated a probable carcinogen by WHO, The World Health Organization. In 2016 it was found above recommended limits in 93% of Americans in an Environmental Working Group study. In 2017, a large internal study that began in ’03 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that glyphosate levels in participants had doubled since 1996, and are well over the recommended limits both here in the US and in Europe. And then finally in 2019, February of that year, a study by the University of Washington, which was actually the most extensive review of epidemiological literature to date, found that glyphosate increases cancer risk by 40%, especially of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.  

So guess what company makes one of the few FDA approved drugs to treat Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma? Bayer Monsanto. In fact, this particular drug was fast-tracked by the FDA to treat late-stage types of cancer that were resistant to other therapies in 2019, just one year after the 66 billion merger between Bayer Monsanto in June 2018. This is just another example of how these types of toxins circulate in our environments and our body, and generate huge amounts of profit for the medical industrial complex, in multiple levels.  

Enlist Duo was one of the first pesticides to be fast track for approval under Trump's EPA, and Enlist Duo is actually glyphosate plus one of the chemicals that was used in Agent Orange. So, you know, this is Trump's America, but it's also the biopolitics of the medical industrial complex as they have been. So one of the defining characteristics of the medical industrial complex that is very concealed from our view, is that it's not just profit driven, but at every level it incentivizes making people sick so it can profit from curing or treating us. I'm going to take a pause for a moment to just let that sink in. This isn’t hyperbole or conspiracy theory. It's readily demonstrable fact.  

There's other things about Bayer Monsanto that illustrates and out pictures some other profound and chilling aspects of the medical industrial complex, both of its history and how it functions in present time. So Bayer, well known for aspirin, also has historic ties to a big chemical conglomerate called IG Farben, of which it was a member company. IG Farben was responsible for creating Zyklon B, which was the chemical used to murder three million Jewish people, disabled people, Roma people, LBGT people, and Communists in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Between 1943 and 1944, 6,000 people were murdered daily in Auschwitz and the interned in slave labor - Jewish, disabled, Roma, LBGT, and Communists people - were used to actually build IG Farben’s factory that was producing Zyklon B. And as many of you may know from knowing this history, even in some limited way, disabled people were among the first to be murdered. Bayer, BASF another huge Chemical Corporation that still exist, and Hoechst, made the chlorine gas that's notorious as being known as the ‘gas cloud’ that was used in WWI trench warfare prior to joining with other big chem companies in 1925, to form IG Farben. So IG Farben actually has deep ties to the founding of the institutional infrastructure of the MIC, as we know it as well.  

So JD Rockefeller was actually a board member of IG Farben and he is a well-known monopolist who is also a member of the Carnegie Foundation, which was responsible for commissioning the Flexner Report in 1910. And that report essentially resulted in the remaking of medical school education, and in many ways laid the groundwork for the institutional infrastructure of the MIC. So Rockefeller has a lot of ties and entanglements with this history that I think demonstrate a lot of what's crucial to understand about the MIC, so we can really disrupt and transform it. Rockefeller also founded the Institute for Medical Research, which developed pharmaceuticals. So you can see that at the ground up, wanting to make sure that the pharmaceutical industry played a really big role in healthcare institutions was very very important. He also funded the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which produced the United States first eugenicist research and also produced the world's first racial hygiene laws.  

Standard Oil, which is Rockefeller’s company, supplied IG Farben with tetraethyl lead, an essential ingredient of the gasoline used for Nazi fighter planes. After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was IG Farben, and this investment was actually part of a pattern of reciprocal investments between the U.S. and Germany during the Nazi years. In ‘28, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute for Eugenics Anthropology and Human Heredity was created. It was run by Ernst London, Hitler's foremost racial hygienist, and the institute's main financing came from Rockefeller. So this really just illustrates the extent to which this eugenesis project, an ecocidal project, a profit-driven project, is all really part of the founding institutions of the medical industrial complex. There's also a chilling statistic that the UN Chemical Outlooks Report published in 2019, and that's that in 2017, the global chemical industry was worth more than five trillion dollars, and by 2030 this is predicted to double.  

I think for me this highlights the urgency of really understanding, exposing and transforming the medical industrial complex because of its complicity with so much of the decline of health, so much of the decline of individual and collective community power, and the degradation of our ecosystems. It's hard to imagine a livable world if the amount of chemical toxins circulating in our environments doubles in just 10 years.  

So, you know at this point you may ask, Mordecai, just please just give us a simple succinct definition of the medical industrial complex. I think on some level, rather than a succinct definition—although I will give you that in a moment—one of the best ways to define the MIC is to really reveal all of its interlocking parts. Look at how it behaves, its rationales, its practices, the embedded normalized and invisiblized systems of oppression, the legacies of the enslavement of Black lives and bodies, and the attempted genocide of the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, upon which it's built, and it's impacts upon every aspect of our lives. Well beyond the doctor's office, or health care plans, or even the legal bottles we must wage, or we've had to wait with health insurers for access to basic care even before the pandemic.  The MIC is a set of entangled institutions, scientific disciplines, mindsets, and practices that interact with and bear upon all domains of society. It controls and manages the delivery of healthcare, and acts as the most authoritative arbiter on what constitutes health and illness.  What constitutes normal and deviation, what constitutes legitimate diseases and treatment, and really, who is worthy of care and life itself. 

Just circling back to the pandemic in these times, you know, there's other chilling facts that define this moment that I think we're all too aware of. Over 200,000 people have perished from COVID-19 in the U.S. On Friday the 25th, 55 thousand new people were diagnosed with COVID-19. That is a huge amount. That's the greatest number for I think the last three months. Notice that I didn't say 55 thousand new cases. That type of depersonalizing language is common in public health talk, but it really erases from our awareness that each of these ‘cases’ are actual people, each one beloved, precious, immeasurably valuable, and irreplaceable. That’s one of the ways that we can disrupt the way this system functions is to just really honor the loss.  

I think one of the things that was most despicable and painful about the really brief amount of the debate that I listened to yesterday, and truly it was only about three minutes because that's about all I could take, and also I had to teach, was the way in which Trump was just very very casually engaging. And not just of gaslighting, but profound dismissal of the huge pain and loss that people in this country and globally have been facing, just regarding the pandemic alone. That's not even speaking to the intensification of racialized violence, police violence or the many other things that we will touch upon in a few moments. So, you know, just the normalization of oh well, you know, not that many people have really died, and it's really just older people and people with diabetes or heart conditions, and you know, not that many children or young people. This casual way to just speak of those disposable people, those people that are already inherently flawed, that is an expression of intersectional ableism. Because of course as you know, there's such a high proportion of Black people in the U.S., and Latinx people in the U.S., and disabled people of all races that have been most impacted by COVID, so that casual dismissal really shows some of the dynamics of these times as well.  

As you also probably know, we have had over 7 million people with COVID in the U.S., and we're leading the world in cases and deaths, and were followed most closely by Brazil and Russia, which I think should give us all pause. There’s certainly a pattern that emerges, and that is a pattern that draws our attention to the political context in in those countries. The edging towards, or arguably in on, some places like Russia, and the dictatorship or the fascist overtaking that's happening in those places. If you contrast the response to COVID to other places in the world, you can really see the extent to which the pandemic here has been exploited to push an eugenicist agenda, and the way in which the medical industrial complex enforces and carries this out. It's really playing a role in edging us closer to a full racist dictatorship. I'm not trying to be alarmist. I'm just trying to draw our attentions to the real risks that we are facing.  

A couple of great examples are Morocco and Sudan. Morocco, very soon after the pandemic, essentially invoked the equivalent of the Defense Production Act. There is no fanfare or discussion or controversy - factories were just redeployed immediately to mass-produce personal protective equipment, or PPE. So guess what happened? There was only slightly over 2,000 deaths there to date. Sudan made testing readily accessible as early as mid-March, fast testing, very easy for people in the country to be able to access. The death toll there is only 836.  

So the contrast is vast, and even prior to the pandemic our communities have been being attacked and divided on several fronts. As noted scholar of fascism, Jason Stanley, has talked about recently, fascism uses a lot of tactics and it plays the long game. Hitler's rise to power took about five to six years, and so did the full fledge onslaught of the genocide in Rwanda, but both contexts deployed similar rhetoric to what's being used by Trump and this Administration, which I think we could accurately call a regime.  

So, you know, what are some of the ways that our communities are being attacked and have been? One I think that is crucial to mention because it is in fact a public health crisis, is the lethal targeting of Black and Brown people, the majority of whom are also disabled by the police. When police officers shoot a young Black father seven times in the back in front of his children, as they did with Jacob Blake, or they shoot into an apartment 34 times and a young woman, Breonna Taylor, is murdered. This exemplifies police force as behaving as domestic terrorists and engaging in acts of violence that function as collective punishment and are profoundly and collectively traumatizing.   

It’s not just me that's saying this is a public health crisis. Clearly Black lives matter, and our communities are demanding that this is recognized as the horrific crisis that it is. I think something that's pivotal and hopeful and I'll take a little bit of a pause now to kind of evoke the potential of this moment, is that something has happened in the medical industrial conflict since its monopolist roots, or even its roots prior to that in trans-Atlantic slavery and the attempted genocide of Indigenous people that the MIC and healthcare workers have been democratizing over the last 20 to 30 years. So there's more and more Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are healthcare workers at all levels, including doctors and research scientists. There are more women, more queer, trans, non-binary people, and more disabled folks. So now this is a moment when we actually need them most, as are accomplices, and they're there. They are in the belly of the beast, able to begin to question what's happening from the inside and begin to amplify the demands of communities most impacted. 

A great example of this is an organization I have the gift to work with as well, called the Do No Harm Coalition, that is based here in the Bay Area, which is where I'm tuning in from. Oakland, otherwise known as Ohlone territory, where Do No Harm is based as well. They do a lot of great work, please look them up if you're interested in learning more, and if you are a radical healthcare worker who is located in the Bay Area, please join their work. There's actually chapters that are starting up around the country. So yeah, if that's you, you know, please do research them. One of the projects that they've done in the past was called the Justice Project and it's a study of the impact of collective trauma on Black communities due to police terrorism. That's just an example of some of the opportunity and the power and potential of this moment.  

Let's segue back to what we're up against but, you know, don't lose that hope. Remember how it feels in your body because I really want everyone who's listening or watching to be able to carry that forward from this talk, so you can feel supported to action because we all have a role in this great work if we choose it.  

Coming back to this moment, what we're seeing characterizing these times and what we're seeing as an intensification of these eugenicist attempts being deployed by the MIC is a normalization of eugenics as such a huge part of ableism, the justification of medical rationing. So one such example of this that's very painful is the recent death of Michael Hickson, who was a 46 year old disabled man living in South Austin, Texas. He had a very severe heart attack and as a consequence, he had cognitive impairment and was a quadriplegic. He had some health complications from that understandably, but he was living a good life, incredibly loved and cherished by his wife and four children. He came down with COVID so he was admitted to the hospital. His wife, Melissa Hixon, almost immediately got into a struggle with the doctors providing his care, because they essentially claimed that Michael's quality of life, “he doesn't really have much of one” and that quote was captured on tape by Melissa Hickson because she became very mistrustful of the doctors pretty immediately, and actually recorded a conversation that's now been widely publicized in the media.  

But essentially what happened was Melissa agreed with the doctors that she and Michael didn't want for him to be intubated, but she did request that he receive other life-saving treatment such as food, water, oxygen therapy, and medicine. Essentially, the doctors and the state of Texas intervened and refused this, essentially killing Michael Hickson by letting him die. So Texas decided that they shouldn't have to use resources to try to save someone with Michael's disabilities, and it's just it's a profound loss. Often times when I talk about Mr. Hixon, I just actually start crying, and this is an example of the way the state and the medical industrial complex are able to carry out this eugenicist project. That they're able to enforce this rendering of someone's life being unworthy of living, this is an extreme example of medical ableism being heightened, really exposed, and yet justified in these pandemic times. So the right and the ability of the medical industrial complex to manage and administer life, to wield the ultimate authority of who lives and who dies, and our quality of life, is really what Michelle Foucault meant when he initially proposed the term biopolitics that I've been evoking throughout the entire conversation. All of these complex dynamics we've been discussing are the out-picturing, the manifestations, and the impacts of biopolitics. 

So where do we really go from here? And what are other ways this is impacting us in this moment? The PPE (personal protective equipment) and ventilator scarcity have been really part of the way in which this has been normalized, and I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about how this ‘scarcity’ has come to be. As of last week over 1,150 healthcare workers have died of COVID-19 due to inadequate PPP. Rationing and shortages are still commonplace in hospitals all over the country. There's been a lot of fuzzy facts, and obfuscation of facts, and alt-facts around how this has happened, because the reality is that we in the United States we could have had a response that looked like Morocco’s, or Sudan’s, or New Zealand’s, or Taiwan’s. There's many ways that we could have responded.  

But unfortunately the MIC has already been designed for scarcity to leverage that as a form of social control and assurance of highest profits, so what you see when you look deeply at how this ‘scarcity’ has come to be is that there's hospital administrators at every level across the country, who have been firing nurses and other healthcare workers for bringing in their own PPE or for wearing N95s for procedures for which it wasn't deemed medically necessary.  And administrators refusing to procure masks due to too high a cost per unit or refusing to take mask donations. I have a colleague that I work with in the Health Justice Commons, who's one of our rad docs, who is one of the members of the Radical Telehealth Collective that we're starting as a response to the pandemic, and he's he situated in Tacoma, Washington. He has shared with me and others that the hospital that he works in received hundreds of mask donations that are literally just put away in a locked room that healthcare workers are not allowed to access.  

More importantly, the Trump regime has made very clear decisions, which have led to thousands of unnecessary and preventable deaths and needless preventable sufferings, and one of the most well-documented examples of this was picked up by news outlets as diverse as Vanity Fair and Business Week, and that's a meeting that took place on March 20th of this year, so very early on in the pandemic, and this meeting brought together Public Health experts, Silicon Valley funders, and CEOs from many corporations including Mary Barra, who's the CEO of GM. All these people came together and they were basically like we're ready to throw down, we are ready for the defense production act like, you know deploy our factories to make PPE to make ventilators. We can you know, we can save communities we can save lives. The representative for the Trump regime at this meeting was Jared Kushner, who's Trump son-in-law, and he said "no, you all don't understand business, you don't understand how capitalism works, and we're not going to do this. All of the different localities and states are going to fend for themselves, especially because the areas that are most hardest hit by the pandemic are blue regions, are blue states, are Democrats."  

So there was a clear decision that was very horrifically, politically motivated very early on by the Trump Administration. And that you can just see that pattern play out again and again and again, that's just one of the most heightened examples. There's other ways in which these biopolitics of the MIC are playing out in very very heightened ways. We already mentioned the Public Health crisis of racialized police violence that has preceded and also has continued to worsen and become more intense throughout the pandemic. The biopolitics of the medical industrial complex is also defined by the bi-directional entanglement and amplification of power and control of the prison industrial complex and the MIC uses carceral confinement and medical torture in its own institutions and across other ‘carceral complexes’.  

When I say carceral complexes I mean institutions such as jails or prisons or ICE detention centers that are really part of these systems of ‘Criminal Justice and Confinement’. So this has been brought to our attention in intense and painful but crucial ways recently by Dawn Wooten, the whistleblower who is a nurse stationed in the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia. So what Dawn informed the public about was two huge things. One was very high and unnecessary and coercive amounts of sterilizations on Spanish-speaking women or people with uteruses. The other was a complete miss handling of the public health crisis around COVID in these institutions, in these ICE detention centers. And, it's important to know that Irwin Detention Center is run by LaSalle Corrections and they own and run 13 other ICE detention facilities across the South.  

I think Dawn Wooten’s words to our communities when she became a whistleblower are so powerful, so I'm going to evoke them now for all of us. She said "I became a whistleblower, now I'm a target, but I'll be a target any time rather than staying a part of an inhumane system." So again another bright spot of resistance and potential is that there's so much conscientious objection happening within these institutions.  

You know, another thing that's very painful is that Dawn Wooten estimates at least 50 people who are interred in Irwin Detention Center have COVID and that at least 13 workers do, and in fact that Health Services administrator of Irwin Detention Center, who had hired Dawn, Marion Cole, died of COVID.  

So it's just, it's really there's so much tragedy unfolding. We can see the way in which that medical industrial complex is so complicit in and you know, you may know some of the back history of eugenics in this country - it is not new. I was able to talk a little bit about that history and how it relates to the founding of the MIC. Regarding the Rockefellers and other monopolist that I name, but the first eugenics legislation to legalize force sterilization of those unfit and disabled was in 1907 here in this country in Indiana, followed by California and 28 other states. During the period of 1907 to the mid-40s over 70,000 people mostly Black, brown, poor, and disabled people were forcibly sterilized. Hitler boasted that he looked to these laws and the Eugenics program in the U.S. to ‘inspire’ the Nazi program.  

Now nominally eugenics ended in the U.S. In the mid-40s in response to the horror of Nazism, but we can clearly see the way that it continues. The MIC allows it to continue by degrees in other contexts, you know in our institutions that are part of our lives and our world. Another example of this that precedes the pandemic is the legalization of transvaginal ultrasounds. It's really more specifically the legal mandating of the use of transvaginal ultrasounds for people that have uteruses and vaginas that want to have an abortion.  

So this legislation is law in Kentucky and Virginia and several other states and it basically a mandates a person who wants to have an abortion that you, have to have an invasive procedure in which a sonogram device is inserted into your body. It's painful, it's medically unnecessary and then also as part of this legislation the medical practitioner who's working with you is forced, mandated by law, to narrate what they're seeing on the sonogram image. If they don't do so they can lose their license to practice medicine. So you can see this way in which a very patriarchal agenda is inserted—I apologize for the poor choice of words there—into our medical practices and normalized, you know, not recognized as coercive and even though it's a very clearly medically unnecessary. It's you know, it's a way that the autonomy of doctors is even undermined or other healthcare practitioners that might be doing these procedures.  

I think, you know in connection to that in connection to reproductive justice and reproductive health, the impending installment of Amy Barrett as a new Supreme Court Justice is another huge issue for us to be aware of. You know Amy Barrett is a member of a highly conservative Catholic organization. But what's most disconcerting about her is that you know, she is coming with a very extremist right-wing agenda. So if in fact if Barrett is installed to the Supreme Court, and she has been voted in by November 10th, then she will be one of the Supreme Court Justices presiding over California versus Texas, which is the case that could repeal the ACA, the Affordable Care Act. Now if that were to happen 30 million people will lose health care across the U..S, according to the economic policy Institute, and over 1.2 million people outside of the health sector could lose their jobs.  

So, you know these patterns of withholding of healthcare, especially healthcare related to reproductive health and justice, foisting it upon people coercively, you know forcing sterilization on people. These are methods used to deploy social control and really enforce white supremacy patriarchy and ableism. You know forced sterilization has a long history of use as a genocide all tactic of war, including against Indigenous women in this country. Jen Dearwater a two-spirit disabled journalist and researcher of Cherokee Nation descent writes about this extensively. So that's a great resource for this, but what these dynamics really show us is the way in which also across histories and into present time, these tactics of wartime violence have been transported into the medical industrial complex and across carceral systems and normalized as legitimate or necessary.  

You know, so that kind of helps us sum up and understand how we got here and exposes some of the medical industrial complex’s hidden histories. You know by design the medical industrial complex is white supremacist and eugenicist at its roots. It was created as an interlocking set of ‘vertical industries’ by monopoly families to ensure maximum profit and social control - not unlike the fossil fuel chemical or related industries. And in fact, you can see the way that they are entangled from some of the prior examples and histories that I laid out.  

I want to I want to bring in some very very helpful and powerful resources and guides in learning more about these topics and engaging in this work more deeply. So, Harriet Washington is someone who I would really love for you to all be familiar with. Harriet is the author of the really loved and very important book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to Present and she also she wrote a great many books, many of them are award-winning. She also more recently wrote A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and the Assault on the American Mind and she actually has another book that will be coming out soon, so keep a look out for it. But one of the really powerful things that Harriet Washington did in Medical Apartheid is she was one of the first people to expose J. Marion Sims who many of you may be familiar with as the ‘founding father of the medical sub-discipline of gynecology. What she revealed for our communities, for activists, for organizers, is the extent to which J. Marion Sims engaged in coercive experimentation and medical torture of enslaved Black women and also poor immigrant women in order to kind of create his techniques and technologies for that discipline. So that's just an illustration of not just the white supremacy and the patriarchy that's really embedded in the system but the way in which it's intrinsically entangled with how knowledge has been accumulated and how it's been so abstract, how knowledge has so painfully been extracted from our communities, and that's just a part of how the MIC has accumulated its knowledge.  

Another great academic that I want to bring to everyone's attention is Ruha Benjamin who has authored many books and is doing a lot of work in data justice right now and has done a lot of work in bringing an abolition mindset to health justice and healing justice. So her work is really powerful. One of the articles of hers that I really love is "Catching Our Breath: "Critical Race Science and Technology Studies and the Carceral Imagination" and this you know, there's a lot of aspects to this piece but it overviews the racist history of the spirometer, which is a device used to measure people's lung capacity. If you have asthma or you know someone that does you have seen a spirometer I guarantee it and the work also borrows heavily of the research of Lundy Braun.  

So in the history of the spirometer, it was actually built by a man named Cartwright because he wanted to study the differences in lung capacity in enslaved Black people and white people, to be able to quantify it precisely. You know, again this illustrates the dynamics the founding dynamics of the MIC. So according to Cartwright and his ‘findings’ the deficiency of Black people was twenty percent in comparison to white people. So that this deficiency was actually a defining characteristic of Black people and this is an example, not just for the creation of racist medical technology, but also of the way that that race is encoded in a biological essentialist way that is completely outside of reality and real bodies. But what this has resulted in essentially is that because of this calibration even to this day a person who is Black would have to exhibit more lung capacity loss in order to be documented as having a diagnosis, or being deserving of care because there's a metric that set that Black Americans ‘have less lung capacity in comparison to other races’.  

So this is another reason why even you know, social justice oriented practitioners struggle within the medical industrial complex because there's embedded layers of white supremacy and gender injustice and ableism.  

Another example of similar racist parameters exist for threshold of illness for kidney disease in Black Americans making it slower and harder for kidney disease to be diagnosed in Black Americans and slower and harder for Black Americans to receive dialysis or to become eligible for transplants. This is actually an issue that many of the fine people that I work with with the Do No Harm Coalition have been working to expose and disrupt. So I want to thank them for their work.  

Another excellent resource for breaking down the racism and eugenicist logics of different realms of medicine is the Institute for Justice and Healing and you can find their executive summary on their website.  

Another excellent resource is Dr. Alondra Nelson's Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.  

A couple more things, I suggest to all of my students and people in my communities with whom I'm learning and organizing as required reading for our times - I highly, highly recommend Sins Invalid's Disability Justice Primer, second edition, which you can also find on their website.  

Then another excellent resource is the Changing Frequencies Podcast, and they will also be releasing a medical industrial timeline soon. So again really powerful resources.  

I think this is just the beginning or for many of you a continuation of the powerful work that you're already doing. You know, what is to be done? What can we do in this moment?  

You know and it's so important that we work to transform and unlearn internalized ableism and that we work to reimagine health and healing from the framework of collective liberation. It’s crucial that we honor and uplift and ancestral and Indigenous knowledge and practices, you know in these times. I think you know in some ways health justice is most centrally about reclamation, you know, it's about re-claiming our bodily autonomy, our authority and power to define for ourselves and our communities what health truly means and understand that health is, you know necessarily a collective endeavor, and it's something that is contingent upon our environment, and our social institutions. It is a process of healing and justice that requires justice in all realms of society, you know this hyper-compartmentalization of health to in an individual body is a white supremacist, kind of male supremacist, ableist myth. So we need to be able to eject that and align with what's really true and recenter to our expertise about our own bodies and our very embodiments our bodily needs and that of our loved ones our communities, humanity as a whole, and the planet. 

So what are four major demands, or you know aspirations, that we can set upon this new kind of imaginative horizon if we clear out all the intersectional oppression that is spun, and that we're indoctrinated into because of the MIC what does that look like? So I would say, you know again understanding, exposing, challenging, transforming ableism, you know, especially medical ableism and racialized ableism is work that we all need to be doing now. And disability justice needs to be understood and centered in all of our work at all levels. So if you're a teacher, if you're a parent, if you're a climate justice organizer, whatever walk—or roll—of life, for those people that use wheelchairs that are listening, you know, whatever walk or path of life that you are in, you know engage in this work of challenging and transforming ableism and centering disability justice. The DJ primer, the Disability Justice primer, that I mentioned a few moments ago as a great resource for that. I hope I've provided some good information in this talk as well.  

Another demand is the democratization of science and all its translational applications across disciplines and technological innovations. So we need people science, you know, we no longer can tolerate science being elite, or the purview of corporate power. Science needs to center the precautionary principle, and it needs to center broad public oversight and participation. You know, all scientific institutions should become collectives. They should be worker-owned co-ops of some form and even that's another huge piece of this in order for us to successfully dismantle and recreate the MIC, you know, we're going to have to massively transform capitalism and how our economy functions, so transformative economics is a huge part of this.  

We also need to abolish the chemical big-agro industry in its current form and we need to work towards a moratorium on new chemicals, especially pesticides, herbicides, solvents, and volatile organic chemicals. You know that doubling from 5 to 10 trillion in the next 10 years, that was predicted by the UN report that I referenced earlier, we really need to forestall that from happening. You know, as I mentioned we need to collectivize healthcare institutions, including big-pharma and healthcare institutions in which people are providing care to community members. So I think that we should have networks of worker-owned co-ops by healthcare workers. So people that are curanderas and people that are cardiologists are working with horizontalism, equality deep respect. You know, we're able to actually disrupt and transform the commodification of these ancestral healing systems. And we're able to let healthcare workers also be the administrators, and also design these institutions. We need to shift obviously from profit to disability justice and climate justice principles. And disability justice is always intersectional, so it you know challenges racism and sexism and all the other systems of oppression that comprise ableism and uphold it. We really need to center and set into motion medical reparations for Black and Indigenous people and their families first and foremost, then other people of color and other survivors of all classes and races of medical torture and abuse. Of which I'm one myself, which is part of why I've been so called to do this work with all of us.  

I'll just finally say, remember how powerful love is as a revolutionary tool and practice. You know, we have to love ourselves and one another and love the vision and the dream that we're holding for one another and there is healing and power in that, especially in these times.  

So with that, I will thank you all so deeply.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliot, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please Subscribe, wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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