Tucson, U.S.A. — The United States is forfeiting a half century of leadership in medical care and medical research and development, writes orthopaedic surgeon Lee Hieb, M.D., in an article in the winter issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

“We are rapidly throwing it all away as we spiral ever downward into a “vampire economy”—an economy so overtaxed and overregulated that it is sucking the lifeblood out of its productive citizens, she writes.

Hieb undertakes a diagnostic examination of the medical economy, and features the following findings:

• There are 140,000 pages of regulations pertaining to Medicare, compared with a “mere” 82,000 in an impossibly complex tax code.
• Today, 49 cents out of every dollar is spent by government. In 1920, only 10 cents was spent by government, and 90 cents privately. Even in 1947, after World War II and the Marshall Plan, only 20 cents of every dollar was spent by government.
• Businesses are organized into cartels. Some are favored by government, so that profits are retained privately, but losses are shared by taxpayers.

The diagnosis, Hieb writes, according to the Austrian school of economics, is that we have a classic fascist economy. According to Lwewellyn Rockwell, “Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.”

Hieb’s description of the economy comes from the title of Guenther Reimann’s 1938 book, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism.

“The frontispiece of Reimann’s book is a pictorial representation of what it took a car manufacturer to get 5,000 tires for his autos. After 6 months and numerous encounters with boards, chambers, secretaries, ministers, councils, and commissars, the company received 1,000 rubber tires and 4,000 ersatz tires, at a 200% increase in price.”

Hieb compares this with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), although the FDA takes 15 years to approve a drug, not just 6 months.

When F.A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1928, 55 percent of the German economy was controlled by the government, and their military expenditure was 10 percent of their budget. Today in America it is estimated that 45 percent of our economy is controlled by the government, and our military consumes 21 percent of the national budget.

Hieb explores the moral hazards of dependency on government money, and warns physicians: “We must never put ourselves in such financial dependency on the government that we are willing to compromise Hippocratic principles of ethical patient care.” Independence, she writes, is the “garlic necklace.”

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943, publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

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The Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial film, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is probably one of the most striking films ever with its several disturbing sexual and violent imagery. The film is based on 18th century French libertine Marquis de Sade’s book, The 120 Days of Sodom. The book is about 4 libertines holding up several slaves for 4 months in a castle in order to experience the sexual gratification without boundaries which contains sado-masochistic attitudes. Pasolini, transposes the book to Mussolini’s Italy in 1944. Therefore Sade’s libertine novel becomes an extreme critique of fascism and leads the audience to think about the problem of evil.

The movie consists of four parts: Anti inferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood. In Anti inferno we see the kidnapped men and women taken to a palace and four powerful men, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President chooses 18 of them (9 of each sex) as their victims. The victims are basically for this 4 men to give them pleasure by any means. There is no hope for escape, no freedom, no laws, no morality, no nothing for victims, all promised is death in the end. Victims are definitely forbidden to attend any kind of religious behavior and sexual intercourse with each other. Thus we clearly see how individuality is completely erased by once being defined as a victim.

The sexuality in the film is without any kind of intimacy and eroticism, only based on 4 fascist’s sexual desires. The degradation of human as a whole and using the human body only as a mediation of pleasure are quite disturbing and since there are no boundaries, the audience has to bear literally intolerable scenes of rape, torture, blood, eating feces, etc. throughout the film.

The extreme imagery of the film points out how far human can go when he holds the power or in other words when violence is legitimate. But the striking part of this film is that Pasolini is not just focusing on the power holder while criticizing fascism. He approaches to the issue from the other side as well, by pointing out victim’s “immoral” behavior when they have the chance to save themselves. So the film evokes the questions such as, is anything acceptable when one’s own being is under threat, namely in times of crisis? Does the victim has the right to do anything when he has the chance to save his own life? Where does the border appear between being the fascist and the victim?

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom is an intense film focusing on the problem of evil and fascism, though it is hard to watch. But maybe just because it is shocking, it is a must-see film.

There is one last thing to draw attention. Ironically, a short time after the release of Salo, Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car on November 2, 1975. It is notable that one day before his death, Furio Colombo interviewed with him and the title of the interview was “We Are All In Danger”.

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