Editors Note: On Sept. 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, filmmaker Michael Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment. Listen to a podcast of the full conversation here. Following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is, as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs. Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street. Personally, I’m hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I’m just wondering how you’re coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck. Michael Moore: I don’t know if they’re so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled […]
Research suggests Hippocrates’ holistic view of health and illness was right; mind does matter when it comes to health and healing. Nurse researchers and clinicians at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON) and the Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) share that view and are working at this mind-body intersection. They are exploring how to prevent the damage excessive stress can do to a young child’s development and how the mind can help speed or slow healing and help control pain. And they’re helping nurses recognize and recover from their own stress-induced behavioral problems. Key Ingredient to Growing Healthy Kids under Stress: Active Parenting JHUSON researcher and professor Deborah Gross, DNSc, RN, FAAN, knows unrelenting stress hurts. For young children, that hurt can last a lifetime. Stress causes excessive secretion of the brain’s ‘fight-flight hormone, cortisol, that can damage a child’s growing body and brain. It’s a hurt she’s working to help stop. Consistent with a recent Institute of Medicine report, she has found that some behavioral disorders in young people are preventable, particularly if resilience is taught and risk factors for stress are reduced. Among the foremost stressors are factors like poverty and unemployment, community violence and […]
PORTLAND, Ore. — In the last days of her life, Annabel Kitzhaber had a decision to make: she could be the tissue-skinned woman in the hospital with the tubes and the needles, the meds and smells and the squawk of television. Or she could go home and finish the love story with the man she’d been married to for 65 years. Her husband was a soldier who had fought through Europe with Patton’s army. And as he aged, his son would call him on D-Day and thank him – for saving the world from the Nazis, for bequeathing his generation with a relatively easy time. That son, John Kitzhaber, knew exactly what his mother’s decision meant. He was not only a governor, a Democrat who served two terms in Oregon as it tried to show the world that a state could give health care to most of its citizens, but a doctor himself. At age 88, with a weak heart, and tests that showed she most likely had cancer, Annabel chose to go home, walking away from the medical-industrial complex. ‘The whole focus had been centered on her illness and her aging, said Kitzhaber. ‘But both […]
Former president Jimmy Carter went on the record to point out that he believes that racism is at the heart of the great deal of the extreme animosity being leveled at President Obama (NBC News September 15). Carter identified himself as a Southerner with an insider’s understanding. There’s something he didn’t mention however: the special culpability of his own religion — Evangelical Christianity — for the anti-Obama hyperventilating and furious reaction to our first black president. And that reaction has less to do with race and more to do with the ugliest side of religion. The fact is that if you’re going to blame one group above all others for the willful ignorance and continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama the best candidate would be the evangelical/fundamentalist community. The angry part of the South Carter spoke of is racist because it’s dominated by a certain type of ‘Christian’ culture. Since Carter is also an evangelical Christian (as well as a Southerner) he would have done well to use his evangelical insider status to point to not just racism but to scream bloody murder about a bigger problem today: the hijacking of Christianity […]