University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds has screened Indoctrinate U, and has nothing but good words to say for it:
HELEN AND I JUST WATCHED EVAN COYNE MALONEY'S FILM, Indoctrinate U. It's a gripping hour-and-a-half, and the college administrators -- and there are a lot of them -- who call the cops on Evan rather than answer simple questions about matters of public record certainly give higher education a jackbooted-thug ambience. Even your dumber corporate PR people would know better, but they are used to a lot more public scrutiny than the folks who run colleges and universities.
I hope that the film gets a lot of attention. It certainly deserves it, and I think it's going to leave a lot of people angry.
Sign up to see the film here, and join the more than 20,000 others who have done the same.
The best way toward sustainable global development lies in the free exchange of information and the robust debate that enables ideas to be honed into workable practices. But Proctor & Gamble doesn't seem to be so sure about that. A press release issued by the Free Enterprise Action Fund tells the story of a corporate giant that pays lip service to the free flow of information, but not much more:
We wanted Procter & Gamble to show its managers and employees the new documentary "Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism" (http://www.mineyourownbusiness.org) and to publicly acknowledge the need to hear from both sides of the sustainable development debate," said Steve Milloy of AFM [Action Fund Management]. "While Procter & Gamble said it was willing to distribute 100 copies of the film to its employees, the company refused to publicly acknowledge the value of debate," added Milloy.
"Without the requested public acknowledgment, we doubt that Procter & Gamble is really sincere about showing its employees 'Mine Your Own Business,' or educating its employees about what many view as the dark side of environmentalism," said AFM's Tom Borelli. "Procter & Gamble's stakeholder engagement on sustainability apparently is limited only to the voice of environmental activists. 'Mine Your Own Business' spotlights the human cost of blind adherence to sustainability--a message company management needs to hear," added Borelli.
Negotiations between AFM and PG began after AFM filed a shareholder proposal with PG requesting a report to shareholders on the actions the company is taking to promote the general business environment.
"Procter & Gamble touts its sustainable development activities on its web site, but says little if anything about what it's doing to promote business, capitalism and free enterprise," said Milloy. "The company offered to meet with us about our concerns, but our position was that employee-viewing of "Mine Your Own Business" would be a more productive use of everyone's time.
"We're obviously disappointed, but not surprised," said Borelli. "Companies like Procter & Gamble have been so intimidated by anti-business environmental and social activists that they're afraid to be seen as considering alternative points of view," Borelli said.
"I suppose we'll have to look forward to discussing this issue with Procter & Gamble CEO Alan G. Lafley at the annual shareholder meeting this fall," Milloy concluded.
AFM is the investment advisor to the Free Enterprise Action Fund, which aims to "increase shareholder value by advancing free-market principles in the companies it owns."
The message MPI film Mine Your Own Business delivers about the dark side of environmentalism can be tough for those who have invested--emotionally, ideologically, and financially--in sustainability. But the film is a crucial complement to the ideal of sustainability, and tells hard truths about the costs a less-than-thoughtful environmentalism can levy on the world's poor. Still, some awfully big ostriches are dealing with the film by sticking their heads in the sand.
The “hear no evil” aspect of the syndrome is demonstrated by the recent experiences of "MYOB" filmmakers at the International Finance Corp., the private finance arm of the World Bank.
Though filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney declined comment, the IFC apparently had contacted them about hosting a screening of "MYOB" in the bank. The IFC finances a lot of large infrastructure projects and has had to wrestle with anti-development environmental groups that try to block those development efforts.
Not only did the IFC invite the filmmakers to screen the documentary, it also offered as a form of payment to do what it did with Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that is, purchase 200 DVDs and distribute them to local schools. McAleer and McElhinney jumped at the offer.
But a rather sheepish IFC official subsequently contacted the filmmakers and said that the bank had rethought its offer. The bank could only find the funds to buy 10 copies of "MYOB" and it had decided it would not distribute them to local schools.
Instead, the bank would lend them internally to bank employees. A final condition was that the filmmakers were not allowed to tell anyone or announce to anyone that the IFC showed the film.
After the screening, World Bank employees, on a one-by-one basis, reportedly commented to McAleer and McElhinney about how true "MYOB" was, but that they were not allowed to say so within the bank.
The syndrome’s “speak no evil” aspect is exemplified by my recent personal experience with consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, which touts its support for “sustainable development” on its Web site.
Concerned that the company was promoting a concept that has become an Orwellian eco-activist term for blocking all development opportunities no matter what the humanitarian costs, a shareholder group with which I am affiliated filed a related shareholder proposal with the company.
In negotiations concerning the proposal, we asked Procter & Gamble to consider distributing copies of "MYOB" to its employees as a way of providing them an alternative viewpoint on “sustainable development” and to make a public statement to the effect that the company thought it was important to hear alternative viewpoints on environmental topics.
But while the company agreed to distribute copies of "MYOB" to its employees, it refused to make the public statement. Procter & Gamble’s position was that it didn’t want to be seen as endorsing a particular organization’s point-of-view — an ostensibly reasonable position except that the company has previously publicly endorsed the viewpoints and mission of the Rainforest Alliance, an anti-development environmental group.
Without the public acknowledgment, we doubted that the company was serious about the need for balanced views on sustainable development. Since negotiations collapsed, we’ll be raising the issue with Procter & Gamble’s CEO, Alan G. Lafley, at its annual shareholder meeting this fall.
The combination of intimidating environmentalists and intimidated organizations has resulted in a tragic absence of debate about the environmental monkey on the backs of the world’s poor.
Until we can at least talk about what environmental policies may be doing to developing nations — let alone debate these policies--we will have little hope of changing the lamentable state of affairs that has blocked life-saving economic development.
The free exchange of ideas, the free flow of information, and the debate that ensues from both are the essence of liberty. They anchor democracy, and they offer us our best hope for a sustained, sustainable future. It's worth asking why organizations such as Procter & Gamble and the IFC are reluctant to foster them.
This week, Mine Your Own Business returned to Washington for a two-day marathon of screenings--and met with spectacular success. On Wednesday, the minority staff of the House Natural Resources Committee hosted a screening for 50 Capitol Hill staffers. Later that day, the Heritage Foundation, Ethics & Public Policy Center, and Institute on Religion and Democracy co-hosted a screening at the Heritage Foundation. Open to the public, the screening drew a crowd of more than 100 people. On Thursday, Cato's Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity hosted a thirdscreening for an audience of over 75 international policy experts.
Attendees included not only Congressional staffers and policy experts, but also civil servants from many government departments (including Commerce and Energy) and representatives from the Chilean embassy, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the American Petroleum Institute. Many people requested copies of the DVD and plan to show it to their colleagues and communities.
It's great to see word getting out about Indoctrinate U. University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds calls the film "gripping" and says he hopes "the film gets a lot of attention. It certainly deserves it, and I think it's going to leave a lot of people angry." He also reprints an email from IU director Evan Coyne Maloney describing the groundswell of support the film is receiving: "The overall conversion rate is something like 25%, which is absolutely unheard of in any other media," Maloney says of the IU website's "sign up for screenings" option. "Direct mailers would sell their firstborn for that kind of conversion. Sometime in the next week, we will break 20,000 signups. And that's without spending a single dime promoting the site! If we get five times that--certainly feasible--I think distributors will have a hard time ignoring us."
Reynolds also points to a glowing review by Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News:
A friend of mine did a round of campus visits with his son earlier this year before the son decided where to enroll in the fall. When they came back after one particularly unsatisfactory visit my friend explained why that college was definitely crossed off his son's list.
As I wrote to someone I know who is a professor emeritus there, "He found the insularity and the pervasive groupthink stifling. All the 'chalking' was left wing; he went to a history class and the professor claimed that capitalism was responsible for the Holocaust (and refused to let a student who disagreed finish speaking)."
There was more, but you probably know this story by now - many colleges and university campuses are pervasively left wing, to the extent that any student not on the left is likely to be marginalized or worse.
Seebach urges readers to sign up for screenings in their area -- and expresses her hope that popular demand will bring the film to Denver soon.
Wherever you live, sign up. Everyone who cares about education in this country should have a chance to see this film.
Roy Innis has good words for Mine Your Own Business--and harsh ones for radical environmentalists. "You have to see the film, 'Mine Your Own Business,' to fully grasp the callous disdain these radicals have for the world's poor," he writes;
These enemies of the poor say they are "stakeholders" wishing to "preserve" indigenous people and villages. They never consider what's wanted by the real stakeholders — those who live in these communities and must endure the consequences of harmful campaigns waged all over the world.
The WWF, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and other multinational activist groups battle mines in Romania, Peru, Chile, Ghana and Indonesia; electricity projects in Uganda, India and Nepal; biotechnology that could improve farm incomes and reduce malnutrition in Kenya, India, Brazil and the Philippines; and DDT that could slash malaria rates in Africa, where the disease kills 3,000 children a day.
They harp on technology's speculative hazards and ignore real, life-or-death dangers that modern mining, development and technology would reduce or prevent. They never mention the jobs, clinics, schools, roads, improved housing and small business opportunities — or the electricity, refrigeration, safe water, better nutrition, reduced disease and fewer dead children.
They pervert "sustainable development" to mean no development, and ignore how mines will lay the foundation that will sustain prosperity and better living standards for generations.
Agitators use global warming and "corporate social responsibility" to force companies to acquiesce to their agendas — and ignore human rights to energy and technology, and people's desperate cries for a chance to take their rightful places among the Earth's healthy and prosperous people.
They extol the virtues of microcredit, to support minimal family enterprises, and demand debt forgiveness and more foreign aid for corrupt dictators — but oppose economic development that would eliminate the need for international welfare. They blame Newmont Mining for accidents that killed five people over a two-year period in Ghana, but refuse to admit that their pressure campaigns cause millions of deaths every year.
One could justifiably call it eco-manslaughter — or a racist experiment on powerless, impoverished Third World families.
Yes, there are environmental impacts from mines, dams and other development. There are health and other risks. But the Industrial Revolution also brought those changes. Are we worse off for it? Do we want to return to the jobs, lifestyles and living standards of pre-industrial, pre-electric America, when 95% of Americans were farmers, cholera and malaria were ever-present, and the average life expectancy was 45?
Would any of the greens, politicians and celebrities who clamor to keep the world's poor "indigenous" (and thus impoverished, energy-deprived and diseased) care to live that lifestyle for even one month? Would they exchange their 10,000-square-foot mansions for a hovel, give up electricity and stop globe-trotting in private jets?
Why hasn't the United Nations criticized the institutional racism being perpetrated in the name of "saving the planet"? Where are U.S. civil rights groups, media, churches and these poor countries' leaders? This intolerable situation cannot continue. People of conscience must no longer remain silent.
Innis chairs the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights organization that supports the economic rights of the world's poor. Rand Simberg calls the phenomenon Innis charts here the Green Man's Burden.
Here's to Glenn Reynolds for foregrounding an important review of an important film.
In an article entitled "Exposing Poisoned Ivies," Washington Times columnist Kevin Vance delivers a detailed profile of Indoctrinate U, director Evan Coyne Maloney, and MPI:
On more than one occasion while making the film, campus police escorted Mr. Maloney out of campus buildings after administrators refused to speak on camera. During the making of "Indoctrinate U," the filmmakers made more than 200 attempts to contact administrators involved in various campus incidents. None of the administrators was willing to speak on camera.
Mr. Maloney says he was astonished by how few administrators were willing to defend their policies.
"One thing that shocked me is that these people know what they're doing is wrong, and they keep doing it," he said. "Rather than stop, they just do everything they can to make sure that the public doesn't find out."
For Mr. Maloney, directing films is a relatively new endeavor. He was a software developer until the company he worked for went out of business in the collapse of the dot-com bubble. In early 2003, he was looking for other things to do. He noticed that television and press coverage of antiwar protests was very different from what he was seeing in New York.
Mr. Maloney recognized that many of the protesters were Marxists and from other extremist groups. He made a video of interviews with protesters and posted it on his blog, Brain-Terminal.com. The video then made its way to the Fox News Channel.
He then joined forces with Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg to form a film production company, On the Fence, that produced two short documentaries, "Brainwashing 101" (2004) and "Brainwashing 201" (2005).
Those early films caught the attention of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Moving Picture Institute (MPI). "I saw a lot of potential, and I wanted to help [Mr. Maloney] in other ways," Mr. Halvorssen said.
MPI, founded in 2005, "exists to nurture aspiring filmmakers who care about American freedom," said Mr. Halvorssen. MPI has generated support and publicity for "Indoctrinate U."
Already the movie has been praised as "excellent" in the Rocky Mountain News, and gotten noticed by several conservative publications, with National Review's Stanley Kurtz calling it "fun and powerful" and the Weekly Standard describing it as "free-wheeling.
"Indoctrinate U" follows Mr. Maloney to different campuses, where he chronicles the stories of students like Steve Hinkle, who was prosecuted for posting flyers for an upcoming College Republicans event at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Because neither campus administrators nor university trustees are protecting individual rights on campus, Mr. Maloney said, someone must. "It's time for us as taxpayers and as citizens to exercise some oversight on our own," he said.
His hope is "that by people seeing this film, there will be enough people out there to hold professors and administrators to account," Mr. Maloney said.
Mr. Halvorssen called the film "a vitally important contribution to higher-education reform" that "shines the light of public exposure on the assault on civil liberties that occurs on a daily basis on American college campuses."
Donald Boudreaux, chair of economics at George Mason University, has good words for Mine Your Own Business:
...just as religious belief sometimes can inspire adherents to commit acts of cruelty against other human beings, so, too, can environmentalism. Such cruelty is vividly revealed in the new film "Mine Your Own Business." This movie is a documentary centered on a small Romanian town, Rosia Montana. A poor mountain village, Rosia Montana was chosen by a western mining company as a site for a new mine -- an enterprise that would have offered higher-paying jobs to the mostly peasant, rural population.
Environmentalists, though, opposed the mine. Among their chief reasons was their insistence that the mine would "destroy" the way of life of residents of Rosia Montana. On this point, the environmentalists were correct: The mine would indeed change the way of life in that town. But as the film documents, that's precisely an outcome that the townspeople wanted.
Their rural way of life -- with chickens scampering along the dirt roads and outhouses rather than indoor plumbing the norm -- was no joy for them. Most of these townspeople welcomed an opportunity to integrate with the modern, industrial, global economy.
The environmental congregation, however, paid no attention. Living in cities far away from Rosia Montana, environmentalists -- against all evidence -- insisted that the townspeople really don't want the industry, jobs and greater prosperity that the mine would bring.
One environmentalist, a Belgian woman, confidently shared her revelation that the people of Rosia Montana prefer to travel by horse rather than by automobile, so the added wealth that the mine would bring to enable the townspeople to afford cars would be pointless.
The townspeople, alas, have very different ideas. Being human, they're capable of thinking for themselves. And when asked if they'd prefer a horse to a car, droves of them looked at the questioner as if he were stupid to ask such a thing. "A car" was the constant and unambiguous answer of each person asked.
In another scene, a local man in his 20s, after expressing his support for the mine, was asked if he shared the environmentalists' concern that the mine would destroy the town's beauty. Looking momentarily befuddled, the young man glanced around his hometown -- at the dirt streets, the shacks, the ever-present farm animals -- and said matter-of-factly that "It is not so beautiful."
I don't know if the mine ever will be built in Rosia Montana; environmentalists are still fighting it. If these environmentalists succeed, it will be yet another example of religious zealotry run amok with sad consequences.
Boudreaux's characterization of radical environmentalism as a form of fundamentalism is as useful as it is apt--if it seems odd at first to describe a political movement centered on conservation as a form of faith-based proselytism, it becomes less so when one grasps how bent this movement is on compelling others to conform to its apocalyptic tenets. As Mine Your Own Business shows, the people trying to prevent places such as Rosia Montana from developing economically are so blinkered by their fervent belief in their cause that they are willing to ignore not only facts, but also the well-being of those they are trying to "save."
Ghana's foremost daily, the Ghana Graphic, announces the June 19 national premier of Mine Your Own Business and offers a fresh perspective on a film that has outraged Western environmentalist NGOs and activists:
The premiering comes off at a time when there is divided opinion about the impact and effectiveness of NGOs working in the country, with some people calling for a regulatory body to oversee the registration and operations of NGOs.
“Mine Your Own Business will make a lot of comfortable Western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion of environmentalism,” McAleer said.
The strength in the documentary is that the writer managed to get the views of a lot of poor people in mining communities who, rather than supporting the view of environmental NGOs, saw them as a threat to their survival and hope to living a better life should they succeed in the campaigns to close down the mines operating in their communities.
To those community dwellers, the Western environmentalists used them as baits to lay claim to titles, awards and huge funding, all of which did not benefit them in any way.
While mining is a lucrative venture with a high potential of making communities and their people rich, some mines across the world have not lived up to expectation.
Some of them engage in indiscriminate and environmentally unfriendly means of operation and leave the communities more devastated and impoverished after the closure of the mine.
But some mining experts have attributed any such eventualities to weak regulations from the host country.
Recently, Ghana declared its intention to increase the benefits that the country derived from mining.
Over 70,000 people have watched the documentary, which has toured many countries including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Bulgaria and Romania.
It has also been shown on 15 US university campuses, including Harvard, Yale and Brown, and has featured on many television networks.
As this film spreads, so does its impact. And as it reaches developing nations, the power of its perspective on environmentalism's tendency to overlook the plight of the world's poor only grows. While Western audiences view the film as a critique of a Western movement, developing nations see it as an opportunity to clarify--and strengthen--their own economic missions.
The New York PostprofilesIndoctrinate U director and star, Evan Coyne Maloney:
KYLE SMITH: Why did you make this movie?
EVAN COYNE MALONEY: What I wanted to do was show the faces of academic people whose careers have been put in jeopardy for something as simple as expressing opinions that might be the minority opinions on campus but in larger society are actually pretty commonplace. Film has a level of emotional impact that simply can't be matched in other media.
Q: Summarize the film.
A: It says that there is a predominant ideology on campus and it's almost a case of groupthink.
In any community, once you pass a critical mass of people who share the same views, they tend to act poorly to people with different views. This is a human failing. You see it around the world with religious strife, you see it in different businesses where a successful company will collapse because they've become ossified in their thinking.
The film is about free speech and free thought. I think that most Americans, regardless of ideology, would say that the things I'm covering are absolutely appalling.
Q: Where'd you go to college?
A: I went to Bucknell University from 1990 to '94. I had a political opinion paper. It was my experience there that made me question what was going on. Entire stacks of the paper would get picked up and thrown away in Dumpsters. This is something that is still happening. It was that incident that made me realize that the ideals of tolerance and diversity were empty platitudes. My university was not interested in diversity of ideas.
Q: How have distributors reacted so far?
A: We're talking to them. Many distributors don't see a market yet for documentary film unless it's the standard Michael Moore-Al Gore worldview. So we probably have an additional hurdle. But ultimately there is a market for this. I'm optimistic that we're going to get distribution.
Maloney's message is as important as it is subtle. Indoctrinate U is not arguing that the current political climate of campuses needs to be shifted to the right--as some have suggested--but rather that any campus that is a de facto political monoculture is going to run into serious problems realizing its mission. Intellectual vitality cannot exist where there is not intellectual variety; free inquiry cannot be genuinely embraced in the absence of diversity of thought. It's really very simple -- even if it's also quite subtle.
As Michael Moore's Sicko spreads the message that single-payer health care is what America needs, MPI is launching a series of short films that debunk the disinformation anchoring Moore's campaign. FreeMarketCure.com features a series of hard-hitting shorts that show Canada's health care system in all its disfunctional glory. Created by independent filmmaker Stuart Browning, the shorts also explode some of the destructive myths about the U. S. system that proponents of nationalized health care like to present as fact.
In a press release issued today, MPI announced the launch and explained its importance:
Shirley Healey, a resident of British Columbia, was scheduled for "urgent" surgery on her blocked mesenteric artery--in four months' time. Ontario man Lindsay McCreith was offered a "critical" MRI on his cancerous brain tumor--again in four months' time. Both gravely ill patients crossed the border into the United States, where they received life-saving treatment within days.
The stories of Healey, McCreith, and several others are available at FreeMarketCure.com, a new film website dedicated to educating the public about single-payer health care. Sponsored by the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), FreeMarketCure.com is America's one-stop answer to the dangerous fantasy that the government can and should manage your health care.
Created by MPI fellow Stuart Browning, FreeMarketCure.com features short films that reveal the truth about health care in Canada and in the United States. The site will also host commentary and a weblog by policy experts David Gratzer (a physician and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute), David Hogberg (a senior analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research), and David Catron (an expert on health care finance).
"As our national debate about health care heats up, it's crucial to distinguish between facts and spin," Browning says. "Canada is facing a health care crisis--but you won't hear about that from those who argue that America should resolve its health care woes by modeling itself after the Canadian and Cuban systems."
Browning's films reflect the reality of health care in Canada, where government control has resulted in unconscionably long waiting lists for critical care, where private health insurance is illegal, and where more and more frustrated patients are taking matters into their own hands, crossing the border into the U.S. to get the timely, quality care they need.
Visit the site now -- and make sure that you are in possession of the facts. Our national debate about health care must be a well-informed one. The well-being of every American depends on it.
Tomorrow, MPI fellow Stuart Browning will premiere his short films about health care in the U.S. Senate's Rayburn Building. The occasion is a panel discussion on health care reform hosted by MPI and the Cato Institute. Featuring commentary by Cato director of health policy studies Michael Cannon, American Prospect writing fellow Ezra Klein, and Browning himself, the panel will debunk some of the demonstrably inaccurate claims Michael Moore makes in his new film, Sicko.
"Moore is promoting the myth that government-run health care is a magic bullet," Browning says. "But the facts just don't support his claims. People need to have a rounded understanding of the issues. Only then can we hope to have a meaningful debate about what kinds of reforms will actually work."
Visit FreeMarketCure.com to watch Browning's films, to read expert commentary on health care, and to become fully educated about this issue. The health care debate has long been in need of spin control. FreeMarketCure.com exists to provide it.
MPI fellow and FreeMarketCure.com creator Stuart Browning explains why we need an alternative view of health care:
I'm an independent filmmaker with no ties to the health insurance or healthcare industry -- only a personal concern about American liberty and medical freedom. I've made a number of short films about health care policy -- specifically for the internet -- and featured on a new website: www.freemarketcure.com.
Michael Moore's new movie, "Sicko", is set to inject a large dose of misinformation and propaganda into our national dialog about health care policy. According to one observer, Michael Moore has created a love letter to the Canadian system. However, Americans should know that Canada rations health care and that many Canadians wait inordinately long periods of time for urgent medical treatment. The Fraser Institute's annual report "Waiting Your Turn" estimates that Canadians are waiting for nearly 800,000 medical procedures. If the Canadian system was adopted in the U.S. -- and you assume one person per treatment - that would translate to nearly 7.3 million Americans. Not 7.3 million Americans theoretically without health care due to a lack of insurance -- but 7.3 million Americans who need medical treatment but cannot get it without being on long waiting lists.
How long? In Canada, it depends on the province and the type of treatment. The median wait time for medical treatment in Canada in 2006 was 17.8 weeks. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. It's not hard to find Canadians who have waited months to get an MRI, and years for some types of treatments. There are multiple kinds of waits in the Canadian system: the wait to see a specialist, the wait to get a diagnostic test, the wait to get surgery -- and then the wait for rescheduled surgery after one's initial surgical appointment has been cancelled -- sometimes multiple times -- a routine phenomenon. Waits for orthopedic surgery can be multiple years - and in the case of some elderly Canadians - forever. Waits for things like gastric bypass and sleep apnea treatment are routinely 4-5 years.
My short movie, "A Short Course in Brain Surgery," highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, a Canadian with a suspected brain tumor who had to wait four months for an MRI. Instead, he crossed the border to the U.S and got it in two days. He then faced another four month wait just to see a specialist in order to schedule surgery which would represent yet another wait. Instead, he had the tumor removed in the U.S. -- immediately. It turned out to be early stage brain cancer.
Another short, "Two Women," chronicles the sad story of Janice Fraser who, unable to urinate, needed to have a pacemaker-type device implanted to control her bladder. Unfortunately, the hospital arbitrarily rationed the operation by doing only one per month. Janice was number 32 on the list -- nearly a three year wait. She ended up waiting so long that she developed life-threatening infections, had to have her bladder removed in an emergency procedure, and will now wear a urine bag for the rest of her life.
"The Lemon" tells the story of Shirley Healey who was suffering from a near total blockage of her mesoenteric artery, which feeds blood to the bowels. She was slowly starving and risked death by waiting in Canada. She came to Bellingham, Washington where she got her life-saving operation immediately. The American surgeon who operated said that the Canadian patients are the worst, most dangerous cases he sees -- due to the long waits.
Consider this: across Canada, thousands of baby boomers and the elderly often wait years for knee and hip replacements; often in great pain while taking powerful narcotics. However, a dog in Canada can get a joint replacement operation at a veterinary hospital done in a matter of weeks.
The real danger of adopting a system like the one in Canada is not just long waits for medical treatment. Americans would pay much higher taxes and lose important liberties while turning over personal life-and-death decisions to government bureaucrats.
Visit FreeMarketCure.com and sort out your understanding of an issue that desperately needs to be rescued from the spin cycle.
Pointing to the New York Post's profile of Indoctrinate U, Glenn Reynolds wryly notes that "universities don't seem to like [the film] much" and offers some thoughts on who needs to see Evan Coyne Maloney's important new film: "Maybe Evan should hold screenings for alumni groups and state legislatures ..."
It's good to see early audiences for the film show so much interest in getting it seen. It's one thing to appreciate a film's value--but quite another to spontaneously offer ideas about how the film can reach the audiences it needs to reach.
Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, is billed as a documentary, but everyone instinctively understands that it is actually a policy piece that is not at all interested in objectivity or a rounded presentation of the issues. Kyle Smith of the New York Postlays out the mythological dimensions of Moore's film and offers some telling counterpoint:
Moore knows that in Britain, where National Health Service spending has more than doubled since Tony Blair was elected, with little to show for it, there is a two-tier health system: the smart set carry private insurance, which Moore wants to outlaw in the U.S. The cliché in London (check out this story and this one) is that the well-shod go to the same doctor as the suckers on the National Health Service. The difference is that private clients get treated right away while the NHS losers wait two years to get their strep throat looked at.
Moore glosses over wait times, hoping his audience is too stupid to notice. He asks a handful of Canadian patients how long they had to wait to see the doctor. Oh, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, everyone says. So if Moore finds five people who didn’t have to wait, there’s no waiting for anybody! “To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable,” writes Thomas Malkom, a vehemently pro-Moore columnist for Canada’s paper The Star. The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in a 2005 decision, ruling that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care" The decision resulted from a Canadian case in which a man waited a year for hip-replacement surgery, and Canada has started down the road of privatization. Check out the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (which is, like "Sicko," a fiction film) for a view of how Canadians view their system: agonizing waits; trips across the border to Vermont to get access to modern technology; fetid facilities modeled, seemingly, on an American one—the Confederate field hospital in "Gone with the Wind."
Here is Dr. David Gratzer, the Canadian author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save Health Care," who believes both the US and Canadian systems are deeply flawed:
"Like most Canadians, I believed that we had the best-run health-care system in the world. Because the system was publically owned, I assumed that compassion came before profit and that everyone got good care. . .After I entered medical school, however, my view of Canadian health care changed…I trained in emergency rooms that were chronically, chaotically, dangerously overcrowded, not only in my hometown of Winnipeg, but all across Canada. I met a middle-aged man with sleep problems who was booked for an appointment with a specialist three years later; a man with pain following a simple hernia repair who was referred to a pain clinic with a two-year wait list; a woman with breast cancer who was asked to wait four more months before starting the lifesaving radiation therapy. According to the government’s own statistics, some 1.2 million Canadians couldn’t get a family doctor. In some rural areas, town councils resorted to lotteries: the winners would get appointments with the only general practitioners around."
Mere anecdotes? Yes, but mine cancel out Moore’s. Where are the stats? Moore emphasizes life-expectancy figures in which the US slightly lags some other Western countries. But life expectancy involves many factors; two that Moore is especially knowledgeable about, obesity and homicide by firearm, are special American plagues. Here’s a stat: The percentage of patients having to wait more than four months for non-emergency surgery is about five times higher in Canada and seven times higher in Britain than it is here. [see Gratzer, 171]
In his EW interview, Moore tacitly admitted that "Sicko" lies about wait times, saying, "Well, okay, let’s set up a system where we don’t have the Canadian wait. Let’s set up a system where we take what they do right and don't do the things that we do wrong."
Moore's concesssion is a telling one, and his recommendation is easier said than done. The long wait times are part and parcel of government-managed care. They can't simply be regarded as a liitle glitch in an otherwise healthy system--they exemplify the problems with the system.
This point--about wait times, and about how integral unconscionable delay is to Canada's health care system--is made forcefully and chillingly by Stuart Browning in a series of short films that form the heart of his new site, FreeMarketCure.com. Gratzer, it is worth noting, is an integral part of Browning's project, which is to offer Americans a factual antidote to the fantasy Moore's film peddles.
On Wednesday, Michael Moore premiered Sicko in Washington, at a special screening held at the historic Uptown Theater. FreeMarketCure.com was there to protest the one-sided message of Moore's film. Joined by Americans for Prosperity and Bureaucrash, they staged what can only be described as a media coup--reporters were so impressed that they had a hard time believing that Fidel and his nurses were not actually part of the Moore media operation.
Hollywood is beginning to take notice of MPI's upstart documentary about higher ed, Indoctrinate U. But more people still need to sign up to impress upon distributors that there is a substantial national audience for this film. 22,000 have signed up to see the film so far -- but 100,000 is the goal.
What you can do to help reach the goal of 100,000 signups: Sign up yourself, and then make sure that three or four of your friends, or neighbors, or colleagues, or associates do, too. It's really that simple -- and when IU reaches that goal, it will have made film history as the most successful grassroots campaign of the Internet age.
On Tuesday, June 26, Mountain View Productions, Ltd. will premiere its stunning new documentary, The Singing Revolution, at a special Capitol Hill screening co-sponsored with MPI and the U.S.-Baltic Foundation. Most people outside of Estonia don't know the story of how the Estonian people sang their way to freedom, using song to anchor their peaceful bid for independence from Soviet occupation. This film, created by MPI fellows James and Maureen Tusty, tells that story with power, grace, and unforgettable sound. MPI is proud to support its distribution throughout North America.
The event will include a reception with special guest Estonian president H. E. Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
Check out this video spot capturing the D.C. premiere of Michael Moore's Sicko--or, to be more precise, capturing the protests outside the Uptown Theater arranged by FreeMarketCure.com, Bureaucrash, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Featuring a team of nurses wheeling a crippled Castro around in a chair, the protesters made the point that Cuba's health care system is feeble--and that any argument for socialized health care that uses Cuba's system as an example of successful government-run care hasn't got a leg to stand on. Handing out flyers with images from Cuban hospitals--including cockroach-infested treatment rooms, filthy toilets, and evidence of unsanitary procedures--the protesters countered Moore's romanticized portrait of Cuban health care with a healthy dose of reality.
CNBC, Alternet, and the Washington Examiner, among others, took photos of the protesters and asked for flyers. More than 500 flyers were handed out that evening, and the event was a tremendous success. "My favorite moment of the whole night," one of Fidel's nurses reported, "was when I was interviewed by a guy from Alternet.com and then approached by him later so he could ask me if I was 'absolutely sure' I wasn’t being paid by Michael Moore’s PR camp."
When the New York Times covers something, people pay attention. The Times has the power to decide whether something is news -- and to set the tone for public understanding of the material it covers. That power has in turn been balanced by the blogosphere, which frequently features sharp and incisive commentary on the paper of record's reporting. Such was the pattern this week, when the TimesreviewedIndoctrinate U--but only, it seemed, in order to discount the film's argument about the repressive climate on American campuses. This involved some remarkable rhetorical acrobatics--author Joe Berger covers the film in order to suggest that the pattern of repression it documents does not exist, and uses a case of censorship at Vassar as the centerpiece of its argument that free speech is alive and well in higher education.
Berger's contortions were not lost on his readers, and a number of bloggers have responded with uncompromising critiques of his logic, his presentation of facts, and his grasp of the issues.
Director Evan Coyne Maloney dismantles Berger's article, noting that it concentrates more on material that isn't in the film than on material that is, and noting, too, that its attempt to discount the film's argument actually winds up confirming it. Maloney submitted his response to the Times in a letter to the editor.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff takes Berger to task (cross-posting at the Huffington Post) for his selective and skewed presentation of facts, noting that the hours he spent with Berger educating him about campus speech were apparently wasted and noting, too, that Berger doesn't seem to grasp the difference between free speech and censorship. George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki agrees.
Sonny Bunch of the Weekly Standard notes that Berger "seems to use Evan Coyne Maloney’s film as little more than an introductory device to tell us how few restrictions are placed on free speech on campus" and contrasts his unwillingness to give Maloney his due to the Times' praise of Michael Moore's Sicko (Bunch also encourages his readers to check out MPI fellow Stuart Browning's health care shorts at FreeMarketCure.com).
The fact that the paper covered the film at all shows how seriously the folks at the Times--and elsewhere--do in fact take Indoctrinate U. And the transparent attempt to dismiss Maloney's claims by holding up Vassar's recent censorship episode as proof that free inquiry is alive and well on campus speaks volumes about both the solidity of Maloney's argument and the shaky reasoning of those who wish to deny the validity of the film's claims.
Released across America yesterday, Michael Moore's Sicko deplores the country's reliance on private medical insurance, arguing that state-run health care -- as found in countries such as Canada, Britain, France, and Cuba -- would be a vast improvement over a system it deems irredeemably broken, inequitable, and corrupt.
But not everyone agrees with Sicko's diagnosis. Among Moore's most vocal critics is MPI fellow Stuart Browning, whose FreeMarketCure.com website showcases a series of short films exposing the disquieting reality of government-run health care.
Together, Browning's films tell shocking truths about single-payer health care that Moore and its other advocates conveniently ignore. Two Women shows how, in Canada, a sex reassignment procedure can enjoy greater government support than an urgently needed bladder operation. Brain Surgery focuses on the plight of an Ontario man denied timely treatment for his cancerous brain tumor. The Lemon argues that socialized health care systems have much in common with the centrally planned economies of Soviet-era Eastern Europe. And Uninsured in America disputes the commonly cited statistic that 45 million Americans cannot afford private health insurance.
On June 21, Browning screened his short films at a Capitol Hill panel discussion on health care. Co-sponsored by the Cato Institute and the Moving Picture Institute, the event attracted more than 150 people, including Hill staffers, representatives from health care organizations, the media, and members of the public.
Browning spoke eloquently at the event about the pitfalls of single-payer national medical care, after which his fellow panelists, Ezra Klein, writing fellow for the American Prospect, and Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, debated options for reforming America's health care system. While agreeing with Browning's free-market philosophy, Cannon noted that even in the United States, the government pays for over half of all treatment. No country, as he pointed out, operates a truly free-market health care system.
In an effort to imagine what such a system would look like, Browning has produced a new short film, A Dog's Life, which will be available soon on FreeMarketCure.com. Showing how free-market veterinary care offers timely and convenient service, as well as affordable care, A Dog's Life reaches the ironic conclusion that Americans' dogs and cats may have recourse to better health care than Americans themselves.
The archived webcast and podcast of the event are online here. Visit FreeMarketCure.com to find out more about Browning's work, to view his short films, and to read his insightful op-eds.
