Joachim Hagopian and Georgi Alexandrov  Stankov, June 17, 2026

www.stankovuniversallaw.com

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

Introduction

Vocabulary: What is Panopticon? What is Pandemonium?

This article is a collection of two of the many brilliant articles by Joachim Hagopian, which he explicitly mentioned as references in our joint previous article. I decided to publish them together, as they encompass and expose the infinite crimes committed in human healthcare system, including big pharma and foster care system, in such a convincing way as no other living author I know of   – and I know all the relevant writers and thinkers on this small planet – is capable of.

June 16, 2026

The Failures of America’s Foster Care System

By Joachim Hagopian

Global Research, July 19, 2014

I worked with the largest county children’s welfare services in America for more than a quarter century. For several decades as a licensed therapist in Los Angeles County, I provided mandated therapy to both children as well as young adults were aging out of the child welfare system. Over the years I made countless trips to LA County Children’s Court representing dozens of children and families as my clients.

My decades of firsthand mental health experience saw the destructive inside machinations of a corrupt, overloaded, thoroughly broken foster care system do more damage than good to children and families with whom I closely worked. Like all institutions in America, the child welfare system is just another corrosive, morally bankrupt, oppressive mechanism by which to control the poorest people in this country, acting as a national conduit pipeline to prison, substance abuse, human trafficking, homelessness, mental illness and early death.

Though each county child protective services department in the United States operates under a separate budget funded by individual county, state and federal mental health source dollars, the child welfare system in this country is so overburdened and systemically flawed, it has been failing our kids miserably for a long time now. We all hear about the horror stories of murdered children in the foster care system who fell through the cracks. High profile cases exposing the tragic fate of young people trapped in a system that fails to protect them are far too common. They are written about extensively in newspapers all the time. But the American public rarely is privy to the inner workings of a system gone bad from the firsthand perspective of an insider who worked within that failed system for decades.

This is my account of the child welfare system as a therapist who worked out in the community with young people on either probation or within foster care as well as in residential group homes. I observed the broken system from the inside out. Universal human rights are routinely violated every minute and hour of every single day, bringing with each passing year even more atrocities of neglect and abuse from the system designed to protect children. Instead it is literally destroying them. The shocking, gaping problems of the largest child welfare department in America that is the LA County Department of Children & Family Services (DCFS) that I interfaced with for many years epitomizes what has gone so terribly wrong with the national system operating in every state and county throughout the United States.

To illustrate the blatant flaws inherent in the child welfare system, I shall present the stories of two families that as a therapist I strongly advocated for children as my clients to reunify with their biological families in LA County Children’s Court. The first case was an eight year-old boy I shall call Pablo who when two months old was placed by DCFS to live with the boy’s aunt due to the his mother being an alleged drug addict unable to properly care for the child. Pablo also had a sister six years older also placed with the biological mother’s sister.

Prior to my being assigned as Pablo’s therapist, the fifteen year old sister had grown increasingly rebellious and defiant, clashing with her aunt and after running away from home, DCFS decided to place her in the foster care system. Because of the volatile relationship the sister had with the aunt as her primary caregiver, the DCFS social worker assigned to the case became suspicious of the aunt’s capacity as primary caregiver to Pablo. DCFS normally contracts with local mental health agencies in the community to provide mental health services to minors with open cases in the child welfare system. I was working as clinical manager to one of the DCFS mental health providers overseeing community service operations in both biological and foster care family homes as well as group homes in the Pasadena area. I also directly supervised approximately eight to ten therapists including Pablo’s therapist. When DCFS grew concerned about the aunt’s capacity to provide a healthy home environment for Pablo, based on DCFS’ recommendation, the Children’s Court judge stipulated that a licensed therapist be assigned Pablo’s case. At that point I became directly involved in Pablo’s care as both his weekly individual therapist as well as his and his aunt’s weekly family therapist.

My assessment of Pablo and his aunt’s relationship after providing therapy services in their home for about two months was that Pablo was responding well to treatment and already beginning to make considerable progress with his treatment plan goals that I had collaboratively formulated with both Pablo and his aunt. They had to do with learning to stay on task with such daily activities as picking up toys after play and following his aunt’s prompts for redirection. As a child given the mild case diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a way over-diagnosed mental health classification conveniently used to label high energy children who simply have minds of their own and pose as management problems in an educational system designed to stamp out children’s spirited creativity in favor of docile compliance. Pablo experienced some difficulty focusing both in the classroom and at home and engaged in hyperkinetic motor movement and behavior that would often get him into trouble in both settings when he failed to comply with adult imposed rules. Under the psychiatric care of one of my agency’s staff psychiatrists, Pablo was taking daily medication prescribed for his ADHD.

After I completed and presented to DCFS my written assessment and clinical findings noting early progress in treatment per protocol under my service agency contract with county Children’s Services, against my recommendation and based on approval from the DCFS social worker’s supervisor, unbeknownst to me, one afternoon the social worker abruptly entered the family home and forcibly removed Pablo from the only family home he had ever known in all his nine years, severely traumatizing and terrorizing the little boy. Neither he nor the aunt nor I ever saw what seemed like an ambushed assault and violation of the worst order coming. In one fell swoop they were not only interfering and undermining the family’s progress in treatment, they were also destroying this family. The social worker created such extreme havoc in the home, Pablo was crying hysterically and uncontrollably as the social worker literally ripped him from his aunt’s arms and physically coerced him out the door. In all the turmoil, chaos and family drama he had created, the highly unprofessional DCFS social worker forgot to even take any of Pablo’s clothes or medication with him prior to placing the highly distraught boy against his will and choice into foster care, a task that was left for me to follow up with the next day.

After receiving the brokenhearted aunt’s horrifying account, I took Pablo’s clothes and meds over to the nearby foster home where Pablo was now living, consoled a still very traumatized Pablo and spoke briefly with the foster parents who had worked with DCFS for a number of years. Children’s Services had completely gone against the family’s therapist’s recommendations, but most importantly against the family’s best interest to stay together as an intact family, suddenly and violently uprooting this fragile young child with absolutely no justifiable reason at all. Clearly Pablo was severely traumatized by the system’s cruel and unusual decision to suddenly break up this family. There was no question that the aunt loved her nephew as her own son and the little nephew most definitely loved and needed his aunt as every child needs his mother.

Seeing the irreparable damage and harm the system willfully inflicted on my clients, I immediately contacted the social worker and his supervisor and arranged an emergency meeting a couple days later. When pressed for an explanation, neither the social worker nor his supervisor could supply a remotely legitimate reason for separating the boy from his only family. The most they could come up with was feebly mumbling something about the boy’s teacher remarking that one day Pablo had come to school wearing dirty clothes. No consideration apparently was ever made to think that every chance this little guy got he was on his knees playing in the dirt because that is what healthy, energetic, lively little boys do. For unknown reasons, it was clear that DCFS was on a witch hunt to demonize the aunt in their false accusations to break apart the family. I saw firsthand the criminal misuse of a totalitarian system run amok operating under the sinister guise of protecting children from harm but by its own vindictively blind and destructive actions was doing grave harm to my vulnerable innocent client who never knew what hit him.

I started seeing my client for his individual therapy sessions at his new foster home. But used to seeing me within the safe and familiar confines of the only home he ever knew, I quickly realized he was not comfortable in the foster home setting, so I began bringing him to a nearby park a couple times a week to help the child cope with the trauma the system had senselessly caused. Every time I would show up, the first thing out of this poor little kid’s mouth was, “When can I go home to my aunt?” It was heartbreaking. As a professional, I could never express my true feelings about the Nazi-like tactics responsible for his current trauma, anxiety and pain. In a matter of weeks the boy had gone from living his entire life with his aunt and sister, then to just living with his aunt and every other week hour-long visits with his sister, to now not living with any family at all. To his never ending question, I finally told him, “Pablo, I’m doing everything possible to get you home with your aunt.”

Because the child system had absolutely no basis for removing Pablo from his family home and knew it, they got caught in a compromising position of having to save face, notoriously unable to ever admit mistakes. In the meantime, they were constantly challenged and confronted by this therapist strongly recommending immediate reunification with the aunt. Just prior to the next scheduled Children’s Court hearing, on the holiday weekend the social worker and foster mother met with Pablo at the foster home and actually manipulated the nine year old child into allegedly agreeing that his aunt had used a belt to punish him. Without any visible sign as evidence other than their little boy’s “forced confession,” at the last minute they were able to bring fabricated evidence to court that would assure the judge to back their decision to keep the child locked in foster care indefinitely.

When I spoke to the aunt, I completely believed her when she told me she never touched Pablo with a belt. And in my next session with Pablo, he himself even denied such an event ever took place. Clearly the social worker and foster parent falsely twisted and put words in the boy’s mouth to maliciously trick him into keeping him from living with his aunt. After showing up at Children’s Court a number of times in person and writing numerous letters and reports to both DCFS and the court judge expressing my serious concerns that the move to foster care was clearly not in the child’s best interest and was doing irreparable harm to the young boy, the Children’s Court judge suddenly ordered me off the case.

After developing a close supportive relationship with the child helping the boy cope with the sudden traumatic loss of his aunt, now the system was removing his therapist as his only advocate in a position to get him back living with his aunt. Because the system viewed me as both a threat and a thorn in its side, an unpleasant reminder of its own wrongdoing, the corrupt and devious system eliminated me from ending the prolonged damage being inflicted on both this boy and his aunt. The system had no qualms about committing the despicable crime of repeatedly afflicting traumatic harm whereby this nine year old’s support system would one by one abruptly be eliminated from him. His sense of abandonment at that young age must have been so profound that the damaging effects are likely to leave permanent scars, never knowing he could trust those he felt closest to because they could all of a sudden disappear from his life at any time. This is the kind of diabolical harm I witnessed time and time again by an appallingly ugly system exercising life and death power and control over a half million foster kids in this country.

Another case came to me when an upset father arrived at my clinic after his son and daughter had been taken away from him and placed in foster care. I was in my office when the secretary called me to the lobby to deal with the distraught parent desperate to get his two kids back. I brought him back to my office and learned the circumstances that had befallen him as a struggling, low income, single parent. Ultimately I told him to contact his children’s DCFS social workers and request that they contact my agency for services and sent him home wishing I could do more.

Two or three months later I was contacted by one of his kid’s social workers and I became the therapist of his 14-year old son and 6-year old daughter. It turns out that earlier in the year the son I shall call Jim ended up with an abscess tooth infection that was swelling up and his father Bill rushed him to Children’s Hospital Emergency Room. Jim was admitted overnight but hospital staff contacted DCFS suspecting that possible physical abuse had caused Jim’s facial swelling. Two DCFS investigators interviewed Jim in the hospital and then unannounced the following evening showed up at the family residence with police officers in tow. After finding empty prescription bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, on the spot they made the snap decision to remove the six year old girl named Lisa from the only home she ever knew. They woke her up from a deep sleep and once again stole another traumatized, hysterical small child from her understandably agitated biological father.

The DCFS investigators placed Lisa and Jim into a foster care home, again without any solid evidence of either abuse or neglect, minus the customary criteria for children services to remove kids from their biological family home. The trauma for a six year old girl to be awakened and grabbed up by a police officer and carried away into the night from the only parent she had ever known and loved is both life altering and embeds such deep fears that most likely will haunt her the rest of her life. I can bear witness that for several years afterwards the trauma of that fateful night caused her to go into panic attacks cowering in anxiety and fear every time she saw a police officer in blue uniform. That is how deep-seeded the damage done to this defenseless little girl by the malevolent system that failed to protect her.

Though the damaging trauma had already been done, during the ensuing months LA Children’s Services ultimately found no evidence of parental abuse and after four months, Jim was reunified with his father at the same time that I was assigned as therapist. But Lisa remained in foster care. I began seeing Jim weekly for his individual therapy at the local high school where he was a freshman and family therapy at his home with his father. I went to Lisa’s foster home weekly for her therapy where I discovered the elderly foster mother smoking cigarettes inside her home, obviously posing physical health danger to my client. There is a very sad and sickening irony when the system sworn to protect children was placing and knowingly keeping a child in harm’s way after causing irreparable harm in originally taking her away from the only family who loved her.

Though no evidence of child abuse was ever uncovered by Children’s Services, the father Bill had only one-hour supervised visits with his daughter Lisa each week at the DCFS office. Throughout their entire lives both Jim and Lisa had lived under their father’s care despite each having different mothers. The boy’s mother was schizophrenic and the girl’s mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Jim as Lisa’s older brother had a very caring and protective relationship with his little sister. Both the father and brother’s sense of loss with Lisa no longer living with them made them both feel depressed as their family was not complete without her.

Lisa’s biological mother currently lived in San Bernardino County and after learning Lisa had been taken away from her father, she opportunistically contacted LA County DCFS to seek custody of Lisa. However, six years earlier when Lisa was only two months old the mother showed up for a visit with the father toting Lisa having visible facial scratches and abrasions. Once the father contacted DCFS, he received full custody. The mother was out of Lisa’s life after that. Therefore, the only family life Lisa ever knew was the love from her father and brother.

It turned out Lisa’s intellectually challenged six year older half-sister had aggressively hit and scratched two month old Lisa just prior to that fateful visit six years earlier. Lisa’s half dozen years older half-sister at that time was also being sexually molested by adult males the mother allowed into their home though the abuse was discovered a couple years later. Though Lisa’s mother could not keep either Lisa or her mentally challenged, sexually abused daughter safe, years later because LA County Children’s Services had removed Jim and Lisa from their father that year, under DCFS recommendation the Children’s Court judge began authorizing every other weekend visits to the mother’s home in San Bernardino County where that same sexually abused, still physically abusive older sister also lived, except now that older sister was twice Lisa’s age and size at 12-years old.

Over the next several months six-year old Lisa would disclose in her individual therapy sessions with me how her older sister would be constantly aggressively hitting and picking on her. The mentally impaired older sister did not like suddenly having a cute little sister competing for her mother’s attention after having the mother to herself her entire life. As a legally mandated reporter of suspected child abuse, I contacted Children Services abuse hotline and submitted a written child abuse report to DCFS that was then passed onto San Bernardino County Child Protective Services (CPS) to initiate a follow up investigation of suspected child abuse.

Several weeks later I learned that Lisa’s mother had caught the older sister and Lisa observing pornography on the internet. Within that same month while the older sister had a friend staying with them on a sleepover it was learned that the older sister who slept in the same room with Lisa woke Lisa up and insisted that she watch the older sister and her friend lay naked on top of each other simulating having sex. The severely sexually damaged 12-year old was clearly acting out both sexually and aggressively, a classic symptom of early sexual abuse. Overwhelmed, my six year old client was confused and disturbed by her bizarre sister’s behavior.

A couple months later in yet another incident the older sister physically forced Lisa to place a wad of Vicks Vapo-Rub up inside her vagina. When Lisa began screaming in pain, the mother quickly doused and washed Lisa’s burning private parts. But throughout Lisa’s time with her mother, Lisa began to regularly suffer from vaginal infections due to the ongoing abuse. Fixated with touching and sticking foreign objects into the vagina is also classic evidence of sexual abuse. When the father took Lisa to the family physician, the doctor expressed concern that Lisa’s reproductive organs were at risk of permanent damage.

Yet despite my constant series of abuse reports and subsequent San Bernardino County CPS’ investigations, apparently not enough substantiated evidence was ever found to warrant suspending all contact or changing the every other weekend arrangement at the mother’s. It became my client’s word versus her mother’s and other daughter’s. Clearly Lisa was being physically, emotionally and sexually abused by her older sister on a consistent and regular basis yet despite my countless phone calls, writing abuse reports every month, numerous letters and quarterly reports all bringing red alert full attention to Children’s Services in both counties as well as the LA Children’s Court judge presiding over the case, along with my showing up at Children’s Court repeatedly warning all authorities of the incessant overt abuse going on, nothing ever changed. The judge refused to even allow me into her courtroom. I would walk in and she would ask, “Who is this person?” Upon learning I was the child’s therapist, more than once the judge ordered me out of her courtroom with me asking her loudly, “Did you get all my abuse reports?”

Not only were all authorities that included DCFS social workers, the child’s attorney, the father’s attorney and the judge all fully aware of the ongoing abuse occurring every other weekend in San Bernardino County, the judge actually decided to completely wash her hands clean of the case, closing Lisa’s LA County file and transferring it to San Bernardino. But far worse, knowing she was being abused, the judge willfully sent Lisa to permanently live with her mother in the same home where the older sister was regularly abusing Lisa. At the final LA Children’s Court hearing with the judge having already made up her mind, she finally permitted me inside her courtroom to testify on record presenting the overwhelming evidence. But at that point it was too late, Lisa was being sent to live permanently with her mother and abusive older sister, like it or not.

The LA County judge obviously knew the child would only be further harmed by her decision. To me, that clearly constitutes criminal disregard and malfeasance betraying the very oath she had sworn to protect children from abuse. From day one of Lisa’s sad life never was her mother able to adequately protect Lisa from her other daughter’s abuse. It is all on record. Jim missed his sister badly and only became more depressed while Lisa’s father Bill became extremely upset and agitated over this unacceptable, unjust and inhumane court ruling. Based on petty reactions to the father’s anger, all players in the Children’s Court system complicit in this crime even included the father’s own attorney recommending Lisa be sent away to another county knowing full well Lisa would only be further abused. Even Lisa’s own DCFS social worker secretly knew it was wrong, apologizing to me after admitting it was his supervisor who was pushing permanent placement with the mother.

The judge arranged the exact reverse of the prior schedule. Lisa would now live fulltime at her mother’s and only be allowed to spend every other weekend with her father and brother. I would continue seeing her every other weekend for both individual and family therapy. I also continued conducting individual and family therapy with Jim and his father. Such outrageous unfairness, gross injustice and system’s complicit abuse were excruciating for Lisa who missed her brother and father so much, she would cry uncontrollably and throw fits every other Sunday when she knew she had to return to her mother’s abusive home, dreading she would continue to be victimized. Yet no one was protecting her, despite my over-the-top advocacy and the emotional pleas of both her father and brother. Lisa felt we were failing her in our impotence to change anything. The poor little girl thought her father and brother no longer loved her enough. It was an intolerable situation thanks to the child lack-of-welfare system.

Finally with more child abuse reports after Lisa told me her sister pushed her down the stairs at her home, Lisa’s social worker from San Bernardino County Children’s Protective Services finally began paying attention to me and ultimately recommended Lisa return under her father’s care. Driving two hours each way on numerous occasions out to San Bernardino County Children’s Court, I continued advocating for Lisa to be protected from her older sister’s nonstop abuse and her mother’s proven, longstanding incapacity to protect Lisa. After two years of fighting the system as their family therapist, all my efforts to seek justice for Lisa and her family finally paid off as the Children’s Court judge in San Bernardino at long last ultimately ordered Lisa’s reunification with her father and brother.

But the severe damage had already been done to Lisa. The system had criminally failed her and in my clinical opinion, Lisa was traumatized for life. Such protracted mental and emotional anguish most likely impaired her mental stability for life. She was not the same little girl I met when I first became her therapist. Her capacity to focus was completely shattered. Her capacity to trust was totally destroyed. As I see it, the mother’s neglect and inability to protect Lisa, her father’s, brother’s and my inability to protect her from the system’s horrific criminal abuse as well as her sister’s abuse that lasted nearly two straight years, has permanently crippled this little girl for life. These cases presented here are just two examples of how the child welfare system in America destroys families and individuals. With god-like powers the criminal system makes such far reaching life and death decisions with millions of families that hurt the lives of so many innocent, defenseless children. Children’s services and the foster care system whose sole purposes are to protect children from abuse do just the opposite. They betray our children every single day, inflicting irreparable harm on generation after generation of America’s youth.

The Orwellian Big Brother police state is currently a living nightmare oppressively ruining people’s lives by running roughshod over citizens’ and families’ rights in America. Local county children services agencies work hand in hand with law enforcement to usurp their authority by daily invading our homes and arbitrarily plucking our children from our biological families when no abuse or neglect is even present. The fact that abuse goes on regardless of socioeconomic level is belied by the fact that children in the child welfare system virtually all come from poor, impoverished families. Similar to the inequality of the prison population and broken justice system, the broken child welfare system also appears to prey exclusively on those living in poverty. This apartheid tyranny and betrayal is criminal injustice of the highest magnitude. In thousands of cases the only abuse is once again the punitive, megalomaniacal, thoroughly destructive arm of big government destroying private citizens’ lives and the sanctity of the family unit as a scared institution. This pervasive damage is currently being done to the American family.

The majority of children living in the foster care system truly are victims of some form of child abuse, often at the hands of biological adult family members that are most often the children’s parents. I have worked with countless youth and adolescents who were sexually, mentally and emotionally damaged by chronic abuse and neglect from adult family members and adult family friends. The demand for adequate care and treatment for these emotionally impaired children overwhelmingly exceeds available services. In situations where serious neglect and abuse are occurring, in the interests of protecting the child from further abuse, obviously it becomes necessary on both ethical and legal grounds to remove the child from the home immediately as a last resort (although the traumatic effects of removal of children may be lessened if the abuser(s) was instead removed). But prior to tearing so many families apart, clear-cut evidence of abuse needs to be present. Far too often in my extensive experience, it is not.

Efforts to keep the family intact by providing monitored support, therapy and training is far more effective and humane than constantly yanking children from their family homes. It is common even after prolonged severe abuse for kids to want to return home to their biological families and their abusers over remaining with foster care families. Then of course there is an extremely high incidence of abuse coming at the hands of abusive foster parents. More times than I can recall I learned of another abusive situation caused by a foster parent. Barely half of all foster parents hold a high school diploma. Many are low income households that need and use the foster care money as their main source of income. Fiduciary abuse of misspending dollars that should be utilized for the care and maintenance of foster children is all too common.

In the turnover shuffle from one foster home or group home to the next, many sent to ten or more in the course of their placement in the system, children quickly see through the transparent motivations of foster parents who value their monthly paycheck more than the kids they are entrusted to care for. A very revealing fact is that a sizeable 22% of kids in foster care repeatedly run away or end up aging out of the system staying with friends rather than remain in the foster care setting. In one study during the year prior, one third of teenage runaways were in foster care. Nearly 40% of youth that arrive in runaway shelters nationally were in foster care during the preceding year. 11% arriving in shelters were homeless. Another alarming finding estimates that up to 45% of those leaving the foster care system end up homeless within their first year. These astounding numbers clearly show that the current system is failing these young people.

Young adolescent girls from abusive, impoverished backgrounds placed in the foster care system prone to drug abuse and being runaways are especially easy targets for adults pimps and human traffickers to exploit them as prostitutes and sex slaves. Children in the system come to see themselves as mere cash commodities to their surrounding adults, which when internalized manifests as self-worth debased into a mere monetary value. That makes children in the system especially vulnerable and prone to being exploited by adult human traffickers, pimps and predators. 60% of female minors rescued in the United States from human sex trafficking operations in 2013 were already former victims of the broken foster care system. In LA County in 2012 56% of the girls participating in a support program for commercially sexually exploited females were previously in the child welfare system. In New York City in 2007 of the 2250 victims of human trafficking, 75% were involved in the child system. In Florida an estimated 70% of trafficking victims were from the system. These numbers prove how the foster care system is but a direct pipeline to human trafficking. Only 50% of foster care children graduate nationally from high school and only 2% go on to college.

Clearly the outcomes for system aged out young adults are atrocious. Remarkably high percentage of them become statistics suffering from substance abuse, homelessness, prostitution, human trafficking and crime. Karl Dennis, executive director of the Illinois based Kaleidoscope, states:

“80 percent of the adults in all the California correctional facilities are graduates of the state juvenile justice, child welfare, mental health and/or the special education systems.”

Recognizing the enormity of poor outcomes befalling young adults who are aging out of the child welfare system, several years ago California smartly extended continuing support services funding up through age 23. The crucial importance of providing ongoing assistance into young adulthood with additional educational, vocational/job, therapeutic and housing resources has been a huge step in the right direction though still more needs to be done.

Just as there are good, well meaning, compassionate children’s court judges, county social workers, child and family therapists and children’s attorneys, there are also plenty of good caring foster parents. But because the system is so overloaded and overstretched beyond humane capacity, too many of these all-important players in the child welfare system act as dysfunctional cogs in a highly dysfunctional, uncaring bureaucratic system.

The number of children removed from families of origin in the last fifteen years has doubled while the number of foster parents has steadily decreased. When a county social worker has 100 or more kids on his or her caseload, and is mandated to make monthly visits to dozens of placements all over the county and then complete monthly reports on each child, it becomes virtually impossible to offer quality monitoring care and accurately managed services. Hence, so many young people fall through the ever widening cracks into the black hole abyss of mismanaged negligence and endangerment. The current system is reactive and crisis driven, frantically patching up all the gaping, dam-breaking holes and cracks while too many others always open up in their wake. In its current structure and operation, the flood of high profile deaths and permanent injuries to America’s most vulnerable population is beyond the faulty, broken system’s means to manage, protect and correct the current abominable conditions. A sorely needed overhaul of the system becomes imperative.

Of the five billion dollars federally allocated to annually fund child foster care in this country, 90% of that money spent on the child welfare system is reactive, after-the-fact interventions instead of proactive, preventative measures that would minimize the incidence of child abuse from ever taking place. Investing in programs that provide support to prospective parents and families can go a long ways to strengthening parenting skills and building a social support network of community resources vital to child abuse prevention. Monies allocated for addressing the root cause of child abuse prior to the actual abuse serve as a far more prudent and wise long term investment. More families would be able to stay together while the current exorbitant costs of outsourcing biological parents with hired hands too often in it to collect monthly paychecks from an overtaxed system clearly has not worked.

Whether unintended consequences of a thoroughly broken and shattered system or by pre-calculated, sinister design, the present foster care system merely serves as a human trafficking and prison pipeline to death and destruction. Foster care was originally intended to be a temporary placement until children could be adopted. Emphasis needs to be placed on reunifying with healthy and willing biological family members as well as finding suitable adoptive parents. But most of all prevention programs need to be instituted in every community throughout the nation. The present failed system is an enormous burden, grand theft automatically to both countless children’s lives stolen and destroyed as well as an American taxpayer rip-off. As a nation, we can and should do better. We owe it to our children, and that includes all our children.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He has worked extensively with child abuse victims within the child welfare system. He now concentrates on his writing.

 

The Evils of Big Pharma Exposed

By Joachim Hagopian

Global Research 18 January 2015

Originally published on Global Research in January 2015

This article published six years ago, is of utmost relevance to the ongoing covid-19 crisis.

***

What’s wrong with America is what’s wrong with Big Pharma. And what’s wrong with Big Pharma is what’s wrong with America. This circular reality is aimed to be thoroughly covered in this presentation.

This is the story of how Big Pharma seeks enormous profits over the health and well-being of the humans it serves, and how drug companies invasively corrupted the way that the healthcare industry delivers its vital services. This is neither a new nor unique story. In fact, the story of Big Pharma is the exact same story of how Big Government, Big Oil, Big Agri-Chem Giants like Monsanto have come to power. The controlling shareholders of all these major industries are one and the same. Big Money belonging to the global central banking cabal own and operate all the Fortune 500 companies in addition to virtually all national governments on this earth. The Rockefellers privatized healthcare in the United States back in the 1930’s and has financed and largely influenced both healthcare and Big Pharma ever since.

The history of the last several centuries is one in which a handful of these oligarch families, primarily from Europe and the United States, have been controlling governments and wars to ruthlessly consolidate and maximize both power and control over the earth’s most precious resources to promote a New World Order of one totalitarian fascist government exercising absolute power and control over the entire global population. This group of oligarch families have systematically and effectively eliminated competition under the deceptive misnomer of a free enterprise system. Modernization is synonymous with globalization, privatization and militarization. Subsequently, an extremely small number of humans representing a privileged ruling elite has imposed a global caste system that’s hatched its long term diabolical plan to actualize its one world government. Sadly at this tumultuous moment in our human history, it’s never been closer to materialization.

Here in the early stages of the twenty-first century, a ruling elite has manipulated our planet of seven billion people into a global economic system of feudalism. Through pillaging and plundering the earth, setting up a cleverly deceptive financial system that controls the production and flow of fiat paper money using the US dollar as the standard international currency, they have turned the world’s citizens and nations into indentured servants, hopelessly in debt due to their grand theft planet. With Russia and China spearheading a shift away from the US dollar and petrodollar, and many smaller nations following their lead, a major shift in the balance of power is underway between Western and Eastern oligarchs. Thus, by design escalating calamity and crises are in overdrive at the start of 2015.

By examining one aspect of this grand theft planet through the story of Big Pharma, one can accurately recognize and assess Big Pharma’s success in its momentum-gathering power grab. Its story serves as a microcosm perfectly illustrating and paralleling the macrocosm that is today’s oligarch engineered, highly successful New World Order nightmare coming true right before our eyes that we’re all now up against. By understanding how this came to manifest, we will be better able to confront, challenge and oppose it.

Every year a handful of the biggest pharmaceutical corporations are a well-represented fixture amongst the most powerful Fortune 500 companies of the world. The twelve largest drug manufacturers and the eight largest drug delivery companies (or otherwise known as the drug channels companies) that include drug wholesalers, chain pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers (so called PBM’s) consist in total only 20 of the top 500 global corporations in the world. Thus, despite making up only 4% of the total Fortune 500 companies in 2014, both Big Pharma’s highly profitable revenues and absolute economic and political power in the United States and world are unprecedented.

The median revenue of the drug channels companies that made 2014’s Fortune 500 from the most recent available 2013 figures was $95.1 billion with a median profit as percentage of assets of 2.9% over the year before. The top 12 drug manufacturing companies held a median revenue of only $17.5 billion but a median profit of assets level of 10.6% over 2012. Though the channels companies like CVS (the top channels company and #12 on Fortune 500), Walgreen (#37) and Rite-Aid (#118) overall maintain higher revenues and positions in the Fortune 500 list, their profit margins are not nearly as immense as the pharmaceutical manufacturers that are almost four times more profitable.

Big Pharma’s top eleven corporations generated net profits in just one decade from 2003 to 2012 of nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars – that’s just net profit alone. The net profit for 2012 amongst those top eleven amounted to $85 billion in just that one year. The majority of these largest pharmaceuticals are headquartered in the US – including the top four, Johnson & Johnson (#39 on Fortune 500 list), Pfizer (#51), Merck (#65) and Eli Lilly (#129) along with Abbott (#152) and Bristol Myers Squibb (#176). The healthcare research company IMS Health projects worldwide sales of Pharma drugs to exceed one trillion dollars by 2014. With that kind of obscenely powerful money to throw around, what Big Pharma wants, Big Pharma nearly always gets.

Just as the oligarchs buy, own and control national governments to do their sleazy bidding, Big Pharma as an extension of those same oligarchs does too. Perhaps what makes Big Pharma unique in the US is that the industry outspends all others in laying down cold hard cash into its lobbying efforts – another word for bribing governments that includes not only US Congress (and parliaments) but its US federal regulator, the bought and sold Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It poured $2.7 billion into its lobbying interests from 1998 to 2013, 42% more than the second most “Gov. Corp.” bribe which happens to be its sister industry insurance.

And it’s this unholy trinity of the medical establishment (personified by the American Medical Association), embedded insurance industry that wrote Obamacare into law and Big Pharma that makes the United States the most costly, broken, corrupt, destructive healthcare system in the entire world. The structured system is designed and layered with built in incentives at every tier to make and keep people sick, chronically dependent on their drugs for survival that merely mask and smother symptoms rather than cure or eradicate the root cause of disease.

Plenty of empirical evidence exists that confirm concerted diabolical efforts have been made to ruin the lives of pioneering heroes who have come up with possible cures for cancer, AIDS and other terminal illnesses. Obviously their work poses a serious threat to medical status quo. Hence, their treatments have all been effectively suppressed by conventional medicine. Bottom line, if humans are healthy, the healthcare industry does not survive. Thus, it’s in its own inherently self-serving interest to promote illness in the name of wellness.

Also because natural healing substances cannot be patented, Big Pharma has done its sinister best to squelch any and all knowledge and information that come from the far more affordable means of alternative health sources that explore ancient traditional cultures’ medicinal use of hemp along with thousands of other plants and roots that could threaten drug profits and power of Big Pharma and modern medicine as they’re currently practiced and monopolized.

Another cold hard reality is pharmaceutical drugs especially when consumed to manage chronic disease and symptoms cause severe side effects that also damage, harm and kill. The most prescribed drugs of all are painkillers that typically are highly addictive. Big Pharma with the help of their global army of doctors have purposely and calculatingly turned a large percentage of us especially in the United States into hardcore drug addicts, both physically and psychologically addicted to artificial synthetic substances that are detrimental to our health and well-being. More than three quarters of US citizens over 50 are currently taking prescribed medication. One in four women in their 40’s and 50’s is taking antidepressants. Though the US contains just 5% of the world population, it consumes over half of all prescribed medication and a phenomenal 80% of the world’s supply of painkillers. Those who admit to taking prescription drugs on average take four different prescription drugs daily. Taking massive amounts of prescription drugs has caused an epidemic that’s part of a sinister plan to squeeze yet more profit out of a system designed to keep humans chronically unhealthy.

Even more alarming is the fact that death by medical error at near a quarter million people annually has become the third largest killer of US citizens behind heart disease and cancer. Other more recent studies have estimated upwards of up to 440,000 have died yearly from preventable mistakes at hospitals. Blind obedience to Big Pharma and a conventional medical system too dependent on surgery and technology has inflicted more harm than good on the U.S. population.

Because doctors now are forced to rely so heavily on drug companies for information about what they prescribe, they’re ill equipped and ill-informed in their lack of adequate knowledge and training to understand what all the interactive drugs are doing to toxically harm their human guinea pigs they call patients. We are finding out that the cumulative and synergistic effects of poly-prescription drug use is frequently a lethal cocktail to millions of human beings on this planet. Combine that with the negative effects of our air, water, food and alcohol/illicit drugs, and the health dangers increase dramatically.

Look at the current damage done by over-prescribing antibiotics. Studies have learned that too much antibiotics cause trans-generational permanent DNA damage. The 20,000 times a year in the US alone that antibiotics are prescribed are highly toxic and damaging to the nervous system. On top of that, they simply don’t work anymore. The epidemic of trans-mutated bacterial infection and parasites that invade and infest the digestive tract in particular killing good bacteria and spread to other internal organs have become highly resistive to overuse of antibiotics. Big Pharma and doctors know all this yet they are responsible for antibiotic overconsumption by uninformed Americans.

Then look at what we are now learning about Big Pharma vaccines and the wanton reckless endangerment of children and pregnant mothers with toxic levels of mercury causing increased rates of autism, brain damage and even death. The criminal cover-up by Big Gov. and Big Pharma is egregious. Flu vaccines have recently been exposed that are totally ineffective along with the horrific damage being done to humans worldwide. Instead of preventing and decreasing illness, vaccines too often have had the opposite effect, exponentially increasing illness, causing irreversible damage and even death to thousands of unsuspecting victims mostly living in Third World nations. India’s Supreme Court is currently looking into charging Bill Gates with criminal harm to many of its citizens especially children injured or killed by his global vaccine program.

A growing number of critics believe Gates’ true aim is to eugenically reduce the world population from seven billion down to a “more manageable” size of half to one billion people. With the precedent of a well-documented history of horrifying eugenics practiced on the poor and most vulnerable in the US up till the 1980’s, oligarchs have been scheming to kill most of us on the planet for a long time now. With last year’s West African outbreak of the most deadly Ebola virus ever, and it being patented as bio-warfare, and mounting evidence that it was purposely started by a joint US military-university research team in Sierra Leone causing its global spread, more people than ever have perished and a growing segment of the population suspect that it is being used as a weapon of mass destruction to effectively depopulate the earth. We can largely thank the demonic partnership between Big Pharma and US Empire for that.

To further control the global health system, Big Pharma has largely dictated what’s been taught in medical schools throughout North America, heavily subsidizing them as a means of dictating the conventional dogma that’s standard curriculum down to even the textbooks. Several years ago a revolt at Harvard amongst med students and faculty went public. For a long time now doctors have been educated primarily to treat their patients with drugs, in effect becoming drug pushing, pharmaceutical whores, mere foot soldiers in Big Pharma’s war on health. Starting in the final year of med school, Big Pharma insidiously hones in on young med students, seductively wining and dining prospective physicians, showering them with money in the form of educational handouts, gifts, trips and perks galore to recruit its legions of loyal, thoroughly indoctrinated drug peddlers around the world. Thousands of doctors in the US are on Big Pharma payrolls. Typically early on in their careers physicians are unwittingly co-opted into this corrupt malaise of an irreparable system that’s owned and operated by Big Pharma.

And here’s why the drug companies control the global healthcare empire. Since 1990 Big Pharma has been pumping at least $150 million that we know about (and no doubt lots more we don’t know about) buying off politicians who no longer represent the interests of their voting public. Thanks to Big Law via last spring’s Supreme Court decision, current campaign financing laws permit unlimited, carte blanche bribery power for America’s most wealthy and powerful to fill the pockets of corrupt politicians with absolutely no oversight. Though the corporate buyoff of other nations around the globe may not appear quite so extreme and blatantly criminal as in the United States, international drug companies make certain that every national government allows full access and flow of their prescription drugs into each nation, including rubber stamped approval by each nation’s regulatory body to ensure global maximization of record setting profit. But because far more money is spent on the healthcare industry in the US, twice as much as the next nation Canada and equal to the next ten combined, it’s no surprise that hapless Americans end up having to pay far higher exorbitant costs for their made-in-the-USA drugs than anyone else on the planet. The average US citizen spends about $1000 on pharmaceutical drugs each year, 40% higher than Canadians.

Big Pharma also invests more dollars into advertising than any other industry in America, transmitting its seductively deceptive message direct to its consumers, explicitly giving them marching orders to request specific drugs from their doctors. In 2012 alone, pharmaceutical corporations paid nearly $3.5 billion to market their drugs on television, radio, internet, magazines, saturating every media outlet. Their message – pleasure, relief, peace of mind, joy, love and happiness are all just a pill away. No problem or pain in life can’t be conquered by a quick fix – compliments of Big Pharma.

Much of Big Pharma’s success over the last couple decades has been the result of specifically targeting special new populations to con and win over, resorting to creating new diseases and maladies to entice troubled, stressed out, gullible individuals into believing there’s something abnormally wrong with them, that they are among always a growing segment of our population who quietly suffer from whatever discomforting symptoms, deficits, dysfunctions, ailments, syndromes and disorders that enterprising Big Pharma connives to slyly invent, promote, package and sell. This unethical practice has been called “disease mongering.” Drug companies today operate no different from the snake oil salesmen of yesteryear. Saturating the market with their alluring, promising ads, check out any half hour of national network news on television targeting the baby boomer and geriatric crowd and you’ll notice 95% of the commercials are all brought to you by none other than Big Pharma. Of course they pay big bucks for slick ad marketing campaigns that shrewdly target the oldsters most apt to suffer health problems in addition to being virtually the only Americans left still watching the nightly network news. Three out of four people under 65 in the US today recognize that mainstream news media is nothing less than pure Gov. Corp. propaganda.

Also in recent years Big Pharma has become deceitfully masterful at repackaging and rebranding old meds at higher prices ever in search of expanded consumers. It’s a lot easier and far less money to engage in this unethical industry-wide practice of recycling an old pill than to manufacture a new one. Prozac became the biggest drug sold until it was learned that it caused so many people to kill themselves or others, especially adolescents. Then Eli Lilly deceptively repackaged and relabeled it under the less threatening name Sarafem at a much higher price tailored to target unsuspecting women seeking relief from menstrual pain. Like Prozac as another Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor antidepressant, Paxil was suddenly repackaged as the cure-all for shyness under the guise of treating social anxiety. Taking full advantage of knowing that millions of humans feel unsure of themselves dealing with strangers and groups, Big Pharma to the rescue exploiting people’s nervousness by clinically labeling it as social anxiety and reintroducing the antidepressant pink pill as their panacea to personal happiness, lifelong self-confidence and success in life. This most prevalent industry pattern of reusing the same old drugs all dressed up with new custom designed names for new purposes on new custom designed populations for yet more price gouging is nothing less than resorting to a predatory practice of criminal false advertising.

Perhaps as sinister as any aspect of the drug business is how Big Pharma has completely taken over the FDA. A recent Harvard study slammed the FDA making the accusation that it simply “cannot be trusted” because it’s owned and operated by Big Pharma. With complete autonomy and control, now pharmaceutical companies knowingly market drugs that carry high risk dangers for consumers. But because they so tightly control its supposed regulatory gatekeeper, drugs are commonly mass marketed and before the evidence of potential harm becomes overwhelming, by design when the slow bureaucratic wheels turn issuing a drug recall, billions in profit have already been unscrupulously reaped at the deadly expense of its victims. Additionally, doctors, pharmacists and patients rarely even hear about important recalls due to dangerous side effects or contamination. Yet hundreds of Big Pharma drugs are recalled every year. Many FDA approved drugs like FenPhen, Vioxx, Zohydro and Celebrex kill hundreds before they’re finally removed from the shelf. This withholding the truth from the professionals and public consumers is yet more evidence that Big Pharma protects its profits more than people.

This evil practice that keeps repeating itself is proof that Big Pharma is a criminal racket. It no longer needs outside independent research demonstrating a drug’s efficacy to be FDA approved. Currently research is conducted and compiled by the pharmaceutical industry itself to fraudulently show positive results from methodologically flawed drug trials when in reality a drug proves either ill effective at doing what it’s purported to do or downright harmful. Research outcomes only need to show that the drug outperforms a placebo, not other older drugs already available on the market that have proven to be effective at lower cost.

Similar to shady personnel moving seamlessly in and out of governmental public service to think tanks to universities to private law to corporations to lobbyists, the same applies to heads of the FDA moving to and from Big Pharma. Unfortunately this is how our government has been taken over by special interests. Yet this rampant conflict of interest goes unchecked.

Because Big Pharma sometimes outright owns and largely controls today’s most prominent medical journals, spreading false propaganda, disinformation and lies about the so called miracle effects of a given drug is yet another common practice that is malevolent to the core. 98% of the advertising revenue of medical journals is paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. Shoddy and false claims based on shoddy and false research all controlled by Big Pharma often get published in so called reputable journals giving the green light to questionable drugs that are either ineffective or worse yet even harmful. Yet they regularly pass peer and FDA muster with rave reviews.

But because Big Pharma’s never held accountable for its evildoing, it continues to literally get away with murder, not unlike the militant police, the CIA, Monsanto and the US Empire that willfully and methodically commit mass murder on a global scale or through false flag terrorism having its mercenary Moslem allies kill innocent people as on 9/11 and France’s recent “9/11.” Since all serve the interests of their oligarch puppet masters toward grand theft planet and New World Order with total impunity, the world continues to suffer and be victimized.

Nearly five years ago the Justice Department filed and won a huge criminal lawsuit against Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world employing 116,000 employees and boasting an annual revenue of more than $50 billion ($53.8 in 2013). Fined $2.3 billion to pay off civil and criminal charges for illegally promoting the use of four of its drugs, the unprecedented settlement became the largest case of healthcare fraud in history. The crux of the case centered on Pfizer’s illegal practice of marketing drugs for purposes other than what the FDA originally approved. While the law permits a wide leeway for physicians to prescribe drugs for multiple purposes, Pharma manufacturers are restricted to selling their drugs only for the expressed purposes given them by FDA approval.

The 2003 lawsuit would never even have been filed had it not been for whistleblowing sales rep John Kopchinski who forced authorities to investigate what’s been a common Big Pharma practice, selling drugs for off-label uses. While back in 2001 the FDA had approved a 10 mg dosage of Bextra for arthritis patients and for menstrual cramps, Pfizer sent Kopchinski out with instructio ns to give complimentary 20 mg samples of Bextra to doctors, thus willfully and illegally endangering patient lives, particularly because in 2005 Bextra was taken off the market due to increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. The truth is Big Pharma will do anything to boost its money making big profits, including killing innocent people.

But the story doesn’t end here. This legal case potently illustrates how the US federal government has been co-opted and conspires with Big Pharma to knowingly do harm to American citizens. When the story broke in the fall of 2009 of this record fine levied against Pfizer, assistant director Kevin Perkins of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division touted how the feds mean business going after lawbreakers within the pharmaceutical industry, boasting that “it sends a clear message.” But it turns out that that false bravado was an all-for-show facade.

The truth is the US government will knuckle under to Big Pharma, Wall Street and Big Banks every single time, even when it knows these “too big to fail” criminals repeatedly violate laws intended to protect the public. And constantly bailing them out at overburdened taxpayer expense only causes them to become more brazenly criminal, knowing they will always be protected by their co-conspirators the feds.

Back in November 2001 the FDA had stated that Bextra was unsafe for patients at risk of heart disease and stroke, rejecting its use especially at higher than 10mg doses on patients suffering from post-surgery pain. Yet Pfizer went ahead anyway marketing its product for any doctor who “used a scalpel for a living” as one district manager testified. It was learned that Pfizer deployed multimillions of dollars to its well-paid army of hundreds of doctors to go around “educating” other MD’s on the miracle benefits of Bextra. Again, misusing doctors as pitchmen to sell inflated false claims is employing the medical profession as Big Pharma’s industry whores.

By the time Bextra was finally taken off the market in April 2005, after killing a number of at risk patients that never should have been prescribed the painkiller, Pfizer had already made its cool $1.7 billion off the drug being illegally sold for purposes the FDA had expressly forbidden. Here’s where Big Pharma rules over Big Gov. Because by law any company that’s found guilty of fraud is prohibited from continuing as a Medicare and Medicaid contractor, which of course Pfizer is and was, the feds under the morally bankrupt excuse that Big Pharma’s also “too big to fail” made a dirty little secret deal with Pfizer in the backroom law offices of the federal government.

Just like US Empire uses the “national security” card, so do the banksters, Wall Street and Big Pharma use their “too big to fail” trump card to get away with their own crimes against humanity. It’s a rigged world where an elitist cabal of cheats and thugs mistreat fellow humans as owned commodities and indentured expendables. Money and power mean everything while human life means nothing to them. So the secret deal was cut where on paper only the fake Pfizer subsidiary Pharmacia and Upjohn that never sold a single drug would be found criminally guilty so the conveniently contrived loophole would spare Big Pharma Pfizer’s from its alleged death. Records show that on the very same day in 2007 that the feds worked out this sweetheart deal with Pfizer, this hollowed out shell company as Pfizer’s backdoor nonentity was born. How convenient as Big Gov. and Big Pharma got to live happily ever after together in criminal conspiracy against their own people they’re supposed to serve and protect, kind of like the way police forces across this nation are “serving and protecting” citizens.

Then with drug profits so obscenely high, even with a slap on the hand penalty fee of $2.3 billion, Big Pharma’s net profit for just one quarter easily can pay it off. Three years later in July 2012 the Justice Department handed down yet an even bigger fine of $3 billion to UK’s global healthcare giant GlaxoSmithKline for the same exact crimes. As long as Big Pharma continues raking in such enormous profits, fines into the billions mean nothing since they’re paid off in a few months’ time. Not until CEO’s and top executives of Big Banks, Big Wall Street and Big Pharma start going to jail to serve long term sentences for their crimes, it’ll conveniently remain business as usual. And as long as Big Pharma owns Big Gov. Corp., just like the oligarchs own everything there is to earthly own, nothing will ever change for the better unless we as citizens of the world demand accountability and justice that punishment rightly fit the corporate crime.

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Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.

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