Here's the video to Geov Parrish's (publisher of Eat the State) recent 50th birthday roast.
Geov's invitation read: "As many of you know, it's an extremely unlikely as well as significant milestone, since I've been battling a terminal illness since 1991, with a stubborn refusal to let it be, you know, terminal. So it seemed like an event worth celebrating."
While all panelists did a fantastic job, emcee Goldie (HorsesAss) and Tim Harris (Real Change) were standouts:
Goldie highlighted Geov's unpredictable politics contrasting his liberal medicare-for-all beliefs (as a multiple organ transplant recipient) with his libertarian defense of motorcyclists who don't wish to wear helmets (4:30 in).
Harris (36:45 in) explains how Real Change and Parrish's Eat the State are dominating American politics and controlling what we think. My favorite lines were about his deplorable use of the deperately poor as a labor force for distributing Real Change and when Eat the State and Real Change were just starting out, ETS has 3 ads and RC has 7 ads, which gave ETS the moral high ground. "Their paper was so f***ing underground that we couldn't find it."
Geov wrote about his struggle for survival against the backdrop of the American medical system Defending My Life in 2001 and "My life between the cracks" in 2004 for Seattle Weekly:
"While insurance companies, in denying high-cost treatments, can claim that they are trying to ensure lower-cost health care reimbursement for more people, the big transnational corporations that dominate the pharmaceutical industry have no such excuses. Drugs like cyclosporin are lifesavers; the greed of their manufacturers can be a major barrier to equitable health care. For someone in the U.S., it's a struggle; for someone in the Third World with AIDS, cancer, or a transplant, it's a death sentence. It's been well publicized, for example, that some of these companies have fought mightily—with U.S. government support—to prevent inexpensive generic anti-AIDS drugs from being distributed in the Third World." via Defending My Life 2001
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