Business Archives - Circle of Change

Food / Farming

Key elements of this domain include practices that are both sustainable and support local, small farming. Another is breaking up the monopoly that a few Big Ag companies use to control food production. Other essential elements include applying regenerative methods to our topsoil, humane treatment of livestock, and local economic support especially in rural areas ready to reengage in organic food production.

Another Monopoly

September 10, 2026

If all goes as planned, President Trump is going to “save” Argentina by importing tons of their beef into the U.S. Never mind what will happen to our farmers and ranchers. According to Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer and President of the Farm Action Fund, “63 farmers go out of business each day in America.” When asked how could this be, given that beef prices at the grocery store ...

Back to School

July 28, 2026

Despite the passage of time, the basic medical school curriculum hasn’t changed all that much. A person technically holds the academic title of an allopathic doctor (MD) as soon as they graduate. However, to actually practice medicine and treat patients independently, they are legally required to complete a residency program, which typically takes anywhere from 3 to 7 years depending ...

Where Did They All Go?

February 9, 2026

When I was a kid, each summer, in our neighborhood, the ‘”bug truck” would slowly spray clouds of DDT to “protect” us from mosquitoes. It used to be that whenever you hit the road one travel ritual was to clean the bugs off your windshield. There’s even a name for this concern: the windshield phenomenon. We were a bug-hating nation. Now, entomologists have documented the dra...

Good News Is Always Welcome

January 22, 2026

Since 1850, according to regeneration.org, “industrial agriculture has created a legacy of water pollution, animal abuse, degraded land, and unhealthy food. It has been responsible for over a third of all carbon dioxide emissions generated by humans. Fortunately, regenerative agriculture is gaining in public awareness and financial support. Here are five examples of what might be ca...

The Price We Pay

January 9, 2026

If you think the price we pay for groceries these day is high, the price Americans pay in health and wellbeing is even higher. Despite more attention than ever on how unhealthy our food supply is, Europe is miles ahead of us. For example: People with wheat allergies find the bread products in Europe safe to enjoy because the wheat varieties are often softer and lower in gluten, treating methods...

Why Words Matter

December 30, 2025

Not that long ago, “animal husbandry” was the name of a branch of agriculture concerned with the day-to-day care of animals raised for meat, fiber, milk, and other products. Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic Revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards. Now the very same branch is called “animal science.” According to Will H...

Food & Farming

December 8, 2025

I’ve wanted to write about my website’s Food & Farming Domain for some time, but where to begin? It’s such a complicated and vast topic. Now, however, I’ve found a way in by identifying some of the current issues and in the next post highlighting possible answers. Industrialization began just 80 years ago, after World War II when the factories were still humming when man...

Who Owns the Land? (Part One)

June 6, 2025

“This land is your land; this land is my land….” If Woody Guthrie were alive today he might need to add another verse to “this land was made for you and me.” The amount of foreign-owned agricultural land has grown significantly in recent years. In 2011, 26 million acres were owned by foreign investors. In 2022, foreign-owned acreage grew to 43.4 million. In most states, very ...

Rural America – What They Keep Getting Wrong

June 1, 2024

In February 2024, a new book took the latest shot at rural America - White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. It has caused quite a stir. Does the subtitle sound familiar? it’s the latest word used to sell books, scare people, and recruit voters. The title is primarily applied to describe “those people” living in flyover, nowhere land. In the book ...

Rural America –Getting It Right

June 15, 2024

What’s In a Name? I hated the term “flyover country” long before I moved there and was curious about the phrase. It wasn’t meant to be the elitist slight it is now. In fact, according to Gabe Bullard writing in a 2016 National Geographic article, the term was first listed in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1980, influenced by the early non-stop, transcontinental commercial flights 30 year...

Civilization

August 15, 2022

I just discovered a book – Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress. Full disclosure - I’m waiting for it to come from the library and love the book’s cover. I did see the author, Christopher Ryan, on a “Useful Idiots” podcast https://usefulidiots.substack.com/ and thought I’d share some of what Ryan had to say. And note: a few thinkers (especially the Hobbesian guys like Steven Pin...

Who Owns the Land – Part II

June 26, 2025

Would you be surprised if I told you that these numbered circles represent a recent tally of data centers in the U.S. What is a data center? According to Cisco, one of the tech giants: “At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. Data centers accommodate the following: Email and file sharing, productivity ...

Promote A Healthy Community

Your local community can become a more educated and health-conscious neighborhood through organizing public initiatives.

Learn About Healthy Food and Farming

Learn about current challenges to our soil, farming, and food systems, and their impact on our health and wellbeing.

Lobbyists

Their purpose is to influence how lawmakers write or vote on legislation related to particular issues. Companies, labor unions, trade associations and other influential organizations spend billions of dollars each year to lobby Congress and federal agencies. The number of lobbyists in Washington, D.C as of 2024 is estimated to be over 12,000.

The American Mendacity Association

October 15, 2024

After years of witnessing the demise of the American health care system, I’ve come to think of the American Medical Association as primarily a self-serving, duplicitous organization. I grew up thinking that it was almost a priestly sect that cared about health and healing. Ten years of working in the health insurance industry opened my eyes. Happily, the AMA’s membership is going down, not sim...

How Sausage is Made

November 1, 2022

As a kid, I watched my Grandma Rosie make link sausage (all that gross fat and pork). Gross! Remembering that experience, I am thinking about the midterm elections on November 8th. Like who can ignore them? I thought since we have candidates promising us the sun and the moon, it would be a good time to brush up on how our laws are actually made. We’re told there might be new sausage chefs eager ...

Moral Injury

August 29, 2020

If I ever find an agent and/or publisher for a book I’m working on, this is how it will open: Imagine kicking over a rotting log and finding all manner of centipedes running to escape the sunlight when darkness is their life. This is how I view the healthcare industry we’re living with today. Photo by Viktor Talashuk For more than a dozen years, beginning in 1982, I was a sales and marketing ...

Engage With Elected Officials

Identifying and supporting elected leaders who champion health initiatives is key to improving our healthcare system.

Learn About Healthy Food and Farming

Learn about current challenges to our soil, farming, and food systems, and their impact on our health and wellbeing.

PR / Marketing

Our movement will be called everything you can think of, but the American people want change. The so-called “powers that be” are counting on “we the people” being too small, like David, to possibly win the battle against the many Goliaths. It’s good to remember that other battles for public policy reforms have been waged and won. By working together across the country, small campaigns can inspire a national movement that Congress and federal agencies will no longer be able to ignore.

When Narratives Compete

June 25, 2026

We are all storytellers. It’s part of our DNA. It’s how we share our experiences, our beliefs, form community, and make sense of the world. Some of our early stories proved to be false but considered endearing - Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. A more sophisticated word for story is narrative. What is a Narrative? Studiobinder.com provides a good definition: A...

The American Mendacity Association

October 15, 2024

How One Man Shaped Medicine

August 1, 2024

In 1910, two of the richest men in America – Nelson D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie – hired Abraham Flexner to review medical institutions across North America. The two had questions regarding the quality of the medical teaching facilities in the US and Canada. Despite his non-medical background, focused solely on the classics, Abraham Flexner was chosen for his perceived objectivity. Unlik...

Fifteen-Minute Cities

July 1, 2024

I live in a fifteen-minute city if I limit my walk to the library, the bookstore, a small grocery store, local restaurants, and lots of banks. It’s a lovely walk on a graveled, wooded trail. But it’s miles from the rest of the actual city where we have to drive for gas, Costco, larger grocery stores, a few beleaguered malls, medical and personal services. Maybe this is the case for you too? We...

It’s a No Foolin’ April

April 1, 2024

In September 2022, the White House hosted a conference that focused on nutrition, health, and hunger in America. Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the main organizers of the event, is a cardiologist and Dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition. He and his students developed a new food pyramid. It took three years and used taxpayer funds to complete. Here is a portion of the results of that study highlighte...

How Was Justice Served?

March 15, 2023

In 2008, I had one of those I wonder whatever happened to moments and googled my blind-from-birth, mentor and former boss, Barry Scheur. My jaw dropped when I saw the headline in Modern Healthcare, dated December 05, 2005: “HMO dreams end in court. Barry Scheur began the Oath of Louisiana with big plans; now he stands accused of fraud after the HMO’s collapse.” Barry and several members of h...

The S Word

February 1, 2023

Prior to the midterm elections I heard Sen Ted Cruz (R), from the great state of Texas (where all of Houston was on a boil water alert that day), say that if the Democrats took over government, socialism would be the horrifying result. I found this laughable. It’s pretty clear we have the 1%ers happily running the economic and political show of both parties for the rest of us 99%ers. But it did ...

ICYMI

March 1, 2022

Words matter. And it’s entirely reasonable to put truly offensive words on the “our history” shelf. There, never to be forgotten and used in the context of understanding our ______ist (fill in the blank) past. I’m fine with be aware of the power of words. And then there are the silly extremes. I thought calling a pregnant woman a “birthing person” was a prizewinner. But . . . In Case Y...

Moral Injury

August 29, 2020

Manufacturing Hate

December 3, 2019

I just experienced my first ever “book shaming” at a local coffeeshop. After I’d settled in with my latté and muffin, I took a book out of my carry bag. Because it was close quarters, I felt the man next to me shift in his chair to see what I was reading. I admit to being curious about what people read but to my knowledge I’ve never judged a person solely on a book. First I heard the mean...

Just 90 Miles Away

May 24, 2020

In 1997, I joined 150 Americans and Canadians to violate the decades-old U.S. embargo of Cuba. My reason for going was to see Cuba’s healthcare delivery system and after working in Miami to satisfy my curiosity about the island just 90 miles away. My trip was organized by IFCO, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization/ Pastors for Peace. Our Pastors caravan, the 7th, was dedicat...

Demand Science-Based Solutions

Support key directors of health-related state and federal departments who want to rebuild public trust by requiring science-based, transparent research and information.

Insurance

They use vertical integration to control medical care, pharmacy benefits management, and reimbursement to create excessively profitable programs. Based on public support, a universal health insurance program might be a viable alternative to current insurance programs.

Brokerage firms help employers to choose insurance products for their employees, while receiving compensations for their guidance derived from the cost of the insurance they recommend.

The Medicalization of Health

April 10, 2026

The way the human body is constructed, pairs of body parts are obvious. If you start at the top, we have two of most everything down to our two feet. The relationship between the pairs is also well documented. If you break a leg, the other one does double duty but both legs will need to heal – one from the break, the other from the overtime. These supportive relationships – shoulders, hands...

A Different Deadly Species

February 19, 2026

The “murder hornet,” the world’s biggest species of wasp, has an MO that reminds me of a particular human species. The murder hornet feeds on other insects and kills off the worker bees until the workforce is severely depleted. Sounds like the MO of the U.S. health insurance industry. Here is a recent photo and clip of the “profit over people” gang before the U.S. House Ways and Means...

Let’s Make a Deal

October 28, 2025

I believe that saying what you think without self-censoring in order not to offend someone has never advanced a person’s sense of self. I also believe that people can respectfully disagree on important topics and remain colleagues and friends. Maybe one way to do this is to find commonality before simply discarding the other person. But, these days, that has been lost to righteously choosing a s...

“Sharing” Patient Data Or We’ll Do Anything To Make Money

July 15, 2024

Received May 14, 2024 (via email) NOTICE OF DATA BREACH Dear BARBARA, On behalf of Kaiser Permanente, I am writing to inform you about a privacy matter that may have affected you. What Happened?On October 25, 2023, Kaiser Permanente determined that certain online technologies (commonly known as cookies or pixels) installed on our websites and mobile applications may have transmitted personal inf...

100 Million People

July 15, 2022

I thought I’d read it wrong when I saw this heading in a recent posting from Kaiser Health News (KHN). I looked again and saw that the full title of the well-researched article was as follows: “100 Million People in America Are Saddled with Health Care Debt.” This is slightly less than one-third the estimated population in 2022. This 100 million includes 41% of adults “beset by a health ca...

Working for Something Better

December 15, 2024

Imagine kicking over a rotting log and finding all manner of centipedes running to escape the sunlight when darkness is their life. This is how I have come to view the healthcare industry we’re living with today. Just that, it’s become an industry rather than one of the elements committed to creating good health and promoting wellbeing. For more than a dozen years, beginning in 1982, I work...

The New Canaries?

July 1, 2023

I couldn’t stop thinking about a short notice I read in my local newspaper and wanted to share this in a post. “Runaway youth in Washington State will now have the option to defer shelters and host homes from contacting their parents if they leave home to seek gender affirming or reproductive health care under Senate Bill 5599.” The state’s House and Senate passed the bill and sent it on ...

How Was Justice Served?

March 15, 2023

The Catch-22 of US Healthcare

September 5, 2021

I worked in the health insurance industry from 1982 to 1989, with one regrettable relapse. My first job was with an HMO. I actually believed if we provided more preventive services and made care affordable, the health of all Americans would improve. Those were innocent days, before doctors’ practices were owned by venture capitalists, before medicine became Big Pharma, before insurance companies...

Moral Injury

August 29, 2020

Big Pharma

New information is unfolding that multinational pharma companies have hidden drug trial data and through the FDA released poorly tested drugs and vaccines. Many experts contend that big pharma’s primary interest is in illness not health, developing expensive drugs for special diseases, and inhibiting the use of less-costly generic drugs. They unduly influence professional journals, medical training, and sponsor over half of TV and print media.

Anthony Fauci – The Covid-19 Pandemic

August 27, 2026

In November of 2003, Anthony Fauci received a copy of a CIA report titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” which warned that pathogens could be genetically engineered to be dangerous. Almost two decades later, COVID-19 became an infectious disease caused by the virus SARS-COV-2. Initially discovered in Wuhan, China, by late 2019, the first U.S. case of COVID-19 was reported in the state of Wash...

Anthony Fauci – The AIDS Epidemic

August 25, 2026

There is an old saying that “a leopard can't change its spots." And when it’s applied to human behavior, the phrase refers to how a person rarely changes their basic nature and personality. This phrase reminded me of Dr. Anthony Fauci who is back in the news for his starring role in the Covid pandemic. For some people, his leading role in the AIDS epidemic will come as new information and surp...

Vaccines – Part Two

June 12, 2026

Before we explore vaccines in the “modern era,” it would be helpful to determine what makes a competent scientist? These four elements are considered guiding principles: 1. Do not be swayed by unverified information; base scientific discussions on peer-reviewed evidence. 2. Acknowledge uncertainty in origin theories but remain cautious of interpretations driven by ideology or political a...

Vaccines – Part One

May 15, 2026

Today’s blog post is about vaccines that were first named by Edward Jenner in a 1798 pamphlet. He was referring to the “smallpox of the cow” or cowpox. To quote from the 2025 book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality by Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake, “His proposal for inoculation with a weak form of disease-causing matter to prevent serious illness became the central concept of...

The Medicalization of Health

April 10, 2026

Let’s Make a Deal

October 28, 2025

Déjà vu – All Over Again

August 26, 2025

I haven’t thought about Yogi Berra in years and then I read Celia Farber’s reissued book Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS andYogi’s famous saying came to mind. Why the famous saying? I briefly worked as a contracted Marketing Director for my former boss who was running an HMO. Since I was in a financial dilemma, I took the job and told myself that maybe I could make a...

Thank You

August 6, 2025

It’s been awhile since I wanted to thank a member of Congress. I imagine that I’m like many Americans, tired of this “august body” ignoring what Americans say they want or need. I haven’t seen a poll that says Americans want forever wars and government corruption. But recently, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, held a significant...

The WHO Debate

July 23, 2025

If it hadn’t been for Covid-19 and the role the World Health Organization played in mandates, lockdowns, and the vaccines, this specialized UN agency might not be in the news. As a result of the Trump administration, a sharpened focus is on the attempt of the WHO to take primacy over individual nation states when/if another pandemic occurs. But first, a quick reminder of WHO’s history. WHO�...

Witness to a Crime

May 15, 2025

In 1981, I spent the summer in the remote village of Kapenguria, Kenya, working toward my master’s degree in health administration. I’ve written about that life-changing experience in my memoir, The Red Kitchen, and elsewhere. One of my assignments was to create the local hospital’s first census plus work in their Women’s Health Center. Wandering around the village center one day, I ...

Hold That Pill

November 15, 2024

“If you think your doctors prescribe medications for you on the basis of their unbiased judgment and objective medical research, Carl Elliott’s book, White Coat – Black Hat, will disabuse you of that old-fashioned notion. In his superb exposé, Elliott shows how the big drug companies have bribed and corrupted the medical establishment so that we no longer know which drugs are effective or w...

100 Million People

July 15, 2022

PE – Not Your Gym Class

June 15, 2022

Do you remember when the health insurance wordsmiths came up with “patient-centered care?” Like, who else was being treated? Martians? Now, we have yet another turn of phrase - “profit-centered care.” The latest is private equity (PE) companies acquiring hospitals, doctors, clinics, rehab centers, nursing homes, emergency rooms, and anything else remotely related to give investors a “hea...

Symptomology

September 29, 2020

As some of you know, I’m working on a hybrid—part memoir and part how to get us off our collective ass and provide affordable, accessible healthcare to our people. The biggest barrier is that all we read and talk about are the symptoms—not the disease. This is like hearing an odd noise coming from under the hood of your car. You drive to your regular automotive shop and the son of the boss w...

“Question Authority” Returns

April 17, 2025

In the 1960s, Timothy Leary, a well-known figure of the counterculture, popularized many catchphrases like the one above. It’s message was meant to raise doubts about the Vietnam War among other issues. In 2024, according to Marty Markary, M.D. we need to once again reexamine our assumptions about some medical beliefs. In his most recent book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wr...

Demand Science-Based Solutions

Support key directors of health-related state and federal departments who want to rebuild public trust by requiring science-based, transparent research and information.

Big Business

Major corporations as well as trade organizations spend a percentage of their profits on Congress to enact legislation that supports their financial goals. Their sway is equal to their size, revenue, and influence. The largest businesses as well as trade organizations control the marketplace. Their dominance also reduces opportunities for small businesses, inhibits new product development, and exercises financial influence over health care decisions at both the state and federal levels.

Another Monopoly

September 10, 2026

When Narratives Compete

June 25, 2026

Vaccines – Part Two

June 12, 2026

Vaccines – Part One

May 15, 2026

A Different Deadly Species

February 19, 2026

Where Did They All Go?

February 9, 2026

Good News Is Always Welcome

January 22, 2026

The Price We Pay

January 9, 2026

Why Words Matter

December 30, 2025

Food & Farming

December 8, 2025

Let’s Make a Deal

October 28, 2025

Who Owns the Land? (Part One)

June 6, 2025

How One Man Shaped Medicine

August 1, 2024

Fifteen-Minute Cities

July 1, 2024

It’s a No Foolin’ April

April 1, 2024

How Sausage is Made

November 1, 2022

Down the Rabbit Hole

October 1, 2023

It’s Not Just for Rabbits A friend sent me an email several months ago suggesting her healthcare experience as a topic for a blog post. She was excited to find a Primary Care Clinic in her city that sounded perfect. They advertised, among many things, time to get to know you as a patient and a multi-team approach. She liked her doctor who looked at her mild osteopenia recorded in a DXA* scan, p...

PE – Not Your Gym Class

June 15, 2022

Unions on the Rise

May 15, 2022

When Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky called Chris Smalls “not smart or articulate” in 2020, he unintentionally put another log of motivation on an existing fire. In Amazon’s mind, Smalls was just a Black warehouse worker; a mouthy guy who didn’t talk like a Harvard grad. Smalls was essentially fired for speaking out about Amazon’s COVID-19 safety failures. Many of us, especially d...

Symptomology

September 29, 2020

Manufacturing Hate

December 3, 2019

Reworking the Workplace

November 15, 2019

I wish that when we talk about polarization we were only talking about how to protect polar bear habitats in the Arctic. But, alas, now the term’s most common meaning refers to the act of dividing, often people and opinions, into completely separate groups. We’ve gone binary in the U.S. This applies to today’s workplace as well and poses a significant challenge. Possibly for the first time i...

Who Owns the Land – Part II

June 26, 2025

Learn About Healthy Food and Farming

Learn about current challenges to our soil, farming, and food systems, and their impact on our health and wellbeing.

Promote A Healthy Community

Your local community can become a more educated and health-conscious neighborhood through organizing public initiatives.

Root: Business

Another Monopoly

Back to School

Where Did They All Go?

Good News Is Always Welcome

The Price We Pay

Why Words Matter

Food & Farming

Who Owns the Land? (Part One)

Rural America – What They Keep Getting Wrong

Rural America –Getting It Right

Civilization

Who Owns the Land – Part II

related actions

The American Mendacity Association

How Sausage is Made

Moral Injury

related actions

When Narratives Compete

The American Mendacity Association

How One Man Shaped Medicine

Fifteen-Minute Cities

It’s a No Foolin’ April

How Was Justice Served?

The S Word

ICYMI

Moral Injury

Manufacturing Hate

Just 90 Miles Away

related actions

The Medicalization of Health

A Different Deadly Species

Let’s Make a Deal

“Sharing” Patient Data Or We’ll Do Anything To Make Money

100 Million People

Working for Something Better

The New Canaries?

How Was Justice Served?

The Catch-22 of US Healthcare

Moral Injury

Anthony Fauci – The Covid-19 Pandemic

Anthony Fauci – The AIDS Epidemic

Vaccines – Part Two

Vaccines – Part One

The Medicalization of Health

Let’s Make a Deal

Déjà vu – All Over Again

Thank You

The WHO Debate

Witness to a Crime

Hold That Pill

100 Million People

PE – Not Your Gym Class

Symptomology

“Question Authority” Returns

related actions

Another Monopoly

When Narratives Compete

Vaccines – Part Two

Vaccines – Part One

A Different Deadly Species

Where Did They All Go?

Good News Is Always Welcome

The Price We Pay

Why Words Matter

Food & Farming

Let’s Make a Deal

Who Owns the Land? (Part One)

How One Man Shaped Medicine

Fifteen-Minute Cities

It’s a No Foolin’ April

How Sausage is Made

Down the Rabbit Hole

PE – Not Your Gym Class

Unions on the Rise

Symptomology

Manufacturing Hate

Reworking the Workplace

Who Owns the Land – Part II

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