About The Pedro Gatos Institute on Addiction, Health, & Social Theory

Following our initiation as a non-profit in August 2022, we have been seeking to organize our informational format concept into a website that will be a library of podcasts, show excerpt transcripts organized by topic, and ppt vignettes primarily focused on the world impact of US & western foreign policies in world history over the past 500 years. We start from the premise that we, as news and information consumers, are inundated with a narrative that leaves out important information and misrepresents too often many of the issues within the unfolding realities of the world. The result is predictable. If the information upon which we base our assumptions and understandings is consistently inaccurate so will our interpretation of the world around us. Deciphering truth from fiction has become problematic. Our non-profit seeks to become a repository of reliable well sourced out data that can be trusted for those interested in identifying and then reducing if not eliminating those factors that create preventable forms of human misery that plague our world.

Archival excerpts of Bringing Light Into Darkness weekly Radio shows hosted by Pedro Gatos and which has been airing on 91.7 KOOP Radio in Austin, Texas streaming live at koop.org for the past two decades largely contribute to the database that will be made available to the public. Data from a hundred or more guests vetted for the integrity of their research and writing products have created a library of historical and contemporary information largely around foreign policy, social theory, addiction, health, race and class issues that we seek to make available to the public through a library indexed topical interests.

PGI's Vision and Mission

We start from the following premises. That there is too much misery in the world. Some of the misery is unavoidable and is generated from the forces of nature but the vast majority is created by mismanagement of world resources by human beings. Because it is humanity’s mismanagement of our world of resources that generates the lion’s share of human misery in the world today it can be prevented and reversed.

What we have discovered long ago at PGI is:

1.   As of 2020 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations[1],  AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom whose combined net worth is over $430B. This means that 90% of the information made available to us through mainstream media news services is generated by interests that ultimately are not invested in change but in the status quo of gross wealth inequality.  

2. According to the most recent wealth distribution data in the US that I could find, “In the third quarter of 2022, 68 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 3.3 percent of the total wealth.” More revealing, was that the top 1% owned nearly the same amount of wealth (30.6%) as the bottom 90% of US households (32%).[2]

3. In February (2016), researchers at the Brookings Institution analyzed life expectancies for men who were among the top 10 percent of earners, and those who were among the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, (bottom 10%) life expectancy was 14 years shorter than for those among the rich.[3] This proves that poverty and the injustices that create it kills!

4. These corporate executives that own 90% of the information made available to us, have a vested interest in maintaining this status quo not addressing its injustices. As Jim Morrison of the Doors wrote: “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”

5.  Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man picked up on this many years ago and shared that as a result of these oppressive power dynamics there is a closed universe of informational discourse. That certain information is kept out of the public discourse creating a restricted informational environment largely incapable of seeing enlightening contradictions such as those that gross wealth disparity yield.

6.  This is what the mission of PGI is, to bring light into that darkness. To present authentic history that has been left out of our mainstream informational environment.  Because that is what yields the data needed to deconstruct oppression and the profound unfairness it yields.

7. To see how through informational control we have been educated to be ahistorical and out of touch with the real forces that shape our world and are leading our species to a premature destruction.

"The Pedro Gatos Institute on Addiction, Health, and Social Theory provides educational support to the students, journalists and the general public using our online library / archival systems of historical significant data that has been largely kept from public scrutiny. The institute vision is to provide, continuing education seminars and public policy internships and a library of reliable, detailed and well sourced out informational data. The goal of the institute is to reduce human generated misery by identifying and deconstructing those factors that promote gross wealth inequality and by furthering the interests and perspective of traditionally underrepresented populations in the formulation of public discourse and institutional policy."

Our belief is that persons armed with truthful knowledge and driven by their compassionate nature and driven by our passion to seek right over wrong will lead our world away from its present course of self destruction and towards realizing our human potential of actualizing a world through deeds that promote liberty and justice for all.

Pedro Gatos Institute Board Members and Governing Body  

President/Chief Executive Director/ Host

Pedro Gatos

Voting Board Member

Muhammad Sahimi

Treasurer/ CFO

Kent Anshutz

Voting Board Member

Alisha Jumann

Secretary

Pat Bucko

Voting Board Member

Evan Solis

Voting Board Member

Michael Whitney

Intern

Jacob Bucko