Lionel Badal
August 09, 2009
Dick Cheney, 46th US Vice-President (speaking as the CEO of Halliburton (HAL) in 1999):
Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature… Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. It is the basic, fundamental building block of the world’s economy. It is unlike any other commodity. [1]
Al Gore, 45th US Vice-President, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (June, 2004):
We almost certainly are at or near Peak Oil. [2]
Introduction
Over the past decade, a fierce debate has emerged amongst energy experts about whether global oil production was about to reach a peak, followed by an irreversible decline.
This event, commonly known as “Peak Oil” far outreaches the sole discipline of geology. From transportation to modern agriculture, petrochemicals and even the pharmaceutical industry all of them rely on one commodity: cheap and abundant oil. In order to sustain the needs of an ever globalized world, oil demand should double by 2050 [3].
Nonetheless, geological limitations will disrupt this improbable scenario. In fact, a growing proportion of energy experts argue that Peak Oil is impending and warn about the extraordinary scale of the crisis.
42 Years of Oil Left?
According to the 2009 BP Statistical Review, the world has precisely 42 years of oil left [4]. Those numbers come from a very simple formula, the R/P ratio, which consists of dividing the official number of global oil reserves by the level of today’s production.
Nevertheless, this methodology is dangerously defective on several key points as it ignores geological realities. Oil production does not consist of a plan level of production that brutally ends one day; it follows a bell-shaped curve.
Indeed, the important day occurs when production starts to decline, not when it ends. As it is a non-flexible commodity, even a small deficit in oil production can lead to a major price surge.
Finally, the R/P ratio does not acknowledge that production costs increase over the time; the first oil fields to be developed were logically the easy ones and so the most profitable. It is well recognized that remaining oil fields consist of whether poor quality oil or remotely located fields which need high technologies and expensive investments.
Therefore, relying on the R/P ratio gives a false impression of security while the actual situation is critical.
Global Oil Reserves: Lies and Manipulations
Oil is a strategic resource; therefore having oil is a key political and economical advantage for a state. This is why politics interfere in the evaluation of oil reserves, especially in countries with poor accountability records; that is, the majority of OPEC countries. In fact, OPEC oil reserves have dramatically increased during the 1980s and 1990s.
However, they have not discovered major oil fields after the 1970s. At this conjuncture, the question of what lays behind these fluctuations needs to be asked.
The geologist Dr. Colin Campbell, founder of ASPO [5], explains the hidden reasons that led to these changes:
In 1985, Kuwait, added 50% to its reserve. At that time, the OPEC quota was based on the reported reserves; the more you reported, the more you could produce. [6]
Fellow OPEC members who were unwilling to see the influence of Kuwait growing, simply raised their reserves soon after. Moreover, OPEC countries continue to present their reserves as flat despite having extracted huge amounts of oil during the past twenty years.
At this point, we should not forget that oil reserves reported by these countries are not audited by independent experts. In 2006, the notorious Petroleum Intelligence Weekly said it had access to confidential Kuwaiti reports which stated that reserves were half the official numbers [7].
In reaction, the Kuwaiti Oil Minister stated,
The Kuwait people are not concerned with numbers. This is related to national security. [8]
In 2006, Dr. Samsam Bakhtiari, a senior energy expert from the National Iranian Oil Company, declared that oil reserves in the Middle-East were “about half, or even less than what the respective national governments claim” and added “as for Iran, the usually accepted official 132 billion barrels is almost 100 billion barrels over any realistic assay” [9].
In fact, importing countries are simply asked to trust OPEC nations. Strangely, but surely, this is done by importing countries who assume these numbers are true and use them in their projections. On a report to the US Congress on Peak Oil, the US Government Accountability Office justly noted these problematic estimations [10].
The question of oil reserves is most relevant. As oil exporting countries have less oil in their ground, Peak Oil will arrive faster. Oil optimists who argue Peak Oil is still decades away rely on these same erroneous data.
In addition, if importing countries assume oil reserves are abundant as they do, the crisis will be unexpected, unprepared and misunderstood; in one word: overwhelming. Similarly, once oil shortages occur, oil importing countries may assume that exporting countries are deliberately reducing their oil exports to harm their national interests.
Such a flawed assumption from oil importing countries is likely to have serious repercussions, and eventually lead to new oil wars.
The Imminent Decline of Global Oil Production
In 2008 the International Energy Agency (IEA) conducted for the first time [11] a detailed field-by-field analysis of global oil production and its findings are bleak. Asked by a journalist on what the previous analysis relied on, the Chief-Economist of the IEA admitted, “it was mainly an assumption” [12].
In the 2008 World Energy Outlook (WEO), they have analysed about 800 fields, which account for ¾ of global reserves and more than 2/3 of global oil production [13].
They come to the conclusion that decline rates are far higher than previously thought, between 6.7 and 8.6% a year [14].
As result, they now estimate that to maintain the current levels of oil production by 2030 the world would need to develop and produce 45 MBD; as said by Dr. Birol, approximately four new Saudi-Arabias [15].
Simultaneously, they have analysed all the projects that are financially sanctioned in all the countries in the world (about 230) up to 2015. As it takes five to ten years to produce oil from a new field, they have a clear image of the coming situation.
When they add all the projects together (if all of them see the light of the day – unlikely with the current credit crunch [16]) they will bring about 25 millions barrels per day [17]. However, because of the important decline rates, the world will still be short of “at least” 12.5 MBD before 2015 [18].
Asked by a journalist if this means Peak Oil, Dr. Birol answered, “We are facing a serious threat” [19].
In 2009, Merrill Lynch conducted a similar analysis and concluded that, “the world now needed to replace an amount of oil output equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s production every two years” [20].
Yet, oil production is already in an irreversible decline in at least 54 of the 65 most important producing countries and we nowadays consume three barrels of oil for a single one discovered [21]; an unsustainable situation.
The latest annual report on geopolitical prospective from the US Joint Forces Command reached the stunning conclusion that:
By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD… The implications for future conflict are ominous...[22]
At this pace, global oil production could decline by 50% from its current level, as soon as 2030 [23].
A Contested Reality: By Whom and Why?
For many years, Peak Oil was ignored by officials from oil companies and governmental agencies such as the IEA [24]. They negligently repeated that production was not at risk. However, over the recent years and in light of indisputable facts, we have seen a radical change in the discourse of the IEA [25] and leading oil companies such as Chevron (CVX) [26] and Total (TOT) [27].
In a recent video interview, Chevron’s Vice-Chairman, Peter Robertson, clearly expressed his fears:
You know, it’s often times people will ask, ‘Why in the world would Chevron be encouraging its customers to use less energy?’ After all, we sell energy – that’s our product… In many ways, a lot of us are concerned about the ability of the world’s supply system to provide the energy that people need…[28]
To the desolation of many, the debate has not been closed. Indeed, a few voices continue to sponsor, actively and loudly, the vision that oil production does not face any danger. Amongst them, we find three notorious voices, namely the CERA oil consultant, the OPEC cartel and not surprisingly in regard to its notorious poor record of scientific objectivity, the oil company, Exxon Mobil (XOM).
At this conjuncture, we can picture the hidden motives for Exxon Mobil to do so. By telling the public that oil production will no longer be plentiful, the consequences for the company are numerous. They include the danger of diversification from oil and creating a context of mistrust regarding oil companies; all of them bad for short-term business.
Regarding the OPEC, we saw earlier how prone they were to manipulate their reserves and we should not expect much from official OPEC statements.
The following comment from Dr. Chalabi, the former OPEC Secretary-General, gives additional information about how the cartel really works:
OPEC countries do not care about what might happen 20 years from now. They care about what they get today. Because, these are politicians, they want more money, to spend rationally or not. [29]
Furthermore, Dr. Sadad al-Huseini, former Head of Exploration and Production at the Saudi-Aramco, publicly contradicted his former bosses, by declaring that, “oil is likely to peak at a 95 MBD plateau by 2015” [30].
Besides, Dr. Shokri Ghanem, former Head of the Research Division at OPEC's Secretariat, head of the Libyan National Oil Company and a relation of OPEC’s current Secretary General, admitted in a 2006 report published by the OPEC Secretariat:
All in all, most would appear to agree that peak oil output is not very far away for all of us. It could take place sometime within the next decade or so, which in fact means that there is not much time left for a world economy to be driven largely by oil. [31]
The Cambridge Energy Research Associates is a well-known energy consultant group and a leading opponent to Peak Oi l [32]. Yet, CERA has been accused of providing a biased vision of the situation as it is “close to the oil industry" [33].
The following declaration from Chris Holtom, former head of British military intelligence, currently a strategic consultant to the oil & gas industry, gives valuable information:
There is a pack of deceit and economy with the truth here - some wilful, some born of ignorance, or fear of "group-think" related to stock price or employment. It needs careful and persuasive exposure of agendas, motives and possible consequences... Peak Oil is a potential Black Swan event, where the consequences are so great that after it we spend most of our time justifying why we didn’t anticipate it… It is a global issue and global bodies need the clout and courage to address them. [34]
Any Viable Alternative Energy?
There is no easy, present, solution to the crisis. Alternatives to oil are still far from being a feasible replacement; hydrogen for example would require 30 to 50 years to replace oil economies [35].
Meanwhile, the automobile industry is now planning to develop electric cars in the near future. While the first electric cars are expected to come on line in 2010-12, in order to replace 50% of the car fleet, the world would need between 10 to 20 years [36].
Besides, as manufacturing a single car requires at least 20 barrels of oil [37], once oil production starts to decline, in 2011-2013[38], it will increasingly become difficult to develop the electric car on a massive scale.
In fact, the closer we get to Peak Oil, the more difficult a massive and costly emergency plan to develop alternative energies will become.
To quote a report on Peak Oil, commissioned by the US Department of Energy,
Previous energy transitions (wood to coal, coal to oil, etc.) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. [39]
As mentioned to me by David Fridley, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a former colleague of the US Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu:
My own efforts have focused on the science of alternative energy. The deeper you go into this area, the less sanguine you become that there is any effective mitigation possible… The bottom line is that there is no thermodynamic match for petroleum. [40]
The Industrial Civilisation at a Turning Point
In the following declaration, Dr. Jeremy Leggett, former member of the UK Government Renewables advisory board and one of "the key players in putting climate change on the world agenda" according to Time Magazine [41], described in 2006 how the crisis could unfold:
The price of houses will collapse. Stock markets will crash. Within a short period, human wealth -- little more than a pile of paper at the best of times, even with the confidence about the future high among traders -- will shrivel. There will be emergency summits, diplomatic initiatives, urgent exploration efforts, but the turmoil will not subside. Thousands of companies will go bankrupt, and millions will be unemployed… The earth has always been a dangerous place, but now it will become a tinderbox. [42]
While world leaders are debating on how we should manage the current economic crisis, that none of them saw coming, in a 2006 interview, Dr. Colin Campbell effectively forecasted the 2008 oil spike, which was to be followed by a recession and a subsequent fall in oil prices; a scenario that unfolded exactly as he said:
I think we are facing an oil price shock, 100 or 200 dollars a barrel, an economic recession that cuts demand, and I will not be at all surprised if a fall in demand would make the price collapse again. So we might be back to 20 or 30 dollars a barrel next year perhaps. And so you have a price shock, a recession, a recovery, hits again the falling capacity limit, another price shock. And so I think that in the next few years, we have a sequence of vicious circles and gradually the reality of the situation will filtered through. We are on for a very volatile few years with enormous economic consequences. [43]
In fact, a former director at the IEA, who used to be the superior of Dr. Fatih Birol, told me during a discussion that,
The current (economic) crisis was caused by the insufficiency of (oil) supply from 2007 onwards, an avatar of Peak Oil. [44]
Similarly, a recent study on the 2008 oil shock [45], from the economist Dr. James Hamilton - Brookings Institution - concludes that:
The evidence to me is persuasive that, had there been no oil shock, we would have described the U.S. economy in 2007:Q4-2008:Q3 as growing slowly, but not in a recession. [46]
This extract from the Energy Watch Group study on oil production provides useful additional information:
The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life... The now beginning transition period probably has its own rules which are valid only during this phase. Things might happen which we never experienced before and which we may never experience again once this transition period has ended. [47]
We are entering a new world with completely different characteristics to the one we have been growing with, the one where boundaries were crossable. It will be an unattractive world of “less far, less fast, less often, and more expensive”[48]; a radical and unexpected evolution or what could better be described as a regression.
The transitory period we are entering now will be, to be sure, chaotic and fierce.
The end-of-the-fossil-hydrocarbons scenario is not a doom-and-gloom picture painted by pessimistic end-of-the-world prophets, but a view of scarcity in the coming years and decades that must be taken seriously. (Deutsche Bank, December, 2004) [49]
Footnotes
[1] Dick Cheney, “Speech at the British Institute of Petroleum”, (Institute of Petroleum, Autumn 1999) (here).
[2] Al Gore, “CNN Larry King Live”, (CNN, 13 June 2006) (here).
[3] Marvin Odum as quoted in NPR, "Shell Sees Global Oil Demand Doubling By 2050", (NPR, 27 February 2009) (here).
[4] British Petroleum, “2009 Statistical Review: Oil Reserves Table” (here).
[5] Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (here).
[6] Colin Campbell, “A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash”, (Lava Production, 2006) (here).
[7] Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, “Oil Reserves Accounting: The Case of Kuwait”, (Energy Intelligence, 30 January 2006) (here).
[8] Arab Times, “Kuwait oil reserves secret for national security; Shuwayib acting head of KPC”, (Arab Times, 13 May 2007), Web Edition No:12881 (here).
[9] MoneyWeek, "Why we must take Peak Oil seriously", (MoneyWeek, 13 September 2006) (here).
[10] GAO, “Crude Oil: Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes it Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production”, (US Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Requesters, February 2007) (here).
[11] George Monbiot, "When will the oil run out?" (The Guardian, 15 December 2008) (here).
[12] Ibid
[13] Olivier Rech interviewed by the author, (Paris: IEA HQ, 18 December 2008).
[14] John Kemp, "Oil industry running faster just to keep up?: John Kemp", (Reuters, 19 November 2008) (here).
[15] The Times, "World needs four new Saudi Arabias, warns IEA", (Times Online, 12 November 2008) (here).
[16] Spencer Swartz, "OPEC Nations Delay Drilling Projects", (The Wall Street Journal, 10 February 2009) (here).
[17] Fatih Birol interviewed by Andrew Evans, "Fatih Birol of the IEA talks the talk about peak oil", (Aceditor, January 2008) (here).
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Tom Arnold, "Oil output could fall by 30m bpd by 2015 - Merrill", (Arabian Business, 4 February 2009) (here).
[21] Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “Statements on Oil by the Energy Committee”, (KVA, 14 October 2005) (here).
[22] USJFCOM, "Joint Operating Environment 2008", (Joint Forces Command, November 2008), page 17 and 19 (here).
[23] Energy Watch Group, "Crude Oil - The Supply Outlook", (EWG, February 2008) (here).
[24] George Monbiot, "When will the oil run out?" (The Guardian, 15 December 2008) (here).
[25] Javier Blas and Carola Hoyos, “Oil price to bounce back with recovery, IEA warns”, (Financial Times, 6 November 2008).
[26] David J. O'Reilly, “CEO, Chevron in their Real Issues Ad”, (Chevron Corporation, 12 July 2005) (here).
[27] Carola Hoyos, "Falling oil poses threat to supplies", (Financial Times, 22 October 2008) (here).
[28] Peter Robertson, "How Chevron Makes the Most of the Energy We Have", (Chevron, April 2009) (here).
[29] Fadhil Chalabi, “A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash”, (Lava Production, 2006) (here).
[30] Sadad al Husseini interviewed by Steve Andrews, "Sadad al Husseini sees peak in 2015", (ASPO USA , 14 September 2005) (here).
[31] Shokri Ghanem interviewed in the “OPEC Bulletin”, (OPEC, 11-12 2006), p. 60 to 63 (here).
[32] CERA Press Release, "Peak Oil Theory – “World Running Out of Oil Soon” – Is Faulty; Could Distort Policy & Energy Debate", (CERA, 14 November 2006) (here).
[33] Energy Watch Group, "Peak Oil could trigger meltdown of society", (Press release, 22 October 2007) (here).
[34] Email discussion with the author, 14 May 2009.
[35] US National Academy of Engineering, “The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs”, (The National Academy Press, 2004).
[36] R. Hirsch, R. Bezdek and R. Wendling, “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management”, (US Department of Energy, February 2005).
[37] Belfast Telegraph, "Scientists warn that oil supplies will start to run in four years' time" (here).
[38] Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security, “The Oil Crunch Press Release”, 29 October 2008 (here).
[39] R. Hirsch, R. Bezdek and R. Wendling, “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management”, (US Department of Energy, February 2005), p. 64 (here).
[40] Email discussion with the author, 11 July 2009
[41] Jonathon Gatehouse, "When the oil runs out", (Macleans, 9 February 2006) (here).
[42] Ibid
[43] Dr. Colin Campbell as interviewed by Jonathan Holmes, "Peak Oil?", (ABC, 10 July 2006) (here).
[44] Email discussion with the author (under the Chatham House Rule), 30 April 2009.
[45] John Hamilton, “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08”, (Brookings Institution, 23 March 2009).
[46] Ibid, p. 40.
[47] Energy Watch Group, “Crude Oil the Supply Outlook“, (EWG, October 2007), p. 70 (here).
[48] Yves Cochet, "Pétrole Apocalypse", (Fayard, 1 Septembre 2005).
[49] Deutsche Bank, “Energy Prospects after the Petroleum Age“, (DB: 2 December 2004), page. 10 (here).
http://seekingalpha.com/article/154901-peak-oil-for-dummies
Friday, August 28, 2009
H1N1 Pandemic: Pentagon Planning Deployment of Troops in Support of Nationwide Vaccination
Militarization of public health in the case of emergency is now official
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 31, 2009
Related Article: Michel Chossudovsky, Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health: The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program, Global Research, July 2009.
According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."
"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.
The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.
It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.
As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.
Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added)
The implications are far-reaching.
The decision points towards the militarization of civilian institutions, including law enforcement and public health.
A nationwide vaccination program is already planned for the Fall.
The pharmaceutical industry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall, enough doses to vaccinate more than half of America's population.
The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed,. with a view to supporting a mass vaccinaiton program.
It is worth noting that this involvement of the military is not being decided by the President, but by the Secretary of Defense, which suggests that the Pentagon is, in a key issue of of national interest, overriding the President and Commander in Chief. The US Congress has not been consulted on the issue.
This decision to mobilise the Armed Forces in the vaccination campaign is taken in anticipation of a national emergency. Although no national emergency has been called, the presumption is that a national public health emergency will occur, using the WHO Level 6 Pandemic as a pretext and a justification.
Other countries, including Canada, the UK and France may follow suit, calling upon their Armed Forces to play a role in support of the H1N1 vaccination program.
US Northern Command
Much of the groundwork for the intervention of the military has already been established. There are indications that these "regional teams" have already been established under USNORTHCOM, which has been involved in preparedness training and planning in the case of a flu pandemic (See U.S. Northern Command - Avian Flu. USNORTHCOM website).
Within the broader framework of "Disaster Relief", Northern Command has, in the course of the last two years, defined a mandate in the eventuality of a public health emergency or a flu pandemic. The emphasis is on the militarization of public health whereby NORTHCOM would oversee the activities of civilian institutions involved in health related services.
According Brig. Gen. Robert Felderman, deputy director of USNORTHCOM’s Plans, Policy and Strategy Directorate: “USNORTHCOM is the global synchronizer – the global coordinator – for pandemic influenza across the combatant commands”(emphasis added) (See Gail Braymen, USNORTHCOM contributes pandemic flu contingency planning expertise to trilateral workshop, USNORTHCOM, April 14, 2008, See also USNORTHCOM. Pandemic Influenza Chain Training (U) pdf)
“Also, the United States in 1918 had the Spanish influenza. We were the ones who had the largest response to [a pandemic] in more recent history. So I discussed what we did then, what we expect to have happen now and the numbers that we would expect in a pandemic influenza.”
The potential number of fatalities in the United States in a modern pandemic influenza could reach nearly two million, according to Felderman. Not only would the nation’s economy suffer, but the Department of Defense would still have to be ready and able to protect and defend the country and provide support of civil authorities in disaster situations. While virtually every aspect of society would be affected, “the implications for Northern Command will be very significant.”
“[A pandemic would have] a huge economic impact, in addition to the defense-of-our-nation impact,” Felderman said. The United States isn’t alone in preparing for such a potential catastrophe. (Gail Braymen, op cit)
Apart from the CNN dispatch and a FOX news report, there has been virtually no mainstream press coverage of this issue. No statement has been made by USNORTHCOM. The Fox New Report suggests that US troops would be involved in organising military quarantines (see videoclip below).
See also: Fox News Report
We invite our readers to review Global Research's News Highlight Dossier: H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic Dossier. The latter contains a collection of articles and analytical reports.
Related Article: Michel Chossudovsky, Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health: The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program, Global Research, July 2009.
Addendum.
The US military has for some years been involved in Influenza Surveillance, in collaboration with partner Armed Forces in different countries. The Pentagon is also in liason with the Atlanta based CDC. The US military is actively involved in laboratory based activities internationally with partner Armed Forces. The following report is of particular relevance to the Pentagon's potential role in a H1N1 Vaccination Program. According to the Institute of Medicine, quoted by Health Insurance Law Weekly:
"The DoD-Global Emerging Infections System, through its avian influenza/pandemic influenza activities at the [DoD] overseas laboratories and headquarters, has contributed greatly to the development of laboratory and communications infrastructures within partner countries. Beneficial effects can be seen from current DoD-GEIS efforts in 56 countries to assist its public health partners in building capacity through training and support of laboratory and communications infrastructures."
Writing in the article, Col. James Neville, MD, MPH, of the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks City-Base, Texas, and colleagues state, "During seven complete influenza seasons, the DoD Global Laboratory-Based Influenza Surveillance Program...coordinated and expanded influenza surveillance efforts among the uniformed services and with DoD partner nations overseas, and operated in concert with WHO and CDC programs. As a result, the DoD and other global communities benefited from improved surveillance and expanded influenza laboratory and epidemiologic capability. The generated data and information supported timely, informed decision making in response to threats, expanded the data set used to select the components for seasonal influenza vaccines, and provided candidate seed viruses for possible use in influenza vaccines used worldwide."
In a commentary in the same issue, Dr. Patrick W. Kelley, MD, DrPH, of the Institute of Medicine, The National Academies, notes that, "The somewhat unexpected emergence of novel H1N1 in Mexico, rather than in the anticipated Asian setting, highlights a lesson learned about the need for comprehensive global influenza surveillance. This is a lesson that geographically diverse foreign military health systems may be well-positioned to help address."
He continues, "The success of the US DoD system, and the particular epidemiologic characteristics of military populations and military health systems, suggest that global influenza surveillance and response could be more comprehensive and informative if other military organizations around the world took advantage of their comparative organizational advantages to emulate, extend, and institutionalize the US DoD approach."
The article is "Department of Defense Global Laboratory-Based Influenza Surveillance: 1998-2005" by Angela B Owens, MPH; Linda C Canas, BS; Kevin L Russell, MD, MTM&H; James Neville, MD, MPH; Julie A Pavlin, MD, PhD, MPH; Victor H MacIntosh, MD, MPH; Gregory C Gray, MD, MPH; and Joel C Gaydos, MD, MPH. The commentary is "A Commentary on the Military Role in Global Influenza Surveillance" by Dr. Patrick W Kelley, MD, DrPH. Both appear in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 37, Issue 3 (September 2009) published by Elsevier. (Health Insurance Law Weekly, August 2, 2009)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.
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© Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2009
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14580
By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, July 31, 2009
Related Article: Michel Chossudovsky, Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health: The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program, Global Research, July 2009.
According to CNN, the Pentagon is "to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials."
"The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command's Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.
The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.
It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.
As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called "execution order" that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.
Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said." (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009, emphasis added)
The implications are far-reaching.
The decision points towards the militarization of civilian institutions, including law enforcement and public health.
A nationwide vaccination program is already planned for the Fall.
The pharmaceutical industry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall, enough doses to vaccinate more than half of America's population.
The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed,. with a view to supporting a mass vaccinaiton program.
It is worth noting that this involvement of the military is not being decided by the President, but by the Secretary of Defense, which suggests that the Pentagon is, in a key issue of of national interest, overriding the President and Commander in Chief. The US Congress has not been consulted on the issue.
This decision to mobilise the Armed Forces in the vaccination campaign is taken in anticipation of a national emergency. Although no national emergency has been called, the presumption is that a national public health emergency will occur, using the WHO Level 6 Pandemic as a pretext and a justification.
Other countries, including Canada, the UK and France may follow suit, calling upon their Armed Forces to play a role in support of the H1N1 vaccination program.
US Northern Command
Much of the groundwork for the intervention of the military has already been established. There are indications that these "regional teams" have already been established under USNORTHCOM, which has been involved in preparedness training and planning in the case of a flu pandemic (See U.S. Northern Command - Avian Flu. USNORTHCOM website).
Within the broader framework of "Disaster Relief", Northern Command has, in the course of the last two years, defined a mandate in the eventuality of a public health emergency or a flu pandemic. The emphasis is on the militarization of public health whereby NORTHCOM would oversee the activities of civilian institutions involved in health related services.
According Brig. Gen. Robert Felderman, deputy director of USNORTHCOM’s Plans, Policy and Strategy Directorate: “USNORTHCOM is the global synchronizer – the global coordinator – for pandemic influenza across the combatant commands”(emphasis added) (See Gail Braymen, USNORTHCOM contributes pandemic flu contingency planning expertise to trilateral workshop, USNORTHCOM, April 14, 2008, See also USNORTHCOM. Pandemic Influenza Chain Training (U) pdf)
“Also, the United States in 1918 had the Spanish influenza. We were the ones who had the largest response to [a pandemic] in more recent history. So I discussed what we did then, what we expect to have happen now and the numbers that we would expect in a pandemic influenza.”
The potential number of fatalities in the United States in a modern pandemic influenza could reach nearly two million, according to Felderman. Not only would the nation’s economy suffer, but the Department of Defense would still have to be ready and able to protect and defend the country and provide support of civil authorities in disaster situations. While virtually every aspect of society would be affected, “the implications for Northern Command will be very significant.”
“[A pandemic would have] a huge economic impact, in addition to the defense-of-our-nation impact,” Felderman said. The United States isn’t alone in preparing for such a potential catastrophe. (Gail Braymen, op cit)
Apart from the CNN dispatch and a FOX news report, there has been virtually no mainstream press coverage of this issue. No statement has been made by USNORTHCOM. The Fox New Report suggests that US troops would be involved in organising military quarantines (see videoclip below).
See also: Fox News Report
We invite our readers to review Global Research's News Highlight Dossier: H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic Dossier. The latter contains a collection of articles and analytical reports.
Related Article: Michel Chossudovsky, Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health: The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program, Global Research, July 2009.
Addendum.
The US military has for some years been involved in Influenza Surveillance, in collaboration with partner Armed Forces in different countries. The Pentagon is also in liason with the Atlanta based CDC. The US military is actively involved in laboratory based activities internationally with partner Armed Forces. The following report is of particular relevance to the Pentagon's potential role in a H1N1 Vaccination Program. According to the Institute of Medicine, quoted by Health Insurance Law Weekly:
"The DoD-Global Emerging Infections System, through its avian influenza/pandemic influenza activities at the [DoD] overseas laboratories and headquarters, has contributed greatly to the development of laboratory and communications infrastructures within partner countries. Beneficial effects can be seen from current DoD-GEIS efforts in 56 countries to assist its public health partners in building capacity through training and support of laboratory and communications infrastructures."
Writing in the article, Col. James Neville, MD, MPH, of the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks City-Base, Texas, and colleagues state, "During seven complete influenza seasons, the DoD Global Laboratory-Based Influenza Surveillance Program...coordinated and expanded influenza surveillance efforts among the uniformed services and with DoD partner nations overseas, and operated in concert with WHO and CDC programs. As a result, the DoD and other global communities benefited from improved surveillance and expanded influenza laboratory and epidemiologic capability. The generated data and information supported timely, informed decision making in response to threats, expanded the data set used to select the components for seasonal influenza vaccines, and provided candidate seed viruses for possible use in influenza vaccines used worldwide."
In a commentary in the same issue, Dr. Patrick W. Kelley, MD, DrPH, of the Institute of Medicine, The National Academies, notes that, "The somewhat unexpected emergence of novel H1N1 in Mexico, rather than in the anticipated Asian setting, highlights a lesson learned about the need for comprehensive global influenza surveillance. This is a lesson that geographically diverse foreign military health systems may be well-positioned to help address."
He continues, "The success of the US DoD system, and the particular epidemiologic characteristics of military populations and military health systems, suggest that global influenza surveillance and response could be more comprehensive and informative if other military organizations around the world took advantage of their comparative organizational advantages to emulate, extend, and institutionalize the US DoD approach."
The article is "Department of Defense Global Laboratory-Based Influenza Surveillance: 1998-2005" by Angela B Owens, MPH; Linda C Canas, BS; Kevin L Russell, MD, MTM&H; James Neville, MD, MPH; Julie A Pavlin, MD, PhD, MPH; Victor H MacIntosh, MD, MPH; Gregory C Gray, MD, MPH; and Joel C Gaydos, MD, MPH. The commentary is "A Commentary on the Military Role in Global Influenza Surveillance" by Dr. Patrick W Kelley, MD, DrPH. Both appear in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 37, Issue 3 (September 2009) published by Elsevier. (Health Insurance Law Weekly, August 2, 2009)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.
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Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax
By Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.
The alarm has been sounded. Politicians, pharmaceutical executives and media conglomerates would have us believe that a 1918-style pandemic is a real threat. The 1918 pandemic, however, evolved out of conditions unique to World War I, for four specific reasons.
Why 2009 is Not 1918
First, World War I was characterized by millions of troops living in waterlogged trenches along the Western Front. This war zone became fertile ground for an opportunistic virus, as medical literature reveals:
"…a landscape that was contaminated with respiratory irritants such as chlorine and phosgene, and characterized by stress and overcrowding, the partial starvation in civilians, and the opportunity for rapid ‘passage’ of influenza in young soldiers would have provided the opportunity for multiple but small mutational charges throughout the viral genome." (1)
Second, the war witnessed the growth of industrial-scale military camps and embarkation ports, such as Etaples in France, enabling the flu virus to enter into another phase of accelerated mutation. On any given day, Etaples was a makeshift city of 100,000 troops from around the British Empire and its former dominions. These soldiers concentrated into unsanitary barracks, tents and mess halls.
Today, many cities and nations have dense concentrations of people; none of these, however, are geographically isolated under the conditions of trench warfare and World War I-style deployments. Of course, there are smaller, sub-populations of people in prisons (prone to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis), in military barracks (prone to respiratory pathogens and meningococcal infections) and on cruise ships (prone to the Norovisus) – all proof of the connection between human confinement on the one hand and infectious disease on the other.
Third, after the war, ships such as the USS Alaskan became floating Petri dishes. Thousands of soldiers were packed like sardines for the long voyage home, allowing the virus to reverberate within hermetically-sealed units.
Fourth, returning troops were stuffed into boxcars for the train trip back to military bases, where they infected new recruits. Later, it was documented that Army regiments whose barracks allowed only 45 square feet per soldier had a flu incidence up to ten times that of regiments afforded 78 square feet per man. (2)
The 1918 flu virus became pandemic because, during World War I, the normal host-pathogen relationship was abandoned when millions of young men crowded into geographical confinement. In World War I, a flu virus was presented with a seemingly limitless number of hosts – almost all young, male, and with compromised immune systems. Unconstrained and unchecked by the usual habits of human behavior, the virus went rogue.
Flu viruses are smart, but they are not suicidal: if the host becomes extinct the virus will become extinct too. The evolutionary strategy, from the virus’s perspective, is to stay one step ahead of the immune systems of both humans and animals – but not two steps ahead. The flu virus aims to infect and reproduce without killing a critical mass of the hosts, of the herd, so the virus’s virulence is ameliorated after it becomes fatal for people on the margins of the host population – the weak and the elderly. World War I disrupted this synchronized, co-evolutionary relationship between flu viruses and human populations.
No flu since 1918 has been strong enough to produce, in millions of people, a "cytokine storm," which is an immunological over-reaction leading to pulmonary edema (the lungs filling with fluid) - the curse of those with the strongest immune systems, normally between 20 and 40 years of age.
In normal flu pandemics, even in severe ones, the flu virus kills a portion of the weak and elderly. This appears to be the case in 1837 for Germany and in 1890 for Russia in 1890, though reliable medical evidence is scarce. It was certainly true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968, neither of which were significantly fatal for young adults. The flu 1976-1977 has been exposed as a boondoggle, a fraud, with far more people dying of the vaccine than from the flu itself.
Indeed, 1918 was an aberration. Since then, no flu has scythed away so many people: some 500,000 Americans and anywhere between 25 - 50 million people worldwide in three waves: first in March, then in August (the deadliest wave), and in then again in November of 1918, lasting into the spring of 1919.
The origins of the 1918 pandemic can be traced back to the trenches of the Western Front in 1915, 1916, and 1917 – to the world’s first large-scale industrial and international war. There was no other cause: If WWI had not been fought, it is inconceivable that the 1918 flu pandemic would have been so severe. Today, in 2009, absent the conditions of WWI, it is preposterous for political and medical authorities to claim that the swine flu is a menace to society.
The Mysterious Origins of the H1N1 "Swine Flu" Virus
If the current H1N1 swine flu virus does become abnormally lethal, there would be three leading explanations: first, that the virus was accidentally released, or escaped, from a laboratory; second, that a disgruntled lab employee unleashed the virus (as happened, according to the official version of events, with the 2001 anthrax attack); or third, that a group, corporation or government agency intentionally released the virus in the interests of profit and power.
Each of the three scenarios represents a plausible explanation should the swine virus become lethal. After all, the 1918 flu virus was dead and buried – until, that is, scientists unearthed a lead coffin to obtain a biopsy of the corpse it contained. Later, researchers similarly disturbed an Inuit woman buried under permafrost. (3)
The US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with a scientist from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, then began to reconstruct the 1918 Spanish flu. Had Iran or North Korea engaged in Frankenstein experiments (complete with ransacking graves) to reverse engineer the 1918 virus the US and the UK would have gone ballistic at the UN Security Council.
Interestingly, numerous doctors and scientists suspect that the swine flu virus was cultured in a laboratory. A mainstream Australian virologist, Adrian Gibbs - who was one of the first to analyze the genetic properties of the 2009 swine flu – believes that scientists accidentally created the H1N1 virus while producing vaccines. And Dr. John Carlo, Dallas Co. Medical Director, "This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified."(4) Because of this, the 2009 swine flu virus -- which has yet to be detected in any animals -- has a rather suspicious pedigree.
The Propaganda Campaign
Across the mainstream media, reports announce one swine flu death after another (even though ordinary flu kills about 35,000 Americans each year). Upon closer scrutiny of what passes for journalism, the victims have "underlying health problems," or "a common underlying health condition," or "significant medical conditions."
One news headline even blared: "Swine flu mother dies after giving birth, leaving her premature baby fighting for life," and only later, buried deep in the story underneath, did it explain that she had "other medical problems" which included being confined to a wheelchair because of a serious car accident.
Citizens the world over are increasingly skeptical of hyped headlines followed by smaller-print caveats. They are uneasy with the effort to create "doublethink" – a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 and a reference to holding two contradictory ideas in one’s mind simultaneously, paralyzing critical thought.
The media has never been in the habit of reporting the cases of people who, for no known reason, die of the flu. Out of the 35,000 Americans who die each year from flu-related illnesses, some are bound to be relatively young and healthy. It happens. This year, however, their stories are front-page news.
More recently, news reports claim that the H1N1 swine flu can affect people in the lungs and lead to pneumonia. This, however, is what separates the flu from the common cold in the first place; and this is why tens of thousands of elderly people die of flu-related symptoms each year. Fox News even claimed that "this one morphs and mutates and comes back in different ways…," (like all flu viruses). In short, the media now uses the flu’s own ordinary symptoms to fuel fear.
Fortunately, a growing wave of online media challenges the propaganda. Back in 1976, there were no rival voices, and the Center for Disease Control’s manipulative television commercials dominated the airwaves. Fortunately, as a testament to official shamelessness, these videos are now archived and searchable on the Internet under the title of "1976 Swine Flu Propaganda."
Now, like then, the US government’s pandemic policy alternates between the ridiculous and the repugnant. The government’s flu website is revealing. First, the historical section on the 1918 virus is intellectually dishonest, making absolutely no link between the unique conditions of World War I and the flu pandemic; instead, the site propagates the erroneous notion that this virus came out of the blue. (5)
Second, the site announces an absurd American Idol-style video contest: "Create a Video About Preventing or Dealing With the Flu & Be Eligible to Win $2500 Cash!" (Congress has earmarked 8 billion dollars for swine flu prevention and can only offer $2,500 to the proles -- or, rather, to the one prole who, rising above mediocrity, best parrots the Party Line.)
And third, the site encourages the use of Twitter to "stay informed…" There is something mildly disturbing about the US federal government promoting Twitter as a form of resistance to foreign authoritarianism, while, simultaneously, using social networking to further federalize and protect the abuse of power at home.
1976 + 1984 = 2009
In sum, it appears that the 2009 swine flu pandemic will not be 1918. It might be a 1976-style hoax, however, serving profit and power - with a bit of Orwell’s 1984 thrown in for good measure.
Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.
Author of Biotech Empire (Amazon)
Notes
1. JS Oxford, A Sefton, R Jackson, W Innes, RS Daniels, and NPAS Johnson, “World War I may have allowed the emergence of ‘Spanish’ influenza,” The Lancet/ Infectious Diseases Vol. 2 February 2002.
2. Byerly CR. 2005. Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I. New York, NY: New York University Press.
3. Ann H. Reid, Thomas G. Fanning, Johan V. Hultin, and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, “Origin and Evolution of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus Hemagglutinin Gene, PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Division of Molecular Pathology, Department of Cellular Pathology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC. Communicated by Edwin D. Kilbourne, New York.
4. Paul Joseph Watson, “Medical Director: Swine Flu Was ‘Cultured In A Laboratory,” This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified. April 26, 2009.
5. http://www.flu.gov/
24 Aug 2009
*****
http://www.legitgov.org/essay_bosworth_swine_flu_hoax_240809.html
The alarm has been sounded. Politicians, pharmaceutical executives and media conglomerates would have us believe that a 1918-style pandemic is a real threat. The 1918 pandemic, however, evolved out of conditions unique to World War I, for four specific reasons.
Why 2009 is Not 1918
First, World War I was characterized by millions of troops living in waterlogged trenches along the Western Front. This war zone became fertile ground for an opportunistic virus, as medical literature reveals:
"…a landscape that was contaminated with respiratory irritants such as chlorine and phosgene, and characterized by stress and overcrowding, the partial starvation in civilians, and the opportunity for rapid ‘passage’ of influenza in young soldiers would have provided the opportunity for multiple but small mutational charges throughout the viral genome." (1)
Second, the war witnessed the growth of industrial-scale military camps and embarkation ports, such as Etaples in France, enabling the flu virus to enter into another phase of accelerated mutation. On any given day, Etaples was a makeshift city of 100,000 troops from around the British Empire and its former dominions. These soldiers concentrated into unsanitary barracks, tents and mess halls.
Today, many cities and nations have dense concentrations of people; none of these, however, are geographically isolated under the conditions of trench warfare and World War I-style deployments. Of course, there are smaller, sub-populations of people in prisons (prone to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis), in military barracks (prone to respiratory pathogens and meningococcal infections) and on cruise ships (prone to the Norovisus) – all proof of the connection between human confinement on the one hand and infectious disease on the other.
Third, after the war, ships such as the USS Alaskan became floating Petri dishes. Thousands of soldiers were packed like sardines for the long voyage home, allowing the virus to reverberate within hermetically-sealed units.
Fourth, returning troops were stuffed into boxcars for the train trip back to military bases, where they infected new recruits. Later, it was documented that Army regiments whose barracks allowed only 45 square feet per soldier had a flu incidence up to ten times that of regiments afforded 78 square feet per man. (2)
The 1918 flu virus became pandemic because, during World War I, the normal host-pathogen relationship was abandoned when millions of young men crowded into geographical confinement. In World War I, a flu virus was presented with a seemingly limitless number of hosts – almost all young, male, and with compromised immune systems. Unconstrained and unchecked by the usual habits of human behavior, the virus went rogue.
Flu viruses are smart, but they are not suicidal: if the host becomes extinct the virus will become extinct too. The evolutionary strategy, from the virus’s perspective, is to stay one step ahead of the immune systems of both humans and animals – but not two steps ahead. The flu virus aims to infect and reproduce without killing a critical mass of the hosts, of the herd, so the virus’s virulence is ameliorated after it becomes fatal for people on the margins of the host population – the weak and the elderly. World War I disrupted this synchronized, co-evolutionary relationship between flu viruses and human populations.
No flu since 1918 has been strong enough to produce, in millions of people, a "cytokine storm," which is an immunological over-reaction leading to pulmonary edema (the lungs filling with fluid) - the curse of those with the strongest immune systems, normally between 20 and 40 years of age.
In normal flu pandemics, even in severe ones, the flu virus kills a portion of the weak and elderly. This appears to be the case in 1837 for Germany and in 1890 for Russia in 1890, though reliable medical evidence is scarce. It was certainly true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968, neither of which were significantly fatal for young adults. The flu 1976-1977 has been exposed as a boondoggle, a fraud, with far more people dying of the vaccine than from the flu itself.
Indeed, 1918 was an aberration. Since then, no flu has scythed away so many people: some 500,000 Americans and anywhere between 25 - 50 million people worldwide in three waves: first in March, then in August (the deadliest wave), and in then again in November of 1918, lasting into the spring of 1919.
The origins of the 1918 pandemic can be traced back to the trenches of the Western Front in 1915, 1916, and 1917 – to the world’s first large-scale industrial and international war. There was no other cause: If WWI had not been fought, it is inconceivable that the 1918 flu pandemic would have been so severe. Today, in 2009, absent the conditions of WWI, it is preposterous for political and medical authorities to claim that the swine flu is a menace to society.
The Mysterious Origins of the H1N1 "Swine Flu" Virus
If the current H1N1 swine flu virus does become abnormally lethal, there would be three leading explanations: first, that the virus was accidentally released, or escaped, from a laboratory; second, that a disgruntled lab employee unleashed the virus (as happened, according to the official version of events, with the 2001 anthrax attack); or third, that a group, corporation or government agency intentionally released the virus in the interests of profit and power.
Each of the three scenarios represents a plausible explanation should the swine virus become lethal. After all, the 1918 flu virus was dead and buried – until, that is, scientists unearthed a lead coffin to obtain a biopsy of the corpse it contained. Later, researchers similarly disturbed an Inuit woman buried under permafrost. (3)
The US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with a scientist from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, then began to reconstruct the 1918 Spanish flu. Had Iran or North Korea engaged in Frankenstein experiments (complete with ransacking graves) to reverse engineer the 1918 virus the US and the UK would have gone ballistic at the UN Security Council.
Interestingly, numerous doctors and scientists suspect that the swine flu virus was cultured in a laboratory. A mainstream Australian virologist, Adrian Gibbs - who was one of the first to analyze the genetic properties of the 2009 swine flu – believes that scientists accidentally created the H1N1 virus while producing vaccines. And Dr. John Carlo, Dallas Co. Medical Director, "This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified."(4) Because of this, the 2009 swine flu virus -- which has yet to be detected in any animals -- has a rather suspicious pedigree.
The Propaganda Campaign
Across the mainstream media, reports announce one swine flu death after another (even though ordinary flu kills about 35,000 Americans each year). Upon closer scrutiny of what passes for journalism, the victims have "underlying health problems," or "a common underlying health condition," or "significant medical conditions."
One news headline even blared: "Swine flu mother dies after giving birth, leaving her premature baby fighting for life," and only later, buried deep in the story underneath, did it explain that she had "other medical problems" which included being confined to a wheelchair because of a serious car accident.
Citizens the world over are increasingly skeptical of hyped headlines followed by smaller-print caveats. They are uneasy with the effort to create "doublethink" – a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 and a reference to holding two contradictory ideas in one’s mind simultaneously, paralyzing critical thought.
The media has never been in the habit of reporting the cases of people who, for no known reason, die of the flu. Out of the 35,000 Americans who die each year from flu-related illnesses, some are bound to be relatively young and healthy. It happens. This year, however, their stories are front-page news.
More recently, news reports claim that the H1N1 swine flu can affect people in the lungs and lead to pneumonia. This, however, is what separates the flu from the common cold in the first place; and this is why tens of thousands of elderly people die of flu-related symptoms each year. Fox News even claimed that "this one morphs and mutates and comes back in different ways…," (like all flu viruses). In short, the media now uses the flu’s own ordinary symptoms to fuel fear.
Fortunately, a growing wave of online media challenges the propaganda. Back in 1976, there were no rival voices, and the Center for Disease Control’s manipulative television commercials dominated the airwaves. Fortunately, as a testament to official shamelessness, these videos are now archived and searchable on the Internet under the title of "1976 Swine Flu Propaganda."
Now, like then, the US government’s pandemic policy alternates between the ridiculous and the repugnant. The government’s flu website is revealing. First, the historical section on the 1918 virus is intellectually dishonest, making absolutely no link between the unique conditions of World War I and the flu pandemic; instead, the site propagates the erroneous notion that this virus came out of the blue. (5)
Second, the site announces an absurd American Idol-style video contest: "Create a Video About Preventing or Dealing With the Flu & Be Eligible to Win $2500 Cash!" (Congress has earmarked 8 billion dollars for swine flu prevention and can only offer $2,500 to the proles -- or, rather, to the one prole who, rising above mediocrity, best parrots the Party Line.)
And third, the site encourages the use of Twitter to "stay informed…" There is something mildly disturbing about the US federal government promoting Twitter as a form of resistance to foreign authoritarianism, while, simultaneously, using social networking to further federalize and protect the abuse of power at home.
1976 + 1984 = 2009
In sum, it appears that the 2009 swine flu pandemic will not be 1918. It might be a 1976-style hoax, however, serving profit and power - with a bit of Orwell’s 1984 thrown in for good measure.
Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D.
Author of Biotech Empire (Amazon)
Notes
1. JS Oxford, A Sefton, R Jackson, W Innes, RS Daniels, and NPAS Johnson, “World War I may have allowed the emergence of ‘Spanish’ influenza,” The Lancet/ Infectious Diseases Vol. 2 February 2002.
2. Byerly CR. 2005. Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I. New York, NY: New York University Press.
3. Ann H. Reid, Thomas G. Fanning, Johan V. Hultin, and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, “Origin and Evolution of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus Hemagglutinin Gene, PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Division of Molecular Pathology, Department of Cellular Pathology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC. Communicated by Edwin D. Kilbourne, New York.
4. Paul Joseph Watson, “Medical Director: Swine Flu Was ‘Cultured In A Laboratory,” This strain of swine influenza that’s been cultured in a laboratory is something that’s not been seen anywhere actually in the United States and the world, so this is actually a new strain of influenza that’s been identified. April 26, 2009.
5. http://www.flu.gov/
24 Aug 2009
*****
http://www.legitgov.org/essay_bosworth_swine_flu_hoax_240809.html
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
When it Comes to Water, Can Corporations and Community Really Coexist?
By Peter Asmus, AlterNet
Posted on August 19, 2009, Printed on August 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142030/
When drought brought a critical shortage of water to Kerala, India, anti-globalization activists placed part of the blame on Coca-Cola, which operated a plant there.
Critics contended that Coca-Cola failed to involve the local community in its plans, and the activists began building a substantial global movement against water privatization, employing the tactic of "brand-jacking" of the world's No. 1 brand -- Coke -- to make their point.
Coke's Kerala plant has since ceased operations, making it a casualty of the global pressure placed on the company. But the campaign against privatization of water resources by activist groups has only grown stronger on the campaign front.
Today, the focus is on bottled water, which critics point to as a wasteful, expensive example of water privatization -- companies taking public water, repackaging it and selling it back to us for a profit.
But the water wars have just begun. Bottled water may be today's popular target, but that battle has peaked. Now, activists are beginning to look beyond bottled water, setting their sights on much bigger objectives.
At stake, they believe, is whether water is recognized as a basic human right, or becomes simply another commodity controlled by giant corporations.
While the bottled-water controversy may have helped propel fresh water issues into the limelight internationally, the current hottest buzz phrase among water-policy-reform advocates, and a topic galvanizing the debate over privatization of water, is the wonky phrase "free prior informed consent" (FPIC).
Jonathan Kaledin, director of The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) global freshwater certification program, said: "Water has been so abundant. There has been an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude about it. As the risks of water shortages become more public, corporations that use a lot of water need to become more aware of the concept of FPIC."
In a nutshell, FPIC recognizes that communities have the right to self-determination. They have a right to give or withhold their consent for new production facilities that may impact local water supplies or prices.
From a legal point-of-view, FPIC is an evolving concept that is gaining wider acceptance by nongovernmental organizations, as well as a few private corporations. FPIC is now incorporated in some forms of international treaty law, especially when it comes to indigenous peoples and extractive industries such as oil and mining. What's new is that FPIC is now being applied to water.
In fall 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the principle of FPIC for development projects, and momentum is building globally toward establishing FPIC as a principle of customary international law. The two key challenges for FPIC is an apparent conflict with the sovereign rights of nations to exploit their own natural resources (as they deem fit), and a lack of clarity about how to implement FPIC.
Among the key issues yet to be resolved are:
* How is "the community" defined? Is there a strict geographical limitation to "community," and are elected officials given greater or equal status to local citizens?
* If there is a lack of consensus within the "community," what process validates any decision-making (i.e. majority vote of local governing body; a referendum?)
* Absent a political process, what exactly represents an adequate level of consent?
David Shilling, a water expert with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (IRRC) argued that FPIC is quite important in order for government and companies to make deals, because it is at the community level where water impacts will be felt. He went on to say:
The community involved has to be part of that conversation. The underserved deserve a place at the table, too. And human rights -- not technical issues -- should be the focus. Otherwise, the corporation will not have a social license to operate. Unfortunately, companies and government have a hard time with this sort of thing. Need to put these issues about water into a larger context, a tangible framework to get a buy-in and to help elevate discussions to the level of community consent.
Bridge Over Troubled Water?
Nestle Waters has had its fair share of controversies over siting production plants. In Michigan, for example, private wells were allegedly impacted by withdrawals. In early July, a settlement between Nestle Waters and Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation was reached, reducing the company's per-day pumping limits, with additional restrictions during spring and summer months.
Alex McIntosh, Nestles Water's director of corporate citizenship, doesn't hold back when assessing how critics view his company's products. "Bottled water has become symbolic about the issue of who actually owns water. Is it fair for water to be priced and sold, and then shipped to us in plastic?" is the way he paraphrased how critics see his company's products. Bottled water is "literally a drop in the bucket," he said, pointing to stats that show bottled water represents a fraction of 1 percent of total water consumption.
Nevertheless, Nestle Waters is moving forward on developing and implementing a "Siting and Community Commitment Framework." A key element to be examined is the notion of FPIC.
This move by Nestle was prompted by a public outcry from the community on the McCloud River in Northern California when the County Community Service District invited Nestle to explore a water operation, and some residents were concerned that the deal allegedly gave the firm a 50-year contract and priority rights to water that feeds one of California's premier rainbow trout and steelhead streams.
To its credit, Nestles Waters has withdrawn the deal and is working with the community to come up with something better.
Community concerns typically revolve around fears that "the company will use all of our water, destroy the aquifer and change our way of life," McIntosh said. "The power differential is also an issue, as communities want balanced deals. Many have almost spiritual views of local water supplies and are just opposed to someone bottling local water and selling it."
Mark Hays, senior researcher for Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a 20-year-old organization well experienced with boycotts and a fierce critic of bottled water, is not very sympathetic to beverage companies such as Nestle Waters or Coke.
"We see FPIC as being about democratic control of water," Hays said. "The impacts of bottlers on any local community are a tricky thing to deal with." But he put forth a few principles that could shape a FPIC protocol for water: 1) A full accounting of a project's impacts; 2) No undue influence on the general public's access to water; 3) No secret economic or political agreements with public agencies.
"We have a ways to go before asking for FPIC," Hays said. "Most of the times, the question of whether a facility will have impacts should be simple and clear. Absent good data, some 'stickiness' can occur." Hays's bottom line question on FPIC was this: "Will Nestle Waters or other corporations accept 'no' for an answer?"
A Good Step Forward, But No Panacea
Without the kind of substantive participation that FPIC mandates, the tenured security of rural communities is always at the mercy of decisions made by others with more perceived power. It is well documented that such insecurity perpetuates poverty.
In contrast, with the bargaining power that FPIC provisions bring them, communities can demand direct compensation for damages or a continuing share of the profits of resource extraction. They can even require the backers of development to invest part of the profits from these ventures to meet community needs. In this respect, FPIC is a tool for greater equity and a natural pathway to a co-management role for local communities in large development projects
But FPIC is not a panacea. Consider these comments from Anil Naidoo of the Council of Canadians:
I do think that it is good to bring the community in on the first level of discussions about water. And the notion of water as a human right cannot be disassociated from these discussions. But even if employing democratic means, any consent or decisions should not give away the human right to water or the health of the environment for future generations. How do we respect intergenerational rights?
This whole process is still operating from an anthropomorphic view ... It is very important to have more transparency and to develop a set of guidelines of what is appropriate. But if you still give away all of the water to Nestle Waters, what good is that? I still have reservations about how FPIC will be used and for what.
Other NGOs, such as Amazon Watch, are much more open to making the business case for FPIC. "To give people and communities the fundamental right to have a say about what happens on their lands under FPIC is a good thing," Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch pointed out. "To date, many companies are adhering to ILO 169, so companies are consulting with local communities. But sitting at the table and consulting is not enough, when the choice is 'yes or yes.' The community needs to have the right to say 'no,' they need to be able to have veto power."
Koenig says FPIC just makes good business sense. "If oil companies or other extractive industries do not have a social license to operate, they will experience project delays, bad PR, both of which aren't good for business. So far, no company has been able to say 'no.' "
But FPIC is at the heart of current U.N. declarations on the human right to water, and the new barometer of how companies will be judged in terms of CSR and the human right to water.
Peter Asmus is an environmental writer based in Stinson Beach, Calif. He is the author of a new book, Introduction to Energy in California, published by the University of California Press. His Web site is www.peterasmus.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142030/
Posted on August 19, 2009, Printed on August 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142030/
When drought brought a critical shortage of water to Kerala, India, anti-globalization activists placed part of the blame on Coca-Cola, which operated a plant there.
Critics contended that Coca-Cola failed to involve the local community in its plans, and the activists began building a substantial global movement against water privatization, employing the tactic of "brand-jacking" of the world's No. 1 brand -- Coke -- to make their point.
Coke's Kerala plant has since ceased operations, making it a casualty of the global pressure placed on the company. But the campaign against privatization of water resources by activist groups has only grown stronger on the campaign front.
Today, the focus is on bottled water, which critics point to as a wasteful, expensive example of water privatization -- companies taking public water, repackaging it and selling it back to us for a profit.
But the water wars have just begun. Bottled water may be today's popular target, but that battle has peaked. Now, activists are beginning to look beyond bottled water, setting their sights on much bigger objectives.
At stake, they believe, is whether water is recognized as a basic human right, or becomes simply another commodity controlled by giant corporations.
While the bottled-water controversy may have helped propel fresh water issues into the limelight internationally, the current hottest buzz phrase among water-policy-reform advocates, and a topic galvanizing the debate over privatization of water, is the wonky phrase "free prior informed consent" (FPIC).
Jonathan Kaledin, director of The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) global freshwater certification program, said: "Water has been so abundant. There has been an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude about it. As the risks of water shortages become more public, corporations that use a lot of water need to become more aware of the concept of FPIC."
In a nutshell, FPIC recognizes that communities have the right to self-determination. They have a right to give or withhold their consent for new production facilities that may impact local water supplies or prices.
From a legal point-of-view, FPIC is an evolving concept that is gaining wider acceptance by nongovernmental organizations, as well as a few private corporations. FPIC is now incorporated in some forms of international treaty law, especially when it comes to indigenous peoples and extractive industries such as oil and mining. What's new is that FPIC is now being applied to water.
In fall 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the principle of FPIC for development projects, and momentum is building globally toward establishing FPIC as a principle of customary international law. The two key challenges for FPIC is an apparent conflict with the sovereign rights of nations to exploit their own natural resources (as they deem fit), and a lack of clarity about how to implement FPIC.
Among the key issues yet to be resolved are:
* How is "the community" defined? Is there a strict geographical limitation to "community," and are elected officials given greater or equal status to local citizens?
* If there is a lack of consensus within the "community," what process validates any decision-making (i.e. majority vote of local governing body; a referendum?)
* Absent a political process, what exactly represents an adequate level of consent?
David Shilling, a water expert with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (IRRC) argued that FPIC is quite important in order for government and companies to make deals, because it is at the community level where water impacts will be felt. He went on to say:
The community involved has to be part of that conversation. The underserved deserve a place at the table, too. And human rights -- not technical issues -- should be the focus. Otherwise, the corporation will not have a social license to operate. Unfortunately, companies and government have a hard time with this sort of thing. Need to put these issues about water into a larger context, a tangible framework to get a buy-in and to help elevate discussions to the level of community consent.
Bridge Over Troubled Water?
Nestle Waters has had its fair share of controversies over siting production plants. In Michigan, for example, private wells were allegedly impacted by withdrawals. In early July, a settlement between Nestle Waters and Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation was reached, reducing the company's per-day pumping limits, with additional restrictions during spring and summer months.
Alex McIntosh, Nestles Water's director of corporate citizenship, doesn't hold back when assessing how critics view his company's products. "Bottled water has become symbolic about the issue of who actually owns water. Is it fair for water to be priced and sold, and then shipped to us in plastic?" is the way he paraphrased how critics see his company's products. Bottled water is "literally a drop in the bucket," he said, pointing to stats that show bottled water represents a fraction of 1 percent of total water consumption.
Nevertheless, Nestle Waters is moving forward on developing and implementing a "Siting and Community Commitment Framework." A key element to be examined is the notion of FPIC.
This move by Nestle was prompted by a public outcry from the community on the McCloud River in Northern California when the County Community Service District invited Nestle to explore a water operation, and some residents were concerned that the deal allegedly gave the firm a 50-year contract and priority rights to water that feeds one of California's premier rainbow trout and steelhead streams.
To its credit, Nestles Waters has withdrawn the deal and is working with the community to come up with something better.
Community concerns typically revolve around fears that "the company will use all of our water, destroy the aquifer and change our way of life," McIntosh said. "The power differential is also an issue, as communities want balanced deals. Many have almost spiritual views of local water supplies and are just opposed to someone bottling local water and selling it."
Mark Hays, senior researcher for Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a 20-year-old organization well experienced with boycotts and a fierce critic of bottled water, is not very sympathetic to beverage companies such as Nestle Waters or Coke.
"We see FPIC as being about democratic control of water," Hays said. "The impacts of bottlers on any local community are a tricky thing to deal with." But he put forth a few principles that could shape a FPIC protocol for water: 1) A full accounting of a project's impacts; 2) No undue influence on the general public's access to water; 3) No secret economic or political agreements with public agencies.
"We have a ways to go before asking for FPIC," Hays said. "Most of the times, the question of whether a facility will have impacts should be simple and clear. Absent good data, some 'stickiness' can occur." Hays's bottom line question on FPIC was this: "Will Nestle Waters or other corporations accept 'no' for an answer?"
A Good Step Forward, But No Panacea
Without the kind of substantive participation that FPIC mandates, the tenured security of rural communities is always at the mercy of decisions made by others with more perceived power. It is well documented that such insecurity perpetuates poverty.
In contrast, with the bargaining power that FPIC provisions bring them, communities can demand direct compensation for damages or a continuing share of the profits of resource extraction. They can even require the backers of development to invest part of the profits from these ventures to meet community needs. In this respect, FPIC is a tool for greater equity and a natural pathway to a co-management role for local communities in large development projects
But FPIC is not a panacea. Consider these comments from Anil Naidoo of the Council of Canadians:
I do think that it is good to bring the community in on the first level of discussions about water. And the notion of water as a human right cannot be disassociated from these discussions. But even if employing democratic means, any consent or decisions should not give away the human right to water or the health of the environment for future generations. How do we respect intergenerational rights?
This whole process is still operating from an anthropomorphic view ... It is very important to have more transparency and to develop a set of guidelines of what is appropriate. But if you still give away all of the water to Nestle Waters, what good is that? I still have reservations about how FPIC will be used and for what.
Other NGOs, such as Amazon Watch, are much more open to making the business case for FPIC. "To give people and communities the fundamental right to have a say about what happens on their lands under FPIC is a good thing," Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch pointed out. "To date, many companies are adhering to ILO 169, so companies are consulting with local communities. But sitting at the table and consulting is not enough, when the choice is 'yes or yes.' The community needs to have the right to say 'no,' they need to be able to have veto power."
Koenig says FPIC just makes good business sense. "If oil companies or other extractive industries do not have a social license to operate, they will experience project delays, bad PR, both of which aren't good for business. So far, no company has been able to say 'no.' "
But FPIC is at the heart of current U.N. declarations on the human right to water, and the new barometer of how companies will be judged in terms of CSR and the human right to water.
Peter Asmus is an environmental writer based in Stinson Beach, Calif. He is the author of a new book, Introduction to Energy in California, published by the University of California Press. His Web site is www.peterasmus.com.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142030/
A Mean Streak in the US Mainstream
Tuesday 25 August 2009
by: Mary Dejevsky | Visit article original @ The Independent UK
photo
Opponents of President Obama's health care plan rally in Delray Beach, Florida. (Photo: Getty Images)
The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here.
When we Europeans - the British included - contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?
The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.
If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle - even though it was central to his election platform - is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend - although this is a big part of it.
It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama's chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.
The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party's mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even - yes - frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum.
As some of Obama's enemies warned through the campaign - and I mean warned, not promised - this is the philosophical terrain where, his voting record suggests, this President is most at home. But many more are not. The absence from the Senate of Edward Kennedy, through illness, and Hillary Clinton, elevated to the State Department, has left his pro-reform advocacy in the legislature sorely depleted.
But there is something else at work here, too, beyond defective advocacy, and it lays bare a profound misunderstanding. Europe hailed Obama's landslide election victory as evidence that America had reclaimed its better self, turned to the left and bade farewell to ingrained racial divisions as well. That was a benevolent, but ultimately idealistic, gloss.
Obama's victory can indeed be seen as a reaction to eight years of conservative Republicanism under George Bush and a turn by US voters to the left. But that left is still quite a bit further right than in most of Europe. Nor was it just a leftward turn that cost John McCain the White House; it was also a rejection of the weaker candidate. Obama's great asset was that he came across as more competent on the economy, at a time of global financial meltdown. From this side of the Atlantic, we convinced ourselves that Americans had voted with their hearts, but there was a considerable element of the wallet as well.
That wallet element helps explain the deep-seated misgivings that have surfaced about Obama's plans for health reform. A majority of Americans believe they have adequate health cover. Their choice of job may be limited by their insurance requirements (and labour mobility reduced). And their calculations may be upset - sometimes disastrously - by accident or illness.
But with most pensioners protected by the state system known as Medicare, an "I'm all right, Jack" attitude prevails. It coexists with the fear that extending the pool of the insured, to the poorer and more illness-prone, will raise premiums for the healthy and bring queuing, or rationing, of care - which is why stories about the NHS inspire such dread. The principle that no one should be penalised financially by illness is trumped by the self-interest of the majority, then rationalised by the argument that health is a matter of personal responsibility.
The point is that, when on "normal", the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.
This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber - or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.
Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West. Still others see it as the price the US pays for its material success. What it means, though, is that if and when Obama gets some form of health reform through, it will reflect America's fears quite as much as its promise. And it is unlikely to be a national service that looks anything like ours.
http://www.truthout.org/082509L?print
by: Mary Dejevsky | Visit article original @ The Independent UK
photo
Opponents of President Obama's health care plan rally in Delray Beach, Florida. (Photo: Getty Images)
The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here.
When we Europeans - the British included - contemplate the battles President Obama must fight to reform the US health system, our first response tends to be disbelief. How can it be that so obvious a social good as universal health insurance, so humane a solution to common vulnerability, is not sewn deep into the fabric of the United States? How can one of the biggest, richest and most advanced countries in the world tolerate a situation where, at any one time, one in six of the population has to pay for their treatment item by item, or resort to hospital casualty wards?
The second response, as automatic as the first, is to blame heartless and ignorant Republicans. To Europeans, a universal health system is so basic to a civilised society that only the loony right could possibly oppose it: the people who cling to their guns, picket abortion clinics (when they are not trying to shoot the abortionists) and block funding for birth control in the third world. All right, we are saying to ourselves, there are Americans who think like this, but they are out on an ideological limb.
If only this were true. The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle - even though it was central to his election platform - is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend - although this is a big part of it.
It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama's chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.
The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party's mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even - yes - frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum.
As some of Obama's enemies warned through the campaign - and I mean warned, not promised - this is the philosophical terrain where, his voting record suggests, this President is most at home. But many more are not. The absence from the Senate of Edward Kennedy, through illness, and Hillary Clinton, elevated to the State Department, has left his pro-reform advocacy in the legislature sorely depleted.
But there is something else at work here, too, beyond defective advocacy, and it lays bare a profound misunderstanding. Europe hailed Obama's landslide election victory as evidence that America had reclaimed its better self, turned to the left and bade farewell to ingrained racial divisions as well. That was a benevolent, but ultimately idealistic, gloss.
Obama's victory can indeed be seen as a reaction to eight years of conservative Republicanism under George Bush and a turn by US voters to the left. But that left is still quite a bit further right than in most of Europe. Nor was it just a leftward turn that cost John McCain the White House; it was also a rejection of the weaker candidate. Obama's great asset was that he came across as more competent on the economy, at a time of global financial meltdown. From this side of the Atlantic, we convinced ourselves that Americans had voted with their hearts, but there was a considerable element of the wallet as well.
That wallet element helps explain the deep-seated misgivings that have surfaced about Obama's plans for health reform. A majority of Americans believe they have adequate health cover. Their choice of job may be limited by their insurance requirements (and labour mobility reduced). And their calculations may be upset - sometimes disastrously - by accident or illness.
But with most pensioners protected by the state system known as Medicare, an "I'm all right, Jack" attitude prevails. It coexists with the fear that extending the pool of the insured, to the poorer and more illness-prone, will raise premiums for the healthy and bring queuing, or rationing, of care - which is why stories about the NHS inspire such dread. The principle that no one should be penalised financially by illness is trumped by the self-interest of the majority, then rationalised by the argument that health is a matter of personal responsibility.
The point is that, when on "normal", the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.
This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber - or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.
Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West. Still others see it as the price the US pays for its material success. What it means, though, is that if and when Obama gets some form of health reform through, it will reflect America's fears quite as much as its promise. And it is unlikely to be a national service that looks anything like ours.
http://www.truthout.org/082509L?print
Friday, August 7, 2009
Could the Global Meltdown Spark a Great Revolution?
By Ben Protess, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on August 4, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.
Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo. Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years -- equality, democracy, and social rights.
Proponents of neoliberalism are indifferent to this history and dismiss the notion that "another world is possible" that could alleviate grinding misery and poverty around the world. But in opposition to the contemporary individualistic system of capitalism, evidence of a new global movement dedicated to social justice and human rights has sprung from the ashes of the past. Just in the past decade, we have witnessed the expansion of worker insurgencies, peasant and indigenous uprisings, ecological protests, and democracy movements.
Historians frequently view revolutions as extraordinary and unanticipated interruptions of state social regulation of everyday life.
This isn't the case.
In my work as editor of a new encyclopedia of revolution and protest, I've reviewed 500 years' worth of revolutionary actions. And the surprising pattern I've found is the regularity of volatile and explosive conflicts, commonly revealed as waves of protest from within civil society to confront persistent inequality and oppression. While historians cannot forecast the time and place of revolutions, the past has a sustained, if disjointed, record of popular resistance to injustice.
History shows that revolutions must have political movement and a socially compelling goal, with strategic and charismatic leadership that inspires majorities to challenge a perception of fundamental injustice and inequality. A necessary feature is the development of a political ideology rooted in a narrative that legitimates mass collective action, which is indispensable to forcing dominant groups to address social grievances -- or to overturning those dominant groups altogether.
Unresponsive rulers risk possible overthrow of their governments. For example, the vision and struggle of a multiracial South Africa was a guiding principle that put an end to the entrenched white-dominated apartheid system.
A second essential element is what Italian philosopher Antonio Negri calls constituent power, the expression of the popular will for democracy -- a common theme in nearly all revolutions -- through what he calls the multitude.
Mr. Negri counterpoises the concepts of constituent power and constituted power to demonstrate the oppositional forces in society. Thus, following the American Revolution, the ruling elite created a second Constitution establishing a national government with fewer democratic safeguards.
In response to challenges from popular movements, modern states have concentrated power in constitutions and centralized authority structures to suppress mass demands for democracy and equality. Few democratic revolutionary movements have gained popular power as new states almost always consolidate control, often resorting to repression of the masses that initially brought them to power. Still, virtually all revolutions during the past 500 years have created enduring consequences that, in evolving form, remain forces for justice to this day.
Revolutionary movements must recognize the durability and overwhelming inertia of state power. They must acknowledge that they are highly unlikely to seize power from unjust regimes, even when their objectives have moral force and are deeply popular among the masses. And yet, history is full of exceptions to this rule, so we must conclude that while revolutionary transformation is improbable, it is always a possibility.
At a lecture to Young Socialists in Zurich just one month before the February 1917 Revolution, Vladimir Lenin said: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution." Less than a year later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained power over the Soviet state with the initial support of workers, peasants, and most of the military.
In the last century, the opponents of the failed bureaucratic statism in the Soviet sphere and free-market capitalism in the West have struggled to find a discourse of resistance. While democratic opponents defeated Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, opponents of free-market capitalism have yet to gain traction, in part due to the general consensus among global rulers in defense of neoliberalism. As such, revolutionary movements have had to redefine themselves outside territorial borders as powerful tools of the global collective to petition for human rights and social justice for all.
People are inherently cautious and take extraordinary action only when they have little to lose and something to gain. The current economic crisis has pushed more people into poverty and despair than at any time since the early 20th century, to the point where alternatives to the current system can be considered.
Today, throughout the world, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, and students are galvanized into movements that are challenging state power rooted in global norms of neoliberalism. New movements have gained greater traction with the legitimacy and strength of a global collective behind them, rather than as isolated protests. The oppressed are framing new narratives of liberation to contest power on a state and international level: whether peasants in Latin America or India struggling for land reform; indigenous peoples mobilizing resistance for official recognition of their rights; or workers and students throughout the world waging unauthorized strikes and sit-ins, and taking to the streets in support of democracy and equality.
© 2009 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
Posted on August 4, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.
Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo. Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years -- equality, democracy, and social rights.
Proponents of neoliberalism are indifferent to this history and dismiss the notion that "another world is possible" that could alleviate grinding misery and poverty around the world. But in opposition to the contemporary individualistic system of capitalism, evidence of a new global movement dedicated to social justice and human rights has sprung from the ashes of the past. Just in the past decade, we have witnessed the expansion of worker insurgencies, peasant and indigenous uprisings, ecological protests, and democracy movements.
Historians frequently view revolutions as extraordinary and unanticipated interruptions of state social regulation of everyday life.
This isn't the case.
In my work as editor of a new encyclopedia of revolution and protest, I've reviewed 500 years' worth of revolutionary actions. And the surprising pattern I've found is the regularity of volatile and explosive conflicts, commonly revealed as waves of protest from within civil society to confront persistent inequality and oppression. While historians cannot forecast the time and place of revolutions, the past has a sustained, if disjointed, record of popular resistance to injustice.
History shows that revolutions must have political movement and a socially compelling goal, with strategic and charismatic leadership that inspires majorities to challenge a perception of fundamental injustice and inequality. A necessary feature is the development of a political ideology rooted in a narrative that legitimates mass collective action, which is indispensable to forcing dominant groups to address social grievances -- or to overturning those dominant groups altogether.
Unresponsive rulers risk possible overthrow of their governments. For example, the vision and struggle of a multiracial South Africa was a guiding principle that put an end to the entrenched white-dominated apartheid system.
A second essential element is what Italian philosopher Antonio Negri calls constituent power, the expression of the popular will for democracy -- a common theme in nearly all revolutions -- through what he calls the multitude.
Mr. Negri counterpoises the concepts of constituent power and constituted power to demonstrate the oppositional forces in society. Thus, following the American Revolution, the ruling elite created a second Constitution establishing a national government with fewer democratic safeguards.
In response to challenges from popular movements, modern states have concentrated power in constitutions and centralized authority structures to suppress mass demands for democracy and equality. Few democratic revolutionary movements have gained popular power as new states almost always consolidate control, often resorting to repression of the masses that initially brought them to power. Still, virtually all revolutions during the past 500 years have created enduring consequences that, in evolving form, remain forces for justice to this day.
Revolutionary movements must recognize the durability and overwhelming inertia of state power. They must acknowledge that they are highly unlikely to seize power from unjust regimes, even when their objectives have moral force and are deeply popular among the masses. And yet, history is full of exceptions to this rule, so we must conclude that while revolutionary transformation is improbable, it is always a possibility.
At a lecture to Young Socialists in Zurich just one month before the February 1917 Revolution, Vladimir Lenin said: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution." Less than a year later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained power over the Soviet state with the initial support of workers, peasants, and most of the military.
In the last century, the opponents of the failed bureaucratic statism in the Soviet sphere and free-market capitalism in the West have struggled to find a discourse of resistance. While democratic opponents defeated Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, opponents of free-market capitalism have yet to gain traction, in part due to the general consensus among global rulers in defense of neoliberalism. As such, revolutionary movements have had to redefine themselves outside territorial borders as powerful tools of the global collective to petition for human rights and social justice for all.
People are inherently cautious and take extraordinary action only when they have little to lose and something to gain. The current economic crisis has pushed more people into poverty and despair than at any time since the early 20th century, to the point where alternatives to the current system can be considered.
Today, throughout the world, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, and students are galvanized into movements that are challenging state power rooted in global norms of neoliberalism. New movements have gained greater traction with the legitimacy and strength of a global collective behind them, rather than as isolated protests. The oppressed are framing new narratives of liberation to contest power on a state and international level: whether peasants in Latin America or India struggling for land reform; indigenous peoples mobilizing resistance for official recognition of their rights; or workers and students throughout the world waging unauthorized strikes and sit-ins, and taking to the streets in support of democracy and equality.
© 2009 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings
By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), a book about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), a book about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
14 Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed
By David Dvorkin, Dvorkin.com
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
The great ebb and flow of the marketplace has recently forced me to try to convince myself of the benefits of being unemployed.
Some of those benefits are obvious, and I could have anticipated them even before a supervisor tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to talk to me about something. ("Do you have a minute?" he asked. What would have happened if I'd said no, that I was too busy?)
Not Having to Wake up to the Alarm Clock
That's an obvious one. There was a character in the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip of many years ago who retired but would still get up at the crack of dawn and go down to the mill every morning just so he could thumb his nose at the place as the get-to-work whistle blew. That was an amusing strip, and I saved it for years. But I wouldn't want to take the bus downtown every weekday just to emulate that cartoon character, even if my old workplace had a whistle and even if I had retired voluntarily. So I've turned off the alarm.
(Oh, you ask, but what if you oversleep and waste away the hours you should be spending looking for another job? That hasn't been a problem. The constant sense of dread wakes me up in plenty of time – usually well before the crack of dawn.)
Getting Rid of Telemarketers and Door-to-Door Salesmen
Back in the glorious paycheck days, I used to think about telling them I'd just lost my job. Actually, sometimes I really did tell them that, because I'm a cowardly kinda guy and it's easier to fib than to be firm. Now I don't have to fib. When I tell them I'm unemployed, they hang up or back away quickly, terrified of infection by the job-loss virus. And they seem to have crossed me off those secret lists they hand around. It's true that some of one's friends back away with the same look of fear in their eyes, but I'm sure that's unconscious.
I'm hoping to get taken off the snail-mail solicitation lists, too. From time to time, for example, I get invited to contribute to the Republican National Committee. Yeah, sure. Try me again after I've developed Alzheimer's. Throwing solicitations of that sort away was always easy. But it was hard and induced considerable guilt to throw away unanswered solicitations from organizations I support philosophically. Sometimes you're just strapped for cash, you know? Even with a regular paycheck coming in. I'd feel terrible guilt as I tore up the good-guy solicitations and dropped them in the trash, and I'd tell myself that at least if I lost my job, I'd have an acceptable excuse and wouldn't feel guilty. And I was right! Actually, I still feel guilty, but I tell myself that I'll resume making contributions to those worthy outfits as soon as I have a regular paycheck again.
When.
If.
But here are some benefits of being unemployed that I did not anticipate.
Spousal Closeness
My wife and I were close before, but we've been drawn even closer by a sense of common striving and the extra time we're spending together. A lot of that extra time is spent worrying together, fretting together, hyperventilating together – but together!
Long-Range Planning
I used to obsess over long-range planning. Not that I did any long-range planning; I just obsessed over not doing it. And I used to spend too much time mulling over – even obsessing over – the past. Or at least obsessing over the fact that I was mulling over it so much. You should live in the present, I would tell myself. Now I'm doing just that. The present is intensely with me. I'm obsessing over it.
Scamsters
They've always been around, and they're an amoral, revolting bunch. I'm no kid, I'm no naif, I know all of that.
Nonetheless, I've been surprised at just what low reptiles some of them are. There are companies that post fake job ads so that, brimming with hope and desperation, you'll send them your resume. Then they call you, ask you to come to their office for an interview. Of course you go, dressed in your best interview clothes. The office is sumptuous. The people are well dressed. The pitch is slick. Give us lots of money, and we'll show you how to find the high-paying hidden jobs, the ones that are never advertised, the positions only we know about.
If you do fall for that pitch, you'll only spend money you can't afford to spend, you'll almost certainly never get a job through them, and they, the piles of excrement in human shape, are the only ones who will benefit. How do you think they can afford those offices?
These people are rotten enough to be members of George W. Bush's cabinet. Encountering them has taught me something about the depths of human nature. I guess that qualifies as a benefit of being unemployed.
My Beard
It's still growing!
Well, of course it is, you say. Let me explain that, on an emotional, irrational level, I still feel relieved every morning when I realize that I still need to shave.
It's still growing! Despite the way I frequently feel, I haven't really been unmanned.
Clutter
Our house was so cluttered!
We had dangerously outdated canned foods in kitchen cabinets. It just sat there taking up space and making the house look smaller, the way clutter does. Now we're coming up with inventive ways of combining stuff that we would once never have thought combinable. Why, back then we might even have thrown it out. (Eventually.)
We've rediscovered old hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and bars of soap that we stashed away and forgot about long ago. (Golly, where did those come from?) Now we're using those up instead of actually paying for bars of soap or bottles of shampoo.
And how about all those CDs that we never have liked and always wondered what possessed us to buy, let alone to keep? Well, that's what the used-CD store is for! (Oops. They've gone out of business.)
We have clothes we know we'll never wear again and should have gotten rid of long ago. How fortunate that we didn't! Why, you can get money for that stuff at a thrift store! A tiny amount that we might once have thought not worth bothering with, but our standards have changed. Round 'em up, move 'em out, Rawhide!
Now we're gaining space in the cabinets and in the closets and in the bookcases and even in the refrigerator. Some day, that space could come in handy. Some day, when we can afford to buy things again.
We actually have two refrigerators in our kitchen, a big one and a small one. (The reasons are historical and trivial.) Now we've reached the point where we could easily get by with just the big one. Soon, we'll be able to manage with just the small one. When we reach that point, perhaps we'll sell the big one, assuming anyone would be so foolish as to buy it. (It wasn't a great refrigerator even when it was new.) That will give us extra space in the kitchen, but more to the point, it will make it easier to move to smaller quarters, if it comes to that. Such as under a highway viaduct. Do they have power outlets there? I suppose not. It's not something I used to think about all that often.
The kitchen cabinets are built in, so we'll have to leave those behind.
Snobbery
We have been cured of the sin of snobbery.
It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. Oh, sure, sometimes we'd buy the house brands out of some sort of general moral conviction that we ought to save money. And then we'd gradually drift back to the name brands because . . . well, we just did. But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! And the house-brand cans stack better! And the labels are spiffier! Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.
Power. Shower.
Are you a fan of the television show Smallville? We sure are.
Although there are a few details about the show that keep bothering me.
How do the desperately cash-strapped Kents keep that farm running? They have no employees. 'Course not. Can't afford 'em. Wouldn't need 'em, either, if Clark did all the work with his superspeed and superstrength instead of spending his time mooning after Lana Lang and otherwise engaging in superteen superangst. Pa Kent's no use. He spends his time vaguely and ineffectually tinkering with odd bits of farm equipment. That's why Ma Kent had to get help from her nasty father and go to work for the remarkably evil and devious Lionel Luthor. I also wonder if I really did once glimpse snow-capped peaks in the background in, er, Kansas.
But I digress.
What really bothers me about the Kents is that despite their constant worrying about money, and even though their house seems to be nicely designed to let in lots of sunlight (in Kansas . . . ), nonetheless during the middle of the day they seem to keep every single electric light in the place turned on!
(I also wonder if perhaps this is a terrible cultural side-effect of that evil socialistic institution, the Rural Electrification Administration, but I'm digressing again.)
People don't need that much light. Especially not people who are worried about money.
We decided to start taking our showers in the dark. Cool showers, of course. Fortunately, it's still late summer when I'm writing this, so the cool water feels nice and there's sunlight coming in through the bathroom window. Are you paying attention, Kents?
Oh, and say, speaking of it being summer, we're learning that we don't really need the air conditioning quite as desperately as we used to think we did. This winter, we'll try to make the same discovery about heat.
Popcorn
Speaking of things you don't need, what about that tub of buttered popcorn at the movies? Or the movie itself? The movie will be out on DVD soon enough – and maybe when that time comes you'll still be able to afford to buy a DVD and you'll still own a DVD player. And a TV set. And a living room. And if you don't still own all of those things, you certainly won't be wasting time thinking about missing that dumb movie. On the negative side, should you eventually find yourself without a living room or a kitchen, the idea of that popcorn – of its smell, of its taste, of its essential fillingness – will start to affect you powerfully. Even without butter.
Weight, Losing
We both talked for years about trying to lose some weight. As you will have guessed from the preceding paragraph, we're finally doing it. If I hadn't lost my job, we'd still both be doing nothing more than talking about it. I might soon be able to get into those older Dockers and jeans covered with dust in the closet. Not all clutter is bad.
Weight, Lifting
And exercising more. That's something else I always knew I should do. Time, time, there was never enough time! But now at last there is enough time. I really do intend to start exercising lots and lots just as soon as my stomach acid settles down again.
Triumph of the Will
It's really all a matter of will power, isn't it? Thanks to being unemployed, I've developed more will power. I've become very good at maintaining my self-control and even smiling when people ask me if I'm taking advantage of all this time off by relaxing and enjoying myself and getting a lot of writing done. Well, yeah, I do keep tinkering with my resume. (Go read it! Click here!)
FEH
I never really expected that being unemployed would give me a deeper understanding of our wonderful capitalist— I'm sorry, I mean Free Enterprise Hurrah! system. Or the FEH, as its friends call it.
For example, I have a much clearer understanding of what a true living wage is, what's really necessary for two people to survive on. The amount is certainly less than I used to think it was. I may even learn to adjust my estimate downward even more in the future. Of course, I'm talking about surviving on, not living happily on.
That's what you might call the practical, personal-finances aspect of the FEH. There's also the theoretical side. I had that all wrong, as well.
I actually thought – and this is really silly when you consider that I've been working in the FEH for nigh on to a thousand years and so should know better – that companies feel the same sense of obligation and duty toward their employees that they insist their employees should feel toward them. If you contribute to your company's success and help it to advance its interests and financial health, often making sacrifices of your own time to do so, then your company will reciprocate by making sacrifices in bad times to take care of you by not depriving you of your paycheck and benefits. That's the way I thought it worked.
Where in the world did I get that idea? Now I finally understand – and I'm so much the better man and citizen for the understanding – that the true, indeed the only, obligation any company's top management has is to its Board of Directors and major shareholders. And of course to the continued employment of its top managers. My appreciation for the wonderfulness of the FEH can only be deepened by this knowledge, even if I am now forced to gaze upon that wonderfulness from a cold and comfortless place outside the warmth and safety of its shelter.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of being unemployed is this. I now feel absolutely free to despise George W. Bush. Oh, of course I despised him before I lost my job. But now I know I'm not alone.
Read more David's work at Dvorkin.com.
© 2009 Dvorkin.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
The great ebb and flow of the marketplace has recently forced me to try to convince myself of the benefits of being unemployed.
Some of those benefits are obvious, and I could have anticipated them even before a supervisor tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to talk to me about something. ("Do you have a minute?" he asked. What would have happened if I'd said no, that I was too busy?)
Not Having to Wake up to the Alarm Clock
That's an obvious one. There was a character in the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip of many years ago who retired but would still get up at the crack of dawn and go down to the mill every morning just so he could thumb his nose at the place as the get-to-work whistle blew. That was an amusing strip, and I saved it for years. But I wouldn't want to take the bus downtown every weekday just to emulate that cartoon character, even if my old workplace had a whistle and even if I had retired voluntarily. So I've turned off the alarm.
(Oh, you ask, but what if you oversleep and waste away the hours you should be spending looking for another job? That hasn't been a problem. The constant sense of dread wakes me up in plenty of time – usually well before the crack of dawn.)
Getting Rid of Telemarketers and Door-to-Door Salesmen
Back in the glorious paycheck days, I used to think about telling them I'd just lost my job. Actually, sometimes I really did tell them that, because I'm a cowardly kinda guy and it's easier to fib than to be firm. Now I don't have to fib. When I tell them I'm unemployed, they hang up or back away quickly, terrified of infection by the job-loss virus. And they seem to have crossed me off those secret lists they hand around. It's true that some of one's friends back away with the same look of fear in their eyes, but I'm sure that's unconscious.
I'm hoping to get taken off the snail-mail solicitation lists, too. From time to time, for example, I get invited to contribute to the Republican National Committee. Yeah, sure. Try me again after I've developed Alzheimer's. Throwing solicitations of that sort away was always easy. But it was hard and induced considerable guilt to throw away unanswered solicitations from organizations I support philosophically. Sometimes you're just strapped for cash, you know? Even with a regular paycheck coming in. I'd feel terrible guilt as I tore up the good-guy solicitations and dropped them in the trash, and I'd tell myself that at least if I lost my job, I'd have an acceptable excuse and wouldn't feel guilty. And I was right! Actually, I still feel guilty, but I tell myself that I'll resume making contributions to those worthy outfits as soon as I have a regular paycheck again.
When.
If.
But here are some benefits of being unemployed that I did not anticipate.
Spousal Closeness
My wife and I were close before, but we've been drawn even closer by a sense of common striving and the extra time we're spending together. A lot of that extra time is spent worrying together, fretting together, hyperventilating together – but together!
Long-Range Planning
I used to obsess over long-range planning. Not that I did any long-range planning; I just obsessed over not doing it. And I used to spend too much time mulling over – even obsessing over – the past. Or at least obsessing over the fact that I was mulling over it so much. You should live in the present, I would tell myself. Now I'm doing just that. The present is intensely with me. I'm obsessing over it.
Scamsters
They've always been around, and they're an amoral, revolting bunch. I'm no kid, I'm no naif, I know all of that.
Nonetheless, I've been surprised at just what low reptiles some of them are. There are companies that post fake job ads so that, brimming with hope and desperation, you'll send them your resume. Then they call you, ask you to come to their office for an interview. Of course you go, dressed in your best interview clothes. The office is sumptuous. The people are well dressed. The pitch is slick. Give us lots of money, and we'll show you how to find the high-paying hidden jobs, the ones that are never advertised, the positions only we know about.
If you do fall for that pitch, you'll only spend money you can't afford to spend, you'll almost certainly never get a job through them, and they, the piles of excrement in human shape, are the only ones who will benefit. How do you think they can afford those offices?
These people are rotten enough to be members of George W. Bush's cabinet. Encountering them has taught me something about the depths of human nature. I guess that qualifies as a benefit of being unemployed.
My Beard
It's still growing!
Well, of course it is, you say. Let me explain that, on an emotional, irrational level, I still feel relieved every morning when I realize that I still need to shave.
It's still growing! Despite the way I frequently feel, I haven't really been unmanned.
Clutter
Our house was so cluttered!
We had dangerously outdated canned foods in kitchen cabinets. It just sat there taking up space and making the house look smaller, the way clutter does. Now we're coming up with inventive ways of combining stuff that we would once never have thought combinable. Why, back then we might even have thrown it out. (Eventually.)
We've rediscovered old hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and bars of soap that we stashed away and forgot about long ago. (Golly, where did those come from?) Now we're using those up instead of actually paying for bars of soap or bottles of shampoo.
And how about all those CDs that we never have liked and always wondered what possessed us to buy, let alone to keep? Well, that's what the used-CD store is for! (Oops. They've gone out of business.)
We have clothes we know we'll never wear again and should have gotten rid of long ago. How fortunate that we didn't! Why, you can get money for that stuff at a thrift store! A tiny amount that we might once have thought not worth bothering with, but our standards have changed. Round 'em up, move 'em out, Rawhide!
Now we're gaining space in the cabinets and in the closets and in the bookcases and even in the refrigerator. Some day, that space could come in handy. Some day, when we can afford to buy things again.
We actually have two refrigerators in our kitchen, a big one and a small one. (The reasons are historical and trivial.) Now we've reached the point where we could easily get by with just the big one. Soon, we'll be able to manage with just the small one. When we reach that point, perhaps we'll sell the big one, assuming anyone would be so foolish as to buy it. (It wasn't a great refrigerator even when it was new.) That will give us extra space in the kitchen, but more to the point, it will make it easier to move to smaller quarters, if it comes to that. Such as under a highway viaduct. Do they have power outlets there? I suppose not. It's not something I used to think about all that often.
The kitchen cabinets are built in, so we'll have to leave those behind.
Snobbery
We have been cured of the sin of snobbery.
It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. Oh, sure, sometimes we'd buy the house brands out of some sort of general moral conviction that we ought to save money. And then we'd gradually drift back to the name brands because . . . well, we just did. But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! And the house-brand cans stack better! And the labels are spiffier! Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.
Power. Shower.
Are you a fan of the television show Smallville? We sure are.
Although there are a few details about the show that keep bothering me.
How do the desperately cash-strapped Kents keep that farm running? They have no employees. 'Course not. Can't afford 'em. Wouldn't need 'em, either, if Clark did all the work with his superspeed and superstrength instead of spending his time mooning after Lana Lang and otherwise engaging in superteen superangst. Pa Kent's no use. He spends his time vaguely and ineffectually tinkering with odd bits of farm equipment. That's why Ma Kent had to get help from her nasty father and go to work for the remarkably evil and devious Lionel Luthor. I also wonder if I really did once glimpse snow-capped peaks in the background in, er, Kansas.
But I digress.
What really bothers me about the Kents is that despite their constant worrying about money, and even though their house seems to be nicely designed to let in lots of sunlight (in Kansas . . . ), nonetheless during the middle of the day they seem to keep every single electric light in the place turned on!
(I also wonder if perhaps this is a terrible cultural side-effect of that evil socialistic institution, the Rural Electrification Administration, but I'm digressing again.)
People don't need that much light. Especially not people who are worried about money.
We decided to start taking our showers in the dark. Cool showers, of course. Fortunately, it's still late summer when I'm writing this, so the cool water feels nice and there's sunlight coming in through the bathroom window. Are you paying attention, Kents?
Oh, and say, speaking of it being summer, we're learning that we don't really need the air conditioning quite as desperately as we used to think we did. This winter, we'll try to make the same discovery about heat.
Popcorn
Speaking of things you don't need, what about that tub of buttered popcorn at the movies? Or the movie itself? The movie will be out on DVD soon enough – and maybe when that time comes you'll still be able to afford to buy a DVD and you'll still own a DVD player. And a TV set. And a living room. And if you don't still own all of those things, you certainly won't be wasting time thinking about missing that dumb movie. On the negative side, should you eventually find yourself without a living room or a kitchen, the idea of that popcorn – of its smell, of its taste, of its essential fillingness – will start to affect you powerfully. Even without butter.
Weight, Losing
We both talked for years about trying to lose some weight. As you will have guessed from the preceding paragraph, we're finally doing it. If I hadn't lost my job, we'd still both be doing nothing more than talking about it. I might soon be able to get into those older Dockers and jeans covered with dust in the closet. Not all clutter is bad.
Weight, Lifting
And exercising more. That's something else I always knew I should do. Time, time, there was never enough time! But now at last there is enough time. I really do intend to start exercising lots and lots just as soon as my stomach acid settles down again.
Triumph of the Will
It's really all a matter of will power, isn't it? Thanks to being unemployed, I've developed more will power. I've become very good at maintaining my self-control and even smiling when people ask me if I'm taking advantage of all this time off by relaxing and enjoying myself and getting a lot of writing done. Well, yeah, I do keep tinkering with my resume. (Go read it! Click here!)
FEH
I never really expected that being unemployed would give me a deeper understanding of our wonderful capitalist— I'm sorry, I mean Free Enterprise Hurrah! system. Or the FEH, as its friends call it.
For example, I have a much clearer understanding of what a true living wage is, what's really necessary for two people to survive on. The amount is certainly less than I used to think it was. I may even learn to adjust my estimate downward even more in the future. Of course, I'm talking about surviving on, not living happily on.
That's what you might call the practical, personal-finances aspect of the FEH. There's also the theoretical side. I had that all wrong, as well.
I actually thought – and this is really silly when you consider that I've been working in the FEH for nigh on to a thousand years and so should know better – that companies feel the same sense of obligation and duty toward their employees that they insist their employees should feel toward them. If you contribute to your company's success and help it to advance its interests and financial health, often making sacrifices of your own time to do so, then your company will reciprocate by making sacrifices in bad times to take care of you by not depriving you of your paycheck and benefits. That's the way I thought it worked.
Where in the world did I get that idea? Now I finally understand – and I'm so much the better man and citizen for the understanding – that the true, indeed the only, obligation any company's top management has is to its Board of Directors and major shareholders. And of course to the continued employment of its top managers. My appreciation for the wonderfulness of the FEH can only be deepened by this knowledge, even if I am now forced to gaze upon that wonderfulness from a cold and comfortless place outside the warmth and safety of its shelter.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of being unemployed is this. I now feel absolutely free to despise George W. Bush. Oh, of course I despised him before I lost my job. But now I know I'm not alone.
Read more David's work at Dvorkin.com.
© 2009 Dvorkin.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
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