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1.5 million-year-old fossil humans walked on modern feet

Footprints found at Ileret, Kenya, display anatomically modern features

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Ancient footprints found at Rutgers’ Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.
Published as the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science, this anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers Professor John W.K. Harris and an international team of colleagues. Harris is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and director of the Koobi Fora Field Project.
Harris is also director of the field school which Rutgers University operates in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya. From 2006 to 2008, the field school group of mostly American undergraduates, including Rutgers students, excavated the site yielding the footprints.
The footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy.
To ensure that comparisons made with modern human and other fossil hominid footprints were objective, the Ileret footprints were scanned and digitized by the lead author, Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
The authors of the Science paper reported that the upper sediment layer contained three footprint trails: two trails of two prints each, one of seven prints and a number of isolated prints. Five meters deeper, the other sediment surface preserved one trail of two prints and a single isolated smaller print, probably from a juvenile.
In these specimens, the big toe is parallel to the other toes, unlike that of apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a pronounced human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance. The size, spacing and depth of the impressions were the basis of estimates of weight, stride and gait, all found to be within the range of modern humans.
Based on size of the footprints and their modern anatomical characteristics, the authors attribute the prints to the hominid Homo ergaster, or early Homo erectus as it is more generally known. This was the first hominid to have had the same body proportions (longer legs and shorter arms) as modern Homo sapiens. Various H. ergaster or H. erectus remains have been found in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, with dates consistent with the Ileret footprints.
Other hominid fossil footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago had been discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, Tanzania. These are attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis, a possible ancestral hominid. The smaller, older Laetoli prints show indications of upright bipedal posture but possess a shallower arch and a more ape-like, divergent big toe.
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Other institutions involved in this research included the George Washington University, Liverpool John Moores University, Smithsonian Institution, University of Cape Town and University of Nairobi.

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Reliable Prostate Cancer Test May Be Decade Away, Doctors Say

By Michelle Fay Cortez and Marilyn Chase

March 20 (Bloomberg) — It may take a decade to replace the prostate cancer test that doctors say is inadequate and risky, yet is used on 75 percent of American men 50 or older.
The PSA cancer-detection test may only prevent deaths in about 7 in 10,000 males with the disease, according to research reported March 16. The exam often leads men without lethal cancer to undergo unneeded treatment that can result in sexual impotence or incontinence, said Gerald Andriole, chief of urologic surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
At least four new tests are being studied in people, said Sudhir Srivastava, chief of the biomarkers research group at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The research, aimed at distinguishing slow-growing cancers that rarely cause death from malignancies that can spread and kill, will take “at least 10 years” before they’re in common use, said Christine Berg, also at the NCI. In the meantime, scientists are tweaking the current test to make the results more precise.
“The challenge we have right now is, when we find cancer we don’t know if it is a killer cancer or a toothless lion,” said Andriole, who led one of the two March 16 studies on the test, in a telephone interview.
In the U.S., 28,660 men die from prostate cancer each year, and 186,320 men are diagnosed with it, according to the American Cancer Society.

PSA Increases
The existing test measures prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a blood protein that reflects damage to the prostate. PSA levels rise when prostate cancer develops. They also increase with age and when men develop benign conditions, including enlarged prostate glands or a urinary tract infection.
When men get an elevated PSA result, ruling out cancer requires extracting a piece of the prostate, a gland that weighs less than an ounce and is located below the bladder and in front of the rectum. It secretes fluid that helps semen travel during ejaculation.
The biopsy, a procedure most often done using a needle pushed through the wall of the rectum, costs about $2,400, according to Elizabeth Streich, a spokeswoman for Columbia University Medical Center in New York. In a biopsy, a surgeon removes a tiny piece of prostate tissue so that doctors can examine cells under a microscope for the presence, type and aggressiveness of cancer.
A biopsy’s reliability can also be questionable because it “is prone to being subjective, according to who reads the slide,” Srivastava said.

Genetic Markers
Three of the tests now being studied in humans use genetic markers to differentiate between slow-growing and potentially lethal cancer, the NCI’s Srivastava said. Two would be used to screen urine, another is a blood test, and the fourth would be used in a biopsy to offer a more precise measurement of genetic activity leading to metastasis, the process that spreads cancer throughout the body.
Arul Chinnaiyan, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is working with privately held Metabolon Inc., a diagnostic screening company based in Durham, North Carolina, on a test for an amino acid called sarcocine that rises when prostate cancer is active, according to the company.
Metabolon’s test would screen urine to check the severity of a prostate tumor, said John Ryals, Chief Executive Officer of Metabolon, in a telephone interview today.
“One of the problems with PSA is that it doesn’t really tell you much about whether you really have cancer or not and how aggressive a tumor is,” Ryals said. “Sarcosine is involved in the transition of a tumor going from a non-invasive state to a more invasive state.”

Urine, Blood Tests
The National Cancer Institute is working with University of Michigan researcher John Wei on a study analyzing urine samples from patients in Ann Arbor, Boston and Baltimore, seeking a biomarker called PCA3, the NCI’s Srivastava said. PCA3 is a snippet of genetic material that is overproduced in prostate cancer cells.
The blood test being assessed in humans is looking for two genes that fuse together once cancer becomes present. The genes are a marker that the cancer is spreading, according to Srivastava at the NCI, which is collaborating on the research. About 200 volunteers are involved in the research being undertaken at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Diego, Srivastava said.
A fourth method would examine prostate tissue sample taken during biopsy for a gene called GSTPi1 that can act as a switch, turning on the growth process linked with cancer. Quest Diagnostics Inc., based in Madison, New Jersey, is working with Epigenomics AG in Berlin to develop genetic tests for GSTP1 that would help detect disease activity, the companies said in a statement.

Predicting Behavior
“I am hopeful, although I don’t know when it will come, that if we understand the genetics of cancer we’ll be able to predict its behavior,” said Philip Kantoff, chief clinical research officer and chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
While testing on new genetic models continues, researchers are working on ways to make the present PSA test more effective. One way may be to weigh a man’s basic PSA score against how fast the number rises over time, according to the NCI’s Berg.
Combining that information with a patient’s age, the size of his gland, and whether the PSA the protein is floating free in blood or bound to other proteins may improve the accuracy of the test over time, Berg said. Elevated PSA in men in their 40s, before age-related damage is inflicted on the prostate, can also predict cancer rates a quarter century later, Andrew Vickers, a specialist in molecular markers and surgical research results at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said.

Really Tell Risk
“With a single PSA test at an early age,” weighed in relation to other factors, “you can really tell who is at risk for cancer,” Vickers said in a telephone interview.

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Do we know anything about Lahore Resolution?

By Hamid Mir

March 23 is just a public holiday for most of the Pakistanis. Their knowledge about the genesis and significance of this day is very limited. They simply think that March 23 is Pakistan Day because All India Muslim League for the first time adopted a resolution in Lahore for the creation of a separate Muslim homeland in 1940. Very few of them know that word ‘Pakistan’ was not used in this resolution. No Muslim Leaguer including Muhammad Ali Jinnah mentioned the name of Pakistan in their speeches on March 23, except a lady speaker Begum Muhammad Ali Jauhar. This resolution was originally called Lahore declaration but Hindu press branded it ‘Pakistan Resolution.’ The text books in schools and colleges of Pakistan do not say that Lahore resolution was actually passed for at least two separate Muslim states. Rights of the non-Muslims were also protected in that resolution very clearly. It also gave protection to the provincial autonomy because Muslims of the subcontinent wanted economic justice.

The resolution for the creation of separate Muslim states in the British-controlled India was moved by the chief minister of United Bengal Maulvi A K Fazlul Haq. There was no doubt that he surely wanted two separate states. One for the Muslims of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP, Balochistan and Kashmir and the other for the Muslims of Bengal and Assam. Like it or not but the historical realities are difficult to digest. If we read the Lahore Resolution carefully it will be easy to understand that this resolution was not implemented in its true spirit on August 14, 1947, due to the conspiracies of Congress leaders and Lord Mountbatten and also weakness of All India Muslim League.

In fact, the concept of a sovereign independent Bengal had its origins in the Pakistan movement. The mother party of Pakistan was All India Muslim League and interestingly this party was born in 1906 in Dacca in Bengal and not in the present-day Pakistan. Many historians claim that Chaudhry Rehmat Ali introduced the word Pakistan in 1933. United Bengal was not part of his Pakistan scheme. He proposed the name ‘Bangsam’ for the separate state of Bengali Muslims living in Bengal and Assam. Two professors of Aligarh University Syed Zafarul Hassan and Dr Afzal Hussain again proposed two Muslim states in their famous Aligarh scheme in 1935. They proposed that Punjab, North West Frontier Province, Sind, Balochistan, Bahawalpur, Jammu and Kashmir, Kapurthala and Malir Kotla should be one state. Bangal and Assam including the Purena district of Bihar should be the second state and the third state should be the rest of India.

Dr Syed Abdul Latif of Osmania University, Hyderabad, in his book ‘The Muslim Problem of India’ published in 1938 proposed four separate Muslim states. He proposed a state from Patiala to Rampur including Lucknow for the Muslims of UP and Bihar and another separate state of Hyderabad (Andhra Perdesh). He also supported the Pakistan scheme and Bangsam scheme of Chaudhry Rehmat Ali. Another Muslim Leaguer from UP Chaudhry Khaleequz Zaman also proposed the scheme of two separate Muslim states to England in 1939. The adoption of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 was a significant step towards highlighting the demand for separate homelands for the two Muslim majority zones of India. The Lahore Resolution said:

‘No constitutional plan would be workable or acceptable to the Muslims unless geographical contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary. That the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.’ The words autonomous and sovereign were used for independent states not for the provinces.

Some historians like Dr Safdar Mehmood are not ready to accept that Lahore Resolution actually meant two separate states. He claims that Jinnah clarified to the foreign correspondents on March 24, 1940, that Muslim League wanted only one state. Few historians even claimed that the real word in the Lahore Resolution was ‘state’ not ‘states.’ It was just a typing error. The office secretary of All India Muslim League from 1914 to 1948 Syed Shamsul Hassan have a different story.

Syed Shamsul Hassan was a trusted man of Jinnah. He clarified that there was no typing error in the Lahore Resolution. The word ‘states’ was approved by the draft committee members including Malik Barkat Ali, Nawab Ismail Khan and Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan. The working committee of All India Muslim League again met in Bombay from Aug 31 to Sept 2, 1940 under the chairmanship of Jinnah and this meeting again said that separate Muslim states should be established in the north-west and east of India.

Unfortunately the Lahore Resolution remained undefined until April 1946. It was again the chief minister of United Bengal Hussein Shaheed Suharwardi who moved a resolution in the working committee meeting of Muslim League held in Delhi on April 7, 1946, that Bengal and Assam in the north-east and Punjab, NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan in the north-west of India should be a single state. The word Pakistan was used for the first time in that resolution.

Kamaruddin Ahmad in his book ‘The Social History of East Pakistan’ published in 1967 in Dacca wrote that Secretary General of Bengal Muslim League Abul Hashim raised objection on the resolution moved by Suharwardi. Kamaruddin Ahmad was a die-hard Bengali worker of Pakistan movement. He was present in the meetings of Lahore and Delhi. He wrote that Jinnah explained to Abul Hashim that Delhi resolution was not meant to change the Lahore Resolution but to have one constituent assembly for the Muslim India for drafting the constitution or constitutions of Pakistan on the basis of Lahore Resolution. After few weeks of the Delhi meeting Suharwardi started his efforts for the creation of a separate United Bengal state with the help of Abul Hashim and a Bengali Hindu leader of Congress Sarat Chandra Bose. This Hindu leader was the elder brother of famous freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose. He was in Congress but he failed to convince his party for the creation of United Bengal.

A very well respected Pakistani historian Zahid Chaudhry claimed that Jinnah quietly supported the efforts of Suharwardi and Sarat Chandra Bose for a United Bengali state. In his book ‘Bengali Mussalman aur Tehrik-i-Pakistan’ he clearly wrote on page 448 that Jinnah told Mountbatten once that there is no use of Bengal without Calcutta and he will be very happy on the creation of a separate United Bengal and this state will have very friendly relations with Pakistan. Suharwardi, Abul Hashim and Bose also met Mahatma Gandhi and tried to convince him for the United Bengal scheme. Suharwardi even offered that he will form a coalition government with Congress in United Bengal but Gandhi never listened to him. He forced Mountbatten to divide Bengal. He occupied many Muslim majority areas like Kashmir and Gurdaspur in the East Punjab with the help of Mountbatten.

Division of Bengal was a violation of Lahore Resolution as well as Delhi resolution. Bengalis supported Muslim League because they wanted justice. They were a majority in United Bengal but they were economically dominated by Hindu elite. Division of Bengal was a great injustice to them. They never got justice even after the creation of Pakistan. Military dictators of Pakistan never fulfilled the promises made in the Lahore Resolution. Bengali leaders like Suharwardi were humiliated by the dictators and their toady judges.

The creation of Pakistan was the result of a political and democratic struggle but pro-American military dictators destroyed all the democratic institutions and finally Bengalis said goodbye to Pakistan.

We never learned any lessons. Our students in colleges and universities still do not know what the real cause was for the creation of Bangladesh, what provincial autonomy is and what promises were made by the Muslim League in the Lahore Resolution. According to the original draft of the Lahore Resolution, the central government should have control only over defence, foreign affairs, communications and finance. Rest of the powers should go to the provinces. The Lahore Resolution says that Pakistan needs strong provinces, not a strong centre. Late Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman demanded this provincial autonomy promised in the Lahore Resolution through his famous six points but Pakistani generals declared him a traitor. Unfortunately Pakistan still has areas like North Waziristan and Bajaur that are run by old British laws. The constitution of Pakistan has no writ in these tribal areas. Local people are suffering from injustice even after 1947. The Baloch are also demanding provincial autonomy. Intelligence agencies are still more powerful than the elected provincial government in Balochistan It needs justice more than the other provinces today. If we implement the Lahore Resolution in its true spirit I am sure there will be no problem in the tribal areas and Balochistan.

The writer works for Geo TV. Email: hamid.mir@geo.tv
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Billboard encourages women to report jail abuse

STARK COUNTY — A story that already has people talking nationwide is certain to get more attention with a billboard that encourages former female inmates to report jail abuse. The billboard along Route 62 near Root Avenue in Stark County [in the State of Ohio, US] was put up as a result of the civil lawsuit brought by Hope Steffey against Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson. Steffey’s clothes were forcibly removed by both male and female deputies and she was left completely naked inside the Stark county jail for six hours. Sheriff Swanson says Steffey was considered suicidal so her clothes had to be removed for her own safety. Steffey has denied she was suicidal. The woman’s lawyers discovered during the lawsuit that at least 128 women between 1999 and 2007 were strip-searched or forced to remove their clothing or placed on suicide watch, homicide watch or “naked detention.” This Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson is like a concentration camp commandant. When asked about the ethics of stripping prisoners – young women, naked in his jail Swanson justified his ‘Abu Ghraib’ style treatment of human beings by stating that he has hundreds of prisoners that are stripped naked in his jail. Swanson thinks the large scale of the crime somehow legitimizes it. Sheriff Swanson should know that many thousands of Jews were also stripped naked in concentration camps and it didn’t make the dehumanizing practice any less of an atrocity. In fact it made it much worse.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Past-News.php/2009/03/15/billboard-encourages-women-to-report-jai

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Mystery of Sh5bn gold stuck at JKIA

By DAVID OKWEMBAH

Nearly four tonnes of unrefined gold from Congo is stuck in Nairobi, setting off an international controversy over its ownership and whether it was smuggled into the country.
The gold was en route to Zurich, Switzerland, from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But the Swiss company, which was to receive the gold, Firstar, pulled out at the last minute saying it had learnt that the cargo belonged to Zimbabwean Vice-President, Mrs Joice Mujuru, investigations by the Nation reveal.
A South African businessman, Dancor Spies, claimed to be the key mover in the transaction denies that it had anything to do with the Zimbabwean. He, however, would not disclose who owns it.
Mr Spies ultimately stopped communicating with the Nation and threatened to go to court if the story is published.
The gold, whose worth is estimated at between Sh4 billion and Sh5 billion, is reported to have been flown in on November 28, last year, from Lubumbashi, an area of the Congo where Zimbabwean officials have influence.
Zimbabwe is among nations which have mineral interests in the Congo and at one time sent an army to prop up the Kinshasa government against rebels.
According to the certificate of origin, a copy of which is certified by Nairobi lawyer Cecil Miller, the quantity of gold in question is 3,700 kilogrammes.
Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, Mrs Nyasha del Campo, a commodities trader based in Spain, told the Nation that she was an intermediary in the transaction.
Kenyan law firm
She claimed that the gold belonged to a friend of Mr Spies in Nairobi. In subsequent e-mails, however, she changed her stance: “I am not the owner of the gold. The owner was represented by a local Kenyan law firm and I was not privy as to know who owns this gold. I was just an intermediary,” she wrote.
Mr Spies said the cargo belonged to a mine in the Katanga Province of the Congo. He claimed to have been unable to get in touch with the owner for three weeks.
“Regrettably, I am not in a position to give you any further detailed and confidential information as I am not the owner of the gold. I was unable to make contact with the owner since 3 weeks ago. I am however still trying,” the South African said.
He, however, was categorical that the gold did not belong to Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, her husband or any of her family members.
The gold saga came to light three weeks ago when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) linked it to Mrs Mujuru and her husband Solomon, the former head of the army under President Mugabe.
Mrs Mujuru and her family are among small elite who have prospered in Zimbabwe as the rest of the country plunges into an ever-deeper economic mire.
According to Swiss gold refinery firm Firstar, the Zimbabwean vice-president was using her daughter, Nyasha, who is married to a Spaniard, Pedro del Campo, to sell the gold.
However, the daughter was unable to pay Sh16 million freight for the 3,700kg of gold to Zurich and is reported to have sought the support of her mother to have the gold airlifted from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

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Extravagant Results of Nature’s Arms Race

By NICHOLAS WADE

Nature is reputed to be red in tooth and claw, but many arms races across the animal kingdom are characterized by restraint rather than carnage.

Competition among males is often expressed in the form of elaborate weapons made of bone, horn or chitin. The weapons often start off small and then, under the pressure of competition, may evolve to attain gigantic proportions. The Irish elk, now extinct, had antlers with a span of 12 feet. The drawback of this magnificent adornment, though, was that the poor beast had to carry more than 80 pounds of bone on its head.
In a new review of sexual selection, a special form of natural selection that leads to outlandish armament and decoration, Douglas J. Emlen, a biologist at the University of Montana, has assembled ideas on the evolutionary forces that have made animal weapons so diverse.
Sexual selection was Darwin’s solution to a problem posed by the cumbersome weapons sported by many species, and the baroque ornaments developed by others. They seemed positive handicaps in the struggle for survival, and therefore contrary to his theory of natural selection. To account for these extravagances, Darwin proposed that both armaments and ornaments must have been shaped by competition for mates.
In his view, the evolution of the armaments was driven by the struggle between males for females, whereas the ornaments arose from the choice, largely by females, of characteristics they prized in males. Modern biologists have devoted considerable attention to female choice and how it has led to such a riotous profusion of animal high fashion, from the plumage of birds to the colors of butterflies. Less attention has been paid to the equally rich diversity of animal weaponry.
Dr. Emlen said he became interested in animal armament after studying a species of dung beetle in Panama that specialized in monkey scat. He broadened his studies to dung beetles worldwide and noticed a pattern in their weaponry. Dung beetles may have started their highly successful career feeding on dinosaur ordure, and seem then to have diversified to that of mammals. They have two principal strategies. Some, like the scarabs, cut out pieces of dung and roll it away for private consumption. Other species dig under a deposit and draw it into their tunnels.
Dr. Emlen noticed that only the tunneling species of dung beetles had evolved horns, which the males use to protect their tunnels from other males. The beetles that push balls of dung away also fight all the time with other males, but are hornless.
“I became fascinated by animals with strange morphologies that make you wonder how in the world they could possibly have mated,” Dr. Emlen said. After collecting papers on “anything that had funky structures,” he began to see a pattern in who developed weapons and who did not. Whenever there was some resource that could be monopolized and used for reproductive advantage, males would develop weapons to fight off other males.
The cost of developing and carrying the weapon, Dr. Emlen inferred, was outweighed by the greater access to females gained by owning some prized possession like a food source or tunnel where females could lay eggs.
Dr. Emlen noticed a tendency for weapons to start out small, like mere bumps of bone, and then to evolve to more ornate form. The small weapons are actually quite destructive since their only role is to attack other males. But the more baroque weapons, even though they look more fearsome, seem to cause lesser loss of life.
The reason is that the more menacing weapons have often acquired a signaling role. Instead of risking their lives in mortal combat, males can assess each other’s strengths by sizing up a rival’s weapons, and decline combat if they seem outclassed. The ornate weapons also lend themselves to ritualized combat in which males may lock horns and assess each other’s strength without wounding each other.
“The most elaborate weapons rarely inflict real damage to opponents, but these structures are very effective at revealing even subtle differences among males in their size, status or physical condition,” Dr. Emlen writes in the current Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

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Anti-Capitalism as Suicide Prevention: Personal Worth Against Exchange Value and Corporate Thought Control

By Paul Street

Recently I spoke to an acquaintance who happens to be a psychiatric nurse at a major hospital. She reports an epidemic of distraught people coming and brought into her facility’s emergency room in the wake of mental breakdowns and, often, suicide attempts. She’s seen more of this in recent months than in any previous time in her career.

I asked the obvious question: “is it the economy?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Layoffs. Foreclosures. Bankruptcies. Evictions. Loss of health insurance since that goes out with the job. Divorces resulting from all of the above. They blame themselves.”

They blame themselves.

How tragically horrible but unsurprising. It’s wrong because the United States economy is under the control of a state-capitalist profits system that guarantees no real security to most of its majority working class population. As a prerequisite for being granted the money required to buy basic life necessities (food, clothing, housing, health care and more), that majority is compelled to rent out its labor power to a relatively small class of employers. But employers don’t hire and retain people unless it is profitable to do so. The right to rent one’s self out is contingent upon exploitation – on the existence of an employer-friendly gap between what the worker gets paid and how much the boss[es] can get above that payment. When there’s no profit to be made off workers, employees are sent packing. Beneath occasional nice severance gestures, it’s “See ya. Good luck, punk.”

As it happens, capitalism itself chronically makes it impossible for bosses to employee people profitably. Competition, technological displacement, capital flight (typically from higher to lower-wage zones of the world economic system), excess capacity, the collapse and closing of markets, periodic downturns in the “business cycle,” credit crises, the bursting of speculative asset bubbles, – all of these and other and interrelated factors make it inevitable that vast swaths of the workforce (or proletariat if you will) are periodically evicted from the workforce through no fault of their own. In big economic meltdowns like the current Great Recession (sparked by a collapse of artificially inflated real estate values and the deregulated hyper-financialization and systemic excess of capital lacking profitable productive investment outlets), the number of hardworking wage- and salary-earners who are turned into hapless job-seekers and discouraged unemployed (and suicides) is truly horrific. The profit system’s ever-present “reserve army of labor” (Karl Marx’s useful term) expands to absurd levels. Thousands show up when a fire department announces a handful of openings. Hundreds of unemployed (including people with advanced graduate degrees) apply when a local school district advertises a janitorial position. Millions of human beings are rendered officially redundant practically (it seems) overnight.

It is not their fault. This is how capitalism “works,” and it’s nothing new. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained in 1848, the profits system: “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal tires that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in the place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.” Along the way, Marx and Engels observed, that system and its many and diverse government agents created (through enclosure, expropriation, and labor-exploiting economies of scale that independent artisans could not match) a property-less working class majority whose members “live only so long as they find work and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital.” Working class people must “sell themselves piecemeal.” They (well, their labor power) “are a commodity like any other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market,” including recurrent “commercial crises” that help “make their livelihoods more and more insecure.”
The current unemployment epidemic, with its vast under-reported collateral damage, is consistent with the deeper story of “life” (and death) under the historically specific form of political economy called capitalism. It has nothing to do with the personal adequacy of those who are being pushed out of the workplace [1].

Sadly, there is little space for acknowledging these harsh historical and institutional realities in the dominant U.S. political and media culture. A political candidate or party who honestly takes up these critical questions has no chance of receiving the big money sponsorship and corporate media favor required to become “viable” in the American “dollar democracy” – the “best democracy that money can [and did] buy.” As Herbert Schiller noted 36 years ago in his neglected study The Mind Managers (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1973), the state-capitalist “elite” enlists its powerful, means of mass communication to keep any such understanding at bay. It seeks to engender endemic popular “passivity” and “mental torpor” with “lethal” and “intentionally devitalized” cultural content designed “not to arouse but to lessen concern about [harsh] social and economic realities” (like structurally generated mass unemployment) in a society divided between (i)”haves,” “winners,” and “order-givers” and (ii) “have-nots,” “losers,” and “order-receivers.” (Schiller 1973, pp. 1-31) You can learn from that media today about (supposedly) isolated examples of morally bad capitalist behavior – Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and the recently ugly AIG executive and trader bonuses, for example – but not about the deep assault that capitalism (once aptly described by Marx as the de facto “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”) routinely against a decent and democratic existence. Especially during periods of graphic capitalist failure and excess like the present, you can see and hear occasional pseudo-progressive hints of Charles Dickens-like moralizing against plutocratic overindulgence. Serious discussion of the profit system’s deadly impact on ordinary peoples’ security (and on democracy, social justice, international harmony, and ecological sustainability) is forbidden in the corporate masters’ communications and culture complex.

Sober structural critique of the existing system of class rule is unthinkable there for reasons that are not mysterious. The main media institutions are owned and operated by giant profit-based state-capitalist super-conglomerates like General Electric (owner and part owner of NBC, A&E, American Movie Classics, Biography Channel, Bravo, CNBC, Court TV, History Channel, MSG Network, MSNBC, National Geographic Worldwide and more), Time Warner (owner of film and music production companies, theme parks, sports teams, magazines, websites and book publishers as well as Turner Broadcasting), Walt Disney (ABC, Disney Channel/Network, Lifetime Network, ESPN, Classic Sports, E! and more), Viacom (CBS, Paramount, Blockbuster, theme parks, music publishing, book publishing, Nickelodeon, MTV, TNN, and more), the News Corporation (FOX Channel, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, 20th Century Fox, London Times, TV Guide, the LA Dodgers, many stadiums, five New York sports teams, FOX Family Channel and more). Predictably enough, the news, entertainment, and self-help productions of these giant communications and culture empires reflexively and routinely isolate “individual” problems like poverty, joblessness, and military “post-traumatic stress” from their taproots in the historical and social-structural context of the profits system and that system’s imperial and military-industrial component. They harp instead on peoples’ supposed “personal responsibility” for their place in the world – a major theme on Dr. Phil, Biggest Loser, Deal or No Deal, Dr. Laura, and Judge Judy (the last is unsparing in her contempt for those who dare to be unemployed) and in such fine journalistic productions as “Self” Magazine (yet to be balanced on newsstands by a journal titled “Other”).

And they do so with no small impact. Modern corporate communications gives capitalist masters a capacity to shape mass perceptions (and even feelings) in ways that pre-television anti-capitalist sages like Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Rosa Luxembourg, and Antonio Gramsci, Trotsky (saved from the television era by a Stalinist ice-pick) could never have imagined in their wildest dreams (or nightmares). As Herbert Schiller noted, “a national communications pageant is orchestrated by the surrogates of the state-capitalist economy…The flow of information in a complex society is a source of unparalleled power” (Schiller 1973, pp.6-7).

Along with the intimately related absence of a serious anti-capitalist or even mildly social-democratic Left in the United States, the ubiquity of passivity-inducing, consent-manufacturing, victim-blaming, life-fragmenting, and inequality-justifying messages in the dominant media-politics culture makes it less than surprising that masses of freshly discarded Americans blame themselves for the fate that capital has imposed on them. As Sigmund Freud observed (in one of his rare useful formulations), psychological depression is anger turned inward. Dominant state-capitalist ideological, cultural, and ideological institutions function to turn blame away from those who deserve it – the top 1 percent that owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and larger shares of the nation’s politicians and media messages – and on to various deflective and inappropriate targets, including ourselves, who have been told again and again, in countless different ways, in a diversity of mediums, that our personal worth is a reflection of our exchange value – the measure of our utility to capital.

If you are looking for a reason (there are many) to work for the re-building and expansion of a Left in the U.S., please consider that anti-capitalism is among other things suicide prevention. In the meantime, let us remind increasingly frayed and torn fellow Americans that the Americans most worthy of suicidal feelings these days are at the top, not the bottom of society. As millions more lose their means of livelihood and the human community drifts yet closer to final material and social run under the yoke of capital, a final comment from Marx and Engels in 1848 seems as true as ever 161 years later: “The bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law…Society can no longer live under the bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” Society itself, in fact, will commit suicide by not transcending the profits system and its parasitic masters [2] – a topic for a future commentary.

Paul Street (paulsrtreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many essays, reviews, speeches, and book, including Empire and Inequality: American and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987). Street will speak on “Change and Continuity: An Assessment of Obama’s Early Administration” on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 7pm, Paul Engle Center, 1600 4th Av SE Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

NOTES

1. With unduly disastrous consequences in a militantly “market”-oriented (actually state-capitalist) society like the U.S. – one that grants trillions of dollars worth of government assistance to the giant incorporated Wall Street institutions who precipitated the current crisis as it boasts the weakest social welfare state (unique among modern industrial “democracies” in its failure to guarantee health care to all of its citizens) in the industrialized world.

2. For some dark and deeply informed reflections, please see Herve Kempf, How the Rich Are Destorying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2007).

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