Month: January 2010

Consumerism has, as Huxley feared, changed all of us – we’d rather hop to a brave new world than rein in our spending

By George Monbiot guardian.co.uk

Article historyWho said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a) the boss of Greenpeace, b) the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c) an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d) the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream.

In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it were not. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

As the Guardian revealed today, the British government is now split over product placement in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers, and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.

Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and wellbeing. Last week, for instance, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”. But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak” and “gloomy”. High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.

Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800 million people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.

In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

Most important, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for instance, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures that seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.

You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag”, which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly … We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending'”. Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”. But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning: immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.

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by Appu Esthose Suresh

Young men in Angad, an impoverished settlement in the heart of Amrtisar city, do not take kindly to strangers. With reason, as, according to the police, every male member at Angad’s Hindustan Basti is a drug addict. A group of young men disperses as this correspondent walks by, and a little later, another group quietly asks, “Chahiye [Do you want some]?”

Drug addicts stand aimlessly around the Basti giving legitimacy to Punjab Finance Minister S. Manpreet Badal’s claim, “Punjab is in the grip of a drugs hurricane.” An affidavit filed by Harjit Singh, secretary with Punjab’s Department of Social Security, states that 16% of the population of Punjab is hooked to hard drugs. Although the only available survey that covers the entire State of Punjab was conducted in the year 2000, it talks volumes about the extent of drug abuse. According to this survey, 67% of rural households in Punjab have at least one drug addict in the family. Satish Chandra, Health Secretary to the Punjab Government, in a candid admission to Covert said that the figures could only be worse today.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime maintains that Punjab has emerged as the new hub of drug trafficking. The State accounts for one-fifth of the total heroin confiscated in the country. Statistics provided to Covert by highly placed sources in the State Intelligence Bureau of the Punjab police reveal that 573.93 kg of heroin has been confiscated since 2005.

The sources pointed out that Punjab is vulnerable to drug trafficking because of its proximity to the “Golden Crescent” comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. In recent years, they said, drug traffickers from across the border have started using Punjab as their main supply line for sending illegal narcotics to the West. The porous border with Pakistan makes smuggling easy, but increased surveillance makes it difficult for traffickers to smuggle large quantities of drugs to other States. So they dump a good portion of the drugs and narcotics in Punjab where these are easily available at cheaper rates than in other States.

FINANCE MINISTER Badal blames drug abuse to unemployment and farmer-prosperity. He said, “The Green Revolution has made every farmer in Punjab relatively rich. Our new generation is not interested in agriculture. They want jobs in industries. But we are not able to become an industrialised State yet. So the disgruntled youth with money in plenty get distracted by such social evils.” Thirty-three-year-old Jagjot Singh has been undergoing treatment for drug abuse for the last three years. He is from a fairly prosperous family, and does not have to account for the money he spends. His parents used to live in the United States at one time. As a 15-year-old, he was curious and interested enough to try smack [heroin] for the first time at his friends’ insistence. It soon became an addiction. “Within three years I could not live without it. I dropped out of college,” says Jagjot. His parents stopped giving him financial support, so he became a driver. He started using drugs that could be injected. He remembers: “Every nerve in my body was going dry. I could not stand it and started acting like a mad person. It was scary and I decided finally to get rid of it somehow.”

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by B. R. Gowani

In crisis or to question
believers turn to God
(a non-existing entity)

Being an atheist
I turn to my Ba or Mother
(once in existence, now in memory)

O! Ba Ma
what has happened to Obama?
His TSA people
will pat and full body scan
any of the 675 million Muslims
traveling within the US
or from outside to the US

50%of the world’s Muslims,
that is, 10% of the world’s population!

Not all these Muslims can travel
most of them have been grounded till death
due to economic circumstances,
their leaders’ policies,
and US imperialism

Those traveling will protest, scream, curse
but will ultimately submit

The United States,
on a path to self-destruction,
will lend a sympathetic ear
but will execute the new rules, anyway

O! Ba Ma
Obama’s men will humiliate Muslims
but let’s ask Obama
to do a small favor:
Muslims should be allowed to reciprocate
in a small way
by fingering the patting/scanning officer
(for a symbolic give-back),
of course, with a sanitary glove on
cause no one likes the US shit

Side effect:
soothing cream industry will flourish

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

By Franklin Lamb, Countercurrents.org

Beirut: However President Obama is judged on various subjects for his first year in office, he has already made history in the way that neither his predecessor nor any other leader has ever managed.

On January 3, 2010, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010. The TSA press release sought to assure the traveling public: “The new directive includes long-term sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.”

At midnight Washington DC time, January 3, it went into effect and placed 675,000,000 (675 million) more Muslims and Arabs on yet another ‘Terrorism ‘list. Also added were Nigerian and Cuban Christians but they were not the target.

675 million is the approximate total number of people on the new list from the ten “prone to terrorism Countries” as the Washington Post called them this morning, or “terrorist leaning countries “according to Fox news, (Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen) and the four current” State sponsors of Terrorism” ( Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba).

All 675 million of these citizens are subject to being watched, patted down, and full body scanned under arrangements calling for ‘intense screening’ by the national airlines who would like to transport them to the US. As with the new H. R. 2278 Congressional initiative against satellite TV providers, the airlines flying from or via the 14 countries will have to enforce the new stringent security measures or themselves risk losing their lucrative US bi-lateral landing rights and potentially, end up on yet another US Special Global Terrorism facilitator list.

In addition to the approximate 675 million covered by the new measure, with the average birth rate of these countries being approximately 45 live births per 1000 per year, it means that more than 17,000,000 newborns will join the new US T list even before their first gulp of their mommy’s milk. And every subsequent years worth of new ‘T babies’.

The new list initiative is enough to warm Dick Cheney’s heart, reputed as he is to have never seen an Muslim or Arab (except those he does business with) he didn’t want terrorized by a listing or other means, but the international rebellion against this latest US War on Terrorism initiative has begun.

As this report is being prepared, Nigeria has just weighed via media reports reaching Beirut around noon on 1/5/09 and its government has demanded that their 150,000,000 (150 million) citizens be immediately scratched from the new T list of 14 countries singled out for special treatment. Nigeria Information Minister Dora Akunyili announced today that” Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, did not accept the new Terrorism list and we do not have a history of terrorism and such a move could not be justified. It is unfair to include 150 million Nigerians on the US list for tighter screening because Nigerians do not have terrorist tendencies.

It’s no secret these days that anyone who even looks like they could be Arab or Muslim is already on a ‘mental US Terrorism watch list’ evidenced by reports of some passengers deciding not to board flights after observing Hijab wearing females or Abaya wearing Muslin or Arab men looking at them. What often happens according to airport security officials is that non Muslims sometimes stare at Muslims trying to detect something unusal or suspicious about them and then the Muslims stare back wondering why they are being stared at and both parties become paranoid.

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(China Daily)

If the 9/11 terror attack on the US in 2001 set the tone for the world’s political arena in the first decade of the new millennium, it is no exaggeration to say that China’s rise re-defined the global economic landscape.

Statistics abound to testify to China’s rising economic prowess. To name but a few, once the numbers come in China will probably have replaced Germany to become the world’s top exporter in 2009; it is set to replace Japan to become the world’s second largest economy next year, from the 10th place 10 years ago; and it is playing a leadership role, together with other major players, in building a more fair and rational world economic order.

The country’s ascent in the past decade, however, would have been unbelievable for many Chinese 10 years ago, when East Asia was reeling in the wake of the devastating Asian financial crisis. To anchor the regional economy, China unswervingly but painfully decided to hold its currency firm, despite the domino-like fall of other regional currencies. The price it paid as a result was slumping exports and slowing economic growth at the turn of the century.

Since then, its economic leadership in the region has been growing, and so has its integration into the world economy. In 2001, China became a member of the WTO, marking a new page in the world’s economic history. More recently, it has been playing an increasing role in reforming the global financial regime, which was previously monopolized by developed countries.

Economists estimate that in 2009, China could have contributed to about half of the world’s economic growth. It speaks volumes about what that integration means for the world.

China’s economic achievement, however, has not come easily. Internationally, it has come amid the recurrent “China threat” accusation from some countries that feel uneasy about China’s rising economic power.

When the world economy suffered from falling prices, China was readily accused of “exporting deflation” to the rest of the world; when world market prices rose, China was accused of driving up prices. When the Asian currencies faced the danger of collapse in the Asian financial crisis, the yuan was asked to stand firm; when some countries suffered a trade deficit, they demanded that China raise the value of the yuan

Such drama has been repeatedly put on stage – all within the same decade.

Domestically, China has to continually push its market economy reform against frequent attempts by some to retreat to the old centralized economic management. For Westerners, who have taken for granted that the market economy is the best choice for economic development, it is hard to understand how strenuously Chinese policymakers have pushed that reform, something that was only initiated in the early 1980s.

Moreover, it is yet to solve such problems as a widening wealth gap, unbalanced regional development, restructuring of the manufacturing- and export-centered economy as well as the build-up of what will be a costly social security system.

If the past decade saw China rise to become an international economic powerhouse, the next will see how China deals with those internal economic challenges to make its development more sustainable.

By Michelle Chen

America’s borders tightened and loosened this week as the Obama administration revamped its travel restriction policies.

The formal end to a longstanding travel ban on people with HIV/AIDS has enabled travelers to enter the country without being subjected to discrimination based on their HIV/AIDS status. Steve Ralls of Immigration Equality hailed “the end of a shameful and discriminatory policy that has exacted a heavy price on our country’s reputation in the scientific community and kept countless individuals—both straight and gay—separated from their loved ones.”

The lifting of the ban (the result of a repeal process initiated under the Bush administration’s PEPFAR legislation) also sends a powerful signal of openness to the communities most impacted by AIDS around the world, which are concentrated in the Global South. The new policy sets the stage for the United States to host the World AIDS Conference for the first time since 1989.

But just as the gates opened for people with HIV/AIDS, the Christmas Day underpants bomb panic triggered a throwback to post-9/11 paranoia: travelers now face enhanced screening procedures for 14 countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and of course, the perennial warmed-over Cold War boogeyman, Cuba.

The administration doesn’t even seem interested in pretending the new restrictions are implemented equitably: the public’s willingness to tolerate profiling in the name of security is a hallmark of the Bush era that carried over smoothly into the new administration.

One student who was stopped at Los Angeles International couldn’t make sense of it: “They took my bag and took everything out, just right there in front of everyone. It feels bad. It’s supposed to be everybody or nobody. It’s not right.”

The public debate has been reduced to the “controversy” surrounding the most basic tenets of civil liberties. At a New York Times online forum, ACLU legislative counsel Michael German challenged the self-defeating tactic of counterterrorism via profiling:

Some people want to target Muslims, figuring some are bound to be “radicalized.” But what do we go by? Name? Appearance? The vast majority of Arab Americans, for instance, are not only innocent of sympathy for terrorism, they’re actually Christian. To profile Muslims you’d have to target blacks, Asians, whites and Hispanics (remember Jose Padilla?). How could that work, and would it really help identify those who are intending harm or would it simply divert resources that could be better used on investigations?

Finally, and not inconsequentially, racial profiling is wrong, un-American and unconstitutional. It is institutionalized racism. And when we abandon our principles, we not only betray our values, we also run the risk of undermining international and community support for counterterrorism efforts by providing an injustice for terrorists to exploit as a way of justifying further acts of terrorism.

Eight years after 9/11 ushered in a new regime of surveillance, intimidation and secrecy, the new administration has rebranded the absurd game of whack-a-mole in its homeland security strategies. Crossing the border isn’t just logistically chaotic these days; it’s a test of how much we’re willing to let fear push the boundaries of our constitutional rights.

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By Abdus Sattar Ghazali, Countercurrents.org

It was a bloody beginning of the year 2010 in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. More than one hundred people were killed and another 22 injured in a car bomb attack on the packed volleyball ground in Laki Marwat.

At the time when the suicide bomber attacked the volleyball ground, around 25 elders of the ‘peace committee’ were holding a meeting at a nearby mosque, but they remained unhurt. Officials say that the bomber apparently decided to target the crowd and the players, as most of them were members of the armed Lashkar that demolished houses of the militants and evicted them from their villages.

Elsewhere in the northwest province, a roadside bomb exploded near a car in the Bajur tribal region, killing a pro-government tribal elder and five of his family members. Tribal leaders who support the government against the militants are frequent targets of attacks.

Borrowing a page from Al-Anbar experiment, the US has advised Pakistan to enlist tribal leaders in the border areas in the fight against the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces. The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province of Iraq where American commanders have worked with Sunni sheiks to turn locals against the militant group. This has been hailed as a great success in fighting insurgents there.

Many experts point out that the experiment as it played-out in Iraq had produced disastrous results in El Salvador where it further polarized the populace and turned the people against the US efforts. Tellingly, the consequences of the Anbar model are emerging in the volatile Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) where even national army is seen as an occupying army by many fiercely independent-mind tribesmen.

The tragic incident of Laki Marwat best reflects the outcome of the new government policy to pit tribes against tribes through bribes. The pro-government tribes are being armed by the Pakistan government. Till this date more than 700 tribal elders have been killed in this strategy.

In October 2008, a suicide bomb attack on a pro-government tribal jirga in Orakzai killed at least 51 people and more than 200 wounded. Orakzai has been the most peaceful of Pakistan’s seven semi-autonomous tribal regions. Unlike most of the others, Orakzai does not border Afghanistan. The jirga was about to send a tribal lashkar led by 25 elders to destroy the alleged Taliban headquarters in the area.

South Waziristan Operation

The Laki Marwat bomb attack was not far from South Waziristan, where Pakistan’s mercenary army is waging an offensive, called Rah-e-Nijat (the Salvation Path), against the Pakistani Taliban or militants. That operation has provoked apparent reprisal attacks that have killed more than 500 people since October when the military operation was launched.

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By Amy Goodman

Dennis Brutus broke rocks next to Nelson Mandela when they were imprisoned together on notorious Robben Island. His crime, like Mandela’s, was fighting the injustice of racism, challenging South Africa’s apartheid regime. Brutus’ weapons were his words: soaring, searing, poetic. He was banned, he was censored, he was shot. But this poet’s commitment and activism, his advocacy on behalf of the poor, never flagged. Brutus died in his sleep early on Dec. 26 in Cape Town, at the age of 85, but he lived with his eyes wide open. His life encapsulated the 20th century, and even up until his final days, he inspired, guided and rallied people toward the fight for justice in the 21st century.

Oddly, for this elfin poet and intellectual, it was rugby that early on nagged him about the racial injustice of his homeland. Brutus recalled being sarcastically referred to by a white man as a “future Springbok.”

The Springboks were the national rugby team, and Brutus knew that nonwhites could never be on the team. “It stuck with me, until years later, when I began to challenge the whole barrier—questioning why blacks can’t be on the team.” This issue is depicted in Clint Eastwood’s new feature film, “Invictus.” President Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, embraces the Springboks during the 1995 World Cup, admitting that until then blacks always knew whom to root for: any team playing against the Springboks.

In the late 1950s, Brutus was penning a sports column under the pseudonym “A. de Bruin”—meaning “A brown” in Afrikaans. Brutus wrote, “The column … was ostensibly about sports results, but also about the politics of race and sports.” He was banned, an apartheid practice that imposed restrictions on movement, meeting, publishing and more. In 1963, while attempting to flee police custody, he was shot. He almost died on a Johannesburg street while waiting for an ambulance restricted to blacks.

Brutus spent 18 months in prison, in the same section of Robben Island as Nelson Mandela, where he wrote his first collection of poems, “Sirens, Knuckles, Boots.” His poem “Sharpeville” described the March 21, 1960, massacre in which South African police opened fire, killing 69 civilians, an event which radicalized him:

Remember Sharpeville

bullet-in-the-back day

Because it epitomized oppression

and the nature of society

more clearly than anything else;

it was the classic event

After prison, Brutus began life as a political refugee. He formed the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee to leverage sports into a high-profile, global anti-apartheid campaign. He succeeded in getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games in 1970. Brutus moved to the United States, where he remained as a university professor and anti-apartheid leader, despite efforts by the Reagan administration to deny him continued status as a political refugee and deport him.

After the fall of apartheid and ascension to power of the African National Congress, Brutus remained true to his calling. He told me, “As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent of the shacks, the situation becomes worse. … The South African government, under the ANC … has chosen to adopt a corporate solution.”

He went on: “We come out of apartheid into global apartheid. We’re in a world now where, in fact, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; the mass of the people are still poor … a society which is geared to protect the rich and the corporations and actually is hammering the poor, increasing their burden, this is the reverse of what we thought was going to happen under the ANC government.”

Many young activists know Dennis Brutus not for his anti-apartheid work but as a campaigner for global justice, ever present at mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—and, most recently, although not present, giving inspiration to the protesters at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. He said, on his 85th birthday, days before the climate talks were to commence: “We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor. … The people of the planet must be in action.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2009 Amy Goodman

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By News Agencies

China’s United Nations ambassador on Tuesday said that Beijing was not ready to immediately support new sanctions against Iran, as called for by Western powers, saying the issue needed “more time and patience.”

“This is not the right time or right moment for sanctions because the diplomatic efforts are still going on,” China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Yesui told reporters through an interpreter.

The U.S. and other Western allies accuse Iran of working to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge and says its program is for peaceful purposes.
Earlier on Tuesday, Iran welcomed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s remarks that the West would not insist on a hard-and-fast deadline for starting dialogue over the Islamic Republic’s contentious nuclear program.

Clinton said Monday that the United States has begun discussing with its allies methods of “pressure and sanctions” to take on Iran. She emphasized that the goal was to keep the door to dialogue open, so as stop the Islamic regime without harming innocent civilians.

“We share the same idea with her. Deadlines are meaningless,” Iranian government spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said on response on Tuesday.
The U.S. and other Western allies accuse Iran of working to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge and says its program is for peaceful purposes.

“Our goal is to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving,” Clinton said on Monday.

A State Department official said that the goal was to keep the “door to dialogue” open, but added that the U.S. “would not wait forever.”

“We have avoided using the term “deadline” ourselves, since we have made clear that the door to dialogue will remain open,” said the official. “But we have also made clear that we will not wait forever, and discussions on pressure and sanctions with our international partners have already begun.”

Reiterating Clinton’s remarks, the official said: It’s not appropriate to comment on the details of those discussions, except to say that our objective is to pressure the Iranian government without contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranian citizens.”

According to the official, the U.S. was growing wary of Iran’s continued defiance of international demands, which he said had contributed to the recent discussion with its allies.

“The results of our efforts to engage the Iranians directly have not been encouraging. And we remain disappointed at Iran’s non-response to a proposal for the Tehran Research Reactor,” said the official.

“The Iranian government essentially announced a deadline to receive a positive response to their unacceptable counter-offer,” he added, referring to the West’s offer to export uranium enrichment off Iranian territory. “This sort of behavior only increases our concerns and those of others in the international community, about Iran’s intentions.”

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