Democracy
Governments Exist to Further the Interests of "Favored Groups"
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"We the People" are Never the Favored GroupComment by HealthWrights Administration:The problems humanity faces cannot be solved in the context of the predatory, global capitalism that rules the earth. Unregulated capitalism is itself the problem that needs to be solved. It is pointless to lament the moral and intellectual short-comings of the 1% who rule. If they did not have precisely the shortcomings that they do, they would never have risen to the top of the banking and corporate systems that are destroying us. The problem is systemic. Whether we are ruled by the Democrats or the Republicans makes little difference. The names of our leading politicians even less. The multinational banks and corporations are the favored groups whose interests our government exists to support and expand. Given this conflation of government and business, we can expect neither health nor freedom nor peace.
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Global Research, July 13, 2012
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Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system."—Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary Andrew Mellon
Governments have never existed to solve problems domestic or international. Governments and their institutions exist merely to further and secure the interests of favored groups, but We the People are never the favored group. Paul Krugman recently wrote that
the fact is that the Fed, like the European Central Bank, like the U.S. Congress, like the government of Germany, has decided that avoiding economic disaster is somebody else’s responsibility. None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.
The government of Louis XVI made scanty attempts to solve the problems of the French people which ultimately led to the French Revolution. The various governments in the United States in the early 1800 made few attempts to resolve the problems raised by slavery in American society and the Supreme Court made any resolution of them impossible which led to the Civil War. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austro-Hungary made no effort to resolve the ethnic problems his empire faced in the Balkans which ultimately led to the First World War. Great Britain and France made no attempts to ameliorate the problems Germany faced as a result of the conditions imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles which then resulted in the Second World War. No government has made much of an attempt to resolve the problems created in the Levant by the creation of Israel, and instability, slaughter, and war have prevailed ever since. Now a third world war, an atomic conflagration, may be in the offing. Domestic and international conflicts are being exacerbated world-wide by similar failures at problem resolution. The Western nations and Israel are not making any serious attempts to resolve their problems with Iran. The only possibility of resolving the problems in Western minds is for Iran to merely conform to what the Western world wants. Western European nations are treating the debt crisis similarly. There is only one resolution: the Southern European states must merely do what the Northern ones say regardless of how it affects the peoples of Southern Europe. And the American Congress is paralyzed by each party's insistence that its way is the only way. So what is really going on? What are Krugman and others missing? The answer is as plain as sunlight on a cloudless day. Governments have never existed to solve problems domestic or international. Governments and their institutions exist merely to further and secure the interests of favored groups. For instance, each nation's foreign policy always consists of "protecting our interests" somewhere or other. Whose interests are "our interests"? Why the favored group's, of course. And who are the favored groups? Well, it all depends. The favored group of European governments is international investors, not the common people of a single European nation. The Greeks can be damned so long as the investors get repaid even though the common people of Greece did not borrow one euro from international investors, the Greek government, which has no income it doesn't take from ordinary Greeks, did, and the investors were not only willing but anxious to lend. The favored group of the Mubarak government in Egypt was the Egyptian military that even after the overthrow of Mubarak is still trying to secure its interests. The favored group in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen is a royal family. In Iraq and Iran, a religious sect is favored. Every one of these governments except, perhaps, Iceland has shown a willingness to kill those common people who are never the favored group. The United States of America is an extreme case. The Democrats in Congress have their favored groups; so do the Republicans. But the common people is not the favored group of either party, although the politicians pay homage to it. America is comprised of a mass of groups, some favored, some not. Even though the nation's founders warned the Colonists about the danger of factions, every issue in America attracts a faction, and sometime or other, government favors one or more of them. Americans have pro and an anti-immigration factions. Within these, there are pro and anti-Asian factions, pro and anti-Latino factions and within these, Central and South American and Cuban factions. There are pro and anti-gun control factions, abortion factions, contraception factions, labor factions, business factions, healthcare factions, free and regulated market factions, free trade and protectionist factions, global warming and anti-global warming factions, more and less taxation factions, big and small government factions, federal and states' rights factions, imperialist and anti-imperialist factions, religious and anti-religious factions. Factions here; factions there; disagreement everywhere! Where Americans once believed united we stand, divided we fall, today they believe division secures our group's special interests. And the moneyed groups have made this work by using raw power and bribery. But the nation? Oh, well, its seams are all coming apart. The nation doesn't matter to factions; only the interests of the favored group does. And that is why American society does not work. It is a nation whose people do not live together; they merely live side by side, where neighbors who have lived side by side for years break into violent conflict over the most trivial of things: a barking dog, a crowing rooster, a loud party, a minor inconvenience as, for instance, a parked car, children playing in someone's yard, a tree-limb extending over a property line, a sign or even an American flag on a pole, the color of a house, the height of a lawn and the kind of plants in it—just some of the recent neighborly conflicts I have observed. America is a nation comprised of people who revel in conflict. Even the legal system is adversarial. Our cities, or at least parts of them, are war zones. More people are killed daily in America than in Afghanistan. Since Americans can't get along with each other why would anyone expect them to get along with the rest of the world? What makes anyone believe Americans care if Sunni and Shi'as get along? The human condition will never improve until governments everywhere begin governing for the people, all the people, and none but all the people. So long as governments govern for the benefit of special groups, antagonisms, dislikes, and hatred will prevail; the Earth will seethe with conflict. Some will say it's just human nature, that human beings have a dark side rooted in greed that cannot be extirpated. If so, we are just like ants where workers and soldiers live merely to provide for queens and their entourages of drones who exist merely to produce more ants, where common people are but beasts of burden that exist for the sake of the greedy. Perhaps this view is accurate, but the best of humanity has never thought so. Only Machiavelli's The Prince among thousands of works is renowned for this view (although Ayn Rand may be catching up). Religious and humanitarian works that contest it abound. The trouble is we have too many people like Paul Krugman. Generally his heart seems to be in the right place; he seems to genuinely care about what happens to people, but he never goes far enough. He and those like him seem never to be able to mine an argument deep enough to find the source of its lode. They stop digging when they get to something that fits their preconceptions, as, for instance, personal human failures. During an interview on Internet radio, I was once asked, being a veteran, why soldiers fight. The host, I am certain, expected some profound response such as for God and country, for human dignity, for the rights and freedoms our people enjoy. But I merely answered, because they're there! When we take perfectly normal young Americans off the street and send them into battle, we do not presume that they are inherently killers. After all, killers are bad people. Yet we send these good young men and women off to kill and they do. When they return, we again do not assume they are killers. We expect them to return to being perfectly normal young men and women. So do bankers do what they do because they're bad people or because they're bankers and banking requires it? Are politicians corrupt because they are bad people or are they corrupt because politics requires it? People, ask yourselves this question. Do our institutions make us what we are? If our institutions promote greed, will we be greedy, if our institutions promote killing will we be killers, if our institutions promote bribery, will we be bribed, if our institutions promote corruption, will we be corrupt? What will we be when our institutions promote goodness and how can we build such institutions? The Romans had an expression—cui prodest?—meaning “who stands to gain?" Who advocates a specific view isn't important; what is important is who stands to gain from it. Only then can who the view favors be known. But in today's world, cui prodest? is too general a question. It is too easy to conjure up arguments that purport to show that many or even all gain. That everyone gains from tax cuts for the rich can be argued ad infinitum. But who stands to gain the most financially can't. It always has a specific answer, and if you want to know who the government's favored group is at any time, that is the question that must be answered. When the answer is some group other than the common people, the view must be rejected; otherwise, the human condition is mired in the mud of hate and will never improve, conflict will persist, and the human race will very likely exterminate itself and perhaps life itself. Jefferson knew that merchants had no country. And that the business of America is business has often been voiced by the established elite and endorsed by the Republican party. The Congress is in gridlock because the Republicans do not care what happens to America or the American people, just so long as their favored constituents' interests are preserved. That is what Paul Krugman and others like him fail to understand. That is why the models of economists, even if any turn out to work, are of no consequence. The only models that matter are those that advance and secure the interests of the favored group. Can the problem of unemployment be solved? Nobody in power really cares! Can the problem of world-wide poverty be solved? Nobody in power really cares! Can peace ever prevail between human beings? Nobody in power really cares! The dead require no benefits, and a very small government will suffice. Postscript. Since drafting this piece, I have discovered that three political scientists, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, have provided empirical evidence for my thesis in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their views are summarized in a piece by Daniel Little: "What is really interesting about this analysis is that it implies that the sizzling rhetoric coming from the right -- personal attacks on the President, anti-gay rants, renewed heat around abortion and contraception -- is just window dressing. By the evidence of voting records, what the right really cares about is economic issues favoring the affluent -- tax cuts, reduced social spending, reduced regulation of business activity, and estate taxes. This isn't to say that the enraged cultural commentators aren't sincere about their personal belief -- who knows? But the policies of their party are very consistent, in the analysis offered here. Maybe the best way of understanding the extremist pundits is as a class of well-paid entertainers, riffing on themes of hatred and cultural fundamentalism that have nothing to do with the real goals of their party." There you have it. The people are viewed by the establishment as chickens to be broiled for lunch.
John Cozyis a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.
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Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You
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Recently a friend of mine died from cancer. It all happened too fast for anyone to keep up with. We were discussing how to arrange for chemotherapy when clinical tests had already shown that the cancer was inoperable and untreatable. We were discussing how to get him to dialysis when it was already clear that this procedure would only make his last days less comfortable. We were discussing how to get hospice care into the situation when it was already plain that the family did not have either the physical or the emotional resources to care for him at home. Perhaps because of denial we were always discussing issues that no longer had any relevance. In his case all that was relevant was making him comfortable and helping him say goodbye.
A similar thing seems to be happening with regard to global health. The unraveling of the earth's living systems is happening too fast. Many of our discussions are no longer relevant. Take the question, "How shall we preserve and strengthen democracy in the US?" for example. There is nothing left to preserve. We are already a police state. Or the question, "How shall we reform capitalism so that it becomes sustainable?" That tipping point was crossed quite some time ago. The capitalist elite is destroying the earth and it can't be stopped. The system is irreparable. It's that simple. So long as profit is the sole bottom line collapse is inevitable. You can take your pick. Will it be ecological collapse, the Third World War, a humanly engineered pandemic, an economic melt down, or some combination of these possibilities? It seems quite impossible to avoid them all.
In speaking of the current "security and surveillance state" in the US, Chris Hedges, in the article below, says, "now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it." I am thinking it will be impossible, at least until it begins to self destruct under the weight of its own contradictions.
So what is to be done? That brings us back to the issue of our being a police state. It is clear that law abiding protest will not turn things around. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, will be labeled as terrorism and that will be used to justify draconian punishments without due process. With Big Brother's eyes everywhere, who will be able to be able to mobilize a defense? Perhaps another tipping point has come and gone. We have to ask ourselves whether the time for effective protest and civil disobedience is past. It would appear that Stalin has re-incarnated himself in America. The gulags have already been constructed.
The world, at least as we have know it, is terminally ill. We have run out of treatments for it.
So again, we must ask: What is to be done? First, we can bide our time and watch. As the old structures collapse, new possibilities will open up. Crises will be points of opportunity. Second, we can teach. People need to be told why the collapse is happening so when they see it they will understand the reasons for it. Writing articles, talking to neighbors and doing teach-ins still seem like options. Emphasis needs to be given to bad systems, not bad people. And the system that most needs to be targeted is corporate capitalism. In this context, protests and demonstrations may have some relevance, but primarily for creating opportunities for teaching. Third, we can hope that the collapse will be big enough to awaken the still sleeping masses to the reality of their situation, but not so big as to leave no remnant. If we do these things, then next time perhaps we can put together a real democracy and a sustainable system that is in harmony with the larger ecology. At that point a lot will depend on how well we have done our teaching. I can see nothing more than this to hope for in the present moment.
http://www.truthdig.com/
Apr 2, 2012
The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.
This is why the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B. Forrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last Dec. 31, puts into the hands of people with no discernible understanding of legitimate dissent the power to use the military to deny due process to all deemed to be terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers, and hold them indefinitely in military detention. The deliberate obtuseness of the NDAA’s language, which defines “covered persons” as those who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” makes all Americans, in the eyes of our expanding homeland security apparatus, potential terrorists. It does not differentiate. And the testimony of my fellow plaintiffs, who understand that the NDAA is not about them but about us, repeatedly illustrated this.
Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.
Last August there was an email exchange between Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security and a former deputy director of the counterterrorism division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and Thomas Kopecky, director of operations at Investigative Research Consultants Inc. and Fortis Protective Services LLC. In that exchange, leaked Feb. 27 by WikiLeaks, Kopecky wrote: “I was looking into that U.S. Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements. Thus far, I have only hear[d] rumors but not gotten any substantial connection. Do you guys know much about this other than its US Domestic fiscal ideals?”?
Burton replied: “No, we’re not aware of any concrete connections between fundamentalist Islamist movements and the Day of Rage, or the October 2011 movement at this point.”
But that changed quickly. Stratfor, through others working in conjunction with the FBI, soon linked U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
In early September, U.S. Day of Rage, which supported the Sept. 17 call to occupy Wall Street, received Twitter messages that falsely accused it of being affiliated with terrorist groups. The messages came from a privately owned security and intelligence contractor, Provide Security, managed by Thomas Ryan, who works for U.S. military and government agencies, and Dr. Kevin Schatzle, a former FBI, Secret Service and New York City Police Department counterterrorism agent who is on the advisory board of a private intelligence firm that sells technology to profile and interrogate terrorism suspects. On Sept. 1 U.S. Day of Rage received three private, direct Twitter messages that read:
“Now you are really in over your head with this. Muslims from an Afghanistan Jihad site have jumped in. ...”
“You seem peaceful, but #Anonymous will tarnish that reputation and FAST! They plan to hack NYPD and Banks for #OccupyWallStreet with #RefRef.”
“Just a heads up. I watched your training videos, but do you realize the #Anonymous relationship/infiltration will cause you MANY problems.”
On Oct. 14, 2011, Provide Security’s Ryan published an article—“The Email Archive of #OccupyWallStreet Movement,” on the Andrew Breitbart Presents Big Government website page—that tied U.S. Day of Rage to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Ryan said in the article that he had “recruited other people to help U.S. begin the collection of data” from social media sites that included U.S. Day of Rage. The article goes on:
On August 10, 2011, the hacker group, “Anonymous” announced that it would join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. That’s what sparked my interest in monitoring #OccupyWallStreet.
I reached out to a colleague and asked if he would be interested in studying the protest with me. At first, it seemed disorganized, and we believed it would only be a few hundred protestors.
As we engaged in monitoring its growth, we recruited other people to help us begin the collection of data available via social media. We began mapping out key players, and monitored Anonymous’s efforts to organize protests in the San Francisco Bay area public transportation system (#opBART) in order to detect patterns of key influences.
Then, at the end of August, we were alerted by a fellow researcher that information about USDoR (U.S. Day of Rage, to which Occupy Wall Street is connected) had been posted on Shamuk and Al-Jihad, two Al-Qaeda recruitment sites. We began to take the “Occupy” protest more seriously, and dedicated more time to researching and monitoring.
Days later, Anonymous announced that it would be releasing its new DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) tool. Because of the Al-Qaeda posting, we contacted the New York Field Office of the FBI so they could investigate the potential threat. From that point on, we decided we needed to include the Human Element of Intelligence (HUMINT), and to infiltrate the protestors to map their ties to Anonymous, and to the postings on Shamuk and Al-Jahad.
Though all this sounds like the delusions of the mentally imbalanced, or perhaps mentally impaired, it was enough to trigger a response within the twisted minds of those who work from the shadows of our security and surveillance state. O’Brien, who was working at the time as a digital media architect for a publicly traded energy efficiency firm, was told by the company’s director of federal programs, a former interrogator and foreign language specialist with the Massachusetts Army National Guard, that he had been asked about her by U.S. government agents numerous times. She was pulled off several projects and then pushed out of her job.
Now the engine of conspiracy, which feeds the machine, was in full gear. On Jan. 11, Australian Security Magazine published an article titled “Radical Islam: Global influence in domestic affairs” that directly tied U.S. Day of Rage to radical Islamic groups. It read, in part:
More recently we found the same types of activity by radical Islamists during the planning of the U.S. Day of Rage that was scheduled for September 17th 2011. While it certainly did not take root and there were none of the violent clashes that took place during the UK riots, none the less the same types of people were there seeking to influence proceedings. Those aiming to influence the U.S. Day of Rage followed a similar pattern as the group and individuals we found trying to influence groups for CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government]. Most were looking to promote violent confrontation, while some were spreading low level jihadist propaganda.
One of the plaintiffs in our lawsuit, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who has advocated transparency laws that would clear the way for WikiLeaks to operate in Iceland and helped produce a video about the 2007 Baghdad airstrike that killed two journalists and nine other civilians, did not appear in court. Author Naomi Wolf, who, along with Cornel West, has offered to join me, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelander and three others as plaintiffs, read Jónsdóttir’s affidavit to the court.
In January 2011 Jónsdóttir, although she is not a U.S. citizen, was served by the United States Department of Justice with a subpoena demanding information “about all [her] tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” The demanded information, which she has refused to provide, includes all mailing addresses and billing information, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, and all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. The Justice Department subpoenaed records for the period from Nov. 1, 2009, to the present. The foreign minister of Iceland advised Jónsdóttir not to travel to the United States for the court hearing on Thursday, fearing she might be detained, especially after the Justice Department refused to issue a statement in writing stating that she would not be held if she appeared on American soil.
Perhaps the most chilling exchange on Thursday took place between government lawyers and Judge Forrest. The judge, who will probably rule in May, repeatedly asked for assurance that the plaintiffs would not be subject to detention under the NDAA. It was an assurance the two government lawyers refused to give. She asked U.S. Assistant Attorney Benjamin Torrance whether the government would see a book containing the sentence “I support the political goals of the Taliban” as providing “material support” for “associated forces.”
Torrance did not rule out such an interpretation.
“You are unable to say that [such a book] consisting of political speech could not be captured under [NDAA section] 1021?” the judge asked.
“We can’t say that,” Torrance answered.
“Are you telling me that no U.S. citizen can be detained under 1021?” Forest asked.
“That’s not a reasonable fear,” the government lawyer said.
“Say it’s reasonable to fear you will be unlucky [and face] detention, trial. What does ‘directly supported’ mean?” she asked.
“We have not said anything about that …” Torrance answered.
“What do you think it means?” the judge asked. “Give me an example that distinguishes between direct and indirect support. Give me a single example.”?
“We have not come to a position on that,” he said.
“So assume you are a U.S. citizen trying not to run afoul of this law. What does it [the phrase] mean to you?” the judge said.
“I couldn’t offer any specific language,” Torrance answered. “I don’t have a specific example.”
There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M. Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011. Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote in the latest issue of Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” Bamford noted that the NSA has established listening posts throughout the country to collect, store and examine billions of email messages and phone calls.
If we lose this case it will hand to the vast network of operatives and agencies that investigate and demonize anyone who is not subservient to the corporate state the power to detain citizens and strip them of due process. It will permit the security and surveillance state to brand as terrorists any nonviolent protesters and movements, along with social and political critics, that in the government’s imagination have any trace of connection to al-Qaida or “associated forces.” If the National Defense Authorization Act is not reversed it will plunge us into despotism, leaving us without a voice, trapped in eddies of fear and terror, unsure of what small comment, what small action, could be misinterpreted to push us out of our jobs or send us to jail. This is the future before us. And we better fight back now while we can.
Illustration by Mr. Fish
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
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- Created on Wednesday, 22 December 2010 12:21
- Written by Karen Franklin
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Note by HealthWrights staff
A number of important points are made in this fine review of Ethan Watters' book: That our simplistic, reductionist ideas about “mental health” are perhaps disease producing. That when big multinationals get into the act, profit trumps all other concerns and values. That diversity is connected to health. The number of people in prisons plus the number of people in mental hospitals provides a good indication of the general health of a society. By this criteria we should not be exporting our culture. Rather we should be learning from those who have a more holistic and humanistic understanding of mental health.
From Karen Franklin's Blog on forensic psychology and criminology, In The News.
A successful virus is adaptive. It evolves as needed to survive and colonize new hosts. By this definition, contemporary American psychiatry is a very successful virus. Exploiting cracks that emerge in times of cultural transition, it exports DSM depression to Japan and posttraumatic stress disorder to Sri Lanka.
Journalist Ethan Watters masterfully evokes the heady admixture of moral certainty and profit motive that drives U.S. clinicians and pharmaceutical companies as they evangelically push Western psychiatry around the globe. On the ground in Sri Lanka following the tsunami, for example, hordes of Western counselors hit the ground running, aggressively competing for access to a native population "clearly in denial" about the extent of their trauma. Backing up the foot soldiers are corporations like Pfizer, eager to market the antidepressant Zoloft to a virgin population.
Watters has done his homework. Each of his four examples of DSM-style disorders being introduced around the world is rich in historical and cultural context. Despite their divergences, each successful expansion hinges on the mutual faith of both the colonizers and the colonized that Western approaches represent the pillar of scientific progress.
It is ironic that Americans are so smugly assured of the superiority of our cultural beliefs and practices, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Do we really want others to emulate a country with skyrocketing levels of emotional distress, where jails and prisons are the primary sites of mental health care? Does our simplistic cultural metaphor of mental illness as a "chemical imbalance, " with human minds reduced to "a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowls of our skulls," represent true enlightenment?
Our implicit condescension is made explicit if we imagine the converse, one of Watters' interview subjects points out: "Imagine our reaction if Mozambicans flew over after 9/11 and began telling survivors that they needed to engage in a certain set of rituals in order to sever their relationships with their deceased family members. How would that sit with us?"
Not only is our missionary zeal condescending, it may be harmful. Watters provides evidence to suggest that the "hyperintrospective" and "hyperindividualist" model of Western psychiatry can be destabilizing to time-worn, tried-and-true indigenous healing practices, in some cases even producing the problems we naively believe we are combating.
"What is certain," Watters cautions in his conclusion, "is that in other places in the world, cultural conceptions of the mind remain more intertwined with a variety of religious and cultural beliefs as well as the ecological and social world. They have not yet separated the mind from the body, nor have they disconnected individual mental health from that of the group. With little appreciation of these differences, we continue our efforts to convince the rest of the world to think like us. Given the level of contentment and psychological health our cultural beliefs about the mind have brought us, perhaps it's time that we rethink our generosity."
Perhaps it is already too late to turn back the tide. Thanks to the exportation of Western diet and lifestyle, 19 out of 20 inhabitants of the tiny island of Nauru in the Pacific Islands are now obese. Previously hardy islanders are stroking out in their 20s and 30s. The globalization of the American psyche is more insidious, but perhaps in the end it will prove equally catastrophic.
Reading Crazy Like Us left me with a nightmare image of a homogeneous future world with McDonald's and Starbucks (see my review of Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture) on every corner, obesity gone wild, and Western psychiatry reigning supreme
Police State USA
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Global ResearchNot only that, but the authority claimed inside the EO does not only apply to National Emergencies and times of war. It also applies in peacetime.
The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order exploits the “authority” granted to the President in the Defense Production Act of 1950 in order to assert that virtually every means of human survival is now available for confiscation and control by the President via his and his Secretaries’ whim.
The unconstitutionality of the overwhelming majority of Executive Orders is well established, as well as the illegality of denying citizens their basic Constitutional and human rights, even in the event of a legitimate national emergency. Likewise, it should also be pointed out that, like Obama’s recent Libyan adventure and the foregone conclusion of a Syrian intervention, there is no mention of Congress beyond a minor role of keeping the allegedly co-equal branch of government informed on contextually meaningless developments.
As was mentioned above, the scope of the EO is virtually all-encompassing. For instance, in “Section 201 – Priorities and Allocations Authorities,” the EO explains that the authority for the actions described in the opening paragraph rests with the President but is now delegated to the various Secretaries of the U.S. Federal Government. The list of delegations and the responsibility of the Secretaries as provided in this section are as follows:
Read other articles by Brandon Turbeville here.
Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Mullins, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor's Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of three books, Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, and Five Sense Solutions. Turbeville has published over one hundred articles dealing with a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville is available for podcast, radio, and TV interviews. Please contact us at activistpost (at) gmail.com.
One World -- One Governance System
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- Written by David Korten
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Note by HealthWright Staff
"The task before us is to create a coherent system of global governance under the auspices of the United Nations--provide the UN with the human and financial resources to fulfill its original mandate, purge it of corporate influence, and introduce the reforms needed to strengthen its function as a democratic governing body."
In this article David Korten calls us to that task.
The Article
UN Yes! -- Bretton Woods No!
The United Nations was founded in 1945 with a mandate to secure a long standing human dream of peace, justice, and prosperity for all people. The UN's founders chose to open the UN charter with the prophetic words, "We the peoples of the United Nations...." Perhaps they anticipated that where governments might fail, one day the world's people would join in unity, as we are joined in unity here to day, to carry forward this dream.
Everywhere, we the peoples are rising to the challenge. A globalizing civil society, rudely awakened by the excesses of corporate tyranny, is unifying around the vision of the UN's founders -- a democratic world of peace, justice, and prosperity for all.
In the protest actions of Seattle '99 some 70,000 people from all over the planet faced the rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray of America's police state to protest the violence and injustice of the world that is and to celebrate the peace, justice and prosperity for all of the world that can be. As many as a million others participated in simultaneous demonstrations in cities elsewhere as the global movement for democracy announced itself to the world. Millions more have participated in protests against corporate globalization--both before and since--in India, France, Thailand, England, Bolivia, Switzerland, Brazil and many others. The global movement for democracy grows out of the national democracy movements that played a critical role in the breakup of the Soviet empire, the fall of apartheid in South Africa and the other great progressive social movements of our time, including the labor, civil rights, environmental, peace, women's, and gay rights movements. Together we have learned that in an interdependent world, until peace, justice, and prosperity are secured for all people, we are all at risk.
Our focus this evening is on the institutions that govern the global economy. Currently these governance functions are divided at the global level between the United Nations system and the Bretton Woods system. The UN system is comprised of the United Nations secretariat; its specialized agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN's various development assistance funds such as UNDP, UNIFEM, UNFPA, and UNICEF. The Bretton Woods system is comprised of The World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization. The UN system has by far the broader mandate, is more open and democratic, and in its practice has demonstrated a far greater commitment to human, social, and environmental priorities. By contrast, the secretive and undemocratic Bretton Woods institutions have consistently aligned with the interests of money, banks, and global corporations.
The founders of the United Nations intended that responsibility for managing global economic affairs--including the overall supervision and policy direction of the Bretton Woods institutions--would fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations General Assembly and its Economic and Social Council. At least since 1981, however, the U.S. government has actively undermined the UN's ability to fulfill this mandate. It has instead supported the Bretton Woods institutions in acting as global governments unto themselves, imposing their will on nation states in disregard of both the democratic will of their own people and the terms of UN conventions and treaties.
The reasons are clear. The U.S. government prefers that the World Bank and IMF take their marching orders from the U.S. Department of Treasury, which in turn marches to the tune of Wall Street banks and investment houses. The WTO functions under the guidance of the U.S. Trade Representative's office, which functions as an extension of the U.S. Business Roundtable--a lobbying arm of the largest U.S. based transnational corporations.
We live in one world. Dividing the governance of its affairs between two competing governmental systems--one responsible for labor, health, food, human rights and environmental concerns and the other for trade, investment, and development--has resulted in a grotesque distortion of human priorities. The need for a more holistic approach to addressing human needs is now more evident than in 1945--the need for global cooperation more urgent.
The choice before us is either to expand the power and mandate of the Bretton Woods triumvirate to cover labor, health, food, human rights, and environmental affairs--thus limiting the UN's role to matters of military security, refugees, and emergency relief--or, reaffirm the original mandate of the United Nations and build its capacity to fulfill its intended function.
Judged by their actions the Bretton Woods institutions dream of a world in which all public services are run for profit by private corporations; all goods and services for domestic consumption are imported from abroad and paid for with money borrowed from foreign banks; and all productive assets and natural resources are owned and managed by global corporations producing for export to generate the foreign exchange needed to repay the foreign loans. This economic absurdity is the dream of global financiers and corporations. It most certainly is not the dream of the world's people.
Not only do the Bretton Woods institutions consistently subordinate social and environmental concerns to corporate profits, they aggressively use their power to block or preclude national and local governments from giving preference to public interests over private corporate interests. To further expand their powers and mandate would be rather like giving the fox the keys to the chicken coop. Our goal must be to reclaim from these institutions the political and economic spaces they have colonized so that people may act through their local and national governments to create vibrant economies, cultures, and governing processes responsive to their needs and values.
Corporate rule can be imposed from the top down--from the global to the local. Democracy must be built from the bottom up--from the local to the global. Our need is not for global institutions with the power and the mandate to dictate local behavior. We need global institutions that assure the right and freedom of local people everywhere to fully express their creative capacities toward the creation of a world responsive to their values, their needs and their aspirations.
In the course of human affairs we find from time to time that by their nature certain institutions are so inherently at odds with human freedom and well-being and so far beyond reform that they must be dismantled and replaced with more responsive and accountable institutional forms. As our forebears eliminated the institutions of monarchy in favor of the institutions of democracy, we must now eliminate the institutions of Bretton Woods--the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization--in favor of the United Nations.
For all its evident faults and deficiencies, the United Nations--in stark contrast to the Bretton Woods institutions--is sound in concept and mandate. It is relatively open and democratic. Its institutional structures are reformable. Redirecting to the United Nations the public funding now so badly misused by the Bretton Woods institutions would quickly eliminate the UN's financial and human resource deficits.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to building a United Nations with the capacity to fulfill its necessary role is the increasingly successful corporate initiative to co-opt the UN's resources, policies, and even its logo and to preclude any action by the UN to hold corporations accountable to the public interest. The eagerness with which the UN leadership has responded to this intrusion threatens to seriously erode the UN's legitimacy and credibility with the very citizen groups whose support it most needs.
The UN is properly an institution of the world's governments and of all the people they represent. Corporations, by their nature, represent only the short-term financial self-interest of a small and wealthy elite. They have no legitimate place in the deliberations and decision processes of the United Nations--nor of any other public governing body. If the UN is to be effective in the essential role of advancing the reform and democratization of economic relations among and within nations, it must be freed from corporate influence.
We must hold the UN and our own governments accountable for creating an institutional and policy framework for a planetary system of locally rooted, globally cooperative, just, sustainable, and compassionate economies based on the principles of authentic development and responsive to the needs of all. The magnitude of the task is compounded by the need to rebuild a United Nations suffering from decades of neglect, to dismantle the institutions of Bretton Woods and undo the enormous damage they have wrought, and create new institutions with more appropriate mandates and structures within the UN system.
By its every action the World Bank has increased the foreign indebtedness of low income countries. It is time to replace it with a United Nations International Insolvency Court to which indebted countries can turn for assistance in freeing themselves from the chains of international debt and IMF conditionality without sacrificing their ability to provide essential public services.
The International Monetary Fund forces countries to give up control over the flow of money and goods across their borders, leading to massive trade imbalances, international indebtedness, exploitation, and financial instability. It is time to replace it with a United Nations International Finance Organization responsible for:
* Monitoring national trade and current account balances, and facilitating negotiations toward agreement on corrective action where there are consequential and persistent imbalances between imports and exports.
* Helping national governments establish capital controls that strengthen domestic employment, domestic investment, domestic ownership, and domestic technical capability; and discourage financial speculation.
* Coordinating international action to prevent money laundering by international and offshore banks and tax evasion by individuals and corporations using off shore tax havens.
The World Trade Organization regulates national and local governments to prohibit them from regulating transnational corporations, trade, and finance in the public interest. Let us replace it with a United Nations Organization for Corporate Accountability that would facilitate:
* International anti-trust actions to break up global concentrations of corporate power, with special attention to banking, media, and agribusiness.
* Dechartering procedures against transnational corporations with repeat convictions for criminal behavior.
* Legal action by those harmed by a corporate subsidiary in one country to collect damages from the parent company based in another country.
* The ratification of an enforceable code of conduct covering all corporations with operations in more than one country, including a strict prohibition on corporate political participation.
The WTO has consistently given priority to trade over concerns for labor, health, food safety, food security, and environmental standards. We must be clear that trade is a means, not an end. Responsibility for matters relating to employment, food safety and security, human and environmental health, and other aspects of human and planetary well-being properly rests not with trade lawyers, but with the relevant specialized UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the International Labour Office, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the United Nations Environment Programme. The mandates and capacities of these agencies to deal with trade related issues should be clarified and strengthened--always giving human and natural interests priority over corporate interests.
Though I've focused here on needed political and institutional reforms at the global level, equally serious reforms are needed at local and national levels. No where is such reform more urgent than here in the United States. Our government has been the chief architect of the destructive policies of the Bretton Woods system and the weakening of the United Nations. Time after time it has acted to undermine democracy and authentic development in Southern countries. It now stands as the chief barrier to the reform of the destructive structures of corporate globalization. Those of us who hold U.S. citizenship have a special obligation to the world to end this travesty through the deep reform of our political system.
The task before us is to create a coherent system of global governance under the auspices of the United Nations--provide the UN with the human and financial resources to fulfill its original mandate, purge it of corporate influence, and introduce the reforms needed to strengthen its function as a democratic governing body.
We have long waited passively, confident that our institutions would fulfill for us our dreams of peace, justice, and prosperity for all people. Now we know the truth. Our institutions have no such magical powers. The creative energies of humanity reside within people--people like us. Our dreams will become reality only through our own commitment and creative effort. If our institutions block our creative expression, we--the peoples of the United Nations--can change them. That is our right. That is our responsibility--to ourselves--to one another--and to the earth that sustains us all.
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