Guest post by Steven Miller

(This is the last of three guest posts laying out the real story about the role of Wall Street banksters in the recent bankruptcy of Stockton California. In this post Miller lays out the extra-legal, criminal nature of government austerity measures.)

If the Oakland Tribune or any other newspaper were really representing the public interest they would spread the word that the people of this country are paying the Banksters twice. The government Bail Out to the banks was at least $16 trillion. This was free money at a dollar-for-dollar rate, unheard of in the history of finance. This money could have and should have been used to pay off all outstanding debts from personal debts to student debts, mortgage debts and city debts. After all, if you owe someone money, and then pay him off, you don’t have to keep on paying. Isn’t that how things work?

So why should we pay them a second time? This open collusion by the government to guarantee bank profits at the expense of everything else in America is the 21^st Century expression of how Mussolini famously defined fascism – the merger of the corporations and the state.

The economist Michael Hudson describes it this way:

“Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed credit-card debt in 2012.) The weapon in this financial warfare is no larger military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings.”  (10)

The Politics of Austerity

Austerity is implemented across the world in various forms, but mostly this is accomplished through extra-legal measures. Leaders of the G20 countries, the biggest national economies, met in Toronto to decide how to address the economic Melt Down. Surrounded by the army to hold off the protestors, these leaders “agreed” to implement Austerity across the board. There was no treaty. No legislation was proposed. No plebiscite was held to find out the will of the people. Austerity was simply imposed.

The same extra-legal process occurred earlier this year with the so-called $90 billion Sequester that permanently cuts social programs for millions of people in the US. A bi-partisan Congress that is supposedly broken and not capable of functioning passed the Sequester more rapidly than any legislation since the Bail Out. While the process was disguised with a few hearings, and did end with legislation, the process occurred completely outside of the legally established fact finding process. No one was legally sworn in to hold them accountable for their testimony and bogus inflammatory statements.

Two years ago Michigan passed Public Act 4 – the Emergency Manager bill. This law empowered the governor, at his own personal discretion, to seize any city or municipal government and appoint a financial manager – either a person or a corporation! – with total power to break contracts and sell off public land, parks, buildings, etc to private corporations. In the 2012 election, the people of Michigan voted for a constitutional amendment to void the act.

Two weeks later, the law was simply re-established in a slightly different form by the governor. (11) Then the governor seized the city of Detroit, depriving them of the civil right to vote. These maneuvers completely void the democratic process and confirm the old saying that law is simply the will of the 1%, written down. It is possible that California will see similar propositions proposed in the 2014 election.

This combination of legal and extra-legal maneuvers, the merging of corporations and the state, demonstrate what political power really is. The Banksters work at it 24/7 and impose it upon the rest of us. We are not going to reverse this class political power by voting every 4 years, or by trying to convince bought-off legislators to see things our way for once. It is time to learn from the masters. The 99%’s struggle for political power must consider how to impose the will of the people, every day and every way, and force government officials to be truly accountable or pay the price.

Notes

10)  Michael Hudson. “The Finance Industry Has Pried into Every Sector of the Economy, and Has Ended Up Running the Whole Show”. December 31, 2012

11)   Rally, Comrades, March-April, 2013. www.rallycomrades.org

photo credit: London Permaculture via photopin cc

Originally posted at Daily Censored

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

The late Barry Goldwater

My decision to focus my activism in the sustainability movement has nothing to do with the horror stories climate change and Peak Oil aficionados tell about the horrible future my children and grandchildren face. I have never found terrifying or guilt-tripping people an effective way to engage them politically. It always seems far more likely to generate demoralization and apathy. I choose to focus my time and energy on sustainability-related issues based on the conviction that people who wish to survive coming economic and ecological crisis will need be extremely well organized. After thirty years of organizing, I find that sustainability engages people at the neighborhood and community level in a way no other issue can.

My friends and neighbors get it. They are all affected by the skyrocketing cost of fossil fuels, mainly because high energy and transportation costs make everything more expensive. They are all acutely aware that something in society has to change drastically. This realization makes them open, to varying degrees, to trying new, less energy intensive ways of doing business and meeting their families’ basic needs.

The only stumbling block I face in organizing around sustainability is efforts by the corporate media to demonize us as liberals or “greenies.” I can see why they do this. Corporate media coverage of climate change and sustainability-related topics is heavily dominated by the fossil fuel industry, which has a vested interest in discouraging people from reducing their use of oil, natural gas and coal.

How Terms like “Conservative” and “Liberal” Lost Their Meaning

Labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” are totally meaningless when it comes to implementing less energy-intensive lifestyles. This relates in part to the bastardization of the word “conservative” by neoliberals, which started with the so-called Reagan revolution in the 1980s. Neoliberalism can be broadly defined as the elimination of all government functions, other than law enforcement, security and defense, in the service of corporate-controlled governance. It’s a radically reactionary political viewpoint that’s consistent with Mussolini’s definition of fasicsm: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” It bears no relation whatsoever to the conservatism my grandparents, parents and I (prior to age 21) subscribed to. Like our role model Barry Goldwater, we were staunch fiscal conservatives who believed in allowing other people total freedom to make their own lifestyle choices, provided they didn’t interfere with someone else’s freedom.

Ironically some of the strongest adherents of neoliberalism as so-called liberals like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This can be seen in their aggressive promotion of pro-corporate globalization treaties, privately run charter schools and other initiatives to privatize public education and the scaling back and privatization of welfare and now social security.

The confusion generated by political labels is especially problematic for sustainability activists like myself who believe that economic and monetary reform are the centerpiece of building a truly sustainable society. Especially as the specific economic and monetary reforms we seek are fiscally conservative in nature. Below are some examples:

1. An end to the drive for perpetual growth.

Sustainability activists believe human beings must commit – quickly – to living within their means, a prime example of fiscal conservatism. They take the position that industrialized society is exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, and has caused serious depletion in many essential resources. The price of oil and gas are skyrocketing because we have nearly used up the cheap stuff. What remains is difficult and expensive to extract and refine. Likewise we have nearly exhausted the ocean’s fish stocks, much of the earth’s topsoil and, in many parts of the world, fresh water.

2. The replacement of debt-based money creation by private banks with a reserve-based monetary system run by a publicly accountable governmental body.

Elimination of debt is part and parcel of living within one’s means.

3. Improved efficiency of production and distribution through economic relocalization, i.e. reducing energy and transportation costs by producing and sourcing food, energy, clothing, and building materials at a local and regional level.

In the case of electricity, there is a 30-40% enegy loss in the process of generation and transition. We can recoup this lost power by creating local distributed generation systems. “Waste not, want not” is also a basic principle of fiscal conservatism.

4. Community-supported initiatives to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

I also heard many variations on this principle growing up. Only purchase what you really need. Darn, mend, sharpen and repair to extend the lifespan of clothes, tools and appliances. Pass on what you no longer need to someone else who can use it.

The Day Goldwater Called Himself a Liberal

A few years before he died, Goldwater himself acknowledged that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” had ceased to have any meaning. In 1996, he joked with Senator Bob Dole, who also resisted the takeover of the Republican Party by neoliberalism and the religious right: ”We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party” (see Conservative pioneer became an outcast).

Micah White, senior editor at Adbusters magazine, has written an absolutely brilliant essay regarding the direction of political change for issue #95 (Philosophy Issue). What he says, in a remarkably gut-wrenching way, is that current efforts by progressives to address fascism and deep decay in US society are having absolutely no effect:

“This is a sincere call for an American Revolution against the decadent, vile plutocrats driving our nation into the ground. Super-consumers, sinister bankers, celebrity whores dine on foie gras and truffles while more than 25 million Americans are unemployed and 2.8 million homes are in foreclosure. A cabal of greedy bastards has turned America, the pioneer of modern democracy, into a corporatocracy where a handful of nonhuman megacorps own our government, political parties, courts, schools and media. The opulent one percent are sucking us dry even as they push us, debt-ridden and redundant, over the precipice. Only an insurrection against their monied despotism can save us now.

Making the case for the overthrow of the American corporatocracy is a serious matter. From the perspective of the plutocrats in power, it is a criminal, seditious, treasonous act punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. Therefore we must be absolutely certain that ours is a righteous rebellion. We must be confident that although our revolution may be illegal from their perspective, it is supremely legitimate, commendable and obligatory from the perspective of universal, natural law. And so that we may guard against recklessness, we must be judicious and put the actions of the American government on trial before deciding if the sentence of execution by popular revolution is necessary and just.”

After 30+ years of activism, what really got to me was the following paragraph:

“Everywhere we look there are signs of moral decay, political corruption and fascistic tendencies. However, activists have not been passive. For decades, since the end of democracy in America first became undeniable, we have tried every tactic to avert catastrophe. We have voted, written letters, donated money, held signs, protested in marches, clicked links, signed petitions, tweeted websites, written books, taught classes, knitted sweaters, learned how to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed petty vandalism … All this has been for naught. Popular revolution remains the only reasonably viable tactic remaining.”

To read the full article go to:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/95/revolution-america.html

Since the October 2008 economic collapse, American workers have faced an unprecedented “austerity cuts,” with major hits on their livelihoods and labor and pension rights. Yet Americans, unlike the rest of the world, don’t respond by taking to the street in the millions. Why is this? Many progressive pundits are deeply dismayed at the apparent passivity and apathy of the American public. Others, myself included, feel the power elite has been laying the groundwork for decades for a totalitarian takeover (also known as fascism) of democratic government.

The Deep State, Peter Dale Scott’s term for shadowy network of government officials and corporate elite that secretly steers foreign and domestic policy behind the façade of democracy (see http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html), seems to rely on two main strategies in suppressing opposition to their agenda. The first involves the indoctrination, via a multibillion dollar public relations industry, of two generations of Americans with a passive, non-engaged consumerist mentality. The second involves a vast interlocking network of left gatekeeping foundations that totally dominate progressive organizing in the US.

Progressive media critics have written extensively about the corporate takeover of the mainstream media that has facilitated censorship of anti-corporate news and the total saturation of American life with pro-corporate messaging. The role of left gatekeeping foundations, which may be even more critical in suppressing organized dissent, receives scant attention, even in the “alternative” media (e.g. the Nation, Democracy Now, the Progressive, Mother Jones). This may relate to the heavy reliance of these outlets on left gatekeeping foundations for much of their funding.

The CIA Funds Both the Right and the Left

I first learned that the Nation was indirectly funded by the CIA through Sherman Skolnick’s investigation of the 990 and 990A tax returns of the Ford Foundation and other allegedly “liberal” foundations that were funding them. Skolnick felt this was the main reason for the Nation’s rabidly dismissive attitude towards the scrupulous research of Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Sylvia Meagher and other scholars into the role US intelligence played in both Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King assassination and other so-called “conspiracies” involving government criminal activity.

I was unaware of the domestic “counterinsurgency” role – involving a range of “Cointelpro”-type functions – of left gatekeeping foundations prior to reading Webster Tarpley’s Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography. It’s really impossible to understand who Obama is or his policy choices without understanding that the so-called liberal foundations that gave him his political start in Chicago had the same fundamental pro-corporate agenda that has characterized his presidency. An agenda underscored by the funding these and similar foundations receive from right wing, CIA-linked foundations.

The Role of the CIA in Protecting Corporate Interests

I think it’s also essential here to clarify what the CIA is and who they represent. Their official function is to gather intelligence overseas, though it’s an open secret that they also engage in international “counterinsurgency” activities: they covertly influence foreign elections (via advertising and paying local campaigners); they create political instability and even “color” revolutions, by funding and training opposition groups (as in Libya); they organize military coups to overthrow democratically elected governments (as in Guatemala, Chile, Iran and Indonesia); they organize and fund mercenary armies (often by collaborating with them in narcotics trafficking) Afghanistan) to overthrow democratically elected governments; they torture suspected Islamic terrorists; and they covertly assassinate foreign political leaders and labor and human rights activists.

According to the corporate media spin, the CIA does all this to protect the American public from Communists, Muslims, immigrants or whatever bogeyman the corporate media happen to be serving up on the six o’clock news. However a careful study of their history shows that the CIA operates exclusively to support and protect corporate interests. The CIA was initially started by Wall Street lawyers (Allen Dulles, a former United Fruit Company board member, and Frank Wisner) and largely recruits its leadership from Yale, Harvard, Princeton and other Ivy League Schools. When it assassinates a foreign leader overthrows a democratically elected government in Chile, Indonesia, Iran or Guatemala, it does so for the benefit of Wall Street companies who want access to that country’s natural resources (the 1954 coup in Guatemala followed Arbenz’s attempt to nationalize a United Fruit Company plantation), cheap labor and markets.

Allen Dulles, first CIA director

Oh No, Another Conspiracy Theory

Although both Tarpley and Skolnick are often dismissed as conspiracy-obsessed wing-nuts, the fundamental role left gatekeeping foundations play in progressive American politics isn’t a half baked conspiracy theory. There is an extensive, carefully documented body of research into why these foundations were formed and why they knowingly agreed to be co-opted by the CIA.

To be continued.

Click to Play: iframe>

Lyrics:

Won’t you Please Come to Chicago by Graham Nash

Though your brother’s bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that’s known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … to get better

Politicians sit yourselves down
There’s nothing for you here
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For a ride

Don’t ask Jack to help you
‘Cause he’ll turn the other ear
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Or else join the other side

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

Somehow people must be free
I hope the day comes soon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Show your face

From the bottom of the ocean
To the mountains on the moon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
No one else can take your place

Yes, we can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

***

The most eye-opening section of Kurlansky’s 1968 (see previous blog) is chapter 3, in which he discusses the importance of violence and the rhetoric of violence in attracting media attention. As a veteran of the 1999 Battle of Seattle (the Seattle anti-WTO protest), I can’t help but agree. If it hadn’t been for a group of Black Bloc anarchists who smashed store front windows at MacDonald’s and Nike, our 75,000 strong protest would never have made the major dailies, much less the six o’clock news. Of course, to give the Seattle police their due, the police riot also attracted significant media attention.

Violence? Or Property damage?

Police violence in Seattle

Violence=Publicity

According to Kurlansky, no one understand the importance of the media in movement building better than Mohandas K. Gandhi, who inspired the current non-violent movement. Gandhi went to great lengths to obtain Indian, British, and American coverage of every protest he organized. In fact it was Gandhi himself who first spoke of the value of British violence in enticing the media to cover the Quit India movement.

Kurlansky goes on to describe a police chief who thwarted Martin Luther King’s organizing efforts in Albany, Georgia by studying his non-violent tactics and countering them with non-violent law enforcement tactics. As a result, King’s Albany campaign was a total failure. Because there was no police violence, it received no national media attention. And without media attention, King was unable to pressure Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to enforce federal civil rights laws there.

After Albany, King and other civil rights leaders deliberately targeted towns with hothead police chiefs and angry volatile mayors. Korlansky relates an incident in 1965 in which a King protester named Annie Lee Cooper punched the sheriff and then dared him to hit her. The photo of Sheriff Clark clubbing a defenseless woman made the front page of newspapers throughout the country.

Later in the book, Kurlansky describes the most highly publicized student antiwar protests of 1968. Here again, he stresses that they only took on national importance because of the repressive (sometimes violent) measures government and university administrators (particularly at Columbia University and University of California-Berkeley) took to stop them. Had the authorities merely ignored the student protests and sit-ins, they never would have received the national media attention that made them historic events.

The 1968 Democratic Convention

At Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, yet again it was police violence by Mayor Daley’s goons that drew national media attention to what was essentially a harmless prank by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs and other Yippies (Youth International Party). Featured events at the Yippies’ Festival of Light in Lincoln Park (where the police riot occurred), included snaking dancing, poetry, mantras, the Yippie Olympics, a Miss Yippie Contest and Pin the Rubber on the Pope.

In addition to attacking non-violent protesters engaged in civil disobedience (remaining in the park after the 11 p.m. closing time), police also viciously attacked reporters, cameramen, as well as going on a clubbing rampage in the neighborhood (Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was one of the local residents who was attacked).

All this magically transformed the Yippies non-violent prank into front page news. Though ironically they had to share the limelight with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Violent Soviet repression of Dubcek’s freedom movement also made this event international front page news.

Police riot at 1968 Democratic convention

To be continued, with a discussion of the Czechoslovakian student/intellectual movement that resulted in Prague Spring and its implications for a repressive American regime in 2010.

I have just read a fascinating book by British author Mark Kurlansky regarding the global liberation struggles that occurred in 1968. For progressives of my generation, this was a year of great hope and inspiration – one that saw millions of students and workers protesting in the streets. I bought 1968: the Year That Rocked the World partly out of nostalgia and partly in the hope of learning something from historic struggles that might help us reclaim the so-called western democracies that are really corporate-run fascist states (“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini)

How the Mainstream Media Shapes Memory

Up until now, I have viewed the political significance of the sixties with the tunnel vision of someone whose recollection and understanding of those years has been shaped by the popular media. Obviously Kurlansky’s book has greatly broadened my perspective. Previously I only associated two mass movements – the US anti-war movement and the French general strike – with the year 1968. Somehow I forgot there were riots in forty US inner cities that year. Although I clearly recall Alexander Dubcek and Prague Spring, I also forget that this also occurred in 1968. This was the inspirational movement that led Czechoslovakia to relax harsh censorship laws and allowed the flourishing of freedom of the speech, press, and artistic expression. I somehow forget that this, too, occurred in 1968.

As Kurlansky points out, there were comparable protest movements in at least a dozen countries – on both sides of the Iron Curtain – that year. Moreover students and workers in different countries learned from, copied, and supported movements in other countries.

In all, Kurlansky describes mass movements in 19 countries in 1968:

• US
• France
• Czechoslovakia
• Poland
• Yugoslavia
• Romania
• Italy
• West Germany
• East Germany
• Spain
• UK
• Russia
• Nigeria
• Palestine
• Mexico
• Brazil
• Ecuador
• Chile
• Uruguay

In addition to his emphasis on the global nature of the 1968 political movement, Kurlansky stresses two other important themes in 1968: 1) the secret to a successful social movement is getting media attention and 2) the secret to getting media attention is violence.

To be continued, with a discussion of how Martin Luther King strategically incorporated violence in his non-violent protests to increase media attention.

In my last (Oct 27) blog, I discussed a YouTube presentation by Richard Heinberg, based on his book Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World, about the way the ruling elite is likely to manage the inevitable social upheaval stemming from severe resource scarcity. Option I, which I discussed previously, is a type of feudal fascism involving a strong central government and the forced removal of large numbers of people to prisons and work camps. Heinberg admits that Option I may provoke strong popular opposition, which may make full, long term implementation of Option I impossible (see http://archive.richardheinberg.com/museletter/186).

Option 2 Ecological Keynesianism

As Option 2, Heinberg offers Susan George’s vision of Ecological Keynesianism.  (George is an American expatriate, economist and anti-globalization activist living in Paris since 1956). (see http://tinyurl.com/2fbulrr and http://loyno.edu/twomey/bread-world-and-global-network-justice?c_id=313).

Like Option 1, this scenario also envisions a strong central government, but operates more like the New Deal in creating work programs and rebuilding infrastructure.  Heinberg gives the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a vast New Deal social experiment accompanying the damming of the Tennessee River, in which thousands of Americans were moved into new experimental communities. I think the example is a good one, as this model sounds a lot like what Obama’s good buddy Zbigniew Brzezinski is proposing in terms of benevolent government that improves efficiency by foregoing democratic processes.

People often forget the downside of the TVA – namely that thousands of people were forced to participate in this experiment against their will. And that the creation of a large, somewhat brutal security network was necessary to police it – a network run between 1950-58 by former Nazi war criminal Werner von Braun.

Under this Green New Deal, a strong central government would provide the finance capital to build public transport systems, super-insulate millions of homes and commercial buildings; develop distributed renewable energy systems; and reorganize agriculture on biointensive, organic model – creating millions of jobs along the way.

George proposes to finance this massive capitalization by taxing speculative currency exchange transactions and eliminating tax havens in the Caribbean and elsewhere.  She points out that half of all world trade passes through off-shore tax havens – and that their elimination would automatically increase tax revenues by $250 billion dollars.

George states that the only way to bring about a Green New Deal government is to build a very powerful populist movement demanding it – as no western democracy will agree to it voluntarily, so long as they are under the thumb of multinational corporations.

Option 3 Bottoms Up

Option 3, according to Heinberg is a vast expansion of existing grassroots and local government activity to revamp local infrastructure to become more self sufficient in providing for basic food and energy needs. Heinberg believes that some areas of the world will be forced to go for Option 3, as more and more countries become failed states with the deepening economic and resource crisis (maintaining a strong central state requires energy for transportation and communication).

Heinberg’s main argument against adopting Option 3 in large industrialized countries is that in most communities in North America and Europe are ill equipped to provide even the most basic services (food, water, power, security) without the support of complex regional and national systems. A breakdown in these services would likely lead to social unrest, leading whatever central government that remains to implement Option 1.

If I should suddenly develop a fatal cancer, Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything, is definitely the person I would want to break the news. Heinberg is a soft spoken, gentle, Mahatma Gandhi kind of guy who blows you away by telling you the party is over and there is no soft landing. But in such a nice way.

There is a great YouTube video (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRz91eimTg&feature=related) of a talk he gave a few years ago in New Zealand about what western society will look like mid-century. Heinberg admits that it’s not politically correct to tell the truth about how bleak things are. Besides having a remarkable low-keyed style that really twists the knife in, Heinberg also seems to have a clearer vision than anyone else of what the ruling elite – who have known about impending resource scarcity since the 1970s – are likely to do as things continued to deteriorate.

We’re Out of Everything

Heinberg is more about resource scarcity than climate change. He says it’s obvious that people aren’t scared enough of climate change to do anything about it. And it’s not just oil and natural gas we’re running out of. In the next 15-20 years, we will also be out of coal, uranium (there will still be coal and uranium in the ground – but extracting it will be incredibly expensive), rock phosphate (needed for industrial agriculture), fresh water, topsoil, grain, fish, arable land, minerals and precious metals (including Indium and Gallium, which are needed to make solar panels).

The hard truth is that human beings have been living for decades beyond the limits of the natural world can provide. Unfortunately people have a hard time getting their heads around this when the media continually bombards them with the message that sacrifice is bad and they have a right to expect something for nothing.

Goodbye Southern California

Heinberg makes it clear that vast urban centers like southern California will simply not exist two decades from now. For two reasons. Owing to dwindling fresh water supplies – everywhere – there will be no way to supply drinking water to millions of people between Los Angeles and the Mexican border.  And because of skyrocketing fuel costs, no one is going to transport food 5,000 miles (as they do now) to feed them.

Major Social Upheaval is Inevitable

He also makes the strong point that public dialogue needs to move beyond changing lightbulbs and carbon taxes – to the major social upheaval that no longer be avoided – as well as options for managing it. We all know damn well the ruling elite has been discussing it – at least since 2000. That’s one good thing about Republicans. They find it much harder to conceal what they’re really up to.

Heinberg lays out three broad societal changes that need to occur as fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive:  de-mechanization (replacing fossil fuel driven machines with human and animal labor), de-urbanization (moving people closer to their resource based) and a total infrastructure revamp -  as existing infrastructure is totally dependent on machines and fossil fuels.

The Role of Government in Managing Societal Change

The most interesting part of the talk was an exploration of the three possible routes government will take in managing this massive societal change. Because it suddenly becomes  clear to me why civil liberties are under such concerted attack in the US (by both Republicans and Democrats) and why the US, China and Russia continue to incarcerate minorities, dissidents and now debtors at break neck speed, putting them to work in our prison industrial complex (see http://www.opendemocracy.net/charles-shaw/essential-reading-on-us-prison-industrial-complex).

Option 1:  A kind of feudal fascism, involving forced movement of people away from cities into prisons and work camps (and slavery), which will involve continual surveillance of the rest of the population. It will be instituted by whipping up popular support for strong law enforcement and military intervention during a period of massive unemployment, homelessness, food shortages and resulting instability and chaos.

Heinberg already sees evidence the world’s most powerful countries (the US, China and Russia) have selected Option 1 and are already moving in this direction. Come to think of it, so do I.

To be continued with Option 2 and 3 – don’t hold your breath – they are a little better than Option 1, but not much.

The University of Washington epidemiologist Dr Stephen Bezruchka has been writing and speaking for nearly two decades on the real cause of illness and poor health. As he repeatedly points out, lifestyle factors (including smoking) only account for ten percent of the causation of illness. According to Bezruchka, the single most important determinant of adult health status and life expectancy is your mother’s income and social status during pregnancy and the first three years of life.

Although more than fifty years of epidemiological studies bear this out, it is only in the last decade scientists could explain why this is – thanks to the new science of epigenetics. While the early Freudians used to make similar claims about unfavorable “psychological” influences on infants and young children, it is now clear the effect is biological rather than psychological. That it relates to “epigenetics” – a term referring to changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than the underlying DNA sequence.

Numerous studies show that environmental stress and hormones (particularly stress hormones) produced during pregnancy can cause genetic code to be transcripted (into proteins and enzymes) in such a way to negatively affect the development of the immune system – in addition to predisposing the fetus to biochemically based mental illnesses.

The Link Between Income Inequality and Poor Health

However the most important epidemiological finding, according to Bezruchka, is that the effect of low income status on health is much more pronounced in societies with extreme income inequality. Study after study bears this out. In other words, a poor person’s adult status and life expectancy will be worse if he is born into a country with big gap between the economic status of its rich and poor residents (such as the US where 10 percent of the population controls 71 percent of the wealth). In fact the US is near the bottom of the charts if you look at statistical indicators that measure the overall health of a country. In life expectancy it rates 38^th, just behind Cuba. In infant mortality it rates 30^th, just above Slovakia.

These findings also belie the efforts of policy and opinion makers to convince us that class differences have disappeared in the US. For example, it’s extremely rare to see working class families depicted on American TV. In fact some Republican commentators accuse their opponent of “class warfare” for even mentioning the existence of an underclass. Nevertheless with a double dip recession on the horizon, in the face of healthy corporate profits and CEO bonuses, American’s class divide is receiving more and more attention.

A Mindset Driven By Social Service Cuts

Dr Susan Rosenthal, in Sick and Sicker, also points out that it’s only in the last thirty years that politicians and policymakers – on both sides of the aisle have made sick people responsible for their own illness. Epidemiological studies – as long as scientists have been doing them – have always shown that poor health correlates directly with low income and social status. Rosenthal notes that even in Dicken’s time it was taken for granted that the poor – undernourished and living in cold, damp, overcrowded tenements – were far more prone to illness than their middle class counterparts. In her mind this shift to a new “blame the victim” mentality has been deliberate – to justify aggressive social service cutbacks (by both Republicans and Democrats) that became fashionable with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Role of Oppression and Exploitation in Illness

Although the data establishing the link between income inequality and poor health is unequivocal, epidemiologists are still at a loss to explain why poor people have poorer health in countries with more income inequality. Bezruchka relates it to the fact that people in more egalitarian societies look after each other more. I like Rosenthal’s explanation better. She relates it to the extremely high level of oppression and exploitation in societies with extreme income disparity.

She points out that minimum wage workers aren’t just poor. They also work in exploitive, arbitrary and often punitive job settings that they feel powerless to change. The immense stress of confronting this massive stress on a daily basis takes an enormous toll on both the human body and psyche.

Dr Susan Rosanthal’s website: http://susanrosenthal.com/

A bibliography of Dr Stephen Bezruchka’s writings can be found at his faculty website http://depts.washington.edu/hserv/faculty/Bezruchka_Stephen

***

The Most Revolutionary Act on Radio:

Gorilla Radio – Chris Cook, Victoria British Columbia

(click on link)

Chris and I discuss how I was first targeted, following my decision to support the occupation (of an abandoned school)  that led to the formation of Seattle’s first African American Heritage Museum – as an alternative to the crack cocaine epidemic among the city’s African American teenagers. We also talk about my research into HIV AIDS, my hospitalization and the Veterans Administration psychologist I worked with who also helped GIs illegally stationed in Cambodia in the sixties and seventies (and terrorized into keeping quiet about it).

XZone Interview with Rob McConnell

(click on link  – show is syndicated – fast forward the music to hear interview)

Rob and I discuss the phone harassment, break-ins, attempts to run me down – and my psychiatric hospitalization. We also talk about the political activities that seemed to lead the government to target me – including my research into HIV AIDS – and my inability to get help from the Seattle police. Then we cover the whole area of conspiracies in general, which are more accurately called State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADS)

What I find most troubling about the reactionary “useless eater” mentality (see May 24 blog) pushed by policy and opinion makers is the way Americans have internalized the belief that it’s their own fault if they become ill. In fact much of the US population seems more freaked out about getting sick than dying. I can’t say I blame them, as so many American workers have no sick leave and lose a day’s pay every time they are ill.

Americans also spend billions of dollars on alternative health care and vitamin supplements and other non-prescription remedies. And many are practically obsessed with healthy eating, only drinking bottled or filtered water, compulsive exercise routines and meditation, yoga and other stress reduction techniques to keep their massive job stress from making them sick (at present those who still have jobs do the work of 1.5 to 2 people on average).

The media compounds the problem by promoting a variety of cough and cold remedies and caffeine and mega B vitamin “boost” drinks to enable people to attend work when they have colds or even quite serious illnesses, such as bronchitis and influenza.

Medicating Kids

Parallel to this pressure for adults to be healthy, is immense pressure for children to be “normal.” While parents seem to be appropriately skeptical about taking unnecessary drugs themselves, they seem far too eager to and medicate children with behavior problems. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I am well aware that ADHD is a genuine disorder affecting 1-2% of children (but not childhood bipolar disorder – this is a diagnosis heavily marketed by drug companies and totally unsupported by developmental or epidemiological research).

At the same time I see absolutely no reason why American children should be three times as likely to be diagnosed and treated for ADHD than children in other parts of the world. In my work, I come across psychiatrists from all over the world. Based on their input, I can safely asserted that the eagerness of US doctors (at the behest of drug companies) to prescribe psychotropic medication for children is an international scandal that casts the standard of  American pediatric and psychiatric care in a very bad light.

Sending Sick Kids to School and Day Care

However I am even more concerned about the number of kids who have to go to school or day care when they’re sick because their working parents can’t afford to stay home and have nowhere else to send them. In doing so, they will also expose all their child’s classmates. Who, because their immune system is still forming, are very likely to develop the illness themselves and expose other children. Over the past decade, I have seen many children who suffer 12 or more serious (requiring antibiotics) throat, ear, sinus or chest infections a year.

This is a major public health problem, especially now that asthma (often triggered by chest infections), is reaching epidemic proportions among American children. Allowing children to suffer one respiratory infection after another can have permanent lifelong health consequences.

Take Home Message

Good health is elusive. In general we have a very limited ability to stay well by eating right, exercising and reducing stress. Epidemiological studies show that only 10% of illness is accounted for by lifestyle factors (including smoking).

The reality is that illness – both acute and chronic – is fundamental to the human condition. In my experience, people willing to allow themselves to be ill and take time off to get well recover faster and cope better with other life stresses better.

Obviously adults have the choice whether or not they want to work when there are sick. Parents with sick children must make that decision for them. They are also entrusted with that child’s future health and welfare. And I think they need to weigh that responsibility carefully in deciding to send a sick child to school or daycare.

To be continued, with a discussion of the role of socioeconomic status (at birth) and income inequality in determining adult health status and life expectancy.

***

The Most Revolutionary Act on radio

Gorilla Radio – Chris Cook, Victoria British Columbia

(click on link)

Chris and I discuss how I was first targeted, following my decision to support the occupation (of an abandoned school)  that led to the formation of Seattle’s first African American Heritage Museum – as an alternative to the crack cocaine epidemic among the city’s African American teenagers. We also talk about my research into HIV AIDS, my hospitalization and the Veterans Administration psychologist I worked with who also helped GIs illegally stationed in Cambodia in the sixties and seventies (and terrorized into keeping quiet about it).

XZone Interview with Rob McConnell

(click on link  – show is syndicated – fast forward the music to hear interview)

Rob and I discuss the phone harassment, break-ins, attempts to run me down – and my psychiatric hospitalization. We also talk about the political activities that seemed to lead the government to target me – including my research into HIV AIDS – and my inability to get help from the Seattle police. Then we cover the whole area of conspiracies in general, which are more accurately called State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADS)