Sounding an Alarm on Oil: In Search of a Presidential Energy Policy...

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line -- then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
~ Killing Times: The Killing Times are Here: Population Policy || Depopulation or Perish || Tragedy of the Commons ~

Michael Ruppert (FTW) Sounding an Alarm on Oil

Wall Street Journal

By Anthony Kaufman
04 November 2009

Michael Ruppert, at home with his friend, Rags, by Clara Tomkins. Star of Collapse, Author of A Presidential Energy Policy, et al

Independent journalist Michael Ruppert predicted the global recession. Now he's foreseeing an imminent energy crisis

Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.

Mr. Ruppert, 58 years old, has since moved on to what he believes are more pressing matters: oil and energy. ("I walked away from 9/11 five years ago," he says. "I have nothing to do with the 9/11 truth movement.") He has a new self-published book, "A Presidential Energy Policy: Twenty-five Points Addressing the Siamese Twins of Energy and Money," and a critically acclaimed new movie, "Collapse," in which he is the sole star and commentator.

Michael Ruppert, Collapse

Directed by documentarian Chris Smith ("American Movie"), the film consists mostly of Mr. Ruppert speaking about the dangers of peak oil and the looming catastrophe that declining oil reserves could bring. The film opens Nov. 6 in New York and on the new video-on-demand channel FilmBuff.

"The power of 'Collapse' is that Ruppert ... never sounds like a crackpot," Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman wrote after the movie's Toronto International Film Festival premiere in September. "You may want to dispute him, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says—right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia—takes up residence in your mind."

But as with "Fog of War," the Oscar-winning documentary about former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Mr. Ruppert comes across in the film as both authoritative and dubious, leaving the audience open to make its own judgment of the man and his ideas. The Wall Street Journal sat down with Mr. Ruppert to discuss oil, Wall Street and the "imminent collapse of human industrialized civilization."

The Wall Street Journal: What is the central message of your movie?

Mr. Ruppert: It is not possible to continue infinite consumption and infinite population growth on a finite planet.

WSJ: So what do you believe needs to be done first?

Mr. Ruppert: Two things are critically important: A real worldwide transparent effort to determine how much oil is really left. Screw state secrets. I don't care what the Saudis, Russians, BP or Chavez want to hide. We have to clean up those books just exactly as the same way that we need to clean up the books on Wall Street. Secondly, we need to establish a second strategic petroleum reserve of refined product for state, county and municipal use because I really foresee a serious oil shock coming as soon as this ersatz recovery starts to push up the global GDP and demand for electricity. We have to make sure we have basic services.

WSJ: In no uncertain terms, you discount all alternative fuel options in the film, calling clean coal a contradiction and ethanol a "joke." How can you be so sure?

Mr. Ruppert: With 800 million internal combustion-powered vehicles on the planet and the fact that oil powers 90% of transportation, there is nothing that replaces what oil does. And transportation, of course, is what makes everything work, from shipping products to shipping people. And you cannot plug any alternative technologies into a 2008 GMC SUV or a 747 airplane. One of the things that I've also stressed is how much energy goes into making products: There's seven gallons of oil in every tire, and all plastics, paints and resins are made from oil.

WSJ: Do you think there's a greater chance of things turning around under the Obama administration?

Mr. Ruppert: No, it's not a matter of political party. It's a matter of energy. And money is useless without energy and money has no respect for power or ideology. We have to reconnect with the requirements that we're living on a planet that's falling apart. And we have to maintain some relationship that's separate from the illusory power of money. Clearly, the power in this country is not in Washington, it's in New York, with the Fed and with Wall Street.

WSJ: How do you see Wall Street playing a role?

Mr. Ruppert: Until you change the way money works, you change nothing. The current economic paradigm calls for infinite growth, from fractional reserve banking to compact interest. So Wall Street needs to somehow help us find an economy that works without requiring more and more consumption.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of The American Empire at The End of The Age of Oil, by Michael Ruppert

WSJ: You've been called "a purveyor of amazing tales" as well as a crusading investigative journalist. What's your response?

Mr. Ruppert: I have two responses: One is that I don't matter. You can focus on me or not, or you can focus on the likely imminent collapse of human industrialized civilization, and I think that's the more important story. On the other hand, I have been severely mistreated. I have been tied up with legal attacks for five to six years and there's only so many I can take on at a time. So I can take away time from reporting and spend time protecting my reputation. And I just made the tactical decision that getting the message out was more important.

WSJ: There's a great irony revealed in the film where we learn about your own economic collapse. Are you still behind in your rent?

Mr. Ruppert: Yes. But people are stepping up to help. We raised $17,000-$18,000 for the legal defense fund for this absolutely crazy ruling in Oregon. [Orgeon's Bureau of Labor and Industries has ordered Mr. Ruppert to pay damages for an incident of workplace sexual harassment.] So I have a lot of support out there. I'll just do whatever I have to do.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Mike Ruppert Documentaries: Denial Stops Here ** Truth & Lies of 9/11 ** Collapse

From the Wilderness: Archives :: Blog

Amazon Purchase: Presidential Energy Policy :: Crossing the Rubicon :: Denial Stops Here :: Truth & Lies of 911

Review of A Presidential Energy Policy, by Michael Ruppert, by Carolyn Baker

Energy Bulletin

Energy Bulletin
May 3, 2009

A Presidential Energy Policy by Michael Ruppert

American culture and consumption has become Public Enemy Number One in the global growth paradigm. People are realizing that the American Dream is murder....Unless a fundamental change is made-and quickly-the only available option is collapse and implosion; the bursting of the human population bubble; or, as people in the Peak Oil movement call it-the Dieoff. The sole purpose of this book (and my life) is to prevent that, or as much of that death and misery, as is humanly possible.
~ Michael C. Ruppert~

This is probably the most important book review I've ever written because A Presidential Energy Policy is unquestionably the most crucial book for anyone aware of the collapse of civilization, which is well underway, to read and understand. It is second only to Mike's first masterpiece, Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of The American Empire at The End of The Age of Oil (2004).

I could have said, "Ruppert's first masterpiece", but Mike is my friend, yet that does not in any way deter my objectivity when assessing the inestimable value of what this book offers the world.

I do have a small quibble with one concept near the book's end on which I will comment later, but first, we need to acknowledge what Mike establishes in the first pages: "...oil price spikes in June and July of 2008 broke the backs of over-extended consumers who could no longer meet their (sub-prime) mortgage payments and that this-and this alone-triggered the great economic crash which began in September and October. Energy and money are inextricably connected in very profound ways...." Furthermore he notes, "The current economic implosion will and can only result in the greatest-and longest lasting-economic depression in human history-a new Dark Age, especially if some fundamental sea changes are not made immediately."


LEADERSHIP

Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? 18July2006 :: PeakOilRSA :: BriefingPaper

In the first chapter, the connection between money and energy is solidly established, but more importantly, the need for leadership and the reality that the plan to deal with the problem has been kept secret from us largely, as Mike documented in Crossing The Rubicon, by the National Energy Policy Development Group of 2001, chaired by Dick Cheney. Presumably, one of the first steps in providing leadership to address the inevitable catastrophic consequences of Peak Oil would be to uncover the truth about oil supply and what contingency plans were formulated by Cheney's group.

Mike asserts that his status as a non-partisan expert on energy depletion with lifelong experience with government, frees him from having to "play nice" with political groups and parties. Consequently, the contents of this book and his expertise offer the leadership desperately needed to authentically address the crisis. Fundamental to doing so, he says, is the need to abandon arguments about offshore drilling and face head-on the reality that the current economic crisis "is a global economic meltdown. No nation gets out unscathed. Nothing can grow forever."

Not willing to ever consider himself a candidate for any elected office, Mike states unequivocally that A Presidential Energy Policy has been written for Barack Obama and will be successful even if it does nothing more than open the door to genuine dialog on energy and money; "one cannot be discussed without the other."

Nor does this book adhere to the agenda of any political party. As with nearly all of Mike's writing over the years, some parts are resoundingly liberal and resemble FDR's New Deal, and some parts echo a conservative Republican or Libertarian approach simply because Mike's overarching concern has always been to "implement policies that will keep the nation functioning and that will protect the American people and the world as a whole." Having said this, he asserts that no president can protect corporations and banks with taxpayer money and at the same time allow the nation and its working and middle class citizens to fail. Unfortunately, that is currently what Barack Obama, despite political rhetoric to the contrary, appears to be doing.


POPULATION

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production. Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror

Concluding Chapter One is the familiar hockey stick diagram depicting population growth which of course correlates exactly with the dawn of the age of oil. While the reader may be tempted to overlook this important diagram, Mike returns to the population issue later in the book, and no reader should take the correlation lightly. The fact remains that human population has grown to its present level precisely because of cheap and abundant petroleum, and when that form of energy is no longer available to our species, the consequences in terms of how many of our numbers endure is obvious-a reality reiterated many times in A Presidential Energy Policy. It is therefore crucial that human beings begin to openly and honestly discuss the issue of population and commit to reducing it through means that are as humane as possible lest through our resistance to doing so, nature takes the matter into its hands and reduces population in ways that are horrific and unimaginable.

In this book Mike is thinking like a president and asks the reader to do the same. He also asks us to abandon all of the hype about alternative energies, green technology, and magic bullet solutions to the realities of Peak Oil and boldly confront the fact that "It is not possible to use enormous amounts of resources to address a resource shortage." While Obama and subsequent presidents will be faced with unprecedented energy crises, Mike reminds us that this is not just an American crisis and that the ramifications of burgeoning population growth alongside a decline in cheap fossil fuel energy spells nothing but doom for the human race unless it begins immediately to intelligently and humanely navigate what Mike calls two sides of a giant claw tightening its grip around all of us.

Therefore, the energy policy of the United States cannot be created in a vacuum. All countries, not just our own, depend on petroleum from other countries, and any president must thoughtfully ponder this fact and detach from wishful thinking about so-called energy breakthroughs, especially since the United States represents 5% of the world's population but uses 25% of its energy. He or she must also understand that oil depletion is happening far too rapidly to naively believe that switching to some attractive alternative is even possible.


SIAMESE TWINS, CHICKENS, AND EGGS

Truth & Lies of 9/11, by Michael Ruppert

In this book Mike is thinking like a president and asks the reader to do the same. He also asks us to abandon all of the hype about alternative energies, green technology, and magic bullet solutions to the realities of Peak Oil and boldly confront the fact that "It is not possible to use enormous amounts of resources to address a resource shortage."

In the "End of Suburbia", Richard Heinberg states unambiguously that Peak Oil will bring about a recession that never ends. In A Presidential Energy Policy, Mike Ruppert points out that:

All the new money being printed out of thin air is going to service a $700 trillion derivatives bubble to keep banks and lending institutions afloat. All that money is doing is enabling the financials to try and make their minimum monthly payments on a credit bubble they created.

In numerous places, including "The End of Suburbia", Mike has reminded us that the books on oil have been as cooked as the books on Enron, but it is now time for every country to know with certainty how much oil it has left. A key player in the ongoing mystery of how much oil remains on earth has been Saudi Arabia, and there is abundant evidence that that nation's oil supply has peaked, thanks to the brilliant research of Matt Simons, chairman of the world's largest energy investment bank and author of Twilight In The Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and The World Economy.

But not only must a president know how much oil his/her country has, that chief executive must carefully assess the limitations and disrepair of America's energy grid. While much of the nation's infrastructure has been and is being privatized, this does not mean that grid efficiency can be achieved within the next few decades, especially when skyrocketing energy prices will exclude many citizens from being able to afford the delivery of that energy at all. For as Mike notes, "A spike, even back to $3 a gallon will cause more hardship in 2009 than $4 gasoline did in 2008." Additionally, when assessing infrastructure, a president must include the costs of asphalt (highly petroleum intensive) and the loss of land which is very likely going to be needed for growing food. When infrastructure isn't rebuilt because of "lack of money or materiel, civilization starts to break down."


GEOPOLITICS, FOOD, CLIMATE CHANGE

Lest the reader infer that A Presidential Energy Policy deals only with domestic energy issues, Mike has included a chapter on Iraq and on Saudi Arabia, a separate chapter on foreign policy, and numerous articles by Mike regarding energy and geopolitics written in recent years are archived at the From The Wilderness website. In fact, he may know more about pipelines throughout the world and the geopolitical implications of them than anyone.

I must also mention that for me, no discussion of the collapse of industrial civilization, energy depletion, or economic meltdown can be complete without a discussion of climate change. In this book, Mike integrates the relevance of climate change in both his consideration of Peak Oil and the current economic depression. In this way, he offers a holistic assessment of what I have been calling for years the Toxic Triangle of collapse and what others have been labeling the "Triple Crisis": energy, economics, and the environment.

Eating Fossil Fuels, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer

And on the topic of environment, Mike says that "if there is anything that must be understood with regard to energy it is its relationship to food." Additionally, "If there is any issue which will reveal whether an American president is serving corporations or the people, it is food." Included in his chapter on food, are articles on the use of ethanol as an energy source, as well as one of the most important articles ever published by From The Wilderness, "Eating Fossil Fuels", by Dale Allen Pfeiffer. Connecting the disastrous use of ethanol with population dieoff, Pfeiffer presents us with three choices regarding population, that is: Facing and acting on our dilemma and consciously, voluntarily limiting population growth; allowing the government to regulate population growth; or allowing nature to perform unspeakable acts of suffering and death.

Having adamantly warned us for years not to be seduced by promises of alternative energies which they are incapable of delivering, Mike reiterates his cautionary assessment of them. As he has stated many times,"...there is no alternative energy or combination of alternative energies, that will permit current consumption and lifestyle to continue-let alone provide for the compound growth we are wedded to in the current economic paradigm." The supreme reality of Peak Oil is that we will be downsized, whether we intend to be or not. To deny this fact is tantamount to assuming that Disneyworld can be run on a handful of flashlight batteries.

But Mike doesn't present these facts without also clarifying specific criteria for choosing energy options. Carefully contemplating them is beyond sobering; in fact, it is chilling, especially when one considers the touting of so-called solutions like shale and the electric car-both large consumers of water, which like every other resource on earth has also dramatically peaked. Should anyone doubt this, I suggest the films "Thirst" and "Flow" which unequivocally document the decline of water worldwide. The last thing our species and the earth community needs is another form of energy usage that further depletes any of myriad disappearing resources on this planet.


LOCALIZATION

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, by Community Solution

If the rest of A Presidential Energy Policy were not so incredibly juicy, Mike's laundry list of so-called energy alternatives alone, and his analysis of them would be worth the read. But he doesn't leave us there because he takes us into what I believe is the absolute crux of the book, namely, localization as "the alternative to the alternatives." As I write that, I'm reminded of some local farmer friends of mine who are off the grid raising three children and who do all their farming with draft animals. They're fond of pointing out that what we have become accustomed to calling "alternative energy", namely solar and wind, is the only tangible energy there is and that all other forms are, in fact, alternative. They do not, however, proclaim solar and wind to be the magic bullets that many others do. What they do proclaim and live, is the localization of all resource options.

In the Localization chapter, Mike advises the president to understand that:

...your first awareness is that the federal government cannot and will not take on the role of solving problems in cities and townships. That would be inefficient and inappropriate on every conceivable level. Only the people in each locality know and can decide what they need most. Each location has different needs. Your second awareness is that if localities fail at the bottom, the nation will fail at the top.

The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were amongst the first people to recognise the importance of the Soldiers of the Soil. In fact Cleopatra declared the earthworm sacred, and anyone trying to take them out of the country was subjected to the death penalty. Tests carried out in the Nile valley by the US Department of Agriculture in 1949 proved that the great fertility of the soil there was due largely to the work of earthworms.~ SQ Worm Sosiety

Moreover, says Mike, all local responses to a tightening of oil supply will be dictated by the degree of self-sufficiency to which each community has liberated itself from dependence on anything from outside. Dear reader, please take the time to read that sentence again. The implications of this are jaw-dropping-and-absolutely necessary for us to wrap our minds around and implement, now. One implication is that globalization is dead. How well I remember Mike's statement in "End of Suburbia" that Peak Oil would absolutely reverse globalization. So hello human race, here we are with those giant parking lot gluts of cars all over the Los Angeles area, not to mention the Port of Long Beach, that no one will buy. For the same reason, when I enter a J.C. Penny's store, the walls and doors are covered with "70% Off" signs. Globalization, R.I.P.

As Mike points out, many individuals and families have relocated to areas where they can make themselves less dependent on fossil fuels and the goods and services of civilization. What is also true is that while we have organizations like Community Solutions and the Transition Town movement with which I am deeply involved in my community, those endeavors are still largely educational and have not been fully implemented. One stellar exception to this is Willits, California which has had a head start on localization for some time.

However, Mike adds a caveat with which I could not agree more, namely, that "There is no hope for any of us outside of a community." Here, it is important to broaden our definition of community because it does not necessarily mean a living community but rather, a group of folks in our local venues who are collapse-aware, who are working to gain self-sufficiency, and to do what is necessary to support each other in the face of collapse.

Hence, at this point I must raise the only quibble I have with A Presidential Energy Policy. In this must-read articulation of everything a president, and a nation's citizens must understand about energy, Mike has left us with what I consider a scenario that is less than feasible:

Whether as a result of the collapse of industrial civilization, the total insolvency of the United States government, the economic crash that is just beginning, or climate change (or all of the above), the effects on the United States government are going to be profound. Services are going to be cut. Bureaucracies are going to remain that may not be needed any longer, while some that may be desperately needed will not exist. At some point it will become necessary to put everything on the table and reorganize the government entirely. The imperative first-place-to-begin is the Executive Branch, which should be created anew from a blank sheet of paper.

In a subsequent paragraph, Mike states we may need to design and build a new Executive Branch of government that reflects the new paradigm being born and that for this, we will need new Jeffersons and Madisons-new founding fathers and mothers. While I do not rule out the possibility of this eventuality, I certainly do not believe it is probable. The very sea change that Mike has been brilliantly describing throughout the book dictates that we are now and will be in the days ahead, traversing territory that is absolutely unprecedented in modern history. For example, if we holistically consider the Triple Crisis, Toxic Triangle, or whatever we choose to call it-energy depletion, economic meltdown, and global climate change, then we must consider that any or all of those could radically alter not only the existence of a federal government but the very geography of the continent itself.

Last year I relocated from the Southwestern United States to Vermont. My reasons for doing so are legion, and I discussed some of them in my June, 2008 article "Location, Location, Re-location." Famous for its intense winters and high unemployment even in good times, Vermont is not for the faint of heart, and I do not recommend it unless one has job security and the ability to navigate a treacherous winter.

That said, one attraction to this sparsely populated state with its abundance of water and arable land is that it has always been a bastion of independent thinking and has today one of the strongest movements for secession in the nation. No, I'm not referring to some Rick Perry quip like "Texas might secede", but rather I'm referring to a group of thoughtful individuals who have been observing and preparing for collapse for several years. I happen to serve on the editorial board of their outstanding newspaper, Vermont Commons, the only statewide independent newspaper in Vermont.

Truth & Justice!; or Secession? for the Cape Republic of Good Hope

While I am not personally a rabid secessionist, I have come to believe that preparation for the radical alteration of geography as a result of the Triple Crisis is essential for everyone who wishes to be self-sufficient. In this state, as in I would imagine all others, there are pockets which might be completely cut off from other areas as a result of natural disasters or collapsed bridges or other infrastructure which cannot be repaired-eventualities to which Mike referred in his wonderful book. I believe that not only is such fragmentation likely, but that those disconnections might become so severe that a federal government would become completely irrelevant to and out of reach for the citizens in those areas who might be cut off from the rest of the state and nation by circumstances which we cannot now fully imagine. In other words, "secession" may not the only means by which a community becomes radically self-sufficient. In my opinion, therefore, it behooves us, if we are truly committed to localization, to focus our energies accordingly, rather than on the remapping of the Executive Branch of the federal government. It is also entirely possible that no either/or will occur and that both scenarios will deserve our attention.

Revisiting The Limits to Growth, by Mathew Simmons

What Mike has emphasized repeatedly throughout the book is an urgent transformation of our thinking-a mentality that has left miles of unsold new cars sitting in lots all over Los Angeles-cars with seven gallons of oil in each tire. Only a profound soul sickness could create and maintain a civilization that is destroying everything in its path with little thought to the suicidal trajectory into which it has become locked.

I ask you to read A Presidential Energy Policy as soon as possible and share it with your friends and family. Share it with your elected officials and your neighbors and begin now to educate your community in preparation for the inevitable consequences of the Triple Crisis. Unquestionably, we are entering a new Dark Age, but the information Mike has offered, if heeded, could punctuate the darkness with a thousand points of light.

Richard Heinberg comments that "This book, recently reviewed at length by Carolyn Baker, describes the essence of our global energy predicament for a mass audience. Ruppert ties together the issues of oil depletion, resource geopolitics, population, climate, world currency/banking systems, and global food supplies, showing how perilous our current path is, and what we need to do to change direction. Short, readable, and clear, this is an ideal book to give to friends, relatives, or political representatives who don’t yet “get it.”"

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., manages Truth to Power at http://www.carolynbaker.net/ and is the author of the just-published Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse. She is an adjunct professor of history and psychology and is the author of U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, (2006), endorsed by Mike Ruppert. Carolyn is also a former writer for and Managing Editor of From The Wilderness.

Source: Energy Bulletin

Mike Ruppert Documentaries: Denial Stops Here ** Truth & Lies of 9/11 ** Collapse

From the Wilderness: Archives :: Blog

Amazon Purchase: Presidential Energy Policy :: Crossing the Rubicon :: Denial Stops Here :: Truth & Lies of 911

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

“Today, people are beginning to understand that the government's account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread—and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.” —Ayn Rand, ‘Moral Inflation’

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.
~ American capitalism whimpers || 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years || Objectivism: Bridging Liberal Conservative Environment Divide ~

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Telegraph UK

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:12PM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Explosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

Governments have already shot their fiscal bolts. Even without fresh spending, public debt would explode within two years to 105pc of GDP in the UK, 125pc in the US and the eurozone, and 270pc in Japan. Worldwide state debt would reach $45 trillion, up two-and-a-half times in a decade.

(UK figures look low because debt started from a low base. Mr Ferman said the UK would converge with Europe at 130pc of GDP by 2015 under the bear case).

The underlying debt burden is greater than it was after the Second World War, when nominal levels looked similar. Ageing populations will make it harder to erode debt through growth. "High public debt looks entirely unsustainable in the long run. We have almost reached a point of no return for government debt," it said.

What is the Mandrake Mechanism?: It's the most important financial lesson of your life!! ... It is the method by which the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing; the concept of usury as the payment of interest on pretended loans; the true cause of the hidden tax called inflation; the way in which the Fed creates boom-bust cycles. The Creature from Jekyll Island: The Federal Reserve Bank, by Edward Griffin

Inflating debt away might be seen by some governments as a lesser of evils.

If so, gold would go "up, and up, and up" as the only safe haven from fiat paper money. Private debt is also crippling. Even if the US savings rate stabilises at 7pc, and all of it is used to pay down debt, it will still take nine years for households to reduce debt/income ratios to the safe levels of the 1980s.

The bank said the current crisis displays "compelling similarities" with Japan during its Lost Decade (or two), with a big difference: Japan was able to stay afloat by exporting into a robust global economy and by letting the yen fall. It is not possible for half the world to pursue this strategy at the same time.

SocGen advises bears to sell the dollar and to "short" cyclical equities such as technology, auto, and travel to avoid being caught in the "inherent deflationary spiral". Emerging markets would not be spared. Paradoxically, they are more leveraged to the US growth than Wall Street itself. Farm commodities would hold up well, led by sugar.

Mr Fermon said junk bonds would lose 31pc of their value in 2010 alone. However, sovereign bonds would "generate turbo-charged returns" mimicking the secular slide in yields seen in Japan as the slump ground on. At one point Japan's 10-year yield dropped to 0.40pc. The Fed would hold down yields by purchasing more bonds. The European Central Bank would do less, for political reasons.

SocGen's case for buying sovereign bonds is controversial. A number of funds doubt whether the Japan scenario will be repeated, not least because Tokyo itself may be on the cusp of a debt compound crisis.

Mr Fermon said his report had electrified clients on both sides of the Atlantic. "Everybody wants to know what the impact will be. A lot of hedge funds and bankers are worried," he said.

Source: Telegraph UK

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

“... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures...... it is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals.”

“... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources -- in this rough order of importance -- all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities.”

“...there is general agreement that up to the point when cost per acceptor rises rapidly, family planning expenditures are generally considered the best investment a country can make in its own future.”
~ National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth ~

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

Mail & Guardian, UK

Nov 17 2009 08:04

Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot. 18July 2006 :: PeakOil_RSA Briefing Paper

I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? 18 July 06 :: PeakOilRSA :: Briefing Paper

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He's replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only about 25%.

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production. Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it's grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world's people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I've been bellyaching about the British government's refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I'm beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85-million barrels a day in 2008 to 105-million in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103-million barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production. Oil, Smoke & Mirrors

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to "approach a plateau" towards the end of this period, but there's no hint of the graver warning that the IEA's chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: "We still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau ... I think time is not on our side here." Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123-million barrels in 2004, to 120-million in 2005, 116-million in 2007, 106-million in 2008 and 103-million this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, "even today's number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this".

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76-million barrels per day. Analysing the IEA's figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world's new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate "never before seen in history". As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that "the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now".

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production. Crude Awakening: Oil Crash

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn't seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift when the fields are depleted. So the assumption in the IEA's new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen "to around one half by 2030" looks unsafe. The UK Energy Research Centre's review finds that, just to keep oil supply at present levels, "more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 ... At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging." There is, it says "a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020". Unconventional oil won't save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only five million barrels a day by 2030.

The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were amongst the first people to recognise the importance of the Soldiers of the Soil. In fact Cleopatra declared the earthworm sacred, and anyone trying to take them out of the country was subjected to the death penalty. Tests carried out in the Nile valley by the US Department of Agriculture in 1949 proved that the great fertility of the soil there was due largely to the work of earthworms. ~ SQ Worm Sosiety

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don't need much labour or energy.

There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle's low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can't afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It'll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn't going to happen. - guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2009

Source: Mail & Guardian, UK

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

“... World population growth is widely recognized within the Government as a current danger of the highest magnitude calling for urgent measures...... it is of the utmost urgency that governments now recognize the facts and implications of population growth, determine the ultimate population sizes that make sense for their countries and start vigorous programs at once to achieve their desired goals.”

“... population factors are indeed critical in, and often determinants of, violent conflict in developing areas. Segmental (religious, social, racial) differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources -- in this rough order of importance -- all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence... Clearly, conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots. Recognition of these relationships appears crucial to any understanding or prevention of such hostilities.”

“...there is general agreement that up to the point when cost per acceptor rises rapidly, family planning expenditures are generally considered the best investment a country can make in its own future.”
~ National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth ~

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

PBS: Secrets of the Dead

Frequencies of the CCR5 allele

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF PERSONS WITH THE CCR5 DELTA-32 MUTATION

The delta-32 mutation of the CCR5 receptor gene is present in up to 20% of the white population worldwide.8 Persons who have 2 copies of this mutant gene have been shown to be highly resistant to HIV infection; those with a single copy can be infected but experience an attenuated course of disease.9
-- The AIDS Reader

Plaque commemorating Black Plague

CCR5: Evolving hypotheses

When the CCR5-delta32 mutation was first discovered — and when its restriction to European populations was identified — scientists hypothesized that the mutation had been favored because it offered resistance to an intense epidemic largely restricted to Europe: the bubonic plague pandemic of the Middle Ages. However, when scientists studied ancient DNA from 2900-year-old skeletal remains, they found that the mutation was common in European populations long before the plague epidemics. Further research and several lines of evidence suggested that smallpox may have been the more likely culprit. New research has offered yet another hypothesis. The genetic variation associated with the mutation is similar to the genetic variation associated with neutral mutants. Perhaps, the CCR5 mutant drifted to high frequencies in Europe through nothing more than luck. Researchers continue to investigate the possibilities — but meanwhile, there is little doubt that the CCR5 mutant offers a significant survival advantage to those at risk of HIV infection.
-- Understanding Evolution

Plague Boils on Human Skin

No one knows exactly why, but in the late 1320s or early 1330s, bubonic plague broke out in China's Gobi desert. Spread by flea-infested rats, it didn't take long for the disease to reach Europe. In October of 1347, a Genoese ship fleet returning from the Black Sea -- a key trade link with China -- landed in Messina, Sicily. Most of those on board were already dead, and the ships were ordered out of harbor. But it was too late. The town was soon overcome with pestilence, and from there, the disease quickly spread north along trade routes -- through Italy and across the European continent. By the following spring, it had reached as far north as England, and within five years, it had killed 25 million people -- one-third of the European population.

Spread of Bubonic Plague

The bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis and is characterized by chills, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and the formation of black boils in the armpits, neck, and groin. Though the disease was originally called the "Great Mortality" and the "Great Pestilence," the name "Black Death" was eventually adopted because of these black boils, which derive their color from dried blood under the skin caused by internal bleeding. In certain cases the bacterium spreads to the victims' lungs, causing them to fill with frothy, bloody liquid. This derivation of the disease is called pneumonic plague, and can quickly spread from person to person through the air. It is almost always lethal.

Eyam, England

The plague first spread to Britain in 1348, travelling from Bristol to Oxford and London in several days. More than three hundred years later, in 1665, perhaps the worst of the English epidemics broke out in London. That summer, the nobility and clergy fled the city, as some 7,000 people died each week. As many as 100,000 lives were lost before winter killed the fleas and the epidemic tapered off. Contemporary medicine could provide no explanation for the sickness, and most doctors were afraid to offer treatment. In an attempt to keep from being infected, the few physicians who did risk exposure wore leather masks with glass eyes and a long beak filled with herbs and spices that were thought to ward off the illness. Even one person in a household showing plague-like symptoms was enough to mandate a 40-day quarantine for the whole home -- a virtual death sentence for everyone living in it.

Hilltop View of Eyam, England

In September 1665, George Viccars, a tailor in the small, central-England village of Eyam, received a parcel of cloth ridden with plague-infected fleas from London. Four days later, Viccars died. By the end of the month, five more villagers had succumbed to the plague. The panicked town turned to their rector, William Mompesson, who persuaded them to quarantine the entire village to prevent the bacterium from spreading throughout the region. It seemed like suicide. A year later, the first outsiders ventured into Eyam, expecting a ghost town. Yet, miraculously, half the town had survived. How did so many villagers live through the most devastating disease known to man?

John Clifford examining the Eyam parish register

Local Eyam lore tells befuddling stories of plague survivors who had close contact with the bacterium but never caught the disease. Elizabeth Hancock buried six children and her husband in a week, but never became ill. The village gravedigger handled hundreds of plague-ravaged corpses, but survived as well. Could these people have somehow been immune to the Black Death?

Dr. Stephen O'Brien of the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. suggests they were. His work with HIV and the mutated form of the gene CCR5, called "delta 32," led him to Eyam. In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body. O'Brien thought this principle could be applied to the plague bacteria, which affects the body in a similar manner. To determine whether the Eyam plague survivors may have carried delta 32, O'Brien tested the DNA of their modern-day descendents. What he found out was startling. ...

Joan Plant, tracing family tree

For a disease-causing microorganism to infect the human body there must be a gateway or portal through which it enters into human cells. The plague bacterium works this way, hijacking the white blood cells sent to eliminate it. Traveling inside the white blood cells to the lymph nodes, the bacteria break out and attack the focal point of the human immune system. Dr. Stephen O'Brien felt that the mutated CCR5 gene, delta 32, may have prevented the plague from being able to enter its host's white blood cells.

Eyam provided O'Brien an ideal opportunity to test this theory. Specifically, Eyam was an isolated population known to have survived a plague epidemic. Everyone in the town would have been exposed to the bacterium, so it's likely that any life-saving genetic trait would have been possessed by each of these survivors. "Like a Xerox machine," says O'Brien, "their gene frequencies have been replicated for several generations without a lot of infusion from outside," thus providing a viable pool of survivor-descendents who would have inherited such a trait.

Dr. Bill Paxton examines Steve Crohn's DNA.

Knowing who died and who lived through the early years of the plague is somewhat problematic. Deaths among the general English population were not recorded in the 14th Century -- the height of the Plague -- and most communities did not begin recording parish registers until around 1538. Fortunately, Eyam began keeping a parish register in 1630. Thus historian John Clifford began by examining the register, noting everyone who was alive in 1665, the year the plague came to Eyam. He searched for evidence of life through the year 1725 -- marriages, baptisms, burials that took place years after the plague had left the village. Deleting the names of those lost during the plague period, he was able to determine who the survivors were.

DNA samples could only be collected from direct descendents of the plague survivors. DNA is the principal component of chromosomes, which carry the genes that transmit hereditary characteristics. We inherit our DNA from our parents, thus Eyam resident Joan Plant, for instance, may have inherited the delta 32 mutation from one of her ancient relatives. Plant can trace her mother's lineage back ten generations to the Blackwell siblings, Francis and Margaret, who both lived through the plague to the turn of the 18th century. The next step was to harvest a DNA sample from Joan and the other descendants. DNA is found in the nuclei of cells. The amount is constant in all typical cells, regardless of the size or function of that cell. One of the easiest methods of obtaining a DNA tissue sample is to take a cheek, or buccal, swab.

Crohn's blood, resisting infection.

After three weeks of testing at University College in London, delta 32 had been found in 14% of the samples. This is a genetically significant percentage, yet what, really, did it mean? Could the villagers have inherited delta 32 from elsewhere, residents who had moved to the community in the 350 years since the plague? Was this really a higher percentage than anywhere else? To find out, O'Brien assembled an international team of scientists to test for the presence of delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero." In fact, the levels of delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents.

Spread of the Plague

Meanwhile, recent work with another disease strikingly similar to the plague, AIDS, suggests O'Brien was on the right track. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, tricks the immune system in a similar manner as the plague bacterium, targeting and taking over white blood cells. Virologist Dr. Bill Paxton at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City noticed, "the center had no study of people who were exposed to HIV but who had remained negative." He began testing the blood of high-risk, HIV-negative individuals like Steve Crohn, exposing their blood to three thousand times the amount of HIV normally needed to infect a cell. Steve's blood never became infected. "We thought maybe we had infected the culture with bacteria or whatever," says Paxton. "So we went back to Steve. But it was the same result. We went back again and again. Same result." Paxton began studying Crohn's DNA, and concluded there was some sort of blocking mechanism preventing the virus from binding to his cells. Further research showed that that mechanism was delta 32.

Scientists studying HIV first learned about the gateway-blocking capacity of the CCR5 mutation in 1996. Several drug companies, then, quickly began exploring the possibility of developing pharmaceuticals that would mimic delta 32 by binding to CCR5 and blocking the attachment of HIV. Previous methods of treatment interfered with HIV's ability to replicate after the virus has already entered a cell. This new class of HIV treatment, called early-inhibitor -- or fusion-inhibitor -- drugs seek to prevent the virus from ever attaching at all. These pharmaceuticals are still in relatively early stages of development, but certainly stand as a hopeful new method of approaching HIV treatment.

Source: PBS: Secrets of the Dead

Ecologically-minded liberals should also heed Dr. Salter’s work, for only when Third-World populations are made to bear the consequences of their own reproductive irresponsibility will they, and the world as a whole, establish population policies that protect the environment. Closing off the “safety valve” of Third-World immigration to the West should be as attractive to the sincere left as to the racial right.

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

Interview with Dr. Stephen O'Brien

Dr. Stephen O'Brien

You may possess a genetic mutation. Most people would probably be aghast to learn that one of their genes is malformed. But before you start asking, "What does that mean? Will it make me sick someday? Will I pass it on to my children?" bear in mind that a mutation of the CCR5 gene -- called "delta 32" in its mutated form -- has no adverse effect on humans. In fact, possessing delta 32 could save your life, and the lives of your children.

"It's highly unusual," says Dr. Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. "Most genes, if you knock them out, cause serious diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia or diabetes. But CCR5-delta32 is rather innocuous to its carriers. The reason seems to be that the normal function of CCR5 is redundant in our genes; that several other genes can perform the same function."

"The non-mutated form is what's called a chemokine receptor," he says. Chemokines are protein distress calls released by an injured region of your body. "The normal function of the CCR5 gene is to act as a retriever of the chemokine distress signal from these bruises, which will then be alleviated by the chemokines."

This may not sound exciting, but delta 32 is a powerful mistake. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, attacks the human immune system, infecting the white blood cells sent to destroy it. The delta 32 mutation, however, effectively blocks the crucial gateway into human cells the virus needs. In the case of Steve Crohn, whose partner was the fifth person to die from AIDS, possessing the CCR5 mutation has prevented him from contracting the virus.

O'Brien explains further, "In order to have total resistance to HIV, you have to carry two doses of the mutated gene -- one from each parent. If you get only one dose, you will not be resistant to infection. However, you may be able to delay the onset of HIV once you become infected. That's because, in patients with one copy of the mutation, the amount of 'portals' or 'doorways' that HIV can use is reduced by about 50 percent. That slows down virus replication, which is the most important factor in AIDS progression."

O'Brien's work on AIDS led him to another disease that delta 32 could prevent, the plague. "They both, upon entering the body, infect the macrophages, which are the first line of defense against bacterial infections," he says. "Over the course of evolution, many bugs and pathogens have become extinct because the body learned how to defend itself against them. So the ones that are around today, like HIV and the plague, are pretty savvy -- HIV, for example, specifically attacks and kills the very cells that are designed to kill it. Both these pathogens have developed very clever ways around our immunological defenses."

Eyam Plague Cottage

The results of the Eyam study suggest that delta 32 may have helped save Europe from the bubonic plague pandemic. It seems logical, then, that this could be confirmed by an experiment in which the plague bacterium is injected into the cells of someone possessing the delta 32 mutation. "We have attempted to design experiments that allow us to expose the plague to the lymphocytes of different people, including Steve Crohn," O'Brien says. "But so far we haven't been able to design that kind of experiment ... to do that experiment, you would need to isolate that particular kind of cell. You would need to isolate the exact strain of the plague, and you would need to expose them together."

Nevertheless, delta 32 seems to be a formidable defense the human body has developed in response to ages of pathogenic exposure. And though we may just be getting acquainted with it, delta 32 has been protecting humans for ages. O'Brien suspects the mutation has been around since long before the Black Death. "There have been human remains dug up from graves in Scandinavia -- bodies 3,000 and 4,000 years old -- in which they actually found the mutation, through DNA typing. So there are all kinds of pieces in this puzzle that are coming together."

Source: PBS: Secrets of the Dead
DNA Test for CCR5/Delta32

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Cultural Marxism

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production.

To advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis --— a stable human population – at, or slightly less than – the eco-systems long term carrying capacity --- is intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.
~ Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, Energy Bulletin | Population Growth: Most Powerful Force on Earth, Money&Markets ~

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxism


by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report as a guest-post at Gates of Vienna.

FrontPage Magazine: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Theodore Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

But how is that possible? Don’t we have free speech here? And we have no Gulag?

The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West, and the most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a credible alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist rhetoric and thinking have penetrated every single stratum of our society, from the Universities to the media. Islamic terrorism is explained as caused by “poverty, oppression and marginalization,” a classic, Marxist interpretation.

What happened is that while the “hard” Marxism of the Soviet Union may have collapsed, at least for now, the “soft” Marxism of the Western Left has actually grown stronger, in part because we deemed it to be less threatening. The “hard” Marxists had intercontinental nuclear missiles and openly said that they would “bury” us. The soft Marxists talk about tolerance and may seem less threatening, but their goal of overthrowing the evil, capitalist West remains the same. In fact, they are more dangerous precisely because they hide their true goals under different labels. Perhaps we should call it “stealth Socialism” instead of soft Socialism.

One of the readers of Fjordman blog once pointed out that we never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2. He was thinking of the former Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe, but he should probably have included their Marxist fellow travellers, their sympathizers and apologists in the West. We never fully confronted the ideology of Marxism, and demonstrated that the suffering it caused for hundreds of millions of people was a direct result of Marxist ideas. We just assumed that Marxism was dead and moved on, allowing many of its ideals to mutate into new forms and many of its champions to continue their work uninterrupted, sometimes filled with a vengeance and a renewed zeal for another assault on the capitalist West.

We are now paying the price for this. Not only has Marxism survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger. Leftist ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse, their critics vilified and demonized. By hiding their intentions under labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship of public discourse they could never have dreamt of had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

The Left have become ideological orphans after the Cold War, or perhaps we should call them ideological mercenaries. Although the viable economic alternative to capitalism didn’t work out, their hatred for this system never subsided, it merely transformed into other forms. Multiculturalism is just a different word for “divide and conquer,” pitting various ethnic and cultural groups against each other and destroying the coherence of Western society from within.

At the very least, the people living in the former Communist countries knew and admitted that they were taking part in a gigantic social experiment, and that the media and the authorities were serving them propaganda to shore up support for this project. Yet in the supposedly free West, we are taking part in a gigantic social experiment of Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration every bit as radical, utopian and potentially dangerous as Communism, seeking to transform our entire society from top to bottom, and still we refuse to even acknowledge that this is going on.

In Norway, a tiny Scandinavian nation that was until recently 99% white and Lutheran Christian, native Norwegians will soon be a minority in their own capital city, later in the whole country. And still, Norwegian politicians, journalists and University professors insist that there is nothing to worry about over this. Multiculturalism is nothing new, neither is immigration. In fact, our king a century ago was born in Denmark, so having a capital city dominated by Pakistanis, Kurds, Arabs and Somalis is just business as usual. The most massive transformation of the country in a thousand years, probably in recorded history, is thus treated as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To even hint that there might be something wrong about this has been immediately shouted down as “racism.”

Eric Hoffer has noted that “It is obvious that a proselytizing mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is to win a considerable following. The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence. Where a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family, tribe, country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it moves in and gathers the harvest. Where it finds the corporate pattern in good repair, it must attack and disrupt.” This corresponds exactly to the behavior of much of the Western Left in our age.

In Germany, Hans-Peter Raddatz in his book “Allahs Frauen” (Allah’s Women) dissects the destructive attitude of Multiculturalism that is shared by many civil servants, journalists, politicians and lawyers in Germany and the EU. In particular, he documents how the German Green Party has a program for dismantling and dissolving the Christian “Leitkultur,” or common culture, that so far has been the foundation of Germany and the West. Raddatz thinks that the decades of Muslim immigration are used as an instrument for breaking down the institutions, norms and ideas that the Left has earlier tried to break down through economics. From powerful positions in the media, public institutions and the system of education, these Multiculturalists are working on a larger project of renewing a Western civilization that, according to them, has failed.

A Norwegian newspaper called Dagens Næringsliv exposed the fact that the largest “anti-racist” organization in the country, SOS Rasisme, was heavily infiltrated by Communists and extreme Leftists. They infiltrated the organization in the late 1980s and early ’90s, in other words, during the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe. They went directly from Communism to Multiculturalism, which should indicate that at least some of them viewed Multiculturalism as the continuation of Communism by other means. It speaks volumes about the close connection between economic Marxism and cultural Marxism. They just have different means of reaching the same ends.

Much of the political Left is simply engaged in outing their opponents as evil, instead of rationally arguing against their ideas. Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly translated to English as “to make like Hitler.” The logic behind “hitling” is a bit like this: “You have a beard. Adolf Hitler had facial hair, too, so you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler liked dogs. You have pets, too, you must be like Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. You like carrots, you are just like Hitler.”

Any “right-winger” can be slimed with such accusations. Curiously enough, the reverse is almost never true. Although Marxism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century and failed in every single society in which it has ever been tried out, there seems to be little stigma attached to being a Leftist. The fact that Leftists can get away with this and claim to hold the moral high ground amply demonstrates that we didn’t win the Cold War. We let our guard down after the fall of the Berlin Wall and never properly denounced the ideology behind it. This is now coming back to haunt us.

One member of an anti-immigration party in Britain stated that to be called racist in 21st-century Britain is “the same as being branded a witch in the Middle Ages.” He’s probably right, which means that anti-racism has quite literally become a modern witch-hunt.

Naomi Klein, Canadian activist and author of the book No Logo, is a darling of the Western Left. She claims that the real cause of Islamic terrorism is Western racism, traceable back to the personal experiences of Sayyid Qutb, theorist of modern Islamic Jihad, while in the USA in the late 1940s. “The real problem,” she concludes, “is not too much Multiculturalism but too little.” More Multiculturalism, she claims, “would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.”

Robert Spencer, however, is not too impressed with Klein’s logic or historical knowledge: “Qutb’s world-changing rage?” Is that rage really Qutb’s? Can modern-day Islamic terrorism really be attributed to him, and to his experience of racism in Colorado? One would expect that if that were so, there would be no evidence of political or violent Islam dating from before 1948. But in fact the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was part, was founded not in 1948 but in 1928, and not by Qutb, but by Hasan Al-Banna. It was Al-Banna, not Qutb, who wrote: “In [Muslim] Tradition, there is a clear indication of the obligation to fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and of the fact that God doubles the reward of those who fight them. Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace Islam.”

Paul Berman does not share Klein’s interpretation, either. According to him, Qutb’s book from the 1940’s, Social Justice and Islam,’ shows that, even before his voyage to the USA, Qutb “was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism,” although it may have gotten worse after his meetings with Western “immorality.” According to Berman, the truly dangerous element in American life, in Sayyid Qutb’s estimation, “was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women’s independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America’s separation of church and state — the modern political legacy of Christianity’s ancient division between the sacred and the secular.” Islam’s true champions had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in his book Milestones called a vanguard. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.” Both Milestones and parts of Qutb’s perhaps most important work, In the Shade of the Qur’an, are available online in English. In Milestones, he writes that Jihad will continue until all of the world answers to Islam, that “Islam came into this world to establish God’s rule on God’s earth.” “Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path,” it “has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions” around the world that are in opposition to this. “God’s rule on earth can be established only through the Islamic system.” What does this have to do with Western racism? Why did Jihad start a thousand years before Western colonialism ever touched Islamic lands? What about the tens of millions of people massacred in India because of Islamic Jihad? Was that due to Western racism, too? Naomi Klein doesn’t say, she just blames the West. And she is far from the only one suffering from this delusion.

Commenting on the Jihad riots in France in the fall of 2005, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut stated: “In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult — Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese — and they’re not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character. These people were treated like rebels, like revolutionaries. (…) They’re ‘interesting.’ They’re ‘the wretched of the earth.’ “Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone would have said: ‘Fascism won’t be tolerated.’ When an Arab torches a school, it’s rebellion. When a white guy does it, it’s fascism. Evil is evil, no matter what color it is.”

In an interview with Danish weekly Weekendavisen, Finkielkraut said that: “Racism is the only thing that can still arouse anger among the intellectuals, the journalists and people in the entertainment business, in other words, the elites. Culture and religion have collapsed, only anti-racism is left. And it functions like an intolerant and inhumane idolatry.” “A leader from one of the organizations against racism had the nerve to refer to the actions of the police in the Parisian suburbs as ‘ethnic cleansing.’ That kind of expression used about the French situation indicates a deliberate manipulation of the language. Unfortunately, these insane lies have convinced the public that the destruction in the suburbs should be viewed as a protest against exclusion and racism.” “I think that the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century: A source of violence.”

Maybe the French have fallen prey to the nihilism of Jean-Paul Sartre? Roger Scruton wrote about his continued influence in The Spectator: “The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France. The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing is certain save the repudiation of the national idea. It is thanks to this elite that the mad project of European Union has become indelibly inscribed in the French political process, even though the people of France reject it. It is thanks to this elite that the mass immigration into France of unassimilable Muslim communities has been both encouraged and subsidised. It is thanks to this elite that socialism has been so firmly embedded in the French state that no one now can reform it.” “Man cannot live by negation alone.”

Karl Marx himself has stated that “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism,” a sentiment that corresponds almost exactly to the Islamic idea that “peace” means the absence of opposition to Islamic rule. Cultural Marxism — aka Political Correctness — and Islam share the same totalitarian outlook and instinctively agree in their opposition to free discussion, and in the idea that freedom of speech must be curtailed when it is “offensive” to certain groups. Former Muslim Ali Sina notes that “there is very little difference between the Left and Islam. What is lacking in both these creeds is the adherence to the Golden Rule. Just as for Muslims, everything Islamic is a priori right and good and everything un-Islamic is a priori wrong and evil, for the Left, everything leftist is a priori oppressed and good and everything rightist is a priori oppressor and evil. Facts don’t matter. Justice is determined by who you are and not by what you have done.” “Political correctness is an intellectual sickness. It means expediently lying when telling the truth is not expedient. This practice is so widespread and so common that it is considered to be normal.” Sina also quotes historian Christopher Dawson in writing: “It is easy enough for the individual to adopt a negative attitude of critical skepticism. But if society as a whole abandons all positive beliefs, it is powerless to resist the disintegrating effects of selfishness and private interest. Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.” This will be the end result of Multiculturalism, and one suspects that this was the point of it to begin with.

Another former Muslim, writer Ibn Warraq, visited Denmark to launch his book Why I am not a Muslim. In an interview, Ibn Warraq stated that especially among the Left there is a post-colonial guilt complex that constitutes an almost insuperable obstacle to any criticism of Islam and Third World cultures. The Left have thus put their own, universal values aside in favor of a dangerous relativism. Ibn Warraq pointed out that more than fifty years after the West left its colonies in the Third World, Leftists are still blaming all the ills of Africa and the Middle East on the former colonial powers, while the same left-wingers only ten years after the fall of Communism blamed Russia’s troubles on unrestrained capitalism. “The Left refuses to seek answers elsewhere. At the same time they are, because of Marx, accustomed to look for economic explanations to everything. Consequently, they seek the explanation to Islamic terrorism in the economic situation. But it is a great mystery to me how 200 dead people in Madrid are supposed to help the poor in the Islamic world.”

Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, who has personal experience with living under Socialism, warns that it may not be as dead as many seem to think: “We can probably confidently say that its “hard version” – communism – is over.” However, “fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become – under different names, e.g. the welfare state – the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.” “The explicit socialism has lost its appeal and we should not have it as the main rival to our ideas today.” Klaus warns that illiberal ideas are making a comeback in different shapes: “These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed (Thomas Sowell) on others against their will.” “The current threats to liberty may use different ‘hats’, they may better hide their real nature, they may be more sophisticated than before, but they are – in principle – the same as always.”

“I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based – as de Jasay precisely argues – on not distinguishing rights and rightism), ideology of ‘civic society’ (or communitarism), which is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence, a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.”

Vladimir Bukovsky is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the USSR, and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons. Now living in England, he warns against some of the same anti-democratic impulses in the West, especially in the EU, which he views as a heir to the Soviet Union. In 2002, he joined in on protests against the BBC’s compulsory TV licence, which he considers “such a medieval arrangement I simply must protest against it” “The British people are being forced to pay money to a corporation which suppresses free speech — publicising views they don’t necessarily agree with.” He has blasted the BBC for their “bias and propaganda,” especially on stories related to the EU or the Middle East. “I would like the BBC to become the KGB successors in imprisoning me for demanding freedom of speech. Nothing would expose them more for what they are.”

He is not the only one who is tired of what he thinks is the Leftist bias of the BBC. Michael Gove, a Conservative MP, and political commentator Mark Dooley complain about lopsided coverage of certain issues: “Take, for example, the BBC’s coverage of the late Yasser Arafat. In one profile broadcast in 2002, he was lauded as an “icon” and a “hero,” but no mention was made of his terror squads, corruption, or his brutal suppression of dissident Palestinians. Similarly, when Israel assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, one BBC reporter described him as “polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man.” This despite the fact that under Yassin’s guidance, Hamas murdered hundreds.” “A soft left worldview influences too much of what the corporation produces. We have a right to expect more honesty from the broadcasting service we are being asked to pay for.”

Vladimir Bukovsky thinks that the West lost the Cold War. “There were no Nuremberg-type trials in Moscow. Why? Because while we won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the context of ideas. The West stopped one day too soon, just like in Desert Storm. Just imagine the Allies in 1945 being satisfied with some kind of Perestroika in Nazi Germany — instead of unconditional surrender. What would have been the situation in Europe then, to say nothing of Germany? All former Nazi collaborators would have remained in power, albeit under a new disguise. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991.” “Communism might have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically.” “It is no surprise, therefore, that despite the defeat of communism, the radical Left in the West still arrogates the moral high ground to itself.”

“When the Nazis lost the Second World War, racial hatred was discredited. When the Soviets lost the Cold War, the tenet of class hatred remained as popular as ever.” Bukovsky argues that while there might have been a Western military victory, Socialism still prevailed as a popular idea ideologically throughout the world. He writes: “Having failed to finish off conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called communism anymore, but it retained many of its dangerous characteristics. . . .Until the Nuremberg-style tribunal passes its judgement on all the crimes committed by communism, it is not dead and the war is not over.”

Cultural Marxism has roots as far back as the 1920s, when some Socialist thinkers advocated attacking the cultural base of Western civilization to pave the way for the Socialist transition. Cultural Marxism is thus not something “new.” It has coexisted with economic Marxism for generations, but it received a great boost in the West from the 1960s and 70s onwards. As the Soviet Union fell apart and China embraced capitalism, the economic Marxists joined in on the “cultural” train, too, as it was now the only game in town. They don’t have a viable alternative to present, but they don’t care. They truly believe that we, the West, are so evil and exploitative that literally anything would be better, even the Islamic Caliphate.

The Free Congress Foundation has an interesting booklet online called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology, edited by William S. Lind. According to Lind, Political Correctness “wants to change behavior, thought, even the words we use. To a significant extent, it already has.” “Whoever or whatever controls language also controls thought.” “Political Correctness” is in fact cultural Marxism. The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the translation, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” Lind thinks there are major parallels between classical and cultural Marxism: “Both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on [University] campuses where ‘PC’ has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated.” “Today, with economic Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled its shoes. The medium has changed, but the message is the same: a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state.”

“Just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good,” for instance feminist women. Similarly, “white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.” Both economic and cultural Marxism “have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired.”

Raymond V. Raehn agrees with Lind that “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state.” According to him, “Gramsci envisioned a long march through the society’s institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media.” “He also concluded that so long as the workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals.” Another one of the early cultural Marxists, Georg Lukacs, noted that “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.” At a meeting in Germany in 1923, “Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing “Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution.”

William S. Lind points out that this cultural Marxism had its beginnings after the Marxist Revolution in Russia in 1917 failed to take roots in other countries. Marxists tried to analyze the reasons for this, and found them in Western civilization and culture itself. “Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?”

John Fonte describes how this cultural war is now being played out in the USA in his powerful piece “Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America.” According to him, “beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Marxist intellectual and politician, “believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.” This, according to Fonte, “is the very core of the Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based morality, or the idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of “oppressed” or “marginalized” ethnic, racial, and gender groups.” “The concept of ‘internalized oppression’ is the same as the Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness,’ in which people in the subordinate groups ‘internalize’(and thus accept) the values and ways of thinking of their oppressors in the dominant groups.” “This is classic Hegelian-Marxist thinking — actions (including free speech) that ‘objectively’ harm people in a subordinate class are unjust (and should be outlawed).”

He tracks how the ideas of Gramsci and cultural Marxists have spread throughout Western academia. Law professor Catharine MacKinnon writes in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), “The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible,” because “State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power.” Furthermore, “Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime.” MacKinnon has argued that sexual harassment is essentially an issue of power exercised by the dominant over the subordinate group.” At an academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, “the attendees articulated the view that ‘White students desperately need formal “training” in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism.’”

This can sometimes amount to virtual brainwashing disguised as critical thinking. Fonte mentions that at Columbia University, “new students are encouraged to get rid of ‘their own social and personal beliefs that foster inequality.’ To accomplish this, the assistant dean for freshmen, Katherine Balmer, insists that ‘training’ is needed. At the end of freshmen orientation at Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s, according to the school program, students were ‘breaking free’ of ‘the cycle of oppression’ and becoming ‘change agents.’ Syracuse University’s multicultural program is designed to teach students that they live ‘in a world impacted by various oppression issues, including racism.’”

John Fonte thinks that the primary resistance to the advance of cultural Marxism in the USA comes from an opposing quarter he dubs “contemporary Tocquevillianism.” “Its representatives take Alexis de Tocqueville’s essentially empirical description of American exceptionalism and celebrate the traits of this exceptionalism as normative values to be embraced.” As Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, Americans today are “just as in Tocqueville’s time, are much more individualistic, religious, and patriotic than the people of any other comparably advanced nation.” “What was particularly exceptional for Tocqueville (and contemporary Tocquevillians) is the singular American path to modernity. Unlike other modernists, Americans combined strong religious and patriotic beliefs with dynamic, restless entrepreneurial energy that emphasized equality of individual opportunity and eschewed hierarchical and ascriptive group affiliations.”

This battle is now being played out in most American public institutions. “Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral ‘truths’ are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that ‘the personal is political.’ In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation.”

“While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an ‘exceptional’ nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very ‘exceptionalism.’ America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous.”

Britain’s Anthony Browne writes in The Retreat of Reason of how the Politically Correct are more intolerant of dissent than traditional liberals or conservatives, since Liberals of earlier times “accepted unorthodoxy as normal. Indeed the right to differ was a datum of classical liberalism. The Politically Correct do not give that right a high priority. It distresses their programmed minds. Those who do not conform should be ignored, silenced or vilified. There is a kind of soft totalitarianism about Political Correctness.” “Because the politically correct believe they are not just on the side of right, but of virtue, it follows that those they are opposed to are not just wrong, but malign. In the PC mind, the pursuit of virtue entitles them to curtail the malign views of those they disagree with.” “People who transgress politically correct beliefs are seen not just as wrong, to be debated with, but evil, to be condemned, silenced and spurned.” “The rise of political correctness represents an assault on both reason and liberal democracy.” Browne defines Political Correctness as “an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated.” He also warns that “Good intentions pave the road to hell. The world is not short of good intentions, but it is too often short of good reasoning.”

However, Anthony Browne focuses more in the geopolitical situation to explain the rise of PC than on Marxist strategies: “Political correctness is essentially the product of a powerful but decadent civilisation which feels secure enough to forego reasoning for emoting, and to subjugate truth to goodness. However, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and those that followed in Bali, Madrid and Beslan, have led to a sense of vulnerability that have made people far more hard-headed about the real benefits and drawbacks of Western civilisation.”

“To some extent, the rise of the eastern powers, China and India, will ensure in coming decades that western guilt will shrivel: finally having equal powers to compare ourselves to, the West will no longer feel inclined to indulge in self-loathing, but will seek to reaffirm its sense of identity. (…) in the long-run of history, political correctness will be seen as an aberration in Western thought. The product of the uniquely unchallenged position of the West and its unrivalled affluence, the comparative decline of the West compared to the East is likely to spell the demise of political correctness.”

Lee Harris in his article “Why Isn’t Socialism Dead?” ponders whether Socialism isn’t dead because Socialism can’t die. The Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book, The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind with only one rational choice about which economic system to go with, namely, capitalism. However, says Harris, “the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail.” Thus there is “an...analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.” “It may well be that socialism isn’t dead because socialism cannot die. Who doesn’t want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?”

Maybe Socialism is a bit like the flu: It keeps mutating, and as soon as your immune system has defeated one strain, it changes just enough so that your body does not recognize it and then mounts another attack.

Political Correctness can reach absurd levels. Early in June 2006, Canadian police arrested a group of men suspected of planning terror attacks. The group was alleged to have been “well-advanced on its plan” to attack a number of Canadian institutions, among them the Parliament of Canada, including a possible beheading of the Prime Minister, and Toronto’s subway. However, the lead paragraph of newspaper Toronto Star’s story on the arrests was: “In investigators’ offices, an intricate graph plotting the links between the 17 men and teens charged with being members of a homegrown terrorist cell covers at least one wall. And still, says a source, it is difficult to find a common denominator.” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said that the suspects were all Canadian residents and the majority were citizens. “They represent the broad strata of our community. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed,” he said. However, there was one common denominator for the suspects that wasn’t mentioned: They were all Muslims. The front page article in the New York Times (June 4), too, was a study in how to avoid using the dreaded “M” word. The terrorist suspects were referred to as “Ontario residents,” “Canadian residents,” “the group,” “mainly of South Asian descent” or “good people.” Everything conceivable, just not as “Muslims.”

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair noted proudly during the press conference following the arrests, “I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or Muslim community.” Before launching the anti-terror raids, Canadian police received “sensitivity training” and were carefully instructed in Islamic traditions such as handling the Koran, the use of prayer mats, and blowing oneself up in the course of an arrest. As Charles Johnson of blog Little Green Footballs noted: “Do the Canadian police extend such considerations to Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other faiths? If they don’t, then the Moslems have already won important recognition as a ‘special’ people.” Commenting on the arrests, the Globe and Mail stated that “It may have been the most politically correct terrorism bust in history.” Canada’s secret security apparatus had been “putting serious effort into softening its image” among Muslims for much of the previous years.

The federal government in Canada was considering changes to the Anti-Terrorism Act to make it clear that police and security agents did not engage in religious profiling. The Calgary Sun interviewed a Canadian criminologist, Professor Mahfooz Kanwar, who stated that “Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not.” “Political correctness threatens us because we can’t fight something we refuse to label and understand.” Kanwar said the amount of political correctness during the arrests of 17 Muslims in the Toronto area was “sickening.” “Political correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens our society,” said the Pakistani-born Kanwar. “It is the responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not the other way around,” added Kanwar. Meanwhile, the Canadian Islamic Congress blamed the Canadian government for not showering enough money on the problem. They wanted more funding for research “to scientifically diagnose problems and devise solutions.”

They also wanted a nation-wide “Smart Integration program,” whatever that means. Given the fact that Muslims in Canada had quite recently been pushing for the partial implementation of sharia laws in the country, one would suspect that “smart integration” would mean that non-Muslims should demonstrate a little more appeasement. After all, if Canadian authorities listen to the advice of their compatriot Naomi Klein, these planned mass-killings of Canadian civilians were all due to Canadian racism and because the country wasn’t Multicultural enough. Muslims want to kill Canadians, Canadians smile back, tell them how much they “respect” them and ask what more they can do to please them.

This is what Political Correctness leads to in the end. It’s not funny and it’s not a joke. Political Correctness kills. It has already killed thousands of Western civilians, and if left unchecked it may soon kill entire nations or, in the case of Europe, entire continents.

As I have stated before, Islam is only a secondary infection, one that we could otherwise have had the strength to withstand. Cultural Marxism has weakened the West and made us ripe for a takeover. It is cultural AIDS, eating away at our immune system until it is too weak to resist Islamic infiltration attempts. It must be destroyed, before it destroys us all.

The Leftist-Islamic alliance will have profound consequences. Either they will defeat the West, or they will both go down in the fall. We never really won the Cold War as decisively as we should have done. Marxism was allowed to endure, and mount another attack on us by stealth and proxy. However, this flirting with Muslims could potentially prove more devastating to Marxists than the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As William S. Lind points out: “While the hour is late, the battle is not decided. Very few Americans realize that Political Correctness is in fact Marxism in a different set of clothes. As that realization spreads, defiance will spread with it. At present, Political Correctness prospers by disguising itself. Through defiance, and through education on our own part (which should be part of every act of defiance), we can strip away its camouflage and reveal the Marxism beneath the window-dressing of “sensitivity,” “tolerance” and “multiculturalism.”

Political Correctness is Marxism with a nose job. Multiculturalism is not about tolerance or diversity, it is an anti-Western hate ideology designed to dismantle Western civilization. If we can demonstrate this, an important part of the battle has already been won.

Source: Gates of Vienna

Peak Oil & Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed? || Europe's Impending Social Meltdown

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line -- then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
~ Killing Times: The Killing Times are Here: Population Policy || Depopulation or Perish || Tragedy of the Commons ~

Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed?

Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

Economists who comment on the possible effects of world peak oil production love to ridicule those who make statements such as "demand at some point will exceed supply." Strictly speaking, those economists are right that supply and demand are always in balance. The variable that changes to make it so is price.

So an economist who accepts the possibility of an oil peak may still believe that the marketplace will allow us to make a relatively smooth transition to a new energy economy as the price encourages the development of alternatives to oil and as demand is destroyed. The latter phrase is often glossed over. But demand destruction is at the core of misconceptions by economists about the likely course of events leading up to and following an oil peak.

A smooth transition away from oil mediated entirely by market prices essentially assumes two things: 1) a very gradual decline in oil supplies after the peak and 2) a recognition in the market price that the peak is coming long before it arrives.

Both assumptions are called into question by Robert Hirsch's study of oil depletion curves in various countries across the globe. Hirsch's study indicates that any world peak is likely to have a sharp crest followed by a swift decline in oil production--anywhere from 3 percent to 13 percent per year if the historical record can be relied upon. Hirsch also notes that "in all cases, it was not obvious that production was about to peak a year prior to the event." This would help explain why the second assumption listed above is likely to turn out to be wrong as well. Market participants are unlikely to see the peak coming. This means that prices will only start to signal that alternatives are needed for oil long after it is too late to prevent tremendous disruptions.

Douglas Reynolds gives a more detailed explanation of how energy and other mineral markets misinterpret price signals as indicative of future supplies. When finite mineral resources are involved, the market typically creates "the appearance of decreasing scarcity," something I've commented on previously in Faith-based economics II: The case of oil's sudden scarcity.

The final argument on which the smooth transition idea rests brings us back to demand destruction. An economist will properly point out that people will stop using oil for some applications and will turn to alternatives where they are available. All that is true enough. But it is worth asking what they mean by "applications." In reality, it is the poor who will stop using oil for "some applications," both in industrialized countries and across the world. If alternatives are not available or are just as expensive, they will simply have to forgo the benefits of those "applications." That will help keep a lid on oil prices, but it won't solve the problem: too little oil for all the activities that power and feed 6 billion people.

With a sudden decline in oil availability it is almost certain that agriculture, which is heavily dependent on oil and oil derivatives, will be less productive; that many marginal factories will close in short order; that tremendous financial turmoil will occur in world markets; that many people will have to do with less heat or without heat at all; that skyrocketing prices for transportation will prevent commodities including food from freely circulating around the world, and so on. In short, there would be no smooth transition.

The heightened price of oil would certainly encourage conservation--i.e., demand destruction--but that conservation might come in the form of terrible hardship for millions and perhaps billions of people and possibly death for many. That would give a rather gruesome connotation to the notion of demand destruction. High prices would also encourage the development of alternative energy sources, but that's assuming that world society does not become so disoriented and chaotic that such efforts cannot actually be effected.

If one assumes that the oil peak is far off and that technology will allow us to make a smooth transition to the next energy economy (and solve other related problems that threaten to annihilate us such as global warming), then there is no need to worry about the effects of sudden demand destruction in the oil markets. But, if the peak arrives soon, say, within the next 10 to 15 years, then no bloodless abstraction such as "demand destruction" will be able to obscure the fact that it is people who are going to get destroyed, and lots of them.

Source: Resource Insights (Jan 15, 2006)

Europe's Impending Social Meltdown

By Hans Vogel, Pravda.ru | 22.10.2009

Those in Europe who continue reading their trusted, national newspapers, watching the state-controlled TV news, or listening to state-controlled news broadcasts, will not know what is going on around them. They are being fed a rigorously controlled diet of largely unconnected stories that are designed to give an upbeat impression about the economy.

Yes, there are signs of recovery; yes, one individual businessman does see light at the end of the tunnel; no, the loss of jobs is not as serious as it seemed in the first place, well...any European may complete this list with his own examples. The upbeat news about the economy is presented within a wider framework of the usual trivia of traffic accidents, the private lives of celebrities, and the ubiquitous news about crimes committed by young Muslim immigrants from the mountainous regions of Northern Africa and Turkey.

What one will definitely not learn is, how the unfolding economic crisis, or rather, depression, is affecting Europe's social fabric. Yet it is absolutely vital for anyone in Europe to be informed about what the current economic disaster is doing to his next-door neighbors, to his fellow-men in the same neighborhood, in the rest of the country and in the neighboring countries. It is vital to know what is going on because very soon, most Europeans will probably have to face similar problems. These will eventually have an impact on the entire continent and drastically change its face for years to come. So far, the effects are absolutely devastating and beyond what anyone would have thought possible even a year ago.

Would you believe that half a million people in Spain go hungry? That their situation is so bad they are actually receiving food aid from the EU? These and other shocking facts are to be found in a publication called “The economic crisis and its humanitarian impact on Europe—Testimonies from the Red Cross Red Crescent,” recently published by the Red Cross Red Crescent. It is the first publication that gives an idea of the effects of the current crisis. Since it is just a first step in an effort to determine the extent and scope of what is going on, most of the information is still unquantified. Nevertheless, the report is deeply disturbing, not to say alarming.

Unemployment is on the rise everywhere. Youth unemployment in the EU stands at an average 20%. In the EU alone, some 50 million people are “currently vulnerable due to unemployment; and this does not take into account those that are not looking for work.” Vulnerability can be translated as being exposed to homelessness and hunger. The vulnerability has only increased and will continue to increase, due to governments cutting the budgets for welfare, health care, subsidies and other payments to the socially weak. In other words, those who are so far hardest hit by the crisis are your colleague who lost his job, your old grandmother, your sick uncle, your infant niece, your adolescent nephew who dropped out from school. When will it be your turn to be thrown out of your comfortable middle class existence?

Many middle class Europeans literally become ill from worrying. Many are losing sleep at night, many are taking to drink or drugs and still others are in need of psychiatric treatment. There are already many in the middle class who cannot pay the electricity bills, the heating bills, the telephone bills. Many families are being cut off from utilities and no doubt more will follow. In some countries, such as Hungary, special aid programs have been started to help pay people's heating bills or their mortgages.

In the US, millions have been thrown out of their homes for not being able to pay the mortgage. Thus, outside most US cities and towns, the new homeless are now living in tents. So far, this phenomenon does not seem to have hit Europe but, do not worry, it will soon.

Whereas support for the EU poor and indigent is slow in coming and piecemeal, being left largely to the Red Cross, the Church and assorted charities, support for fraudulent and incompetent banksters has been massive.

The aggregate bailout for banks in Europe is estimated at roughly three trillion Euros, a figure as big as the entire gross national product of Germany, Europe's biggest economy. Nor has the banking problem been solved by this generous funding. According to a February report in the Daily Telegraph, European Banks are still sitting on some 18 trillion Euros in toxic assets (as big as the entire EU GNP). One could go adding to this the lesser but still impressive amounts wasted on other items, such the millions of Euros spent on the criminal colonial war in Afghanistan, the lavish tax breaks for multinational corporations, the billions spent on policies and techniques to halt global warming (which is really a hoax as any thinking person should know), the billions spent on acquiring untested, dubious swine-flu vaccines...the list can be extended endlessly.

The discrepancy between the waste of astronomical sums of hard-earned taxpayer Euros and the minimal funds allotted to the poor and helpless can only be qualified by one word: shameless.

Moreover, what most people fail to realize is that all the money spent on banks, bonuses, wars, junkets and hazy schemes, has to come from somewhere. All of this at a time there is negative economic growth. Anybody even remotely familiar with economics will tell you that when the amount of money in circulation is increased at a faster rate than the growth of the economy, inflation will be the result. Although most of today's governments cannot resist the temptation to fiddle the data, manipulating things like inflation rates, the truth will somehow always come out. In other words, do not give credence to the official data on the economy and inflation.

It does not take a genius to figure out what will be a major result of the present erroneous policies: increased social misery, increased social tension, more insecurity and more crime. All the more so since there aren't any signs of recovery. Just keep in mind that international shipping has virtually ceased and that activity in Europe's main ports has dropped dramatically. Really, it is going to be a long wait for recovery to even begin. And it only remains to be seen whether recovery—if it comes—will lead to a restoration of pre-crisis living standards.

Meanwhile, both the EU and its member state governments are spending billions of Euros to spy on their citizens and to devise even craftier ways of finding out what each individual citizen is thinking. Remember, every single EU citizen is assumed to be a terrorist. Not since the days of Metternich and Guizot have so many European governments been so afraid of their citizens. It would seem government paranoia is justified. Most people in the EU are angry at their governments, angry at the Brussels eurocracy. Many are even boiling with rage. The British secret service now regards the middle class as potentially revolutionary and the most dangerous to the existing order

If history shows anything it is that it is impossible to continue governing without the consent of the majority. The history of rebellions and revolutions shows that these tend to break out when key sections of the population are afraid to lose their livelihoods, like today's European middle classes. There is no reason why these rules would suddenly have lost their validity.

Change may be coming sooner than most people think.

Source: Pravda

The Doors of Perception: Will You Believe Almost Anything?

“Sometimes you may wonder: Why are nations so committed to economic growth at nearly any cost? Why do central banks continue to pump in so much money long after they recognize the inevitability of its inflationary consequences? Why has GDP growth become the supreme icon of most governments, businesses and investors? When debts and deficits run amuck, why dont our leaders just slow down, take a breather, and focus on finding a more stable path?

“Your answers may be varied. But if you trace back through the chain of cause and effect, you will always return to one single, overriding factor: The population explosion colliding with finite resources. More mouths to feed. More demand. More pressure to perpetuate growth. More inflation.”
~ US Naval Services Long-Term Study: Global Tipping Points on Food, Water, Energy, Pollution, Population & Natural Resources & The Population Explosion ~

The Doors of Perception

Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything

- Tim O'Shea

Aldous Huxley's inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all bonds, all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?

It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today's news.

If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that


CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it. Examples:

• Pharmaceuticals restore health
  
• Vaccination brings immunity
  
• The cure for cancer is just around the corner
  
• Menopause is a disease condition
  
• When a child is sick, he needs immediate antibiotics
  
• When a child has a fever he needs Tylenol
  
• Hospitals are safe and clean.
  
• America has the best health care in the world.
  
• Americans have the best health in the world.
  
• Milk is a good source of calcium.
  
• You never outgrow your need for milk.
  
• Vitamin C is ascorbic acid.
  
• Aspirin prevents heart attacks.
  
• Heart drugs improve the heart.
  
• Back and neck pain are the only reasons for spinal adjustment.
  
• No child can get into school without being vaccinated.
  
• The FDA thoroughly tests all drugs before they go on the market.
  
• Pregnancy is a serious medical condition
  
• Infancy is a serious medical condition
  
• Chemotherapy and radiation are effective cures for cancer
  
• When your child is diagnosed with an ear infection, antibiotics should be given immediately 'just in case'
  
• Ear tubes are for the good of the child.
  
• Estrogen drugs prevent osteoporosis after menopause.
  
• Pediatricians are the most highly trained of al medical specialists.
  
• The purpose of the health care industry is health.
  
• HIV is the cause of AIDS.
  
• AZT is the cure.
  
• Without vaccines, infectious diseases will return
  
• Fluoride in the city water protects your teeth
  
• Flu shots prevent the flu.
  
• Vaccines are thoroughly tested before being placed on the Mandated Schedule.
  
• Doctors are certain that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any possible risks.
  
• There is a terrorist threat in the US.
  
• There is a bioterrorist threat in the US.
  
• The NASDAQ is a natural market controlled by supply and demand.
  
• Chronic pain is a natural consequence of aging.
  
• Soy is your healthiest source of protein.
  
• Insulin shots cure diabetes.
  
• After we take out your gall bladder you can eat anything you want
  
• Allergy medicine will cure allergies.
  
• An airliner can be flown with professional precision by a group of crazed amateurs into a 100-storey building and can cause that building to collapse on its own footprint. Twice.
  
• The Iraquis blew up the World Trade Center.

This is a list of illusions, that have cost billions to conjure up. Did you ever wonder why most people in this country generally accept most of the above statements?


PROGRAMMING THE VIEWER

Even the most undiscriminating viewer may suspect that TV newsreaders and news articles are not telling us the whole story. The slightly more lucid may have begun to glimpse the calculated intent of standard news content and are wondering about the reliability and accuracy of the way events are presented. For the very few who take time to research beneath the surface of the daily programming and who are still capable of independent thought, a somewhat darker picture begins to emerge. These may perceive bits of evidence of the profoundly technical science behind much of what is served up in mass media.

Events taking place in today's world are enormously complex. An impossibly convoluted tangle of interrelated and unrelated occurrences happens simultaneously, often in dynamic conflict. To even acknowledge this complexity contradicts a fundamental axiom of media science: Keep It Simple.

In real life, events don't take place in black and white, but in a thousand shades of grey. Just discovering the actual facts and events as they transpire is difficult enough. The river is different each time we step into it. By the time a reasonable understanding of an event has been apprehended, new events have already made that interpretation obsolete. And this is not even adding historical, social, or political elements into the mix, which are necessary for interpretation of events. Popular media gives up long before this level of analysis.

Media stories cover only the tiniest fraction of actual events, but stupidly claim to be summarizing "all the news."

The final goal of media is to create a following of docile, unquestioning consumers. To that end, three primary tools have historically been employed:

• deceit
  
• dissimulation
  
• distraction

Over time, the sophistication of these tools of propaganda has evolved to a very structured science, taking its cues in an unbroken line from principles laid down by the Father of Spin himself, Edward L Bernays, over a century ago, as we will see.

Let's look at each tool very briefly:


DECEIT
Deliberate misrepresentation of fact has always been the privilege of the directors of mass media. Their agents - the PR industry - cannot afford random objective journalism interpreting events as they actually take place. This would be much too confusing for the average consumer, who has been spoonfed his opinions since the day he was born. No, we can't have that. In all the confusion the viewer might get the idea that he is supposed to make up his own mind about the significance of some event or other. The end product of good media is single-mindedness. Confusion and individual interpretation of events do not foster the homogenized, one-dimensional lemming outlook.

For this reason, events must have a spin put on them - an interpretation, a frame of reference. Subtleties are omitted; all that is presented is the bottom line. The minute that decision is made - what spin to put on a story - we have left the world of reporting and entered the world of propaganda. By definition, propaganda replaces faithful reporting with deceitful reporting.

Here's an obvious example: the absurd and unremitting allegations of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for the invasion of Iraq. Of course none were ever found, but that is irrelevant. We weren't really looking for any weapons - but the deceit served its purpose - get us in there. Later the ruse can be abandoned and forgotten; its usefulness is over. And nobody will notice. Characterization of Saddam as a murderous tyrant was decided to be an insufficient excuse for invading a sovereign nation. After all, there are literally dozens of murderous tyrants the world over, going their merry ways. We can't be expected to police all of them.

So it was decided that the murderous tyrant thing, though good, was not enough. To whip a sleeping people into war consciousness has historically involved one additional prerequisite: threat. Saddam must therefore be not only a baby-killing maniac; he must be a threat to the rest of the world, especially America. Why? Because he has weapons of mass destruction. For almost two years, this myth was assiduously programmed into the lowest common denominator of awareness which Americans substitute for consciousness. Even though the myth has now been openly dismissed by the Regime itself, the majority of us still believe it.

Hitler used the exact same tack with the Czechs and Poles at the beginning of his rampage. These peaceful peoples were not portrayed as an easy mark for the German war machine - no, they were a threat to the Fatherland itself. Just like Albania in the Dustin Hoffman movie. And threats must be removed by all available force.

With Iraq, the fact that UN inspectors never came up with any of these dread weapons before Saddam was captured - this fact was never mentioned again. That one phrase - WMD WMD WMD - repeated ad nauseam month after month had served its purpose - whip the people into war mode. It didn't have to be true; it just had to work. A staggering indicator of how low the general awareness had sunk is that this mantra continued to be used as our license to invade Iraq long after our initial assault. If Saddam had any such weapons, probably a good time to trot them out would be when a foreign country is moving in, wouldn't you say?

No weapons were ever found, nor will they be. So confident was the PR machine in the general inattention to detail commonly exhibited by the comatose American people that they didn't even find it necessary to plant a few mass weapons in order to justify the invasion. It was almost insulting.

So we see that a little deceit goes a long way. All it takes is repetition. Lay the groundwork and the people will buy anything. After that just ride it out until they seem doubtful again. Then onto the next deceit.


DISSIMULATION

A second tool that is commonly used to create mass intellectual torpor is dissimulation. Dissimulation simply means to pretend not to be something you are. Like some insects who can disguise themselves as leaves or twigs, pretending not to be insects. Or bureaucrats who pretend not to be acting in their own interest, but rather in the public interest. To pretend not to be what you are.

Whether it's the BushLeague in Iraq or Hitler in Germany, aggressors do not present themselves as marauding invaders initiating hostilities, but instead as defenders against external threats.

Freedom-annihilating edicts like the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act - currently the law of the land - do not represent themselves as the negation of every principle the Founding Fathers laid down, or as shaky pretexts for the Takers to further loot the country, but rather as public services, benevolent and necessary new rules to ensure our SECURITY against various imagined enemies. To pretend to be what you are not: dissimulation.

Other obvious examples of dissimulation we see today include:

• pretending like the world's oil will not be gone in 35 years
  
• pretending like more and more government will not further stifle an already struggling economy
  
• pretending like programs favoring "minorities" are not just another form of racism
  
• pretending like drug laws are necessary for national security
  
• pretending like passing more and more laws every year is not geared ultimately for the advancement of the law enforcement, security, and prison industries
  
• pretending there is a bioterrorist threat in the US today
  
• pretending there is a terrorist threat in the US today
  
• pretending the present regime has not benefited from every program that came out of 9/11

To pretend to be what you are not: dissimulation.


DISTRACTION

A third tool necessary to media in order to keep the public from thinking too much is distraction. Bread and circuses worked for Caesar in old Rome. The people need to be kept quiet while the small group in power carries out its agenda, which always involves fortifying its own position.

All actions of the present Reich since 9/11 may be explained by plugging in one of four beneficiaries:

• Oil
  
• Pharmaceuticals
  
• War gear
  
• Security systems

Every act, every political event, every public statement of the present administration has promoted one or more of these huge sectors. More oil, more drugs, more weapons, more security.

But the people mustn't be allowed to notice things like that. So they must be smokescreened by other stuff , blatant obvious stuff which is really easy to understand and which they think has a greater bearing on their day to day life. A classic axiom of propaganda is that people shouldn't be allowed to think too much about what the government is doing in their name. After all, there's more to life than politics, right? So while the power group has its cozy little war going on, the people need to have their attention diverted.

All the strong men of history would have given their eyeteeth to have at their disposal the number and types of distractions available to today's regimes:

- TV sports, its orchestrated frenzy and spectacle

- Super Sunday

- an endless succession of unspeakably boring, inane movies, short on plot, long on CGI

- the wanton sexless flash of MTV with its uninspired lack of talent, a study in split second phony images

- colossally dull TV programs which serve the secondary purpose of instilling proper robot attitudes into people who have little other instruction in life values

- the artistic Mojave of modern music, with its soulless cyber-droning, a constant quest for the nadir of reptilian brain stimulation, devoid of lyrical competence, instrumental proficiency, or passion

- the ever-retreating promise of financial success, switched now to the trappings and toys that suggest success, available to anyone with a credit card

- organized superstitions of all varieties, with their requisite pseudo-spiritual trappings

- the constant dramatization of crimes and "issues" throughout the world whose collective goal is the humble and grateful acknowledgement of "how good we've really got it"

- dwelling for months on the minutiae of unsupported allegations of impropriety, preferably sexual, of a celebrity personality

With these noisy, banal distractions the forces promoting the general decline in intelligence and awareness jubilantly engulf us on all sides. Media science holds the advantage: as people get dumber and dumber year by year it gets easier and easier to keep them dumb. The only challenge is that their threshold keeps getting lower. So in order to keep their attention, messages have to become more obvious and blatant, taking nothing for granted.

Here are some indicators of our declining intelligence:

- flagrant errors of grammar and spelling rampant in advertising, which go unnoticed

- declining SAT scores and the arbitrary resetting of Average, which has occurred at least twice in the past 8 years, in order to cover up how dumb our kids are really getting

- increased volume and decreased speed of the voices of newsreaders on radio and TV

- the limited vocabulary and cliched speech allowed in radio programs; the obvious lack of education and requisite pedestrian mentality required of the corporate simians who are featured on radio

- increasing illiteracy of high school graduates, both written and spoken

- the unwritten policy requiring school teachers, especially math and English teachers, to pass students who have failing marks, especially if they're a certain race or other, so that the school won't "look bad"

- decreasing requirements for masters theses and PhD dissertations in both length and content

- increasing oversimplification of movie and TV plot lines - absence of subtlety in conceptual and dramatic content; blatant moralizing of compliant robot values

- the speed at which images on TV are flashed, giving the viewer barely enough time to recognize which sledgehammer idea they are referring to before the next one appears, about 2 seconds later. That way there is no possible way the brain can follow a train of thought in any kind of depth. From childhood the brain learns that it is not to be tasked with understanding abstractions or concepts of any subtlety from the information presented. All the brain has to do is react to the incessant bombardment of fragmented ADD-generating visual stimuli without trying to derive sense or logic from it. This is why TV should be watched only with the sound off, since it has generally the same educational value as a lava lamp.

- the enormous proportion of time spent by TV channels telling the viewer what will be shown in the future, leaving no time for actually delivering what they have already endlessly promised in the recent past, which should be airing at the present moment.

- newspaper articles that are not written by reporters but that are scientifically crafted phrase by canny phrase by the PR industry and placed into the columns of syndication in the guise of 'hard news'

- Jerky, clumsy news clips, loaded with coarse innuendo and nonsequitur, ridiculously brief: most news clips evoke only the most superficial suggestion of events which may or may not have transpired, resulting generally in the transfer of no information

- the downward spiral of the level of ordinary conversations, which are commonly just exercises in stringing together random cliché³ from the very finite stock of endlessly repeated homogeneous bytes. It's as though we're only allowed to have 50 thoughts, and most conversation is just linking these 50 programmed audio clips together in a different order
- in popular music the overriding absence of melody, lyric, chord complexity, or instrument competence

PUT-UP JOB

Imagine for a moment that 9/11 was a put-up job engineered for the sole purpose of cementing the current regime into power and frightening the bovine populace into surrendering even more of what little freedom they have left. Hypothetical situation now, just work with me a little. Imagine there never were any dissident crazed terrorists representing Osama or Saddam, but instead a highly disciplined though slightly whacked-out team of military fanatics, programmed somehow to think they were doing something valuable for some faction or other. A put-up job, from the inside.

So then imagine that all the violence and stress perpetrated on the collective American psyche since 9/11 about war, bioterrorism, and security has all been completely unnecessary. And that all the billions of dollars of extra security and wasted time in airports and borders was also totally unnecessary because there never were any terrorists, except those on Capitol Hill. And all the shrill media articles and "stories" that support the few underlying events have been unnecessary, their prime purpose being self promotion. Think how much our quality of life has suffered. What if all this stress has been totally unnecessary?

Many of our best people have come to precisely these conclusions. Once you get past the initial hurdle of being able to consider the unthinkable possibility that the present regime could be so obsessed with gaining political advantage that they would actually blow up 3000 of our own people, the rest falls into place. Over the top? Not such a stretch really when you compare the thousands that have been sacrificed to the whims of other murderous tyrants the world over throughout all of recorded history. How are we any better?


WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW?

When it comes to a discussion of what's going on in the world, the honest individual must admit that he has almost no idea. When was the last time George Bush invited you into the Green Room for a private chat with Cheney and Ashcroft about the future of big oil? When did Bill Gates last invite you up to his Redmond digs for a wine and cheese brainstorming session about the next Big Thing? Or when did your neighbor who lives three blocks away from you call you up to tell you about the unfulfilled plans of his father who just found out he's dying of cancer? How many life stories of the world's six billion people do you know anything about?

This is to say nothing of fluid events which are coming in and out of existence every day between the nations of the world. What is really going on? Much more effort is spent covering up and packaging actual events that are taking place than in trying to accurately report and evaluate them. These are questions of epistemology – what can we know? The answer if very little, if our only source of information is the superficial everyday media. The few people who buy books don't read them. Passive absorption of pre-interpreted already-figured-out data is the preferred method


HOW IT ALL GOT STARTED

But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's back up a minute. In their book Trust Us We're Experts, Stauber and Rampton pull together some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in America. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the last century, highlighting the work of guys like Edward L. Bernays, the Father of Spin.

From his own amazing 1928 chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion. The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays studied these same ideas in order to learn how to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.


THE FATHER OF SPIN

Edward L. Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years after that. (Tye) During that time, Bernays took on hundreds of diverse assignments to create a public perception about some idea or product. A few examples:

As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays' first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to "Make the World Safe for Democracy." (Ewen) We've seen this phrase in every war and US military involvement since that time.

A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women's liberation. After that one event, women would be able to feel secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.

Bernays popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast.

Not one to turn down a challenge, he set up the liaison between the tobacco industry and the American Medical Association that lasted for nearly 50 years. They proved to all and sundry that cigarettes were beneficial to health. Just look at ads in old issues of Life, Look, Time or Journal of the American Medical Association from the 40s and 50s in which doctors are recommending this or that brand of cigarettes as promoting healthful digestion, or whatever.

During the next several decades Bernays and his colleagues evolved the principles by which masses of people could be generally swayed through messages repeated over and over, hundreds of times per week.

Once the economic power of media became apparent, other countries of the world rushed to follow our lead. But Bernays remained the gold standard. He was the source to whom the new PR leaders across the world would always defer. Even Josef Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, closely studied the principles of Edward Bernays when Goebbels was developing the popular rationale he would use to convince the Germans that in order to purify their race they had to kill 6 million of the impure. (Stauber)


SMOKE AND MIRRORS

As he saw it, Bernay's job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. He never saw himself as a master hoodwinker, but rather as a beneficent servant of humanity, providing a valuable service. Bernays described the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership." Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to "control the masses without their knowing it." The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.

Stauber describes Bernays' rationale like this:

"the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society." -- Trust Us, p 42

These early mass persuaders postured themselves as performing a moral service for humanity in general. Democracy was too good for people; they needed to be told what to think, because they were incapable of rational thought by themselves. Here's a paragraph from Bernays' Propaganda:

"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

A tad different from Thomas Jefferson's view on the subject:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

Inform their discretion. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task. And luckily, he saw himself as one of that elect.


HERE COMES THE MONEY

Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were glimpsed, Bernays soon had more corporate clients than he could handle. Global corporations fell all over themselves courting the new Image Makers. There were dozens of goods and services and ideas to be sold to a susceptible public. Over the years, these players have had the money to make their images happen. A few examples:

• Philip Morris
  
• Pfizer
  
• Union Carbide
  
• Allstate
  
• Monsanto
  
• Eli Lilly
  
• tobacco industry
  
• Ciba Geigy
  
• lead industry
  
• Coors
  
• DuPont
  
• Shell Oil
  
• Chlorox
  
• Standard Oil
  
• Procter & Gamble
  
• Boeing
  
• Dow Chemical
  
• General Motors
  
• Goodyear
  
• General Mills

THE PLAYERS

Dozens of PR firms have emerged to answer the demand for spin control. Among them:

• Burson-Marsteller
  
• Edelman
  
• Hill & Knowlton
  
• Kamer-Singer
  
• Ketchum
  
• Mongovin, Biscoe, and Duchin
  
• BSMG
  
• Ruder-Finn

Though world-famous within the PR industry, these are names we don't know, and for good reason. The best PR goes unnoticed. For decades they have created the opinions that most of us were raised with, on virtually any issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:

• pharmaceutical drugs
  
• vaccines
  
• medicine as a profession
  
• alternative medicine
  
• fluoridation of city water
  
• chlorine
  
• household cleaning products
  
• tobacco
  
• dioxin
  
• global warming
  
• leaded gasoline
  
• cancer research and treatment
  
• pollution of the oceans
  
• forests and lumber
  
• images of celebrities, including damage control
  
• crisis and disaster management
  
• genetically modified foods
  
• aspartame
  
• food additives; processed foods
  
• dental amalgams
  
• autism

LESSON #1

Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility for a product or an image was by "independent third-party" endorsement. For example, if General Motors were to come out and say that global warming is a hoax thought up by some liberal tree-huggers, people would suspect GM's motives, since GM's fortune is made by selling automobiles. If however some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report that says global warming is really a fiction, people begin to get confused and to have doubts about the original issue.

So that's exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set up "more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined." (Stauber p 45) Quietly financed by the industries whose products were being evaluated, these "independent" research agencies would churn out "scientific" studies and press materials that could create any image their handlers wanted. Such front groups are given high-sounding names like:

• Temperature Research Foundation
  
• International Food Information Council
  
• Consumer Alert
  
• The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
  
• Air Hygiene Foundation
  
• Industrial Health Federation
  
• International Food Information Council
  
• Manhattan Institute
  
• Center for Produce Quality
  
• Tobacco Institute Research Council
  
• Cato Institute
  
• American Council on Science and Health
  
• Global Climate Coalition
  
• Alliance for Better Foods

Sound pretty legit don't they?

CANNED NEWS RELEASES

As Stauber explains, these organizations and hundreds of others like them are front groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the global corporations who fund them, like those -listed on page 2 above. This is accomplished in part by an endless stream of 'press releases' announcing "breakthrough" research to every radio station and newspaper in the country. (Robbins) Many of these canned reports read like straight news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format. This saves journalists the trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially on topics about which they know very little. Entire sections of the release or in the case of video news releases, the whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station - and voilá! Instant news - copy and paste. Written by corporate PR firms.

Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of the News Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are based solely on such PR press releases.. (22) These types of stories are mixed right in with legitimately researched stories. Unless you have done the research yourself, you won't be able to tell the difference. So when we see new "research" being cited, we should always first suspect that the source is another industry-backed front group. A common tip-off is the word "breakthrough."


THE LANGUAGE OF SPIN

As 1920s spin pioneers like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays gained more experience, they began to formulate rules and guidelines for creating public opinion. They learned quickly that mob psychology must focus on emotion, not facts. Since the mob is incapable of rational thought, motivation must be based not on logic but on presentation. Here are some of the axioms of the new science of PR:

• technology is a religion unto itself
  
• if people are incapable of rational thought, real democracy is dangerous
  
• important decisions should be left to experts
  
• when reframing issues, stay away from substance; create images
  
• never state a clearly demonstrable lie

Words are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. Here's an example. A front group called the International Food Information Council handles the public's natural aversion to genetically modified foods. Trigger words are repeated all through the text. Now in the case of GM foods, the public is instinctively afraid of these experimental new creations which have suddenly popped up on our grocery shelves and which are said to have DNA alterations. The IFIC wants to reassure the public of the safety of GM foods. So it avoids words like:

• Frankenfoods
  
• Hitler
  
• biotech
  
• chemical
  
• DNA
  
• experiments
  
• manipulate
  
• money
  
• safety
  
• scientists
  
• radiation
  
• roulette
  
• gene-splicing
  
• gene gun
  
• random

Instead, good PR for GM foods contains words like:

• hybrids
  
• natural order
  
• beauty
  
• choice
  
• bounty
  
• cross-breeding
  
• diversity
  
• earth
  
• farmer
  
• organic
  
• wholesome

It's just basic Freud/Tony Robbins/NLP word association. The fact that GM foods are not hybrids that have been subjected to the slow and careful scientific methods of real cross-breeding doesn't really matter. This is pseudoscience, not science. Form is everything and substance just a passing myth. (Trevanian)

Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a wild guess. Right - Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet - those in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (Stauber p 20)


CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD PROPAGANDA

As the science of mass control evolved, PR firms developed further guidelines for effective copy. Here are some of the gems:

• dehumanize the attacked party by labeling and name calling
  
• speak in glittering generalities using emotionally positive words
  
• when covering something up, don't use plain English; stall for time; distract
  
• get endorsements from celebrities, churches, sports figures, street people - anyone who has no expertise in the subject at hand
  
• the 'plain folks' ruse: us billionaires are just like you
  
• when minimizing outrage, don't say anything memorable
  
• when minimizing outrage, point out the benefits of what just happened
  
• when minimizing outrage, avoid moral issues

Keep this list. Start watching for these techniques. Not hard to find - look at today's paper or tonight's TV news. See what they're doing; these guys are good!


SCIENCE FOR HIRE

PR firms have become very sophisticated in the preparation of news releases. They have learned how to attach the names of famous scientists to research that those scientists have not even looked at. (Stauber, p 201) It's a common practice. In this way, the editors of newspapers and TV news shows are themselves often unaware that an individual release is a total PR fabrication. Or at least they have "deniability," right?

Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came into the picture. In 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more horsepower. When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of Mines to do some fake "testing" and publish spurious research that 'proved' that inhalation of lead was harmless. Enter Charles Kettering.

Founder of the world famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with General Motors. By some strange coincidence, we soon have Sloan-Kettering issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the body has a way of eliminating low level exposure. Through its association with The Industrial Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton, Sloane-Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. (Stauber p 92). Without organized scientific opposition, for the next 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the 1970s, 90% or our gasoline was leaded.

Finally it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, which they knew all along, and leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. But during those 60 years, it is estimated that some 30 million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and highways. 30 million tons. (Stauber)

That is PR, my friends.


JUNK SCIENCE

In 1993 a guy named Peter Huber wrote a new book and coined a new term. The book was Galileo's Revenge and the term was junk science . Huber's shallow thesis was that real science supports technology, industry, and progress. Anything else was suddenly junk science. Not surprisingly, Stauber explains how Huber's book was supported by the industry-backed Manhattan Institute.

Huber's book was generally dismissed not only because it was so poorly written, but because it failed to realize one fact: true scientific research begins with no conclusions. Real scientists are seeking the truth because they do not yet know what the truth is.

True scientific method goes like this:

1. form a hypothesis
   
2. make predictions for that hypothesis
   
3. test the predictions
   
4. reject or revise the hypothesis based on the research findings

Boston University scientist Dr. David Ozonoff explains that ideas in science are themselves like "living organisms, that must be nourished, supported, and cultivated with resources for making them grow and flourish." (Stauber p 205) Great ideas that don't get this financial support because the commercial angles are not immediately obvious - these ideas wither and die.

Another way you can often distinguish real science from phony is that real science points out flaws in its own research. Phony science pretends there were no flaws.


THE REAL JUNK SCIENCE

Contrast this with modern PR and its constant pretensions to sound science. Corporate sponsored research, whether it's in the area of drugs, GM foods, or chemistry begins with predetermined conclusions. It is the job of the scientists then to prove that these conclusions are true, because of the economic upside that proof will bring to the industries paying for that research. This invidious approach to science has shifted the entire focus of research in America during the past 50 years, as any true scientist is likely to admit. If a drug company is spending 10 million dollars on a research project to prove the viability of some new drug, and the preliminary results start coming back about the dangers of that drug, what happens? Right. No more funding. The well dries up. What is being promoted under such a system? Science? Or rather Entrenched Medical Error?"

Stauber documents the increasing amount of corporate sponsorship of university research. (206) This has nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge. Scientists lament that research has become just another commodity, something bought and sold. (Crossen)


THE TWO MAIN TARGETS OF "SOUND SCIENCE"

It is shocking when Stauber shows how the vast majority of corporate PR today opposes any research that seeks to protect

• public health
  
• the environment

It's a funny thing that most of the time when we see the phrase "junk science," it is in a context of defending something that threatens either the environment or our health. This makes sense when one realizes that money changes hands only by selling the illusion of health and the illusion of environmental protection or the illusion of health. True public health and real preservation of the earth's environment have very low market value.

Stauber thinks it ironic that industry's self-proclaimed debunkers of junk science are usually non-scientists themselves. (255) Here again they can do this because the issue is not science, but the creation of images.


THE LANGUAGE OF ATTACK

When PR firms attack legitimate environmental groups and alternative medicine people, they again use special words which will carry an emotional punch:

• outraged
  
• sound science
  
• junk science
  
• sensible
  
• scaremongering
  
• responsible
  
• phobia
  
• hoax
  
• alarmist
  
• hysteria

The next time you are reading a newspaper article about an environmental or health issue, note how the author shows bias by using the above terms. This is the result of very specialized training.

Another standard PR tactic is to use the rhetoric of the environmentalists themselves to defend a dangerous and untested product that poses an actual threat to the environment. This we see constantly in the PR smokescreen that surrounds genetically modified foods. They talk about how GM foods are necessary to grow more food and to end world hunger, when the reality is that GM foods actually have lower yields per acre than natural crops. (Stauber p 173) The grand design sort of comes into focus once you realize that almost all GM foods have been created by the sellers of herbicides and pesticides so that those plants can withstand greater amounts of herbicides and pesticides. (see The Magic Bean)


THE MIRAGE OF PEER REVIEW

Publish or perish is the classic dilemma of every research scientist. That means whoever expects funding for the next research project had better get the current research paper published in the best scientific journals. And we all know that the best scientific journals, like JAMA, New England Journal, British Medical Journal, etc. are peer-reviewed. Peer review means that any articles which actually get published, between all those full color drug ads and pharmaceutical centerfolds, have been reviewed and accepted by some really smart guys with a lot of credentials. The assumption is, if the article made it past peer review, the data and the conclusions of the research study have been thoroughly checked out and bear some resemblance to physical reality.

But there are a few problems with this hot little set up. First off, money .

Even though prestigious venerable medical journals pretend to be so objective and scientific and incorruptible, the reality is that they face the same type of being called to account that all glossy magazines must confront: don't antagonize your advertisers. Those full-page drug ads in the best journals cost millions, Jack. How long will a pharmaceutical company pay for ad space in a magazine that prints some very sound scientific research paper that attacks the safety of the drug in the centerfold? Think about it. The editors may lack moral fibre, but they aren't stupid.

Another problem is the conflict of interest thing. There's a formal requirement for all medical journals that any financial ties between an author and a product manufacturer be disclosed in the article. In practice, it never happens. A study done in 1997 of 142 medical journals did not find even one such disclosure. (Wall St. Journal, 2 Feb 99)

A 1998 study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that 96% of peer reviewed articles had financial ties to the drug they were studying. (Stelfox, 1998) Big shock, huh? Any disclosures? Yeah, right. This study should be pointed out whenever somebody starts getting too pompous about the objectivity of peer review, like they often do.

Then there's the outright purchase of space. A drug company may simply pay $100,000 to a journal to have a favorable article printed. (Stauber, p 204)

Fraud in peer review journals is nothing new. In 1987, the New England Journal ran an article that followed the research of R. Slutsky MD over a seven year period. During that time, Dr. Slutsky had published 137 articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals. NEJM found that in at least 60 of these 137, there was evidence of major scientific fraud and misrepresentation, including:

• reporting data for experiments that were never done
  
• reporting measurements that were never made
  
• reporting statistical analyses that were never done
  LI>o Engler

Dean Black PhD, describes what he the calls the Babel Effect that results when this very common and frequently undetected scientific fraud in peer-reviewed journals is quoted by other researchers, who are in turn re-quoted by still others, and so on.

Want to see something that sort of re-frames this whole discussion? Check out the McDonald's ads which routinely appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Then keep in mind that this is the same publication that for almost 50 years ran cigarette ads proclaiming the health benefits of tobacco. (Robbins)

Very scientific, oh yes.


KILL YOUR TV?

Hope this chapter has given you a hint to start reading newspaper and magazine articles a little differently, and perhaps start watching TV news shows with a slightly different attitude than you had before. Always ask, what are they selling here, and who's selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton's book and check out some of the other resources below, you might even glimpse the possibility of advancing your life one quantum simply by ceasing to subject your brain to mass media. That's right - no more newspapers, no more TV news, no more Time magazine or People magazine Newsweek.

You could actually do that. Just think what you could do with the extra time alone.

Really feel like you need to "relax" or find out "what's going on in the world" for a few hours every day? Think about the news of the past couple of years for a minute. Do you really suppose the major stories that have dominated headlines and TV news have been "what is going on in the world?" Do you actually think there's been nothing going on besides the contrived tech slump, the contrived power shortages, the re-filtered accounts of foreign violence and disaster, even the new accounts of US retribution in the Middle East, making Afghanistan safe for democracy, bending Saddam to our will, etc., and all the other non-stories that the puppeteers dangle before us every day? What about when they get a big one, like with OJ or Monica Lewinsky or the Oklahoma city bombing? Or now with the Neo-Nazi aftermath of 9/11. Or the contrived war against Saddam? Do we really need to know all that detail, day after day? Do we have any way of verifying all that detail, even if we wanted to? What is the purpose of news? To inform the public? Hardly.

The sole purpose of news is to keep the public in a state of fear and uncertainty so that they'll watch again tomorrow to see how much worse things got and to be subjected to the same advertising.

Oversimplification? Of course. That's the mark of mass media mastery - simplicity. The invisible hand. Like Edward Bernays said, the people must be controlled without them knowing it.

Consider this: what was really going on in the world all that time they were distracting us with all that stupid vexatious daily smokescreen? We have no way of knowing. And most of it doesn't even concern us even if we could know it. Fear and uncertainty -- that's what keeps people coming back for more.

If this seems like a radical outlook, let's take it one step further:

What would you lose from your life if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading newspapers and glossy magazines altogether?

Whoa!

Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual, spiritual, or academic loss from such a decision?

Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate, amoral, phony, culturally bereft, desperately brainless values of the people featured in the average nightly TV program? Are these fake, programmed robots "normal"?

Do you need to have your life values constantly spoonfed to you?

Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to keep you from looking at reality, or trying to figure things out yourself by doing a little independent reading? Or perhaps from having a life?

Name one example of how your life is improved by watching TV news and reading the evening paper or the glossy magazines. What measurable gain is there for you?

What else could we be doing with all this freed-up time that would actually expand awareness?


PLANET OF THE APES?

There's no question that as a nation, we're getting dumber year by year. Look at the presidents we've been choosing lately. Ever notice the blatant grammar mistakes so ubiquitous in today's advertising and billboards? Literacy is marginal in most American secondary schools. Three-fourths of California high school seniors can't read well enough to pass their exit exams. ( SJ Mercury 20 Jul 01) If you think other parts of the country are smarter, try this one: hand any high school senior a book by Dumas or Jane Austen, and ask them to open to any random page and just read one paragraph out loud. Go ahead, do it. SAT scales are arbitrarily shifted lower and lower to disguise how dumb kids are getting year by year. (ADD: A Designer Disease) At least 10% have documented "learning disabilities," which are reinforced and rewarded by special treatment and special drugs. Ever hear of anyone failing a grade any more?

Or observe the intellectual level of the average movie which these days may only last one or two weeks in the theatres, especially if it has insufficient explosions, chase scenes, silicone, fake martial arts, and cretinesque dialogue. Doesn't anyone else notice how badly these 30 or 40 "movie stars" we keep seeing over and over in the same few plots must now overact to get their point across to an ever-dimming audience?

Radio? Consider the low mental qualifications of the falsely animated corporate simians they hire as DJs -- seems like they're only allowed to have 50 thoughts, which they just repeat at random. And at what point did popular music cease to require the study of any musical instrument or theory whatsoever, not to mention lyric? Perhaps we just don't understand this emerging art form, right? The Darwinism of MTV - apes descended from man.

Ever notice how most articles in any of the glossy magazines sound like they were all written by the same guy? And this writer just graduated from junior college? And yet he has all the correct opinions on social issues, no original ideas, and that shallow, smug, homogenized corporate omniscience, which enables him to assure us that everything is fine...

All this is great news for the PR industry - makes their job that much easier. Not only are very few paying attention to the process of conditioning; fewer are capable of understanding it even if somebody explained it to them.


TEA IN THE CAFETERIA

Let's say you're in a crowded cafeteria, and you buy a cup of tea. And as you're about to sit down you see your friend way across the room. So you put the tea down and walk across the room and talk to your friend for a few minutes. Now, coming back to your tea, are you just going to pick it up and drink it? Remember, this is a crowded place and you've just left your tea unattended for several minutes. You've given anybody in that room access to your tea.

Why should your mind be any different? Turning on the TV, or uncritically absorbing mass publications every day - these activities allow access to our minds by "just anyone" - anyone who has an agenda, anyone with the resources to create a public image via popular media. As we've seen above, just because we read something or see something on TV doesn't mean it's true or worth knowing. So the idea here is, like the tea, perhaps the mind is also worth guarding, worth limiting access to it.

This is the only life we get. Time is our total capital. Why waste it allowing our potential, our scope of awareness, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted, and boxed up according to the whims of the mass panderers? There are many important issues that are crucial to our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being which require time and study. If it's an issue where money is involved, objective data won't be so easy to obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought and paid for.

Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little excavation down at least one level below what "everybody knows."

Copyright MMVI TwoTrees

References

• Stauber & Rampton Trust Us, We're Experts Tarcher/Putnam 2001
  
• Ewen, Stuart PR!: A Social History of Spin Basic Books 1996
  
• Tye, Larry The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations Crown Publishers, Inc. 2001
  
• Bernays E Propaganda Liveright 1928
  
• King, R Medical journals rarely disclose researchers' ties Wall St. Journal February 2, 1999
  
• Engler, R et al. Misrepresentation and Responsibility in Medical Research New England Journal of Medicine v 317 p 1383 November 26, 1987
  
• Black, D PhD Health At the Crossroads Tapestry 1988
  
• Trevanian Shibumi 1983
  
• Crossen, C Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America 1996
  
• Robbins, J Reclaiming Our Health Kramer 1996
  
• Huxley, A The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell Harper and Row 1954
  
• O'Shea T The Magic Bean www.thedoctorwithin.com

Source: Heed The Word