The criminal charge related to a painkiller called Bextra, considered a Cox-2 inhibitor, which was pulled from the market back in 2005 due to mounting evidence that it increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. According to the government Bextra, and several other drugs, were promoted as treatment for medical conditions beyond the conditions which the FDA had approved for them. It was the fourth such illegal marketing settlement for Pfizer in the last decade and much like the other three it hardly put a dent in its fortunes ($2.3 billion amounts to less than 3 weeks of Pfizer sales) as its stock declined a mere 14 cents on the very day of the settlement and the company announced plans to acquire rival drug maker Wyeth for $68 billion. The deal is expected to be finalized before the New Year.

In the pharmaceutical industry Pfizer may be the largest shark but it’s hardly a solitary rogue when it comes to this sort of thing. In January of this year Eli Lilly coughed up $1.4 billion for its illegal marketing of Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic with the usual slew of side effects; and Bextra being pulled from the market was hardly an isolated case. Since 1992 more than a dozen drugs have been pulled from the market or had strict limits put on their use.

Back in 1976 Henry Gadsden, chief executive of Merck, just before retirement lamented to Fortune magazine the tragedy that his company’s market was limited only to those who were afflicted with illness when his dream had long been to sell to healthy people, therefore having a market that potentially included every person in the world. Well one can imagine the internal chuckle Mr. Gadsden would have enjoyed scanning the New York Times front page on September 2nd, 2009 (a day before the Pfizer settlement was announced) where it was gloriously revealed, this in a headline of course, “Taking Big Risk for Big Payoff, Industry Seeks Cancer Drugs.” The article bluntly explains that, after years of the industry ignoring the fatal disease, recent scientific breakthroughs and the opportunity to charge people dying from cancer outrageous amounts of money is finally too tempting to resist.

It’s ironic that the Times alludes in passing that drug companies have become perhaps the most powerful force in the country by fulfilling Gadsden’s utopian vision of treating the healthy. Through infinite amounts of marketing and promotion, including consumer advertisements in the form of countless TV ads the kind of which are illegal in all other industrial nations (except New Zealand), and even more effort aimed at co-opting the medical establishment through high paying consulting jobs and ‘continuing education’ seminars for doctors as well as an army of sales people pushing their wares all over the country, drug companies have built vast empires selling mostly the same potentially dangerous drugs of questionable effectiveness under different brand names for allegedly chronic, so called ‘lifestyle’ conditions, the number of which continue to grow practically exponentially.

Further from the edge of life and death the top selling prescription drug in the U.S. in 2008 was Pfizer’s anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor, which brought in $7.8 billion according to IMS Health. Lipitor was far from the only cholesterol drug, known as statins, to reap billions as AstraZeneca’s Crestor saw its 2008 sales jump 30% to $3.6 billion. Such cholesterol drugs were the most profitable class of pharmaceuticals in the world for the past decade. While guidelines for what should be considered ‘normal’ levels of cholesterol were continuing to be lowered, often by medical panels full of doctors with numerous financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, the companies saw gold. In her book The Truth about the Drug Companies, former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell explained the process:

The original statin, Merck’s Mevacor, came on the market in 1987. It was a truly innovative drug, based on research in many university and government laboratories throughout the world… Other companies were quick to produce their own statins. Mevacor was joined by the same company’s me-too drug Zocor, Pfizer’s Lipitor, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Provachol, Novartis’s Lescol, and now Crestor… There is little reason to think one is any better than another at comparable doses.

The key to getting a toehold in the market, according to Angell, was either to test me-too drugs for slightly different outcomes in slightly different kinds of patients, then promote the statin for those uses or to compare new statins to older one’s at nonequivalent strengths – to test a higher does of a new statin against a lower dose of another one. The marketing machines, whose budgets within companies far exceed the research ones, take over from there usually taking the form of paid celebrities leading awareness campaigns (while not acknowledging that they’re on the take of whatever drug company patented the drug they’re promoting), ghost written essays in medical journals, and saturation of TV and print with advertising both sunny and fearful at the same time.

In Our Daily Meds, Melody Peterson described just how widespread the production of me-too drugs has been:

Between 1990-2004 the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research approved about 1100 new drugs. Only about 40% of them were actually “new”, or what the FDA called a new molecule entity. In addition, federal regulators found that most of these “new molecular entities” were not significant improvements over the medicines already being sold. Only 183 drugs, or about 16%, were actually new and significant. The rest were nothing more than me-too drugs or drugs for which there was no need.

The same kinds of shadiness can be seen in the class of drugs that has recently replaced the statins at the top of the sales charts. This year will see the publication of the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the field bible for mental health professionals. If earlier editions are any indication the latest one will feature and slew of newly established disorders all to be treated with the latest anti-depressants or anti-psychotics. DSM-IV featured, among others Dysthymic Disorder (defined by the online Mental Health Encyclopedia as ‘a mood disorder with chronic (long-term) depressive symptoms that are present most of the day, more days than not, for a period of at least two years’), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (‘an ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior toward authority figures which goes beyond the bounds of normal childhood behavior’), and Schizoid Personality Disorder (‘a condition characterized by excessive detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings’). Anti-psychotics such Zyprexa from EliLilly and Seroquel ($3.8 billion in sales in 2008) may not yet be the household names that Prozac, Ritalin, Paxil, Zoloft, and Sarafem are but still are mega-blockbusters- a blockbuster being the code word for a drug that pulls in more than a billion in sales.

Other disorders, both mental and physical, conjured up or legitimized in recent years include Social Anxiety Disorder, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, Estrogen Deficiency disease, Osteoporosis, not to mention the always stretching boundaries of ADD (see Adult ADD) and ADHD to include more and more drug takers. It can’t be said that the effort of branding new disorders and expanding the very concept of what disease is has been a failure for the drug companies. Prescription drug use has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Americans now spend money on prescription drugs in amounts that equal or surpass the amount spent on higher education and automobiles. Their profits enable to have a death lock over the country’s political process. The predictable flipside being that, according to a 2005 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse the number of Americans who admitted to abusing prescription drugs doubled from 1992-2003.

While American children living in the suburbs get pumped with medication for all sorts of overstated or marketed illnesses, children living in the planet’s rapidly expanding slums perish of preventable digestive-tract diseases rooted in contaminated drinking water and overall polluted conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa alone neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the region’s poorest 500 million people. A recent assessment published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases estimates that hookworm, an infection that weakens immune systems and causes anemia, occurs in 40-50 million school aged children. Schistosomiasis, the second most prevalent NTD claims 192 million victims and is ‘possibly associated with increased horizontal transmission of HIV/AIDS.’ There are many others (Lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, roundworm) often overlapping in the same individuals. Why put all of them under the banner of ‘Neglected’? The WHO webpage puts it thusly:

The misery caused by neglected tropical diseases is largely hidden. Affected people live almost exclusively in remote rural areas and sprawling shantytowns, where lack of safe drinking water, poor education, poor sanitation, substandard housing and where access to health care may be virtually non-existent… Neglect also occurs at the level of research and development. The incentive to develop new diagnostic tools, drugs, and vaccines is low for diseases with a market that cannot pay.

It’s a tale of two worlds: one overmedicated, one largely left to suffer debilitating conditions in silence due to the fact they can’t fill the coffers of drug companies (research for NTD treatments, as well as for other deadly diseases like AIDS is often performed under government funded initiatives like the NIH; breakthroughs are later usually licensed to drug companies without any price control requirements). Perhaps Henry Gadsden just forgot to mention that his dream was not only the sale of drugs to healthy people, but to the well off; or maybe that was simply implied as an obvious fact. For all the rhetoric about healthcare “reform” shouted in recent months, it seems that real reform would begin with an industry that for years has been making healthy profits by making the rest of the planet sicker.

Indeed that was an apt and true reply which was given
To Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized.
For when that king asked the man what he meant by keeping
Hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride,
‘What thou meant by seizing the whole earth; but
because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while
thou dost it with a Great fleet art styled emperor-

– Saint Augustine

In his ode to British imperialism, Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson begins his first chapter with the subtitle ‘Pirates’ where he describes with considerable sympathy some of the many adventures of the British, relatively late comers to empire building, search and seizure for gold all over the New World. When the new territories under the Union Jack (Canada, Virginia, etc) came up empty in terms of precious metals in contrast to Spain’s plundering of Mexico and Peru, the British turned their attention to robbing the Spanish fleet. The exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake among others, under the license of Elizabeth I, yielded large dividends:

In a period of recurrent war with Spain from 1585 to 1604, between 100 and 200 ships a year set off to harass Spanish vessels in the Caribbean and the value of prize money brought back amounted to at least 200,000 pounds a year.

For Ferguson this ‘naval free-for-all’ was a major building block toward British domination.

Of course Britain wasn’t the only major power to have its origins affected by piracy in some form. The newly independent United States, like the Atlantic European powers, saw its shipping interests under siege from pirates of the Barbary States of North Africa, themselves reduced to a state of piracy as a result of the struggle between Ottoman and European interests for control of the Mediterranean. In prior centuries the Barbary States had a lucrative trading niche with Mediterranean markets through Venetian and Florentine merchant ships. The cargo of these pirates included slaves captured from ships and coasts as far away as Ireland (the Irish town of Baltimore was emptied of all its inhabitants in 1761) held for ransom and tribute against future attacks. While paling in comparison to the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated one million Europeans were enslaved in northern Africa between the years 1530-1780. In addition to the Barbary pirates the U.S. saw its access to the Mississippi river blocked by Spain and locked out of trade to the British East Indies (one former advantage of colonial status was the protection offered to American ships by British treaties with the Barbary regimes). Both the Barbary States and European powers were apt at using all sides against each other and none of the Europeans were anxious to see the emergence of a potentially dynamic new trading economy on the mercantilist stage. After several American ships were captured and sailors held for ransom, a newly formed navy and Marine Corps were established for a series of skirmishes in North Africa sometimes called the Tripolitan War (1801-05) which ended for the U.S. with a favorable, if temporary, treaty . It was less than a decade later this same navy would prove its mettle in the War of 1812.

An old, familiar adage claims that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. The examples above demonstrate t he battle with and against pirates can lead to empire; perhaps they also show one man’s criminal can be another’s mercenary, or adventure hero. In an interesting book titled Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, Edward Kritzler romantically tells the story of some Jews expelled from Spain by the Inquisition who took to the seas to attack and rob from the ships of the regime that expelled them (these adventures included what was apparently the largest heist in pirates history). It’s a safe bet that in this case moral condemnation wouldn’t be universal; in fact it’s safe to say sympathy would largely be with the pirates.

Since ancient times when humans first took to using the sea for trade to the present day, pirates have had an everlasting presence. The first recorded pirates were the Lukkans who appear in the records of Egyptian scribes all the way back in the 14th century BCE. From there pirates were able to haunt the Athenian, European, and Byzantine empires; soon after pirates were employed by the French, Dutch, and English against Spain, the French word in this case being ‘corsair’. From classics such as Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island to modern day blockbusters like The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the image and mythology of the pirate, in both romantic and negative lights, has never been far from popular culture. American professional sports feature the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team insignias displaying the customary eye patches and skull and bones, a figure which continues to be a fixture of theme restaurants and Halloween costumes.

As is often the case popular conceptions miss a much larger picture. During the Golden Age of Pirates, considered the years 1716-1726 (the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession during which there was again wide spread use of ‘privateering’, i.e., piracy in service of states, particularly, once again, against Spain), the years that gave the world Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts, as well as the mythology of eye patches and hook hands, life aboard a pirate ship presented an intriguing alternative of democracy and egalitarianism to the rigid, exploiting ways of the navy and merchant ships with their all powerful captains, harsh punishments, disease, and brutal working conditions. Pirate crews, often made up of former sailors and indentured servants, elected their=2 0own captains, sat on common councils, and shared food and booty equally. When compared with the Atlantic trade economy and its sugar plantations, low wages, and slavery, piracy offered a version of a free life, albeit almost always a short one. Many are the pirates who hung on the gallows from Jamaica to New York, often not renouncing an ounce of their defiance and getting at least occasional sympathy from locals.

In his mesmerizing history of the period, Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, Marcus Rediker puts it thusly:

Piracy…offered the prospect of plunder and ‘ready money’, abundant food and drink, the election of officers, the equal distribution of resources, care for the injured, and joyous camaraderie, all as expressions of an ethic of justice.

It also offered harsh vengeance against captains who mistreated their men, while captains who were established to be largely of a just character were let go, sometimes with compensation.

During this decade around 4000 people, most of whom were previously sailors mutinied against their captain and took over the ship or were taken prisoner before deciding to join their pirate captors, lived the pirate’s life. The number included a diverse motley of ethnicities including a fair number of Africans and African-Americans, both escaped slaves and free men. All in all over 2000 ships were captured and plundered, including many slave trading ships, probably contributing to the prolonged slump in English shipping that coincided with the period.

Recent months have seen a surge in pirate related headlines, mainly news of ship captures and ransom off the East African coast of Somalia, a point where about a tenth of global trade passes near or by. It was widely reported on February 5th, 2009 that Somali pirates made off with $3.2 million ransom for freeing the Ukrainian ship the MV Faina that was seized last September. In fact pirates are still holding ten other boats, this after, according to the French military, 43 boats were seized off the Somali coast in 2008. The situation has grown severe enough that at least 20 warships from various nations including the first ever naval mission created by the European Union as well as the U.S., Russia, China, Malaysia, and India are patrolling the near by Gulf of Aden. Japan recently announced it will add two of its destroyers to the mix that U.S. Rear Admiral Terry McKnight was quoted describing as “one of the most coordinated international efforts I’ve ever been a part of.”

While the pirates in Somalia have grabbed the headlines, they are far from operating alone. In its 2008 annual report, the International Maritime Bureau documents an ‘unprecedented rise’ in piracy with 293 reported incidents, up 11% from the year before. Nigeria ranked second with 40 reported incidents, and while numbers are down from recent years, pirates continue to be active around Indonesia and the Malacca Straights (another key point of global trade located between Singapore, Malaysia, and Sumatra).

Much like their Atlantic predecessors, today’s pirates are branded by governments and their mouth pieces as pure villainy, menace, and, as fitting the age, terrorists — a word that wouldn’t have been lost on King George or Cotton Mather. Also like their predecessors today’s piracy has its roots in an economic context. In Somalia, it has increased with the lost livelihoods of local fisherman whose traditional methods are no match for illegal trawlers and European fisheries that overexploit East African waters (the same thing is also occurring with devastating consequences for wildlife as hunted ‘bushmeat’ replaces fish for protein consumption). The pirates consider themselves a coast guard of sorts in a cause that can claim some justice, especially in a country rocked by warlords, famine, and violence the past two decades. Of course as the piracy stakes have grown some of these same elements appear to have become intertwined with it, however once again a pirate’s life offers a chance for riches well beyond what the surrounding economic system provides. The BBC reported last October that pirates have actually become a source of loans to businessmen. It’s for these reasons that a survey conducted by the Somalia news site Wardheer News found that 70% of respondents viewed piracy as form of defense of the country’s territorial waters.

What does all this say about piracy? It’s clear that the line between the pirate and privateer is a blurry one. Pirates have been the servants and enemies of states, instruments and headaches for empires. Throughout history they have practiced violence, traded weapons and slaves, and terrorized communities. However they have also rebelled against oppressive authority, freed slaves, had local support and admiration, and given the opportunity for a better, freer life to many who wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance. That being the case the pirate it seems is destined to suffer the same fate the terrorist: admired by some, reviled by others and on an always slippery slope. Perhaps by now it should be clear that the disappearance of both will only come under a just economic order. That was Augustine’s observation sixteen centuries ago. How tragic that it still hasn’t come to pass.

Giving a brief history of the transformation of the old Knickerbocker waterfront to an infamous slum, Riis, while certainly not above ethnic stereotyping, or even outright racism in the case of the burgeoning Chinese population, wasn’t content to let the slumlords’ position, that unregulated population growth and porous morality innate in poor people were the reasons for slum conditions, slide idly by. Rather he argued it was the exorbitant rents and negligent, greedy property holders. He wrote in the introduction:

We know now there is no way out; that the “system” that was the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre forever of our civilization… The story is dark enough, drawn from the plain public records, to send a chill to any heart. If it shall appear that the sufferings and sins of the “other half”, and the evils they breed, are but a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth.

The results of How the Other Half Lives were far-reaching. New laws were passed to enforce stands of hygiene, a homeless shelter was built to replace dreadfully overcrowded police cellars, parks were built, play grounds added to schools, the settlement house movement took off, and eventually child labor laws were passed.

Today New York is a city of more than 8 million people under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. With a poverty rate about the double the national average, it wouldn’t take long for an astute observer to grasp that the city again has a housing crisis. As has often been the case historically, New York has been on the forefront of crises that engulf the rest of the country, if not the world. It was New York, on the heels of the financial crisis in the mid-1970s, which served as the incubator of neoliberalism. It also may prove to be New York where the subprime mortgage crisis, while affecting the city later than other places, may have some of its greatest impact.

Foreclosure

Abandonment of the 1970s, where entire blocks are stripped… is what this will look like.

– Sarah Gerecke, CEO of the Neighborhood Housing Services (NY Daily News, February 17th, 2008)

The edge of eastern Queens has for at least a half century been a haven for black working and middle class homeownership. Over the past two years it has become ground zero for the mortgage crisis in New York. An investigation by the NY Daily News of a three-by-three block section of South Jamaica off Linden Blvd. (one of the area’s main thoro ughfares), found 98 properties foreclosed from January-June 2008. A five block radius around nearby 118th Ave
and 152nd St contains another 32 foreclosed properties.

The foreclosure epidemic spreads from Jamaica to the surrounding neighborhoods of Rochdale and South Ozone Park. Where not long ago streets were filled with working class families living in starter homes, vacant, garbage covered yards are becoming the norm. Squatters and drug deals, not to mention rodents, have seized the opportunity to move into the abandoned homes that have no “For Sale” sign attached anywhere. Residents report that some of the homes have been turned into crack houses (this at a time when New York’s crime figures are still paraded for show by law and order types, though some crime numbers are now inching up).

Predictively, the mortgage crisis has hit New York’s minority neighborhoods the hardest. Besides eastern Queens, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, and Hunts Point, all predominantly black neighborhoods, have experienced high foreclosure rates. Despite making up only a third of all New York homeowners, blacks and Hispanics obtained nearly 70 percent of all subprime refinance loans in 2006.

Since the beginning of 2008, more than 1200 homes in the city have been repossessed. New York State governor David Paterson recently signed legislation that added a 90 day grace period for homeowners to avoid foreclosure, while at the same time warning that major budget cuts are in the state’s near future.

Rezoning

How in the world does the mayor justify what he’s trying to do? He’s nationalizing our property like we’re in Venezuela or Russia, then determining which of his friends will get it.

– Willets Point business owner.¹

In 19th century New York, elites typically moved further north in a rapidly developing Manhattan in order to escape from the immigrant hordes and working class expanding from the south. During the Bloomburg administration, with less such available land, the focus has shifted to “rezoning”, i.e. declaring a neighborhood or district a “marginal commercial environment”, or blighted, and using such legalities to radically transform the landscape by handing it over to large-scale developers and Big=2 0Box stores.

Among the targeted areas has been Downtown Brooklyn, long a commercial center for small business (largely minority and immigrant), that despite drawing 100,000 daily shoppers and posting $100 million in total annual sales was rezoned under the Brooklyn Downtown Redevelopment Plan of 2004. According to a report by the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center (UJC), small businesses are suffering as a result: 57 percent of the businesses surveyed in the report have been displaced or forced out of business either due to rising rents or redevelopment as more properties can be tapped for office towers, hotels (including Brooklyn’s first Sheraton, scheduled to open next year), and high-rise condos.

Willets Point in Queens is another area now targeted under similar pretext. A rezoning plan there, opposed at the moment by a majority of the City Council, would force out 225 private, mostly industrial businesses and 1300 workers in order to transform 61 more acres into $3 billion worth of retail stores, “market place” housing, and movie theaters (Bloomberg also claims a public school).

In East Harlem, Columbia University is almost set for a $6.2 billion expansion into a neighborhood that has likewise been ruled by two studies to be full of old, obsolete buildings. A public hearing is scheduled for next month as some owners are vowing a fight against the forced sale of their property to the university. Columbia for its part has promised some token community investments in return.

Other neighborhoods hit by or targeted for rezoning include Riis’ Lower East Side (now considered one of the city’s hippest places) where a rezoning plan threatens to enclose remaining Hispanic enclaves between a wall of high rises, Williamsburg (right across the East River from the Lower East Side), another historically working class, immigrant neighborhood that has been massively gentrified over the past decade, and the Hudson Yards area in Brooklyn slated to be the site of a new basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets.

The common thread running through each rezoning plan, proposed or underway, is that of stable, historically working class neighborhoods turned upside down and gentrified by deliberate top down policy.

Back to the Future

It’s in the above contexts where it’s worth noting that the homeownership rate in New York is only 33 percent, about half the national average of 67 percent. While it is true that New York has always been a renters’ city full of new immigrants and young professionals living in multi-family dwellings (and Long Island, for all intents and purposes the suburbs of the city, has always served as the area’s home buying Mecca, not to mention the white flight refuge), New York also the lowest homeownership rate of any major American city.

Ethnicity plays a key role in New York’s home ownership. The Furman Center’s 2007 State of the City Report shows that only 28 percent of New York’s black population and 16 percent of Hispanics own their own home (compared to 44 percent of whites and 40 percent of Asians). The Hispanic homeownership rate in particular rates far behind other cities, for example in Chicago the Hispanic homeownership rate is 45 percent.

The Furman Center’s report also found that homeowners in New York are far more affluent than non-homeowners while also less likely to be middle income, and more likely to be in the upper income brackets, than homeowners in the rest of the country.

In the present day, most of the worst elements of the tenement slum have been somewhat, at least legally, eliminated: windowless apartments, double-decker tenements, cellar shelters. However some of the same conditions remain. Exorbitant rents forcing tenants to pay more than 30% of their income on rent are not only still common but increasing, leaving many poorer renters in crowded conditions, especially in the largely immigrant populated sections of the city such as the adjacent neighborhoods of Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Corona, and Sunnyside. These were listed in the Furman Center report as having the highest numbers of severely crowded households — severely crowded being modestly defined as having more than 1.5 persons per room.

The best way forward to reform New York City’s housing problem harkens back to Riis’ efforts all those years ago. In the short-term, grass roots efforts already underway can do their best to beat back mayor Bloomberg’s rezoning efforts while at the same time ensuring that Bloomberg be denied any chance of a third term (the city now has a two term limit on mayors but there is talk of doing away with it, as there was at the end of Giuliani’s second term in the aftermath of 9/11. Giuliani’s effort was defeated).

The long term solution would be one that focuses on affordable housing, community orientated development, and government sponsored housing programs that can bring minority homeownership more in line with national numbers. It will be a difficult task that can expect to meet opposition every step of the way from the entrenched business elite that has called the shots for the past three decades. However, history has already proven that change is possible; and indeed inevitable when it comes to New York.

1. Quoted in NY Daily News, June 26th, 2008.

All of the above characteristics describe the bluefin tuna and bizarre as it may appear, it is on the verge of being eaten into extinction. Until a few decades ago this majestic fish was considered suitable food only for dogs, cats, and horses, or as prize game for fishermen to battle with and then bury after the hunt. However times have grown worse since then as blue fin tuna has in recent decades, under the menu name maguro, been the prize catch of chic sushi bars that have sprouted around the world. A single one can sell for over $100,000 in a Tokyo fish market and tuna hunts have come to include some of the hallmarks of modern warfare such as the use of spotter planes, radar, and electrical harpoons.

The bluefin tuna isn’t the only species of fish to recklessly fall prey to the taste of trendy society. Ones so evolutionary perfect that they haven’t needed to evolve an iota in millions of years, which were residing in the ocean in the ocean millions of years before the dinosaurs ever existed are slaughtered for their fins to the main ingredient in an expensive soup, or are discarded as by-catch by industrial fishing technology. This describes sharks, most of whose populations declined significantly in the past quarter century, threatening to do irreparable damage to the ocean’s food chain (sharks being notoriously slow breeders, recovery from over fishing is difficult). An estimated 100 million sharks a year are killed for their fins to be used for shark fin soup, a delicacy that fetches a $100 a bowl from the newly rich in China.

While Tokyo remains the world’s sushi capital, its spread, for whatever reason, has followed the new global elite like an economic indicator to Moscow, Dubai, India, and China, soon to be the biggest market of all. In his celebratory book The Sushi Economy: The Making of a Modern Delicacy, Sasha Issenberg puts it one way:

Culturally, sushi denotes a certain type of material
sophistication, a declaration that we are confidently
rich enough not to be impressed by volume and refined enough
to savor good things in small doses…More than any other
food, possibly more than any other commodity, to eat sushi
is to display an access to advanced trade markets, of full
engagement in world commerce.

Fishing methods used today in pursuit of such delicacies include long-lining, which consists of a single boat setting a monofilament line across 60 plus miles of ocean, each of which bears lines baited with up to 10,000 hooks, and trawling, or dragging nets equipped for 15 tons of gear across the ocean floor destroying everything in their path- in effect blatantly bulldozing the underwater ecosystem. In the riveting science fiction novel The Swarm, Frank Schatzing imagines a time when the oceans, incited by an all knowing life form called the Yrr, revolt against their human polluters. The revolution takes the form of whales sinking ships, crabs poisoning water supplies, and other surprising twists. Such a scenario is the perfect mirror to what modern human civilization is inflicting on the oceans as fishing has become so brutally efficient as to be revoltingly inefficient. Bycatch, or unwanted species throw back dead or dying make up at least a quarter of the global catch, an estimated 88 billion pounds of life (this according to a 2006 Mother Jones article titled “The Fate of the Ocean”) including some 40,000 sea turtles and hundreds of thousands of seabirds.

The March 2008 issue of Scientific American includes an article titled “Bluefin in Peril” that cautiously endorses commercial domestication of at least most of the ocean as the only way to save the bluefin tuna, and many other species from over-fishing. While such very imperfect methods may ultimately prove to be unavoidable, what would be the grandest solution to save the oceans will be an energized international framework, including provisions such as the banning of trawling.

For the bluefin such a framework has long existed. In 1969, just as the boom was picking up steam, seventeen countries bordering the Atlantic or Mediterranean, including countries with fleets operating there, created the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT). Its mandate was to protect thirty tuna and other, similar, species with regulations such as minimum size limits and quotas allotted to countries (the European Union being its own signatory). However the commission has largely failed in its mandate, mainly because of piracy (where the Libyan government is directly complicit) and lack of international willpower to enforce treaties, particularly in governments surrounding the Mediterranean. A major loop-hole also exists that allows the minimum size requirement to be bypassed simply by catching a smaller bluefin and fattening it up in captivity to reach an acceptable size before killing it, therefore dangerously killing tuna before they can breed and affecting future generations.

An even grander hope is that such international action will be enforced by an educated public. Ultimately it is consumer demand that drives industries and has the greatest potential to spur reform. In the case of the ocean such a people’s movement would save both important and beautiful species as well as the industries that have spawned around them. At the end of the day this is truly the only hope.

In The Sushi Economy Sasha Issenberg ends his introduction by writing “What goes into the making of sushi has to really be a narrative about the development of twentieth century global capitalism.” Issenberg is more correct than he probably cares to realize, all the more reason for the narrative to finally change.

It wouldn’t take long for a visitor to get the general idea. Listening to the local sports radio station in New York on any given day, one will not be able to go ten minutes without hearing the voice of Donald Trump. The reason being that Trump, a powerful, if awful, influence on the city the past decade, is pushing his secret for building wealth in the form of a DVD from which those viewing will learn to get rich by pedaling real estate his “way”.

The smug voice of Trump may be momentarily acceptable to listeners; however his won’t be the only siren’s song enticing pushovers with promises of quick wealth. It won’t be long before a racket called Internet Speedway begins another commercial with the question “Do you know the difference between the millions and millionaires in this country and you? They decided they wanted to be millionaires, so they went out and did it.” The pitch here is an “internet business that virtually runs itself.” Again salvation comes in the mail in the form of a DVD that promises a way to generate money even when asleep.

In case sports talk radio is beneath the interest of most people, New York’s Barnes and Noble bookstores and other megastores have a steady stock of the latest “self-help” sensation. The current fever is a book and DVD called The Secret, edited by Rhonda Byrne and endorsed some months ago by the always reliable Oprah Winfrey (ensuring the book sells in the millions- an estimated three million copies thus far). The Secret also presents a notable novelty; whereas other wealth formulas require at least some kind of physical effort, according to The Secret, the world is inherited by those who simply think the right thoughts. Did you know: “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts” or “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful”; a world full of ungrateful AIDS victims and overly pessimistic poor masses.

While get rich quick schemes sold by shady charlatans and quacks aren’t new, there is also a deeper theme in all this that may have a parallel historically. New York, of course, has always been a large part of the “streets paved with gold” mythology. Now Bloomberg, Trump, Weill, and Ratner of the new Gilded Age have become the historical reincarnation of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Morgan. Marx wrote that major historical events always return as farce the second time, and indeed farce is an apt description of much of the Big Apple.

The words “SoHo” and “Hell’s Kitchen” have become nothing more than marketing slogans and catch phrases for hipster T-Shirts. The former “bohemian” and yuppie populations of SoHo have moved to the Lower East Side and North Brooklyn, historically working class and immigrant neighborhoods, displacing most of the long-time residents. This gentrification has also reached traditional African American cultural strongholds such as Harlem, Fort Greene, and Bedford Stuyvesant. The New York Times has reported that data from the 2004 census reveals that New York’s City’s black population has declined for the first time since the 1863 draft riots (April 3, 2006).

What is left out of the current triumphant grandstanding was summed up nicely in a recent report by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. At the moment 1.3 million New Yorkers, one in six residents of the city, cannot afford a consistent food supply and must rely on shelters and pantries. Demand for such services has exploded an estimated 20% this year to go with an 11% increase last year. According to the Coalition’s report, the sheer numbers of the hungry showing up (along with the Bush Administration’s slashing discretionary spending for emergency food by 76% since 2002) have forced more than half of the city’s pantries to ration food or even turn people away.

These numbers are the foreground to the fact that New York City owns a poverty rate roughly twice the national average and well above where its own poverty rate was two decades ago. It is also one of the most unequal cities in the world — a study earlier this year by the Bookings Institute classified only 16% of the city’s neighborhoods as middle class.

Beyond the pomp and circumstance of millionaire populism, other parallels could be drawn from the current Gilded Age to its predecessor. Like the mid 19th century, the New York of the early 21st century is largely a city of immigrants: Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, and Asians, being the modern pioneer representatives of their Irish and German forbears (currently about 37% of the city’s residents are foreign born). While textbook historians shine brightly on the robber barons and their “philanthropy”, and present day tabloids focus on celebrity “sightings” and shopping sprees, it was the vast army of workers that have had the greatest historical impact on the city, a benevolent influence that continues to the present day.

It was in the heart of the first Gilded Age when a united working class led what was the greatest labor organizing effort in the city’s history. The pinnacle of the movement took place in the summer of 1872 when in May of that year the largely native, English speaking building-trades workers began striking for the eight-hour day. They were soon followed by German furniture makers a few days later. By May 25th there were an estimated 20,000 workers on strike, a week later the number grew to 40,000, and before the summer was over more than 100,000 of the city’s workers took part in the eight-hour strikes. The summer action included an “eight-hour parade” through the Bowery on June 10th led in part by the International and organized by the Eight Hour League, which also organized strikes in several other cities.

Though the workers were ultimately defeated by an alliance of large manufacturers (led by the Steinway piano company; New York is still blessed with a Steinway Street, a main shopping thoroughfare in Queens), police clubs, and a conservative media (of which the New York Times was at the forefront), the foundation was laid during the Gilded years for the eventual victory of the eight-hour day and for the coming of the “Progressive” Era. Lasting products of the first Gilded Age included the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Labor Day.

New York in its current Gilded Age hasn’t completely abandoned its labor heritage. Despite experiencing the outsourcing of its manufacturing base and its transformation into a service economy, the city still claims about a million union members, some of whom have shown signs of life in recent times. This month is the second anniversary of the 2005 transit workers strike against proposed cutbacks to pension plans that shut down the city for most of a week. In April 2006, New York hosted some of the massive immigrant rights demonstrations that swept the country. This past September saw a strike by yellow cab drivers against Global Positioning System devices in their cabs. The ongoing gentrification has stirred up some passionate local resistance in several places. While most of these actions have been defensive in scope, and with mixed success, the potential certainly exists for the resurgence of truly progressive politics. Just as the most significant legacy of democratic progress during the original Gilded Age was accomplished by the diverse, hardworking masses, there are still signs of hope that the same will be said for the present one.

Hegel observes somewhere that all great
incidents and individuals of world history
occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the
first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

There have been many such instances and individuals since Marx wrote that passage in 1852. Our own present day contains several examples, such as the awful fact that there exists a strong possibility the United States will have a quarter century’s worth of Bushes and Clintons as president. Or perhaps Rudy Giuliani will be able to repeat his local carnage on a national level. A far more tragic instance is how the world stood by as a speedy genocide unfolded in Rwanda just over a decade ago, while largely doing the same as a slow moving genocide has taken place in Darfur.

While the skullduggery in Darfur and Iraq continues, another demonstration of Marx’s theme, what future historians may call the longest, most useless, and perhaps most costly war of our time also continues unrelentingly and always shows signs of expanding: the poorly titled “war on drugs.”

Two recent news items confirm this reality. First, the AP reports on August 25 that about 1,100 Colombian refugees have fled to Ecuador, joining the 250,000 already living there; the UN estimates that another 3 million Colombians have been internally displaced by violence creating the largest internal refugee population in the world outside of Sudan. How many Americans know that the Colombian government is the third largest government recipient of American aid after only Israel and Egypt? Or that the U.S. funds a campaign of aerial herbicide spraying that has destroyed the livelihood and environment of thousands of peasants.

The second news item comes from a UN report that establishes that opium production in Afghanistan has reached record levels for the second straight year (up 17% in 2007). This despite a $600 million American counter-narcotics initiative; the NY Times reports that a proposal for a polite aerial fumigation program is now being considered despite opposition from Afghan officials.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Policy, was quoted in the Times as stating: “Afghanistan today is cultivating megacrops of opium. Leaving aside China in the late 19 th century, no other country has produced so much narcotics in the past 100 years.”

Fitting that Mr. Costa should refer to 19th century China. It was there that the then greatest imperial power in the world used the opium trade as a means to open China up to foreign imperialism and exploitation. How ironic then that a century and a half later the current world hegemon uses the disruption of this same trade, 6% of all global trade, as a cover for its current imperialism

In the mid-19th century it was the British provoking two “Opium Wars” against China that eventually forced the Qing government to grant Britain, and other European powers, favorable treaties, ports, and other privileges within China (including British rule over Hong Kong). The Qing government had previously banned opium imports as a threat to morality and custom. The 21st century, picking up where the 20th left off, now has the U.S. justifying imperialism abroad and repression at home in the name of the health and morality of its own population against the trading and selling of drugs- historical tragedy and farce come full circle.

Some of the casualties of this war have been well documented. The U.S. contains the largest per capita prison population in the world, young African American men continue to be exponentially more likely to be ensnared in the criminal justice system, Colombia cannot escape from its drug fueled civil war with the U.S. playing the patron to a government presiding over an extremely unequal economic arrangement that includes the highest number of murdered union activists in the world. Meanwhile in Afghanistan the criminalization of opium, probably the most practical crop at the moment, helps fuel the resurgence of the Taliban (itself a strange ally in America’s drug war before 9/11).

As dreadful as all that is it still doesn’t nearly cover everything. The criminalization of drugs, mixed with neoliberal economics and rapid urbanization in the form of slums, has left most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere in spiraling violence. Time magazine recently reported that Mexico is well on pace to eclipse the 2000 drug related murders it recorded in 2006. The story also notes that the violence has reached previously immune northern cities and become more horrific:

The atrocities would seem more familiar south of
Baghdad than south of the border: mass executions,
contract shootings carried out at funerals and ghastly
video-taped beheadings posted on the Internet while
victims heads are tossed in the streets…the latest surge
in violence is claiming a broader range of victims, including
police, businesspeople, journalists, and politicians.

Further south Central America, the transit route for drugs from the Andes to the U.S., has in effect been seized by high level drug traffickers, corrupt police, and street gangs. Estimates on the number of gang members in the region run as high as 100,000 (the two largest gangs, Mara 18 and MS-13, have their roots in Los Angeles among Central Americans who fled the U.S. sponsored wars of the 1980s) and murder rates have exploded in recent years to some of the highest in the world. The same can be said of Brazil which in the past 15 months has seen its two main cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, become battlegrounds between powerful drug gangs and even worse displays of police force (one week of violence in Sao Paulo in May 2006 left 170 people dead).

The beauty of this war for U.S. policy makers (missed by mainstream critics of the drug war) is that it offers an instrument of domestic control in the form of prisons, probation, and the eliminating of voting rights to poorer citizens, and at the same time greases the wheels of the arms and law enforcement industries (the U.S. spends around $50 billion a year on the drug war), while enabling a permanent connection with militaries throughout the hemisphere at a time when even conservative politicians have to sound somewhat like Hugo Chavez (briefly overthrown in a U.S. supported coup) and Evo Morales. A rise in populism in the region has always meant the potential of U.S. backed military interference.

The surest solution to combat this imperialism and repression has long been obvious: the legalization of all narcotics. The effects of this would be multifaceted and magnificent: the opening of prisons, the eliminating of an imperial pretext, and the weakening of street gangs and crime dons that hold local populations prisoner in places like El Salvador, Brazil, and Jamaica. Add to the list greater medical oversight, less health risks for users (most of whom use drugs without adverse heath effects), and economic benefit to poor farmers.

As the anti-war movement goes forward against war in the Middle East, it is critical that it not overlook a war fought by every American president since Nixon, a heavy casualty war that takes place all over the world. The time has come a militant anti-war movement to meet it head-on.