The Social Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.

— President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977

[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.

— President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983

So said Presidents Carter and Reagan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716).  Now we read of horror stories like this:

I’m a 68 year old grandma of 2 young grandchildren. I went to college to upgrade my employment status in 1998 or 1999. I finished in 2000 and at that time had a student loan balance of about 3500.00.

Could not find a job and had to request forbearance to carry me. Over the years I forgot about the loan, dealt with poor health, had brain surgery in 2006 and the collection agents decided to collect for the loan in 2008.

At no time during the 6-7 year gap did anyone remind me or let me know that I could make a minimum payment on the loan. Now that I am on Social Security (have been since I was 62), they have decided to garnishee my SS check to the tune of 15%.

I have not been employed since 2004 and have the two dependents ….  I don’t dispute that I owed them the $3500.00 but am wondering why they let it build up to somewhere around $17,000/20,000 before they attempted to collect.

Her debt went from $3500 to over $17,000 in 10 years?!  How could that be?

It seems that Congress has removed nearly every consumer protection from student loans, including not only standard bankruptcy protections, statutes of limitations, and truth in lending requirements, but protection from usury (excessive interest).  Lenders can vary the interest rates, and some borrowers are reporting rates as high as 18-20%.  At 20%, debt doubles in just 3-1/2 years; and in 7 years, it quadruples.  Congress has also given lenders draconian collection powers to extort not just the original principal and interest on student loans but huge sums in penalties, fees, and collection costs.

The majority of these debts are being imposed on young people, who have a potential 40 years of gainful employment ahead of them to pay the debt off.  But a sizeable chunk of U.S. student loan debt is held by senior citizens, many of whom are not only unemployed but unemployable.  According to the New York Federal Reserve, two million U.S. seniors age 60 and over have student loan debt, on which they owe a collective $36.5 billion; and 11.2 percent of this debt is in default.  Almost a third of all student loan debt is held by people aged 40 and over, and 4.2% is held by people over the age of 60.  The total student debt is now over $1 trillion, more even than credit card debt.  The sum is unsustainable and threatens to be the next debt tsunami.

Some of this debt is for loans taken out years earlier on their own schooling, and some is from co-signing student loans for children or grandchildren.  But much of it has been incurred by middle-aged people going back to school in the hope of finding employment in a bad job market.  What they have wound up with is something much worse: no job, an exponentially mounting debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the prospect of old age without a social security check adequate to survive on.

Gone is the promise of earlier presidents of a “commitment to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.”  The plight of the indebted elderly is reminiscent of the Irish immigrants who came to America after a potato famine in the 19th century, who were looked upon in some places as actually lower than slaves. Plantation owners kept their slaves fed, clothed and cared for, because they were valuable property.  The Irish were expendable, and they were on their own.

It is obviously not a good time to raise interest rates on student debt, but they are set to double on July 1, 2012, to 6.8%.  Many lawmakers in both parties agree that the current 3.4% rates should be extended for another year, but they can’t agree on how to find the $6 billion that this would cost. Republicans want to take the money from a health care fund that promotes preventive care; Democrats want to eliminate some tax benefits for small business owners.

Congress cannot agree on $6 billion to save the students, yet they managed to agree in a matter of days in September 2008 to come up with $700 billion to save the banks; and the Federal Reserve found many trillions more.  Estimates are that tuition could be provided free to students for a mere $30 billion annually.  The government has the power to find $30 billion — or $300 billion or $3 trillion — in the same place the Federal Reserve found it: it can simply issue the money.

Congress is empowered by the Constitution to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and no limit is set on the face amount of the coins it creates. It could issue a few one-billion dollar coins, deposit them in an account, and start writing checks.

But wouldn’t that be inflationary?  No.  The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply (M3) has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be added back into the economy without inflating prices.  Gas and food are going up today, but the whole range of prices must be considered in order to determine whether price inflation is occurring.  Housing and wages are significantly larger components of the price structure than commodities, and they remain severely depressed.

There is another way the government could find needed funds without raising taxes, slashing services, or going further into debt: Congress could re-finance the federal debt through the Federal Reserve, interest-free.  Canada did this from 1939 to 1974, keeping its national debt low and sustainable while funding massive programs including seaways, roadways, pensions, and national health care.  The national debt shot up only when the government switched from borrowing from its own central bank to borrowing from private lenders at interest.  The rationale was that borrowing bank-created money from the government’s own central bank inflated the money supply, while borrowing existing funds from private banks did not.  But even the Federal Reserve acknowledges that private banks create the money they lend on their books, just as central banks do.

U.S. taxpayers now pay nearly half a trillion dollars annually to finance our federal debt.  The cumulative figure comes to $8.2 trillion paid in interest just in the last 24 years.  By financing the debt itself rather than paying interest to private parties, the government could divert what it would have paid in interest into tuition, jobs, infrastructure and social services, allowing us to keep the social contract while at the same time stimulating the economy.

For students, at the very least the bankruptcy option needs to be reinstated, usury laws restored, predatory practices eliminated, and the cost of education brought back down to earth.  One possibility for relieving the burden on students would be to give them interest-free loans.  The government of New  Zealand now offers 0% loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after they graduate.  For the past twenty years, the Australian government has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans.  The loans in the Australian Higher Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.

Predatory lenders are keeping us in debt peonage through misguided economics and bank-captured legislators.  We have people who desperately want to work, to the point of going back to school to try to improve their chances; and we have mountains of work that needs to be done.  The only thing keeping them apart is that artificial constraint called “money”, which we have allowed to be created by banks and let out at interest when it could have been created by public institutions for public purposes, either by direct issuance or through publicly-owned banks.  We just need to recognize our oppressors and throw off their yoke, and the good times can roll again.

The “purer” the form of capitalism the faster, the rise of fascism. There is a dark and bitter grace to this: Fascism is the deranged agency that sends the capitalist machine into systemic runaway, thus the system crashes and burns — and out of its ashes and debris…a more humane system can come into being.

Although the yearning for freedom is inborn, as is the case with the development of any skill or talent, one must open oneself to its promise by discipline and practice. Otherwise, attempts at exercising freedom — free will’s dance with resistant and changing circumstance — can be an ugly sight to behold.

Witness the following litany of the lost evinced by us, the denizens of late-stage capitalism: The dismal air haunted and minds distracted … cluttered by the ceaseless chatter of those dim ghosts of human discourse known as text messages and tweets; the parade of preening narcissists and prattling sub-cretins that is celebrity culture and Reality Television; the joyless bacchanal termed the nation’s epidemic of obesity.

Experiencing freedom involves risk, imagination, and discipline. In contrast, choosing between purchasing a bag of Cheetos or a bag of Doritos … amounts to not quite the same thing. Resisting the call to freedom leaves an individual empty, and bag after bag of salted snack food will not sate the hollow ache within when one chooses the benumbing safety of culturally proffered palliatives over living out the truth of one’s being.

A thousand text messages will never replace a single kiss…because a kiss conjures both the soul’s numinosity and brings earthly complications — the stuff of freedom.

When your heart aches, you are experiencing or being beckoned towards your destiny. Depending on the choices that you make, you can become waylaid at a fast food drive-thru or risk the road towards freedom that unfurls before you.

Hint: The excessive heft acquired by your hindquarters will begin to shrink as you begin a long distance trek in the direction of freedom.

What forces unloose titanic appetites, devoid of reason and restraint? Why is more than you can ever need never enough?

How is it that a trillion dollars can be spent on military weaponry, but the collective psyche of this nation continues to be gripped by nebulous fear?

Expressed in mythopoeic lexicon: The appetite of a Titan (e.g., the limit-devoid greed and empty appetite of late capitalism) will grow so random and ravenous that he will devour his own young, while his presence will cause the young to construct Icarusian wings…but an (infantilized by the internalization of consumerist impulsiveness) adult-child of the corporate state can never devour enough sky, thus put enough distance between himself and his own titanic need to escape earthly circumstance, until his wings of wax are undone by the steadfast sun, and he is returned to the inhuman eternity of the sea’s briny womb (e.g., languishing in the media hologram, avoiding the implications of personal destiny-denied and global-wide ecocide).

The appetite of the earth is insatiable. Life must live on death. To become fully human, one must make peace with this fact by an acceptance of limits, by drawing lines of demarcation between necessity and titanic want.

Storytellers, poets, novelists i.e, myth makers have told this ageless tale of woe and warning for millenia. To ignore the admonition above amounts to insertion of your name into the following list: Tantalus, Midas, Lady Macbeth, George Babbitt, Captain Ahab, Gatsby, Cthulhu, Fred C. Dobbs, Marquise de Merteuil, Patrick Bateman, Mr. Burns, Gollem, the denizens of both Goldman Sachs and your local mall’s food court. Ignore the warning and insert your name here: .

One needs one’s emptiness every bit as much as one has the need to be “fulfilled.” How so? Because room is required within so that new awareness can grow. Therefore, love your inner, empty places. It is the method that you live your way into the future.

From time to time, I have been asked, how does one cope with the ever increasing “complexity” of our age. Short answer: It would be ill-advised to become adapted to a madhouse.

Instead, attempt to view complexity as future compost. At this stage, a song of grief is as resonate as a song of ebullience…Rot ensures renewal; the future is compost and compost is the future. Thus: Rejoice in the reek. Mortification restores our humanity, turning us away from the tyranny of unchecked proliferation. It bestows us with the ability to love our limits.

In this, it is synonymous with grace.

In a nation defined by vast wealth disparity and the deprivation it causes others on the planet, by means of impoverished lives and ecological devastation, taking more than one’s share contributes to the vast harm done. The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism.

There is a need in both the besieged psyche of an individual and its societal analog — in our own case, in the collective psyche of a declining nation — to worship and fear phantoms and view flesh and blood as phantasmal. As a culture, for example, we elevate celebrity culture to cultic status while ignoring the suffering of the poor; the teabagger crowd is accepted as a legitimate political movement, not as corporate state Astroturf; that there exist people known as Islamo-Fascists; and the acceptance as fact by all too many the noxious corporate media fiction that the energies of the Occupy Wall Street movement have faded — but the outcomes of the overpriced theatrical artifice of U.S. election cycles represents the democratic expression of the political will of a free people.

Phantoms arrive in the psyche when one refuses life’s ongoing invitation to commune with flesh and blood beings; to engage the rigors of insightful thought; to know both the agony and the release of heart-opening engagement and falsity-cleaving insight.

Apropos: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” –Carl Jung

As we are surrounded by gibbering, imploring media phantoms, our hunger to regain a resonate relationship with the world at large grows…yet the corporate state proffers drive thru window cuisine. We give them our life blood — and, in return, we settle for an evening at Applebees. And the plundering class insist we are privileged to be offered this, that our plight could be worse; we could spend our hours languishing in one of their foreign sweatshops.

As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly.

“Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.” — James Hillman

To the mind of a child, his/her parent’s view of the world constitutes the very architecture of their psyche. The world carries the imprimatur of their parents’ face. A child’s character begins to develop when he/she begins to compare what they carry within, forged by paternal admonition and action, to their experiences outside the home. If the child remains in a passive position, then his/her personal destiny becomes arrested. This is the poisoned apple proffered to the dormant beauty within us all. Conversely, we must accept the small, hidden aspects of our character (our helpful dwarves) that dwell in a deep forests within, far from the cold castles of paternal expectation, to be able to awaken to hidden potential.

Life in an authoritarian state, which is paternalistic by nature, arrests the psyche’s drive to self-awareness; it puts one to sleep with infantilizing bribes — e.g., all the bright and shiny things of the consumer state — as it manipulates by means of coercive fear — e.g., the looming dragons of poverty and police state intimidation.

“In Freud’s time we felt oppressed in the family, in sexual situations, in our crazy hysterical conversion symptoms, and where we felt oppressed, there was the repressed. Where do we feel that thick kind of oppression today? In institutions–hospitals, universities, businesses; in public buildings, in filling out forms, in traffic…” –James Hillman

There exist few viable alternatives within the present political set-up to address the degradations inflicted by the corporate state and the machinery of duopoly in place to maintain the systems reach and power — and there will not arrive a mainstream prince to confront the vain usurpers and slay the institutional dragons who cling to power in the present era. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is true nevertheless. The sooner one faces this reality: the hopelessly corrupt nature of the present system — the closer we, collectively, move towards the creation of alternative arrangements when the current one collapses from its own corruption.

Poets of previous generations warned that one’s soul could be lost in blind pursuit of vaults of riches and limitless knowledge. It is difficult not to laugh in derision or weep in anguish for a people who sell their soul for access to the contents of a convenience store. Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.

In timeless stories, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, the awakening kiss of a princely figure should not be misapprehended with gender-based overtones of exclusively male power and dominance. Instead, the symbolic prince should be read as — the possibility that unfolds as one’s true calling when one awakens to one’s circumstance. In our time, this timeless tale plays out as: The ongoing challenge we have been given to face and struggle against the life-devouring, institutional dragons of corporate state governance.

Of course, there will never arrive a tacked-on, Disneyesque “happily ever after” ending. There is no distant kingdom of the mind that exists beyond the reach of harm or corruption. If there were, new stories would cease to unfold. By this method, this world beckons us to live out our own unique tale.

Of course, this is more than a purely academic issue for Maher.  In June of 2002, his own ABC television show, Politically Incorrect, was yanked off the air for similar reasons.  When major sponsors (notably Sears and FedEx) withdrew their advertising in protest of Maher’s controversial remarks (interpreted to be “pro-terrorist), the Sinclair Broadcasting Group immediately pulled the plug on the show’s ABC affiliates, and Politically Incorrect was history.

Maher’s objections are interesting.  He argues that if advertisers can dictate what stays on the air and what doesn’t, we have, in effect, relinquished our right to free speech.  If media sponsors are given the final say as to which opinions are allowed to be expressed, and which opinions aren’t, it means we’ve handed over our precious, constitutional right of free expression to the corporations.  Not good.

But there’s a fine distinction here—a distinction between corporate cowardice and consumer muscle.  And the Limbaugh episode is a prime example of the latter.  Without any threat of boycotts, Rush’s advertisers nonetheless fled the show en masse, hypocritically pretending that his comments were so outrageous—so offensive, so repugnant—that they couldn’t bear to be associated with such a program, even though they’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb, and a presidential candidate not to realize this kind of material was the show’s stock in trade.  The only difference? This particular slur got some bad press–culminating in rats deserting a not-yet-sinking ship.

Frightened advertisers fleeing Limbaugh is reminiscent of the Hollywood blacklists of the 1950s, a phenomenon that, surprisingly, has been misunderstood by many.  You still hear people blame the blacklists on HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), declaring it was HUAC who forbade the studios to hire certain actors and writers suspected of subversive activities.  The opposite was true.  It was the studios themselves who voluntarily initiated the blacklists (ruining careers in the process), fearing that HUAC’s Commie smear campaign might damage their box office.

Boycotts are different.  Boycotts are manifestations of public outrage aimed at specific targets, for specific reasons, with the goal being to change specific policies or practices, with the weapon of choice being the threat of wreaking economic hardship.  While most boycotts fail, some actually do work.

Coors beer (the Coors family helped establish the Heritage Foundation) suffered a public relations setback a few decades ago when Paul Newman, among others, threatened a boycott.  In the late 1970s, an AWPPW-led west coast boycott of Scott Paper did considerable damage to sales (so much damage that some Scott facilities were forced to curtail operations, resulting in AWPPW production workers being laid off).  And wasn’t economic pressure largely responsible for South Africa abandoning apartheid?

Economic leverage isn’t the enemy of free expression; it’s a form of free expression.  Not to pick on Bill Maher (whom I enjoy and watch regularly on HBO), but if a labor union were to launch a successful boycott of a vehemently anti-union company’s products—a boycott that ultimately led to management negotiating a fair labor agreement—would Maher view this as an infringement of the company’s right to free speech?  An infringement of the company’s right to express its rabidly anti-union point of view?

Didn’t Ralph Nader say that the biggest and potentially most powerful lobby in the country—infinitely bigger and badder than the NRA, AIPAC, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce—was the American consumer?

If consumers chose not to buy new shoes for two months, the shoe business would collapse.  If consumers drank only tap water instead of Coke, Pepsi, etc, for two months, the beverage industry would go belly up.  Indeed, this is where the true power of the 99% resides, in our role as consumers.

Clearly, Limbaugh’s sponsors bailing out was an example of grandstanding and gutlessness, and once the smoke settles most of these advertisers can be expected to come crawling back.  But boycotts are different.  What’s wrong with trying to put the economic squeeze on sleaze radio?  For that matter, what’s wrong with trying to kill it? Limbaugh influences millions of people.  If the Acme Widget Company were his main sponsor, wouldn’t launching a national boycott of Acme products make eminent sense?

Let’s not conflate free speech with willful deceit, or political discourse with agitprop, or hate radio with healthy public debate.  They’re not equal.  And let’s not pretend that exerting economic leverage is unethical or off-limits, because it isn’t.  In fact, it may be the only arrow we have in our quiver.

If you are from another nation that doesn’t observe this nonsense (I’m jealous) — but anyway, Black Friday is the day after our Thanksgiving that sets off the consumer festival of Christmas in America. Stores deeply discount small amounts of items hoping to draw in “marks” who they then disorient with bright lights and hallucinogens. The buyers have sleep deprivation (they open the stores in the middle of the night before people have changed out of their Thanksgiving “fat pants”). Black Friday is said to be named that because it was the first time in the year that a business might find itself in the black — that is, out of debt. Large banks have a Black Friday machine, that of the Federal Reserve, but non-banks have to make due with this version.

Funny that this tradition that has proven itself to be dangerous due to past tramplings wasn’t met with John Pike clearing the sidewalks. It’s a blatant absurdity to mention this though, of course. Even the most thick-headed Americans know that the only time you are targeted in your free speech or assembly is when it jacks around with the big boy money. You can hang out at funerals, calling the deceased “fags worthy of death” and this won’t be met with pepper spray. Nobody will trick you into stepping in the street so they can arrest you. Because that nonsense doesn’t interfere with commerce and advances the notion that the country tolerates unpalatable free speech (it’s the palatable stuff with the potential to spread that gets the pepper treatment). You are also free to bring guns to “protests” against government health care if you like. And you can hang around on sidewalks without bathrooms if you brought your wallet. Hell, defecate on a car if you want — Visa or American Express, sir?

I get the usual visceral disgust when I see the footage or hear others talking about their Black Friday plans, but I am trying to remove myself from all my rancid sanctimony this year. An aside, a sanctimonectomy is almost as expensive as an exasperectomy, but you all know that.

Like so many things American, the notion of Black Friday has a kindergarten notion of good in it. Someone is in line to get a present they can’t afford for a loved one. It’s a modern day cutting off of your hair to buy your husband a watch chain as he sells the watch to buy you a comb for your hair.  Whew, that was convoluted — sorry.

But like it or not, our modern Black Friday mayhem has roots in even the stories we are forced to read as adolescents.  Thank you O. Henry. We never reach the end though, when the epiphany that “stuff” is not what matters takes residence. Americans have the giddy notions to do good for others, but like a damn Labrador retriever end up knocking people over with their slobbery intentions.

The toddler mentality is certainly advanced by those who have the ability to… well, advance things!

Take a piece of a good intention and turn it into hell. It’s the formula for getting kids to go to war (or was before the economy helped so much). Take an honest to god, good intention like giving a present, or being told that you need to protect you and yours, then pervert it to advance something quite different. To facilitate slave sweatshops or to murder families in mud huts making wild profits for the makers of the bombs — that’s not what you were sold in either case, was it? But Americans like it superficial. White hat-good, Black hat-bad cheesy Western movies caressing our brains. And, of course, we are good.  That’s the national narrative, facts be damned.

This is the mentality that many of the OWS protesters find themselves trying to erode. It’s large and it’s consciousness shifting. That’s why they try so hard to kill it. And many jaded people will do the bidding for them.

But I would advance that there’s a core decency in even the Black Friday mayhem -that of wanting to do something for someone else by purchasing a present. (I told you I’m trying very hard to cast off judging these folks).

The challenge is to erode the pathology that promises that emptiness will be filled by transient consumer goods. It’s easy to just laugh at the spectacle and feel superior when you don’t partake in all of this, but, really, many of us who do mock it, just bought a computer at a different time of the year at a higher price. We aren’t virgins in all of this.

Disparaging Black Friday is a little like pretending that meth addicts will be well if they just take care of their teeth. No awareness of the festering issue at hand. No thought to cause. But it’s just as stilted and lacking in nuance to feel entirely superior to these Black Friday troops. We could all stand to grow up and attempt to expand on the minuscule (but present) core decency lurking in our fellow citizens.

It’s really time to start eroding these artificial lines.

Not to be missed here is that this bad information is coming from Consumer Reports, an organization devoted to consumer protection. And, if my attacking Consumer Reports strains your credulity, I will ask you to accept something even harder to believe: Much of Consumer Reports problem is traceable to the NIMH, which is putting out public information not to be trusted.

Let’s take a look at the article’s first paragraph, which sets the stage for considerable nonsense:

A 46-year-old teacher saw a psychiatrist on referral from his primary-care doctor because he felt so depressed he couldn’t function at work. The psychiatrist asked about his past relationships, his symptoms, his medical history and more. And then he ordered some blood tests. Medical history? Blood tests? Absolutely. Feeling depressed can mean many things, and not all of them represent true depression. A doctor needs to pay attention to all the patient’s symptoms and consider all possible causes for them.

While this description may appear eminently reasonable, it creates a quite false impression of what we know about mental disorder and what we have reason to do in treatment. Although the psychiatrist asks about relationships, the importance of life experience factors is all but lost in the medical posturing. Psychiatry, in concert with the pharmaceutical industry, has promoted a genetic chemical imbalance theory for mental disorder. The theory is a mythology because there is no good empirical basis for the theory or the claims being made. There are no peer-reviewed studies that corroborate the serotonin hypothesis for any mental disorder, including depression. Research results are not simply non-supportive, they are contradictory to the theory. Despite more than 100 years of research seeking to uncover physical causes for mental disorders, aside from the discoveries a century ago related to general paresis (from syphilis) and Karsakoff’s syndrome (from alcohol abuse) no underlying physical cause has been found for any mental disorder.

Blood tests? There are no blood tests for mental disorder. Psychiatrists do blood tests not because they help to diagnose mental disorder (they don’t), but because the drugs they prescribe (which outcome studies have found to be ineffective) can be lethal if the dosage is too high. While these blood tests prevent psychiatric prescriptions from killing patients, they are not sufficiently sensitive to detect harm. Robert Whitaker, in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, discusses data concerning how disability rates have soared since the widespread prescription of antidepressants. Many primary care doctors have been deceived along with the public because the published psychiatric research is highly biased toward drugs (this has been documented), giving a misleading impression to doctors and the public of their effectiveness.

Medical histories? Consumer Reports also assigns undue weight to physical illness as a cause of mental disorder and gives an exaggerated picture of psychiatrists as possessing broad medical diagnostic competency. Both are overstatements that appear to be an attempt to justify the necessity and importance of a medical degree to treat mental disorder. There is an abundance of evidence that mental disorders are of environmental, not physical origin. It is true some physical illnesses (for example, hormonal problems) can produce symptoms that sometimes have been misdiagnosed as depression, and all therapists need to be aware of this possibility and make appropriate referrals. But this is an atypical occurrence and far more likely to be within the diagnostic competency of the patient’s primary care physician. It is simply false that psychiatrists, with their meager training in internal medicine, are geared to make complex differential diagnoses. The patient’s primary care physician is much better trained and experienced than the psychiatrist to discover an illness that is responsible for negative emotional reactions.

Consumer Reports Insights goes on to convey additional misinformation by conflating sadness with depression. Prior to DSM-III (published in 1980), sadness and depression were viewed as different. Whereas depression was regarded as a mental disorder, sadness was recognized as a normal, temporary response to loss. Losses occur throughout life and a lot of research establishes the connection between loss and sadness. Sadness is simply a part of experiencing life, but we get over it, even when it has the intensity of grief. Now sadness/depression is diagnosed as an illness – an illness, we are told, that is best treated medically. The pharmaceutical industry has become extraordinarily profitable as a result of this psychiatric construction. Abandonment of the distinction between sadness and depression has led to many people being prescribed drugs who would get better and be better off if left alone. When treatment for sadness is warranted, more effective help comes from a doctor who pays close attention to the patient’s life circumstances rather than one who prescribes drugs. The same point applies to depression, particularly when treated by a behavior therapist who is trained to know what to pay attention to (research results bear this out).

Consumer Reports Insights then discusses “true depression” (whatever that is, since the article never defines depression properly) as distinguished from “atypical depression,” which “usually responds well to SSRI antidepressants and psychotherapy.” In actuality, outcome studies find little or no support for the SSRIs as being effective in the treatment of depression. When measured short-term (after three months of treatment), SSRIs produce results no better than placebos (and for this reason are properly regarded as placebos); measured long-term, the SSRIs are found to be no good at all. Results indicate that after a year’s time all but a small fraction of patients on antidepressants have either relapsed or dropped out of treatment (because not only do antidepressants not work, they have aversive side effects).

Finally, lest you have missed getting their point, Consumer Report Insights ends the article by stating that the 46-year-old teacher who sought help from a psychiatrist because he felt depressed was found to have a “mild long-term panic disorder that had been worsened by an under-active thyroid gland. With the help of thyroid pills and anti-panic medication, he soon felt much better.” Are we to believe that the psychiatrist, not the primary care physician, discovered (and treated?) the thyroid problem? How odd that would be. Cases with hormonal deficiencies or other physical causes for emotional disorder certainly exist, but as stated above, (a) physical illnesses are infrequent causes of mental disorder, (b) depending on psychiatrists to make this diagnosis would be a mistake, and (c) drugs don’t reliably treat anxiety conditions any more than they do sadness or depression. And, incidentally, not mentioned in this recounting of the teacher’s experiences, those anti-panic meds are habit forming (there are more than ten million addicts from anti-anxiety meds in this country) and they have been found to be a major cause of deaths from automobile accidents and when combined with drinking alcohol.

The medicalization of psychiatry began roughly thirty years ago when psychiatry switched from a psychological (psychoanalytic) theory of mental disorder to a biological theory (the chemical imbalance theory). From its inception this medicalization of psychiatry has been aimed at two goals. First, increasing the respectability of psychiatry within the medical community by becoming “real doctors” who prescribe drugs to their patients, rather that offering talk therapy. Second, was the challenge of overcoming the stiff competition psychiatry faced from other mental health professionals, primarily psychologists, which by the 1980s threatened to put psychiatry out of business. People need to know that the medical claims that were made then, and which continue to be made now, have failed to be validated. Psychiatry has achieved success and respectability on the basis of marketing, not science. The Consumer Reports Insights article is representative of a great deal of misleading public information that needs to be set straight. Fundamentally, the article is a false credentialing of psychiatry to the public and to the rest of medicine, and a not very subtle unfounded attack on the competency of non-medically trained mental health practitioners, many of whom are operating on a far more solid research foundation.

The medicalization of psychiatry has been highly successful for the profession of psychiatry – far less so for patients. As described briefly above, outcome research has revealed that drug treatment produces poor results. Patients initially interpret the side effects of these drugs to mean the drug is helping (a placebo effect). However, since the drugs do not produce changes in the conditions or behaviors that have given rise to the patient’s problem and because they also induce noxious side effects (weight gain, constipation, loss of sexual desire), with time many patients lose faith in the drugs and stop taking them. For those, who continue on the drugs there is increasing evidence that long-term use of these drugs makes people worse (more prone to relapse). Particularly alarming in this regard is prescription of these drugs to children. As indicated earlier, the explosion in prescriptions of the SSRIs has been accompanied by a very significant increase in the number of people diagnosed as mentally disabled. Contrary to the rosy, benign picture of psychiatric practice painted by Consumer Reports Insights, there is reason to believe psychiatrists are providing poor treatment in the short run and injuring their patients when prescribing drugs long-term. In terms of both effectiveness and safety, outcome research indicates the medicalization of psychiatry has led us astray.

A great deal of research points to how the development of faulty responses to life’s challenges constitutes the basis for mental disorder. Correction of problems with this kind of origin can’t be done medically. The best treatments we have today for a wide range of mental disorders are behavioral (non-medical) treatments, all of which have been derived empirically. These promising results have taken place despite the fact that the amount of grant research devoted to behavioral treatment has been miniscule compared with drug research. We need therapists who possess the more trustworthy expertise of understanding how mental disorders are acquired and maintained as a consequence of people having learned debilitating behaviors in response to difficult conditions in their lives.

The Consumer Reports Insights column has contributed to the problem, not the solution. That aside, most importantly, we need to get over our wishful thinking that we can get rid of our problems simply by taking a pill. Although many doctors encourage this fantasy, it’s just not that easy. Help is available, but as is the case with most of our accomplishments in life, effort is required to make it happen.

If you are interested in reading more about the background of history and research on which these comments are based, including NIMH’s role in disseminating disinformation, read my article entitled, “What Underlies Psychopharmacology?”

Last week, senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate, the “Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011,” they claimed would “establish a framework to protect the personal information of all Americans.”

During a D.C. press conference, McCain told reporters that the proposed law would protect a “fundamental right of American citizens, that is the right to privacy.”

While Kerry and McCain correctly state that “The ease of gathering and compiling personal information on the Internet and off, both overtly and surreptitiously, is becoming increasingly efficient and effortless due to advances in technology which have provided information gatherers the ability to compile seamlessly highly detailed personal histories of individuals” (p. 4), there’s one small catch.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh reported that the bill “doesn’t apply to data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information.”

While the measure would apply to “companies and some nonprofit groups,” CNET disclosed that “federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge” would be exempt.

As we know, a gaggle of privacy-killing agencies inside the secret state, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as offices and subunits sprinkled throughout the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy, including U.S. Cyber Command, all claim authority to extract personal information on individuals from still-secret Office of Legal Counsel memoranda and National Security Presidential Directives.

As the American Civil Liberties Union reported in March, what little has been extracted from the Executive Branch through Freedom of Information Act litigation is heavily-redacted, rendering such disclosures meaningless exercises.

For example, the bulk of the November 2, 2001 21-page Memorandum for the Attorney General, penned by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo, which provided the Bush administration with a legal fig-leaf for their warrantless wiretapping programs, is blank. That is, if one ignores exemptions to FOIA now claimed by the Obama administration. (B1, b3, b5, exemptions relate to “national security,” “inter-departmental communications” and/or programs labelled “TS/SCI”–Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest classification).

And, as of this writing, the American people still do not have have access to nor even knowledge of the snooping privileges granted securocrats by the Bush and Obama administrations under cover of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, CNCI derives authority from classified annexes of National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) first issued by our former “decider.”

Those 2008 presidential orders are so contentious that both the Bush and Obama administrations have even refused to release details to Congress, prompting a 2010 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) demanding that the full text, and underlying legal authority governing federal cybersecurity programs be made public.

McCullagh points out that the bill “also doesn’t apply to government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, and the IRS, which collect vast amounts of data on American citizens.”

Nor are there provisions in the bill that would force federal or state agencies to notify American citizens in the event of a data breach. No small matter considering the flawed data security practices within such agencies.

Just last week, InformationWeek revealed that the “Texas comptroller’s office began notifying millions of people Monday that their personal data had been involved in a data breach. The private data was posted to a public server, where it was available–in some cases–for over a year.”

“The posted records,” we’re told, “included people’s names, mailing addresses, social security numbers, and in some cases also dates of birth and driver’s license numbers.”

None of the data was encrypted and was there for the taking by identity thieves or other shady actors. InformationWeek pointed out although “most organizations that experience a serious data breach” offer free credit monitoring services to victims, “to date, Texas has not said it will offer such services to people affected by the comptroller’s breach.”

CNET reminds us that the “Department of Veterans Affairs suffered a massive security breach in 2006 when an unencrypted laptop with data on millions of veterans was stolen.”

McCullagh avers that “a government report last year listed IRS security and privacy vulnerabilities” and that “even the Census Bureau has, in the past, shared information with law enforcement from its supposedly confidential files.”

The limited scope of the Kerry and McCain proposal is underscored by moves by the Obama Justice Department to actually increase the secret state’s already formidable surveillance powers and short-circuit anemic privacy reforms that have been proposed.

In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last week, during hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Associate Attorney General James A. Baker warned the panel that granting “cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans’ cell phones would hinder police investigations.”

But even when it comes to reining-in out-of-control online tracking by internet advertising firms, the Kerry-McCain bill comes up short.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Kerry-McCain bill won’t stop online tracking by advert pimps who hustle consumers’ private details to the highest bidder.

The civil liberties’ watchdogs aver, “the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities.”

“Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information,” EFF’s legislative analyst Rainey Reitman writes, one that “leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.”

Additionally, the proposal is silent on Do Not Track, “meaning there is no specific proposal for a meaningful, universal browser-based opt-out mechanism that could be respected by all large third-party tracking companies,” and consumers “would still need to opt-out of each third party individually,” a daunting process.

Worst of all, consumers “won’t have a private right of action in the new Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights. That means consumers won’t be granted the right to sue companies for damages if the provisions of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights are violated.” In other words, even when advertising firms and ISPs violate their users’ privacy rights, the bill would specifically prohibit individuals from seeking relief in the courts.

Moving in for the Cybersecurity Kill

While the Kerry-McCain bill would exempt government agencies from privacy protections, the Defense Department is aggressively seeking more power to monitor civilian computer networks.

NextGov reported that General Keith Alexander, the dual-hatted commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency said that his agency “cannot monitor civilian networks” and that congressional authorization will be required so that CYBERCOM can “look at what’s going on in other government sectors” and other “critical infrastructures,” i.e., civilian networks.

Mendacity aside, considering that NSA already vacuums-up terabytes of America’s electronic communications data on a daily basis, reporter Aliya Sternstein notes that Alexander “offered hints about what the Pentagon might be pushing the Obama administration to consider.”

“Civil liberties and privacy are not [upheld] at the expense of cybersecurity,” he said. “They will benefit from cybersecurity,” available only, or so we’ve been led to believe, from the military, well-known for their commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law as the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning amply demonstrates.

Cyberspace, according to Alexander, is a domain that must be protected like the air, sea and land, “but it’s also unique in that it’s inside and outside military, civilian and government” domains.

Military forces “have to have the ability to move seamlessly when our nation is under attack to defend it … the mechanisms for doing that have to be laid out and agreed to. The laws don’t exist in this area.”

While Cyber Command currently shares network security duties with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as I reported last year, a Memorandum of Agreement between DHS and NSA, claims that increased “interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation’s cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities,” will be beneficial.

We were informed that the Agreement “will focus national cybersecurity efforts, increasing the overall capacity and capability of both DHS’s homeland security and DoD’s national security missions, while providing integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

But as Rod Beckström, the former director of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), pointed out in 2009 when he resigned his post, he viewed increased control by NSA over national cybersecurity programs a “power grab.”

In a highly-critical letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Beckström said that NSA “effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions.”

Citing the agency’s role as the secret state’s eyes and ears that peer into America’s electronic and telecommunications’ networks, Beckström warned that handing more power to NSA could significantly threaten “our democratic processes…if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization.”

Those warnings have gone unheeded.

National Defense Magazine reported that retired Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “would hand over the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity responsibilities to the head of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command.”

Seconding Pace’s call for cybersecurity consolidation, under Pentagon control, Roger Cressey, a senior vice president with the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, a company that does billions of dollars of work for the Defense Department, “agreed that putting all the responsibility for the federal government’s Internet security needs would help the talent shortage by consolidating the responsibilities under one roof.”

“The real expertise in the government,” Cressey told National Defense, “capable of protecting networks currently lies in the NSA.”

Cressey’s is hardly an objective opinion. The former member of the National Security Council and the elitist Council on Foreign Relations, joined Booz Allen after an extensive career inside the secret state.

A military-industrial complex powerhouse, Booz Allen clocks-in at No. 9 on Washington Technology’s list of 2010 Top 100 Contractors with some $3.3 billion in revenue.

As Spies For Hire author Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, “Among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies … are data-mining and data analysis, signals intelligence systems engineering (an NSA specialty), intelligence analysis and operations support, the design and analysis of cryptographic or code-breaking systems (another NSA specialty), and ‘outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning’.”

With “data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans’ personal information” off the Kerry-McCain “privacy” bill table, as CNET reported, enterprising security firms are undoubtedly salivating over potential income–and lack of accountability–which a cybersecurity consolidation, Pentagon-style, would all but guarantee.

Within that dusky haze, obscured by claims of national security or proprietary business information, take your pick, would you bet your life that the wizards of misdirection and deception care a whit that you really are more than a disembodied data point?

Lost in the debate surrounding privacy invasion and data mining however, is the key role that internet service providers (ISPs) play as intermediaries and gatekeepers. From their perch, ISPs peer deeply into and collect and analyze the online communications of tens of millions of users simultaneously, in real-time.

Concerted efforts to eliminate online anonymity, in managed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, are greatly enhanced by the deployment of deep packet inspection (DPI) sensors and software on virtually all networks.

As Canadian privacy watchdogs DeepPacketInspection.ca tell us, DPI offer ISPs “unparalleled levels of intelligence into subscribers’ online activities.”

“To unpack this a little” they aver, “all data traffic that courses across the ‘net is contained in individual packets that have header (i.e. addressing) information and payload (i.e. content) information. We can think of this as the address on a postcard and the written and visual content of a postcard.”

All of which is there for the taking, “criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” Cryptohippie chillingly informs.

Still the illusion persists that communication technologies are somehow “neutral.” Neither good nor bad but rather, much like a smart phone loaded with geolocation tracking chips or the surveillance-ready internet itself, simply there for all to use.

Reality as is its wont, bites with ever-sharper teeth.

As with other recent advances touted as breakthroughs–from the biomedical and pharmaceutical research that spawned factory farming and genetically-modified crops to something as seemingly banal as the highway system that ushered in exurban sprawl–from the workplace to the car-pool lane to idle hours spent trolling the web, our techno-toys function rather handily as instruments of social control.

Simply put, DPI hand our minders an unprecedented means to examine and catalogue our online communications. From blog posts to web searches to the content of email and video files, we’re delivered up every day, figuratively and literally, to advertising pimps or law enforcers, a faceless army of gatekeepers guarding an indefensible system in perpetual crisis.

“Reengineering” the Internet … for Persistent Surveillance

Subtly guiding internet traffic into fast and slow lanes, based on the size and content of a particular file, or examining said file for malicious or illegal content, DPI has been deployed as a means of conserving bandwidth and as a defense against viral attacks.

Leaving aside the critical issue of net neutrality, linked to moves to further monetize the internet and hold communications hostage to the ability to pay for quicker network speeds, there is no question that ISPs and individual users should have a keen interest in defending themselves against the depredations of organized gangs of identity thieves and predators.

If DPI were solely a tool to weed out malicious hacks or channel traffic in more equitable ways, thereby ensuring the broadest possible access to all, it could provide concrete benefits to users and contribute to a safer and more secure communications’ environment.

This hasn’t happened. Instead, securocrats and corporatists alike are working feverishly to “reengineer the internet”–for the delivery of targeted ads and as a surveillance platform–and both view DPI’s ability to read individual messages, the “deep packet” as it were, as a singular means to do just that.

Last year, Antifascist Calling reported on moves by surveillance mavens to deploy deep packet sniffing Einstein 3 software developed by the National Security Agency on the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

As with the agency’s pervasive driftnet spying on Americans, as AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in his release of internal company documents, DPI and the hardware that powers it is the “secret sauce” animating these illegal programs.

Earlier this year, Klein told Wired Magazine that the documents suggest that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping “was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg,” evidence of “an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples’ communications every second automatically.”

Ostensibly designed for detecting and thwarting malicious attacks aimed at government networks, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the packet sniffing Einstein 3 program, developed under the code name TUTELAGE, can screen computer traffic flowing into state portals from private sector networks, including those connecting people to the internet.

“Its filtering technology,” journalist Siobhan Gorman wrote, “can read the content of email and other communications.”

Einstein 3 is considered so toxic to privacy that AT&T sought “legal assurance that it will not be sued for participating in the pilot program,” The Washington Post reported. Although they were given assurances by Bush’s former Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey, that the firm “would bear no liability,” AT&T deferred until the Obama administration granted the waiver in 2009. So far, the federal government has expended some $2 billion on the program.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher with the Tor Anonymity Project told CNET News in March that expanding Einstein 3 to private networks “would amount to a partial outsourcing of security” to unaccountable corporations.

But it will do much, much more. Appelbaum averred that the project represents “a clear loss of control [for the public]. And anyone with access to that monitoring system, legitimate or otherwise, would be able to monitor amazing amounts of traffic.”

A year later, a related program under development by NSA and defense giant Raytheon, “Perfect Citizen,” relies on a suite of sensors deployed in computer networks that will persistently monitor whichever system they are plugged into. While little has been revealed about how Perfect Citizen will work, it was called by a corporate insider the cyber equivalent of “Big Brother,” according to an email obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

I have pointed out many times that under the rubric of cybersecurity (the latest profit-generating “War on Terror” front), the secret state, America’s telecoms and internet service providers are conjoined at the hip in what are blandly called “public-private partnerships.”

Indeed, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence, posted a confidential document that provided details on the inner workings of one such initiative, Project 12.

Ultimately, the goal of the secretive enterprise, Public Intelligence averred, “is not simply to increase the flow of ‘threat information’ from government agencies to private industry, but to facilitate greater ‘information sharing’ between those companies and the federal government.”

This will be accomplished once “real-time cyber situational awareness” is achieved across all eighteen critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) sectors identified in the report.

Simply put, NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and a constellation of top secret cybersecurity projects will come to nought if filtering software that examines–and catalogues–the content, or deep packets, of those spied upon aren’t deployed across all networks, public and private.

No surprise then, that the origins of the ghost in the internet surveillance machine lie in unscrupulous efforts by advert pimps to deliver us to market.

“Opting In” to the Corporate Police State

Readers are familiar with the practice of web sites that install tracking “cookies” and other nasty bits of code that follow our antics across the internet.

This information is sold to advertisers by firms such as Google and Yahoo who charge a premium price for the privilege of peering into browsing habits.

Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that a gaggle of niche firms “harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.”

We’re told that the dubious practice of “web scraping” provides the “raw material” in a rapidly expanding “data economy.” Journal reporters found that marketers “spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009″ and that “spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.”

And with incentives such as these, and virtually nothing in the way of regulation, is it any wonder we find ourselves preyed upon.

While we might garner a measure of privacy from the prying eyes of ISPs, marketing vultures and our political minders through the use of strong encryption, as I reported last month, the Obama administration will soon seek congressional authorization which mandates that software designers and social networking sites build backdoors into their systems.

According to The New York Times, the administration claims this is necessary so that law enforcement and intelligence snoops have a surefire means “to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages,” because their “ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is ‘going dark’.”

Mendacious administration claims are more than matched by those in the online advertising industry.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that deep packet inspection, “one of the most potentially intrusive technologies for profiling and targeting Internet users with ads is on the verge of a comeback, two years after an outcry by privacy advocates in the U.S. and Britain appeared to kill it.”

Advertising grifters Kindsight and Phorm “are pitching deep packet inspection services as a way for Internet service providers to claim a share of the lucrative online ad market.”

Right up front, Phorm declares that theirs’ is a “global personalisation technology company” that “delivers a more interesting online experience,” that is, if your interests lie in having a behavioral profile of yourself created, centered around intrusive web tracking and data mining technologies.

While both firms claim that user privacy is of “paramount” concern, the industry’s track record suggests otherwise. In 2008 for example, internet marketing firm NebuAd planned to “use deep packet inspection to deliver targeted advertising to millions of broadband subscribers unless they explicitly opted out of the service.”

An outcry ensued when the scheme became public knowledge. While NebuAd has gone out of business, “several U.S. ISPs who signed deals with NebuAd have been hit with class-action lawsuits accusing them of ‘installing spyware devices; on their networks,” the Journal averred.

According to Ars Technica, the lawsuit charged the firm and ISPs “Bresnan Communications, Cable One, CenturyTel, Embarq, Knology, and WOW! of all being involved in the interception, copying, transmission, collection, storage, usage, and altering of private data from users.”

NebuAd was accused by plaintiffs of exploiting “normal browser platform security behaviors by forging IP packets, allowing their own JavaScript code to be written into source code trusted by the web browser,” the complaint reads. “NebuAd and ISPs together cooperate in this attack against the intentions of the consumers, the designers of their software, and the owners of the servers they visit,” attorneys charged.

“All of the involved parties,” journalist Jacqui Cheng wrote, were “alleged to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, California’s Computer Crime Law, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Invasion of Privacy Act.”

In Britain, a similar controversy erupted when BT Group PLC were forced to disclose that they “had tested Phorm’s technology on some subscribers without telling them. Last year, BT and two other British ISPs that explored deploying Phorm’s service–Virgin Media Inc. and TalkTalk–abandoned it,” the Journal reported.

At the time, the nose-tweaking tech web site The Register revealed that although Phorm refused to state how many BT customers had been profiled, “at the absolute least there are 38,000 BT Retail customers unaware their communications have been allegedly criminally intercepted in the last two years. The number could be as high as 108,000.”

When grilled by The Register as to why Phorm doesn’t believe “people have the right to know how likely it is they were part of a secret test,” a Phorm spokesperson replied “‘We’re just not going to disclose that’.” He claimed “‘they were BT customers and you have to ask BT about that’.”

BT also refused to respond to inquiries. How’s that for transparency!

Why then, should users believe industry professions of faith that ISPs won’t provide them with subscribers’ real identities? After all, as one wag told the Journal, ISPs “feel like they have data and they ought to be able to use it” and “they really desperately want to.”

Accordingly, the Journal reported that Kindsight, owned by telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent SA (talk about a seamless web!), “says six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been testing its security service this year although it isn’t yet delivering targeted ads. It declined to name the clients.”

CEO Mike Gassewitz told Journal reporters that the company “has been placing ads on various websites to test the ad-placement technology and build up a base of advertisers, which now number about 100,000.”

Phorm’s history hardly inspires confidence. CEO Kent Ertugrul, “a Princeton-educated, former investment banker,” we’re informed by the Journal, honed his business skills in the early 1990s when he formed “a joint venture with the Russian Space Agency to offer joy rides to tourists in MiG-29 fighter jets.”

Coming at the height of the Yeltsin kleptocracy that looted billions of dollars in assets from the sell-off of the prized possessions of the former Soviet Union, at the very least this should have raised an eyebrow or two.

Before changing its name to Phorm in 2007, Ertugrul ran an enterprise called 121Media. According to numerous published reports, the firm produced a spyware application called PeopleOnPage. “This application,” Wikipedia averred, “acted as a browser hijacker and passed details of the user’s currently visited website to central ContextPlus servers, so that the user could be targeted with advertising” in the form of intrusive pop-ups.

The adware component, AproposMedia, was described by InternetSecurityZone.com as “…a malicious executable program that is usually installed without user consent or knowledge. AproposMedia may have the ability to secretly monitor, record, and transmit computer activity.” Indeed, The Register reported that Ertugrul’s PeopleOnPage ad network “was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure.”

Former pop-up king Ertugrul has called online rights’ campaigners “privacy pirates” who represent a “neo-Luddite retrenchment,” and told The Daily Telegraph last year that Phorm’s technology is a “game changer” in “protecting users’ privacy.”

But armed with a marketing scheme that promises “the potential for companies to collect substantially more revenue for literally any page on the internet,” serious privacy concerns are a real issue when deep packet inspection technologies are touted as a splendid means to do so.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee told New Scientist in 2009 that the “ever-increasing power of computers that is helping the internet to grow is also threatening its future.”

Berners-Lee “likened DPI to wiretapping, and pointed out that companies could use it to learn a huge amount about our ‘lives, hates and fears’.”

Information I might add, that is portable and readily exploitable by our political minders and the corporate grifters they so lovingly serve.

And with a national security state already monitoring huge volumes of data collected from the internet and other electronic communications’ platforms, The Guardian warns that Britain and other managed Western democracies are “sleepwalking into a surveillance society.”

Isn’t it time we woke up?

I have sympathy for the fears and dreads of my fellow citizens, but little for the detail of their aspirations and none for the unsocial actions that they are willing to take to make their expectations real.

One of the coded messages presented in many different forms especially by the Republicans translates into screwing over the other guy so that you can keep what you have– coded messages are especially a Republican thing since if their true agenda were honestly explained,  they would get only about 5 to 10 percent of any election.  Why anyone would believe such messages is unclear to me since when someone tells me something like that, I am quite confident that I am the one that they have in mind to screw over; but shortsighted greed has fueled con games for thousands of years.  The whole ‘big government’ meme is a con to empower big business – when was the last time you had any say in the leadership of Bank of America – and to disenfranchise and disempower the working classes.

So here is middle class Joe Normal American; he wants a regular life (he learned to think this way from politicians!) and by ‘regular life’ he means having the goods and services associated with the top 20% of income (beginning at about $90,000 in 2005).  He just wants to be like everybody else only a little better off: 4 thousand square feet of house (“everyone has 3 thousand!”), a little bigger SUV, a boat and jet skis and so on.  He is told that this is both normal (that is his middle name) and “good for the country.”  Both are also lies.

And here is the rub: what is recognized as good for Joe depends a great deal on Joe’s expectations and beliefs; what is good for the country, and by extension also good for Joe, must be evaluated by much broader and substantive standards.

Joe cannot be expected, nor should he expect of himself, to either fully understand or to fully respond to the major forces of the biophysical space, but he should be expected to know that such forces exist and are essential in how we, as inhabitants of a region, nation and planet, act in the world.

Such a recognition implies restraint and so is anathema to the greedy way of life.  It is the ‘party of greed’s’ argument that Joe only needs to consider his own wishes, that by fully committing to self-aggrandizement he will be supporting the economic growth that will bring all good things to all people… unless, of course, he is materially poor, in which case he is to have no opinion or desire other than to bow to the wants and needs of his betters; restraint is essential for those who are not recipients of the invisible hand of greed.

But what is good for the country?  Are we only to mean by that question the economic elite? Can we mean all of the nation’s people? Are we to include the biophysical structures and systems that support and sustain all of life?  Is it other than shortsighted madness to leave out the people and the ecology from the question?

The last question above is, of course, rhetorical.  Failing to consider all of the relevant and substantive sources of influence on us is something we train our children against, and a sign that a person is losing the compos of their mentis. So, by ‘what is good for the country?’ we must mean to include all of the people and the biophysical forms and functions of the physical space.  This should be so obvious as to need no comment, but I fear it may not be and will add that the damage and destruction of the systems that sustain biological life, not the economic health of Goldman Sachs or Halliburton, ultimately determine the quality and possibility of human life.  That which is good for the biosphere is finally what is good for the country.

Seen in this way, there are some changes that need to be made.  In broad strokes: economic growth as currently configured would have to end; population would have to be reduced; total human consumption of earth’s productive capacity would have to be cut in half and then half again; the expectations and beliefs associated with a good human life would have to dramatically change.  If a typical poorly informed manipulating-message repeater were to say, “you are trying to change our way of life,” they would be correct (if Joe Normal American only realized: ‘Our way of life’ is elite code for, “I am happy having incalculable power and wealth and have no intention of giving them up even if all of life on earth has to suffer.”).

If meaningful changes were to be made, how would Joe have to live? What would his life be like? First let us understand it is only consumption by the many that creates the wealth of the few, the more consumption the more wealth.  All the immediate social drivers are for more rather than less use of the earth’s productivity.  So even if Joe were to realize that he needed to use less,there would be great forces at work to get him to use more.

This would be the first condition of his life; confusion, pressure and the resulting anger.  The physical conditions would not necessarily be ameliorative.  No 4000 square foot houses, more like 400 sq. ft. for 2 or 3 people.  No boats, ATVs, SUVs, more like bicycles and public transportation; most people would travel long distances rarely.  Joe would need to grow some of his own food and would, therefore, have to learn the skills of gardening and animal husbandry.  Most people would eventually live in villages of no more than a few hundred, these grouped into super-villages totaling a few thousand and these grouped into townships of several tens of thousands.

There would be a good bit of collective functioning as a way to reduce the consumption of major capital goods.  This should not be an especially foreign idea since we do this now with things like libraries on the public side and factories on the private side.  There would be a shifting of personal goals away from private consumption of material goods as a way to maximize the human experience (He who dies with the most toys wins) to maximizing the human experience with as few material goods as possible (getting the most pleasure and fulfillment from using as little of the earth’s productivity as possible).  This is the ‘way of life’ of all other species, and is driven by natural biological incentives; we would need to reintroduce the incentives that result is sustaining adaptations.

Joe would be very very unhappy if he continued to believe, and if the society around him believed, that excess was the way to success.  If Joe didn’t want to grow food; if he wanted to go where he wanted when he wanted by any means he wanted; if he continued to believe that his behavior was only his and no one else’s business, that he owed no compensation to the air to breathe it, to the wood in his chair or clothes on his back other than to pay the store a money price; then Joe would be a very unhappy camper indeed.

But if he began to discover the body pleasure of walking or biking; if he found satisfaction in preparing soil, planting seeds, protecting the growing crops, collecting and storing food for a season; if he began to realize the need and seek the methods for compensating the ecosystem that supplies him with the very conditions of life, and then find the pleasure in both the actions and connection of that compensating, then Joe could live with a fullness unavailable through excess.

And so my dilemma when I read and hear about our financial tribulations: There is a desperation to return to normal, return to a normal that is destructive of our environment, our humanity and our specieshood. Returning to normal often means today returning to the abnormal; like drug addicts, we create the new ‘normal’ of intoxication that we are driven powerfully to return to. There is the maddening fear of what is come if we have to give up our economic expectations, the big house, the hundreds of thousands ‘in the bank’ for ‘the future,’ the toys.

But what we are collectively experiencing now is only a very mild form of the changes that we will have to endure, and embrace, to get to a ‘way of life’ that will allow us to live not only on, but with, the earth and its total living process.  There is anger at the elites for lying to us, for manipulating our information, for intentionally controlling our expectations.  But we like today’s normal, as infantile and unhealthy as it is.

I want people to recover from their present fear, but I don’t want them to fall back into the lethargy of excess, yet that is exactly what they see as normal.  The closer we are to what is called recovery, the farther we are from the path and the forces that can initiate and guide the changes essential for the human species to reconnect with the behaviors and beliefs that can let us move from now to the future without the major conflagration that certainly awaits us otherwise.

I want to yell out, “This is the future.  See what you want of it.  Make it work for you.  Use the courage of your disrupted life to take on the elites – they are nothing without you; they know that, but will kill you to keep you from knowing it.  These economic disruptions are a gift; it is only through them that the real structures of power and economic domination can be seen.  Then you must act, act in defiance of the normal and in pursuit of a truly human life.”

But I am speechless.  It all sounds so foolish to the modern ear when said out loud.

While I don’t enjoy flying, I recently had to get from here to there and back. A few of the details are hazy, but I’m sure this is how my conversation went with a ticket agent.

“I’d like a ticket,” I said with a smile.

“No problem,” said the agent, equally smiling, “that’d be $300.”

“But I didn’t tell you where I’m going.”

“Makes no difference. We’re running a special this month. Anywhere for only $300.  Now would you like a seat?”

“Of course I’d like a seat!” I said.

“$75,” said the agent.

“But you said the ticket was only $300.”

“And it is. But if you’d like a seat, that’s a surcharge.”

“That’s outrageous. What if I didn’t want a seat?”

“We have a special this month only. No seat is only $25.”

“$25 for not getting a seat?”

“No, sir,” said the agent. “The $25 is for a strap on the ceiling to hold on to.”

“What if I don’t want a strap?”

“Sir, the FAA requires it.”

“Give me a seat,” I said reluctantly.”

“Fine. One seat. Now will that be a window seat, an aisle seat, or one of the five pencil-thin narrow seats between them?”

“An aisle seat would be nice,” I said.

“$50 said the agent.”

“You charge for a seat and another charge for an aisle seat? I asked incredulous.

“It’s a lot cheaper than a window seat.”

“Why is it less than a window seat?”

“Everyone knows that in a window seat you can look out at absolutely nothing but clouds, but get the joy of inconveniencing the other passengers as much as you want when you have to go to the bathroom.”

“I suppose there’s a charge for the bathroom,” I said sarcastically.

“$5 a visit,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now would you like lunch on your flight?”

“How much?”

“It’s $10, and you get a choice of day-old chicken salad sandwich or recently unfrozen cheese sandwich, each with five potato chips.”

I selected the ebola chicken salad.

“Something to wash it down? We have a wide variety of almost-cold drinks. “$3 for soda, $5 for any micro-mini liquor. But if you buy three or more, you get one free bathroom pass.”

“Can I just pass on the drinks right now and decide once I’m in the air?”

“Not a problem,” she said just as sweetly, “but there’s a surcharge for last-minute decisions. We have to add a buck to each drink. And we take only cash. Clean, unmarked, crisp bills in the exact amount.”

I bought two sodas.

“Diet or regular?”

“Diet.”

“That’d be fifty cents more for each soda.”

“That’s outrageous. You can go to any soda machine in the country and buy two diet sodas for the same price as regular sodas. And they’re only a buck or so apiece.”

“Really? That’s strange. I’ll have to look into that. So that’s $6 for two sodas plus a buck for the surcharge. Now do you have luggage you’re taking?”

“How much?”

“Only $50 a bag. Carry-on bags are only $30. How many bags, sir?”

“One checked bag and one carry-on bag.”

“Yes, sir, that’ll be $160.”

Apparently she didn’t ace her SAT math test. “You said a checked bag was $50, and a carry-on was $30. That’s only $80.”

“I’m just assuming you’d want them to return with you. Most passengers do.”

“You mean the $80 is for one-way only?”

“That’s what the illegible fine print says. Most people prefer to bring their bags back with them.”

“Do most people prefer to take trains?” I asked. She let it pass unnoticed.

“Now, sir, if you’ll just step on the scale.”

“You mean I should put my bags on the scale,” I said.

“No, sir, I mean you should put you on the scale. It costs more in jet fuel if we have passengers, so we add a weight surcharge.”

I complied with her request.

“That’ll be an extra $15,” she said.

“For what?!”

“According to our weight charts, you’re 15 pounds overweight. We charge a dollar a pound.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “My physician says I’m within the normal weight range.”

“Sir, I don’t wish to argue with you, but according to our charts you’re overweight. We can’t have you slowing down our plane’s speed because of your bulk.”

“Who prepares these charts! The Society of Anorexic Actuaries?”

“No, sir,” said the ticket agent proudly, “we have only professionals. Last month, it was one of the women from ‘Friends.’ I think next month it’ll be Nicole Richie.”

“I assume if someone is underweight, you give them a refund?”

It took her two minutes to stop laughing.

“Is there anything else you would like to make your flight more enjoyable?” she asked. “Seat belts, barf bags, headsets for music or an abridged and censored movie?”

I took one of each, and she began calculating the costs.

“… And, finally, there’s the gas surcharge, state, federal, cloud, and runway taxes—”

“I have to pay for the runway?!”

“You do want to land, don’t you?”

She gave me the total.

“Would you like a shot of oxygen with that?” she asked.

I gave her two bucks more.

As the middle men, our mega corporate retailers are part of the problem of inflicting society with shoddy goods.  These organizations demonstrate complacency and contempt for the general public. Profit and greed are their driving forces. Quality is their enemy; a durable, well made product means that it won’t soon be replaced, negatively affecting short term profits.

Don’t we have a right to access well made products created with pride in workmanship? Shouldn’t we take comfort in knowing that what we buy was produced by people paid fairly in good working conditions? How have we become so callous and selfish? What we need is a complete overhaul of our economic system. A country less dependent on trade, and one that begins to develop its own strong manufacturing base, is a country on the verge of self-sufficiency and strength. We have become too enthralled in a one world system on the verge of collapse due to the greed of a few powerful people in governments and big business. Large North American corporations are actually their own worst enemies; by eliminating jobs domestically, they are losing great numbers of consumers who can actually afford to buy their products. Greed. It’s not called a Deadly Sin for nothing. The workforce is not completely innocent either; if workers hadn’t demanded unreasonable wages in so many sectors through their unions, they might not have scared off their employers so quickly. It is mutual self-destruction.

One way we can get out of our economic conundrum would be to support and encourage small manufacturing businesses. Safe products with high quality could become in demand by consumers when compared to the junk that is available in large retail outlets. If we could buy goods that are actually made to last and not fall apart in a few weeks, we would more likely go back to the retailer that sold them; that option is being challenged by our present system.

Unfortunately there are tremendous obstacles to a domestic manufacturer surviving even just the first few months of business: firstly, large corporations in the retail business are not easily persuaded to sell the goods of such companies; secondly, domestically produced goods compete against cheap foreign counterparts that flood the market. By sheer massive inventories, mega retailers dominate their industry by selling at reduced rates. We have been conditioned to value quantity over quality. We jeopardize our economies, our health and our pride as independent nations. Imagine if countries developed strong manufacturing bases and focused more on their domestic market; employment would increase dramatically and we would all be less dependent on a global system run by a few powerful men. We need to again produce what we need at home and dramatically diminish imports.

Of course, the story was complete bullshit—an urban legend concocted by some imaginative college student or animal rights activist, who knows, but it’s taken its place among fast food lore, nonetheless. In any case, the story serves as a great analogue for society as a whole in our modern day economic system. Not that I think a select few humans are destined for processing at the Soylent Green facility, but we are remarkably conditioned to feed the economy in a multiplicity of other ways—all of which is the manifestation of a very American type of capitalism that has, perhaps fatally, spread over the world entire.

Economists tell us that we are the all-mighty consumers, but it is the economy that often consumes us. Evidence of this can be seen on the faces of the unemployed or those who have lost their homes in this latest economic downturn. And while this economy consumes anyone willing (or unwilling) to buy into it, it is the bottom half that is most often served up, apple in mouth. We are the hapless lambs offered to the haut monde. Yet, even in this sacrificial status, many of us continue on with our lives, spending unabated if credit allows. Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also quite useful in a system that’s trying to squeeze every last drop of life from its hosts.

And squeeze it does through our spending habits—habits that have been very purposefully and meticulously shaped by a culture dominated by the need to sell massive amounts of often quite useless stuff. Not a single aspect of our behavior—of our lives has been considered without this in mind. Our spending is the lifeblood of the economy and, like that imagined fleshy glob of poultry product, nourishing our desire to spend, to be differentiated from our ability to spend, is essential.

As such, this perverse society in which we live touches on a variety of basic human emotions and urges to provoke our desire to spend. Like some inverse papal edict issued from the highest capitalist authority: envy, want, and pride, for instance, are considered to be virtues of a quasi-religion, whereas plain-old need and frugality is the stuff of the unenlightened masses, or, better yet, those not preordained for success in this temporal world.

Frugality, indeed, might be subconsciously thought of as our original sin and absolution can only come about through consumption. With each successive new generation of lambs (or chickens), the standards of such consumption are elevated. For instance, a time traveler from 1980 might find it hard to accept that we are only 30 years removed from his or her world. The “need” for gadgetry in our day and age has rendered us a collection of technologically dumbfounded addicts. So much so that our concern for safe driving has been subverted in favor of endless, if largely pointless communication with our fellow junkies. I can’t help but think that the break down of civil society is at least partly owed to the blank, unempathic stares of the cell phone throngs. With mindless elements of television, movies, and the Internet aiding in the pathosis—yes, zombies do exist.

Not that I should dwell on the technology hordes. God knows that there are X number of other material goods out there that we have been nurtured to believe we must have. Nor is technology the primary source of our debt (we can thank health care and real estate for most of that burden). But technological gadgetry might be the most inescapable of our addictions, and that alone might make it the most obnoxious. It is an efficacious conveyor of the faith. It’s also a market that, by itself, has remained affordable in some form to even the lowliest of individuals—a true opiate of the masses. One might be just as likely to see a drug dealer carrying the latest cell phone incarnation as they would the young professional on-the-go. Interestingly enough, the former might have a better need-based argument for using such a device round-the-clock.

Technology, more pointedly, is how we are bombarded 24 hours a day with images and sounds imparting the righteousness of frivolous spending through the most deceptive means advertising can offer. It has our devoted attention while, ironically, it distracts from the truly essential things that life has to offer: family, friendship, love, some measure of verity. It provides, instead, a surrogate means for maintaining a connection to those essential aspects—if only to encourage us to spend more, to make us more efficient consumers. Call it conspiracy, but I suspect that we are all just some experiment meant to nourish an economy from which only a few will ultimately find joy. I can’t help but think that there is some better alternative.

A flying car will soon be available for $194,000. Its Italianate name, Terrafugia, translates to Fleeing the Earth, so our Jetsons future is still on, many hope, even as more Americans are sleeping in their cars, and many more are struggling to fuel their lugubrious lemons. The Motor City, Detroit, has been in full collapse mode for decades, to be slowly reincarnated as an urban agrarian zone. Instead of the clanking of heavy machinery, one will soon hear cockcrows among gunshots.

We will not flee this earth. On a finite planet, growth is also finite, and we’ve already reached all limits. There will be no economic recovery, because economic growth is no longer possible. The cheapest labor has been found, and demand for all resources, primarily oil, is outstripping supply. Nearly a billion people are already starving, and a billion lack clean water. The average Mozambican uses a gallon of water a day, less than a third of what you and I flush down the toilet each time. By contrast, the average American consumes 151 gallons of water daily.

We use more of everything. With five percent of the world’s population, we engorge on 24 percent of its resources. Got a problem with that? If we can pay for it, we’re entitled, aren’t we? But there’s the problem. We’re the world’s biggest debtor nation. We haven’t been paying for squat. As a starving planet looks on, we’re like the biggest pig who refuses to leave the all day, all night, all-you-can-eat buffet, with our moment of reckoning willed and deferred to our distant progeny. It’s a farce, really. As we slobber, no one dares to nudge us from the trough because, well, we’re so well-armed. We’ll kick your ass! Got a problem with that?

To maintain our position as the biggest loser, we have troops in 130 countries. With the American attention span reduced to a nano second or less, no real pretext is needed when we invade and occupy a sovereign nation. Why are we still in Afghanistan? It’s not to catch Bin Laden, that’s for sure. His name hasn’t been mentioned with any urgency for years. Though blamed for two bankrupting wars, he was invisible during our last presidential election. The Washington Post did reveal, however, that the CIA had made a video of a fake Bin Laden sitting around the fire, talking about gay sex. Though our spooks couldn’t stop terrorists from boarding four different planes on September 11, 2001, they were certainly creative, in an Animal House sort of way. Even if this video was never released, no one bothered to ask if those tapes that had circulated were real. Who cares? Have you seen Britney’s latest outfit? Likewise, whenever anyone challenges any aspect of the official version of 9/11, he’s labeled as a kook, but why should we trust Washington on anything, when it has proven, over and over again, to be incapable of telling the truths?!

Our leaders are unctuous crooks, and the country seems aimless. That’s why your average American just wants to be left alone, to resume his shopping spree when the economy does revive. Else, anticipating the worst, he stocks up on ammo, beans and tuna. What’s missing is any collective purpose or vision. With each man, woman and child hooked to his own ipod and laptop, we are alienated and alone. Thus, Gary Faulkner, armed with just a Chicom pistol, sword and knife, headed to Pakistan to capture Bin Laden. He took baby Bush’s promise to “smoke him out” at face value, not knowing that this threat was no more real than O.J.’s vow to capture Nicole’s “real killer.”

Though many still don’t know it yet, we are a poor nation. As this Mother of all Depressions becomes more undeniable, Americans will have no choice but to endure, tolerate and, yes, even enjoy and appreciate each other on a much more intimate level. Our towns and cities will become more compact, and each home will have to accommodate more bodies, from returning adult children to close, then distant relatives, to boarders. More Americans will have to share their kitchen and bathrooms with strangers. Bedrooms will be partitioned. Destitution and proximity will breed conflicts, certainly, but they will also force people to cooperate and compromise. We will become dirtier, even bloodier, but at least we will have real lives, and not virtual ones spent in front of a screen, as we stuff our faces with endless poison.

The creators of the Jetsons also brought us the Flintstones, likely a more accurate portrayal of our future, but in that cartoon, there is also the personal automobile. Spoiled by a century of cheap oil, the American mind seems incapable of imagining life without a nice set of wheels at its center. Made of stones and sticks, Fred’s appears to run on nothing. We won’t be so lucky.

As the oil age recedes in the mind’s rear view mirror, science fiction will become a genre about the past. Pondering those who needed machines to do just about everything, from brushing their teeth, to writing, to self pleasure, future readers will be amused, disgusted and only seldom envious. Imagine a world where music was a nuisance because it had become repetitive and could not be silenced! Imagine people who could barely walk, yet flew!

As convincingly argued by Tim Jackson in his groundbreaking book, Prosperity without Growth, the unlikelihood of ‘absolute decoupling’ (reducing resource use while continuing to grow the economy) means that a different way of ensuring economic stability and maintaining employment is necessary. A growing number of academics and activists who recognise the tendency for New Deal economics to rely on a “grow your way out of unemployment” approach are calling for an alternative route to sustainability – reducing the working week and sharing paid employment equitably in a steady-state economy.

A recent report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) makes a particularly compelling argument for work sharing in their proposal for a new ‘normal’ working week for Britain of 21 hours. “While some are overworking, over-earning and over-consuming, others can barely afford life’s necessities,” wrote one of the report’s authors in the Guardian. “A much shorter working week would help us all to live more sustainable, satisfying lives by sharing out paid and unpaid time more evenly across the population.”

In her new book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, Juliet Schor similarly argues for fewer and more evenly spread hours spent in paid employment. A long-time advocate of work sharing, she maps out a vision for a new economics that would not only allow more time for family and community, but would also give people the opportunity to acquire goods and services in more ecologically friendly ways outside of the fossil-fuel intensive market economy.

Making the time to live sustainably

An enduring myth of industrial capitalism is that as technological advances have increased labour productivity, we no longer have to work as hard to meet our material needs. That it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods is undoubtedly true, yet prior to the successes of the labour movement in the late nineteenth century, industrialisation drove working hours to their highest level in human history. According to the economic historian, James E. Thorold Rogers, the workers participating in the eight-hour movement were simply striving to recover the amount of leisure time enjoyed by their medieval ancestors. With the push for deregulation over the last few decades, work hours in the most affluent parts of the world have actually started increasing once again, reversing the century-long decline sparked by trade union action.

As governments around the world have prioritised the pursuit of GDP growth as the single most important goal of their economic policy, productive effort has become separated from human needs. Economic activity now prioritises the accumulation of private profit over the securing of basic welfare – the pursuit of ‘what can be done’ over ‘what needs to be done’. The imperative for ever-expanding economic output creates a need to stimulate and satisfy higher and higher levels of consumer demand. Instead of producing the anticipated era of leisure – Keynes himself envisioned a 15-hour week with the work shared as widely as possible – the pursuit of growth for growth’s sake has led to an era of hyper-consumerism and overwork.

There is much less evidence to suggest that the constant ramping up of economic efforts and the commodification of more and more of our time and activities is healthy for social or environmental well-being. In 2004, a study by the NEF found that whilst economic output in the UK has nearly doubled in the last 30 years, life satisfaction levels have remained resolutely flat. Steady-state economist, Herman Daly, suggests that growth in the industrialised world may even have become ‘uneconomic’ in that its social and environmental costs exceed the benefit it brings. Collectively, humanity is already using up the Earth’s natural capital faster than it can be replenished, as evidenced by the work of the Global Footprint Network. All of which begs the question: instead of maintaining a system that maximises economic output and full-time employment, what about creating new arrangements that maximise human well-being and ecological sustainability?

People are already taking the transition to an alternative economic system into their own hands. A movement is growing around the idea of ‘downshifting’ – deliberately choosing to work and earn less in order to live a more fulfilling and simple life. In so doing, people are consciously rejecting the idea that we live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume. Such endeavours to redefine ‘the good life’ are not only reflected in individual decisions to downshift, but also in the growing popularity of transition towns, the collective rebuilding of local economies, and the climate justice movement’s vocal critique of overconsumption.

The problem is that downshifting as well as other efforts to counter consumerism are incoherent in modern economic terms. In Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, Madeleine Bunting reveals that while the majority of Britons accept it as self-evident that, for all but the poorest people, overwork ‘is your choice’, there is also a widespread acceptance that this purported power to choose is often exceptionally hard to exercise. It is not only the clear structural bias towards full-time employment that makes it difficult to negotiate flexible working hours, but also the ingrained logic of social comparison – the need to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ – which constantly upgrades our perceived materialistic ‘needs’ as incomes rise. The widespread sense of having to earn enough to live a ‘normal’ consumer lifestyle, one that is sold to us through advertising and reinforced by cultural norms, reflects the immense structural and social barriers to work sharing that exist in industrialised growth-driven economies.

Overcoming structural barriers

As evidenced by some of the more virulent reactions to the NEF’s 21 Hours report, the proposal to slash the working week and share hours more evenly across the population seems counter-intuitive. How would the poor and even middle-classes cope with losses in income? Wouldn’t government revenues drop and demand for public services rise? How would businesses cover the increased cost of employing a greater number of people for the same amount of work? What about shortages in skills that are already stretched to meet labour demand in some industries?

Although many of these concerns are valid, it is important to remember that work sharing is not a short-term policy solution, nor do its supporters suggest that it should be a sudden or enforced change. No one assumes that the redistribution of paid employment is a panacea for the social and ecological malaise described above. It is instead part of a long-term vision for a post-industrial world in which the economy is transformed to meet the needs of communities rather than the desires of consumers; a sustainable future where the benefits of the planet’s limited resources are shared equitably and protected for future generations.

Importantly, reactions such as that of the Institute for Economic Affairs’, Mark Littlewood, who called the proposal for a shorter working week “fantasyland economics”, reveal how deeply engrained the growth imperative is in today’s economic and social logic. The tendency in orthodox economics to assume that GDP growth is the best measure of economic progress is the greatest barrier to any policies that seek to purposefully ‘downshift’ the economy. Yet it is precisely because work sharing goes against the conventions of the growth paradigm that the idea is so important.

Overcoming the current structural bias toward long and unevenly distributed work hours requires a myriad of economic reforms. These could include income and wealth redistribution (including a substantially increased minimum wage); encouraging uncommodified forms of production and consumption (such as ‘self-providing’ or ‘co-production’); creating new measurements of progress and prosperity; and freeing sources of finance from the burden of interest-accruing debt. Perhaps most importantly, it requires an end to the work-to-earn, earn-to-consume mindset that currently dominates day-to-day life in many industrialised societies.

The fact that the proposal for a 21-hour week has been taken seriously in the halls of Westminster is a sure sign of encouragement, but until a popular movement gathers momentum behind the idea, governments are unlikely to act. In the end, it is up to people themselves to willingly step off the consumer treadmill and demand the right to an even and reduced share of paid work. Instead of accepting the trappings of ‘consumer-sovereignty’, we must demand the freedom not to consume – the freedom to become the producers and creators in a new economy that builds lasting prosperity within ecological limits.

As commercial culture replaces public culture and the language of the market becomes a substitute for the language of democracy, consumerism appears to be the only kind of citizenship on offer to children and adults alike.
– Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared (Updated and Expanded Edition): Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010), p. 24.

What are the implications for a democratic society increasingly under the sway of corporations that subordinate politics, history, public discourse, and non-commodified forms of culture to consumerism, escapist entertainment, and corporate profits?
– Ibid., p. 90.

Growing up corporate has become a way of life for American youth, and companies like Disney constitute a new global force in shaping youth around the world as consuming subjects.
– Ibid., p. 211.

In March 2007, Disney announced early preparation for a new animated production, The Frog Princess. Maddy (as in: Mammy), in true “American fairy tale” tradition, would be a Black chambermaid slaving away in the New Orleans pit of a spoilt, White débutante, only to be rescued ultimately by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother who helps her clutch the heart of a White prince who rescued her from a Black Magic villain. Civilization!

But soon as the 40 million Black people in America got word of Disney’s latest exploits in the realm of racial imagination, holy hell let loose, and the plot and title were at once scrapped: revised as The Princess and the Frog: the tale of Tiana, a fatherless 19-year-old Black waitress (and aspiring restaurant owner), set in Jazz Age New Orleans, who tries to snap a wicked spell placed on a not-quite-White prince, and thereby restore his humanity — only to be transformed herself into a frog, then having to hop through life’s animated twists and turns until arriving at the inevitable ending where both regain their character, fall into sensual bliss, and live happily ever till the credits roll.

The embarrassing effrontery of Disney’s first proposal is in many ways emblematic of the media/merchandise giant’s decades-long anachronistic approach to reality, and stubborn disregard of cultural sensitivity: a characteristic synonymous with corporate hubris. But it also extended a ritual Disney has, since inception, strived to keep secret — injecting highly educational-political-pedagogical shots into the social realm, all the while claiming Innocence as prime and final motif.

How fortuitous for Disney that as it sought to assure the world Black girls belonged better in kitchens and laundry rooms (rather than restaurants and board rooms), a Black family was ascending the podium of international acclaim, and Michelle Obama, wife of the current President, was arousing curiosity from all ends for refusing to recline in the back-seat while her husband ran laps across the country, hoping to convince citizens he could do the job just as good as any of his White opponents/predecessors.

Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock survey this theme with abundant brilliance in a newly released, updated and expanded version of The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, first published in 1999. Disney has long been educational and political, they write, and parents who prefer Disney — because, so the chants go, it offers up innocent and harmless alternatives to the sinful, violent, sexist, caustic courses that make up most TV shows and movies these days — need to widen their eyes more to a reality not so hard to pick up: far from innocent and harmless, Disney’s stuff not only render social and political and historical commentary often skewed toward bias, but at times aim for that exact edge.

When, in 1992, Disney unfurled Aladdin, and blurred the line between ignorance and xenophobia, with the main theme, “Arabian Nights,” confessing,

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don’t like your face
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

The Gulf War had just ended. And, here, Arabs were distorted as grotesque-faced barbarians waiting/needing to be civilized. Walt Disney would have been much pleased. After all his vision, as World War II raged, was to employ film in “molding opinion.” Thus all coincidences were off when in freezing point of the Cold War, twelve years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned to clouds, Disney released Our Friend the Atom, a 53 minute film extolling the virtues of atomic power.

Yet, Disney affects kids and adults with equal authority — with a strident, mythical representation of Innocence that concerns childhood just as much as it does nationhood: kids revel exhilaratingly in the spectacle of fairy tales and everlasting happiness (which only lasts the longer they can buy the hundreds of merchandise lined up to relive various epic moments in various pictures), and adults are steered to examine their country as pure and faultless, and a righteous crusader against evil in this world.

Disney, here, blurs the line between childhood and adulthood, catering to both children and adults’ sense of perfection, and purging the imaginary world it creates of “evil” — one historical record at a time. At Disneyland, “There are no historical records of labor strikes … There is no history of labor unrest. No history of attacks on immigrants. No history of slavery or segregation. No Red Scare, no McCarthyism, no atom bomb.”

Disney so values Innocence and Perfection that employees must adhere to extremely conservative dress codes and conducts — no facial hair, limited hair-length, no earrings or bracelets on men, limited accessories on women; smiley-faces and cheerful dispositions always, complete obedience to script, etc. And when accidents occur, such as passengers being thrust off malfunctioning rides hundreds of feet in the air, employees must keep these “incidents” under wrap. Should ambulances be necessary, hurt passengers would be hurtled into “low-profile vehicles” to keep the thousands of oblivious, potentially soon-to-be-victims everlastingly happy in the “happiest place on earth.”

Disney’s deal with parents is terribly complex. Parents must be willing to submit their kids up for inspection, upon which Disney decides which roles they fit, and which identity-narrative they adopt. But parents must also realize the prize of the birthright: admission of inherent deficiency, both in themselves and in their kids. After all, successful parents don’t need imaginary characters raising their kids: and smart kids don’t need imaginary characters for stimulation: and, more pernicious, a manageable society does not need moral lessons from the world’s largest media and entertainment empire. But such is the deal brokered, which explains why Disney has raked in millions of dollars from the absurd Baby Einstein products which swear to enable toddlers whose parents “want their kids to keep up in a highly competitive world”—a Darwinian society. It also explains why DisneyFamily.com was launched to, amongst other excuses, provide “resources on parenting and raising healthy children.”

For this reason, in Disney’s film history adults have always represented quirky, uncouth, uncool, burdensome characters. Kids are central target — adults: merely proxy. But once the heart of the child has been claimed, the adult is of no use anymore, and kids must come to understand that. Ironically many adults were raised by/on Disney, and stand forever armed to bring down the hammer on anyone who claims Disney does more than entertain —that it educates (explicitly or otherwise). And it’s not so hard to understand why: for who, in right mind and sense, can accuse a bunny-eared, glove-wrapped, oval-eyed mouse of orchestrating an insidious plan to indoctrinate children worldwide?

This has made Disney Teflon for years — even as it carries out some of the most retrograde work practices in the modern world, and bombards children with consumerism, and attempts to subvert parental authority, individual agency, social community, public spaces, and private lives. Disney also wins in a world where the worth of children factor less each day, where hundreds of billions of dollars are cashed in annually from direct marketing to kids of any age, with horrendously minimal concern from legislators and elected officials who with a conscientious vote can end the abuse immediately.

Giroux and Pollock make mention of an addiction more injurious to kids than all the street paraphernalia laws have been installed to haul them off to jail for buying or selling — a zombie-like addiction to various electronic media forms, documented January this year by a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation study suggesting typical American tweens and teens actively engage electronic media for up to 8 hours daily — up 1 hour, 17 minutes in just 5 years. With a 2000 Nielsen Media Research study able to account for only 38.5 minutes spent weekly by most parents and kids in meaningful conversation, it’s clear who the real Daddy and Mommy are —Mickey and his emissaries.

“Too many parents have become mere shadows in the lives of their children, who spend endless hours absorbed by the visual imagery on a screen,” write Giroux and Pollock in The Mouse that Roared. “By exposing them to a marketing pedagogical machinery eager and ready to transform them into full-fledged members of consumer society, the commercial world defined by Disney and a few other corporations conscripts children’s time.” And in an age where kids register over 40,000 TV ads annually, where by 4th grade most have memorized 300-400 brands, the identity of the American child can only fall somewhere between consumer and commodity.

For Disney, Identity reigns supreme. The White female raised on Disney mostly learns that her lot in life is to seek endlessly until finding that knight-in-shining-armor — without whom her life would lack meaning. For the White male, over the White female has he been given dominion: for her existence is incomplete without him; and should he feel just in kidnapping and abusing and maltreating her, she can’t but settle patiently till the inner prince lurking is comfortable enough to set forth, as Belle in Beauty and the Beast recounted: “There’s something sweet/ And almost kind/ But he was mean/ And he was coarse/ And unrefined/ And now he’s dear/ And so unsure/ I wonder why/ I didn’t see it there before/.” For the Black or Brown male or female, if a chambermaid or villain or terrorist or thug or brute isn’t too full a pill to swallow, arrangements can be made for a future blockbuster motion picture that stresses to do better.

Other colored kids don’t belong on LCD screens but in toxic, run-down, roach-infested, union-busting, underpaying factories — to sew and stuff the clothes and dolls Disney sells to Western children at hundreds of times the hourly wages earned by kids slave-laboring in China or Haiti. (For more, see the candid 1996 documentary, Mickey Mouse goes to Haiti: Walt Disney and the Science of Exploitation.) As one child in Orange County, Florida, is swiping a junior debit card to pay for a $23 T-shirt, emblazoned with the face of her favorite Disney pop star, another in Sonapi Industrial Park, Port-au-Prince, is swatting the sweat off her brows and hurrying, before dusk falls, to line up the edges of the same shirt which in a few months would be hung on a rack in some Florida Disney store.

But Disney, the mammoth media conglomerate it is, can flaunt weight and worth around without any worries. It can invade classrooms — as happened with five hundred 3rd grade students from eight Maryland schools in 2006, which helped pilot a “Comics in the Classroom” program employing Disney characters as literacy resources (“kids end up learning without even thinking about it,” the Vice President of Disney World Publishing bragged) — and little pushback is felt. It can sell to kids disposable icons like Miley Cyrus, star of the popular sitcom Hannah Montana, thereby reducing self-expression “to what a young person can afford to buy,” and only faint, distant objections are raised. It can offer crypto-fascism a facelift, with pictures like The Incredibles and The Path to 911, knowing well whatever criticisms fall its way wouldn’t stain a spot on its financial reputation. It can champion conservative causes openly, and sleep tight knowing the cloak of Innocence still spreads unruffled.

“The issue here,” Giroux and Pollock argue, “is not whether people read Disney differently, or even enjoy the glut of entertainment and commodities that the company dumps into the culture, but whether a democratic society can allow an ever-expanding corporate culture to blur the distinction between public and private, entertainment and history, and critical citizenship and consumer identity.” And Disney is today more important than ever, as it encroaches international and indigenous communities where, given its unremarkable human rights record and neoliberal devotions, “everything potentially becomes a commodity, including, and perhaps most especially, identity.”

With the elegant, former CEO Michael Eisner booted out in 2005, and the mild-mannered Roger Iger assuming position shortly after, many saw a moral sea-change and better days for/from Disney hovering over. Close reading, however, suggests differently: for while Eisner governed through imposition (“It doesn’t matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computer, or satellite. Everyone’s going to have to deal with Disney.”), Iger’s lash is no less swift. He prefers the new-neoliberal doctrine of illusion-of-choice, of selling customers fictional identities, of “empowering” citizens to carry out their civic duty — consume.

In 2005, Iger insisted to the Associated Press, “Consumers have a lot more authority these days and they know that by using technology they can gain access to content and they want to use the power they have. … We can’t stand in the way and we can’t allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go or wants to go.”

What Disney has for nearly a century packaged as family, wholesome fun and entertainment—totally innocent and innocuous — has meant the imposition of narrow and often prejudicial values, ingrained by kids, adults, and the larger society—in the U.S. and beyond. And though Disney may be a global, corporate force wielding enormous resources, those who find fault with its principles have no other choice but to fight on its own turf and terms — with kids, with adults, with society.

“Central to such a challenge,” advise Giroux and Pollock, “is the necessity of addressing how neoliberalism as a pedagogical practice and a public pedagogy operating in diverse sites has succeeded in reproducing in the social order a kind of thoughtlessness—a social amnesia of sorts — that makes it possible for people to look away as an increasing number of people are made disposable.”

Fighting Disney on its own turf and terms also means critically engaging multiple media forms, creating progressive versions, and refusing to be swept up by animation (as though computer-generated characters couldn’t command harmful suggestions). “Film watching involves more than entertainment,” admonish the authors: “it is an experience that reproduces the basic conditions of learning.”

Only then, by avid learning, can this very real war be won.

And, sure enough, Pfizer ads on WLS-AM radio in Chicago exhort women to see their “nurse practitioner” for fibromyalgia because a visit “only takes five minutes.” As if time, not money or health, were the only issue.

Sure, private insurance and government entitlement programs may cover the $100-to-$200 a month cost for Cymbalta, Savella and Lyrica now that they are approved for fibromyalgia, raised insurance rates and squandered tax dollars notwithstanding.

But should doctors prescribe people with simple pain, seizure drugs like Lyrica and antidepressants like Cymbalta and Savella which are linked to life threatening side effects including the risk of suicide?

People taking Lyrica (pregabalin) have twice the amount of suicidal thinking of those not on the anticonvulsant says an FDA alert issued in January. And Lyrica’s parent molecule, Neurontin (gabapentin) is also linked to suicide in an article in the April 14 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA.)

Meanwhile Cymbalta — an SNRI (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant like Savella — has a long trail of inexplicable suicides like 19-year-old Traci Johnson, a healthy volunteer who participated in its initial trials. There was also Carol Anne Gotbaum, the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, who killed herself in police custody at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport in 2007 on the drug.

Families of two people taking Cymbalta who requested anonymity because of pending lawsuits told a reporter their loved ones were driving home for dinner and abruptly, for no apparent reason, killed themselves while taking the drug. Neither had any prior mental problems.

And Savella? Approved in the US in 2009 but rejected by European regulators for lack of effectiveness data and side effects?

Public Citizen asked the FDA to remove Savella from the market earlier this year because the FDA’s own statistical reviewer admitted there was “no evidence” it worked.

A 40-year-old user on askapatient.com writes that, “After three months of taking Savella, I started self-destructing and cutting myself,” and that, “I was not depressed and did not need a antidepressant, but Savella made me want to die.”

Of course fibromyalgia meds are not the only nostrum hawked to the general public. Ads for vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV) which causes cervical cancer are everywhere.

Just as GSK’s HPV “glamour” ad, which debuted at the Oscars, seems to sell perfume but actually sells cervical cancer, poster-sized ads on Chicago’s CTA Red Line seem to sell individual Chicago neighborhoods but actually “sell” the many women at risk for cervical cancer in those neighborhoods. Very different.

GSK’s Cervarix and Merck’s Gardasil vaccines for the HPV virus are so lucrative the pharma giants are trying to position cervical cancer as the next big risk here — and in poor countries. But cervical cancer actually killed 12 times fewer people in 2009 than hospital-acquired infections according to Dr. Joseph Mercola — and 49 unexplained, Gardasil-linked deaths have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention according to the Washington Examiner. Meanwhile, India has suspended trials with the vaccines after six suspicious deaths, says the Malaysian National News Agency this week.

Nor are the vaccines more effective than Pap smears or even cost effective, except to pharma. World health experts say the HPV vaccines never pay for themselves with boys — they are recommended for boys as young as nine — and don’t pay for themselves for women or girls if their effectiveness runs out and boosters are required which no one knows.

Some parents have objected to HPV vaccine advertising as child mongering.

“I was greatly offended that Merck suggest I vaccinate my nine-year-old daughter against an STD,” says Kelley Watson, a mother of two in Chicago’ Oak Park neighborhood. “Especially insulting was there was never any mention of HPV as an STD. It was presented as something women can contract through tampons or nylon stockings as if men played no part.”

It was only last year that Cymbalta maker Eli Lilly agreed to pay $1.42 billion for mismarketing its antipsychotic Zyprexa. Lyrica maker Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion for Bextra, Geodon, Lyrica and Zyvox fraud in 2009 and $430 for mismarketing Lyrica parent Neurotin in 2004.

Do the aggressive fibromyalgia and HPV campaigns imply forgiveness is cheaper than permission?

When products fail due to a systemic design, materials or manufacturing flaw, large and statistically significant levels of problems emerge fairly rapidly.  This is definitely not the case with the Toyota problem.  With many millions of Toyota models on which even more millions of miles have been driven, if there had been an inherent materials or manufacturing design defect, then we would have seen untold thousands of cases of sudden acceleration.  It literally would have been virtually a daily event happening all over the country in many Toyota models.  But, in fact, little more than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own.  This is a tiny, minuscule percentage of Toyotas.

This infrequent runaway car problem is not analogous to a serious case of bacterial contamination of a major food product causing many thousands of cases of food poisoning in a relatively short period.  It is even more difficult to find the cause of.

Understanding this nature of defects also means that the so-called solutions of replacing floor mats and gas pedals are sheer nonsense.  Indeed, it did not surprise me to read today that there have already been cases of sudden acceleration in cars that had received fixes by Toyota.  More than 60 Toyota owners have complained to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about cars already repaired under the two major Toyota recalls, saying they aren’t fixed and their throttles can still race out of control.

While recognizing the agony and suffering of sudden acceleration accidents and deaths it is also necessary to appreciate the statistically rare occurrences of this problem.  Only by doing so is it possible to understand that the ultimate explanation – and solution – to the sudden acceleration problem will be a non-systemic flaw or defect in a critical component.  In other words, either a random defect in a material or some unusual and infrequent deviation in a manufacturing process of some critical component.  Only such a situation can logically explain so few sudden acceleration problems in so many millions of cars being operated for many more millions of hours and miles.

In my professional opinion, the likely scenario is a defect in a semiconductor chip used in the electronic control system.  A defect that was caused by some infrequent flaw in a raw material or manufacturing process that would not show up in routine quality control testing of raw materials or components.  That so many different Toyota models over many years have been found defective signifies the likelihood of a particular problem component made in a specific factory that has been used for quite a while.  Moreover, the defect obviously does not ordinarily impair vehicle performance but only manifests itself under some infrequent conditions, as yet undetermined.

Rita Taylor of Fort Worth, Texas experienced runaway acceleration, took her car to a Toyota dealer, and had the floor mats removed.  A few months later she had another frightening runaway episode.  Ditto for Eric Weiss in California, who also had a second episode months after the first one and after removing the mats.  Others who have not died and kept using their Toyotas have also had repeat events.  Thus, perfectly normal vehicle performance is possible between runaway events.

Make no mistake, the precise cause of such a sporadic event is incredibly difficult to pin down and even more difficult to remedy.  An extremely intense and costly investigation is necessary.  It is the classic needle-in-the-haystack problem.

If my thinking is correct, then it is sheer folly to believe that replacing floor mats or gas pedals can solve the sudden acceleration problem.  However, there is one aspect to the sudden acceleration problem that also is crystal clear and, in some ways, even more aggravating than the acceleration problem.  This is the absence of an override system that absolutely prevents fuel being fed to the engine when brakes are employed while a car is accelerating.  It is gratifying that the federal government is seriously considering requiring such an override system in all vehicles.  An effective override system might, in the long run, be a faster and more cost-effective solution than chasing-the-defect strategy, especially for retrofitting many millions of vehicles.

Alternatively, finding the cause of the sudden acceleration problem requires a standard failure analysis methodology, namely to obtain absolutely every Toyota vehicle that has experienced sudden acceleration.  Then meticulously examine through microscopic and other types of analysis and testing all critical components of the electronic system (called by Toyota the Electronic Throttle Control System with intelligence).  Think of it like an autopsy.

This does not appear to have been done.  To the contrary, the firm hired by Toyota tested several ordinary vehicles and components.  One of the primary authors of the Exponent report said they did not examine any vehicles or components that had the unintended accelerations.  This makes no sense whatsoever if the defect is rare and, therefore, its finding that there was nothing wrong was meaningless.  Worse, it was a deception and distraction.

“Drug companies frequently hire outside firms to draft a manuscript touting a company’s drug, retain a physician to sign off as the author and then find a publisher to unwittingly publish the work,” the Associated Press said on August 19, 2009. “Drug company salespeople often present medical journal articles to physicians as independent proof that their drugs are safe and effective.”

Between 2000 and 2002, articles from the CASPPER program appeared in five medical journals. On August 21, 2009, Jim Edwards on BNET, described the CASSPER ghostwriting brochure. The document shows that the intent of CASSPER was to flood the market with ghostwritten information, he said. It stated: “Paxil Product Management has budgeted for 50 articles for 2000.”

The trial in Kilker v Glaxo ended on October 13, 2009, with a jury in Philadelphia finding that Glaxo “negligently failed to warn” the doctor treating Lyam Kilker’s mother about Paxil’s risks and the drug was a “factual cause” of Lyam’s heart defects. The family was award $2.5 million.

Ghostwriting 101

The world-renowned neuropsychopharmacologist from the UK, Dr David Healy, testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Kilker trial.

While testifying, Healy explained the process of ghostwriting to the jury. He said ghostwriting probably began seriously in the 1980s. “It’s where an article appears under the name of usually a fairly distinguished person in the field,” he testified.

But it involves more than just the true author being concealed, he told the jury. “It’s a process where the ghostwriters work for companies who are very good at getting articles into the best journals in the field, like the New England Journal of Medicine, and recruiting some of the best known names in the field to be the apparent authors of the articles.”

“They may come from one of the big named universities like Princeton or whoever, but the actual fact the person who appears to be the author isn’t the true author,” he said. “If you were to read the article, you often don’t get any hints of who the true author of the article actually was.”

Ghostwriting impacts doctors in the real world trying to make decisions on whether to prescribe a drug in several ways, Healy told the jury. For instance, he said, if he was doing his own writing, he “would write an article on the drug, warts and all.”

“But if the article has been written by a ghostwriter working for one of the pharmaceutical companies,” he said, “the chances are the warts are somehow going to vanish.”

“The article will talk about the good aspects of the drug and will leave out the risky issues which are probably the most important things for the practicing doctor to know,” he explained.

If the ghost author comes from an extremely distinguished university, doctors reading the article will think it has to be right, he said. “The simple fact that the article is going to be apparently written by this big named person and appears in an extremely good journal means that most average doctors will think this has to be true,” he told the jury.

It’s not just the case of the doctor who reads the article being deceived, he said. “It’s the fact that the credibility of the institution is and the name is being used to sell the drug, as well.”

Healy came face-to-face with ghostwriting when one of the drug companies offered to ghostwrite his articles, he said. Since then, he has researched the ghostwriting process to assess how common it is.

The assessment found that “at least half, maybe more, of the articles that appear in major journals under the names of the best known people in the field, are ghostwritten when they have to do with pharmaceutical drugs,” he told the jury.

“If they have to do with the drugs that are being sold at the moment, the ones that are fashionable at the moment, then these articles are highly likely to be ghostwritten even when they appear in the very best journals,” Healy said.

Ghostwriting Up Close

While testifying, Healy told the jury that he was familiar with companies that Glaxo hired to ghostwrite literature and put other doctors’ names on it. “I think the leading firm in the field was one called STI,” he said. “This stands for Scientific Therapeutics Information.”

The jury was shown a July 28, 2003, document sent to the Glaxo product manager for Paxil, by Sally Laden, working for STI, which stated: “Thank you for offering me the chance to work with you to write two review articles.”

“This letter summarizes my fees for this project,” Laden wrote. “The safety paper is priced higher because of a greater number of named authors and the anticipated additional work involved in assessing the CR data in progress.”

For the development of the manuscript, and up to five drafts, the price quoted was $12,000. One of the topics for a manuscript was on the safety of antidepressants in breast-feeding.

“The first draft will be the first run through the material,” Healy told the jury. “She will have put the article together laying out the issues, laying out the references, structuring the paper up in the way that the journal she actually expects that this paper is going to go to will want the article structured.”

Draft 2 goes back to Glaxo again and the author, whoever is actually going to put their name on the paper. Then draft 3 goes back to Glaxo and the author for sign-off, and then there will be a final version that goes to the journal, Healy explained. Then draft 5 is revisions from journal reviewers, he said.

He noted that Laden said the safety paper is more expensive because there was going to be more authors. “I should emphasize that more authors here does not mean more authors writing the paper,” Healy told the jury. “It means more names appearing on the authorship line.”

“She has to recruit people and the people whose names are on the authorship line get paid for being authors,” he explained.

Sally Laden’s “name has appeared on a range of different articles that have been produced for GlaxoSmithKline, not just on the issue of giving drugs to women of childbearing years but across the board,” Healy said.

During Healy’s testimony, the family’s lead attorney from Houston, Sean Tracey, introduced the actual manuscript by STI. “This is an article that is going to go to a journal,” Healy said. “It has been authored by Ms. Laden, contrary to what appears there.”

The names Zachary Stowe and Jeffrey Newport appeared on the authorship line. Healy noted that Draft 4 stated: “Final article cover page to be removed.”

“The cover page will be removed,” he explained, “because the journal will treat the article quite differently if they think that the true author is not on the authorship line.”

Healy said the paper was an example of ghostwriting. “It is going to go to a journal called Psychopharmacology Bulletin,” he testified. “And in this particular issue of the journal where this paper later comes out, every paper in that issue of the journal has to do with Paxil.”

The jury was then shown the actual article that was published and it was the exact same article but without Laden’s name on it.

Healy testified that Stowe runs the women’s mental health program at Emory University and publishes on SSRIs and women’s health issues, with publications favorable to Paxil, and also gives seminars and talks for other doctors which outline “how it can be a good thing to treat women of childbearing years with Paxil.”

He was not allowed to tell the jury how much Glaxo had paid Stowe over the last year or two, which was revealed by an investigation led by Iowa Senator, Charles Grassley, as the ranking Republican on the US Senate Finance Committee. The amount Stowe got paid “is not public knowledge where you can show me a document that says it,” the judge said.

However, Stowe’s Glaxo earnings are most certainly public knowledge. A google search in December 2009, with the following three key words in quotes, “Stowe” “GSK” “paid,” brought up 15,800 hits.

On June 10, 2009, in reference to Stowe, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Emory University has disciplined a prominent psychiatrist who was being paid by an antidepressant maker at the same time he was conducting federal research about the use of such drugs in pregnant women.”

The National Institute of Mental Health said “it is reviewing Stowe’s activities, prompted by a letter from a U.S. Senate committee that said Stowe received $253,700 in 2007 and 2008 for “essentially promotional talks” for the drug maker GlaxoSmithKline,” the June 11, 2009 Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The charts with dates for Stowe’s promotional talks reveal that many times he gave two talks for Glaxo on the same date and made five grand per day, in addition to payment for all traveling expenses. On one date, he billed $96 for meals alone.

For ready reference, the list of academics in the field of psychiatry identified by Grassley’s investigation thus far, as not fully disclosing money from drug companies, includes Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens at Harvard; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association, from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and A John Rush from the University of Texas; and Fred Goodwin, the former host of the radio show, “Infinite Minds,” broadcast for years by National Pubic Radio, before it was thrown off the air.

The supplement to the Spring 2003, Psychopharmacology Bulletin, found online, sure enough shows the ghostwritten paper, “Clinical Management of Perinatal Depression: Focus on Paroxetine,” with the names Stowe and Newport, along with papers by Martin Kelly, Charles Nemeroff, Alan Schatzberg, Karen Wagner, and Kim Yonkers, for a total of fourteen Paxil papers altogether.

Under “Disclosure,” the article ghostwritten by Laden stated: “This work was supported by an unrestricted educational grant from GlaxoSmithKline. Doctor Stowe serves as scientific advisor for and receives research grants from Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. He also receives grant support from Wyeth.”

The disclosure that the work was supported with a grant from Glaxo would not tell a doctor reading the paper that it was actually written by somebody else, Healy said.

While testifying, Healy explained that an “unrestricted educational grant, if I were to receive one, it would assume that I am saying things that are relatively favorable to the pharmaceutical company who has given me the educational grant.”

“If I am saying things hostile to the drug,” he said, “I will not get an unrestricted educational grant, although the word “unrestricted” suggests that I should.”

Stowe’s undisclosed income above was from Glaxo alone. In August 2007, he was listed as an author on a study titled, “Atypical Antipsychotic Administration During Late Pregnancy,” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

According to the disclosure section, Stowe has received research support from Glaxo, Pfizer, and Wyeth, has served on advisory boards for Glaxo, Wyeth, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and has served on speaker’s bureaus and/or received honoraria from Glaxo, Lilly, Pfizer, and Wyeth.

The second author on the ghostwritten paper, Jeffrey Newport, is the associate director of Emory’s Women’s Program. Newport was also an author on the “Atypical Antipsychotic” study. He has received research support from Glaxo, Lilly, Janssen, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, NIH, and Wyeth, and he has served on speaker’s bureaus for Glaxo, AstraZeneca, Lilly, Pfizer, and Wyeth, according to the disclosures.

The next person the jury heard about was Charles Nemeroff. He was also an author on the atypical study. Nemeroff was the Chief of Psychiatry at Emory, until he lost the position last year, Healy told the jury. “He’s possibly best known or was the best known psychiatrist in the United States.”

“He influenced an awful lot of heads of departments, professors of psychiatry, general people within the field of academic mental health, and through them and an awful lot of prescribing doctors here in the U.S. And, indeed, perhaps worldwide,” Healy testified.

A link to “Articles” on the Emory website in mid-2009, brought up roughly 90 studies and papers that include the co-author Nemeroff.

Healy said he believed Nemeroff was one of the founding members of the Paxil advisory board and he participated in continuing medical education seminars with talks on Paxil.

Nemeroff would have been “the key person in producing the kinds of talks with slides that would have been held for large audiences of doctors, and then those slides and talks would have been distributed out to different doctors in the field who hadn’t been at the major meetings as he gave his talk,” Healy told the jury.

During his testimony, Tracey showed Healy a document from a continuing medical education seminar titled, “Fertility, Mood and Motherhood,” and Healy said the material for the seminar was prepared by Glaxo for Nemeroff. It was again supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Glaxo and Nemeroff “was reimbursed for his role in this,” Healy pointed out.

Healy was also not allowed to testify about Nemeroff’s fall from grace at Emory, how much he was paid by Glaxo, or his failure to disclose over a million dollars from drug companies.

Dr Bernard Carroll, a past chairman of the department of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, summarized the Nemeroff saga well on the Healthcare Renewal website on November 3, 2008, in writing: “The fallout to date includes his severance from several NIH-funded projects at Emory University School of Medicine, a freeze of NIH funding for a major center grant, and his stepping down from Emory’s chair of psychiatry while an internal investigation proceeds.”

During her cross examination of Healy, Glaxo’s lead attorney, Chilton Varner, presented an exhibit showing a continuing medical education presentation given by Nemeroff.

“Can you see that in this continuing medical education program Doctor Nemeroff says that paroxetine, sertraline, fluvoxamine, (are) not associated with increased risk of teratogenicity or other complications?” she asked Healy.

“Yes, I do,” he replied.

In small print, the disclosure for the presentation showed Nemeroff had received research grants and participated in the speakers bureau and consulted for Glaxo, Eli Lilly, Solvay and Pfizer.

During re-direct, Tracey asked Healy to tell the jury what the actual results of the study that Nemeroff was discussing in the presentation showed, and specifically when Paxil was looked at alone. The results “showed that there was a 1.8-fold increase in the odds ratio of a birth defects to the women who have been taking Paxil during pregnancy,” Healy testified.

“Overall, for this group of drugs there was an increase in risk,” he said, “but specifically for Paxil the risk was greatly increased.”

“And beyond that,” Healy stated, “what isn’t included here in the conclusions, overall there was a — on this group of drugs, there was a doubling of the rate of miscarriages on the drug compared with the rate of miscarriage for the women who are being compared who weren’t on the drug.”

“There was also an increased rate of women going on to voluntarily abortions on the drug,” he added.

One of the lead authors on the study was Gideon Koren. “Doctor, without giving any details,” Tracey asked Healy, “do you know whether Doctor Koren has ties to the pharmaceutical industry?”

“I know he has,” Healy said.

During his opening statement, Tracey told the jury that 1998 was a big year for Paxil because a study came out by a doctor named Gideon Koren, and a researcher named Kulin, that looked at Paxil and two other SSRIs.

The study compared women who took SSRIs, to women who didn’t take any SSRIs, and the number of birth defects in the two groups was the same. “So Doctor Koren concluded that SSRIs appear to be safe,” Tracey said.

“Within, literally within 24 hours,” he told the jury, “GSK’s marketing machine cranked up and they faxed this information to their entire sales force.”

And the sales force took this information and began to use it to sell to women, he noted. “What they didn’t tell anybody was this,” Tracey said. “That when you separated Paxil out from the other SSRIs, you saw that Paxil was causing birth defects, that there was an increased risk of birth defects in this study in these women when you looked at Paxil by itself.”

“That was not in the paper,” he said. “That information was not found out until two years ago.”

While testifying, Healy was barred from telling the jury about Koren’s involvement in one the biggest academic research scandals in history a few years back when he sent vicious anonymous letters to discredit fellow researchers and denied doing so until DNA evidence from postage stamps proved he was lying years later. In September 2003, the Canadian Association of University Teachers reported on the disciplining of Koren in the CAUT Bulletin as follows:

“The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons has formally reprimanded University of Toronto professor of medicine Dr. Gideon Koren. He had written anonymous harassing letters about Dr. Nancy Olivieri and three colleagues during Olivieri’s dispute with the Hospital for Sick Children, the University of Toronto and Apotex Inc. He then had lied repeatedly to conceal his responsibility. The college also cited him for additional misconduct, in research.”

The Teachers Association further explained in the Bulletin: “The college’s finding of research misconduct was in relation to a study on a drug to treat a blood disorder in children that Koren and Olivieri had once collaborated on. Olivieri identified risks that the drug was ineffective and caused liver damage, and voiced her concerns despite legal warnings from its maker, Apotex. Koren differed and, contrary to accepted norms, published an article on the drug using data from other researchers, including Olivieri, without their knowledge or consent.”

“Koren had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from Apotex after the company had terminated the drug trials in its efforts to prevent Olivieri from disclosing risks to patients, as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding he had received during the trials,” the newsletter reported, citing an journal article by the authors of “The Olivieri Report.”

Apotex marketed a generic version of Paxil, or paroxetine.

The penalty had been jointly proposed to the discipline committee through prior agreement between Koren’s attorney and counsel for the college, the Bulletin noted. In its decision, the committee said it was “deeply troubled by this case” and “seriously considered administering a more severe penalty” than that proposed, as it wished “to express unequivocally its condemnation of Dr. Koren’s misconduct.”

Glaxo Money Still Flowing

In a December 14, 2009 report on Pharmalot, Ed Silverman noted that Glaxo had published a list of fees paid out to US healthcare professionals for speaking and consulting services for the three month period of April 1, 2009 to June 30, 2009. “By its own tally, Glaxo paid $14.6 million to approximately 3,700 US docs and other healthcare professionals,” he reported.

Although Glaxo paid out millions of dollars over the years to the doctors discussed in this article, not one of them was called to testify as an expert in the first birth defect trial.

Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

The demand for oil is categorized as “demand inelastic,” considering there are no ready substitutes available for oil, the implications being consumers have few opportunities to switch to other fuels for the myriad activities which oil enables. Strict supply conditions and a growing demand for oil give rise to an economic environment in which, as a rule of thumb, each 10% increase in the price of oil restricts U.S. GDP growth by up to 0.1 percentage points. Proceeding the Joint Economic Committee in April 2002, Alan Greenspan observed, “all economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

U.S. oil consumption habits are quite extraordinary: for, due to a monumental privilege made possible by the U.S. dollars current status as reserve currency, the U.S. accounts for more than 25% of global daily demand, despite composing only 4% of the human population. Transportation accounts for 67% of U.S. oil consumption, and 97% of transportation in the U.S. is fueled by oil, with virtually no substitutes. An overwhelming amount of this movement of goods and services is on behalf of the major industries, featuring at center the military-industrial complex.

Over the past three years, gasoline prices in the U.S. and western world have fluctuated dramatically. In the summer of 2008, for instance, they rose to over $4/gallon but subsequently settled; decades of price inflation aside. Many analysts cite the reality of Peak Oil as the main reason for the inflationary and wild oil prices, however others argue that the price of crude oil today is not determined by the relation of supply to demand, but, rather, the control of oil through speculation by four major Anglo-American companies and their associates. This highly deferential pyramid in regards to the number of sellers in the oil market, in and of itself, results in higher prices. More sellers, on the other hand, would lead to more supply, leading to a more competitive environment with lower prices and higher quantity. Many maintain that Peak Oil not an ecological phenomenom, but, rather a political one, such as the prolific researcher and author William Engdahl.

At least 60% of the $128 per barrel price of crude oil in the summer of 2008 was, indeed, the outcome of unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. While some of the spike has to do with summer’s status as driving season, other factors, such as the paper markets, play a significant role. U.S. rules as stated in Commodity Futures Trading Commission enable speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the NyMex, having only to pay 6% of the value of the contract. So, a futures trader in the Summer 2008 was required to pay approximately 8$ for every barrel, borrowing the other $120. This 16 to 1 hyper-leveraging of oil futures abated the high prices and ameliorated bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters by expenses suffered by the population.²

The selling of oil futures and derivatives contracts have major implications for where oil prices sit at any given time, for the number of buyers and expected prices shifts demand. Further, the process of fixing these prices is so open-ended, only few insiders, such as major oil trading banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, know who is buying the oil futures and derivatives contracts; that is, “paper oil.”

This perceived anticipation for the future affects our present demand, and when a multitude of investors bet on a bullish oil market, the price will increase. Similarly, cash for clunkers, for instance, increased consumer demand due to the tax write-off and deflated price of the cars featured in the program, shifting demand from the future to the present. In the future, profits of the auto industry and price of automobiles should fall due to depressed demand exacerbated, in part, by this program.

The appearance of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures over the past 15-20 years has made possible the present speculative bubble in oil prices. The advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts has landed control of oil prices not with OPEC, but with Wall Street.

In June of 2006. a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report entitled “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices,” observed “…substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices.” The ability for certain firms to influence prices by way of speculation is one symptom of a decades long process of deregulation in the marketplace and the following explosion in derivatives trading.

The report noted, also, that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulation of financial futures, had been mandated by Congress to ensure the laws of supply and demand were reflected in the prices on the futures market. The U.S. Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future deliver… causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue an unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA, moreover, instructs the CFTC to implement trading limits, “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.”

The Commodity Futures Trading Trading Commission, a financial futures regulator, had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states, “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery … causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.”

Therefore, the world’s keystone commodity market, oil, is unregulated and highly manipulated. The global economy runs, so to speak, on oil. The U.S. dollar, since 1971 under Nixon, has been a purely fiat currency, as are the majority of global currencies and all speculative instruments; in other words, it’s intrinsic value has been, since 1971, based solely on arbitrary pronouncement and maintained through responsible fiscal policies and management. No longer backed by gold or silver, paper and digital dollars were effectively backed by the world’s oil, especially when one considers that, in order to buy crude oil, virtually each nation had to first purchase US dollars. This dynamic is what Valery Giscard d’Estaing termed an “exorbitant privilege,” in reference to the benefit the U.S. enjoyed in the U.S. dollar being the international reserve currency: one outcome being, that the U.S. would not face a balance of payments crisis, because it purchased imports in its own currency.

The aforementioned US Senate Report further acknowledged:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called “futures look-alikes.”

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

The impact on market oversight has been substantial. NYMEX traders, for example, are required to keep records of all trades and report large trades to the CFTC. These Large Trader Reports, together with daily trading data providing price and volume information, are the CFTC’s primary tools to gauge the extent of speculation in the markets and to detect, prevent, and prosecute price manipulation. CFTC Chairman Reuben Jeffrey recently stated: “The Commission’s Large Trader information system is one of the cornerstones of our surveillance program and enables detection of concentrated and coordinated positions that might be used by one or more traders to attempt manipulation.”

In contrast to trades conducted on the NYMEX, traders on unregulated OTC electronic exchanges are not required to keep records or file Large Trader Reports with the CFTC, and these trades are exempt from routine CFTC oversight. In contrast to trades conducted on regulated futures exchanges, there is no limit on the number of contracts a speculator may hold on an unregulated OTC electronic exchange, no monitoring of trading by the exchange itself, and no reporting of the amount of outstanding contracts (“open interest”) at the end of each day.

David Kelly of J.P Morgan Funds, the Chief market strategist for one of the world´s leading oil industry banks, recently told the Washington Post: “One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong.” The story is floated around, and generally accepted for that matter, that China´s oil imports are exploding, meaning grave implications for the supply-demand equilibrium, and subsequently reason for the spike in prices. David Kelly´s enunciation, in contraposition, negates that hypothesis.³

OPEC, furthermore, left its 2008 global oil demand forecast unchanged, citing slowing economic growth in the industrialized world and slight growth in the emerging markets. OPEC predicted oil demand in 2008 to be, for the most part, unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India, and Latin America will rise, offset by lower demand in the EU and North America.

Big oil conglomerations profit enormously from high oil prices. Advocates of Peak Oil argue that, in the near future, Absolute Peak Oil was the coming end to cheap oil. One premise of Peak Oil holds fossil fuel to be the leftovers of fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, and so therefore characterized by finite supply. Alternatively, a theory of oil formation, arrived at in the Soviet Union of the 1950′s, criticizes the assumptions of western biologists to be unproveable, citing the fact that western geologists have warned an end to oil for more than century, thereafter discovering more supplies.

For the USSR, in the Cold War of the 1950′s, a domestic supply of oil was a geopolitical necessity, and a considerable boost to security. In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev and a team of other scientists concluded: “Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.” They termed this new theory “a-biotic,” or, in other words, non-biological.⁴

Implications of such a theory being that earth’s oil supply is limited only by the amount of organic hydrocarbon materials present deep in the earth at the time of earth’s formation, as well as the technology available to drill uber-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. The scientists argued that oil comes from deep in the earth, and from conditions of high temperatures and very high pressure. Porfir’yev: “Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth.”

The theory of Peak Oil originated in a 1956 paper by Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist employed by Shell Oil. Oil from wells is extracted, he argued, in a bell curve nature, and once a “peak” was reached, what he termed “Hubbert’s Curve,” decline ensued. By 1970, he argued, oil production in the United States would peak and the oil crises of the seventies are oft cited as evidence of the legitimacy of his theory. Free trade agreements world wide have taught us, on the other hand, that it is more likely the flooding of the US market with tariff free and dirt cheap Middle East imports by Shell, Mobil, Texaco, and the other Saudi Aramco made it impossible for California and many Texas producers to compete.

Exacerbating theories that political posturing promotes the illusion of limited oil supplies, the suppression of alternative modes of transportation is well-documented; from electro-magnetism to water powered cars. Why does the combustible engine reign supreme in an age of moon exploration, globalization and other seemingly sky-high technologies?

How do few companies get to the point of wielding so much influence?

By the 1870′s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the United States, as well as various foreign countries. The King of Holland, in 1890, supported the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company for the purpose of refining and selling kerosene from Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. In the same year, a British company founded to ship oil, the Shell Transport Trading Company, “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”⁵

In 2008, it was widely reported that the U.S. government secretly led dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts. Andrew Kramer, for the New York Times, uncovered the story that the world’s oil giants, “Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller companies” were present at “talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.”

According to the Times, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…”

There is much evidence that the Bush administration, foreign firms and Iraq’s Oil Ministry had conspired during the most important periods of the Iraq War. There are deep financial ties between the military occupation in Iraq and the aforementioned oil giants; for instance, the oil giants Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron often make appearances on the Pentagon’s payroll. In 2007, these five firms earned more than $4.1 billion from the Pentagon, with Royal Dutch Shell at the forefront with $2.1 billion.

The government of Iraq and Royal Dutch Shell eventually signed a $4 billion deal to “to establish a joint venture with [Iraq's] South Gas Company in the Basra district of of southern Iraq to process and market natural gas.” The Times reported that Shell “established an office in Baghdad.” A “Green Zone” was guaranteed, and Shell was handed a $338 million contract for aviation fuel by the Pentagon. Therefore, the U.S. government was heavily involved in dealings between Shell and the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and the U.S. military regularly pays Shell billions of dollars each year.⁶

These subsidies should drive the price of oil down, as, from the businesses´ perspective, subsidies lower costs and make firms willing to offer more at a given price.

In an October 6 Business Week article, Robert Fisk elaborates upon the coming demise of the dollar. The phenomenon will see Gulf Arabs, along with China, Russia, Japan and France end dollar dealings for oil. The break from the post World War II Bretton Woods world order will be an in-between period as the aforementioned nations shift to a bread basket of currencies; among which will be the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a fledgling, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.⁷

It is possible that such plans partially explain the dramatic rise in the price of gold over the last few weeks. Certainly, they portend the end of the Dollar System as we have known it since the end of the Second World War. Further, these questions center on the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil to both the rising giant of China and the waning United States. The deadline for the currency transition is 2018. Adding to the drama, Iran recently announced that its foreign currency reserves would from now on be held in euros as opposed to dollars. Many analysts recall what transpired after the last Middle East oil producer decided to sell its oil in euros than dollars. After the decision by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq.

Others hold that the timeline for revaluation is much shorter. The decline in consumer spending, which makes up 70% of the U.S. economy, and unemployment rates, which, though their rise has slowed continue on an upward trajectory, are indicators of this. A revaluation of the US dollar, if even only by one-third, would seriously compromise the U.S.’s ability to import commodities, such as oil.

In September, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs stated that oil price could potentially peak at $85 a barrel by the end of 2009, and average approximately $90 in 2010. Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, recently raised their prediction $10, but it still lands at $65 a barrel. This is after they predicted in 2008 $150 oil by 2010.⁸

1. Securing America’s Future Energy. Fundamentals of the Global Oil Market.
2. F W Engdahl. ‘Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation‘. Global Research, 2 May 2008.
3. F W Engdahl. More On the Real Reason Behind High Oil Prices, Global Research, 21 May 2008.
4. F W Engdahl. War and Peak Oil. Global Research, 26 September 2007.
5. Andrew Gavin Marshall. Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order. Global Research, 28 July 2009.
6. Nick Turse. Pentagon Hands Iraq Oil Deal to Shell. Global Research, 4 October 2008.
7. Robert Fisk. Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018? The Independent, 6 October, 2009.
8. Deutsche Bank raises 2010 oil price forecast. Boiler Juice, 6 October 2009.

That’s the startling finding of a new study — Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults –- that appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The 44,000 dead a year estimate is about two-and-a-half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine in 2002.

The Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health,” said lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

“Historically, every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of nonprofit national health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs, and 45,000 pay with their lives.”

“Even the most liberal version of the House bill would leave 17 million people uninsured,” Woolhandler said. “The whittled down version that Senator Max Baucus is proposing would leave 25 million uninsured. That translates into about 25,000 deaths annually from lack of health insurance. Absent the $400 billion in savings you could get from a single payer system, universal coverage is unaffordable. Politicians in Washington are protecting insurance industry profits while sacrificing American lives.”

The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking education, income and many other factors including smoking, drinking and obesity into account.

It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.

Previous estimates from the Institute of Medicine and others had put that figure near 18,000.

The methods used in the Harvard were similar to those employed by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, which in turn were based on a pioneering 1993 study of health insurance and mortality.

Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease.

An increase in the number of uninsured and an eroding medical safety net for the disadvantaged likely explain the substantial increase in the number of deaths associated with lack of insurance.

The uninsured are more likely to go without needed care.

Another factor contributing to the widening gap in the risk of death between those who have insurance and those who don’t is the improved quality of care for those who can get it.

The research, carried out at the Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School, analyzed U.S. adults under age 65 who participated in the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) between 1986 and 1994.

Respondents first answered detailed questions about their socioeconomic status and health and were then examined by physicians.

The CDC tracked study participants to see who died by 2000.

The study found a 40 percent increased risk of death among the uninsured. As expected, death rates were also higher for males (37 percent increase), current or former smokers (102 percent and 42 percent increases), people who said that their health was fair or poor (126 percent increase), and those that examining physicians said were in fair or poor health (222 percent increase).

“The Institute of Medicine, using older studies, estimated that one American dies every 30 minutes from lack of health insurance,” said study co-author Dr. David Himmelstein. “Even this grim figure is an underestimate – now one dies every 12 minutes.”

The authors broke down the 44,840 deaths by state.

California leads the nation with 5,302 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas follows closely behind with 4,675 deaths due to lack of health insurance per year.

Texas also had the highest rate (in 2005) of uninsured citizens — 29.7 percent.