it seems to me that the people have gotten better, but the world has gotten worse.
social movements have helped to enlighten wide sectors of the public, but the powerful have continued to consolidate their control. the war on the environment continues, as we recycle. the jails fill up with black youth, as we refuse to say the n word. we celebrate hispanic heritage month, as our government attempts to overthrow the bolivian government. we listen to afro-cuban music, as our government maintains the cuban embargo. of course, there are millions of us that are still extremely regressive. i understand that. but the point stands that while the masses have improved to an extent, the world has not. this is due to the fact that power lies elsewhere. it is also due to the fact that people are hung up on the wrong things. imagine if all the men who purchased viagra instead used that money to cure malaria. one million africans (900,000 of whom are under the age of five) die each year from the disease. imagine if all the money and time that was spent advertising this product, and all the money and time that was spent on research for this product, was instead used to combat serious diseases. such an example encompasses both factors. for one, our system is driven by the profit motive. hence, those in power are in the business of producing products that will both make them a profit, and that will cater to the needs of those with money. the availability of such products will then create false needs amongst the population. these false needs will then be felt by the people to be wants, or as parenti says it, supply will actually create demand. if hair transplants did not exist, there would be bald men who would be bummed that they had lost their hair, but they wouldn't be marching by the thousands down the street in protest to demand the creation of hair replacement products. however, once the product was created, millions of men who wanted their hair back, now felt the "need" to purchase these products. the system felt the need to produce this product, because they knew there was a market of men with money who would pay for such a thing. so, the fault lies on both ends. the system should have first marshalled all of its resources to cure diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and water borne diseases that kill millions each year. then, years from now, after these diseases had been wiped out, and after our food and water had been made cleaner and healthier, and after "first world" diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes had been fought and greatly reduced, then maybe there could be some research into things like viagra and hair restoration.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Weekend Edition
November 21 / 23, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
Sic Transit: The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.
Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.
I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send. her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.
It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. the She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?
The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry he new White House counsel will be Gordon Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.
The young people who worked for Obama and who voted for him have been feeling wan this week, amid all the retro talk about the Clintons. And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who hd hands-on time grappling with health insirance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair's account of the pardons for Holder's central role in the affair.)
Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere don the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.
The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective. He’d better get this one right. A conventional appointee could doom his administration right from the start.
In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?
The Golden Age of Eating was….
But first a quotation.
“The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.
“Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.
“A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.
“But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.
“It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.”
That’s Paul Craig Roberts, on this website Thursday. In the latest edition of our subscriber only newsletter Roberts lays out the big economic picture with bleak and compelling vigor. It’s must reading if you want to know the shape America is really in. Subscribe to read his powerful essay.
Subscribe too, and read Judy Gumbo Albert’s risposte to Sarah Palin. Judy writes a great memoir of the late Sixties, from the Yipster perspective of one who famously said, when the Weathmen blew up a lavatory in the Capitol, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”
Weekend Edition
November 21 / 23, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
Sic Transit: The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.
Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.
I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send. her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.
It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. the She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?
The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry he new White House counsel will be Gordon Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.
The young people who worked for Obama and who voted for him have been feeling wan this week, amid all the retro talk about the Clintons. And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who hd hands-on time grappling with health insirance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair's account of the pardons for Holder's central role in the affair.)
Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere don the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.
The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective. He’d better get this one right. A conventional appointee could doom his administration right from the start.
In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?
The Golden Age of Eating was….
But first a quotation.
“The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.
“Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.
“A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.
“But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.
“It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.”
That’s Paul Craig Roberts, on this website Thursday. In the latest edition of our subscriber only newsletter Roberts lays out the big economic picture with bleak and compelling vigor. It’s must reading if you want to know the shape America is really in. Subscribe to read his powerful essay.
Subscribe too, and read Judy Gumbo Albert’s risposte to Sarah Palin. Judy writes a great memoir of the late Sixties, from the Yipster perspective of one who famously said, when the Weathmen blew up a lavatory in the Capitol, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”
Post a Comment