Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/13512

Theoretical Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Loving, Thinking, and Queering Anarchism

2011-01-25

- By Deric Shannon and Abbey Volcano

This article argues that queering anarchism means complexifying it. Concretely, we propose that we can apply some of the ways that we (might) love to the ways that we think about political theory. Thus, we build the metaphor of ‘theoretical polyamory’ to suggest that having multiple partners (or political theories) is a way of constructing more holistic and nuanced movements than might be implied by solely relying on anarchism for the answers to the complex questions surrounding the political project of undoing all forms of structured and institutionalized domination, coercion, and control.


Shortly after joining a social anarchist group, the two of us were asked to weigh in on a statement of principles in which the section on ‘Gay Liberation’ was being changed to ‘Queer Liberation’. We were glad we were asked for our input and both put a lot of thought into our contributions to the discussion. We strategized, reflected, carefully crafted our responses and did everything in our power to make the suggestions palatable and understandable.


Queer theory, after all, has a lot to offer anarchism. It shows some of the ways that we become ‘constituted as socially viable beings’ (Butler, 2004: 2). It also addresses the many ways that we are denied that social viability through the discursive construction of identities that often function more as cages than descriptors. If anarchism is consistently to critique and dismantle all institutionalized hierarchies, then it must not only offer alternatives to capitalism and the state, it must also offer ‘a radical reorganization of sexuality’ – one that does not chain people down with supposedly stable identities as a result of their sexual and/or gender practices, then create hierarchies of value out of those identities (Heckert, 2004: 101). Further, we saw the opportunity as a way to expand our group’s understanding of heteronormativity, to problematize ideologies of normalcy more generally, and to allow for an analysis that encompassed more than that which would fall under an ‘LGBT’ identity model.

But something went wrong in the dialogue. Shortly after mentioning the ‘Fword’
(that is, Foucault), one particular member in the group shut down. He sent
out his objections to the email list complaining that postmodernism is so much
intellectual junk. He explained that since to postmodernists the theory of class
struggle is an oppressive grand narrative, then postmodernism is incompatible
with social anarchism.

This certainly wasn’t a new or unexpected reaction. Many folks from the libertarian
socialist/anarchist tradition have criticized the ‘posts’ variously as ‘tragedies’,
‘catastrophes’, and the like (for two good examples, see Albert n.d.; Zerzan,
1991). That ‘is at least part of the reason we spent so much time crafting our own
contributions to the subject – better not to alienate one’s audience from the outset!
Again, however, unfortunately we made the strategic mistake of mentioning the ‘Fword’
and the resulting discussion was less than constructive (at one point we were
accused of using the email list as a ‘debating society for grad students’ – effectively
delegitimizing things we have experienced quite materially within our own bodies).

More importantly, it brought to mind a number of questions for our own political
identifications. How do we simultaneously exist as anarchists and as people
who are influenced by post-structuralism – or, for that matter, feminism, critical
race theory, radical environmentalism, queer theory, various Marxisms, animal
liberation, and so on? Why do our social anarchist comrades feel the need to
police our political identity and which theoretical traditions we borrow from?
More importantly, why do so many of our comrades feel comfortable dismissing
entire theoretical perspectives, making sweeping denunciations and condemnations
of them, rather than taking what is valuable from a variety of systems of thought
and not limiting ourselves to one?

This essay attempts to respond to some of those que(e)ries. It is about creating
an open-ended revolutionary project without easy answers and with a willingness –
an eagerness – to ask uncomfortable questions. It is about having humility and
being more willing to engage than to denounce and about building a recognition
among us that we don’t have to be trapped in a political partnership that does not
suit us or confined by an identity that we did not choose. It is about anarchism,
sexuality, and finding value in relating the ways that we love to the ways that we
(might) think.

Queering anarchism

In queer theory, the very idea of the queer is a shifting terrain that cannot be pinned
down to some single definition. Rather, as Halperin (1995: 62) writes,
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.
There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity
without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a` -
vis the normative.

Thus, the theoretical space created by ‘queer’ allows us to go beyond LGBT identity
models to examine the ways that ‘(h)ierarchies exist within heterosexuality as
well’ (Heckert, 2004: 111).

This leaves queer theory (and identification) open to a range of sexual and/or
gender practices not covered under the LGBT umbrella. Further, it begs the question
why some practices have historically come to constitute an ‘identity’ while
others have not. As Sedgwick (1990: 8 ) writes:

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital
activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that
include preference for certain acts, certain zones of sensations, certain physical types,
a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a
certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender
of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the
dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of ‘sexual orientation’.

Thus, part of the project of queering anarchism is to widen anarchism’s analysis of
sexuality to include non-normative sexual practices that include, but are not limited
to, those implied by markers such as ‘LGBT’. After all, an analysis using an LGBT
identity model often encourages thinking about heterosexuality as ‘devoid of politics,
embroiled in no relations of dominance and subordination, and to affect no
form of coercion’ (Brickell, 2000: 171).

Marriage rights, a major goal of LGBT (or, perhaps more correctly, gay and
lesbian) identity-based groups, is an excellent starting point for showing the
strengths of queer political practice. As Warner (1999: passim) eloquently explains,
marriage is based on exclusion. Indeed, the legal benefits of state-based marriage
‘equality’ are refused to any grouping, regardless of the grouping’s sex and/or
gender configuration, if the relationship is not dyadic/monogamous. This effectively
creates an institutionalized hierarchy that could exist within heterosexuality
that is made invisible using identity models that are organized primarily around
gender. Queer politics, a politics based on difference, allows us space to analyze
differences that could exist within heterosexual practices and create a political
practice based on inclusion and critical of the state-enforced monogamy inherent
in marriage.

Thus, non-monogamy as a site for theoretical exploration of anarchism and
sexuality is a strategic choice for us. First, it is strategic because we want to participate
in this larger process of queering anarchism and believe that a good starting
point is including non-normative sexual practices that are not primarily organized
around gender in our explorations. Secondly, non-monogamy already has a long
history within anarchist theory and practice. Noted anarchists from Emma
Goldman to Alexander Berkman to Voltarine de Cleyre practiced non-monogamy
openly and many turn-of-the-century anarchist women ‘condemned the institution
of monogamy’ outright (Leeder, 1996: 144).

Finally, non-monogamy also serves as a strategic metaphor for some of
the conversations about politics and thinking that took place as a result of
the incident we opened this piece with (among others). Thinking about political
theory in terms of loving and romantic attachments is also nothing new to
anarchism (see, for example, Ehrlich, 1981). Some of the questions that plagued
our relationships with people (whether same-sex or not) began having increased
significance for the way we thought about political theory (i.e. How could I possibly
get everything I want from a single partner? Do I want a ‘primary’? and so
on). This particular formulation, then, is an attempt to apply some of those questions
to how we think about politics, as we agree that ‘(s)exuality is not separate
from these other issues which are more commonly considered political’ (Heckert,
2004: 101).

Unpacking the divide between loving and thinking

Another aspect of the larger project of queering anarchism would be applying some
of the insights of post-structuralist political theory to anarchism, as it undergirds
much of the queer political project.1 Again, this is nothing new for anarchism (see
e.g. Day, 2005; Kuhn, 2009; May, 1989, 1994, 2009; Newman, 2001, 2007).
However, this seems particularly salient for this theoretical project for a couple
of reasons.

First and foremost, anarchism and post-structuralist political thought share the
desire to break down borders (Heckert, 2010). While anarchism is typically seen to
be concerned with physical borders (i.e. smashing the state), increasingly, and
especially since the late 1960s and with the influence of the Situationists, many
anarchists have applied this analysis of the state-form to the ways that we create
and maintain borders within our heads (for some examples in queer anarchist
youth culture, see Ritchie, 2008). One of these borders that we wish to help
smash by playing with theory in this article is the border in place between the
way we love (or fuck, as it were) and the ways that we think about politics.
Indeed, the way that we love has had (and continues to have) implications for
how we think about politics, as should be clear by the end of this piece.

Secondly, post-structuralist political thought allows us to show how knowledge
and power function alongside one another. Queer theory has borrowed heavily
from Foucault in this endeavor, especially his work on sexuality, to show how
discourses of knowledge are created, produce identities and docile bodies and, in
some cases, reinscribe the very identities that oppress us. Further, post-structuralism
criticizes knowledge claims that suggest a reaching of ‘The Truth’. This has
manifested itself as criticisms of the grand narratives through which past theorists
have tried to explain an incredibly complex human history in some unified fashion
as well as criticisms of claims at having ‘The Solution’ to the complex relations of
ruling we have come to live in.

For us, this has meant that queering anarchism means complexifying it. Many of
the criticisms we have gotten from (a rather loud minority of) comrades regarding
queering our political project are focused around class struggle being THE instrument
to bring about radical social change. Under this economistic (and, in our
opinion, more Marxist than anarchist) view, the struggle between workers and
bosses and the replacement of capitalism with socialism will somehow magically
bring about an end to environmental destruction and patriarchy. It will likewise
end confining notions of gender or ‘sexual identity’ and hierarchies made out of
those notions. As well, libertarian socialism will somehow ensure that ‘disabled’
people will be treated as if they are every bit a worthwhile human being as the ‘ablebodied’
and it will end racism and white supremacy.

These criticisms of economic reductionism are not meant to suggest that
we see no need for class struggle (we do) or that we are not committed to socialism
(we are). Rather, we are opposed to the suggestion that there is a single answer
to a complex problem – that of institutionalized hierarchy and domination and
our struggle to dissolve those kinds of social relations. This also means that,
as anarchists committed to this struggle, our project requires a certain degree
of humility. That is, perhaps other perspectives answer some questions better
than anarchists can (or have). This has certainly been the case in our studies
of feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, radical environmentalism, animal liberationism,
queer theory, and so forth. This brings us, then, to theoretical polyamory
and applying the lessons we learn from how we love to how we think about
politics.

Theoretical polyamory: What it is and what are its benefits

Our intention here is to play with theory a bit through metaphor. We believe that
play can be deadly serious, fun, and help move us forward – particularly playing
with the ways that we think and feel. Nevertheless, we also want to add an initial
caveat before sketching out this theoretical space. One of the things we have
learned through reading queer theory (and living queer lives!) is to be suspicious
of labels. Still, we require a certain amount of signification in order to communicate
our ideas. Thus, any labeling that we do within this piece should be recognized as
fluid and not static. By the time the reader actually sits down to read this essay,
we may well have developed new interests and political commitments. Like
non-monogamous sexual practices, a non-monogamous theoretical outlook
should recognize that relationships do not always endure.

First and foremost, the question that might come to mind is this: Why ‘theoretical
polyamory’ and not ‘non-monogamy’? Part of this is because the usage of
‘polyamory’ has come to mean a greater emotional connection among multiple
partners. Taormino for example, defines ‘polyamory as the desire for or the practice
of maintaining multiple significant, intimate relationships simultaneously’
(2008: 71, emphasis ours) while she also warns, however, that ‘(s)etting up false
dichotomies such as sexual versus emotional, casual versus committed, or playful
versus serious just gets us into a whole heap of trouble’. That said, we are fiercely
committed to our politics and don’t see them as mere dalliances. We want our
political commitments to be significant and intimate.

Secondly, ‘non-monogamous’ practices have come to describe a range of sexual
practices that sometimes includes unprincipled behavior. For example, a cheating
partner in a relationship where there is prior agreement about not taking on lovers
outside of the partnership could be said to be non-monogamous. We want principled,
emotional, honest, and intense relationships with our political ideas. And we
want to include an honesty about the ideas that we develop relationships with,
never feeling like we have to hide that we might have political commitments and
influences not shared by our comrades.

Theoretical polyamory, then, is the belief that we can have multiple partners
when it comes to political theory.3 One theory could not possibly adequately
describe the complexity of our relations of ruling. One theory could never hope
to prescribe the ‘proper’ mode of resistance. Moreover, it is problematic to suggest
that such a ‘proper mode’ could even exist given the ways that hierarchies emerge
sometimes in very random ways. Those things said, there are benefits to having
polyamorous relationships that illustrate quite well what this might mean for
theory.

In polyamorous relationships, for example, one might choose to have a primary
partner. Perhaps someone wants to share greater intimacy with a particular person.
Some folks might feel more comfortable having relationships with others if they
have the safety of a primary. Likewise, sometimes our personal attachments to a
particular partner are so strong that it just makes sense to nestle in with that person
and make them the center of our romantic attachments.

Our experience has certainly been similar with theory and political commitments.
As we construct our own version of theoretical polyamory, we recognize
social anarchism as our primary partner. Anarchism is the political theory that
radicalized us and we have a special bond and attachment with it because of that.
Further, we believe in formal organizations, participation in mass movements, and
struggles to alter the structures of society (though we keep in mind Foucault’s
(1980: 60) admonition that ‘nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms
of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a
much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed’). All of these are
hallmarks of social anarchist approaches to politics.

However, one of the benefits of polyamorous arrangements is having multiple
partners to meet the needs that one’s primary may not meet. In relationships, this
has meant that we may value our time with a given partner because we are outrageously
sexually attracted to them. Perhaps yet another partner is willing to sit and
talk to us for hours about our favorite role-playing game or sport. Still
another might share our love of obscure analog free jazz recordings from the
1920s. And so on.

Again, one can see the immediate connections between the ways that this benefits
our relationships with how we think about politics. Perhaps it would not have
been such a shock for us to mention that we are influenced by Foucault to our
comrades if they were used to looking outside of a single theoretical perspective for
questions and answers to the problems, as anarchists – as people concerned with
social justice, that we all face. Further, as mentioned earlier, love affairs with other
perspectives have been common within anarchism. It’s time we start being more
open, principled, and honest about these outside relationships!

Finally, one of the benefits of having polyamorous relationships for us is the
chance to experiment in a variety of ways with desire. Perhaps one, for example,
has some level of opposite sex/same sex/gender/genderqueer attraction but not at
the level of complete sexual intimacy. Perhaps one is interested in making out with
someone of the opposite sex, but not necessarily having penetrative sex. As Kinsey
noted years ago, there is not some exact hetero/bi/homo categorical distinction.
Rather, there are a range of desires within our sexual practices. As well, as the trans
and intersex movements have shown and ‘pomosexuality’ (see especially, e.g.
Queen and Schimel, 1997) demonstrates, there are possibilities for experimenting
with these desires in nearly infinite ways.

Such is our attraction to Marxism, to name one example. For starters, Marx,
although often economistic and reductionist, outlined quite well the position we
have experienced for the vast majority of our adult lives as exploited laborers in a
capitalist economy and the need for a struggle between classes to resolve this.
Likewise, Marxists, especially neo-Marxists, have done some amazing work with
ideology and culture that anarchists (and queers!) could learn a lot from. From
Althusser’s (see e.g. 2001) conceptualization of state ideological apparatuses to
Gramsci’s (1971) articulation of cultural hegemony to Habermas’s (1987) idea of
the colonization of the life-world, Marxists have given us tools to analyze the ways
that assumptions about our social worlds become naturalized and a part of everyday
reality. Nevertheless, the fetishization and uncritical acceptance of the state
form as a guiding principle in social (re)organization within Marxism is certainly a
turn-off for us. Really, we can only see ourselves going so far with Marxism and
typically prefer the company of our primary partner.

Concluding thoughts

This piece is an argument against dogmatism using the metaphor of polyamorous
relationships to highlight how this might be applied to political thought. As anarchists,
it is part of our ongoing contribution to queering anarchism and widening the
field of struggle to give critical analysis to sexuality. It is also an argument for
drawing connections between the ways that we love and the ways that we think
and breaking down these divides between thought/action/loving, and so on
that we have come to accept in a world organized on the principles of hierarchy,
coercion, and control. Part of that control is made visible when we demonstrate how
these categorical distinctions come to be naturalized and begin questioning the
necessity of drawing distinctions between different methods of engagement with
life and ideas.

Further, we hope to raise some questions in the process about our goals. For
many of our social anarchist comrades ‘the’ goal is libertarian socialism to be
achieved through ‘the’ instrument called ‘class struggle’. But how will stateless
socialism alone bring about an end to hierarchical social forms that do not necessarily
emerge from structures such as the state and capitalism? How do we create a
political practice that also opposes domination as it is enacted through the construction
(and maintenance) of discourses, knowledges, and identities? How might
we live our lives in ways that create new cultural forms and subjectivities that we
build on our own terms (inasmuch as that is possible) rather than accepting the
identities, cultures, and subjectivities that we have inherited from a sick and hierarchical
world in which humanity is perpetually at war with itself, the environment,
and the entire non-human world?

To answer some of these questions, we suggest that we step outside of anarchism
and borrow liberally (radically?) from many perspectives. We suggest that we
develop multiple relationships with a variety of theories so we can act creatively
depending on the context of the struggle we are involved in. As feminists, antiracists,
radical environmentalists, libertarian socialists, and a host of other ‘political
identities’ we are well aware of how inadequate any one perspective is to
describe ourselves, our relationship with political ideas, and a complex and radical
political project that could not possibly be contained within a single theory or
identity. Perhaps in the end, this means a collapse of ‘anarchism’ itself and an
embrace of a political anti-identity in much the same way ‘queer’ was meant as
an answer (or, perhaps, a bigger question?) to questions about gender and sexual
identity. We cannot foretell our own futures, though we are open, as always, to
developing multiple relationships and recognize that they do not always endure.
Let’s just hope that our multiple partners can manage to get along!



Notes
1. Much has been made of whether it is correctly termed ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘postmodernist’
and in what contexts. We prefer to see postmodernity as a condition as outlined by
Lyotard (1979) and the concomitant and diverse theoretical insights with this condition
as ‘post-structuralist’ theory.

2. Lest we be accused of caricature, we want to mention that despite these experiences with
a minority of comrades, ‘social anarchism’ is certainly made up of many ideas itself. This
kind of reductionism is not inherent in social anarchist theory and politics, but does tend
to come out of its more sectarian elements. For a particularly good example of this
‘broad’ social anarchism, see Franks, 2006. For a good look at historical struggles against
reductionism within social anarchism, see Ackelsberg, 2005.

3. Because of both personal experiences and thinking, we want to make it clear that the
authors do NOT ascribe to the view that monogamous sexual relationships cannot be
queer, are bad, and so on. In fact, we think it necessary for anyone who identifies with
queer positionality to take steps to ensure that new categories and identities that we
develop in response to what currently exists do not become new normative standards
within our own communities. Thus, some of what we believe about theory and politics
does not necessarily comfortably sit within the metaphor that we have created about how
we do relationships.

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[American Dream]

MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS RAID MASSIVE RAVE PARTIES, CRACK DOWN ON RIVAL PUSHERS…

By Pancho Montana

“Raise your hand if you like weed,” the gang leader asked the raver crowd. But nobody raised a hand or so much as moved. They were too scared. So he repeated his question, this time while firing a quick burst from his R-15 into the air. ”I said who likes fucking weed?!!” Naturally, a lot of hands went up.


MONTERREY, MEXICO— La Letra (what we call the Zetas these days because we’re too terrified to call them by name) is at it again. It’s getting worse than ever, thanks the lower ranks of the cartel business–made up of young, impressionable school dropouts and assorted jobless little motherfuckers. Now, these scumbags are letting their presence be known like never before. In Monterrey, the Zetas have started using them to police the drug use of the general population to make sure that people are consuming the right drugs and buying them from the “right sources.” As in: them.

These junior squads have started doing rounds at parties like some sort of narco-security. If they see someone smoking weed, they approach and inquire about the source of the weed, breaking off a little from the joint and inspecting the mary jane (they know exactly what their product looks like and can recognize their product from the others). If it’s not from one of their tienditas (remember those neighborhood drug stores I wrote about about a year back?), they just take him backstage to introduce the kid’s naked ass to their little friend “la tabla,” which’ll leave them with welts for the next few weeks and mental scars for the rest of their lives.

The Zetas kicked off this trend when they started recruiting among young pandilleros (aka gang-bangers) from poor neighborhoods at the start of the Cartel War, somewhere from 2005 to 2006. Now the fashion has been catching on with other cartels, too. That’s the way it is these days. Nobody likes competition from independent operators anymore, not even the drug cartels. The anti-capitalist bastards!

This has been screwing everything up, and I don’t mean just for local businesses or for the freelance dealers who have been left without income or heads. It’s been just as bad for the little people, especially kids. You can’t even smoke a joint at a rave without being bothered anymore. To get hassled like that when you’re all soft, tripping on acid or ecstasy or mescaline—it’s just brutal.

Around 4AM, when the main DJ was starting to play, his crappy psycho music was suddenly interrupted by machine gun rapid-fire– and it all screeched to a halt like air blowing out of a balloon.



The ravers found themselves surrounded by about 50 thuggish kids armed with machine guns, sent courtesy of the Zetas. They were 19 to 25 years old at most, and acted all tough strutting around with their R-15s, rounding up the crowd like sheep dogs, sporadically firing bursts into the air from their black rifles just to keep people on their toes.

When the thugs had all the ravers assembled into a flock, the little bastards proceeded to rob everyone. Going person to person, they took cell phones, cameras, jewelry, cash, and anything else shiny that got their attention. They were like little ravens with automatic weapons. They even stole the DJ’s passport and credit cards. Fuck, they even took his headphones.

But that was all just collateral. The main purpose of their visit were the drugs. With flashlights in hand, they scouted the floor for baggies of weed, pills, LSD, coke, anything… They must have felt like they were on an easter egg hunt.

The leader then addressed the people: “Raise your hand if you like weed,” he asked the crowd. But nobody raised a hand or so much as moved. They were too scared. So he repeated his question, this time while firing a quick burst from his R-15 into the air. ”I said who likes fucking weed?!!” Naturally, a lot of hands went up.

“Good, now, who likes pills [ecstasy]?” he continued. A few hands went up. “Great, great,” he said, satisfied. ”But if you like them so much why aren’t you buying them at the right place?” he asked the crowd, like some kind of TV salesman.

The meaning was clear to all involved: you better buy your drugs from the Zetas’ tienditas.

He finished with a brief, somber, almost grandfatherly speech: “We apologize to everyone. We know this is a party but we are only doing our jobs, so that you won’t buy your loquera [drugs] from other sources. The plaza belongs to the compañia and we are going to come to these parties every time that we want to. We are taking your cellphones and cameras to erase any evidence.”

Before taking off, the thugs started calling out cars like they were valets. Like this:

“Who owns the blue Mazda truck?” a Zeta kid who looked like he was sponsored by Ed Hardy would shout. After some frightened girl somewhere in the back would raise her trembling hand, he’d yell: “Give me your keys.”

Nobody gave me an exact number of just how many cars Zetas took that night from the rave, but it was somewhere between 10 and 20 cars. They weren’t doing it just to be dicks. No, the stolen cars had a very specific purpose. They’d be used in levantones (kidnappings), executions, moving drugs and/or insurance company fraud.

After that, the comandante said his goodbyes to his captives and warned: “Now putos, everyone is gonna get on the floor face down for 20 to 30 minutes. And if anyone stands up or walks outside the big tent area, I got men outside who will kill you just like that. So it’s up to you.” He added that they shouldn’t even think about going to the police because the cops worked for them.

I’m still a little shocked by this story because nothing like it had ever happened before.

Why are they doing this? Well, I figure it has to do with Mexico’s war on drugs. The government has been pushing the narcos so hard that now we are entering uncharted territory.

http://exiledonline.com/the-economy-is- ... -at-raves/

[American Dream]

Dottie Walters REVEALS the Seven Secrets Of SELLING to WOMEN






Hear it all at:

http://timewavezero.posterous.com/7-sec ... -50s-style

or:

http://heinouberspace.blogspot.com/2009 ... ts-of.html




80% OF THE NATION'S BUYING POWER IS CONTROLLED BY WOMEN

" 7 Keys to Reaching this Unlimited Buying Power "

. LEARN



SEVEN SELLING SECRETS...SEVEN TESTED REASONS


"The seventh and biggest secret of all: infuriate them! You see, a woman hides within her FURIES, whose forces once released can conquer any foe. Women are like the sea. The currents and tides which move them every day are regular ebbs and flows, until a wind whips them up....this force can be used to your advantage if you can show a woman how your product will protect her family, her country, or her own attractiveness."



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[American Dream]

Billyray's All-Purpose Product






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[American Dream]

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Yoga and Capitalism: An Uneasy Partnership





Last week’s corporate-sponsored Yoga at the Great Lawn event in NYC has been attracting quite a bit of press. Yesterday’s NYT blog article took a look at the corporate angle of the event. “This would have never happened without corporate support,” said Sascha Lewis, a co-founder of FlavorPill, the NYC cultural guide which organized the event.

It was advertised as a free class, and as such needed corporate sponsorship. The distributed mats (which every registered person was supposed to receive) were branded with the JetBlue logo, a small gesture which in fact positions yoga mats as desirable retail space. adidas, which didn’t appear on the official literature but had a presence, since the event’s primary teacher, Elena Brower, is an adidas yoga ambassador (and is apparently making efforts to help adidas deliver their sustainability yoga wear line ~ I thought their previous ambassador accomplished that task…)

On the one hand, it’s great that this event happened and so many people, especially first-timers, were able to experience yoga in a grand setting. However, given the scope and ambition of the event, I have to question the intention behind these corporate interests in yoga. They claim they want to bring yoga to as many people as possible, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s their main interest.

The event accomplished the feat of being the largest yoga class ever recorded, even though there wasn’t much of a class. The practice was cancelled shortly after it started, due to the rain, and the disappointed practitioners lugged “their soggy JetBlue yoga mats and their SmartWater bottles and their ChicoBags filled with a few goodies” (according to the NYT blog post) out of the park.

“The yoga community is now merrily two-stepping the American way, with corporate logos,” observed the NYT blog. It then went on to ask if this was even a bad thing. Given the culture that yoga has landed in, it certainly seems inevitable. But there are ways to cross the line. At the Yoga at the Great Lawn event, Well+GoodNYC noted, “A single row of Who’s Who yoga teachers like Sadie Nardini, Sarita Lou, and Duncan Wong sat like Adidas-branded Buddhas, all in matching white tanks.” The shiny yoga elite, dressed alike in their branded uniforms… it’s kind of a creepy picture.

I wonder, do we have to do this dance? We all know it’s a dance. You really can’t convince me that, other then sponsoring an event with a guaranteed captive audience of 10,000, do these companies embody yogic values? JetBlue would like to co-opt the openness and transparency associated with yoga by guaranteeing “no blackout dates, no seat restrictions” on its frequent-flier program. It’s nice of adidas to sponsor a high-profile yoga teacher, offer free yoga classes around the world and develop a line of sustainable yoga wear ~ but its other business practices include endorsing the slaughter of kangaroos (an endangered species) in Australia and sweatshops in Asia. Can we separate these actions from its endorsement of yoga?

Elena Brower indicates that “the notion that capitalism and yoga are in conflict is old-think. ‘The companies are making it possible for all these thousands of people to have this experience. This is what we need,’” she said. I’m going to step forward and say that I’m pretty old-school in being skeptical of corporate motivations for sponsoring large scale yoga events, and I’d prefer to create community from a grassroots level, and introduce people to yoga without having to woo them with free branded mats and bottled water.

[American Dream]

Marlboro man takes sacred plant

by Tamara Herman


Indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon have refused to repeal a policy resolution issued in 1996 declaring US citizen Loren Miller an enemy whose "entrance in any indigenous territory should be prohibited."

Miller, director of the American-based International Plant Medicine Corporation, exchanged two packs of Marlboro cigarettes for a sample of a sacred Amazonian plant from a tribal chief 12 years ago and proceeded to patent it without seeking permission from local indigenous groups.

The plant, Ayahuasca, is a sacred hallucinogen that Amazonian people have been cultivating for thousands of years.

Miller maintains that he is acting in accordance with US and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) patent laws, which allow him to sell and breed Ayahuasca. However, the Co-ordinating Body for Indigenous Organizations in the Amazon Region (COICA), which represents 400 Amazonian indigenous groups in nine South American countries, rejects Miller's commercial claim to Ayahuasca.

COICA argues that intellectual property rights regimes should allow indigenous people to control and benefit from the commercial use of their knowledge and biological resources. They note that the Convention on Biological Diversity, negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil and ratified by over 170 countries, promotes "the equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations, and practices."

"Bioprospector" companies, such as Miller's International Plant Medicine Corporation, often screen plants used by indigenous people for genetic components that may be useful in agricultural, pharmaceutical and other commercial products. Indigenous people's biological resources contribute an estimated $30US billion a year to the pharmaceutical industry.

US officials say Miller's actions are legal under the 1995 GATT Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP) Agreement, which allows corporations to patent their knowledge-based innovations in all GATT member nations, thereby profiting from the research and development undertaken.



http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_h ... n28752586/

Theme from Cancer Country

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/what-socialis ... erspective

What is Socialism? An Anarchist Perspective.

The following is a piece written by Jason Brannigan from Organise! submitted in May 2007 as part of the James Connolly Debating Society's "What is Socialism?" discussion.




“Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice
Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”
Mikhail Bakunin

Socialism can be many, very different, things. For anarchists it must be libertarian, indeed class struggle anarchists often interchangeably describe themselves as libertarian socialists or libertarian communists.

Anarchists are socialists who believe that socialism must be built out of the struggles of working class people, acting in their own class interests. ‘Socialism’ cannot be imposed from above.

Some on the left have tried to attack anarchism on the basis that such and such a person in the past said something that was obviously dodgy. This may be a fun game, but it also misses the anti-authoritarian and collective nature of class struggle anarchism. Anarchists do not refer to themselves as Bakuninites, Proudhonists, Kropotkinites, and this is quite deliberate. While two of those mentioned have actually contributed to anarchist thought and to the struggles of working people (indeed a prophetic warning for all socialists from Bakunin is quoted at the start of this submission) Proudhon was far from class struggle anarchism. Anarchists do not hang on the every word of any one dead revolutionary refusing to get tied to a pseudo-religious dogma that tries to pass itself off as socialism.

Class struggle anarchists also largely accept Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist system, we feel no need to call ourselves after deity Marx as a result. Yet there are significant differences between large sections of the socialist movement and anarchism. The most fundamental of them being in relation to ‘consciousness’ or the ability of working class people to act in our own interests and in the, quite reasonable, assertion that socialism cannot be achieved via or implemented by the state.

Anarchists don’t get involved with parliamentary democracy, at best this is a distraction and a sham, at worst, well… It has led to all sorts of oppositional parties getting into power only to accommodate themselves to ‘economic realities’ and implement the very things they were meant to be opposed to before they got in. The economic realities are of course the realities enforced by a global capitalist elite, not the economic realities of the day to day lives of the rest of us. There are other reasons for opposing the use of the state to deliver socialism. One is the point that any body that sets itself up as a governing class, over and above the rest of us, actually becomes a new ruling class with its own interests to defend. Simply, even with the best intentions in the world, socialists who utilise the state to bring about socialism on ‘our behalf’ become the ‘new boss’.

So anarchists aren’t about building a political party, if they aren’t about running in elections or seizing the state by other means, what are they about? Anarchists want to improve everyday conditions for ourselves and other working class people, while struggling towards the revolutionary transformation that can create a free and equal society, one based on mutual aid and co-operation. We believe in workers control, in workers running their own communities and workplaces because, simply put, they are the people best placed to do it.

Is that utopian and far-fetched? Perhaps, but lets consider the alternative, the continuation of the current system.

It’s not working, or rather it is, for the rich and powerful. But not for working class people across the globe, nor is it working in terms of the environmental legacy we will be leaving our grandchildren.

Stress and overwork affect more and more people while others are flung on the dole; we live in a world of plentiful resources yet millions starve; some people make vast fortunes just because they own companies, land, property or natural resources, but those of us who create the wealth, work the land and build the properties are left struggling to pay for the natural resources and commodities we create. Politicians tell us there’s no money - not for wages, pensioners, benefits or local amenities. But there’s always plenty for war (and politicians’ pay rises).

Locally and globally the gap between the richest and the poorest sections of society has never been so great. For all humanities technological advances we spend more time working than people did 40 years ago. Yet instead of a war on poverty they’ve got a war on ‘benefit fraud’, a war on drugs and a ‘war on terror’ while the institutions that create war, poverty and environmental destruction stigmatise, imprison and deport the resultant refugees.

None of this is inevitable or coincidental, it all comes back down to capitalism - an economic system defined by wage slavery and the accumulation of profit out of other people’s work.

Anarchists believe that, “the emancipation of the working class shall be the task of the workers ourselves!”

In practical terms this has meant groups like Organise! support workers against their bosses - against victimisation, in demanding higher wages and better conditions. Anarchists intervene practically to support workers engaged in disputes and are also active in their own workplaces and communities.

The focus on the workplace comes from the recognition of the power of our class as producers. Anarchists seek to get involved in and relate to struggles as they develop out of the needs and experiences of working class people. Some have called approaches to ‘socialism’ that are based on the day to day struggles of working class people, that seek to build class unity around actual instances of class struggle, ‘abstract’. I have to ask then what exactly is more abstract? Is it the reality of life under capitalism experienced by the vast majority of people in the north, across these islands and globally? Or is it some more ‘concrete’ reality such as the desire to see a mythic ‘nation once again’ Ireland created before we can have ‘socialism’? It seems obvious to me which is the more abstract.

Anarchists, libertarian socialists, are opposed to capitalism and the state. As such they are opposed to the mythologies of nationalisms and nation states. In Ireland that means opposition to rule from Westminster, the Dáil and our widely celebrated ‘new’ local assembly at Stormont. Both British and Irish nationalism have often been as detrimental to the life experiences and interests of working class in the north as have policies emanating from Westminster.

We are indeed in a new era. Not one were we hand over control to those involved in power-sharing. A control that is in reality only a small hand in administering a system suited to the needs of the wealthy and powerful. Not one in which we have to believe the hype around Gerry and Paisley sharing ‘power’. But one where we can begin to re-examine our real interests while dropping the mystification and worn out symbols. Our interests do not lie with ‘our’ nation, British or Irish, whatever that may mean, they lie with our fellow workers who together with us create the wealth of the world but who are not allowed a full share of it.

Class struggle anarchists or libertarian socialists want to secure, together with other working class people, a full and equal share of the wealth and social benefits created by the combined labour of our class. This means abolishing the capitalist system. Anarchists also want to build a world based on direct democracy and workers control of production. This means abolishing the state and not replacing it with any other centralised or hierarchical political body, but with a system of federation and delegation where delegates are directly elected and immediately recallable.

Anarchists reject all systems of oppression and all attempts to divide people through discrimination and prejudice. Recognising capitalism’s catastrophic effect on the natural environment they seek to develop a future based on sustainable communities. Anarchists are internationalist and reject all artificial borders and boundaries as we reject all the politicians and governments that require them. They do not regard themselves as a ‘vanguard’, we do not want to be the new leaders of a hierarchically organised labour movement, let alone seize the state in the name of the workers.

We as working class people have agency, we can act, we can start with small attainable victories. The working class still has the means to replace capitalism with a free and socialist society. The road to revolution may be long and hard. If it was easy they would not call it struggle. We believe that if the confidence and ability of working class people is to be built to the extent that this future becomes possible that all our struggles must be under the direct control of those involved in them and be based on direct action - that is directly controlled by those involved and not mediated through politicians or trade union bureaucrats. We believe, and history supports our belief, that ‘socialism’ will be achieved by the working class itself or it will not be achieved at all.

[American Dream]

From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an agricultural workers' organizing group in South Florida, USA :

http://www.ciw-online.org/slavery.html

The CIW's Anti-Slavery Campaign is a worker-based approach to eliminating modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry. The CIW helps fight this crime by uncovering, investigating, and assisting in the federal prosecution of slavery rings preying on hundreds of farmworkers. In such situations, captive workers are held against their will by their employers through threats and, all too often, the actual use of violence -- including beatings, shootings, and pistol-whippings.

In one of the most recent case to be brought to court, a federal grand jury indicted six people in Immokalee on January 17th, 2008, for their part in what U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy called "slavery, plain and simple" (Ft. Myers News-Press, “Group accused of keeping, beating, stealing from Immokalee laborers,” 1/18/08). The employers were charged with beating workers who were unwilling to work or who attempted to leave their employ picking tomatoes, holding their workers in debt, and chaining and locking workers inside u-haul trucks as punishment ("How about a side order of human rights," Miami Herald, 12/16/07).

This case became the seventh such farm labor operation to be prosecuted for servitude in Florida -- involving well over 1,000 workers and more than a dozen employers -- in the past decade. Since 2008, the federal government has initiated two more prosecutions, bringing the total to nine as of 2010. Here below is a list of the nine cases, in chronological order:


U.S. vs. Flores -- In 1997, Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez were sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison on slavery, extortion, and firearms charges, amongst others. Flores and Gomez had a workforce of over 400 men and women in Florida and South Carolina, harvesting vegetables and citrus. The workers, mostly indigenous Mexicans and Guatemalans, were forced to work 10-12 hour days, 6 days per week, for as little as $20 per week, under the watch of armed guards. Those who attempted escape were assaulted, pistol-whipped, and even shot. The case was brought to federal authorities after five years of investigation by escaped workers and CIW members.

U.S. vs. Cuello -- In 1999, Abel Cuello was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison on slavery charges. He had held more than 30 tomato pickers in two trailers in the isolated swampland west of Immokalee, keeping them under constant watch. Three workers escaped the camp, only to have their boss track them down a few weeks later. The employer ran one of them down with his car, stating that he owned them. The workers sought help from the CIW and the police, and the CIW worked with the DOJ on the ensuing investigation. Cuello worked for Manley Farms North Inc., a major Bonita Springs tomato supplier. Once out of prison, Cuello supplied labor to Ag-Mart Farms, a tomato company operating in Florida and North Carolina.

U.S. vs. Tecum -- In 2001, Jose Tecum was sentenced to 9 years in federal prison on slavery and kidnapping charges. He forced a young woman to work against her will both in the tomato fields around Immokalee, and in his home. The CIW assisted the DOJ with the prosecution, including victim and witness assistance.

U.S. vs. Lee -- In 2001, Michael Lee was sentenced to 4 years in federal prison and 3 years supervised release on a slavery conspiracy charge. He pled guilty to using crack cocaine, threats, and violence to enslave his workers. Lee held his workers in forced labor, recruiting homeless U.S. citizens for his operation, creating a "company store" debt through loans for rent, food, cigarettes, and cocaine. He abducted and beat one of his workers to prevent him from leaving his employ. Lee harvested for orange growers in the Fort Pierce, FL area.

U.S. vs. Ramos -- In 2004, Ramiro and Juan Ramos were sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison on slavery and firearms charges, and the forfeiture of over $3 million in assets. The men, who had a workforce of over 700 farmworkers in the citrus groves of Florida, as well as the fields of North Carolina, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted -- at gunpoint -- passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by the DOJ after two years of investigation by the CIW. The Ramoses harvested for Consolidated Citrus and Lykes Brothers, among others.

U.S. vs. Ronald Evans -- In 2007, Florida employer Ron Evans was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on drug conspiracy, financial re-structuring, and witness tampering charges, among others. Jequita Evans was also sentenced to 20 years, and Ron Evans Jr. to 10 years. Operating in Florida and North Carolina, Ron Evans recruited homeless U.S. citizens from shelters across the Southeast, including New Orleans, Tampa, and Miami, with promises of good jobs and housing. At Palatka, FL and Newton Grove, NC area labor camps, the Evans' deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers' pay, holding them "perpetually indebted" in what the DOJ called "a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible." The Palatka labor camp was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, with a No Trespassing sign. The CIW and a Miami-based homeless outreach organization (Touching Miami with Love) began the investigation and reported the case to federal authorities in 2003. In Florida, Ron Evans worked for grower Frank Johns. Johns was 2004 Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the Florida agricultural industry. As of 2007, he remained the Chairman of the FFVA's Budget and Finance Committee.

U.S. vs. Navarrete -- In December 2008, employers Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete were sentenced to 12 years each in federal prison on charges of conspiracy, holding workers in involuntary servitude, and peonage. They had employed dozens of tomato pickers in Florida and South Carolina. As stated in the DOJ press release on their sentencing, "[the employers] pleaed guilty to beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work as agricultural laborers... [They] were accused of paying the workers minimal wages and driving the workers into debt, while simultaneously threatening physical harm if the workers left their employment before their debts had been repaid to the Navarrete family." Workers first reported the abuse to Collier County police, and additional workers sought help from the CIW. The CIW collaborated with the DOJ and the police on the year-long investigation and prosecution.

U.S. vs. Bontemps -- In July 2010, Cabioch Bontemps, Carline Ceneus, and Willy Edouard were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to commit forced labor. DOJ officials accuse the three of holding over 50 guestworkers from Haiti against their will in the beanfields of Alachua County, Florida. The indictment states that Bontemps raped one of the workers in his employ and threatened her if she were to report it. The employers held the workers' passports and visas, and forced them to work in fields recently sprayed with harsh pesticides, causing permanent scarring. The grower, Steven Davis, asked the judge during the court hearing to release Bontemps since he was key to the harvesting operation. "All these people [the workers] look up to him," Davis said. "All these people respect him. All these people worship him." As of September 2010, the prosecution is ongoing. The CIW trained local law enforcement and church groups shortly before the workers were rescued, and assisted in referring the case to the DOJ.

U.S. vs. Global Horizons -- In September 2010, staff of guestworker recruiting giant Global Horizons were charged with operating a forced labor ring active in 13 states, including Florida. Global Horizons President Mordechai Orian and six others are accused of holding hundreds of guestworkers from Thailand against their will, in what prosecutors call “the largest human trafficking case in U.S. history.” FBI Special Agent Tom Simon described the latest case as "a classic bait-and-switch what they were doing. They were telling the Thai workers one thing to lure them here. Then when they got here, their passports were taken away and they were held in forced servitude working in these farms." The prosecution is ongoing, with more details to emerge about the various states workers lived in and what crops they picked.

The Anti-Slavery Campaign has resulted in freedom for more than a thousand tomato and orange pickers held in debt bondage, historic sentences for various agricultural employers, the development of a successful model of community-government cooperation, and the growth of an expanding base of aware and committed worker activists. The CIW employs a unique combination of outreach, investigation, and worker-to-worker counseling in order to combat already-existing slavery operations case-by-case.

[American Dream]

Neoliberalism's Newest Product: The Modern Slave Trade

By Ignacio Ramonet

IPS, August 3, 2011


PARIS, Jul (IPS) Two centuries after the abolition of slavery we are seeing the reintroduction of an abominable practice: human trafficking. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 12.3 million people each year are taken captive by networks tied to international crime and used as forced labour in inhuman conditions.

In the case of women, the victims are subjected mostly to sexual exploitation while others are exploited as domestic servants. There is also the case of youths who are taken captive through various scams so their body parts can be sold in the international human organ trade.

These practices are expanding more and more to satisfy the demand for cheap labour in sectors like the hotel and restaurant industries, agriculture, and construction.

The OSCE dedicated two days of its last international conference in Vienna in late June to this subject[i ]. Though the phenomenon is international, various specialists asserted that the plague of slave labour is growing rapidly in the EU. Unions and labour groups estimate that in Europe there are hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to the blight of slavery [ii].

In Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries of the EU, foreign migrant workers attracted by the mirage of Europe find themselves trapped in the networks of various mafias and working in conditions like slaves of past ages. An ILO report reveals that south of Naples, for example, 1200 homeless farm labourers work twelve hours per day in greenhouses without contracts and for miserable pay, guarded by private militias and living in what resemble concentration camps.

This "work camp" is not the only one in Europe; thousands and thousands of undocumented immigrants have met similar fates, victims of a modern slave trade flourishing in any number of European countries. According to various unions, this form of forced labour accounts for almost 20 percent of agricultural production [iii].

Responsibility for this expansion of human trafficking lies largely with the current dominant economic model. In effect, the form of neoliberal globalisation than has been imposed over the last three decades through economic shock therapy has devastated the most fragile levels of society and imposed extremely high social costs. It has created a fierce competition between labour and capital. In the name of free trade, the major multinationals manufacture and sell their goods around the world, producing where labour is cheapest and selling where the cost of living is highest. The new capitalism has made competitiveness its primary engine and brought about a commodification of labour and labourers.

Globalisation, which offers remarkable opportunities to a lucky few, imposes on the rest, in Europe, a ruthless and unmediated competition between EU salary workers, small businesses, and small farmers and their badly-paid, exploited counterparts on the other side of the world. The result we now see clearly before us: social dumping on a planetary scale.

Continues at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArtic ... leId=25888

[American Dream]

http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=5804

Stratified Reproduction

by Gina Maranto, Biopolitical Times guest contributor

August 3rd, 2011




In a slim new volume, Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market (Routledge, 2011), France Winddance Twine provides multiple accounts of the ways in which racism, classism, and colorism permeate the international market for wombs and gametes. For example, Twine cites the story of a Japanese woman who backs out of a surrogacy arrangement when she learns that the gestational mother, whom she had selected on the basis of her profile and skin color, is Korean. And there is the case of the black woman seeking IVF services who is "policed" in her choices by white doctors who insist it would be "inappropriate" for her to use "white" sperm if "black" sperm were available in the bank. Or the admission of the white, would-be surrogate who tells a researcher that she would carry "a Japanese baby or a Chinese baby because they are white to me," but says that "to give birth to a Black child would add one more controversial aspect to my life and I'm not ready to be on the front page of the National Enquirer" (p. 25).

Twine, a University of Santa Barbara sociologist who has written extensively on whiteness, gender, and racism, argues that such stories have too often been neglected by the press and even by scholars who engage in analyses of gestational surrogacy, and takes it as her brief to reframe the study of this global enterprise in terms of the concept of "stratified reproduction" first advanced by ethnographer Shellee Cohen in her study of West Indian migrant workers in New York. Twine sees gestational surrogacy as "embedded in a transnational capitalist market that is structured by racial, ethnic, and class inequalities and by competing nation-state regulatory regimes" (p. 3). Only some women and couples can afford surrogacy, and in most countries, it is only poor women who are the providers of the desired commodity.

Drawing on the work of other sociologists and of anthropologists, legal scholars, and philosophers including Gillian Goslinga of Wesleyan University, Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Susan Kahn of Harvard University, Amrita Pande of the University of Cape Town, Kelly Oliver of Vanderbilt University, and Rene Almeling and Marcia Inhorn, both of Yale University, Twine provides an overview of international surrogacy with special focus on the U.S., Egypt, Israel, and India.

In the U.S., she argues, it is impossible to consider gestational surrogacy outside the context of chattel slavery, a historical legacy too often neglected. She writes,

For almost 300 years women of African ancestry worked as slave laborers and produced children who were commodities in a stratified system. As the mothers of children who constituted a form of wealth for their owners (and sometimes their biological fathers) they did not possess what [Northwestern University law professor] Dorothy Roberts calls reproductive liberty (p. 8 ).

Ongoing racism and economic inequalities in the U.S. continue to shape the attitudes of both whites and blacks toward surrogacy, yet these forces have largely gone unstudied. Twine laments the "dearth of ethnographic studies of gestational surrogacy that illuminate the experiences of Black, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Latina, and other women socially classified as members of racial or ethnic minorities who are oppressed..." (p. 47). Such studies might reveal the ways in which standard arguments regarding reproductive liberty, including the right to privacy, have been "used to reinforce and restore the privileges of the racially dominant groups to reproduce while restricting or denying the poor and ethnic minorities those same rights" (p. 49).

Twine does a quick review of what she terms "constrained occupational choices" of American women and finds that there is near parity between the highest payment for a singleton surrogacy pregnancy — in the $20- to $25,000 range — and the wages earned by women working in retail sales, or as nursing home or home care aides. So while women in such professions might appear to be exercising agency in choosing to serve as surrogates, Twine sees their choices as structured by their class and economic situations. The same holds in an international context, where women suffer even greater wage discrimination and limits on employment. There is choice and there is choice, and women in higher paying occupations in any country do not typically view gestational surrogacy as an option carrying much benefit.

The book also looks at surrogacy in India from class and ethnic perspectives, and in Egypt and Israel from a religious point of view. (Interestingly, in Israel, where the government subsidizes surrogacy as well as other assisted reproductive technologies, rules prohibit unmarried or gay Jewish men from using ARTs, while granting lesbians and unmarried heterosexual women access.) Twine also documents acts of systematic religious and ethnic segregation in the fertility business in Israel, as when Orthodox Sephardic and Ashkenazi clients at fertility clinics are matched to rabbis of the same heritage, whose approval for procedures is essential due to "the potential social stigma that could attach to a child conceived via ART."

In the end, Twine sees that at least some of the inequities could be eliminated via policy shifts and echoes Dorothy Roberts's call for state support for the procreative decisions of all women, regardless of class, including removal of economic barriers via subsidies.

[American Dream]

.
MAY BE TRIGGERING TO SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL/MK TRAUMA.



I have to wonder how much money may be a factor in the appearance of sketchy mind control accounts such as the one critiqued here:


http://www.konformist.com/mkkafe/ciaslave.htm

"I WAS A SEX SLAVE FOR THE CIA!!!"

Trance Formation of America

Book Review

by

Jaye C. Beldo (Netnous@aol.com)




If you are bored out of your mind with the usual Pamela Anderson Lee 'power fuck' porn, I suggest grabbing a copy of Trance Formation of America and heading to the nearest bathroom with a jar of Vaseline. Why not infuse new life into your worn out sexual fantasies by envisioning some of the scenes spelled out in Cathy O'Brien's supposed exposé of the pedophile shenanigans of our Government officials? I mean, how could you not get excited over picturing Hillary Clinton going down on the author's deformed vagina like a starved wolf while Bill walks in on them and casually ignores them? How can you not get excited about Box Car Willie's penchant for fondling preteens after his cornball shows at the Grand Ol' Opry? Or Dick Cheney using an OZ hour glass as if it were a vibrator on the author, while dry running the next meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan through his mind?

Excuse my overt facetiousness, but this is one hard book to swallow, pardon the pun. I cannot help but get the impression that Cathy is, at times, really no different from some of the questionable UFO abductees making extravagant claims of being transported to other solar systems and back again. Obviously something happened to her of a traumatic nature (her wary demeanor and tremulous voice reminds me very much of Bill Cooper when he talks about the Kennedy assassination). You can hear the trauma in her voice. How she has chosen, whether unconsciously or not, to manifest the effects of the trauma deserves some responsible scrutiny from the reader.

I have trouble fully believing her harrowing story for a number of reasons. Firstly she starts out her book with the following sentence:

"Mind Control is absolute." I can hear Robert Anton Wilson rolling over in his non-local indeterminate grave, shuddering, in subatomic fashion, upon hearing the word is as well as absolute! With statements like these, obviously there are no chinks in O'Brien's armor. Her version of the Great Wall of China is firmly in place and there are no peep holes, no opportunities for us to make our own conclusions. (Please see my review of David Icke's book, The Biggest Secret posted on The Konformist web site for further elaboration on this phenomena of how paranoia compels authors to fill all available space with wall to wall facts.)

However, considering the sordid reputation our government officials have, as spelled out in many other conspiracy books, I truly want to believe at least some of O'Brien's stories. I want to believe that Sparky Anderson, the manager of the Detroit Tigers is/was a pedophile. I want to believe, more than anything, that Gerald Ford made Cathy give him head in the most savage of fashions.

The details Cathy gives are convincing and deeply disturbing if not because they actually happened then because they are the overt manifestation of some other painful experiences she suffered through in her past. I wonder how could she invent all of the relentless scenarios of sexual abuse chronicled in Trance Formation. If she did, I at least hand it to her for having a more than vivid imagination. She seems to have an imagination that may possibly help her cope with the pains of sexual abuse, whether it be from family members or politicians. The details are as convincing as those found in a well written Cloak and Dagger novel. (I'm not suggesting False Memory Syndrome but rather that she may be accessing, via her imagination, the lower astral plane which is rife with ethereal perversions, the very plane that attempts to control us through low vibrational thoughts).

Truth Seekers Books (http://truth-seeker.com) who have been kind enough to send me most of their excellent conspiracy related titles also sent me a video of Cathy and her intelligence insider 'rescuer' Mark Phillips giving a talk on the subject. I attempted to willingly 'suspend my disbelief' to allow the subjective reality of Cathy and Mark into my inscape but something just did not intuitively click or ring true with their story. Strangely, as Mark preambled on for Cathy, he did not go into any extensive details of how he rescued her from the CIA's MK-Ultra lair. I really wanted to know more about it so I could be more thoroughly convinced by her story.

I tried to avoid psychoanalyzing Cathy while watching the video. However, I did notice that she used some NLP techniques to enhance her persuasive potential, such as the voice roll, nodding the head to emphasize certain words, widening the eyes at key moments and other tricks that most politicians and T.V. Evangelists use to put their audience members in a suggestive state. I wonder where she learned these techniques from. Did she learn them from her supposed tormentors at the CIA? If so she needs to hone the skills a bit more to make them less obvious.

I suggest that the reader of Trance Formation regard the work as an elaborate albeit disturbing metaphor of the effects of sexual abuse on young children and how it manifests later on in their lives. Cathy's work may very well provide us with a useful perspective on how trauma can embody itself, how it can be projected upon political figures (and also how political figures can project their perverted sexuality upon us which then manifests in our imaginations. I highly recommend reading Ioan Couliano's work, Eros and Magic in the Italian Renaissance. He describes how those holding power manipulated the masses via images of a sexual nature. Same old, same old. He was later assassinated in a bathroom on the campus of the University of Chicago.)

What I mean is that the very people she chronicles as having abused her could represent/embody, in a way recognizable to her and us, the very deep, ultimately core pathology in the heart of the American psyche. I have little doubt that some of the horrific things she mentions actually happen on a day to day basis. Completely denying them would be folly. However the web Cathy weaves must be skirted with much caution. The gravity of her argument could very well suck us into territory hard to escape if we don't take the necessary precautions.



Jaye C. Beldo is a writer, intuitive counselor, and spiritual anarchist. He has been published in FATE, Green Egg, Magical Blend, Mythos Journal, Electric Dreams, etc.

[American Dream]

http://www.thenation.com/article/162478 ... ison-labor

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Mike Elk and Bob Sloan

August 1, 2011

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.


The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.

This Prison Industries Act as printed in ALEC’s 1995 state legislation sourcebook, “provides for the employment of inmate labor in state correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain products under specific conditions.” These conditions, defined by the PIE program, are supposed to include requirements that “inmates must be paid at the prevailing wage rate” and that the “any room and board deductions…are reasonable and are used to defray the costs of inmate incarceration.” (Some states charge prisoners for room and board, ostensibly to offset the cost of prisons for taxpayers. In Florida, for example, prisoners are paid minimum wage for PIE-certified labor, but 40 percent is taken out of their accounts for this purpose.)

The Prison Industries Act sought to change this, inventing the “private sector prison industry expansion account,” to absorb such deductions, and stipulating that the money should be used to, among other things: “construct work facilities, recruit corporations to participate as private sector industries programs, and pay costs of the authority and department in implementing [these programs].” Thus, money that was taken from inmate wages to offset the costs of incarceration would increasingly go to expanding prison industries. In 2000, Florida passed a law that mirrored the Prison Industries Act and created the Prison Industries Trust Fund, its own version of the private sector prison industry expansion account, deliberately designed to help expand prison labor for private industries.

The Prison Industries Act was also written to exploit a critical PIE loophole that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders. It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), a private trade organization that happened to be represented by Allen’s lobbying firm, Service House, Inc. In 2003, Allen became the Texas House Chairman of the Corrections Committee and began peddling the Prison Industries Act and other legislation beneficial to CCA and Geo Group, like the Private Correctional Facilities Act. Soon thereafter he became Chairman of ALEC’s Criminal Justice (now Public Safety and Elections) Task Force. He resigned from the state legislature in 2006 while under investigation for his unethical lobbying practices. He was hired soon after as a lobbyist for Geo Group.

Today’s chair of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task force is state Representative Jerry Madden of Texas, where the Prison Industries Act originated eighteen years ago. According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were "thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations." These included such states as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well; Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification. Today these state’s legislation are based upon an updated version of the Prison Industries Act, which ALEC amended in 2004.

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida's forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states. What's more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work. According to the Capitol Times, “inmates are not paid for their work, but receive time off their sentences.” The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much of ALEC’s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

“It’s bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China,” says Scott Paul Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of business and unions. “They shouldn’t have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral.”

Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, says prison labor is part of a “confluence of similar interests” among politicians and corporations, long referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” As decades of model legislation reveals, ALEC has been at the center of this confluence. “This has been ongoing for decades, with prison privatization contributing to the escalation of incarceration rates in the US,” Friedmann says. Just as mass incarceration has burdened American taxpayers in major prison states, so is the use of inmate labor contributing to lost jobs, unemployment and decreased wages among workers—while corporate profits soar.

Mike Elk and Bob Sloan

[American Dream]

This article is useful as far as it goes, however it does fall short in looking at how deep corruption and other such institutional factors go inside the United States:


Capital Crimes

The Political Economy of Crime in America

George Winslow

Street Crime

The right never tires of exonerating society and blaming crime on the criminals. This is, of course, nonsense. To understand the important role that basic social and economic problems play in the creation of street crime, simply take a map of a major American city and put a small red dot wherever a homicide occurred. Soon small red lakes start forming in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. For example, in 1993, the New York City Police Department reported that twelve of the city’s seventy-four precincts—all twelve located in impoverished areas of Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—reported a total of 854 homicides (43.6 percent of the city’s 1,960 murders) while twelve other precincts—all located in more affluent terrain—reported only thirty-seven homicides (less than 2 percent of the total). In general, wherever neighborhoods are plagued by extreme poverty and unemployment, extraordinarily high levels of violent crime exist.

Not surprisingly, U.S. prisons are also filled with convicts who have little formal education, lousy job prospects, and dismal incomes. One government survey of prisoners who entered state prisons in 1991 found that 64 percent had not graduated from high school, compared to 19.8 percent in the general population. About 45 percent did not have a fulltime job when they were arrested, 33 percent were unemployed, about 70 percent earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year (compared to 23.5 percent of all U.S. households), and only 15 percent earned more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year (compared to 59.2 percent of all American households).

Likewise, inmate populations are mostly people of color that have faced severe socioeconomic problems. Blacks, with unemployment rates twice as high as whites and poverty rates more than three times higher, comprise 30 percent of federal and 46 percent of state inmates, even though they make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population. Latinos, suffering unemployment rates nearly twice as high as whites and poverty rates nearly three times higher, make up 28 percent of federal and 17 percent of state inmates, but just 10.2 percent of the population. In short, the higher incarceration rates of blacks and Latinos are very strongly correlated with their higher unemployment and poverty rates.

The link between poverty and crime, however, needs to be handled with care. There is, for example, no evidence to support the view that young males of color and immigrants are “more criminal” than other members of the population. Most impoverished young men manage to get through life without committing serious violent crimes, and those who do enter a life of crime commit few of the worst crimes. Most corporate crimes are committed by wealthy, middle-aged white men, and young people of color have virtually no control over the global drug trade or money-laundering. The popularity of derogatory stereotypes also obscures the terrible impact that street crime has on less-affluent neighborhoods. We tend to forget that working and less affluent Americans are disproportionally victimized by crime. This is particularly true of corporate crime—poorer neighborhoods generally have the worst environmental problems, and working Americans are far more likely to die at work than more affluent white-collar workers. In addition, about half of all U.S. homicide victims are black. People who live in households that have less that fifteen thousand dollars in annual income are three times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted, two times more likely to be robbed, and one and a half times more likely to be a victim of an aggravated assault than those who live in wealthy households.

All of this goes to show that the salient difference between high-crime and low-crime neighborhoods in urban centers is economics, not morality. Communities that offer their residents economic and social opportunities have low rates of street crime. And it also tells us why hiring more police, building more prisons, and imposing tougher sentences has not worked. Spending on law enforcement has increased astronomically and the number of people behind bars now approaches two million, but there is little evidence that punishment has had much of an impact on crime rates. Crime rates rose in the 1960s, when the number of people behind bars fell, but those numbers rose in the 1970s as the prison population skyrocketed. Street crime rates then fell in the early 1980s, as the prison population soared. But, crime rates escalated dramatically between 1984 and 1992, when the prison population increased even faster and even more draconian laws were passed. Crime rates dropped in the mid-1990s, as still more people were put behind bars. While law-and-order fanatics have taken credit for this decrease, any honest observer can see there is no connection between stiffer punishment and lower crime rates.

Prisons have been ineffective because punishment doesn’t address what might be crudely called the supply of criminals. Government officials can double or triple the number of people behind bars and keep them there for longer periods of time, as they have in recent years. But crime will not decrease as long as social and economic problems create millions of new street criminals to take their place.

The effects of economic changes on crime can be seen in the recent history of poor white immigrants in major cities like New York. In the 1910s and 1920s, for example, Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods had extremely high rates of street crime. At the time, conservative commentators blamed the problem on genetics. Yet, a mere two generations later, the grandchildren of these supposedly degenerate races are generally affluent and well-educated, with low unemployment rates. Not surprisingly, their involvement in street crime has also plunged.

The success of these groups and the failure of others can be traced to the economic changes made during the New Deal in the 1930s and the early postwar period in the 1940s, which expanded the consumer economy, boosted wages, and improved educational opportunities. But these benefits were not spread equally throughout the economy.

For starters, U.S. farm policies, which encouraged the development of a capital-intensive agribusiness, pushed millions of small farmers and farm laborers out of the U.S. South, Appalachia, and Puerto Rico into Northern cities between 1940 and 1970. These new immigrants arrived at a time when government policies and corporate investment strategies were encouraging the flow of capital out of the older industrial cities and into the lower wage, nonunion urban centers and suburbs of the South and West. Massive U.S. military spending encouraged an enormous government-sponsored shift of capital from urban centers to either the suburbs or low- wage centers abroad. Domestic military spending during the Second World War was disproportionately made in suburban or Sunbelt areas, and the vast majority of postwar military spending occurred outside of urban centers.

Meanwhile, tax policies such as the interest deduction for mortgages favored suburban homeowners over urban renters and reduced investment in decaying urban housing stocks, while other aspects of the corporate tax code encouraged corporations to build new factories overseas or in the suburbs rather than remodel and upgrade urban facilities.

Over time, these capital movements destroyed the economic basis of many American cities and pushed up crime rates, despite the country’s overall prosperity. In one study, Don Wallace and Drew Humphries investigated crime rates in twenty-three cities between 1950 and 1971. They looked at the connection between different types of crime and larger economic changes, such as a region’s economic prospects, labor-force changes, levels of poverty, and unemployment and analyzed how this affected different types of crime. Overall, they found that older, industrial cities had lost jobs, suffered high unemployment, faced large numbers of new migrants, and had much higher levels of murder, robbery, auto theft, and burglary. They concluded: “This result supports our hypothesis as well as earlier studies linking industrial employment, community stability and low crime rates.”

Such problems were further exacerbated in the late 1960s and 1970s. Faced with growing international competition, higher oil prices, and worldwide economic stagnation, corporate America underwent a painful restructuring. Layoffs, attacks on organized labor, the movement of factories overseas to low-wage zones, reduced government regulation, probusiness tax policies, and a wave of mergers cut overhead, boosted profits, and created more globally competitive corporate behemoths. This increased the prosperity of the richest Americans, but it also caused family incomes to stagnate, poverty rates to remain high, and wages for low-skilled workers to drop.

The economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s had an enormous impact on street crime, and not just in the cities. In the 1980s, crime became an increasingly worrisome problem in both rural and suburban areas as millions of workers lost their jobs, the manufacturing sector was devastated, and real wages fell dramatically. Still, America’s cities and their low-wage and often minority workers suffered the most. Overall, almost three million manufacturing jobs were lost nationwide in U.S. cities between 1979 and 1990. Moreover, pay for many low-skilled jobs in the United States fell dramatically—a particularly important development because men with few skills and little formal education are much more likely to commit street crimes than other demographic groups. Wages for low-skilled white men in their twenties fell by 14 percent between 1973 and 1989, while wages for white high-school dropouts fell by 33 percent. Similarly, wages for black high-school dropouts fell by 50 percent and those for black men in their twenties fell by 24 percent during this period.

These problems were compounded by the right’s successful attacks on social programs designed to eradicate the causes of crime. Between 1981 and 1992, federal spending for subsidized housing fell by 82 percent; job training and employment programs were cut by 63 percent; and the budget for community development and social service block grants was trimmed by 40 percent. Between 1972 and 1992, welfare and food-stamp benefits for single mothers declined by an average of 27 percent nationwide. Although welfare benefits once provided enough money for a family of four to live at the poverty level, no state in the early 1990s (when crime rates hit record highs) provided grants and subsidies equal to 100 percent of the poverty level.

Reduced wages, higher unemployment rates, and lower government benefits played a crucial role in the rise of street crime and the growth of street drug markets. Likewise, improved economic conditions in many cities after 1993 begin to explain the recent reductions in street crime. It is no coincidence that street crime rates have fallen to their lowest levels in thirty-five years in a period when unemployment and poverty rates have also dropped back to the levels last seen in the more prosperous 1960s.

The Drug Trade

Changes in the larger capitalist political economy have also played a crucial role in the development of the drug trade. While the right blames much of the drug trade on the permissive cultural values of the 1960s, it is important to remember that U.S. drug users are only one (relatively small) part of a much larger system of distribution, marketing, finance, and production that involves million of impoverished peasants (who grow the drugs), global organized crime groups (who distribute the narcotics and earn most of the profits), hundreds of thousands of poor people who sell the drugs in the United States (one Rand study notes that the average street level dealer makes about ten thousand dollars a year and most of that money goes to support his or her own habit), and large financial institutions (which launder the profits).

It is important to stress that this system came into being long before anyone had ever heard of Timothy Leary, the American psychologist and author who promoted the use of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s. Many aspects of the modern drug trade were created by European imperialism. Between 1797 and 1831, as the British opened new opium-producing regions, Chinese imports of opium skyrocketed from seventy-five tons in 1775, when the British started the Bengal opium monopoly, to 2,555 tons in 1840. Opium became so important that, in 1839 and 1856, Britain went to war against China when the Chinese attempted to end the trade. Thanks to the forced legalization of the drug, about 27 percent of all adult Chinese males smoked opium in 1907, and the country had some 13.5 million addicts consuming thirty-nine thousand tons of opium each year. Meanwhile, the Dutch, French, and Portuguese continued to profit from the trade. They set up state-run opium dens, which encouraged the use of the drug, and they used the profits to help finance their colonial regimes.

The decline of colonialism following the Second World War ended the official state-sponsored drug trade, but the decline of colonialism also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a vicious battle for control of Asia’s rich natural resources. The Cold War created the modern heroin trade, producing a deadly mixture of narcotics, peasant revolts, and political corruption. Opium production expanded exponentially, growing from fifty tons a year in 1948 to well over three thousand tons today. Currently, between 180,000 and 190,000 acres of poppy fields are cultivated in the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, and the enterprise employs well over a million people.

In Latin America, mechanized agribusiness, imported manufacturing goods, and the debt crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s devastated many peasant economies, forcing millions of people to enter the drug trade. In Peru alone, over seventy thousand people moved into the coca-producing regions in the 1980s as the economy shrank by 20 percent, inflation hit 3,399 percent, and real wages dropped by 60 percent. In Colombia, coffee prices fell over 33 percent between 1980 and 1986 as the drug trade boomed and in Bolivia, prices for tin and natural gas plummeted as production of coca leaves skyrocketed. By the mid-1990s, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia were earning billions of dollars from drug exports and about one million people were growing, processing, or smuggling cocaine.

Organized Crime

In the postwar period, the U.S. policy of supporting corrupt anticommunist dictatorships allowed some of the world’s deadliest crime groups to expand into multibillion dollar operations. Just as Al Capone relied on a corrupt Republican party machine to thrive in Chicago during the 1920s, Asian heroin smugglers and drug lords thrived under the protection of U.S.-backed dictators in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Taiwan. As these groups smuggled more heroin into the United States, the number of heroin addicts in America shot up from about thirty thousand in 1945 to about 750,000 in the late 1960s. Similar events occurred throughout Latin America, with similar consequences, and today are taking place in Russia, where criminals now control a quarter of the country’s banks.

U.S. support for corrupt but anticommunist governments in Japan and Europe also aided important crime groups. In Japan, the Yakusa, who helped conservatives crush leftwing labor unrest in the 1950s, established close ties to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which allowed them to operate openly and set up multibillion dollar enterprises. In Italy, an alliance was formed between the Mafia and U.S.-backed Christian Democrats, who were saved from possible defeat by the communists in 1948 by ten million dollars in covert U.S. aid. Eventually, political protection from the Christian Democrats allowed the Mafia to rebuild its power and establish a global organization producing twenty-one billion to twenty-four billion dollars in revenues in 1994.

The most important example of how larger economic changes have benefitted organized crime groups can be found in the area of money laundering. As global trade expanded after the Second World War, major multinational corporations and financial institutions created new and unregulated financial systems to make it easier for them to move goods and services internationally. By the mid-1990s, unregulated offshore banks in Panama, Hong Kong, and the Bahamas managed more than five trillion dollars worth of assets. Today, trillions of dollars worth of currency, stocks, and bonds flow across borders each day, protected by strict secrecy laws, lax government regulations, and virtually nonexistent taxes.

Unfortunately, these same features are attractive to organized crime groups and have allowed them to accumulate almost unimaginable wealth. When Nixon declared his war on the Mafia in 1970, few organized crime leaders were worth more than five or ten million dollars. But, by the mid-1980s, organized crime groups in the United States were bringing in an estimated fifty billion dollars a year and, by the late 1980s, some drug cartel leaders had made it onto Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires. Today, organized crime has so much economic power in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Burma, and Russia that it will be extremely difficult to curb its operations in the future.

Excerpted from: http://monthlyreview.org/2000/11/01/capital-crimes

.

[American Dream]

Peter Dale Scott presents a deeper and much more detailed view of the global drug business- especially as it relates to and includes corruption and other such institutional factors within the U.S. power structure:


Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection


The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11

[American Dream]

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1 ... renti.html


Lockdown America in 22 Minutes

By Christian Parenti


In 2001, Christian Parenti, author of the excellent Lockdown America: Police And Prisons in the Age of Crisis, delivered a talk at the Stop The ACA(American Correctional Association) conference. His talk is about the thirty year explosion in prisons in the United States. A rough transcript is included below the mp3.

[ MP3: Christian Parenti's Lockdown America ]

[ROUGH Transcript]


Thanks for that kind introduction. And thanks for the great talk, Ramona. (To the audience)Thanks for getting up so early.

So what I'm going to talk about just briefly, is to try to get at, is to connect prisons to the larger society we live in, which is capitalist society, and to connect police and state repression in prisons to capitalism as a whole system. As opposed to just critiquing it from the point of view of specific corporate interests. And the reason I think this is important is because we are at a time where there really is a movement afoot internationally and what it's all about is capitalism as a global system and there is a debate going on, which is not always acknowledged as such, as to what is the enemy? Is the enemy nasty corporate practice or is the enemy a whole society that is a specific stage of historical economic development that has, as a system, a logic. And that's you know, what I think. And I think that, I'll give you the punch line first, I think that if we limit our critique to bad corporations we will end up in a cul-de-sac where we will eventually be patting Nike on the head for changing their nasty habits, which they will never do anyway.

So, more specifically, why does America with 5% of the world's population have 25% of the world's prisoners. It wasn't always like that. When this criminal justice crackdown that we're living in now began was really in the late sixties and what was going on in the late sixties? Basically the U.S. system faced a dual crisis, political and economic. the political crisis, you're all familiar with, I'm sure: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, then the anti-war movement adding into that. Also a little known wildcat labor movement that was making things difficult for the captains of industry, massive strikes also making things difficult for the corrupt leadership of the AFL-CIO forcing them to actually act like actual unionists, and of course rioting: massive rioting from 64 on. Every summer huge riots burning down the cities. Black people and white people together, in some situations, shooting back at the police and the national guard. So in other words, the ruling class's worst nightmare.

And in response to this, the police were not really capable of dealing with the situation.

There's also the war in Vietnam that is the background for all of this. You have to remember that the U.S. is bogged down in this hugely expensive, incredibly technically complicated war that by the late-sixties was threatening the power of the U.S. dollar and undermining the whole world financial system and also, after the Tet offensive of '68, it was a war that was falling apart from the U.S. side. U.S. soldiers began fragging their officers, refusing to go into combat, drug abuse and malingering was just a major problem. So all of this needs to be connected. And in response to all of this on the domestic side, the police were not up to the task of basically crushing and containing the rebellion. We often forget that because ultimately they prevail, right? They crush the panthers, they put so many activists in prisons, they shut things down, they were tremendously brutal, broke the law, got away with it, et cetera.

But around 1967-68, it didn't look like that. It looked quite the opposite. The police would apply too much repression and things would blow up into a political storm for the administration. For example, the '68 democratic convention in Chicago: the cops went ape, cracked heads. And it didn't scare people away; it radicalized the movement. It made the U.S. look really really bad. It made it harder for the U.S. to get on the world stage and say "Capitalism and liberal democracy deliver the goods. Not any of these other options people are fighting for. This is The system." It's harder to do that when the entire world is watching cops beat up quaker grandmothers, which is like what they were doing on t.v. in Chicago. Or the cops would apply too little repression, for example watts in '65, they couldn't, Darryl Gates, who later became chief of police, was in charge and he had to coordinate the L.A. Sheriff Department, the Highway Patrol, and the LAPD—three forces that actually hated each other's guts and were competing for turf and all that sort of stuff. Didn't train together properly, didn't have compatible communications equipment, et cetera, et cetera. So first there's confusion, then paralysis, then they withdraw, Boom! that allows this riot, which again put the lie to the idea that everyone was wealthy in the U.S. and that the U.S. had overcome racism and the U.S. was a true democracy. Major problem for the U.S. as a world power.

So in response to the police crisis, Lyndon Johnson, in 1967 proposes legislation, that in '68 passes the house of representatives as D.C. is literally burning for the second time. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated, there is massive riots, there is like smoke billowing over the congress and these guys are designing this piece of legislation which creates the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, this huge federal bureaucracy, which over the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local police to retool and retrain american law enforcement and the judicial system and prisons, to some extent, to deal with the crisis of an incipient revolution which is what they had on their hands at the time.

So the LEAA's intervention is when we begin to see the contours of the criminal justice system as we know it today. That's when cops first get radios in their cars, shoulder radios. That's when they first start using computers. They get body armor. They get helicopters. SWAT teams proliferate. Before the late sixties, there weren't SWAT teams in every major city, and now there are SWAT teams in every small town as well. That's when police have to learn how to read; before that the police didn't have to know how to read. In most states, you needed more training to be a beautician than to be a police officer. Which you might not think is important, but, you know, when you're actually trying to understand the movement and destroy it and think critically about repressing the people, it helps if your troops can read.

So that's the first part of the buildup and it sort of plateaus in the late seventies. The second part of the crisis that was going on parallel to this was economic. The U.S. ended world war 2 as the industrial power on the planet. Europe and Japan, the two main capitalist rivals had been destroyed economically and so the U.S. was, by the end of the war, producing half, or some people say more than half of the world's output and it was in the position to make incredible profits.

U.S. corporations were in their golden era and profit rates had never been as high and have never been as high again and it's because those other two poles of world capitalism were trying to retool and redevelop. Everything from their infrastructure to people's personal goods had been destroyed in the war plus there had been a depression before this. So you had, like, fifteen years of deprivation and pent up economic demand coupled with generous aid from the U.S. and U.S. corporations there to provide the machines, tools, and the commodities at first. And you get this incredible boom throughout the nineteen fifties and the early sixties: the golden era of capitalism. And during that time, the U.S. was able to buy in certain elements of the working class. Profits were so high that American corporations could pay higher taxes, submit to higher regulation, and pay a union wage to a portion of the working class. By the late nineteen sixties, Europe and Japan have recovered. They're now supplying their own markets. They're beginning to import to the U.S. Likewise, many third world or southern countries are becoming newly industrialized countries as economists would put it. You have countries like South Korea, Turkey, Mexico that had just been open markets for western capital now industrializing, producing their own sneakers, toothpaste, tires, whatever.

So finally you have the fundamental crisis that capitalism always returns to: you have a crisis of overproduction. This is one of the central irrationalities of this system. That when things work out the way they're supposed to, you run into trouble. When the economy is going well, you inevitably produce too much stuff and therefore you can't keep producing at the same rate of profitablity, which is the logic, which is the reason that investors invest, that's what keep capitalism going, is profitability. If that doesn't occur, then there's major crisis. Firms go over, millionaires lose their money, investors overreact: there's unemployment and you get sometimes a radical constriction of the economy into a major recession or depression. And then you get massive scarcity caused by overabundance.

So you have, to put it more simply, by the late sixties, basically ninety percent of americans have refrigerators, and you know they didn't coming right of World War Two. They've got cars, they've got blue jeans, and they're not buying them at the same rate. Yet, the world is able to produce more of that stuff than ever before, so it means all this sunk investment in these factories is not profitable. That's a major crisis for the capitalist class that owns the stocks and bonds in factories. So what're they going to do?

Well, the solution in the real, you know, true organic solution to this problem is war. That is one of the functions of war under capitalism. Not that it's thought of as such, but structurally this is how it works: one of the heuristic positive things about war for the capitalist class is that it destroys, not just people, but stuff. You clear away the commodities of capital and then restart a period of growth. It's like burning a field and we are their weeds, unfortunately. So they couldn't just write off capital, destroy Europe's economic base, destroy the U.S. economic base, so where are they going to make up the difference?

Well, from labor. That's the easiest place to go, is to take back the gains that the working class had made over the last thirty years since the depression. Both directly through higher wages and indirectly through what's called the social wage, funding for welfare, increased funding for education, increased funding for the environment. You have to remember that it's under Nixon in the early seventies that you have the creation of the EPA, the creation of OSHA, all of these huge agencies. The Mine Safety Administration created billions and billions of dollars that could go into corporate pockets [that instead] are going to create a better standard of living for people, safer environment, better wages.

So capital tries to attack labor in the Seventies. They try to drive down wages, but it doesn't work, and the ruling class is trying to figure out "well, why is this?" And there's no better illustration than this story: in 1969, General Electric, then the fourth largest employer in the country, one of the top blue chip firms, faced a strike against twelve unions that previusly hadn't gotten along, but they unite, in part driven by their young rank and file, a lot of then coming out of radical movements, coming out of Vietnam, they don't have deference for authority, they're not going to take no for an answer and they don't care. And so the leadership in the union realize they have to strike. They fight GE, they win this massive strike, and wages go up even though, at the same time, unemployment is going up nationally and there's supposively a recession going on. So the honchos at GE get together and they look at "well, what happened here?" and they realize the strikers were not only getting their strike benefits from the union, but they were collecting welfare thanks to a recent liberalization in federal law, and they had collected thirty million dollars in welfare. So from the point of view of general electric, this sort of move towards social democracy in the U.S. was basically state-funded class warfare against them. And so what they had to do to actually get the price of labor down was to destroy this social welfare system that was about containing and controlling the poor which was very much a response to the riots and all that stuff before in the thirties and then in the sixties.

So that had to be destroyed. The consensus around that recalibration of the U.S. economy doesn't really arrive until the late nineteen seventies when Carter appoints Paul Volcker as the chairman of the Federal Reserve and he then ratchets up interest rate from around eight percent to close to sixteen percent which means that people are sometimes paying as high as twenty percent interest. So what that means it's harder to borrow money to go to school, harder to borrow money to open a new factory or a new small business, whatever whatever. Less jobs, the economy constricts, increased unemployment. The idea was to create a crisis: to engineer a crisis so that the working class would be scared and shut up and work harder for less and I'm not being paranoid and reading into this. At one point, congress asked Volcker, the crisis was getting very very bad, Mexico was threatening to bail out on its ninety billion dollar debt and Volcker goes before congress and they say you have to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and he says "Well, I can't do that," because basically, this is his quote, "the standard of living of the average american worker has to decline, I don't think you can get around that," until economic health returns. His colleague in England, where the same policy was being pursued, because this is a world system, Alan Budd, later described the policy this way: "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. What was engineered in Marxist terms," this guy is a Thatcherite conservative, "was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the capitalist's to make high profits ever since." Chief economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher. So that's then the policy of Reagonomics. You have this incredible recession, second worst recession since the great depression. At the same time, you have an assault on labor. You got the, Reagan fires the air traffic controllers, PATCO, a union that had endorsed him: they go on strike, he fires all eleven thousand of them. He starts stacking the national labor relations board with total conservatives who always rule against labor, deregulates laws around health and safety, deregulates laws around investment so it's easier to close a factory and move the machinery to mexico where wages are less, you know the whole story. The effect works.

In 1980, not a single union contract included a wage freeze or wage giveback and none of them really had since the early sixties. By 1982, forty-four percent of all union contracts included wage freezes or outright wage givebacks. So you have, in the eighties, you have the return of mass poverty. I mean there'd always been, you know, mass poverty in the U.S., but you have a new, a renewal of very serious poverty and you have the emmiseration of a whole section of the working class that used to be unionized and fairly middle class and for whom the system essentially worked. So that works, that starts boosting profit rates, profit rates recover in the eighties. You get the stock boom as a response to the real surplus values that's now being extracted from labor because people are producing the same amount of work for less. And you get the boom of the Eighties and it's continued into the Nineties.

But there's a problem that goes with this agenda of shifting, you know, of creating poverty so as to make people work harder for less. You then have all these poor people around, right? And you have cities in major crisis and that's a problem not for any moral reason as far as they're concerned. But because historically the poor, as you all know, have always rebelled, right? In organized ways and in unorganized ways. And they're a problem in other ways. Poor people undermine the legitimacy of the system. It's hard to convince everybody on the planet that everything's okay and this system really works when there are so many people who are hungry, can't get an education, et cetera. Also, the poor scare the monied class, especially when they're poor people of color, so you have a spatial problem. If the poor, you want the poor to intimidate your workers, right? Say you own a hotel, you want the poor. You want homeless people to scare the shit out of your waitstaff, but you don't actually want those homeless people in front of your hotel, cause then they scare away the tourists. And, of course, poor people organize and rebel. So how do you manage this contradiction? You have to have poverty under capitalism, capitalism produces poverty through policy and organically through crisis, but it's always threatened by poverty.

Well, one way was welfare, right? Absorb the poor, co-opt the poor, placate the poor, but that was seen to be aiding workers in general, so that's not an option. Well, what do you do? You switch back to the old-fashioned method of repression, increased demonization. So you get, in the early eighties, a re-engagement with that earlier part of the story of the criminal justice crackdown. and it's very much about containing and controlling the poor. You get the War on Drugs, ramps up in '82, first by changing the rules to favor the prosecution. In '84, there's the first really big federal crime bill that does a whole bunch of stuff. It creates a lot of grants for local law enforcement, local incarceration, but one of the key things it does is create the Asset Forfeiture laws which is a way of recruiting local police into the drug war, because this is really coming down from the top in certain levels. A lot of local police departments, they didn't care if you were smoking marijuana, whatever. In the late seventies, twelve states allowed you to grow and smoke marijuana. So it's hard to get all the cops on board. So you bribe them, right? You say well if you go after the drug dealers, you can take all their cash and their houses and their boats. So you get the assets forfeiture laws which causes this creation of assets forfeitures squads going around taking ninety percent of all the property that they can seize that's drug tainted. Eighty-six, you get another major crime bill that creates new, twenty nine new mandatory minimums, billions of dollars for grants to the locals. Eighty-eight through ninety-two, more of these crime bills. Ninety-two riots, Clinton comes in. More of the same policies culminating in the '94 crime bill where there's thirty billion dollars doled out to the states. Of course, always with strings attached that they must repress poor people more, essentially, right? So you can get the money to build your prison if you have a three-strikes law or truth-in-sentencing law. Which means that in many cases nonviolent offenders on a third or second offense are put away for twenty-five to life. Then you can get extra money from the Feds, etc etc. Ninety-six, effective terrorism anti-death penalty act. Numerous immigration restrictions to militarize the border. And on and on and on, and we're still in that moment of buildup though it is beginning to plateau to some extent and there is this response to it. And now, I mean that brings the story to the moment which you're all familiar and you're all activists and you read a lot about this stuff and I don't need to go into any details, I'm sure you all could probably know more about some of the latest stuff that's happening than I do, but that's sort of a framework to think about this crackdown in a way that's bigger than C.C.A. Because C.C.A. could fail tomorrow, which it might, because it's actually having problems and they're still going to have prisons, you know what I mean? They would like all of this stuff to be profitable, but even if it's not profitable, they're going to have SWAT teams, they're going to have helicopters, and they're going to have prisons. And you're going to pay for them. And it's better for capitalists to make money in the middle, but if they can't, they're going to do it anyway. And that doesn't mean it's not connected to profits, it just means it's not as clearly connected to individual corporate's profits and it's more connected to the profit system as a whole political, economic and cultural system. And anyway, one of the reasons for pointing that out also is because it gives us more avenues of resistance, more ways to enter. And I know you all think like this anyway, so, just a little reminder, but the whole thing is connected so when we're struggling for better education, struggling for the, you know, struggling against the W.T.O., we're also struggling against this whole incarceration, you know incipient police state here in the U.S. So, that's all. Thank you.

[Serious applause.]