Two from Dr. Israel:
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Sat Aug 06, 2011 2:48 pm
by American Dream » Sun Aug 07, 2011 10:31 am
...One of the postmodern ironies is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when, at the level of the "economic infrastructure," the European technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide, at the level of "ideological superstructure," the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the European space itself by the onslaught of the New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises, from the "Western Buddhism" (today's counterpoint to Western Marxism, as opposed to the "Asiatic" Marxism-Leninism) to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of the global capitalism.
Although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain the inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known topic of the "future schock," i.e. of how, today, people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of the technological development and the social changes that accompany it - things simply move too fast, before one can accustom oneself to an invention, this invention is already supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament which definitely work better than the desperate escape into old traditions: instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of the technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination - one should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being... One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliche of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely wrote a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of the Global Capitalism.
And, instead of playing the old game of the aggressive Islamic monotheism against the "gentle" Buddhism, one should rather use the bombing of the Bamiyan status to reflect on a more fundamental deadlock. It is not only that Western Buddhism, this pop-cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference towards the frantic pace of the market competition, is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity - in short, the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism. One should add that it is no longer possible to oppose this Western Buddhism to its "authentic" Oriental version; the case of Japan delivers here the conclusive evidence. Not only do we have today, among the Japanese top managers, the wide-spread "corporate Zen" phenomenon; in the whole of the last 150 years, Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization, with its ethics of discipline and sacrifice, was sustained by the large majority of Zen thinkers - who, today, knows that D.T.Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the America of the 60s, supported in his youth, in Japan of the 30s, the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion. There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of the authentic compassionate insight: the attitude of total immersion into the self-less "now" of the instant Enlightenment, in which all reflexive distance is lost and "I am what I do," as C.S.Lewis put it, in short: in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity, perfectly legitimizes one subordination to the militaristic social machine. Or, to put it in somewhat simplified terms (which, however, just repeat the central ethical lesson of Bhagavadgita): if the external reality is ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, even the most horrifying crimes eventually DO NOT MATTER.
"Western Buddhism" thus perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. Fetish is effectively a kind of envers of the symptom. That is to say, symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed truth erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person: when I "repress" this death, I try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma persists and returns in the symptoms. Say, after my beloved wife dies of the breast cancer, I try to repress this fact by throwing myself into hard work or vivacious social life, but then there is always something which reminds me of her, I cannot escape her ghost haunting me. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, I am able to talk about her most painful moments in a cold and clear way, because I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role of allowing us to cope with the harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly "realists," able to accept the way things effectively are - since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality.
So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality "the way it is"? "Western Buddhism" is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is - what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.
by American Dream » Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:06 am
Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor
Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom
Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology
North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
by American Dream » Sun Aug 07, 2011 1:13 pm
Eco-Capitalism: A Dream within a Dream?
By Jérôme E. Roos On October 31, 2010
A dangerous idea is being planted inside our minds: the inception of an ‘environmentally friendly’ form of consumer capitalism. We need a kick to awaken us from this dream and help us realize that we cannot shop our way out of ecological crisis.
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
~ Edgar Allan Poe
We all know at least some of them – those socially and ecologically conscious ‘Green’ hipsters. Upper middle class yuppies who love to drink fair trade lattes, who buy their organic veggies at the farmers market, and who cannot wait to buy their first Toyota Prius. South Park ran a brilliant sketch on the obnoxious self-righteousness of these smug cosmopolitan liberals. But for all the jokes that can be leveled at the postmodern hypocrisy of this stereotypical iPhone-wielding Green bourgeois, there is a dangerous subconscious assumption that undergirds his mindset and that silently keeps the hyperconsumerist project of credit-fueled capitalism alive: the idea that humanity can shop its way to salvation – averting ecological catastrophe through the conscious purchase of only those excessively priced products that carry a fancy, guilt-reducing, status-enhancing eco-label.
This dangerous idea undergirds the recent adaptation of capitalism in response to rising ecological concern among affluent North-American and West-European urbanites. The greening of the bourgeoisie is leading to the emergence of eco-capitalism, a development naively praised by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins in their best-selling book Natural Capitalism. The expansion of private property and the never-ending quest for capital accumulation remain the predominant dynamics of the eco-capitalist system – only now businessmen have learned that there is actually money to be made catering towards the social and environmental guilt of educated white liberals. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have referred to the inception of today’s triple bottom-line as a classic instance of ‘passive revolution’. For anyone concerned with genuine transformation, recent developments are starting to look more and more like a bad Hollywood movie.
A recent example that comes to mind is Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, Inception, in which a small group of tricksters led by Dom Cobb come together for the greatest mental heist of all time. A set of mysterious technologies allow Cobb and company to infiltrate the dreams of their client’s competitor to perform ‘inception’ – the planting of an idea into the mind of the dreamer. However, to make their ideas stick, Cobb needs to penetrate deep into the subconscious of his victim, requiring him to create and enter a dream inside the dream (and a dream inside that one). Only at this level of the subliminal mind can Cobb and his team of industrial spies truly manipulate their subject’s way of thinking, molding his mind to generate vast profits for their businessman client.
At first sight, this phantasmal story seems to be best reserved for the silver screens of Hollywood. Upon closer inspection, however, Nolan’s storyline shows a haunting correspondence to our present-day predicament of rampant consumer capitalism. Without ever really being aware of it, our half-dreaming minds are being infiltrated every single day by the industrial hitmen of marketing and PR departments from around the world. In this context of carefully manufactured hyperconsumerism, inception is not just a fancy Hollywood idea or a box office goldmine – bizarrely enough, it is the very guiding principle of our present political and economic system.
Someone who was presciently aware of this was Edward Bernays. Bernays is widely considered to be a “pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda.” His 1995 obituary celebrated him as ‘the father of public relations’. His widely influential publications include Propaganda (1928) and The Engineering of Consent (1947). Not coincidentally, Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he made ample use of his uncle’s theories to become “one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious.” As such, Bernays was instrumental in creating the 20th century American ‘dream‘ of consumer capitalism. Bernays was Cobb: the ultimate inception artist.
Applying Freud’s theories to his campaigns for major capitalist firms like Proctor & Gamble, Best Foods, General Electric and Dodge Motors, Bernays laid the very foundations for the field of marketing. Working for the American Tobacco Company in the 1920s, he helped open up a market spanning half the country’s population by successfully breaking the taboo on women smoking in public. Bernays simply hired twenty photo models and sent them to a feminist protest march informing the media that beautiful women would be burning ‘Torches of Freedom’ in the streets of New York. Instantly, Lucky Strikes sales went through the roof.
In the early 1950s, Bernays campaigned for the United Fruit Company – now Chiquita Brands International – and successfully planted the idea in the public mind that Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was really a communist, allowing the U.S. government to ‘legitimately’ overthrow Guzman in a CIA-sponsored coup d’état by the more pro-capitalist dictator Carlos Castillo Armas. By this time, the word propaganda had fallen into disrepair because of its frighteningly effective application by totalitarian spin masters like Goebbels and Stalin. Bernays conceived and adopted the more benevolent-sounding term ‘public relations’, which remains our euphemism for capitalist propaganda today.
Describing his philosophy, Bernays famously wrote that:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Ever since the ‘postmodern revolution’ of the 1960s, the Western world has witnessed the steady rise of ecological concern among the affluent middle classes of the developed world. Rather than posing a threat to the survival of capitalism, as some have argued, the environmentalist critique emanating from the postmaterial counterculture has actually been smoothly integrated into the capitalist project through the embrace of the hollow notions of sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom-line. As a result, in the last couple of years we have witnessed the gradual convergence of these three concepts into an evolving system of eco-capitalism. Nowadays, every single bank, business and baby-boomer entrepreneur claims to be the greenest in town. Being Green has become a fashion statement, an affirmation of status, a sign of moral superiority – and above all, a business asset in a highly competitive marketplace.
As many intellectuals from Thorsten Veblen to Jean Baudrillard have realized over the decades, consumption is not just about meeting physical needs. The act of consumption is essentially social and comparative in nature. It is pursued to provide the individual with a sense of meaning, status and identity. Pierre Bourdieu would have added that the very act of consumption reproduces ‘symbolic violence’ by systematically excluding those who cannot participate in the ‘dream’ for reasons of socio-economic disparity. As such, organic food and hybrid cars have remained narrowly confined to the higher income levels of society, allowing its ‘environmentally friendly’ consumers to revel in a sense of moral superiority and pride. Because its very pursuit has remained the privilege of the higher classes, conscious consumption has hardly made a dent in the Sisyphean quest for sustainability.
The infamous Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Žižek, refers to the system’s new modus operandi as ‘cultural capitalism’. The consumer products that are sold now include in their price not just the commodified value of the actual product, but also the symbolic cost of its very repair and redemption. A Starbucks coffee simultaneously provides you with a caffeine injection, a sense of relaxation and community, and a ticket to heaven, because you charitably over-compensated the poor Guatemalan farmers who harvested your coffee beans.
In other words, while we are happily destroying people’s livelihoods on the one hand through our incessant consumption of entirely unnecessary products, we are on the other hand capable of redeeming ourselves instantly through the conscious consumption of carbon offsets and fair trade price premiums. In order to allow our consumption-driven economic model to be continued in an era of ever-increasing humanitarian and environmental concern, marketing and PR departments have cleverly redefined the act of consumption as the very means by which individuals can display their altruism. It is the ultimate dream within a dream – real life inception at its very best.
We need to wake up from this dream and start seeing through the thinly veiled hypocrisy of postmodern eco-capitalism. Outside the realm of dreams, driving a brand new Toyota Prius has actually been found to cause more carbon emissions than driving this sweet Hummer. This is not a reason to buy an actual Hummer – it is a reason to refrain from unnecessarily buying a brand new car in the first place. After all, at rock bottom, we cannot shop our way out of the ecological crisis, whatever far-fetched ideas Bernays’ heirs may manage to plant into our heads.
Just as in Inception, the deeper we get stuck within our carefully manufactured dream state, the more we will start confusing it with reality. Like Cobb and company, we are already so profoundly anaesthetized that we will probably need a kick to jolt us back into a waking state. If we miss the kick, we could get caught in limbo and be stuck here for the next 100 years – slowly turning into soulless zombies, mindlessly consuming whatever we are made to dream of, and gradually losing touch with the infinitely greater reality that exists outside of the shopping mall and farmers market. We simply cannot afford to let that happen.
Brave Old World
Jacob Foster
Rebecca Lemov. World as Laboratory. Hill and Wang, 2005. 291 pages. ISBN: 0809074648
...John B. Watson,had a far grander vision of explaining everything in terms of ‘stimulus-and-response reactions,’ and dreamed of being able to ‘take a baby and “build” any type of man.’ What Watson did with babies is incomprehensible by today’s standards: ‘How many trials would it take to stop an infant from reaching for a candle flame? Was a six-month-old naturally afraid of living furry animals?’
His macabre baby experiments aside, Watson’s principal contribution to the new ‘engineering’ science of behaviour—what we call behaviourism—was the emphasis on stimulus-and-response. Like the quantum physics flourishing contemporaneously in Europe, behaviourism was a form of positivism, ‘focus[sing] on what we can know scientifically and ignor[ing] the rest.’ Watson formalised the analogy that was to dominate early behaviourist research, between the responses of rats in mazes and the behaviour of men in ‘problem situations.’ The maze was a metaphor for the ‘choices, confusions, blind alleys, and difficulties’ of life itself. The rat—well, the metaphor is obvious.
Watson’s meteoric rise from a poor Southern background to momentary eminence as the dean of American behaviourism provided the template for his successors: the fathers of social engineering were generally ‘classic up-by-the-bootstraps’ American types, and the zeal for social engineering was principally an American one. Watson’s career ended in sexual scandal but his science would live on, both in the business world and the academy.
It would take money to bring the vision of social engineering out of the laboratory and into the real world: big money, like that provided by the mighty Rockefeller foundation. Under the direction of another Chicago man, Beardsley Ruml, a branch of this charitable trust dispensed $50 million to launch American social engineering. As part of this project, Ruml became the first to formalise the social sciences as ‘any field that contributed “a body of substantiated and widely accepted generalizations” about human capacities and behaviour.’ The University of Chicago received considerable support, as did Yale’s new Institute of Human Relations. The goal was simple: to gather empirical data on human behaviour and relations, data that could ultimately be applied to ‘order and control.’
From these theoretical and financial foundations, American social engineers experimented, catalogued, and theorised in circles of ever widening ambition. Under Ruml’s indirect supervision, the infamous Hawthorne experiments revealed that merely monitoring the work process in factories—making the workers aware of their observation—boosted productivity, an eerie confirmation of Bentham’s vision of the Panopticon. But Hawthorne, Chicago, and Ruml were only the beginning. Yale was to take the next steps toward the Brave Old World.
At Yale, Clark Hull speculated grandiosely on the internal stimulus-response mechanisms that govern human behaviour, his goal of building ‘psychic machines’ anticipating the modern mania for artificial intelligence. Following Hull’s lead in peering into the behaviourist black-box, the Yale crew mounted a series of stunning seminars domesticating the ideas of Freud to the behaviourist paradigm. Freud’s subtle theories were boiled down by Neal Miller and John Dollard into the ‘frustration-aggression hypothesis.’ This hypothesis—that when frustrated we vent our anger on other things—has been absorbed by our folk psychology and can be seen at work in the journalistic ‘explanations’ of the recent Muhammad cartoon fracas.
Another Yalie, O. Hobart Mowrer invented an early form of group therapy to address what he saw as a ‘sick society’ around him (now you know who invented that). Mowrer’s group therapy, which emphasised taking responsibility for one’s actions, restored goals, intentions, and freedom to the human subject. It rejected the extreme determinism inherent in the behaviourist program, determinism Mowrer himself had fostered through his early experiments on ‘aversive conditioning.’ Before his group therapy days, Mowrer had discovered that carefully prepared laboratory situations could induce feelings of such extreme anxiety in animals that ‘stimuli which would ordinarily be without visible effect are now capable of eliciting the response.’ In some cases the subject experienced an expected ‘shock’ as almost a relief. But Mowrer was unusual in turning away from stark behaviourism. His colleagues, ignoring his later work on group therapy, planned to drive their determinism even deeper into the psyche.
Of course the promise of the social engineers to regulate human behaviour as precisely as a machine was irresistibly tempting to the military-industrial complex. The love affair culminated in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments. Desperate to understand the terrifying phenomenon of Communist brainwashing in the aftermath of the Korean war, CIA-funded scientists deployed drugs, isolation, and other privations to ‘break down’ experimental subjects and ‘rebuild’ them as desired. Often without consenting, patients were ‘wiped clear of many of their memories, personal habits…and even self-knowledge.’ Watson’s prophecy of a personality made from scratch at last achieved its promise; yet the lives of these new men, built to order, were barely worth living. While far from monsters, the scientists who participated in MK-ULTRA certainly wandered into ethically grey territory, driven by the dream of a perfectly regulated and happy society. The behaviourist paradigm was at last beginning to crack under the strain of its ambition...
by American Dream » Sun Aug 07, 2011 11:55 pm
Continues at: http://struggle.ws/anarchism/writers/an ... tfood.htmlFast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser
Allen Lane
The Penguin Press
This is an excellent book, crammed full of useful (and disgusting) "McNuggets" of information on the whole process of producing "fast food." From the industrialisation of farming, to the monopolisation of food processing, to the standardisation of food consumption throughout whole sections of North America, Schlosser's book exposes the horrors of modern corporate capitalism. He documents the impact of the rise of fast food on almost all aspects of North America, from farming to health, from working practices to landscape, and beyond.
Like the "fast food" economy he dissects, Schlosser's work is far ranging, covering such notable scum bags as Walt Disney (whose father, ironically, was a socialist) and Ray Kroc (the man responsible for making McDonalds what it is now). Schlosser, to his credit, fills his book with interviews with workers involved in every stage of the "fast food" process, including independent farmers and those opposed to corporations advertising in schools and providing teaching materials. He brings a refreshingly human look at an industry that denies in practice individuality and humanity.
The vision of a "fast food" world is truly horrific. It is a world where even the smell and taste of food is mass produced. Standardised food for a standardised society. As he memorably notes, "Millions of... people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu, food that tasted everywhere the same." The true banality of capitalism is exposed in all its multitude of ramifications in Schlosser's book. The Orwellian world of modern corporate capitalism is seen in all its "glory." A world in which the industry group formed to combat Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation is called "Alliance for Workplace Safety" and where the processed food's taste has to have the correct "mouthfeel." It is a world where corporations feed at the public trough and then praise the free market, where firms grow huge and exercise monopolistic power while talking about competition, where executives talk about "the very essence of freedom" and yet their corporation's "first commandant is that only production counts... The employee's duty is to follow orders. Period." For all its talk of liberty, the essence of capitalism is wage slavery, and its most odorous aspects are well documented here.
Fast Food Nation discusses the corporations' perspective on independent farms, opposing any attempt to form co-operatives or associations to improve their bargaining position in the market. As one executive put it, "Our relationship with our growers is a one-on-one contractual relationship" and they "want to see that it remains that way." As with the industrial workforce, the talk of "teamwork" just hides the reality of corporate power - the liberty of doing what you are told, under conditions specified by the powerful. Under such pressure, America's independent farmers are being replaced by industrial farms.
Schlosser places the birth of the "fast food" industry within the 1950s love affair with "progress." Technology would solve all our problems, even the ones it generates itself. The irrationalities here can easily be seen. For example, faced with the serious health problems generated by the industrialisation of meat processing, the meatpacking industry advocated yet more technology to "solve" the problems caused by the existing technology. Rather than focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination, they proposed irradiating food. Of course the firms involved want to replace the word "irradiation" with the phrase "cold pasteurisation"!
Much of what happens today is justified in terms of "progress." Progress is, we are assured, "neutral." As if! Capitalism is a class society, marked by exploitation, oppression and social hierarchies. As such, change within it will reflect the various class conflicts, social hierarchies, power relationships and so on which exist within it as well as the rationales of the economic system (e.g. the drive for profits). Therefore progress can hardly be neutral. This is particularly true of the economy. The development of the industrial structure of a capitalist economy will be based on the fundamental need to maximise the profits and power of the capitalists. It does not follow that because a society which places profits above people has found a specific way of organising production "efficiently", a socialist society will do the same. Anarchists have long been aware that capitalist methods are precisely that and that they may not suit a society which replaces the profit system with human and ecological need as the criteria for decision making. Reading Fast Food Nation brings home this anarchist perspective and provides some modern and well researched documentation to support it. We must never forget that capitalism twists progress in its own imagination.
Fast Food Nation also brings home how alienated the West is from its food. Food production has become increasingly industrialised and concentrated into fewer and fewer big firms. It also raises some important questions for revolutionaries. Clearly, the Leninist idea that socialism simply involves nationalising big business is a fallacy. If a future society is seem in terms of nationalising McDonalds and appropriating the "efficient" mass production generated within capitalism, not only will it not work, it will not inspire anyone to fight for it.
Continues at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc ... -fast.html.
INTRODUCTION
Fast Food Nation
The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
By ERIC SCHLOSSER
Houghton Mifflin
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN SITS on the eastern slope of Colorado’s Front Range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs. From a distance, the mountain appears beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub oak, and ponderosa pine. It looks like the backdrop of an old Hollywood western, just another gorgeous Rocky Mountain vista. And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. One of the nation’s most important military installations lies deep within it, housing units of the North American Aerospace Command, the Air Force Space Command, and the United States Space Command. During the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that America’s air defenses had become vulnerable to sabotage and attack. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top-secret, underground combat operations center. The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteen buildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each; they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. The base is closed to the public, and a heavily armed quick response team guards against intruders. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout and biological weapons. The buildings are mounted on gigantic steel springs to ride out an earthquake or the blast wave of a thermonuclear strike. The hallways and staircases are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low, and there are combination locks on many of the doors. A narrow escape tunnel, entered through a metal hatch, twists and turns its way out of the mountain through solid rock. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vans from one brightly lit cavern to another.
Fifteen hundred people work inside the mountain, maintaining the facility and collecting information from a worldwide network of radars, spy satellites, ground-based sensors, airplanes, and blimps. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center tracks every manmade object that enters North American airspace or that orbits the earth. It is the heart of the nation’s early warning system. It can detect the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that missile has left the launch pad.
This futuristic military base inside a mountain has the capability to be self-sustaining for at least one month. Its generators can produce enough electricity to power a city the size of Tampa, Florida. Its underground reservoirs hold millions of gallons of water; workers sometimes traverse them in rowboats. The complex has its own underground fitness center, a medical clinic, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, a chapel, and a cafeteria. When the men and women stationed at Cheyenne Mountain get tired of the food in the cafeteria, they often send somebody over to the Burger King at Fort Carson, a nearby army base. Or they call Domino’s.
Almost every night, a Domino’s deliveryman winds his way up the lonely Cheyenne Mountain Road, past the ominous DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED signs, past the security checkpoint at the entrance of the base, driving toward the heavily guarded North Portal, tucked behind chain link and barbed wire. Near the spot where the road heads straight into the mountainside, the delivery man drops off his pizzas and collects his tip. And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization - Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.
What We Eat
OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at restaurants and drive-throughs, at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even at hospital cafeterias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music - combined.
Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk in, get on line, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, place your order, hand over a few dollars, watch teenagers in uniforms pushing various buttons, and moments later take hold of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in colored paper and cardboard. The whole experience of buying fast food has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light. It has become a social custom as American as a small, rectangular, hand-held, frozen, and reheated apple pie.
This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both as a commodity and as a metaphor. What people eat (or don’t eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, and technological forces. The early Roman Republic was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves. A nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.
The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years. During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants - mainly at fast food restaurants.
The McDonald’s Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs. In 1968, McDonald’s operated about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about twenty-eight thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald’s. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonald’s is the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes - and the second largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald’s Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald’s spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world’s most famous brand. McDonald’s operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nation’s largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.
In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of the McDonaldization of America. He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on American life. In Eat Your Heart Out (1975), he argued that bigger is not better. Much of what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply. Moreover, the tremendous success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business methods. The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today’s retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.
by blanc » Mon Aug 08, 2011 1:33 am
by American Dream » Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:51 am
blanc wrote:There is a lecture here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
essentially about why there is an epidemic of obesity related disease, which relates the cause of this to the need to establish cheap food for political reasons in the Nixon era.
Corn Refiners Association
Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is the Washington D.C.-based trade association "representing the corn refining (wet milling) industry of the United States".[1]
High-fructose public relations
In June 2008, CRA launched a 18 month, $20 to $30 million public relations and advertising campaign "to convince consumers that HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] isn't the evil it has been made out to be," reported the Wall Street Journal. CRA ran ads in more than a dozen major newspapers -- under the banner "time for a little food for thought" -- stressing that HFCS has the "same natural sweeteners as table sugar and honey." [2]
The campaign, which was created by the Omnicom Group firm DDB, also included television and online ads and "phone and in-person conversations with influential mommy bloggers." A website, http://www.HFCS.com, headlined "The Truth about High Fructose Corn Syrup purports to offer "a sweet surprise" through, among other things, research reports that defend high fructose corn syrup. CRA has been trying to counter the bad publicity around HFCS since 2004, but concluded it "could no longer afford to rely on simple grass-roots marketing tactics such as talking with nutritionists and doctors." Major food and beverage producers, such as Kraft, are now promoting products as HFCS-free. The American Medical Association recently concluded that HFCS "doesn't appear to contribute more to obesity than other caloric sweeteners," but called for "further independent research." [2]
CRA has also established a Scientific Advisory Panel to provide "advice on scientific matters affecting food policy, technology, and health and safety." Enlisting "independent, outside expert advisors" is one tactic corporations use to associate themselves with a body that appears to be official, objective and impartial. Hiring professionals also disabuses them of any impulse to speak out critically of the organization.[3]
Sweet touch
In February 2008, the CRA registered a website[4] -- Sweet-Smarts.com -- which it states was "created to provide factual information about many of the common sweeteners on the market today."[5]
Member companies
Archer Daniels Midland
Cargill
Corn Products International
National Starch
Penford Products
Roquette America
Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas
Sugar Association
The Sugar Association, headquartered in Washington, D.C., states that its mission "is to promote the consumption of sugar as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle through the use of sound science and research."[1] It engages in public relations on behalf of its member companies, encouraging the use of sugar. Member companies consist of sugar producers in the U.S.[2]
Member companies
The Amalgamated Sugar Company
American Crystal Sugar Company
American Sugar Cane League
American Sugar Refining, Inc.
C&H Sugar Company, Inc.
Hawaiian Sugar & Transportation Cooperative
Michigan Sugar Company
Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative
Okeelanta Corporation
Osceola Farms Company
Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Inc.
Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative
Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida
United States Sugar Corporation[3]
Work
In 2003, the sugar industry in the U.S. was threatening to have U.S. government funding of the World Health Organization (WHO) cut off because WHO was saying that no more than 10% of a person's daily calories should come from sugar. CBS News wrote, "An effort to get an increasingly flabby world to stop eating so much sugar ran head-on into the U.S. sugar lobby, which claims the dangers of the sweet stuff are being overstated. People should get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from sugar and other high-calorie sweeteners, the World Health Organization will recommend in a report on Wednesday.
"That guideline is among several in WHO's attempt at a global strategy on health aimed at preventing such threats as heart disease, obesity, cancer and diabetes. It was immediately attacked by the Sugar Association, which represents U.S. growers and refiners." [4]
Sarah Boseley of the Guardian wrote about the threat to cut off funding, "The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby. The association, together with six other big food industry groups, has also written to the US health secretary, Tommy Thompson, asking him to use his influence to get the WHO report withdrawn. The coalition includes the US Council for International Business, comprising more than 300 companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsico. [5]
Advertising
As an example of advertising to increase sales, AG Weekly (Agricultural Weekly) of Twin Falls, Idaho wrote, "The Sugar Association is just finishing a $4 million advertising campaign in nine major urban areas to promote sugar, said Andrew Briscoe, association president and chief executive. The campaign, which received voluntary funding from Amalgamated Sugar Co. in Boise and five other sugar companies, started in September. The effort will run through January in one remaining city." [6]
The sugar industry's image has been tarnished because of concerns in the U.S. about obesity. On March 20, 2005, the U.S. News & World Report wrote about another $3 million to $4 million ad campaign funded by sugar beet growers, "After several decades of declining sales--much of it lost to cheaper high-fructose corn syrup--the industry felt it needed to "reintroduce the consumer to sugar," says Melanie Miller, a spokeswoman for the Sugar Association."
The magazine article talked about the effects of sugar, "A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women who drank soda pop or other sweet drinks were more likely to gain weight and had a higher risk for diabetes than other women. Another study, in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that children who ate some types of sweet foods--candy, soda pop, and sweet bakery goods--were less likely to get all their recommended vitamins than other children. Last year, for the first time, a government committee linked sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity. Then in January, guidelines from the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services made recommendations for sugar consumption stricter than ever before." [7]
Alliance for Better Foods
The Alliance for Better Foods (ABF) was created to promote public acceptance and to oppose labelling of genetically modified foods. It is run by the Washington office of BSMG Worldwide, a full service PR firm whose clients include Monsanto, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris, and numerous other large food, chemical and pharmaceutical corporations.[1]
On its website the group states that it "supports biotechnology as a safe way to provide for a more abundant, nutritious and higher quality food supply. The Alliance encourages fact-based discussion about development in plant biotechnology."[2]
Affiliations
On its website the alliance cryptically states that its "membership represents diverse agriculture and food-related groups, including farmers, processors, distributors, retailers, scientists, food technologists and professionals in other fields dedicated to improving nutrition, protecting the environment and fighting world hunger."[2]
However, in 1999 the group was more open about its supporters with its website stating that its primary public sponsor was the Grocery Manufacturers of America, accompanied by trade associations representing virtually every segment of the food industry (except the organic foods sector):
Agricultural Retailers Association
American Agri-Women
American Bakers Association
American College of Nutrition
American Dietetic Association
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Feed Industry Association
American Frozen Food Institute
American Meat Institute
American Peanut Council
American School Food Service Association
American Soybean Association
Biscuit & Cracker Manufacturers' Association
California Farm Bureau Federation Association
Citizens Against Government Waste
Corn Refiners Association, Inc.
Food Distributors International
Food Marketing Institute
Frozen Potato Products Institute
Grocery Manufacturers of America
Institute of Shortening and Edible Oil
International Dairy Foods Association
International Food Additives Council
International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council of the Americas
Monterey County Farm Bureau
National Association of Manufacturers
National Chicken Council
National Corn Growers Association
National Cotton Council
National Grain & Feed Association
National Pasta Association
National Restaurant Association
National Soft Drink Association
Pet Food Institute
Produce Marketing Association
Snack Food Association
The Sugar Association, Inc.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
U.S. Rice Producers Association
USA Rice Federation
United Soybean Board
United Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Association
United States Council for International Business
Western Growers Association
American Council for Fitness and Nutrition
Formed in January 2003, American Council for Fitness and Nutrition (ACFN) is a non-profit association of more than 80 "food and beverage companies, trade associations and nutrition advocates to work toward comprehensive and achievable solutions to the nation’s obesity epidemic," according to the group's website. ACFN is chaired by Dr. Susan Finn.[1] and "is guided by an Advisory Board of experts in the fields of nutrition, physical activity and behavior change."[1] Its membership roster includes a smattering of health groups, but is mostly comprised of food-industry trade groups, advertising associations, and top food corporations.
School Food Policy
Parents Advocating School Accountability was critical of ACFN's role in the debate on vending machines in schools. Dr. Finn told Knight-Ridder Newspapers' Washington Bureau that junk-food-stocked vending machines in schools play no role in the child obesity crisis without disclosing that ACFN's membership includes Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Cadbury Schweppes, the Snack Food Association, the Sugar Association and the National Soft Drink Association.[2] Several on the ACFN membership list are also members of the newly formed advertising lobbying group, The Alliance for American Advertising.
Members
partial listing from ACFN's website[3]
American Advertising Federation
American Association of Diabetes Educators
American Association of Advertising Agencies
Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation
American Beverage Association
American Dietetic Association
American Meat Institute
Archer Daniels Midland Company
Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers
Association of National Advertisers
Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association
Cadbury Schweppes PLC
Cargill, Inc.
Coca-Cola
ConAgra Foods, Inc.
Corn Refiners Association
Dean Foods Company
Food Marketing Institute
General Mills, Inc.
Grocery Manufacturers of America
Hershey Foods Corporation
H.J. Heinz Company
International Advertising Association
International Bottled Water Association
International Dairy Foods Association
Jack in the Box, Inc.
Juice Products Association
J. M. Smucker Company
Kellogg Company
Kraft Foods, Inc.
McDonald's Corporation
National Association for Health and Fitness
National Confectioners Association
National Council of Chain Restaurants
National Grocers Association
National Organization of Blacks in Dietetics & Nutrition
National Restaurant Association
National Supermarkets Association
National Turkey Association
Nestle USA, Inc.
Ocean Spray
PepsiCo, Inc.
Procter & Gamble Company
Sara Lee Corporation
Snack Food Association
Sugar Association
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
YUM! Brands, Inc.
International Life Sciences Institute
International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) is a Washington-D.C. based lobby group funded by food, chemical and drug companies. Primarily it acts on behalf of the global food manufacturing industry, but it also includes operations involved with agriculture and genetic modification; pesticides and pharmaceuticals; confectionery; and even with such dubious consumables as cigarettes.
On its website the ILSI states that it works "to further the understanding of scientific issues relating to nutrition, food safety, toxicology, risk assessment, and the environment by bringing together scientists from academia, government, and industry." In particular it states that four "key issues" that it addresses are "overweight/obesity", "food biotechnology", "functional foods" and "risk assessment". It also states that "these initiatives are in addition to ongoing efforts to provide new knowledge on: the role of nutrition in human health; the alleviation of worldwide micronutrient deficiency; the safety of food ingredients and additives; and evaluation of water purification methodologies and standards."[1]
However, its private agenda has often been designed to thwart attempts to regulate or reduce public exposure to many dangerous or environmentally-damaging substances. Its private interests are focussed on the financial benefits of its major backers – the larger food companies and their trade associations.
This imbalance led, eventually, to the World Health Organization banning the organisation from direct involvement in WHO (and related agencies) activities.[2]
The ILSI certainly has sponsored genuine research, run real educational workshops around the world, and held many genuine conferences. It has done this both under its own name, and also under the auspices of the seemingly-independent Toxicology Forum which it runs (or perhaps 'guides') in parallel … using the same staff and venues … yet without any obvious connections.[3] It also seems to have extremely close ties to the Society of Toxicologists which also runs conferences essentially similar to the Toxicology Forum.
The Toxicology Forum is three years older than the ILSI (established in 1975) and wider in that it draws its membership from petroleum industries as well as from the ILSI's traditional sources in food, chemical, and drug companies.[4] It's President until recently has been Phillippe Schubik[5] [6][7] of the Eppley Institute at the University of Nebraska, and its Administrative Vice President is ILSI President/Coca-Cola VP Alex Malaspina.
Activities
Today the ILSI specialises in lobbying national and international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). Its membership consists of 400 of 'the world’s leading manufacturers of food and food ingredients, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other consumer products', and the list it publishes includes the names of Burger King, Cargill, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Hershey, Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, Masterfoods (Mars), Monsanto, Nabisco, Nestlé, NutraSweet, Pepsi-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Red Bull and Tate & Lyle. [8]
There are also strong links between the ILSI, alcoholic beverage associations, and confectionery-industry lobby groups such as the US Sugar Association, the UK Sugar Bureau, and the World Sugar Research Organisation (WSRO).[9]
The WSRO and the ILSI both make claims that sugar is good for you, and in 2004 they were charged with paying off the Expert Consultation on Carbohydrates in Human Nutrition, effectively botching the WHO's research on sugar and its health effects. The BBC's Panorama program also says they affected the removal of the WHO's director of the International Obesity Task Force, Derek Yach (who, famously, also ran the Tobacco Free Initiative program at WHO and was an architect of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control).[10]
The US Sugar Association (whose members include Coca-Cola, Pepsi and General Foods) has recently lobbied Congress to withdraw $406 million of WHO funding because of its promotion of low-sugar intake to counter obesity.[11] However the ILSI is even-handed; see how it caved in to G.D.Searle over Nutrasweet trials, and how it rejected two grant proposals in 1985 when a researcher raised questions about the sweetener’s effects on children.[12] The researcher later commented that; "There’s an internal conflict of interest, when a company, which has profit at the bottom line, is charged with finding out the true safety of its product."
The ILSI also lobbies to promote the acceptance of genetic modification of foodstuffs, which is not particularly surprising since both Monsanto and Syngenta are on ILSI's governing board of trustees, and play a substantial role on many committees.[13]
Foundation
Since it was first established in the 1978 by Coca-Cola, Heinz, Kraft, General Foods, and Procter & Gamble, the overall direction of the ILSI has been largely under the control of the Coca-Cola Company, although, as the organisation grew, the control has become more diffuse.[14]
Alex Malaspina, a Vice President at Coca Cola, took on the role of President (between 1978 and 1991) and he set about building a global empire. Coca-Cola also provided the initial secretarial staff, and it used the organisation as a way to build self-funding coalitions of like-minded corporation to further its aims of deregulation and small-government.[15][16]
ILSI Europe was founded in 1986, and other regional operations followed. Now the organisation has branches in Argentina, Australasia, Brazil, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, North Africa and the Gulf Region, North America, North Andean, South Africa, South Andean, Southeast Asia, Thailand and China.[17]
From 1979 it also published the scientific journal Nutrition Review in English, while each national organisation also publishes scientific monographs and journals in its own language.
The ILSI has also cooperated with, and sometimes absorbed, other closely-related industry associations.[18] However it has always been keen to preserve a 'clean' image by not openly associating with industries like that of tobacco. However food and tobacco are inextricably linked through their share of retail outlets as well as group ownership structures.
In the USA, the food and tobacco industries were dominated by multi-industry corporate structures such as that of Kraft General Foods / Millers Beer / Philip Morris; and Nabisco / Kentucky Fried Chicken / Del Monte / RJ Reynolds Tobacco. In Australia, AMATIL held the Coca Cola franchise (and had other foods interests), while still controlling HD Wills & Company, the local manufacturer and distributor of British American Tobacco (BAT) cigarettes. The structural linkage of soft-drink, alcoholic beverage, and tobacco companies is common in other countries also.
Hidden links
During the 1980s, many food-related companies felt threatened by the emerging public health, nutrition and environmental concerns, and they were reluctant to associate with the pariah tobacco industry. So Kraft and Nabisco became the corporate sponsors of the ILSI Research Foundation, not Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds Tobacco.[19] However the ILSI continued to provide special services to the cigarette companies behind the scene.[20]
More recently, the interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations. It is notable that they generally employ the same lawyers, lobbyists and PR companies, and use essentially the same tactics.[21]
It should also be remembered that tobacco and the food/beverage industries shared a concern with additives, preservatives, flavourings and pesticide residues. There is also a shared determination to ensure that the threat of such regulations can't impact their bottom line.
However, by keeping tobacco publicly at arms length (thus preserving its apparent virginal purity), the ILSI was able to convince US government health organisations and those of the United Nations, to accept it as a genuine science-based (almost philanthropic) association intent only on advancing the science of nutrition and food technology. However, sometimes the potential exposure of the real behind-the-scene links to tobacco became, itself, a risk-factor to their status. (See page 4 Philip Morris report – Jim Tozzi – a tobacco lobbyist.[22]
Maintaining distance from the tobacco industry while taking its money was comparatively easy for ILSI to do for the first years, since a large part of their early activities were genuine, and most of its scientist-members were well-intentioned. As a result, they were soon widely accepted around the world in government regulatory and WHO conferences and other activities.[23]
Member companies
The ILSI has over 400 companies as members, but institute's main member companies (those that can influence directions) include:
Bayer AG
Coca-Cola
Dow Agrosciences/Dow Chemical
DuPont
ExxonMobil
General Mills
Hershey Foods
Kellogg
Kraft
McDonald's
Merck & Co.
Monsanto
Nestle
Novartis
PepsiCo
Pfizer
Procter & Gamble
by American Dream » Mon Aug 08, 2011 1:31 pm
by American Dream » Mon Aug 08, 2011 2:07 pm
by American Dream » Mon Aug 08, 2011 4:34 pm
Beyond the Global Brain Drain: The Global Care Drain
By Sonya Michel | Wednesday, October 20, 2010
What problems arise from women in
developing countries emigrating to the West
to work in the care industry?
A new kind of stress is being put on developing societies: Women are leaving their families behind to work in the care industry in rich countries, where they can earn more money for their services. The Wilson Center's Sonya Michel outlines the problems this "care drain" can pose to societies — and explores what should be done to curb the trend.
The “brain drain” phenomenon is one that is well-known to observers of global trends. The migration of educated, skilled and professional workers from their countries of origin (which often trained them) in the developing world to more developed societies where they can earn much greater salaries and enjoy a higher standard of living has been going on for decades.
A trend that is less well known, but becoming increasingly visible and equally troubling, is the “care drain” — the migration of women from developing countries, where they perform the bulk of care work unpaid, to the developed world, where they can do the same work for pay.
Popular “mother-blaming” discourses have been spreading, which attribute all manner of youthful (and sometimes adult) misbehavior to women’s absence.
The care of children, frail elders, the disabled and chronically ill has emerged as a key policy challenge around the globe. Rising rates of female labor force participation, combined with declining birth rates and rapidly aging societies, have disrupted conventional divisions of labor that assigned care work primarily to women.
Instead, care is increasingly being provided through either public institutions or the market. But who is going to take up this kind of employment?
Care work, or “intimate labor,” as it is aptly called, involves hands-on physical ministrations. It often requires workers to live in the homes of their employers and tends to be conflated with domestic service. Widely regarded as unskilled (though many in the field would dispute this), it is usually low-paid and often, because it is performed in isolation, can become a site for the exploitation and abuse of workers.
In other words, it falls into what labor market analysts refer to as the “3D” category (dirty, difficult and dangerous) — work that is widely avoided by native-born workers in developed societies. But women from developing countries where local employment is scarce see it as an opportunity — and for more than a decade they have been migrating by the tens of thousands each year to find jobs in care work in developed economies.
The resulting transnational labor market thus drains resources from poorer countries and concentrates them in wealthier ones, producing a worldwide redistribution — or maldistribution — of women’s caring labor power.
Today’s migrants are not primarily the young single women who traveled from the old world to the new to become domestic servants throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, these are married women, often middle-aged, who leave behind significant family responsibilities of their own. In their view, however, these women are not abandoning their responsibilities but fulfilling them in a different way.
Rising rates of female labor force participation, combined with declining birth rates and rapidly aging societies, have disrupted conventional divisions of labor that assigned care work primarily to women.
By earning money abroad and sending it back in the form of remittances, they can pay for children’s school fees, elders’ medical care, housing improvements and a variety of material comforts, as well as help to start new businesses. By shifting foreign currency from the developed to the developing world, they can ensure a better future for their families.
Yet the accompanying shift in labor power is not unproblematic.
When other relatives are not available to take up the responsibilities of absent mothers, wives, daughters and daughters-in-law (in most places men are notoriously unwilling to perform what they regard as “women’s work”), migrants must use some of their earnings to hire other women to care for their families, creating what sociologist Rhacel Parreñas has called a “global care chain.”
Although the sharp differences in labor costs between developed and developing countries make such arrangements cost-effective, migrant women still find it difficult to manage them from afar, and many spend hours each day on cellphones and laptops trying to smooth domestic disputes or comfort lonely children and spouses.
Skyping between migrants and their families has become so popular that sympathetic NGOs have set up dozens of facilities where they can have free access to computers expressly for this purpose.
Migrants who find work not so far from home can engage in “caring across borders,” participating in job-sharing schemes with other female relatives or friends that allow them to perform paid care work abroad for two or three weeks and return home for another two or three weeks to care for their families — unpaid, of course.
These rotations allow for continuity of care on both sides of the border while bringing migrant workers the financial gains they seek. Relatively inexpensive transportation costs and flexible immigration laws help make them feasible.
Widely regarded as unskilled, "intimate labor" is usually low-paid and often, because it is performed in isolation, can become a site for the exploitation and abuse of workers.
The practice has become quite common within the European Union, where the aging populations of the western members create a demand for care work that is readily met by the younger, often skilled but otherwise unemployed populations of the newly admitted eastern nations.
Elsewhere, however, long distances, strict immigration laws and high transportation costs prevent migrant women from visiting their families freely, and years often go by without face-to-face contact.
Here I am in Canada
Bringing up someone else's child
While someone else
And me, in absentee
Bring up my own!
-Lillian Allen
by norton ash » Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:03 pm
Apologies for the goofy werewolf guy but this is the only version of the song I could find!
by American Dream » Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:12 pm
norton ash wrote:... more likely just Lillian's music pasted over the silly video by a Canadian fan.
by norton ash » Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:28 pm
Other characters on the show included the following. All were played by Billy Van unless noted.
The Wolfman - A werewolf disk jockey at radio station EECH who spun rock and roll records while doing a Wolfman Jack impression. The Wolfman's theme song was Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher". The segment featured then-current hit singles by the Rolling Stones, Sly and the Family Stone, Three Dog Night or other Top 40 radio stars of the time (which were referred to as ‘golden oldies’ in order to avoid dating the program), with The Wolfman and Igor dancing in silhouette against a psychedelic background. Owing to licensing issues, the musical numbers are no longer shown on reruns.
The psychedelic background was 'discovered' by the CHCH crew who revealed it to Markowitz, who put it in the show. The effect was video feedback produced by pointing the studio video camera at a studio video monitor. Markowitz added the blue screen and another feedback camera to create the layered effect.
by American Dream » Tue Aug 09, 2011 11:18 am
...What is distinctive about this period in history is that the United States has become the most "consumer-oriented society in the world." Kids and teens, because of their value as consumers and their ability to influence spending, are not only at "the epicenter of American consumer culture," but are also the major targets of those powerful marketing and financial forces that service big corporations and the corporate state.(6) In a world in which products far outnumber shoppers, youth have been unearthed not simply as another expansive and profitable market, but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism - even as it implodes. Erased as future citizens of a democracy, kids are now constructed as consuming and saleable objects. Gilded Age corporations, however devalued, and their army of marketers, psychologists and advertising executives now engage in what Susan Linn calls a "hostile takeover of childhood,"(7) poised to take advantage of the economic power wielded by kids and teens. With spending power increasing to match that of adults, the children's market has greatly expanded in the last few decades, in terms of both direct spending by kids and their influence on parental acquisitions. While figures on direct spending by kids differ, Benjamin Barber claims that "in 2000, there were 31 million American kids between twelve and nineteen already controlling 155 billion consumer dollars. Just four years later, there were 33.5 million kids controlling $169 billion, or roughly $91 per week per kid."(8) Schor argues that "children age four to twelve made ... $30.0 billion" in purchases in 2002, while kids aged twelve to nineteen "accounted for $170 billion of personal spending."(9) Molnar and Boninger cite figures indicating that pre-teens and teenagers command "$200 billion in spending power."(10) Young people are attractive to corporations because they are big spenders, but that is not the only reason. They also exert a powerful influence on parental spending, offering up a market in which, according to Anap Shah, "Children (under 12) and teens influence parental purchases totaling over ... $670 billion a year."(11)
One measure of the corporate assault on kids can be seen in the reach, acceleration and effectiveness of a marketing and advertising juggernaut that attempts to turn kids into consumers and childhood into a saleable commodity. Every child, regardless of how young, is now a potential consumer ripe for being commodified and immersed in a commercial culture defined by brands. According to Lawrence Grossberg, children are introduced to the world of logos, advertising and the "mattering maps" of consumerism long before they can speak: "Capitalism targets kids as soon as they are old enough to watch commercials, even though they may not be old enough to distinguish programming from commercials or to recognize the effects of branding and product placement."(12) In fact, American children from birth to adulthood are exposed to a consumer blitz of advertising, marketing, educating and entertaining that has no historical precedent. There is even a market for videos for toddlers as young as four months old. One such baby video called Baby Gourmet alleges to "provide a multi-sensory experience for children designed to introduce little ones to beautiful fruits and vegetables ... in a gentle and amusing way that stimulates both the left and right hemispheres."(13) This would be humorous if Madison Avenue were not dead serious in its attempts to sell this type of hype - along with other baby videos such as Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, Sesame Street Baby, and Disney's Winnie the Pooh Baby - to parents eager to provide their children with every conceivable advantage over the rest. Not surprisingly, this is part of a growing $4.8 billion market aimed at the youngest children.(14) Schor captures perfectly the omnipotence of this machinery of consumerism as it envelops the lives of very young children:
At age one, she's watching Teletubbies and eating the food of its "promo partners" Burger King and McDonald's. Kids can recognize logos by eighteen months, and before reaching their second birthday, they're asking for products by brand name. By three or three and a half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities, for example, that they're cool, or strong, or smart. Even before starting school, the likelihood of having a television in their bedroom is 25 percent, and their viewing time is just over two hours a day. Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke 200 brands. And he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented number of possessions, beginning with an average of seventy new toys a year.(15)
Complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, with a politics defined by market power, the American public offers little resistance to children's culture being expropriated and colonized by Madison Avenue advertisers. Eager to enthral kids with invented fears and lacks, these advertisers also entice them with equally unimagined new desires, to prod them into spending money or to influence their parents to spend it in order to fill corporate coffers. Every child is vulnerable to the many advertisers who diversify markets through various niches, one of which is based on age. For example, the DVD industry sees toddlers as a lucrative market. Toy manufacturers now target children from birth to ten years of age. Children aged eight to twelve constitute a tween market and teens an additional one. Children visit stores and malls long before they enter elementary school, and children as young as eight years old make visits to malls without adults. Disney, Nickelodeon and other mega companies now provide web sites such as "Pirates of the Caribbean" for children under ten years of age, luring them into a virtual world of potential consumers that reached 8.2 million in 2007, while it is predicted that this electronic mall will include 20 million children by 2011.(16 ) Moreover, as Brook Barnes points out in The New York Times, these electronic malls are hardly being used either as innocent entertainment or for educational purposes. On the contrary, she states, "Media conglomerates in particular think these sites - part online role-playing game and part social scene - can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers." (17) But there is more at stake here than making money and promoting brand loyalty among young children: there is also the construction of particular modes of subjectivity, identification and agency.
Some of these identities are on full display in advertising aimed at young girls. Market strategists are increasingly using sexually charged images to sell commodities, often representing the fantasies of an adult version of sexuality. For instance, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing franchise for young people, has earned a reputation for its risque catalogues filled with promotional ads of scantily clad kids and its over-the-top sexual advice columns for teens and preteens; one catalogue featured an ad for thongs for ten-year-olds with the words "eye candy" and "wink wink" written on them.(18) Another clothing store sold underwear geared toward teens with "Who needs Credit Cards ...?" written across the crotch.(19) Children as young as six years old are being sold lacy underwear, push-up bras and "date night accessories" for their various doll collections. In 2006, the Tesco department store chain sold a pole dancing kit designed for young girls to unleash the sex kitten inside . Encouraging five- to ten-year-old children to model themselves after sex workers suggests the degree to which matters of ethics and propriety have been decoupled from the world of marketing and advertising, even when the target audience is young children. The representational politics at work in these marketing and advertising strategies connect children's bodies to a reductive notion of sexuality, pleasure and commodification, while depicting children's sexuality and bodies as nothing more than objects for voyeuristic adult consumption and crude financial profit.
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