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Category: Health/Medical

  • When Healthy People are Murdered and the Terminally Ill are Prevented from Dying

    In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
    — Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, January 1982

    I recently lost someone dear to me and watched as they died in almost unrelenting agony over a period of three weeks. As American health care is dominated by sociopaths and a pathological corporate culture antithetical to bioethics, it became apparent to me that we would have to fight for the patient, which meant in this case, fight for their right to die with a modicum of comfort and dignity.

    As these unsavory events were playing out, I ruminated on the macabre absurdity of what was unfolding: here was a man in his 80s dying from multiple metastatic cancers, who had battled these illnesses bravely for about a decade but was clearly reaching the end as he had become bedbound and could no longer feed himself, but whose oncologist was champing at the bit to charge once more into battle with toxic drugs, while simultaneously a US-backed genocide in Gaza and a US-orchestrated war in Ukraine were bringing about the slaughter of enormous numbers of mostly young healthy people.

    According to a recent report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the US-backed Zionist war machine, over 15,000 of which have been children, with two million rendered internally displaced. (The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor number of dead includes those buried under the rubble and assumed deceased). Regarding the cataclysmic conflict in Eastern Europe, former chief of the Polish General Staff, Rajmund Andrzejczak, said “I believe that [Ukraine’s actual] losses should be counted in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands;” while former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko has stated that Ukraine is incurring a staggering 30,000 casualties a month.

    This depraved ideation underscores the logic of capitalism, where the fit are sent to the abattoir while those in the throes of terrible suffering from the latter stages of terminal illness regularly have their misery drawn out for as long as possible to fuel the egos of narcissistic physicians and to feed the medical-industrial complex’s insatiable lust for profits.

    In chess the term zugzwang (from the German, meaning “compulsion to move”) refers to a point in the game where it is one’s turn and yet all options bring the player closer to checkmate. I watched this process unfold recently at an elite Manhattan teaching hospital. Keeping the patient alive and making them comfortable had come into conflict and could no longer coexist. The patient, their family, and their physician had arrived at a fateful crossroads.

    Most rational people would argue that it is preferable to choose hospice at this stage, as keeping the patient alive has become synonymous with imposing growing forms of biomedical torture, which begs the following question: once this tipping point has been reached, is it possible to prolong “life” or is it merely possible to prolong the process of dying?

    American doctors are often trained to drag out a person’s demise without regard for the ethical implications, and this is because their training is profoundly influenced by for-profit hospitals, private health insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry which care about one thing and one thing only: money. It is relatively easy for the medical-industrial complex to drag out a person’s passing due to the interconnectedness of a fateful pentagon: powerful corporate entities that exist for no other reason than to maximize the greatest possible profit, ambitious and myopic doctors who have neither autonomy nor an understanding of the bioethical ramifications of their actions, a technocracy which demands obeisance and blind obedience to “the experts,” a culture which has deified science and inculcated people with the notion that science can achieve anything – even immortality; and a dying, frightened, and increasingly malleable patient whose lucidity and ability to give informed consent are waning.

    Consequently, there is no “wave the white flag class” in American medical schools. Why let someone die without being poked and prodded every ten minutes, when wretchedness can be protracted – and with this more profit-making? This sordid reality underscores the fact that a privatized health care system doesn’t regard patients as human beings but as commodities such as oil, wheat, or cattle which offer opportunities for extraction and ruthless exploitation.

    In a system that prioritized empathy and compassion medical students and residents would receive a significant amount of training in helping them to identify situations where further medical interventions are likely to be harmful. It is also critical that patients be asked when coherent and not in pain what their wishes are regarding end-of-life care. Only a minuscule fraction will instruct their physician to continue to keep them alive once zugzwang has been reached, even if this means ending up on a ventilator or incapacitated for a prolonged period of time. Regrettably, many oncologists are not interested in obtaining their patients’ views on the subject.

    Just as the Banderite junta and its Western owners are incessantly prattling on about how some new Wunderwaffe will magically turn the tide of the war, oncologists invariably have some new drug up their sleeve, even as death is clearly hovering inexorably. No veterinarian would continue to keep a horse or a dog alive if the animal were in terrible pain and there were no means available to alleviate that pain, and yet this is par for the course in American medicine.

    It is the oncologist’s duty to discuss the pros and cons of hospice versus continuing to hammer away with powerful cancer medicines when death is encroaching and defeat inevitable. Failure to do so constitutes a violation of bodily autonomy and the oath to do no harm. Going once more unto the breach one time too many can have devastating consequences and trap the patient in a purgatorial state where, like Prometheus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, suffering is dragged on interminably – a nightmare without end.

    Following John of Gaunt’s blistering chastisement of Richard in act 2, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Richard II (“Landlord of England art thou now, not king”), noble Gaunt asks his attendants to “Convey me to my bed, then to my grave.” Scarcely a minute later Northumberland emerges to inform the king that Gaunt is no more. If Gaunt died in America today, months or even years would likely pass before Northumberland would have emerged saying “His tongue is now a stringless instrument,” together with a fistful of medical bills totaling hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. The scientific prowess inherent in this capability is undoubtedly impressive, but does that make it ethical?

    Common sense dictates that it is preferable to die over a period of weeks rather than months, and that it is preferable to pass away in a relatively demedicalized setting. Every cancer journey ends in remission or death. Once it is clear that the former is unattainable, the question arises as to what kind of death the patient will have.

    Long regarded as one of the great generals of the 19th century, Robert E. Lee battled until he realized that the Confederate military had been degraded to the point where further resistance would only lead to needless suffering and death. He surrendered. Pushing a vulnerable patient to fight till one’s dying breath denies a human being the right to a tranquil resolution of their life, and as transpired with Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War can lead to apocalyptic destruction. Writing in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande warns of the deplorable state of end-of-life care in America:

    The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

    Understanding when a cancer patient is in a zugzwang that can only be resolved by comfort care allows a human being to die surrounded by loved ones rather than under relentless medical bombardment by strangers in an ICU or pre-ICU — a lonely, harrowing, and terrifying death.

    Good doctors know that prolonging dying is seldom a victory just as surrendering to death when the patient has reached a severely debilitated state is seldom defeat. Not all medical problems can be solved through aggressive medical interventions, just as not all geopolitical problems can be solved through war and aggressive foreign policy meddling. Indeed, the wise oncologist knows that the most difficult battles can only be fought and won by sheathing one’s blade and letting the patient drift peacefully, silently, and restfully out to sea.

    The post When Healthy People are Murdered and the Terminally Ill are Prevented from Dying first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • GM Golden Rice Stopped

    On 19 April 2024, the Philippines Supreme Court issued a cease-and-desist order on the commercial propagation of genetically modified (GM) Golden Rice and GM eggplant in the country.

    The Stop Golden Rice Network says that the court decision is a victory for farmers and consumers everywhere as the decision goes beyond Golden Rice and insecticidal eggplant and covers “any application for contained use, field testing, direct use as food or feed or processing, commercial propagation, and importation of GMOs.”

    The court recognised that government agencies and other proponents of GM Golden Rice and GM eggplant “failed to submit proof of safety and compliance with all legal requirements.” The order remains indefinite until GMO proponents can fulfil all the mandated steps and provide concrete evidence that these GMOs are indeed safe.

    A network of farmers, consumers and civil society organisations, Stop Golden Rice emphasises the need to address hunger and malnutrition through securing small farmers’ control over resources such as seed, appropriate technologies, water and land.

    The campaign group says:

    We believe that GM crops are primarily pushed by global monopoly capitalists in food and agriculture… there is already irrevocable evidence of the failure of GM crops and how it has contributed to further indebtedness, crop failures, hunger and loss of biodiversity.

    It states that the court’s decision shows that ordinary people can prevail in the face of corporate power.

    The story of Golden Rice

    Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk of infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.

    The agritech industry has long argued that Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Lobbyists say that Golden Rice, developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency and another 350,000 who go blind.

    Such claims, however, are based more on spin than reality, and, over the years, the interests behind Golden Rice have wasted no time in attacking anyone who questioned it.

    As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, the now disgraced Owen Paterson claimed that opponents of GM were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”. He called for the rapid roll-out of vitamin A-enhanced rice to help prevent the cause of up to a third of the world’s child deaths. He claimed:

    It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology. I feel really strongly about it. I think what they do is absolutely wicked.

    On Twitter, The Observer’s Nick Cohen chimed in with his support by tweeting:

    There is no greater example of ignorant Western privilege causing needless misery than the campaign against genetically modified golden rice.

    The rhetoric took the well-worn cynically devised PR line that anti-GM activists and environmentalists are little more than privileged, affluent people residing in rich countries and are denying the poor the supposed benefits of GM crops.

    Despite these smears and emotional blackmail, in a 2016 article in the journal Agriculture & Human Values Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover found little evidence that activists were to blame for Golden Rice’s unfulfilled promises.

    Researchers still had problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers. It was questionable whether the beta carotene in Golden Rice could even be converted to vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children. There had also been little research on how well the beta carotene in Golden Rice would hold up when stored for long periods between harvest seasons or when cooked using traditional methods common in remote rural locations.

    In the meantime, Glenn Stone noted that, as the development of Golden Rice crept along, the Philippines had managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.

    So, whose interests were really being served in the push for Golden Rice?

    In 2011, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with a background in insect ecology and pest management, answered this question:

    An elite, so-called Humanitarian Board where Syngenta sits – along with the inventors of Golden Rice, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and public relations and marketing experts, among a handful of others. Not a single farmer, indigenous person or even an ecologist or sociologist to assess the huge political, social and ecological implications of this massive experiment. And the leader of IRRI’s Golden Rice project is none other than Gerald Barry, previously Director of Research at Monsanto.

    Sarojeni V Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific, called on the donors and scientists involved to wake up and do the right thing:

    Golden Rice is really a ‘Trojan horse’; a public relations stunt pulled by the agribusiness corporations to garner acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) crops and food… money and efforts would be better spent on restoring natural and agricultural biodiversity rather than destroying it by promoting monoculture plantations and GE food crops.

    To tackle disease, malnutrition and poverty, you have to first understand the underlying causes – or indeed want to understand them.

    Renowned academic Walden Bello notes that the complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past few decades is due to ‘structural adjustment’ that included the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented production.

    And that restructuring of the agrarian economy is something touched on by Claire Robinson of GMWatch who notes that leafy green vegetables used to be grown in backyards as well as in rice (paddy) fields on the banks between the flooded ditches in which the rice grew.

    Ditches also contained fish, which ate pests. People thus had access to rice, green leafy veg and fish – a balanced diet that gave them a healthy mix of nutrients, including plenty of beta-carotene.

    But indigenous crops and farming systems have been replaced by monocultures dependent on chemical inputs. Green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilisers were introduced, and the fish could not live in the resulting chemically contaminated water. Moreover, decreased access to land meant that many people no longer had backyards containing leafy green veg.

    Blindness in developing countries could have been eradicated years ago if only the money, research and publicity put into Golden Rice over the last 20 years had gone into proven ways of addressing Vitamin A deficiency. However, instead of pursuing genuine solutions, what we have seen is pro-GM spin in an attempt to close down debate.

    Technology and development

    If the discussion so far tells us anything, it is that technology is not neutral. It is developed and promoted by people who want to cement their control over a sector and stand to financially gain from its rollout.

    All too often, politicians, corporations and the media equate new technology with ‘progress’. And those who question it, as we see with GMOs, are called Luddites or anti-science in order to prevent proper debate over the social, economic and ethical concerns of rolling out a given technology.

    Take the Green Revolution, for instance. There was nothing progressive, inevitable or neutral about its seed, chemical and related infrastructure technology.

    Despite it being rolled out under the banner of ‘progress’, it underperformed, was exploitative and has had devastating social, ecological and environmental impacts (see the writings of Prof. Glenn Stone, Vandana Shiva and Bhaskar Save). It served US geopolitical, financial and agribusiness interests and prioritised urban-industrial expansion at the expense of rural communities and a more diverse, healthy and nutrient-sufficient agriculture.

    But the Green Revolution became integral to the ‘development’ agenda.

    In a recent article on the Winter Oak website, Paul Cudenec says that ‘development’:

    … is the destruction of nature, now seen as a mere resource to be used for development or as an empty undeveloped space in which development could, should and, ultimately, must take place. It is the destruction of natural human communities, whose self-sufficiency gets in the way of the advance of development, and of authentic human culture and traditional values, which are incompatible with the dogma and domination of development.

    Cudenec argues that those behind ‘development’ have been destroying everything of real value in our natural world and our human societies in the pursuit of personal wealth and power. Moreover, they have concealed this crime behind all the positive-sounding rhetoric associated with development on every level.

    Nowhere is this more apparent than in India.

    The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, global agribusiness and financial capital are working to corporatise India’s agriculture sector. This ‘structural adjustment’ policy and process involves displacing the current food production system with contract farming and an industrial model of agriculture and food retail that serves the above interests.

    The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and export-oriented industrial farming.

    The demand is that India sacrifice its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. This is all passed off as ‘development’.

    It involves the state facilitating the enrichment of a wealthy elite and privileging a certain model of social and economic development based on urban sprawl, centralised power and dependency on global finance, corporations, markets and supply chains. All legitimised under the banners of innovation, technological progress and ‘development’.

    There are other pathways that humanity can take. Anthropologist Felix Padel and researcher Malvika Gupta offer some insights (based on their work with India’s Adivasi communities) into what the solutions or alternatives to ‘development’ might look like:

    Democracy as consensus politics rather than the Western model of liberal democracy that perpetuates division and corruption behind the scenes; exchange labour rather than the ruthless, anti-life logic of ‘the market’; law as reconciliation rather than judgements that depend on exorbitant legal fees and divide people into winners and losers… and learning as something to be shared, not competed over.

    However, we see more ‘development’ being proposed: more rural population displacement and human dislocation, more mining, port and other big infrastructure developments and the further entrenchment of corporate interests and their projects.

    While many have a different vision for the future, self-interest and consumerism underpinned by economic neoliberal dogma continue to seduce the masses into accepting the prevailing ‘development’ agenda.

    Corporate industrial agriculture is integral to that agenda. A model that took hold half a century ago in the Western nations and which has resulted in nutrient-deficient food, narrower diets, the massive use of agrochemicals, food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a wide range of chemical additives, the eradication of many smallholder farmers, spiralling rates of ill health, degraded soil and contaminated and depleted water supplies.

    That’s ‘progress’? Well, agribusiness interests aside, perhaps so for the many private health clinics that have sprung up in India in recent years.

    The introduction of GMOs represents a further entrenchment of the prevailing ‘development’ agenda.

    The decision by the Philippines Supreme Court called out government agencies and those behind the Golden Rice agenda for key failures. This is important for India, whose Supreme Court is about to decide on whether to sanction the commercial cultivation of GM mustard. It would be India’s first GM food crop (of which there are many more in the pipeline).

    Will India’s Supreme Court come down on the side of reason and stop GM mustard on the basis of there being no need for GMOs in Indian agriculture and the well-documented fraud and regulatory delinquency that has surrounded this issue for many years?

    That remains to be seen.

    The post GM Golden Rice Stopped first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ambulances or Tanks?

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  • Kategate: From Conspiracy to Contrition Extraction

    Cancer is a stomping bugger of a disease.  It seeks the worm-ridden end, a thief finding its way into your body unasked and willingly helping itself.  This cellular mass army will, in a most tribal way, make off with your remains chance permitting. So, it’s understandable that people speak about it.  Blog, discuss, worry, grieve and gather in the digital house square.  But not all grief and its content are ever the same.

    The recent obsession with Catherine, the Princess of Wales, who many still see as Kate Middleton, is a fitful reminder that no one’s business is seemingly everybody’s, especially when it comes to the royals.  When she had abdominal surgery in mid-January, her absence from public life prompted a feverish, fitful obsession, something described with a certain deliciousness by Helen Lewis as “QAnon for White Moms”.

    Social media wags and fanatics, evidently finding this royal retreat into silence infuriating, brainstormed their way to the most drearily absurd notions.  If true, virtually none would have made the slightest difference in the war ravaged, climate distempered world.  Had Catherine received a Brazilian butt lift?  Had Prince William made a dash from his marital vows to shack up with the Marchioness of Cholmondeley?

    Some of this was aided by an overly keen interest in the release of a photo on March 11 by Kensington Palace for Mother’s Day.  Featuring the princess and her three children, the photo seemed to show signs of tampering, evidenced by blurring and misalignment.  News outlets and wire services, including the Associated Press, retracted the image.  “At closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image,” came the grave advisory from AP.  “No replacement photo will be sent.”

    All this fuss, despite tech behemoths openly encouraging the mendacious sprucing up of family shots.  With a keen, digitally tampering eye, a child’s scowl and scorn can be airbrushed, leaving portraits of family bliss.  The manipulation became yet another opportunity for the fanning of online flames.  As for the princess, she conceded that, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing.”

    At the Spectator, Brendan O’Neill stated the obvious point that both plot and proportion had been lost in the entire Kate Middleton saga.  “There’s a war in Europe and the Middle East, an energy crisis, a lame-duck government waddling to defeat and people waiting five days in A&E to see a nurse, and you’re still yapping about a princess slightly misaligning her daughter’s sleeve while editing a family photo?”

    With a purplish spike in conspiracy theories about what the princess was up to, British academics and wonks detected signs of foreign interference, with customary finger pointing at Russian groups.  Here was something everyone could earn their crust from, and Martin Inness of Cardiff University was not going to let it pass, claiming he and his team had identified no fewer than 45 accounts posting about the princess linked to a Russian disinformation operation called Doppelgänger.  “It’s about destabilisation. It’s about undermining trust in institutions: government, monarchy, media – everything.”

    With “Kategate” now a raging social media fire, feeding much lazy journalism and the attention-seeking blogosphere, it fell upon Catherine to seize the day and reorient the interest.  The silence, she revealed on March 22, had been occasioned not merely by convalescence but her cancer diagnosis and pursuing a course of “preventative chemotherapy”: “As you can imagine, it has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment.  But most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them.”

    The compass rapidly turned.  Naming, shaming and excessive contrition became the order of the day.  The Palace was blamed for its fumbles.  The princess was defended for having suffered silently while being forced into revealing her diagnosis.  “As someone who speculated on this without considering it could be a serious health condition,” political pundit and author Owen Jones effused, “I’m very ashamed to be honest, and all the very best to her.”

    There was precedent for such an attitudinal shift.  It resembled, at least in echo, the Diana phenomenon.  The death of the Princess of Wales in August 1997 in a car crash turned her into saintly untouchability, all prior blemishes erased.  Only a few days prior to her demise in Paris with the tawdry playboy Dodi, son of Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, she had been mocked for her fickleness and shallowness.  With her death, the lachrymose glands were heavily exercised.  Competitive grieving was the order of the day, and those not partaking were tarred and feathered.

    The difference now is that Catherine had been canny in democratising her condition – a mother, and a young one at that, suffering cancer.  Despite having access to medical care and resources the common citizenry could only dream of, many could relate.  She became the topic of serious, sometimes ludicrous discussion on such light end television programs as Channel 4’s The Last Leg, with all three hosts seeking to milk the tear ducts.  The anchor, Australian comedian Adam Hills, spoke of the day as having been “strange … for all of us” before reflecting on the dying days of his father.

    It would have been particularly strange for Hills, as only one week prior, he had begun the show sitting beside a book titled Photoshop for Dummies.  “I’ve never seen our office WhatsApp group get as excited this week by this story.”  He proceeded to bore his audience for a good quarter hour with the usual inanities about “the case of the missing princess”.

    In the wash up, Catherine, if not her advisors, should have recounted the words of the late novelist Hilary Mantel, whose “Royal Bodies” (2013) in the London Review of Books said with brutal honesty what royals, especially of a certain type, are good for.  From “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore,” Kate Middleton had become “a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions.”  In time, she would be deemed radiant, the press finding “that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.”  To that can now be added another limb: a contrition extractor, farmer of sympathy and tears.

    The post Kategate: From Conspiracy to Contrition Extraction first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • An Important Admission

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea

    May’s family

    Latifa Najjar superimposes hearts over the faces of her children’s online photographs in the classic mother’s move to protect them. But, unfortunately, her children are in a Rafah refugee camp, and it’s the middle of the Israeli-Gaza war. So she’s unknowingly saving me from missing their beautiful faces, if I learn one day they’ve been murdered by bombs or famine. Exterminated by the bad luck of being born in Gaza, a country stripped not only of its housing and masjids (mosques), but food, water, and medical care. A country strip-searched by Israeli soldiers like they strip-search its women—taking their last bit of dignity and leaving nothing left but malnourished bodies and lips to pray with. Latifa lost almost everything—even her snow white, blue-eyed kittens Lia and Leo, for they were left behind in the misery of North Gaza, where they are sure to die.

    Latifa’s brother is dead, a cousin too, but the family she created with her husband still lives. Her eldest daughter, Farah, age seventeen, translates Facebook messages between us. Deciphering her mom’s homegrown Arabic into an English she learned a la cart from Sherlock Holmes movies, social media and online classes. Amideast, an American NGO, gave her an award for an essay she wrote about her future: The Remarkable Story of Farah Najjar. Now that future seems impossibly far away.

    Things are hard for Latifa’s family, so I take her children to the land of make believe, where they become a family of kings and queens. Why not? Latifa’s been so open with me, a total stranger. She has to tell a man she’s never met about her life and death struggles. Not a thing women usually do in Gaza. It’s a patriarchal culture, and I’m on the wrong side of history. But all that is forgotten as I entertain her children with a bedtime story.

    In a faerie tale desert by the sea, I exchange their tattered refugee clothes for luxurious silk garments. I put them on gorgeous thrones set on thick carpets in Bedouin tents instead of dirt floors under blue tarps. The little princes and princesses enjoy endless sweets, playtime and peace. No bombs detonate here, no innocent people scream.

    Years from now they will live in solace. They will forget that long ago missiles wiped out family and friends leaving half-living relatives to bury the dead. Tonight I take them to a world where children slay dragons and fear is conquered with toy swords and Aladdin’s wishes. Finally, the moonlight serenades faces as tired eyes fall asleep.

    That next day I receive a call from a young woman, Fatima, who’s somewhere that’s not Rafah. Stuck on a rooftop overlooking a fractured city block. In her arms, her two-year-old son. Scattered around her: water, garbage and shame. Gunfire argues in the distance. Every building in the background is reduced to rubble or half burned up in flames. Trapped civilians scream out for help, but no one hears them. Fatima asks for money. I send ten dollars. “Ouch,” she replies, demanding more. A Facebook friend obliges. Then Fatima makes another request. The cycle continues. It will never stop. Scam, or not? Normally, I would have never sent her money—I’m not one for double drowning. But I forgive her because, just above, I witnessed hell on a smartphone screen.

    This asking for money is the only control she has over life. She demands our charity, while facing death and being buried by debris. Regardless, she’s nearly alone, with only a few small souls for company, less in weight than they used to be, the lower echelon of refugees. Her only link to sanity is through the same technology that guides the smart bombs which kill whole families. I say goodbye. We will never talk again. She’ll be ravaged by circumstance, and I’ll write about her while sitting here, sickened by what I’ve seen.

    Latifa posts videos of her children singing, dancing, pleading. I can feel her heart beating through the interwebs. There’s nothing else to do, but mask the horror with innocence. Long before the war she was a social researcher, a young woman with a college degree helping her people. And here she is, years later, kingdom gone and trapped among the poor.

    But, she has plans. Like many Palestinians she’s had enough of the endless strife with Israel, and wants to leave Gaza. Enticed by the internet images of life outside their nation-state prison, she works at getting away by soliciting money for her Go Fund Me. With luck they will not perish in the genocide.

    Another woman-lead family messages me. Samah Ouda is far away from food in a place called Nuseirat, a suburb by the sea. The remains of Turkish coffee houses, masjids and cemeteries are all that’s left. The beaches, strewn with chunks of concrete. The streets, peppered with powdered coffee. The call to prayer, absent from the broken minarets after endless centuries. She’s more desperate than Latifa, speaking in shorter sentences, not allowing herself to dream. Her children’s survival, less likely. Her words, terse and to the point. She taught English before the war. Now, she promotes her plight through Tik-Tok and Instagram, to fund her own Go Fund Me.

    I focus on Latifa’s family and their future, not wanting to think about those who won’t make it, those whose death will have no meaning. I message her again, but she’s too busy trying to live, to listen. So I find a channel that’s live-streaming a Gaza hospital, where children play on wheelchairs amid the dying.

    The next day we talk.

    “Alhamdulillah (God help me), I’m desperate,” Latifa says. “We need a truce.”

    So I say: “You are brave. You are strong.”

    “Thanks a lot.” she replies. “We are happy to know you brother. I pray that we survive.”

    Then an anonymous young woman asks me for help. She is alone, stranded in a home housing elderly and children. Like many, she has lost touch with her friends from before the war. I hear it all the time. A fragmented people, living fragmented lives, with fragmented families waiting to die. In this case the young woman is too afraid to go outside, or even look out the window. She has stayed off evil by refusing to see, her terror limited to the sound of bombs, gunfire and drones. But even so, her food is tasteless and nothing smells good. No one hugs her either, so she’s slowly losing the sense of touch as well. A solitary life in a solitary room, but still, that’s a better existence than some.

    She is worried about what the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) will do to her if they invade Rafah. She has heard the stories, the tales of sexual assault. At first I avoid the topic, try to steer her mind somewhere else. But there is a very good chance she will be caught and stripped searched as she tries to flee. Likely in front of male Israeli soldiers, rifles pointed in her direction, ready to kill. She will feel humiliated. A young woman who’s never shown, since puberty, an unrelated man an inch of her skin not on her face or hands. The clothing the Israelis say oppresses her will now be used to violate what little she has left.

    When I finally tell her about how to stem the anxiety and fear, my words feel like instructions for going to the gallows. Repeat this prayer in times of trouble: ‘I take refuge in the Lord of the people.’ Supposedly, the last line spoken before the Prophet’s (PBUH) death.

    I hear about an airstrike striking Nuseirat that kills many women and children. I message Samah and luckily she replies, she is not hurt. We chit-chat for once, and I learn that before the war she was a high school physics teacher.

    The next day I receive messages from two new women. Mays Astal and Maryam Hasanat are desperate. They are both eight months pregnant, in land with little medical care if anything goes wrong. One of them has a good chance of surviving, for the other everything has already gone wrong.

    Mays, Catholic Relief Services employee, Palestinian Red Crescent Society engineer, found herself with nothing but a tent, her two children named Dialah and Mohammed and a husband. Yet she still spends three hours a day as a humanitarian worker risking death at the hands of the IDF. The perfect American nuclear family, except they live in a war zone, not prosperity.

    One day the IDF decided it would be best if they burn down all the buildings in the refugee camp with incendiary munitions, then drive tanks through the tent city to run down the living. Mays and her family bury themselves in the sand, narrowly avoiding being run over. She clings to hope with another Go Fund Me, so she and her family can get out of hell and into Egypt. There she can give birth in peace.

    Maryam has a beautiful Facebook profile picture from her wedding. In it her tall, handsome husband smiles as he looks down at her. Like nearly everyone else, they lost everything, and left their home as soon as Israel littered their living area with leaflets exalting doom and destruction for all who remain. Within a few weeks their apartment was bombed, and her brother-in-law was shot to death by the IDF as he drove back to his young wife and child.

    A day after she contacted me, she sends me a message: “Today my best friend, Haia, and her baby died.”

    “From a bomb?” I ask.

    “No, Haia was pregnant, and she had to have a cesarean section.”

    “What went wrong?”

    “They cut her womb open with no anesthesia, and couldn’t stop the bleeding. Neither mother nor child survived.”

    Then I find out why Maryam’s so desperate. She’ll need a c-section as well, because her pelvis is too narrow. That’s why she needs twenty-five thousand dollars to get to Egypt, so she and her baby won’t die in a hospital in Rafah that has no supplies. So she won’t become one of the thousands of women who have lost their lives between the barbed wire and the sea.

    The following fundraisers will help bring hope to these families. They are listed in order of appearance in this story.

    Latifa’s Go Fund Me Campaign

    Samah’s Go Fund Me Campaign

    Mays Go Fund Me Campaign

    Maryam’s Go Fund Me Campaign

    Maryam and husband

    Pregnant Maryam and her son

    Latifah’s daughter

    • Please message the author at moc.liamgnull@erotavlassore if you want to inquire about helping refugees in Gaza.

    •• First published in Z

    The post The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cat’s Paw

    at’s Paw

    The post Cat’s Paw first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ramadan Fasting

    Ramadan (Arabic: رَمَضَان, Ramaḍān, Ramadhaan) is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and the month in which the Quran is believed to be revealed to the prophet Muhammad

    Quran 20:81 Eat of the good things We have provided for your sustenance, but commit no excess therein.

    Fasting is good for you. Very good. Josh Mittledorf, in Cracking the aging code: The new science of growing old and what it means for staying young, 2016, estimates he’s added a decade, a good, healthy decade, to his life with his regime, which includes a weekly fast from 10pm Wednesday to 8 am Friday, when he only drinks water. He has figured out other ways to trick his mind into operating in its highest metabolic mode, but the main thing is the fast. Fasting has long been a spiritual exercise to quieten the body’s incessant desires for petty satisfactions, real world distractions.

    It is of course the no-brainer way to lose weight, but the marvel, paradox, is that for all living creatures, reducing consumption to just above starvation guarantees better health and longer life.

    Couch potatoes end up flabby, insulin-resistant, chronically sicker as they age, awaiting a pathetic last stage in life where death is arguably an improvement over pain and self-loathing. Which brings me to the other secret, paradox, of longevity. Exercise. And lots of it, every day making sure you’ve pushed yourself to the point of feeling your blood pumping. Forget about antioxidants. If you put your body engine into low gear, it can deal fine with them.

    Exercise produces lots of antioxidants, but top athletes have longer, healthier lives by specialising in manufacturing them! You damage your muscles in hard exercise, but that’s good damage, damage that your body is honed to repair and does so eagerly when you give it the optimal conditions (hot, sweaty), growing back stronger, preparing for the next battle.

    Indian sages do just fine with meditating, no exercise, but lots and lots of fasting. John Oakes, in The fast: the history, science, philosophy, and promise of doing without (2016), argues that fasting acts like a metaphor, withholding, sacrificing, to open you up to compassion, creation, ‘the real work’ or real purpose of our mind-body, allowing room for something else to happen besides the incessant preparing for and indulging in consumption. At his substack, Douglas Rushkoff ponders the sense of emptiness, nonbeing, even death, that fasting suggests. ‘You lose the sense of inside/ outside, of duality, replaced by an existential oneness.’

    Oakes likes to have a partner, a shared community, for his week-long fasts. Which brings to mind the famous hunger strikes by such as Bobby Sands and his fellow IRA prisoners under the cruel hand of Thatcher. And which mostly fail to ‘move the mountain’, but inspire others in the common struggle, and as a bonus, extend your life (as long as you don’t starve to death).

    Mittledorf, Oakes and Rushkoff are secular Jews, dabbling in Buddhism and yoga, and more or less dismiss religion in their fascination with Nature’s paradoxes. Buddhism is a belief based on nonattachment, ‘no preference’, in life, the way to get beyond the world of ‘I’ll eat or be eaten.’ By taking eating out of the equation, you can get beyond the dog-eat-dog mentality. You leave room for ‘food for thought.’

    What’s with the paradoxes? Look at our cliches. Food for thought, no pain – no gain. They are true! Good pain. Bad pain. We are beings of qualia. Good-bad is built into our genes, into our universes. And what’s good for the goose is usually good for the gander. When it comes down to it, there is very little separating one individual from another, except his/her community, and the individuals there are also much the same. Our bodies and minds need stress, good stress, to make the body react to our endeavours as well as possible, to give us ‘good’ individuality.

    Ramadan

    Catholics used to fast moderately in Lent; a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. No meat, but fish Fridays.1 This fasting regime is not much good for revving up the mind-body’s long-life mechanism. Paul VI opened the floodgates in the 1960s, making even this fasting optional.

    The religion best known for its ‘pillar’ of a whole month of dry fasting from sunrise to sunset is of course Islam. It takes its cue from Judaism, the founding monotheism of which Islam considers itself the updated form. Devout Jews do the dry fast for one day, the Day of Atonement. Rushkoff says that Jews mistakenly think that the fasting is a kind of punishment, atonement. But that is a false view. Fasting is hardly a punishment, but rather a time of clearly the mind of material desires, and opening it to spiritual concerns, atoning for your sins.

    Whoever fasts during Ramadan with faith and seeking his reward from Allah will have his past sins forgiven. But if a person does not avoid false talk and false conduct during Siyam [fasting], then Allah does not care if he abstains from food and drink.2 No room for the hypocrite. The only gambling allowed is your wager on which night during the last 10 days is the most holy, the one commemorating the first revelation: When Lailat Al-Qadr comes, Gabriel descends with a company of angels (may Allah bless them all) who ask for blessings on everyone who is remembering Allah, whether they are sitting or standing.3 It’s worth a thousand months’ worth of rewards in a singular eve.

    But many Muslims, like many Jews, mistake the means for an end. You don’t go to heaven just for fasting, but for using the opportunity, one month each year, to clear the mind, to get a glimpse of jannah, where there is no need for material nourishment, where ‘fasting’ has prepared you to nurture your existence on the spiritual level, without the daily grind of consuming.

    Another problem in Ramadan time is that ‘less is more’ is fudged. Yes, you starve a bit each day, but after sunset, watch out for the constant eating, visiting, eating, … to the point that for many, more calories are consumed during the month than at other times of the year. Poor Muslims love Ramadan as they get many more opportunities to gorge, eat meat, than normally. Fair enough, but the better-off Muslims forget about ‘less is more’ too. A shame that for many Muslims, Ramadan lost this precious paradox of Nature.

    When the first night of Ramadan comes, the devils and mischievous jinn are chained up, and the gates of Hell are closed. The gates of Paradise are opened.4 You’re fasting so can’t sin in daytime, and after eating and night prayers you’re exhausted. Ramadan is for spiritual enlightenment, renewal, replacing daily food with daily food for thought. Fasting as a secular has no clear goal other than physical fine tuning, so why not make it a spiritual quest? It’s not only our bodies, but our mind-bodies that are corrupted by consumerism and money-grubbing.

    Ramadan is about cleansing the slate of sins, refusing them for a month (at least in daylight), showing thanks for the blessing of life and the bounty of Nature, showing generosity to the less fortunate (there’s always someone ‘lower on the totem pole’), humility before it all. There isn’t enough backbone in the secular version to attract more than a tiny intellectual elite. Ramadan is for the masses.

    Clashes of civilizations

    I used to pondered why the Muslim world was so ‘backward’, not using the knowledge, inventions it had produced and happily bequeathed the capitalist nations, up to the 16th c—knowledge is respected and considered a gift to all from God. Of course, the Muslim world has been corrupted by industrial capitalism, imperialism. Consumerism in the profane world is now the number one concern of almost everyone.

    The West gladly took/ stole Muslim knowledge and then turned it against not just Muslims but all those outside the West, first occupying the Muslim (the whole) world, setting up West-friendly systems beholden to the West, and bequeathing Muslims a western consumerist lifestyle, which unfortunately includes Ramadan, which is now more about feasting and family than spiritual growth. Muslims spend more during Ramadan on everything from gifts and clothes to food and even cars. In the Middle East alone, last year’s Ramadan spending was worth over $60 billion.

    A positive development from this mixing of cultures has been the new celebration of Ramadan in the secular West. In Austria this week, more than 1,000 people came together for an “open iftar” in the state of Carinthia, where all community members are invited to break the Ramadan fast and eat together — even if they’re not Muslim and haven’t fasted. Last year, thanks to its Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, London became the first large European city to decorate its streets (Piccadilly Circus, Coventry Street to Leicester Square) with Ramadan lights. Frankfurt am Main followed London’s example this year, becoming the first big German city to set up Ramadan lighting.

    Some Muslims are upset about the commercialization of Ramadan. Conservative clerics have argued that non-Muslims shouldn’t partake at all, while far-right Europeans believe the practice will lead to the end of civilization as they define it – the Great Replacement conspiracy.5 And some social media personalities who fasted during Ramadan, treating it as a kind of online health challenge, have been called out for cultural appropriation.

    This year has witnessed a new attraction to Ramadan, to Islam, as Palestinians heroically die under Israeli bombardment and forced starvation. A growing number of young, progressive western women are converting to Islam, citing the Israel-Hamas war as motivation for the conversion – and they’re documenting their journey on social media. They identify the awesome courage of mothers carrying the corpses of their infants, murdered by the Zionist regime, and share their personal journey on Tik Tok, or did until it was abruptly shut down. (I wonder why?) Megan Rice detailed the Palestinians’ “ironclad faith” in wake of the war, now wears a hijab, having founded the virtual World Religion Book Club.

    Despite the sorry state of the ummah now, I still suspect that not taking the western aggressive, exploitative road was the right choice. What has happened to the West in the past three centuries? Two horrendous world wars, with another on the horizon. A constant and recently precipitous decline in morality and religion, not to mention incalculable destruction of Nature. Preserving Islam means rejecting war, materialism, consumerism, which are destroying the world and ourselves, with a mad rush to overproduce, overconsume ’till the cows come home.’

    I’ve been using this Ramadan to ponder a counterfactual history, where the West didn’t succeed in adopting industrial capitalism, where inventions like Chinese gun powder remained for entertainment rather than war, where algebra and astrolabes are used to unite the world peacefully, not through conquest. Inventions would continue, but would be used in a ‘good’ way, unlike, say, the first airplane, which was quickly adapted to fire machine guns, and to carpet bomb Muslims almost as soon as it was invented. Central to Islam is that man should not exploit man. So no usury, no assembly lines. In as much as these principles are more and more sidelined, Islam is weakened.

    Mittledorf, Oakes, Rushkoff are secular in their quest for a longer healthier life, though they admit there is another reality that fasting can help us reach. They are secular Jews, atheists, so they are ‘above’ religion, so well-educated and independent that they don’t need religion, unlike the rest of us. For us, religion is essential to a moral order, to give us backbone, or rather to strengthen that religious backbone that we are endowed with.

    Ramadan is a time of giving, sharing. Not taking, consuming. The best way too feel good is to give. To get a glimpse of a higher reality through channeling, purifying our emotions, our highest evolutionary trait. Cultivating our ‘good’ tertiary emotions: (guilt, shame, selflessness, self-respect), we can even help a pet dog or parakeet feel some of these higher emotions, cultivating their senses.

    As for the Ramadan fast and aging/ health, just remember ‘less is more’. After a day of exhausting emptiness, it doesn’t take a lot to pacify the growling stomach. Keeping the body from satiety lets the body’s higher level maintenance regime kick in, hopefully extending your life for at least another Ramadan or two.

    So why doesn’t the body automatically work at top speed to keep us alive and well as long as physically possible? Well, that appears not to be the be-all-and-end-all in Nature. We have ignored that and worked to create ‘science’ to keep us all alive at all costs. And where is that leading us? We have broken the chain(s) of evolution, where misbehaving populations have collapsed countless times in the past. Quran 29:40 So We seized each people for their sin: against some of them We sent a storm of stones, some were overtaken by a ˹mighty˺ blast, some We caused the earth to swallow, and some We drowned. Allah would not have wronged them, but it was they who wronged themselves. Welcome to 2024.

    It’s as if your body-mind rewards you for being good (to it), for paying attention (to it), taking care (of it), which means you’re probably taking care of others too, as you can’t really love yourself till you love others. The ‘way’ of Islam is to fight the inner shaitan, the lower nafs [self], so you are always in dialogue with your mind-body. So with shaitan locked up for the month of Ramadan, less is more. You are in a noble dialogue with your mind-body and God.

    Catholic fasting is gone, Buddhism lite is the choice of the secular elite, but Ramadan remains the bedrock of Islam. Muslim countries don’t seem to be any better than secular ones when it comes to waste, consumerism, but if we can renew the original meaning of Ramadan, it fits with Nature’s silver bullet, ‘less is more’, where we look to ‘food for thought’ more than a bigger Whopper.

    ENDNOTES

    The post Ramadan Fasting first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Jesus was warm-blooded but fish are cold-blooded.
    2    Hadith al-Bukhari.
    3    Miskhat al-masabih.
    4    Hadith narrated by at-Tirmidhi.
    5    With the complicity of elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food

    The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.

    Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

    Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

    According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

    The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

    In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

    Shift to authoritarianism

    The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

    In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

    This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

    Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

    Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

    To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

    The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

    At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

    The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

    Net-zero agenda

    But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

    Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

    Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

    But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

    He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

    The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

    All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

    Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

    Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

    It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

    Here’s a quote from it:

    Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.

    Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

    However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

    The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

    Fake green

    The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

    It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

    Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

    It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

    Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

    The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

    In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

    It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

    That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

    • The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

    The post Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food

    The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.

    Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

    Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

    According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

    The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

    In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

    Shift to authoritarianism

    The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

    In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

    This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

    Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

    Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

    To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

    The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

    At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

    The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

    Net-zero agenda

    But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

    Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

    Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

    But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

    He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

    The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

    All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

    Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

    Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

    It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

    Here’s a quote from it:

    Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.

    Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

    However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

    The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

    Fake green

    The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

    It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

    Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

    It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

    Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

    The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

    In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

    It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

    That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

    • The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

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  • What Would Mr Rogers Ask?

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  • Sick, and Sick of It All

    Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls.  And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc.  Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

    Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of “news” that fills their days and nights.  So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots.  After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world.  This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda.  A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely.  Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness.  Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

    Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

    For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

    I agree with Crary.  During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem.  Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

    The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.”  It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative.  Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.”  He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences.  For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases.  This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey.  A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

    Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he.  Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist.  So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

    As was his habit, Berger brilliantly places Pollock’s work within social and political history, a description of a time very similar to today when the word “freedom” was bandied about.  Then it was the freedom of the Voice of America extolling the Cold War tale of freedom of the “Free World”; freedom for artists to be free of rhetoric, history, the past, and to jettison the tyranny of the object; freedom of the market amidst a strident yet incoherent sense of loss.  He writes:

    At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

    Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images.  While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing.  Nada, nada, nada.  A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

    Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

    This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me.  It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today.  Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

    Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery.  It was a collection of stories by John Fowles.  I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days.  It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock.  Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside.  As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality.  Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions.  That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces.  Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand.  This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

    Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely.  The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions.  He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock.  The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities.  Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

    Those masterful images because complete
    Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
    A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
    Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
    Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
    Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
    I must lie down where all the ladders start
    In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

    The old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body.  When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.”  He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life.  “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense.  To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

    Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor.  Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency.  The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl.  She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

    The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains.  I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt.  The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

    What the old man still had was an umbilical chord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello’s side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

    The Internet life has made caged monkeys of us all.  We seem to think we are seeing the real world through its connectivity bars, but these cells that enclose us are controlled by our zoo keepers and they are not our friends. Their control of our cages keeps increasing; we just fail to see the multiplying bars. They have created a world of illusions and abstractions serving the interests of global capitalism.  Insurgent voices still come through, but less and less as the elites expand their control.  As internet access has expanded, the world’s suffering has increased and economic inequality heightened.  That is an unacknowledged fact, and facts count.

    Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

    If I Must Die

    If I must die,
    you must live
    to tell my story
    to sell my things
    to buy a piece of cloth
    and some strings,
    (make it white with a long tail)
    so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
    while looking heaven in the eye
    awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
    and bid no one farewell
    not even to his flesh
    not even to himself —
    sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
    and thinks for a moment an angel is there
    bringing back love.
    If I must die
    let it bring hope,
    let it be a story.

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  • The Battle for Income Equality

    Questioning the statistics in Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with intent to undermine his thesis, is futile. Even if Piketty’s alert that returns on investment have exceeded the real growth of wages and economic output, which means that the stock of capital is rising faster than overall economic output, is not exactly accurate, criticism has not upset the conclusions ─ severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution doom the capitalist system to collapse and a more narrow wealth distribution keeps it going.

    Progressive economists connect meager wage growth to limited purchasing power ─ one cause of the 2008 crash ─ and increased concentration of wealth to cautious job growth in the post-crash years. Their conclusions have engineered debates on how to achieve equitable distributions in wages and wealth and raise middle-class wages, and the roles private industry, government, and labor unions play in achieving a more equitable society.

    If private industry refuses to meet its obligations to readjust the divide, Thomas Piketty recommends increasing taxes on high earners and large estates and coupling them with a wealth tax. This method for resolving income inequality gives government a major role in correcting the unequal distributions of income and wealth.

    In previous decades, unions had a larger membership, greater clout, and more strength to move management to meet wage demands. Government lacks a mechanism to force corporations to transfer productivity gains into wage gains. Only corporations can do the trick. Not likely. Corporations do not realize the social and economic benefits of decreasing income inequality and increasing middle-class purchasing power. Lowering remunerations to those in top pay brackets and increasing them for lower-income workers is more than a moral obligation; it has direct benefits to the economy for everyone. It is a requirement for achieving a stable economy.

    Social costs due to less equitable income and wealth distributions

    Rationalizing poorly distributed wealth by noting the American poor are wealthier than the middle class in many developed nations is deceiving. Poverty is defined as an absolute number but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they earn in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not earn in relation to others living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension and leads to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems means combining giving more to the lower classes and taking less by the upper classes.

    The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. One statistical proof is that the United States, classified as the most unequal of the developed nations, except Singapore, had the highest index of social problems. The graph below from 2010-2011 and an earlier article, Health is a Socio-Economic Problem, describe the important relationships.

    Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Private industry has an obligation and an opportunity to fix the problem it has caused. If not, Uncle Sam, whom they don’t want on their backs, will reach into their pockets, redistribute the wealth and resolve the situation.

    Income inequality produces wealth concentration and political consequences. Wealthy individuals have increased control of the political debate, more influence in selection of candidates, tend to place their interests before national interests, and determine the direction of political campaigns. Skewing the electoral process distorts government and the decisions that guide social and economic legislation. Severe disparities in the concentration of wealth reduce democratic prerogatives, fair elections, and equality before the law.

    The Sunlight Foundation, in an article, The Political 1% of the 1% in 2012 by Lee Dustman, June 2013, presents a fact-filled discussion of this topic.
    Note: Although statistics are from ten years ago, they are interesting statistics and are relevant today.

    More than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in the last campaign cycle came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.

    Of the 1% of the 1%’s $1.68 billion in the 2012 cycle, $500.4 million entered the campaign through a super PAC (including almost $100 million from just one couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson). Four out of five 1% of the 1% donors were pure partisans, giving all of their money to one party or the other.

    These concerns are likely even more acute for the two parties. In 2012, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised more than half (54.2 percent) of its $105.8 million from the 1% of the 1%, and the National Republican Congressional Committee raised one third (33.0 percent) of its $140.6 million from the 1% of the 1%. Democratic party committees depend less on the 1% of the 1%. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised 12.9 percent of its $128.9 million from these top donors, and the Democratic Congressional Committee raised 20.1 percent of its $143.9 million from 1% of the 1% donors.

    To the many billionaires who are tilting election campaigns, add the political contributions by super-sized corporations and industries, and electoral control by the wealthy becomes complete. Campaign contributions from the financial sector, the same financial sector that increased its liabilities from 10 percent of GDP in 1970 to 120 percent of GDP in 2009, and shifted investment from manufacturing to rent-seeking ─ making money the new-fashioned way ─ leads the way.

    The Sunlight Foundation article also states:

    In 1990, 1,091 elite donors in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).contributed $15.4 million to campaigns ─ a substantial sum at the time. But that’s nothing compared to what they contributed later. In 2010, 5,510 elite donors from the sector contributed $178.2 million, more than 10 times the amount they contributed in 1990.

    The Debt of each sector as a percentage of GDP tells the story of the financial sector.
    Note: 2022 GDP = $25.4T
              2022 Q4 Debt at the following:
              Total = $89.5T, Household = $19.4T, Business = $20.8T, Finance = $19.3T, Government= $26.8
    2022 Percent of GDP at the following:
    Household = 72.4%, Business = 81.9%, Finance = 76.8%, Government= 105.5%

    The graph shows that the FIRE sector increased its wealth by borrowing money, making the economy work for it rather than working for the economy. The credit enabled the financial industry to grow until it led the nation into the 2008 economic disaster.

    The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration

    What has occurred with wealth concentration? A previous decade indicated a deflection of investment from dynamic industrial processes to static rent situations, from industries that employ workers to make goods to industries that employ money to make money. Graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) record the trend.

    Note: In 2023, Financial sector employment was 9.2M and manufacturing employment was 12.9M.

    The graphs plot employment in the manufacturing and financial sectors, Manufacturing had a slow deterioration during the Reagan presidency, followed by stability during the Clinton administration and a sharp decline during the George Bush era. Some deterioration in manufacturing employment is understandable; administrative jobs (clerical, administration) have been displaced by information technologies and these fields have added jobs; factory floor work of consumer goods has been displaced by machines (robot, numerical control) that have their own factory floors; and labor has been transferred from highly labor-intensive manufacturing to service industries. However, the employment loss is excessive and bewildering when compared to the increase in financial employment. Can a healthy economy result from a steady growth in financial workers and a consistent decrease in industrial workers?

    Beginning in the Reagan era, until economic collapse in 2008, employment in the financial sector monotonically increased, except for slight blips during the 1991 recession and a few years of the Clinton administration. From a ratio of 1/3 in 1986, financial sector employment rose to 2/3 that of manufacturing employment by 2014, and increased by more than the changes in their respective additions to the Gross Domestic Product. Since the 2009 mini-depression, employment in the financial industry has remained relatively static. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the value added by each industry.

    Manufacturing rose from $1390.1 billion in 1997 to $2079.5 billion in 2013, an increase of 50 percent.
    Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing rose from $1623.1 billion in 1997 to $3293.2 billion in 2013, an increase of 100 percent.

    A comparison between salaries of engineers, those who contribute directly to industrial growth, and financiers, those who drive active and passive investments, also reveals the importance given to those who make money from money.

    One of the contributors to Capital, Thomas Philipson, in an article Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006, NBER Working Paper No. 14644, January 2009, shows that wages for the financial sector started a steady growth during the Reagan administration, and eventually exceeded engineering wages, especially for those who had advanced degrees from the elite universities.

    As the FIRE industry expands, the purchasing power contracts, one reason being that part of the rent-seeking covets higher returns and gets sidetracked into endless speculation; money rolling over and over and never available to purchase anything but pieces of paper. Millions of arbitrage transactions per second can earn thousands of dollars per second, which adds up to 3.6 million dollars per hour ─ no positive effect on the economy; only paper dollars continually created.

    Stagnant labor wages and weak purchasing power force expansion of credit to increase demand, The wealthy respond to credit expansion with accelerated demand for larger houses, larger cars, and more luxury goods, spending that raises asset values and places middle-class earners at a disadvantage. The bottom ninety percent on the income scale desperately pursue debt to give themselves a temporary share of prosperity. Debt must eventually be repaid. Real wealth remains with a privileged few and others remain stagnant.

    What is the Result?

    Thomas Piketty has reshaped the thinking of the Capitalist system. Economics enables the understanding of how and when to increase demand, enable sufficient purchasing power, and the true meaning of profit.  A better understanding of economics may come from less regard for the conventional economics of modern theorists and more regard for the classical economics of the fathers of political economy ─ Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. The latter provided a controversial concept ─ wages provide purchasing power, and beyond what is bought by that purchasing power is surplus, whose value allows profit.

    Pledge your support

    Piketty shows that profits are being sidetracked into passive investments that produce only more capital and not useful goods, into the accumulation of excessive personal wealth, and into financial speculation that features the constant churning of paper money, which removes dollars from the market and creates difficulties for manufacturing to grow. Accumulation of excessive wealth generates social problems, diminishes the quality of life, and burdens the middle class when taxes are used to seek relief.

    Capturing the political system by those most responsible for the problems ─ the privileged wealthy who manipulate a portion of the electoral process for their advantage ─ hinders routes to ameliorating the deterrents to a fair and successful economy. Due to their financial and political clout, the wealthy have their voices more easily heard in Congress and before federal agencies.

    Karl Marx claimed that Capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction. Those who foster severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution apparently want to prove his statement is correct.

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  • COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom

    The remedy is worse than the disease.

    — Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Trouble” in Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall

    The government never cedes power willingly.

    Neither should we.

    If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

    Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

    We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

    Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.

    The danger of martial law persists.

    Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

    You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    COVID-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

    “We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

    Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s COVID-19 response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self and private property.

    In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

    “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.”

    Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.

    What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

    Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

    There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

    It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

    Those tactics were already being used abroad.

    In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.

    In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

    In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

    For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

    If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

    Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

    While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

    Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

    How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

    You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

    You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

    It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

    This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

    The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.

    COVID-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

    Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.

    What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?

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  • Are the COVID Protestors Crazy?

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  • Sick to Death: Unhealthy Food and Failed Technologies

    The world is experiencing a micronutrient food and health crisis. Micronutrient deficiency now affects billions of people. Micronutrients are key vitamins and minerals and deficiencies can cause severe health conditions. They are important for various functions, including blood clotting, brain development, the immune system, energy production and bone health, and play a critical role in disease prevention.

    The root of the crisis is due to an increased reliance on ultra processed foods (‘junk food’) and the way that modern food crops are grown in terms of the seeds used, the plants produced, the synthetic inputs required (fertilisers, pesticides etc) and the effects on soil.

    In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas noted a precipitous change in the USA towards convenience and pre-prepared foods often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives, including colourings, flavourings and preservatives.

    He noted that between 1940 and 2002 the character, growing methods, preparation, source and ultimate presentation of basic staples have changed significantly to the extent that trace elements and micronutrient contents have been severely depleted. Thomas added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health.

    Prior to the Green Revolution, many of the older crops that were displaced carried dramatically higher counts of nutrients per calorie. For instance, the iron content of millet is four times that of rice, and oats carry four times more zinc than wheat. As a result, between 1961 and 2011, the protein, zinc and iron contents of the world’s directly consumed cereals declined by 4%, 5% and 19%, respectively.

    The authors of a 2010 paper in the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state that cropping systems promoted by the Green Revolution have resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients. They note that micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis in many developing nations. They add that soils are increasingly affected by micronutrient disorders.

    In 2016, India’s Central Soil Water Conservation Research and Training Institute reported that the country was losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides over the years.  On average, 16.4 tonnes of fertile soil is lost every year per hectare. It concluded that the non-judicious use of synthetic fertilisers had led to the deterioration of soil fertility causing loss of micro and macronutrients leading to poor soils and low yields.

    The high-input, chemical-intensive Green Revolution with its hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilisers and pesticides helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which, in turn, have adversely affected human health.

    But micronutrient depletion is not just due to a displacement of nutrient-dense staples in the diet or unhealthy soils. Take wheat, for example. Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s.

    The researchers say that  the concentrations of these four minerals remained stable between 1845 and the mid 1960s but have since decreased significantly by 20-30%. This coincided with the introduction of Green Revolution semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars. They noted that the concentrations in soil used in the experiment have either increased or remained stable. So, in this case, soil is not the issue.

    A 2021 paper that appeared in the journal of Environmental and Experimental Botany reported that the large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has occurred since the Green Revolution and the introduction of its cultivars.

    Reflecting the findings of Rothamsted Research in the UK, a recent study led by Indian Council of Agricultural Research scientists found the grains eaten in India have lost food value. They conclude that many of today’s crops fail to absorb sufficient nutrients even when soil is healthy.

    A recent article on the Down to Earth website reported on this study that found that rice and wheat, which meet over 50% of the daily energy requirements of people in India, have lost up to 45% of their food value in the past 50 years or so.

    The concentration of essential nutrients like zinc and iron has decreased by 33% and 27% in rice and by 30% and 19% in wheat, respectively. At the same time, the concentration of arsenic, a toxic element, in rice has increased by 1,493%.

    Down to Earth cites research by the Indian Council of Medical Research that indicates a 25% rise in non-communicable diseases among the Indian population from 1990 to 2016. Estimates show that India is home to one-third of the two billion global population suffering from micronutrient deficiency. This is because modern-bred cultivars of rice and wheat are less efficient in sequestering zinc and iron, regardless of their abundance in soils. Plants have lost their capacity to take up nutrients from the soil.

    Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet and specifically micronutrient deficiency.

    The large increase in the proportion of the global population suffering from zinc and iron deficiency over the last four decades has coincided with the global expansion of high-yielding, input-responsive cereal cultivars released in the post-Green Revolution era.

    Agriculture and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says that high yield is inversely proportionate to plant nutrition: the drop in nutrition levels is so much that the high-yielding new wheat varieties have seen a steep fall in copper content, an essential trace mineral, by as much as 80%, and some nutritionists ascribe this to a rise in cholesterol-related incidences across the world.

    India is self-sufficient in various staples, but many of these foodstuffs are high calorie-low nutrient and have led to the displacement of more nutritionally diverse cropping systems and more nutrient-dense crops.

    The importance of agronomist William Albrecht should not be overlooked here and his work on healthy soils and healthy people. In his experiments, he found that cows fed on less nutrient-dense crops ate more while cows that ate nutrient-rich grass stopped eating once their nutritional intake was satisfied. This may be one reason why we see rising rates of obesity at a time of micronutrient food insecurity.

    It is interesting that, given the above discussion on the Green Revolution’s adverse impacts on nutrition, the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” (2019) by Prof. Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity: it merely put more (nutrient-deficient) wheat into the Indian diet at the expense of other food crops. Stone argues that food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased.

    With this in mind, the table below makes for interesting reading. The data is provided by the National Productivity Council India (an autonomous body of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry).

    As mentioned earlier with reference to Albrecht, obesity has become a concern worldwide, including in India. This problem is multi-dimensional and, as alluded to, excess caloric intake and nutrient-poor food (and sedentary lifestyles) is a factor, leading to the consumption of sugary, fat-laden ultra processed food in an attempt to fill the nutritional gap. But there is also considerable evidence linking human exposure to agrochemicals with obesity.

    The September 2020 paper “Agrochemicals and Obesity” in the journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology summarises human epidemiological evidence and experimental animal studies supporting the association between agrochemical exposure and obesity and outlines possible mechanistic underpinnings for this link.

    Numerous other studies have also noted that exposure to pesticides has been associated with obesity and diabetes. For example, a 2022 paper in the journal Endocrine reports that first contact with environmental pesticides occurs during critical phases of life, such as gestation and lactation, which can lead to damage in central and peripheral tissues and subsequently programming disorders early and later in life.

    A 2013 paper in the journal Entropy on pathways to modern diseases reported that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup) and the most popular herbicide used worldwide, enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. The negative impact is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body, resulting in conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

    Despite these findings, campaigner Rosemary Mason has drawn attention to how official government and industry narratives try to divert attention from the role of glyphosate in obesity (and other conditions) by urging the public to exercise and cut down on “biscuits”. In a recent article, Kit Knightly on the OffGuardian website notes how big pharma is attempting to individualise obesity and make millions by pushing its ‘medical cures’ for the condition.

    To deal with micronutrient deficiencies, other money-spinning initiatives for industry are being pushed, not least biofortification of foodstuffs and plants and genetic engineering.

    Industry narratives have nothing to say about the food system itself, which sees ‘food’ as just another commodity to be rinsed for profit regardless of the impacts on human health or the environment. We simply witness more techno-fix ‘solutions’ being rolled out to supposedly address the impacts of previous ‘innovations’ and policy decisions that benefitted the bottom line of Western agribusiness (and big pharma).

    Quick techno-fixes do not offer genuine solutions to the problems outlined above. Such solutions involve challenging corporate power that shapes narratives and policies to suit its agenda. Healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies are not created at some ever-sprawling life sciences park that specialises in manipulating food and the human body (for corporate gain) under the banner of ‘innovation’ and ‘health’ while leaving intact the power relations that underpin bad food and ill health.

    A radical overhaul of the food system is required, from how food is grown to how society should be organised. This involves creating food sovereignty, encouraging localism, local markets and short supply chains, rejecting neoliberal globalisation, supporting smallholder agriculture and land reform and incentivising agroecological practices that build soil fertility, use and develop high-productive landraces and a focus on nutrition per acre rather than increased grain size, ‘yield’ and ‘output’.

    That’s how you create healthy food, healthy people and healthy societies.

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  • Being Your Own Worst Enemy

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  • Democide

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  • The Last Flurry: The US Congress and Australian Parliamentarians seek Assange’s Release

    On February 20, Julian Assange, the daredevil publisher of WikiLeaks, will be going into battle, yet again, with the British justice system – or what counts for it.  The UK High Court will hear arguments from his team that his extradition to the United States from Britain to face 18 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 would violate various precepts of justice.  The proceedings hope to reverse the curt, impoverished decision by the remarkably misnamed Justice Jonathan Swift of the same court on June 6, 2023.

    At this point, the number of claims the defence team can make are potentially many.  Economy, however, has been called for: the two judges hearing the case have asked for a substantially shortened argument, showing, yet again, that the quality of British mercy tends to be sourly short.  The grounds Assange can resort to are troublingly vast: CIA-sponsored surveillance, his contemplated assassination, his contemplated abduction, violation of attorney-client privilege, his poor health, the violation of free-speech, a naked, politicised attempt by an imperium to capture one of its greatest and most trenchant critics, and bad faith by the US government.

    Campaigners for the cause have been frenzied.  But as the solution to Assange’s plight is likely to be political, the burden falls on politicians to stomp and drum from within their various chambers to convince their executive counterparts.  In the US Congress, House Resolution 934, introduced on December 13 by Rep. Paul A. Gosar, an Arizona Republican, expresses “the sense of the House of Representatives that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.”

    The resolution sees a dramatic shift from the punishing, haute view taken by such figures as the late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was one of the first political figures to suggest that Assange be crucified on the unsteady timber of the Espionage Act for disclosing US cables and classified information in 2010.  The resolution acknowledges, for instance, that the disclosures by WikiLeaks “promoted public transparency through the exposure of the hiring of child prostitutes by Defense Department contractors, friendly fire incidents, human rights abuses, civilian killings, and United States use of psychological warfare.”  The list could be sordidly longer but let’s not quibble.

    Impressively, drafters of the resolution finally acknowledge that charging Assange under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for alleged conspiracy to help US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning access Defense Department computers was a fabled nonsense.  For one, it was “impossible” – Manning “already had access to the mentioned computer”.  Furthermore, “there was no proof Mr Assange had any contact with said intelligence analyst”.

    Ire is also directed at the espionage counts, with the resolution noting that “no other publisher has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act prior to these 17 charges.”  A successful prosecution of the publisher “would set a precedent allowing the United States to prosecute and imprison journalists for First Amendment protected activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, something that occurs on a regular basis”.

    Acknowledgment is duly made of the importance of press freedoms to promote transparency and protect the Republic, the support for Assange, “sincere and steadfast”, no less, shown by “numerous human rights, press freedom, and privacy rights advocates and organizations”, and the desire by “at least 70 Senators and Members of Parliament from Australia, a critical United States ally and Mr Assange’s native country” for his return.

    Members of Australia’s parliament, adding to the efforts last September to convince members of Congress that the prosecution be dropped, have also written to the UK Home Secretary, James Cleverly, requesting that he “undertake an urgent, thorough and independent assessment of the risks to Mr Assange’s health and welfare in the event that he is extradited to the United States.”

    The members of the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group draw Cleverly’s attention to the recent UK Supreme Court case of AAA v Secretary of State for the Home Department which found “that courts in the United Kingdom cannot just rely on third party assurances by foreign governments but rather are required to make independent assessments of the risk of persecution to individuals before any order is made removing them from the UK.”

    It follows that the approach taken by Lord Justices Burnett and Holroyde in USA v Assange [2021] EWHC 3133 was, to put it politely, a touch too confident in accepting assurances given by the US government regarding Assange’s treatment, were he to be extradited.  “These assurances were not tested, nor was there any evidence of independent assessment as to the basis on which they could be given and relied upon.”

    The conveners of the group point to Assange’s detention in Belmarsh prison since April 2019, his “significant health issues, exacerbated to a dangerous degree by his prolonged incarceration, that are of very real concern to us as his elected representatives.”  They also point out the rather unusual consensus between the current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and his opposition number, Peter Dutton, that the “case has gone on for too long.”  Continued legal proceedings, both in the UK, and then in the US were extradition to take place “would add yet more years to Mr Assange’s detention and further imperil his health.”

    In terms of posterity’s calling, there are surely fewer better things at this point for a US president nearing mental oblivion to do, or a Tory government peering at electoral termination to facilitate, than the release of Assange.  At the very least, it would show a grudging acknowledgment that the fourth estate, watchful of government’s egregious abuses, is no corpse, but a vital, thriving necessity.

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  • Some of Us Tried to Warn Others

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  • Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth 

    The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

    It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. Institutional investors and wealthy individuals park their funds and wealth in these firms and depend on the financial system a toxic food system to deliver.

    Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

    They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

    The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

    This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.

    In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.

    There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.

    All of this is set out in Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth (December 2023), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research and is a follow up to the author’s book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order (2022).

    That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation currently being heard in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:

    This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.

    ‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?

    Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, an influential US-based think tank, says:

    It takes a book to break down the dynamics that are pushing agro-chemical agriculture to farmers and consumers around the world and to reveal the strength of the diverse movement of people and organizations who stand in the way of these destructive and predatory forces.

    Colin Todhunter takes readers on a world tour that makes a compelling case against the fallacy of the food scarcity and Green Revolution arguments advanced by the mainstream media and international institutions on behalf of powerful financial interests such as Blackrock, Vanguard, or Gates. Todhunter makes it obvious that a key factor of world hunger and of the environmental crisis we are facing is a capitalist system that ‘requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand.’

    Uplifting rather than depressing, after this lucid diagnosis, he highlights some of the countless people-led initiatives and movements, from Cuba, Ethiopia to India, that fight back against destruction and predation with agroecology and farmers-led practices, respectful of the people and the planet. By debunking the “artificial scarcity” myth that is constantly fed to us, Todhunter demonstrates that it is actually not complicated to change course. Readers will just have to join the movement.

    The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) is “an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists” and believes in “open access to truthful information and nuanced reporting”. It is committed to publishing e-books that are free of charge. Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth can be read directly on the GRG site here and can also be accessed and downloaded as a fully formatted pdf (numbered contents/pages etc) on the academia.edu website here.

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  • Collapsing on the Job

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  • Protecting Yourself

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  • Illogic to an Extreme

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  • Letter from India: Stop World Health Organization’s “Pandemic Preparedness” Tyranny

    The global pandemic preparedness accord (‘pandemic treaty’) currently being put in place by the World Health Organization (WHO) will pave the way for “a fascist approach to societal management.” The beneficiaries will be unscrupulous corporations and investors whom the COVID‐19 response served well. This will result in the loss of human rights and individual freedom.

    So says Dr David Bell, a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and former WHO scientific and medical officer. The treaty represents a terrifying power grab that, if successful, will give the WHO a central directing role and monopoly power in global health governance.

    As currently drafted, the treaty will hand the WHO the authority to order measures, including significant financial contributions by individual states, lockdowns, travel restrictions, forced medical examinations and mandatory vaccinations during a public health emergency of its own declaring.

    The WHO will have sole and extensive power to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) for any potential or real threat for extended areas, whether these threats are biological, climate or environment related. And it will do so without proper proof and solely decide measures and medical substances to be imposed on the public without informed consent.

    Its powers will also include the official censorship of information, including free speech — views opposing the official narrative put out by the WHO ­— and it will be accountable to no national parliament or be limited by any constitutional safeguards.

    A group of prominent lawyers, doctors and concerned citizens have written to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Health and Family Welfare Shri Mansukh L Mandaviya urging them to reject the WHO’s global pandemic treaty. The signatories are listed at the end of this article, and the 10-page letter can be accessed in full with all relevant links and references on the Awaken India website: WHO Pandemic Treaty Ultra Vires of the Constitution).

    The WHO released a Zero Draft of the WHO CA+ (this ‘pandemic treaty’ is now officially known as an ‘accord’) with 38 Articles on 1 February 2023 and, subsequently, another draft with 41 Articles on 2 June 2023. The accord marks a fundamental change in how the WHO will function. It seeks secretively, behind closed doors, sweeping powers under its director general.

    The signatories make clear that, under the proposed accord, the WHO can, at will, call a pandemic, declare a PHEIC and then take over the authority of national governments to detain citizens, restrict their travel, require them to have vaccine passports (forced testing and vaccination) and increase social media censorship. The accord would also operate as a ‘framework convention’ that’s on-going, year after year, indefinitely. It facilitates a dictatorship role for the WHO as it moves to acquire unfettered power.

    Two instruments, the accord itself and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, are designed to operate in parallel to give draconian powers to the WHO. Both texts irremediably entail the transfer to the WHO of the power to threaten health freedom, thereby representing a fundamental threat to national, medical and bodily autonomy.

    In their letter, the authors state that the WHO is an external, unelected body, which may not and cannot be appointed to such a dictatorship position. During the COVID-19 event, the WHO’s role in facilitating medical tyranny was clear to see.

    It advocated enforced lockdowns, which destroyed the livelihoods of millions in India and across the world and created a surge in mental health problems. It shut down schools, putting back the education of a generation. It promoted incompletely tested and unapproved vaccines under EUA (Emergency Use Authorisation) that despite the claims of ‘safe and effective’ where nothing of the sort and caused a sharp rise in spike protein-induced heart and brain disease.

    If adopted at the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024 by a simple majority vote, the ‘pandemic treaty’ will come into force within 12 months for all countries, unless a country proactively files rejections or reservations within a 10-month period.

    The letter to the prime minister and the health minister states that the accord and those pushing it are:

    Manifestly violative of Fundamental Rights of the citizens of India and, therefore, Ultra Vires of the Indian Constitution. In their very intent, they cancel the fundamental right to bodily autonomy and integrity, through mandating medical procedures, coercion and further grossly illegal acts.

    The letter adds:

    This is a breathtaking and terrifying onslaught on fundamental civil liberties. It must be understood as fundamental, that the negation of bodily integrity of any human being means the loss of all human rights.

    In making its point, the letter refers to the Nuremberg Code (1947) by stating:

    The consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights resumed this ban against unintentional experimentation in its 1966 text, which states: no one may be subjected without his consent to medical or scientific experiment.

    It also references the Geneva statement for doctors (1948):

    I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient. I will not use my medical knowledge to infringe human rights and civil liberties, even under force. I will keep absolute respect for human life, from conception. I will consider my patient’s health as my first concern.

    The signatories note that there is little alternative but to jettison the WHO from national life and implore the prime minister and the health minister to act to uphold the sovereignty of India and the rights of every citizen.

    They add that unelected, unaccountable and largely unknown delegates from 194 countries meet in Geneva during World Health Assembly meetings, as they did in 2022 when they adopted amendments to the IHR. The process is fraught with secrecy, autocracy and impending tyranny, blatantly devoid of any transparent, democratic process.

    These country delegates are unelected and do not represent the people of their country. The signatories ask:

    How can they negotiate on behalf of nations, let alone an international/global health regulation binding on 194 countries?

    If the ‘global pandemic treaty’ is forced through, we could see perpetual lockdowns. At the same time, corporate interests will dominate. Pandemics will become self-sustaining by creating a bureaucracy whose existence will depend on them.

    People will be at the mercy of the police and bureaucrats who will be immune to any penalty for any acts carried out in ‘good faith’. These acts could take the form of mandatory medical procedures, forced entry into premises, forced isolation and quarantine.

    It was bad enough in 2020 with the full force of the state lined up against the public, especially those who did not agree with COVID policies, but imagine the abuse of power that could occur if the WHO acquires the powers it seeks.

    The seeds of totalitarianism were clear to see with Anthony Fauci saying that he is ‘the science’, former New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden declaring the government as the ‘single source of truth’ and social media companies working hand in glove with the deep state to censor and deplatform prominent figures and world-renowned scientists who questioned the official narrative.

    We saw the suspension of fundamental civil liberties with the threat of state violence on hand, often resulting in citizens being abused by de facto paramilitary police forces for breaching ‘pandemic rules’ that had no scientific basis.

    Governments declared that they were ‘following the science’, but what we saw were inflated death numbers, manipulated data and the fraudulent use of RT-PCR tests to help create the perception of a deadly pandemic in the minds of the public. Readers can consult the online article Stay Home, Save Lives: Uncovering the COVID Deception, which provides insight into the various deceptions that helped instill fear into the global population in 2020.

    The WHO also provided a wrong projection of mortality. The exaggeration caused panic in the population ­— part of a carefully orchestrated ‘fear pandemic’ ­— and paved the way for lockdowns and the mass uptake of vaccines sold to the public based on false claims. The synthetic spike protein of the vaccines has resulted in clotting, bleeding, heart problems and brain blood clotting as well as neurodegenerative problems. And what we are seeing across so many countries since the vaccine rollout is significant excess mortality, which the media is silent about.

    Moreover, the WHO operates within a biopharmaceutical complex, a complicated syndicate that has formed over time, which instructs world health policies. This complex involves the health agencies of national governments, including India, the US and the UK, the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, the Welcome Group and major pharmaceutical companies. Revolving door arrangements between these organisations have resulted in regulatory capture.

    Researcher and campaigner Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement conducted a two-year investigation into how this works in India. Through his research, he exposed the billionaire cartel that controlled India’s COVID-19 Task Force. Tengra listed not just the names of those who sat on this task force, but he also detailed how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical-vaccine industry.

    The task force was responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatic people, dropping ivermectin from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and much more.

    Tengra also exposed how India’s prominent public health personalities, who regularly appeared in the media and on TV, are connected to the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Welcome Trust, USAID, the World Bank and other aspects of the global deep state.

    We have every right to be concerned about a ‘pandemic treaty’ shaped by powerful interests with stakes in closing down economies (see the online article Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation by Fabio Vighi), mandatory vaccination programmes and digital surveillance who are all too willing to strip away our fundamental rights for their own gain.

    The letter to India’s prime minister and the minister of health makes clear that the WHO’s massive conflict of interest should disqualify it from any role in world health. 

     Signatories:

    Dr. Jacob Puliyel, Delhi, MD, MRCP, MPhil, Paediatrician and Visiting Faculty International

    Prashant Bhushan, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India

    Colin Gonsalves, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India

    Nilesh Ojha, Mumbai, President – Indian Bar Association, Advocate Bombay High Court and Supreme Court of India, Human Rights Activist

    Author Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Pune, MD, Formerly Epidemiologist, Indian Armed Forces

    Dr Aseem Malhotra, London (Overseas Citizen of India), MBChB, MRCP. Consultant Cardiologist

    Aruna Rodrigues, Mhow, Lead Petitioner: GMO PIL in the Supreme Court and Member Iridescent Blue Fish (IBF)

    Dr. Donthi Narasimha Reddy, Hyderabad, Public Policy Expert and Campaigner

    Dr. Megha Consul, Gurugram, Paediatrics, Senior Consultant, Neonatologist

    Dr. Pravin Chordia, Pune, MD Surgeon

    Dr. Lalitkumar Anande, Mumbai, MBBS, PG Diploma in Clinical Research

    Dr. Vijay Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS Dr. Veena Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS, DA

    Dr. Kuldeep Kumar, Haridwar, MBBS MS (GENERAL SURGERY) Dr. Praveen Saxena, Hyderabad, Radiologist & Clinical metal toxicologist, MBBS, DMRD Osmania

    Dr. Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, Faridabad, Ph.D (Diabetes)

    Dr. Gautam Das, Kolkata, MBBS, General Physician

    Saraswati Kavula, Hyderabad, Documentary Filmmaker & Freelance Journalist, Awaken India Movement

    Bhaskaran Raman, Mumbai, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Advocate

    Ishwarlal S. Agarwal, Mumbai Advocate

    Tanveer Nizam, Mumbai

    Dr. Susan Raj, Chattisgrah, BSc Nurse, MSW(M&P), Doctorate Humanities, Behavior Specialist

    Jagannath Chaterjee, Bhubhaneshwar, Social Activist

    Dr. Abhay Chedda, Mumbai, BHMS, CCAH, FCAH

    Dr. Gayatri Panditrao, Pune, Homeopathic Physician, BHMS, PGDEMS

    Dr. Rashmi Menon, Mumbai, BHMS, ChT

    Rossamma Thomas, Pala, Kottayam, Kerala, Freelance Journalist

    Ambar Koiri, Mumbai, Awaken India Movement

    Dr. G Prema, Tamil Nadu, Classical Homeopath, Aasil Health Care

    Dr. S. G. Vombatkere, Mysuru, Human Rights Activist Advocate

    Anand Singh Bahrawat, Indore, High Court of Indore Advocate

    Vijay Kurle, Mumbai

    Advocate L Shunondo Chandiramani, Indore, High Court of Indore

    The post Letter from India: Stop World Health Organization’s “Pandemic Preparedness” Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NWO Elephant in the Room

    The post NWO Elephant in the Room first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Renaming the Hippocratic Oath

    The post Renaming the Hippocratic Oath first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza Water Salinity

    Palestinians in Gaza are resorting to drinking from polluted agricultural wells that are almost as salty as seawater, posing an immediate health risk. Special thanks to 10Tooba for their work and partnership on this visual.

    The post Gaza Water Salinity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Politics of Eating

    Reflections on the psychological, moral and political implications of what we eat, and on prospects for non-violent social change.

    Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

    — Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, (Penguin Books, 1994): p.13.

    Getting back into fasting after a break is difficult. In the past, I would fast for two days in every week, but occasionally challenged myself to extend that by a day or two, maybe three, until one day — evidently one day too many — I collapsed like a device unplugged and cracked my head on the sink and toilet bowl on the way down to the stone floor. Syncope is a lovely word, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience.

    These days I opt for intermittent fasting, restricting food intake to an eight-hour window in every twenty-four. Thereafter, not even a wee measly sliver of dried mango, a peanut, a prune, a gherkin or grape is allowed through the gate. I don’t starve, but the tantalising whiff of someone’s bag of salt and vinegar-sprinkled chips occasionally tempts me to tap them on the shoulder and ask for one. I assure myself the craving will pass, but not before the prospect of finishing a whole bag alongside a slice of pizza topped with garlic, herbs and Kalamata olives floods the mind…adding a cake by way of dessert to complete the repertoire of gluttony.

    Such efforts to control cravings for energy-dense foods are effectively attempts to discipline the savannah brain, more specifically the adaptive preferences for salt, sugars and fats inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. These nutrients are essential to human survival, but whilst they are in abundance for around seven of the eight billion people that currently inhabit the planet, they were most likely rather more scarce in our ancestral environment. Moreover, our ancestors did not live the sedentary lifestyle many of us have today, with all the calorific consequences this implies.

    Anticipating famine further down the line, our ancestral urge would be to eat as much as possible of these essential foods whenever found in copious quantities. This inclination remains with us today, but converts to overdrive in circumstances where foods are widely available, made worse by being processed in forms that render them health-threatening and addictive. By imposing a limit on eating times, intermittent fasting therefore serves as a corrective to some of our evolved proclivities — those urges more in keeping with our ancestral environment — and if combined with a high quality diet a relationship with politics is necessarily established; it might not deliver a mortal blow to the ultra-processed food industry, but combined with a whole-food plant-based vegan diet it has a part to play in heightening resistance to some of the shadier tendencies of the food monopolists.

    What does politics have to do with what we put in our mouths? Salt, fats, sugars and various additives are today produced in combined, and often concentrated forms by powerful multinational food corporations — global multi-billion dollar concerns that typically pound the public with adverts illustrating people looking like mindless zombies guzzling sugary drinks, emptying cardboard boxes of sugary cereal into breakfast bowls, and devouring unhealthy concoctions of deep-fried dead things from buckets. Their express aim is to maximise profit by exploiting the palatability of desired nutrients, the preference for calories, and the pleasure-seeking pathways — the latter being an increase in dopamine in the brain’s reward circuit, or to put it another way, the habit of liking something, getting a kick out of it, and wanting more. Many people are consequently undernourished, and in one sense starving, not because there is a scarcity of food in the category of good dietary quality, but because there is an abundance of cheap and available energy-dense foods.

    The correlation between ultra-processed foods, obesity and food-related illnesses continues into the realm of food addiction. A glance at the criteria for determining addiction in the DSM-5, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders), shows people who regularly consume foods rich in salt, fats and sugars conform to the stated criteria for addiction — a condition on a par with being hooked on cigarettes, though many self-report their experience to be far worse. These criteria include repeated consumption despite known harmful consequences, needing more of the substance to get the effect you want, wanting to cut down or stop but not managing to, craving to use the substance, and the experience of withdrawal.

    It’s not difficult to find evidence that links highly-processed foods with obesity or illness among people of all age groups and all social classes, including their pets, but evidence does indicate a higher incidence of obesity and food addiction among lower income groups. That being said, not everyone suffering from food addiction or food-related illnesses is clinically obese. Whether we deem the continued use of highly processed foods the result of one factor, or a combination of several — biological, socioeconomic, behavioural or substance-related — it is perhaps unsurprising that many people, on becoming aware that they face life-threatening conditions, enter a 12-step recovery programme.

    Food addiction and food-related illnesses are set to become our highest health concern. Setting a trend for the world, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023 stated that over 40% of adults and 20% of children and adolescents in the USA are obese, whilst 70% of adults overall are overweight. Those rates are currently lower in Europe, but the trend is no less troubling. Obesity Statistics from the House of Commons Library in 2023 suggest UK obesity rates are running at 25% for adults and children, and that almost 40% of adults are overweight. The Scottish Government’s Health Survey of 2022 indicates that the highest rates of obesity and related illnesses in the UK are in Scotland, and those health risks include diabetes, strokes, sleep apnea, dyslipidemia, hypertension, coronary artery disease, fatty liver disease, a variety of cancers, and possibly cognitive dysfunction — such as poor decision-making and memory impairment.

    In light of the individual suffering, the increasing strain on medical services, and what amounts to an impending societal if not global health catastrophe, the heavily-marketed campaign for intermittent fasting should have proved highly beneficial. The overwhelming focus of the programme, however, was not on individuals relinquishing highly processed foods, but simply on their reduction by restricting food consumption within set times. This was a widely-advertised lifestyle intervention, not a challenge to the dark side of the food industry, and as such it was hardly the worst outcome for the unsavoury food giants: continue eating rubbish, just less rubbish.

    One might argue that any reduction in food intake, even at the level of basic survival mode, is welcome during an epidemic of obesity-related problems — an epidemic that is currently affecting a quarter of the world’s population. But endorsing highly-processed and addictive foods on the intermittent fasting programme, albeit in lesser quantities, not only leaves people ultimately facing failure and a range of health problems, it somewhat suspiciously sidesteps the chance to publicly condemn the food giants. When one considers the vast number of television programmes and magazine articles devoted to dieting, one can’t help but wonder if perhaps a parasitical connection exists between the dieting industry and the food giants, and whether they are in fact motivated to kill their host. Fat, after all, is a monetarist issue.

    The effectiveness of intermittent fasting hinges on the extent to which it is allied to programmes of high dietary quality, otherwise it is no better than the ludicrous calorie-counting diets, some of which even allow chocolate bars and cakes to be counted. If they include foods that are correlated with health concerns, and with added sugars that render them potentially addictive, then even if they help people to lose excess weight, it is difficult to see how they could hope to clear a pathway to optimal levels of health and longevity. On the self-discipline front, speaking from personal experience, intermittent fasting combined with a high quality diet has worked well in the context of everyday circumstances. However, I must admit that when I’m out of the country, fasting all but goes out the window.

    Wandering in foreign parts, as I often do these days, it’s easy to lose track of time and for fasting boundaries to become outrageously stretched. Being vegan, there is the additional challenge of finding suitable food, of laboriously checking ingredients, and of struggling to explain across the language barrier what should be left out of prepared meals. After a while it gets easier to navigate, and even in the once vegan-oriented but now notoriously meat-heavy Japan, I eventually located vegan restaurants in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, found options in restaurants that were otherwise a horror show, and eventually sampled the buddhist cuisine of shojin-ryori.

    Although vegan alternatives are not always on advertised menus, they can often be conjured up if asked. Even in those obscure and in some respects forbidding narrow alleyways, some with vents of rising steam that one might imagine belong to a mythical underworld, people with a pot, a flame and a mix of ingredients will often cobble together something on the vegan front, and in fact I think many folk find the challenge fun. Food is frequently the lingua franca in interethnic situations, of which veganism has often proved to be a particular dialect that many of the people I met were curious to learn.

    There have, however, been communication failures. By way of a well-meaning meat alternative, I’ve been offered a variety-bag of deep-fried long-legged bugs, a bowl of baby octopuses with quail eggs stuffed into their brains, and manure-scented peanut brittle; the latter I licked, causing a week-long bout of projectile vomiting and propulsive diarrhoea. I wanted to die. On the plus side, the food poisoning did render it a little easier to get back on the intermittent fasting track once home…not that I’m recommending that particular course for anyone.

    Places where monks hang out are always a fair bet, and I’ve been offered vegan platters in or around Buddhist monasteries in Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, Sikh gurdwaras, Jain basadis and Krishna temples across India, Taoist pagodas in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Hindu mandirs throughout Indonesia. The trend continued in Malaysia and Borneo, where the most edifying establishments, built from the ground up for moral instruction and intellectual nourishment, tend also to be the best eating joints…or to be neighbouring them.

    Among several areas in which temple followers excelled and I failed was fasting. I have often been beckoned by the aroma of sizzling street food wafting through the tropical night air, and must admit to having devoured a wee Pad Thai at midnight — well outside my fasting hours. In my defence, it is difficult to stick rigidly to a fasting regime whilst wandering wildly for miles in vast areas ten thousand kilometres from home, and when uncertain where the next meal will come from. Stirring up the atavistic remnants of our distant ancestors, I’ve eaten heartily when food was in abundance in preparation for anticipated periods of scarcity, and occasionally compromised to the extent of eating highly processed foods that are potentially detrimental to health. Interrupted fasting might be a more apposite name for my version of intermittent fasting — when I’m abroad, at any rate — but at least I’ve not strayed from the vegan path.

    On that side of things it was disheartening to learn that the Jainist, Hindu and Buddhist priests, monks and nuns I encountered — whilst at the level of rhetoric they avowedly adhere to the principles of ahimsa: of having respect for all living things, and the avoidance of violence towards others — were not in fact vegan. If not meat itself, monks and adherents to each of these religious orders, though there were some exceptions, use dairy, and consequently commodify nonhuman animals for personal benefit. Perhaps many would hope to find consolation in the fact that they are vegetarian, but this is no less barbaric than the exploitation of animals as things for clothes or meat and various products. Bizarrely, some Buddhist orders formally announced meat-eating to be at the discretion of the individual — a position that not only contradicts the principle of ahimsa, but effectively condones violence towards all.

    One could no more tolerate violence selectively applied towards particular groups of sentient beings, than one could selectively condone human rights abuses, or selectively discriminate against particular religious or ethnic groups. Just as it is not possible to disentangle exploitation from violence, animal or human, there is an equivalence between speciesism and other forms of discrimination, such as sexism and racism. For their perception of ahimsa to be anything less than hypocrisy, they would need to stop eating, wearing, and otherwise using nonhuman animals. Breaking the rules of fasting, and even crossing the line for short periods into the terrain of ultra-processed foods, is one thing, but the moral injustice of exploiting sentient beings as objects of property, no less than human slavery, is quite another.

    Becoming vegan does not mean that by definition one upholds the principle of non-violence towards all, but it is impossible to uphold that principle without first becoming vegan. There are many countries around the world with a relatively high percentage of vegans among their population, and occasionally we even hear boasts of a commitment to the extent that the uniforms and boots of their military are made of vegan materials, yet some have a reputation for oppression, war, ethnic cleansing, and a wide range of human rights abuses. Becoming vegan will not automatically render us any less the most murderous species on Earth, but we cannot hope to reverse that trend unless we become vegan.

    Precisely because they participate in the exploitation of nonhuman animals, the meat-eater who professes a commitment to spiritual, ethical or indeed socialist principles is at best deeply flawed in their thinking, and at worst morally suspect. The fact that non-human animals are sentient beings that avoid pain, and have a desire to live their lives to the full, renders veganism a moral imperative. In other words — and quite apart from the benefits conferred by veganism with regard to personal health, the global climate, and world hunger — killing animals is clearly contrary to reason and to what is morally right. Whilst it is generally and somewhat misguidedly packaged and promoted as simply a consumer choice, personal preference or lifestyle option, veganism is at heart a moral and political way of life, one that by necessity fits with campaigns against violence, and with social movements against oppression in all its forms.

    In the 1820s, the French politician and author of The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, cautioned, “The destiny of nations depends on the way in which they feed themselves.” It is a statement that implies the choices we make about the future begin with the next meal. To put it yet another way, to change the world, start with yourself.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Politics of Eating

    Reflections on the psychological, moral and political implications of what we eat, and on prospects for non-violent social change.

    Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

    — Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, (Penguin Books, 1994): p.13.

    Getting back into fasting after a break is difficult. In the past, I would fast for two days in every week, but occasionally challenged myself to extend that by a day or two, maybe three, until one day — evidently one day too many — I collapsed like a device unplugged and cracked my head on the sink and toilet bowl on the way down to the stone floor. Syncope is a lovely word, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience.

    These days I opt for intermittent fasting, restricting food intake to an eight-hour window in every twenty-four. Thereafter, not even a wee measly sliver of dried mango, a peanut, a prune, a gherkin or grape is allowed through the gate. I don’t starve, but the tantalising whiff of someone’s bag of salt and vinegar-sprinkled chips occasionally tempts me to tap them on the shoulder and ask for one. I assure myself the craving will pass, but not before the prospect of finishing a whole bag alongside a slice of pizza topped with garlic, herbs and Kalamata olives floods the mind…adding a cake by way of dessert to complete the repertoire of gluttony.

    Such efforts to control cravings for energy-dense foods are effectively attempts to discipline the savannah brain, more specifically the adaptive preferences for salt, sugars and fats inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. These nutrients are essential to human survival, but whilst they are in abundance for around seven of the eight billion people that currently inhabit the planet, they were most likely rather more scarce in our ancestral environment. Moreover, our ancestors did not live the sedentary lifestyle many of us have today, with all the calorific consequences this implies.

    Anticipating famine further down the line, our ancestral urge would be to eat as much as possible of these essential foods whenever found in copious quantities. This inclination remains with us today, but converts to overdrive in circumstances where foods are widely available, made worse by being processed in forms that render them health-threatening and addictive. By imposing a limit on eating times, intermittent fasting therefore serves as a corrective to some of our evolved proclivities — those urges more in keeping with our ancestral environment — and if combined with a high quality diet a relationship with politics is necessarily established; it might not deliver a mortal blow to the ultra-processed food industry, but combined with a whole-food plant-based vegan diet it has a part to play in heightening resistance to some of the shadier tendencies of the food monopolists.

    What does politics have to do with what we put in our mouths? Salt, fats, sugars and various additives are today produced in combined, and often concentrated forms by powerful multinational food corporations — global multi-billion dollar concerns that typically pound the public with adverts illustrating people looking like mindless zombies guzzling sugary drinks, emptying cardboard boxes of sugary cereal into breakfast bowls, and devouring unhealthy concoctions of deep-fried dead things from buckets. Their express aim is to maximise profit by exploiting the palatability of desired nutrients, the preference for calories, and the pleasure-seeking pathways — the latter being an increase in dopamine in the brain’s reward circuit, or to put it another way, the habit of liking something, getting a kick out of it, and wanting more. Many people are consequently undernourished, and in one sense starving, not because there is a scarcity of food in the category of good dietary quality, but because there is an abundance of cheap and available energy-dense foods.

    The correlation between ultra-processed foods, obesity and food-related illnesses continues into the realm of food addiction. A glance at the criteria for determining addiction in the DSM-5, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders), shows people who regularly consume foods rich in salt, fats and sugars conform to the stated criteria for addiction — a condition on a par with being hooked on cigarettes, though many self-report their experience to be far worse. These criteria include repeated consumption despite known harmful consequences, needing more of the substance to get the effect you want, wanting to cut down or stop but not managing to, craving to use the substance, and the experience of withdrawal.

    It’s not difficult to find evidence that links highly-processed foods with obesity or illness among people of all age groups and all social classes, including their pets, but evidence does indicate a higher incidence of obesity and food addiction among lower income groups. That being said, not everyone suffering from food addiction or food-related illnesses is clinically obese. Whether we deem the continued use of highly processed foods the result of one factor, or a combination of several — biological, socioeconomic, behavioural or substance-related — it is perhaps unsurprising that many people, on becoming aware that they face life-threatening conditions, enter a 12-step recovery programme.

    Food addiction and food-related illnesses are set to become our highest health concern. Setting a trend for the world, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023 stated that over 40% of adults and 20% of children and adolescents in the USA are obese, whilst 70% of adults overall are overweight. Those rates are currently lower in Europe, but the trend is no less troubling. Obesity Statistics from the House of Commons Library in 2023 suggest UK obesity rates are running at 25% for adults and children, and that almost 40% of adults are overweight. The Scottish Government’s Health Survey of 2022 indicates that the highest rates of obesity and related illnesses in the UK are in Scotland, and those health risks include diabetes, strokes, sleep apnea, dyslipidemia, hypertension, coronary artery disease, fatty liver disease, a variety of cancers, and possibly cognitive dysfunction — such as poor decision-making and memory impairment.

    In light of the individual suffering, the increasing strain on medical services, and what amounts to an impending societal if not global health catastrophe, the heavily-marketed campaign for intermittent fasting should have proved highly beneficial. The overwhelming focus of the programme, however, was not on individuals relinquishing highly processed foods, but simply on their reduction by restricting food consumption within set times. This was a widely-advertised lifestyle intervention, not a challenge to the dark side of the food industry, and as such it was hardly the worst outcome for the unsavoury food giants: continue eating rubbish, just less rubbish.

    One might argue that any reduction in food intake, even at the level of basic survival mode, is welcome during an epidemic of obesity-related problems — an epidemic that is currently affecting a quarter of the world’s population. But endorsing highly-processed and addictive foods on the intermittent fasting programme, albeit in lesser quantities, not only leaves people ultimately facing failure and a range of health problems, it somewhat suspiciously sidesteps the chance to publicly condemn the food giants. When one considers the vast number of television programmes and magazine articles devoted to dieting, one can’t help but wonder if perhaps a parasitical connection exists between the dieting industry and the food giants, and whether they are in fact motivated to kill their host. Fat, after all, is a monetarist issue.

    The effectiveness of intermittent fasting hinges on the extent to which it is allied to programmes of high dietary quality, otherwise it is no better than the ludicrous calorie-counting diets, some of which even allow chocolate bars and cakes to be counted. If they include foods that are correlated with health concerns, and with added sugars that render them potentially addictive, then even if they help people to lose excess weight, it is difficult to see how they could hope to clear a pathway to optimal levels of health and longevity. On the self-discipline front, speaking from personal experience, intermittent fasting combined with a high quality diet has worked well in the context of everyday circumstances. However, I must admit that when I’m out of the country, fasting all but goes out the window.

    Wandering in foreign parts, as I often do these days, it’s easy to lose track of time and for fasting boundaries to become outrageously stretched. Being vegan, there is the additional challenge of finding suitable food, of laboriously checking ingredients, and of struggling to explain across the language barrier what should be left out of prepared meals. After a while it gets easier to navigate, and even in the once vegan-oriented but now notoriously meat-heavy Japan, I eventually located vegan restaurants in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, found options in restaurants that were otherwise a horror show, and eventually sampled the buddhist cuisine of shojin-ryori.

    Although vegan alternatives are not always on advertised menus, they can often be conjured up if asked. Even in those obscure and in some respects forbidding narrow alleyways, some with vents of rising steam that one might imagine belong to a mythical underworld, people with a pot, a flame and a mix of ingredients will often cobble together something on the vegan front, and in fact I think many folk find the challenge fun. Food is frequently the lingua franca in interethnic situations, of which veganism has often proved to be a particular dialect that many of the people I met were curious to learn.

    There have, however, been communication failures. By way of a well-meaning meat alternative, I’ve been offered a variety-bag of deep-fried long-legged bugs, a bowl of baby octopuses with quail eggs stuffed into their brains, and manure-scented peanut brittle; the latter I licked, causing a week-long bout of projectile vomiting and propulsive diarrhoea. I wanted to die. On the plus side, the food poisoning did render it a little easier to get back on the intermittent fasting track once home…not that I’m recommending that particular course for anyone.

    Places where monks hang out are always a fair bet, and I’ve been offered vegan platters in or around Buddhist monasteries in Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, Sikh gurdwaras, Jain basadis and Krishna temples across India, Taoist pagodas in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Hindu mandirs throughout Indonesia. The trend continued in Malaysia and Borneo, where the most edifying establishments, built from the ground up for moral instruction and intellectual nourishment, tend also to be the best eating joints…or to be neighbouring them.

    Among several areas in which temple followers excelled and I failed was fasting. I have often been beckoned by the aroma of sizzling street food wafting through the tropical night air, and must admit to having devoured a wee Pad Thai at midnight — well outside my fasting hours. In my defence, it is difficult to stick rigidly to a fasting regime whilst wandering wildly for miles in vast areas ten thousand kilometres from home, and when uncertain where the next meal will come from. Stirring up the atavistic remnants of our distant ancestors, I’ve eaten heartily when food was in abundance in preparation for anticipated periods of scarcity, and occasionally compromised to the extent of eating highly processed foods that are potentially detrimental to health. Interrupted fasting might be a more apposite name for my version of intermittent fasting — when I’m abroad, at any rate — but at least I’ve not strayed from the vegan path.

    On that side of things it was disheartening to learn that the Jainist, Hindu and Buddhist priests, monks and nuns I encountered — whilst at the level of rhetoric they avowedly adhere to the principles of ahimsa: of having respect for all living things, and the avoidance of violence towards others — were not in fact vegan. If not meat itself, monks and adherents to each of these religious orders, though there were some exceptions, use dairy, and consequently commodify nonhuman animals for personal benefit. Perhaps many would hope to find consolation in the fact that they are vegetarian, but this is no less barbaric than the exploitation of animals as things for clothes or meat and various products. Bizarrely, some Buddhist orders formally announced meat-eating to be at the discretion of the individual — a position that not only contradicts the principle of ahimsa, but effectively condones violence towards all.

    One could no more tolerate violence selectively applied towards particular groups of sentient beings, than one could selectively condone human rights abuses, or selectively discriminate against particular religious or ethnic groups. Just as it is not possible to disentangle exploitation from violence, animal or human, there is an equivalence between speciesism and other forms of discrimination, such as sexism and racism. For their perception of ahimsa to be anything less than hypocrisy, they would need to stop eating, wearing, and otherwise using nonhuman animals. Breaking the rules of fasting, and even crossing the line for short periods into the terrain of ultra-processed foods, is one thing, but the moral injustice of exploiting sentient beings as objects of property, no less than human slavery, is quite another.

    Becoming vegan does not mean that by definition one upholds the principle of non-violence towards all, but it is impossible to uphold that principle without first becoming vegan. There are many countries around the world with a relatively high percentage of vegans among their population, and occasionally we even hear boasts of a commitment to the extent that the uniforms and boots of their military are made of vegan materials, yet some have a reputation for oppression, war, ethnic cleansing, and a wide range of human rights abuses. Becoming vegan will not automatically render us any less the most murderous species on Earth, but we cannot hope to reverse that trend unless we become vegan.

    Precisely because they participate in the exploitation of nonhuman animals, the meat-eater who professes a commitment to spiritual, ethical or indeed socialist principles is at best deeply flawed in their thinking, and at worst morally suspect. The fact that non-human animals are sentient beings that avoid pain, and have a desire to live their lives to the full, renders veganism a moral imperative. In other words — and quite apart from the benefits conferred by veganism with regard to personal health, the global climate, and world hunger — killing animals is clearly contrary to reason and to what is morally right. Whilst it is generally and somewhat misguidedly packaged and promoted as simply a consumer choice, personal preference or lifestyle option, veganism is at heart a moral and political way of life, one that by necessity fits with campaigns against violence, and with social movements against oppression in all its forms.

    In the 1820s, the French politician and author of The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, cautioned, “The destiny of nations depends on the way in which they feed themselves.” It is a statement that implies the choices we make about the future begin with the next meal. To put it yet another way, to change the world, start with yourself.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.