The tipping point is only recognized and acknowledged after it’s too late. Exponential, or non-linear, growth is sneaky in that one minute things appear manageable, even benign, when in fact we are mere moments away from total saturation and death. That’s the situation we are in now, having reached the limits of growth on a finite planet. Despite all the handwringing about the Euro Crisis and fixing the problem there, the only way out is degrowth and an awareness that we must live within the means that the earth will allow. For self-serving reasons, the social hierarchy that benefits from the current system will not allow this to happen because it would mean a radical restructuring of how the economy works and how the world’s resources are used and distributed. This is the straitjacket we are caught in by those benefiting at the top of the ponzi scheme who want to use austerity in an attempt to preserve the current scheme at the expense of the masses. But under our capitalist economic system, austerity becomes self-defeating:
The reasons given by S&P, the rating agency concerned, is revealing: “we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues” (www.standardandpoors.com).
Without growth, debt reduction becomes impossible – and yet the only way capitalism has to stimulate growth is by government intervention, thus increasing debt! Capitalism is caught in a vicious pincer movement from which it cannot escape.
The following post explains why we have reached the limits of cheap fossil-fuel driven growth, requiring an out-of-the-box thinking in order to solve our current problems.
The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.
“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.” says Professor Stephen Hawking as reported by Edward Morgan in Looking at the New Demography.
Suffice to say the rate of population growth will not continue, and Morgan makes the case we are already in stage 5 of The Demographic Transition Model
click on chart for sharper image
Peak Oil Implications on Population Growth
Whereas Morgan presents a relatively benign view of things, even wondering if there are ways to reverse stage 5 decline, Paul Chefurka in Population: The Elephant in the Room sees things quite differently, primarily because of oil usage.
Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet’s finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do.
It is becoming clearer every day, as crises like global warming, water, soil and food depletion, biodiversity loss and the degradation of our oceans constantly worsen, that the human situation is not sustainable. Bringing about a sustainable balance between ourselves and the planet we depend on will require us, in very short order, to reduce our population, our level of activity, or both. One of the questions that comes up repeatedly in discussions of population is, “What level of human population is sustainable?“
Oil first entered general use around 1900 when the global population was about 1.6 billion. Since then the population has quadrupled. When we look at oil production overlaid on the population growth curve we can see a very suggestive correspondence:
A closer look at the two curves from 1900 to the 2005 reinforces the impression of a close correlation:
The first questions everyone one asks when they accept the concept of Peak Oil is, “When is it going to happen?” and “How fast is the decline going to be?”
The steepness of the post-peak decline is open to more debate than the timing of the peak itself. There seems to be general agreement that the decline will start off very slowly, and will increase gradually as more and more oil fields enter decline and fewer replacement fields are brought on line. The decline will eventually flatten out, due both to the difficulty of extracting the last oil from a field as well as the reduction in demand brought about by high prices and economic slowdown.
The post-peak decline rate could be flattened out if we discover new oil to replace the oil we’re using. Unfortunately our consumption is outpacing our new discoveries by a rate of 5 to 1. to make matters worse, it appears that we have probably already discovered about 95% of all the conventional crude oil on the planet.
A full picture of the oil age is given in the graph below. This model incorporates actual production figures up to 2005 and my best estimate of a reasonable shape for the decline curve. It also incorporates my belief that the peak is happening as we speak.
In ecology, overshoot is said to have occurred when a population’s consumption exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, as illustrated in this graphic:
Overshoot
Populations in serious overshoot always decline. This is seen in wine vats when the yeast cells die after consuming all the sugar from the grapes and bathing themselves in their own poisonous alcoholic wastes. It’s seen in predator-prey relations in the animal world, where the depletion of the prey species results in a die-back of the predators. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot. The reason is that unsustainable consumption while in overshoot allowed the species to use more non-renewable resources and to further poison their environment with excessive wastes.
In the case of humanity, our use of oil has allowed us to perform prodigious feats of resource extraction and waste production that would simply have been inconceivable before the oil age. If our oil supply declined, the lower available energy might be insufficient to let us extract and use the lower grade resources that remain. A similar case can be made for a lessened ability to deal with wastes in our environment.
Excess Deaths
[Chefurka goes through a series of grim charts culminating with with this explanation of what is coming]
The Cost
The human cost of such an involuntary population rebalancing is, of course, horrific. Based on this model we would experience an average excess death rate of 100 million per year every year for the next 75 years to achieve our target population of one billion by 2082. The peak excess death rate would happen in about 20 years, and would be about 200 million that year. To put this in perspective, WWII caused an excess death rate of only 10 million per year for only six years.
Given this, it’s not hard to see why population control is the untouchable elephant in the room – the problem we’re in is simply too big for humane or even rational solutions. It’s also not hard to see why some people are beginning to grasp the inevitability of a human die-off.
UN Population Projections
Let’s put aside the really grim projections and simply ponder the “low population track” in the following charts of population projections from the UN.
I cannot find the article or source for that chart but the image is from a link on Seeking Alpha.
Demographic and Economic Questions
Is that low UN track that unbelievable? If not, what if the starting point is now, not 2040?
Who is going to pay the medical costs of all the retirees in the developed-world if people live longer and the population simply stagnates?
Where are the energy resources going to come from if the population keeps growing instead?
Where are the energy needs of China alone going to come from at the current rate of China’s economic growth regardless of whether the Chinese population grows or not?
Those who think we are going to “grow” our way out the the current global economic mess better have good answers for the questions in points number one and three above.
Problem number two is a huge problem in Japan right now. The US will face the same problem not too far down the road.
Those who suggest immigration and population growth is the solution to problem number two better have an answer to question number three while also explaining how immigration and population growth is nothing more than a can-kicking exercise.
The China problem is right here, right now. Peak oil all but ensures China’s growth rate is going to plunge in the not too distant future, there is going to be a huge global showdown over oil supplies with China the winner, or a cheap easy to produce means of renewable energy is found in the next five years?
The following video is from 2degrees and helps visualize human population growth from “1 AD up to 2030 AD. Each dot represents 1 million people.” The only time global population shrank was during the Black Death in Europe from 1348 to 1350 with the death toll estimated at somewhere between 75 and 200 million people or 25% to over 60% of the population.
Yesterday the author of The Elements of the Corporatocracy at his site Brane Space published a post called ‘Could the ‘Black Death’ Strike Again?‘ in which he brings up a recent case in Oregon and posits that with austerity measures imposed on our indebted economy in the age of peak oil, our infrastructure will inevitably deteriorate faster without the funds or cheap energy to maintain such things as the endless labyrinth of water pipes and waste management infrastructure. This scenario certainly is what we are facing. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card on America’s Infrastructure gave the country an overall grade of “D” in its most recent report and put a price tag of $2.2 Trillion to make it meet adequate conditions. Another fast approaching reality is that of “peak antibiotics“. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chen, says that we are facing a world without antibiotics:
If current trends continue unabated, the future is easy to predict. Some experts say we are moving back to the pre-antibiotic era. No. This will be a post-antibiotic era,” Chan said. “In terms of new replacement antibiotics, the pipeline is virtually dry…The cupboard is nearly bare.
The UK is facing a “massive” rise in antibiotic-resistant blood poisoning caused by the bacterium E.coli – bringing closer the spectre of diseases that are impossible to treat.
Experts say the growth of antibiotic resistance now poses as great a threat to global health as the emergence of new diseases such as Aids and pandemic flu.
Professor Peter Hawkey, a clinical microbiologist and chair of the Government’s antibiotic-resistance working group, said that antibiotic resistance had become medicine’s equivalent of climate change.
The “slow but insidious growth” of resistant organisms was threatening to turn common infections into untreatable diseases, he said. Already, an estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
“It is a worldwide issue – there are no boundaries,” he said. “We have very good policies on the use of antibiotics in man and in animals in the UK. But we are not alone. We have to think globally.” Between 2005 and 2009 the incidence of E.coli “bacteraemias” [the presence of bacteria in the blood] rose by 30 per cent, from 18,000 to over 25,000 cases. Those resistant to antibiotics have risen from 1 per cent at the beginning of the century to 10 per cent…
Also worth reading are these three articles from last year:
In 2010, Professor Timothy Walsh had a sobering outlook for the future prospects of our battle with antibiotic-resistant bacteria:
Professor Timothy Walsh told Wales on Sunday that in the “Darwinian” battle against disease-carrying bacteria, we are on the losing side.
And he said that we will all have to face up to a world where antibiotics simply do not work anymore.
His claim came after he and his team of scientists at Cardiff University found 37 cases in the UK of a deadly new form of superbug that is resistant to ALL antibiotics….
He said: “This is Darwin’s survival of the fittest – and we are on the losing side.
“The real test is – can bacteria evolve resistance and maintain resistance quicker than we can develop antibacterial drugs?
“The ultimate answer to that is yes, it can.
“We have all been scratching around to try to find new classes of antibiotics, but ultimately bacteria’s DNA systems can evolve and transfer very quickly so the odds are not in our favour.
“We have to be realistic and accept that this is potentially the future we will have to face.”
The world’s population has exploded from two billion people 80 years ago to more than six billion today – all thanks to the discovery and mass production of antibiotics like penicillin.
Because bacteria multiply every 20 to 30 minutes, they evolve very quickly and become resistant to antibiotics used against them.
In the past, this has not mattered because scientists were producing so many new types of drug, but in the last 15 years development of new antibiotics has almost ground to a halt, meaning bacteria are catching up fast…
Worth reprinting in relation to the above article is a response by Dr Edo McGowan PhD, Medical Geo-hydrology, Environmental and public policy analyst, environmental scientist, medical geo-hydrologist working with environmental contaminants:
“A principal route for the spread of newly emerging infectious diseases is through sewage treatment plants which generate these bugs and then release them. Genetic information is rapidly spread amongst the very large number of bacteria found in sewage treatment works. The issue of over prescribing antibiotics may now be vastly over-shadowed by the generation and release of pathogens and superbugs by sewer plants. There have been some good studies coming out of India on the augmentation and generation of sewage assisted superbugs derived from hospitals, see: (http://www.indmedica.com/journals.php?journalid=6&issueid=21&articleid=179&action=article)
What we are finding in America is that the regulatory community, including the US/EPA and the US CDC have been asleep at the switch when it comes to how superbugs are made and then multiplied in sewer plants, thence spread through sewage byproducts such as biosolids into the environment. Several U.S. scientists as well as scientists around the world have documented the spread of antibiotic resistance via treated sewage, biosolids or released treated wastewater. For example, see: “Vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) in Swedish sewage sludge”, by Leena Sahlström, Verena Rehbinder, Ann Albihn, Anna Aspan, and Björn Bengtsson. Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica 2009, 51:24 doi:10.1186/1751-0147-51-24.
Documentation of antibiotic resistance spread by sewage goes back decades but the regulatory community continued to ignore it—-or worse, hid it. The standards used are antiquated and the regulators are well aware of this also. Thus, along the great rivers in the U.S. and other nations, each successive city gets its drinking water from the immediate up-stream sewage outfall of the preceding city. Agricultural lands with applied biosolids also drain into these rivers carrying antibiotic resistant pathogens, see: “Increased frequency of drug-resistant bacteria and fecal coliforms in an Indiana Creek adjacent to farmland amended with treated sludge” by Shivi Selvaratnam and J. David Kunberger.
This process cycles these bugs and each time they get stronger. The fact that we are now finding pharmaceuticals in drinking water shows one that the wastewater systems are not working. Unbeknown to most, there are antibiotic resistant genes, so small that they pass through most water treatment plants and are in fact now found in drinking water. These are not affected by chlorine at currently used levels. They easily transit within the human gut to the gut bacteria and there wait like tiny time bombs for an incoming pathogen, thus arming this pathogen with yet more resistance and virulence.
Once in the gut biota this damaging genetic information can remain for years and also because of the very large number of bacteria in the normal gut biota, there are opportunities for creating higher level pathogens. Antibiotic resistant infections in the United States now cause more deaths than AIDS. This is not an easy issue for U.S. regulators to accept, especially if they want you to believe all is well and rosy. But unless we want to return to amputation as the cure for infections, the regulatory community around the globe needs to wake up.
We may delay what Professor Timothy Walsh indicates by immediately dealing with the current standards for wastewater and redesigning sewer plants. There are extant systems and designs that greatly diminish the flow-through of pathogens. Additionally, the current use of sewage sludge on agricultural land merely spreads more antibiotic resistance into farming areas, thence into the food supply. The current use of reclaimed water on food crops does the same. We have created this problem. It may be that current surgeries will not be possible because of the risk of unstoppable infection and cure for infection may revert to amputation.” – Dr. Edo McGowan
…A permanently contracting economy will result in a bioethical crisis as fewer resources are available to an increasingly stressed global population. We need to reconsider our goals of expansion of capitalism-driven wealth as the system loses its surplus energy. Instead we need to consider the sustainable good of the entire country during the contraction of the economy. We need justice in terms of basic needs for all, with more attention to the health of entire communities rather than individual rights. Failure to provide basic needs for all affects the whole system, with increases in epidemics due to stress, overcrowding, poor nutrition, dirty water and pollution, and failures in vaccination programs and general control of illnesses.
Based on the apparent politics of today, as we continue to descend, what we will probably get as the system becomes more imbalanced and unsustainable is limited fee for service care for the wealthy (with eventual failure of insurance), very limited care for the poor, and early mortality for many….
So if we take into account these various elements of peak oil, austerity cuts, a crumbling infrastructure and ineffective waste treatment facilities, a for-profit healthcare system that primarily serves the wealthy, and “peak antibiotics”, then the outlook does not look good for avoiding another outbreak or plague of some sort. In fact, it appears inevitable if you also consider that bacteria have been imbued with superior mutation and survival abilities from their unbroken 3.5 billion year reign on this planet.
I haven’t done any bashing truth-telling on Mitt Romney yet, so now would be a good time since it looks like King Romney is closing the gap in war chest funds. As Matt Taibbi pointed out earlier this year, “the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the timein America.” And Romney appears to be the golden boy for our financial oligarchs. According to the experts in such matters of our staged elections, Romney has the backing of the 1%:
..Romney will certainly have the advantage as Wall Street tycoons and conservative billionaires line up to contribute. One billionaire, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was reportedly ready to make “limitless” contributions, more than $100 million, to Romney to defeat the president….
“…Romney and his allies are certain to hold the financial upper hand, not least because the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 allowed for a flood of corporate cash. The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obama’s diminished stature and more formidable opponent.”
Now as I explained in my post ‘Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy‘, the job of the President is more of a PR position for who really runs the country, i.e. the corporatocracy. If you look at Obama’s record, he is indistinguishable from his predecessor in all issues that matter to the common person. For instance, contrary to Obama’s pre-election populist rhetoric, he has escalated America’s militarism such as in drone and cyber warfare, and he has widened even further the wealth gap. Having previously signed trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, Obama continues to sell out the American worker to multinational corporations as revealed in a recently leaked document of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (also known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, orTPP). Like all trade agreements before, this one is no different in the way that it was created, i.e. solely by corporate lobbyists, leaving the American public completely shut out. Compare that with what Obama said in 2008:
We can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests…
Rest assured, King Romney will continue the dismantling of America and its Third Worldization in favor of the parasitic financial sector and transnational corporations. He says this TPP tade agreement should be passed through as soon as possible:
Reinstate the president’s Trade Promotion Authority
Complete negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Pursue new trade agreements with nations committed to free enterprise and open markets
Create the Reagan Economic Zone
King Romney will also continue to support the military-industrial-complex and America’s war economy, painting himself as a pro-military, self-sacrificing patriotic citizen. But as Cenk Uygur notes, the truth is somewhere 180 degrees from what is painted for mass consumption:
Now after the 2012 political circus concludes, we will have had twelve years of rule by a president with no military service, and with another 4 more years to come. War is not for the privileged wealthy, but for the children of the impoverished 99% in America’s hinterland.
About 1 in 5 current members of Congress is a veteran, but less than 1% of their offspring are. – David Freed
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, author and Associate Professor of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, clarifies for us the ugly reality behind the wars sold to us today:
Hidden in these tragic figures[cost and lives lost] is war’s dirty secret. As historian and former U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich clearly states, “War is a source of enormous wealth and power [that delivers] profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries.”[2] These beneficiaries find it expedient and surprisingly easy to sell war and militarized priorities to a reluctant public using deception, fear, and patriotism.
The politicos no longer represent us, only themselves and the elite monied interests. So no matter who wins this election, expect more of the same from our corporate overlords.
The environmental disaster that has been unleashed by China’s industrialization over the last several decades has polluted not only its air and water, but also its soil. In fact, the soil has been degraded to such a degree that perhaps as much as 40% of China’s land is unusable for agriculture, as explained in the Guardian:
Scientists told the Guardian that this is likely to prove a bigger long-term problem than air and water pollution, with potentially dire consequences for food production and human health.
Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, estimated that one-tenth of China’s farmland was affected. “The country, the government and the public should realise how serious the soil pollution is,” he said. “More areas are being affected, the degree of contamination is intensifying and the range of toxins is increasing.”
Other estimates of soil pollution range as high as 40%, but an official risk assessment is unlikely to be made public for several years….
China’s worst soil contamination is from arsenic, which is released during the mining of copper, gold and other minerals. Roughly 70% of the world’s arsenic is found in China – and it is increasingly coming to the surface with horrendous consequences.
“When pollution spills cause massive die-offs of fish, the media usually blames cadmium, but that’s wrong. Arsenic is responsible. This is the most dangerous chemical,” he said. The country’s 280,000 mines are most responsible, according to Chen.
But the land – and food chain – are also threatened by lead and heavy metals from factories and overuse of pesticides and fertilisers by farmers. The risks are only slowly becoming well known. The Economic Information Daily reported this week that pollution ruins almost 12bn kilograms of food production each year, causing economic losses of 20 billion yuan.
Chen estimated that “no more than 20% of China’s soil is seriously polluted”, but he warned that the problem was likely to grow because 80% of the pollutants in the air and water ended up in the earth….
“If we don’t improve the quality of farmland, but only depend on increasing investment and improving technology, then – regardless of whatever super rice, super wheat and other super quality crops we come up with – it will be difficult to guarantee the sustainable development of our nation’s agriculture.”
“Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can’t possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can’t raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the United States because we don’t have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up… Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.”
If you take all of China’s environmental problems in total, you come to the conclusion that they are fouling their nest to such a degree that they can no longer support a large percentage of their population which is “still growing at an absolute rate of some 10 million additional inhabitants per year, despite its government’s efforts to stabilize it, through its one child per couple policy.” This simple fact would lead one to think that China’s one-child policy would be enforced even more harshly, especially in a cratering world economy. Yesterday I saw a gruesome news story on MSNBC which supports that assertion:
… She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.
Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people….
The combination of enormous environmental degradation, the one-child policy, and rampant economic growth have all factored into forcing China to export its population to foreign lands, namely Africa, in order to deal with the crisis of environmental overshoot. The following article from the Asia Times is drawn from the report“300,000,000 Million Reasons: What China Really Wants In Africa” by Cedric Muhammad, CEO of Africa PreBrief.
While a cottage industry of “China-in-Africa” experts has emerged over the past five years, on balance their explanations of why a magnetic like pull exists between the two continents is unsatisfactory. Certainly no one denies an array of state-to-state economic and geopolitical incentives recognized by both sides. After all, the simplified resources-for-infrastructure win-win is rather obvious.
Yet and still neither of those benefits – Africa’s gain of badly needed dams, roads, pipelines and bridges and China’s receipt of desperately needed oil and minerals – is as compelling as the widely rumored and highly plausible determination that China’s mainland can only sustain 700 million persons. Therefore at least 300 million to 500 million of its current 1.2 billion population must go elsewhere. The “elsewhere” is Africa if we are to believe French authors Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, who quote an anonymous Chinese scientist in their book China Safari.
I am among those who accept the only 700 million can stay/300 million must leave hypothesis, but I find the explanation for this sorely inadequate. The reason provided for the necessary exodus of 300 million out of China is environmental degradation and in particular water scarcity – so many rivers have been polluted in China that the resource no longer exists in ample supply to satisfy the needs of a desperate Chinese population.
While lack of water is certainly a major issue (see California; Syria-Turkey; and Darfur disputes for proof) the Earth is still a very large place. Why Africa would be the destination of choice for hundreds of millions of persons fleeing a country plagued by simultaneous drought and flood, is not answered by the environmental degradation theory.
As serious as China’s population pressures and environmental woes are, there must still be a more compelling internal and external force driving individuals out of China. There must exist an irresistible motivation shaped by circumstance that draws and drives an enormous mass of Chinese into Africa.
We believe that force can be found coming from an unsuspecting source – the Chinese “one-child” policy.
Though Mao Zedong did state that “revolution plus production can solve the problem of feeding the population” and thought that China’s large population was more asset than liability, that thinking was replaced by efforts at social engineering that the Chinese government now credits with preventing 400 million births, thus keeping the Chinese population from otherwise reaching a level of 1.7 million today.
But people don’t neatly fit into the cardinal or ordinal nature of numbers, nor does their dynamism accept the rigid confines of static public policy. There have been real and unpredictable consequences on the thinking of generations of Chinese families and children living under these regulations – consequences that are now spilling over into Africa.
The pattern of history shows that people vote with their feet as much as they do by ballot and there are many illustrative examples which shed light on the Chinese “one-child” experience. One of the best available is the analogy painted by McGill University professor and economist Reuven Brenner, who years ago likened the experience of Jews living in Europe with what Chinese endure today, writing in an article “China: A Neurotic Prosperity”:
“What can be the point of reference to predict consequences of China’s current childbearing pattern, adjusted over the last decades to one-kid or you’re-out-of-your-apartment policy? To make any reliable analyses, one needs at least two points, so as to draw a straight line as a first approximation.
Fortunately for observers, though unfortunately for those who had to adjust to such social engineering, there is not much new under the sun. There has been a government in the past who passed similar regulations. The year was 1726. The place, Austria.
The Viennese court, under anti-Semitic pressures, fearing a large increase in Jewish population – a fear that by itself suggests that the Jewish birth rate at the time was relatively high – introduced a regulation. Only the eldest son of a Jewish family could marry. The younger boys could not. This regulation introduced into the Austrian empire, including Bohemia, Moravia, parts of what became later Germany, and Alsace, led to the instant migration of young Jewish generation to Eastern Europe, to Poland, to Rumania. Whereas within the Austrian Empire the Jewish birth rates dropped, in Eastern Europe they did not.
How did Jewish parents, who stayed, adapt to the regulation? As one would expect: they had less children, invested more in their education and health, and probably spoiled them much more than would have been otherwise the case. One can speculate that this regulation was the origins of the myth of the neurotic Jewish mothers, and the by now tradition of driving Jewish kids to excellence – true, occasionally, to neurotic excellence.
Will Chinese mothers and kids react in a similar fashion? At least this point of reference suggests a positive answer. Thus one unintended consequence of the one-child regulation will be prosperity driven by kids who will grow up to be very ambitious entrepreneurs.”
There are two intriguing features in this portion of Brenner’s thesis that resonate with us. The first is a comparison of regulatory 18th-century Europe with family planning policies of 20th-century China. The second is the possibility that entrepreneurship may be a more pronounced tendency of children living under such policies.
The regulations on the Jewish birth rate are not a perfect analogy but useful to our understanding of the Chinese experience under “one-child” policy, because they illustrate an incentive for Chinese to migrate elsewhere in pursuit of a greater quality of life and in order to broaden their personal and professional network which has been confined – in a familial context.
Africa represents a land of opportunity for the Chinese migrant. And history shows it is often strong kinship-based ethnic groups whose economic opportunities are more limited at “home” who become the “stranger-traders” abroad, for better or worse. This has certainly happened in parts of Africa where the Chinese represent a valuable link to manufactured goods and novel services unavailable in agrarian and peasant-like societies in Africa.
It is a link that the Jewish community played not only when they migrated into Eastern Europe as Brenner describes but also by the thousands who migrated from Alsace into the American South servicing the Mississippi Delta plantation economy as dry goods peddlers.
Far more important than the quality of the state-to-state negotiation between China and African governments covered ad nauseum by the chattering class, is the on the ground navigation of a swarm of Chinese entrepreneurs – running away from an old reality as much as they are chasing a new one.
I first heard about Peter Van Buren through a guest post by Jesselyn Radack onGlenn Greenwald’s blog discussing another case of Obama’s ever-widening war on whistleblowers:
Today, I’m not writing about the Espionage Act being used to chill journalists and whistleblowers, but something equally as troubling: the assault on whistleblowers’ First Amendment rights, illustrated by the creepy case of Peter Van Buren.
Here is Peter discussing the outright corruption of what I call our military-media-congressional complex:
And another interview he did recently with Eliot Spitzer on CurrentTV:
Van Buren has a sardonic, humorous writing style with many of his posts which makes them enjoyable to read. As Van Buren explains in the following blog entry, the vast black hole that is Iraq continues to milk American citizens dry through the privatization of war via guns-for-hire eager to project America’s increasingly militarized foreign policy. Besides having our pocketbooks raided by this outsourcing of war for profit, these paid mercenaries aren’t the best of ambassadors for spreading good will and a positive image for America, if there ever existed such a thing from our naked grab for resources by way of military invasion. But in a land of such high rhetoric and such low character, when you need someone to carry out the dirty work of our economy, extrajudicial assassins are a President’s best friend. A case in point is the infamous war profiteer Blackwater, then changed to Xe, and now metamorphosized into Academi (still operating with the testosterone-laced, self-righteous warrior-of-God mentality):
I wrote recently about the return of Blackwater to the State Department, with the mercenary guns-for-hire company changing its name once again (now called Academi in a homage to bad spelling) and buying an existing contract to put it back into the State Department’s world.
It gets creepier, as government seems to get these days.
Slam Dunk on Inman
Academi now boasts two celebrities on its Board of Directors, former attorney general John Ashcroft and retired admiral Bobby Inman. Ashcroft of course is Mr. Homeland Security, the guy who set in motion the smorgasbord of unconstitutional wiretapping, spying and detentions without trial that followed 9/11. He is also the guy who was so offended by the marble statues at the Department of Justice that he had them draped to hide classical nude details.
From a State Department-Blackwater love fest perspective, Inman is a slam-dunk. Inside Foggy Bottom, Inman is permanently associated with the up-armoring of embassies abroad through the 1985 “Inman Report,” a call to arms that resulted in the moated, blast-proof, unapproachable fortress embassies America promotes its image through today. The Report was also the catalyst for the establishment of the part of the State Department which titularly oversees the deployment of mercenaries, everyone’s favorite Bureau of Diplomatic Security, DS. Inman’s word is gospel to DS, so his appearance on the Academi Board is no accident.
Small World
Keeping the circle of life theme going, Academi’s CEO Ted Wright used to be president of mega-contractor KBR, the firm Dick Cheney worked for and the firm that made billions running the backstage logistics portion of the Iraq and Afghan crusades. One of Academi’s VPs worked for Queen Noor of Jordan, and has ties to the Bush dynasty. It is indeed a small world.
More creepiness?
Academi, on its “pro shop” web site, sells God’s Will T-shirts, pictured above. Just the thing for the budding merc crusader to wear while gunning down Muslims for profit. Jeez, and people wonder why we’re not winning.
A Devil’s Bargain
In the days since 9/11, State has undergone a fundamental shift, one that has required the organization to make a Devils’ Bargain with mercenaries like Academi. Prior to 9/11, State’s policy was generally to evacuate embassies in countries at war, reinserting diplomats when things quieted down to the point that diplomacy was again possible. This strategy worked well for some 220 years of American history.
After 9/11, State felt compelled to out-macho the military, to prove its manliness in the testosterone-fueled Bush (and now Obama) years. This meant opening and/or keeping open embassies in the midst of shooting wars, originally just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now spread alongside America’s increasingly one-tune foreign policy of belligerence to places like South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere in drone land. The US military, already stretched thin by endless war, has neither the forces nor the interest in guarding State’s pasty pseudo warriors, and so the Department of State is forced to turn to private armies, like Academi, mercenaries, to enable its macho posture abroad.
I saw groups like Blackwater in action in Iraq, often alongside our own military. The mercs were what our military would be like without the NCO corps to enforce discipline, a frat house with guns, lots of guns. While State makes wordplay out of claiming to supervise its mercs, overpaid, ‘roided ‘dudes with guns named Smitty, J-Dub, Spider and the like take little notice when requested to follow the laws of war in protecting diplomats so far out of their environments. It is a situation that isn’t just likely to go wrong, it is one that practically demands to devolve into crisis.
The solution is straightforward. State should understand and admit that it is neither equipped, trained nor needed for combat situations. State should take a step back from adventures that assure its role as negotiators, diplomats, public diplomacists and the like will be misunderstood at best, and refocus its resources away from spending billions on private armies. Until then, State is forced into bed with creepy organizations like Academi, and will suffer for it.
How are things in Iraq these days in the aftermath of our implementation of disaster capitalism? … just peachy. This video best describes the privatization of the Iraqi economy and its oil that is presently going on:
What to talk about… Well I could talk about the presidential cufflinks that JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon wore to Capital Hill this week. The oligarchs like to show who really runs the show. …Or I could talk about the Fed’s new study showing the evisceration of the Middle Class. Do we really need them telling us how badly we’ve been screwed? …Or the traumatized people of Greece hoarding canned food. We’re all preppers now.
I’d rather talk about something that’s going to create blowback for the U.S. down the road that will make 9-11 look pedestrian by comparison – Drone warfare. Not only are these mindless killing machines causing worldwide anger outside the ivory towers in which our plutocrats sit, but this technology is being turned inwards on the Empire’s own peasants, i.e. you and me. Take a look at this DoD Current and Future U.S. Drone Activities Map. And would you trust these guys operating such weapons?
Before I get to the main article of this post, take a look at how commonplace and ‘user-friendly’ these deadly drone weapons are fast becoming:
The US military has issued soldiers in Afghanistan with a new class of lightweight unmanned drone known as the Switchblade, which can be carried in a backpack and used on the battlefield in place of an air strike.
The weapon, which commanders have dubbed the “Flying Shotgun”, has been widely tested by the US Army, US Marines and US Air Force. It has proved so effective that AeroVironment has announced more than US$14m (£9m) worth of Switchblade systems and related engineering contracts in the past 10 months….
While drone strikes from fixed-wing aircraft have a chain of command that stretches from Afghanistan to the United States, with multiple steps to avoid civilian casualties or friendly fire casualties, these ultra-light, portable drones bring the decision to kill down to the level of platoon commander or even individual soldier….
“Technology is moving at lightning speed and policy is moving at glacial speed,” said PW Singer, the author of Wired for War, a critical analysis of the military use of robotic technologies. “This tech is proliferating, with more than 50 countries now building, buying and using military robotics. The cat is already out of the bag.
These weapons will be as ubiquitous as guns with no more than a single person necessary to operate it. I can imagine these things getting into the hands of people who will want to use them in places other than “battlefields” in order to terrorize a population, but this scenario is already a reality since the U.S. has declared the entire planet a battlefield in its War on Terror. That’s not something we had to really worry about with tanks and jet fighters, but this drone technology is cheap and readily available. The larger drones like the Predator and Reaper require a network of people to operate and keep in the sky, but the smaller ones like the Switchblade do not. Nonetheless, both have the same thing in common – the ability to kill without proper forethought, reason, evidence, or moral compunction. Drones can and do kill innocent people remotely, leaving the operators of the device free from the scene of carnage and the brutal reality of what they have committed. And as you will read, what is even more frightening is that future plans call for drones to be completely autonomous, preprogrammed to find and kill targets using predetermined criteria.
…US major Bryan Callahan say(s) that drone pilots are taught ‘early and often’ to compartmentalise their lives, to separate the time they spend firing missiles on battlefields from the time they spend at home. This is perhaps the essence of the problem. The idea that we can separate ourselves off (at the personal and political level) from the economic, political, moral and human consequences of our actions has been taken to a new level by this new way to wage war.
Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, by Medea Benjamin, OR Books, 2012.
The United States, the most prolific user of drones to carry out targeted killings, asserts its attacks are legally justified as it is engaged in a global war against Al Qaeda and associated terrorist groups. By this rationale, the CIA would be justified in dropping a Hellfire missile on a suspected terrorist in an apartment in Hamburg, a restaurant in London or a mosque in upstate New York. Why stop at merely dropping bombs in poor countries dominated by people of color? (page 135)
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, presents a readable, enlightening and alarming account which spells out the many reasons why drones are such an abomination. She explains the history of drones; the vast sums expended in lobbying by the arms corporations, and returned in lucrative government contracts; the secrecy in which the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conduct the undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the crucial role of private contractors such as Academi (formerly Xe, and before that Blackwater) in operating the drone wars; and the moral dimension by which Obama and his henchmen flatter themselves with the words of Thomas Aquinas in pursuing what they present as “just war”.
The book returns again and again to the stories of the victims – both the “targets”, denied due process, and the thousands of innocent civilians who are being killed, maimed or their lives shattered under the shadow of the killer drones. People like Malik Gulistan Khan, a member of a local pro-government peace committee in Pakistan, killed, along with four members of his family in the first drone strike of the Obama presidency, on 23 January 2009. Or Roya, a 13-year old Afghan girl who became the family breadwinner after US missiles killed her mother and brothers following the 2001 invasion.
Gravesites throughout Asia and the Middle East are filled with testaments to drone attacks gone bad. And drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally – or incidentally – caught in their cross-hairs. Think how terrifying it must be to live under the constant threat of a drone attack. Sometimes you’d see them flying menacingly overhead; sometimes they’d disappear but you could still hear their frightening, buzzing sound. (page 28)
The book’s publication coincides with muchhuffing and puffing about Barack Obama’s drone war policy, prompted by revelations last month in the New York Times about the president’s personal involvement in picking out targets from the “kill list”, presented to him at the weekly counterterrorism briefing (“Terror Tuesday”). As Dennis Perrin argued during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign,[1] no one can be surprised at the sight of another Democrat president eagerly outdoing his GOP predecessor and rivals in advancing the technological frontiers of industrial-scale death and destruction. Especially as BHO was a noisy advocate of drone strikes during that same campaign.
Even a casual observer will be aware that drones represent a particular, and particularly disturbing, shift. Obama’s weapon of choice in his ever-expanding, but undeclared and secret wars, is attracting increasing opposition from unlikely quarters, including the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne and former CIA counter-terrorism chiefs.
Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are presented by the White House, and by a faithful media, as a new generation of smart weapons, able to spot, target and kill terrorists in remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Yemen, and Somalia, and Gaza, and Libya, and the Philippines, the list goes on) while being controlled remotely from the safety of an Air Force base in the US. Yet, as Benjamin documents in her book, drones are anything but smart.
Of course, by themselves, drones are simply an assembly of metal and high-tech electronics, unable – for the moment – to do anything on their own. They rely on humans to launch, fly, navigate, spy, target and kill. In fact, as Benjamin notes, it takes 168 people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24 hours, while the Global Hawk surveillance drone needs 300: some on the ground, in the minority of cases where drones are deployed in a declared battle zone, but most, and more often than not, in bases hundreds and usually thousands of miles away. They collate “intelligence” from various sources, and analyse the 1500 hours of video and 1500 still images which the drones beam back each day. Finally, they make life or death decisions to launch Hellfire missiles from drones on the basis of the real-time images of people fed from the same drones’ spy cameras. Those people may or may not be the targets who got the presidential thumbs down that Tuesday, may or may not be engaged in hostile activity, may or may not be male or female, may or may not be 17 or 75, may be carrying an Improvised Explosive Device or simply walking the dog. The drone doesn’t know. The pilot on a 12 hour shift, sitting watching hour upon hour of blurry blobs on a screen at Creech Air Force base in Nevada, doesn’t know either. Far from being smart, the drone is more like a lunatic with a loaded gun.
What then is driving the shift towards drones? The first thing to understand is the big money that “cheap” drones represent for the weapons manufacturers, the military, the CIA, the JSOC and the private contractors. At $5 million for a Predator and $28.4 million for each Reaper, drones look cheap by comparison to fighter jets which can cost ten times as much. But, according to Benjamin, a drone costs between $2000 and $3500 every hour it is in the air, while usage has shot up – USAF drone flying missions alone increased by 3000 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Add in the cost of Hellfire missiles ($68000 a pop), and the unknown sums in the “black budget” of the CIA, which runs much of the drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, and it’s easy to see why drones are so popular among the military-industrial complex and their friends in Washington. Weapons manufacturers such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which has benefited more than any rival from the drone boom, have adopted the “freebie marketing” business model from manufacturers of printers and razors.
Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011-2020. (page 32)
Competition for that money, most of which goes from federal US budgets to American corporations, is understandably fierce, and drives a relentless wave of technological innovation. Take for example, Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a fighter-sized drone which flies itself – autonomously, in the industry jargon. Or the General Atomics Gray Eagle, which “thinks for itself”, according to a GA press release quoted in the book. Benjamin makes clear that the way is clear for larger, faster, more autonomous drones which will, in the near future, be targeting not only unarmed civilians but conventional aircraft and other military forces of traditional enemies like Iran and China. Their increasing autonomy also heralds a generation of drones that not only fly by themselves, but use software to make the kill decision without any human intervention whatsoever. Meanwhile, pressure is building on the Federal Aviation Administration, not least from the White House in the form of the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Bill, to extend the integration of drones into US airspace beyond areas such as the Mexican border, where surveillance drones have been deployed at a cost of over $7000 for each undocumented immigrant or smuggler caught. Police departments across the country are queuing up to get their hands on the new toy.
Politically, back in the USA, the far-off drone wars play very well. A recent poll put support for Obama’s counter-terrorism policy at 83 per cent among all voters, and no less than 77 per cent among his liberal base. In embracing drone war, Obama has eschewed the messy business of capturing supposed terrorists (all that Guantanamo and rendition business didn’t look good, not that he has closed the former or discontinued the latter), in favour of quick kills which present no risk to American troops and, crucially, leave no evidence behind. As many have pointed out, carefully constructed election-year coverage plays his killer drones up rather than down, which testifies to their political utility.
So far, so depressing. Powerful forces are propelling us into the Drone Age. What to do about it? Benjamin is not without her critics, who accuse CODEPINK of being in the orbit of the Democratic Party. And certainly, there is a whiff of liberal, “awareness raising” activism throughout this book. But Benjamin’s closing chapters set out the serious opposition that is building to the Drone Age, both in the US and internationally. Corporations, governments and universities around the world are complicit in the drone wars, and the book closes with extensive references and links to sources of further information and groups engaged in direct action. A model for the fight against drones, Benjamin argues, is the campaign to ban landmines in the 1990s, which credits its success to “several factors”:
It had a clear message and goal. Signature states agreed to six major commitments, among them the destruction of their mine stockpiles within four years and their mine areas cleared within ten years.
It had a campaign structure that was non-bureaucratic and strategy that was flexible.
It put together an “unusually cohesive and strategic partnership” of non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies, and governments.
There was a favourable international context.
Benjamin’s sources concede that the forces pushing drones are probably too powerful, and have too much to gain, for a ban on all drones to be a realistic prospect. But the fight to stop the new generation of “autonomous” drones can be won, and needs to start now.
A recurrent theme in the reality based community is the continued assertion that infinite growth cannot happen on a finite planet. This simple statement seems to be quite self-evident to those announcing it, yet the powers that be cannot seem to be able to wrap their head around it. We live in a society awash with advertisements that seek to sell you something at some price. Capitalism commodifies everything and its ethos of mandatorily attaching some arbitrary, imagined worth to all things has permeated every aspect of our lives, our ethics, and our value system. We are a society that projects a cost/price analysis on everything, including relationships with fellow humans. According to ‘Save the Children’ charity chief executive, Justin Forsyth, half a billion children over the next 15 years will suffer long-term mental and physical harm due to stunted growth by malnutrition. Surely if we valued the future life of our grandchildren more than profit, then we would not allow such a thing to happen. If our own children’s future is not valued enough to save them from our greed and shortsightedness, then why would the environment be treated any differently, despite its importance to the survival of every living thing on the planet. The scientist James Lovelock once said that Green is the color of mold and corruption. If we cannot separate the needs of capitalism from the needs of our planet, then every last bit of resources and life-sustaining gift from the earth will be chopped up into tradable, sellable units and thrown into the gaping jaws of the free market. Philosopher Leonardo Boff notes:
The fundamental defect in the UN’s document for Rio+20 is the total absence of a new vision or new cosmology that would create the hope of the «future that we want», the motto of the great gathering. As such, it belies a promising future.
To those who drafted it, the future depends on the economy. There is little value in the adjectives they attach to it: sustainable or green. The green economy in particular constitutes a great assault on the last bastion of nature: transforming into merchandise and putting a price on everything that is common, natural, vital and indispensable to life, such water, the soil, fertility, jungles, genes, etcetera. That which pertains to life is sacred and must not be passed to the sphere of business. Instead, it becomes part of the market place, under the categorical imperative: take all you want, make business with everything, especially with nature and with her goods and services.
This is the supreme egocentrism and arrogance of the human being, or, as it is also called, anthropocentrism. Human beings see the Earth as a warehouse of resources only for them, without realizing that we are not the only ones who inhabit the Earth, nor do we own her; we do not feel that we are part of nature, but outside and above her, as her «lords and masters». We forget, however, that there exists a whole visible community of life (5% of the biosphere) and quadrillions of quadrillions of invisible microorganisms (95%) that guarantee the vitality and fecundity of the Earth. They all belong to the Earth/condominium and have the right to live and coexist with us. Without interdependent relationships with them, we could not even exist. The Rio+20 document does not take any of this into account. We can then safely say that with that document there is no salvation. It opens a path towards the abyss…
This straitjacket of capitalism will not release its grip on civilization until the needs of this ever-consuming, ever-growing, ever-alienating economic system kills its host. Gil Smart gives insight into this dead-end thinking taking us all over the cliff in his short writing called Faith of our fantasies:
…we face a coming era of constrained resources. Fiscal resources; energy; environmental resources. Continual growth, the type we have conditioned to believe as natural and inevitable, is neither.
I read Megan McArdle’s stuff in the Atlantic, where recently she opined about Europe’s changing demographics (i.e. fewer births, more oldsters) and how this makes robust growth more difficult. She got a letter in return from someone questioning the premise – saying that perpetual growth isn’t possible. This was her response:
Whether or not continuous economic growth is possible, or desirable, the fact remains that modern economies are predicated on the assumption that it will happen. Both individuals and governments have planned for a future in which incomes steadily rise, allowing people to enjoy lengthy retirements, advanced health care, independent living, and of course, repayment of the massive debts that almost everyone has accumulated over the past few decades.
If that growth doesn’t materialize, the shock will be enormous. Generational battles over things like pensions have occurred in the context of rising incomes; they will become bitter indeed if young and old are fighting over a shrinking economic pie. The most brutal shock will of course be over debt. If incomes fall, debt will become an ever larger burden. But if countries default, they will merely shift the shock to someone else — too often, to pensioners at home or abroad.
However laudable Europe’s demographic decline may be from an environmental point of view, it will be an economic disaster for many who expected a stable, prosperous future.
Get it? This is the idea on which we’ve staked our future. And if the idea’s wrong?
Well. I guess that means you’re up shite creek, then.
If we plow blindly down this path, infused with the faith that what we want is what will actually happen – we’re doomed. But not charging down this path requires a fundamental restructuring of the way we think – not bloody likely in this society. Or maybe any society.
Well, Mr. Smart, along with a restructuring of our way of thinking will also be required a restructuring of society. And the elite who sit atop our current social hierarchy of capitalism, benefiting the most from its exploitation and theft, will not let go of the power they hold until it’s ripped from their cold, dead hands, whether by an angry mob or the wrath of an abused and ravaged Mother Earth.
In my post “The Vicious Price/Demand Cycle of Peak Oil & Blackouts in Greece” I mentioned the global land grabs occurring, primarily in Third World countries, by corporations and ‘developed’ countries in order to secure the resources to feed their nation’s citizens and extract profit. These resource appropriations take place at the expense of local, indigenous people who have farmed the land in a sustainable way for centuries if not thousands of years. The bottom line of these land grabs is to get control of the water resources connected to the land. The non-profit organization called GRAIN published an excellent article today explaining this theft in great detail. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. Also worth reading is “The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth” by Fred Pearce, an excerpt of which was published today at Salon.com.
Although all the countries who practice industrial monoculture farming and factory farming are unsustainable and depleting their fresh water resources faster than they are being replenished by natural rainwater/snowmelt, Saudi Arabia is the most severe example:
…perhaps the situation is nowhere more dramatic than in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has no rain or rivers to speak of, but possesses vast ‘fossil water’ aquifers beneath the desert. During the 1980s the Saudi government invested $40 billion of its oil revenues to pump this precious water to irrigate a million hectares of wheat. Later, in the 1990s, in order feed the growing industrial dairy farms that popped up across the desert, many farmers switched to alfalfa, a crop that needs even more water. It was clear that the miracle couldn’t last; the aquifers soon collapsed and the government decided to outsource its food production to Africa and other parts of the world instead. Some 60% of the country’s fossil water under the desert was squandered in the process. Gone and lost forever.
As Saudi Arabia uses its oil wealth to procure resources abroad, so is China doing the same with the wealth generated from its success as an exporter and the huge trade surplus it has built up:
More than 40% of the Earth’s land is used for human needs, including cities and farms; and with the population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50%. Rising demand for resource-expensive foods such as beef could mean it happens by 2025, Prof Barnofsky’s modelling suggests. “It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” he said. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from the 50% mark.
Reading about these land grabs by resource hungry wealthy countries who practice industrialized farming makes me think of the following quote and how little time we have left before mass starvation on a global scale occurs:
I’ve written before about what exactly it means to have an unsustainable agricultural system: If our current system doesn’t change, then one day it will collapse, and millions — if not billions — will starve. This collapse won’t have been unprecedented; it may, in fact, be an almost inevitable part of a cycle of growth and devastation that humanity has been experiencing since the agricultural revolution, as described in a new book, Empires of Food, by the academic Evan D. G. Fraser and the journalist Andrew Rimas.
The book analyzes the agricultural system in places and time periods from Mesopotamia to Rome to the Middle Ages and beyond. It chronicles a disturbingly reliable pattern of agricultural innovation, expansion, and trade that accompanies periods of favorable weather (just as we’ve experienced for the past half-century) and then the horrific implosion of the food system (and the civilization that built it) that always follows because of soil erosion, overpopulation, and climate change. Economic troubles caused by unsound banking practices also usually figure prominently in the demise. Does any of this sound eerily familiar?
Concerning the real reason for the land grabs: Water
“The tensions in south western Ethiopia illustrate the central importance of access to water in the global land rush. Hidden behind the current scramble for land is a world-wide struggle for control over water. Those who have been buying up vast stretches of farmland in recent years, whether they are based in Addis Ababa, Dubai or London, understand that the access to water they gain, often included for free and without restriction, may well be worth more over the long-term, than the land deals themselves.
In recent years, Saudi Arabian companies have been acquiring millions of hectares of lands overseas to produce food to ship back home. Saudi Arabia does not lack land for food production. What’s missing in the Kingdom is water, and its companies are seeking it in countries like Ethiopia.
Indian companies like Bangalore-based Karuturi Global are doing the same. Aquifers across the sub-continent have been depleted by decades of unsustainable irrigation. The only way to feed India’s growing population, the claim is made, is by sourcing food production overseas, where water is more available.
And companies like Chayton Capital think that Africa is the best place to find that water. The message repeated at farmland investor conferences around the globe is that water is abundant in Africa. It is said that Africa’s water resources are vastly under utilised, and ready to be harnessed for export oriented agriculture projects.
The reality is that a third of Africans already live in water-scarce environments and climate change is likely to increase these numbers significantly. Massive land deals could rob millions of people of their access to water and risk the depletion of the continent’s most precious fresh water sources.
All of the land deals in Africa involve large-scale, industrial agriculture operations that will consume massive amounts of water. Nearly all of them are located in major river basins with access to irrigation. They occupy fertile and fragile wetlands, or are located in more arid areas that can draw water from major rivers. In some cases the farms directly access ground water by pumping it up. These water resources are lifelines for local farmers, pastoralists and other rural communities. Many already lack sufficient access to water for their livelihoods. If there is anything to be learnt from the past, it is that such mega-irrigation schemes can not only put the livelihoods of millions of rural communities at risk, they can threaten the freshwater sources of entire regions. (See Water mining, the wrong type of farmingandDeath of the Aral Sea)”
In the not-so-distant future, water will become “the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals,” says Citigroup’s chief economist, Willem Buiter.
Hydro-colonialism?
The Nile and the Niger basins are only two of the examples of the massive give away of land and water rights. The areas where land grabbing is concentrated in Africa coincide closely with the continent’s largest river and lake systems, and in most of these areas irrigation is a prerequisite of commercial production.
The Ethiopian government is constructing a dam in the Omo river, to generate electricity and irrigate a huge sugarcane plantation; a project that threatens hundreds of thousands of indigenous people that depend on the river further downstream. It also threatens to empty the world biggest desert lake, Lake Turkana, fed by the Omo river. In Mozambique the government had signed off on a 30,000 hectares plantation along the Limpopo river which would have directly affected farmers and pastoralists now depending on the water. The project was revoked because the investor didn’t deliver, but the government is looking for others to take over. In Kenya, a tremendous controversy has arisen from the government’s plans to hand out huge areas of land in the delta of the Tana River with disastrous implications for the local communities depending on the delta’s water. The already degraded Senegal river basin and its delta have been subject to hundreds of thousands of hectares in land deals, putting foreign agribusiness in direct competition for the water with local farmers. The list goes on, and is growing by the day. This table shows a selection of the most important cases.
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the Chairman of Nestle, says that these deals are more about water than land: “With the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.”[8] Nestle is a leading marketer of bottled water under brand names including Pure Life, Perrier, S.Pellegrino and a dozen others. It has been charged with illegal and destructive groundwater extraction, and of making billions of dollars in profits on cheap water while dumping environmental and social costs onto communities. [9]
Asked at an agricultural investment conference whether it is possible to make money from water, Judson Hill of one of the private equity funds involved, was unequivocal: “Buckets, buckets of money,” he told a meeting of bankers and investors in Geneva. “There are many ways to make a very attractive return in the water sector if you know where to go.”
In the not-so-distant future, water will become “the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals,” says Citigroup’s chief economist, Willem Buiter.[10] No surprise, then, that so many corporations are rushing to sign land deals that give them wide-ranging control over African water. Especially when African governments are essentially giving it away. Corporations understand what’s at stake. There are “buckets of money” to be made on water, if only it can be controlled and turned it into a commodity. (SeeVirtual water and Grabbing carbon credits?)
The secrecy that shrouds land deals makes it hard to know exactly what’s being handed over to foreign companies. But from those contracts that have been leaked or made public, it is apparent that the contracts tend not to contain any specific mention of water rights at all, leaving the companies free to build dams and irrigation canals at their discretion, sometimes with a vague reference to ‘respecting water laws and regulations’.[11] This is the case in the agreements signed between the Ethiopian government and both Karuturi and Saudi Star in Gambela, for example. In some contracts, a minor user fee is agreed upon for the water, but without any limitation on the amount of water that can be withdrawn. Only in rare cases are even minimal restrictions imposed during the dry season, when access to water is so critical for local communities. But even in instances where governments may have the political will and capacity to negotiate conditions to protect local communities and the environment, this is made increasingly difficult due to existing international trade and investment treaties that give foreign investors strong rights in this respect.[12]”
Stop the water grab
If this land and water grab is not put to an end, millions of Africans will lose access to the water sources they rely on for their livelihoods and their lives. They may be moved out of areas where land and water deals are made or their access to traditional water sources may simply be blocked by newly built fences, canals and dikes. This is already happening in Ethiopia’s Gambela, where the government is forcibly moving thousands of indigenous people out of their traditional territories to make way for export agriculture. By 2013, the government wants to remove 1.5 million people from their territories across Ethiopia.[13] As the bulldozers move into the newly acquired lands, this will become an increasingly common feature in Africa’s rural areas, generating more tensions and conflicts over scarce water resources.
But the impacts will run far beyond the immediately affected communities. The recent wave of land grabbing is nothing short of an environmental disaster in the making. There is simply not enough water in Africa’s rivers and water tables to irrigate all the newly acquired land. If and when they are put under production, these 21st century industrial plantations will rapidly destroy, deplete and pollute water sources across the continent. Such models of agricultural production have generated enormous problems of soil degradation, salinisation and waterlogging wherever they have been applied. India and China, two shining examples that Africa is being pushed to emulate, are now in a water crisis as a result of their Green Revolution practices. Over 200 million people in India and 100 million in China depend on foods produced by the over-pumping of water.[14] Fearing depleted water supplies or perhaps depleted profits, companies from both countries are looking now to Africa for future food production.
Africa is in no shape for such an imposition. More than one in three Africans live with water scarcity, and the continent’s food supplies are set to suffer more than any other’s from climate change. Building Africa’s highly sophisticated and sustainable indigenous water management systems could help resolve this growing crisis, but these are the very systems being destroyed by land grabs.
Advocates of the land deals and mega irrigation schemes argue that these big investments should be welcomed as an opportunity to combat hunger and poverty in the continent. But bringing in the bulldozers to plant water-intensive export crops is not and cannot be a solution to hunger and poverty. If the goal is to increase food production, then there is ample evidence that this can be most effectively done by building on the traditional water management and soil conservation systems of local communities. [15] Their collective and customary rights over land and water sources should be strengthened not trampled.
But this is not about combating hunger and poverty. This is theft on a grand scale of the very resources – land and water – which the people and communities of Africa must themselves be able to manage and control in order to face the immense challenges they face this century.
Going Further
Fred Pearce, The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the Earth,
Eden Project, 2012.
Fred Pearce, When the rivers run dry: What happens when our water runs out? Eden Project, 2006
Farmlandgrab.org News and information on large-scale land grabs. Updated daily. Maintained by GRAIN as a research-sharing and monitoring project open to your contributions and participation.
Apparently the Mafia gang in the oval office decided it would be a good idea to employ the same tactics used by those they decide to ‘off’. As in the days of yore when Romans would usurp a foreign army and incorporate the best of that foe’s weapons and tactics, so it is that the American Empire follows in the footsteps of its long deceased predecessor, the Roman Empire. It’s called the “double tap” — sending in a second predator drone strike shortly after the first responders come to the scene of the initial assassination strike to rescue any survivors or retrieve the dead, including the mourners of resultant funerals held days later. This is a policy of treating the population as guilty by association, exterminating any and all who might be linked, however remotely, with the intended target:
According to the NYT, the Administration assumed that, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” and therefore all military age males in a strike zone could be targeted. A former senior counterterrorism official calls earlier drone targeting, “guilt by association.” Of signature strikes in Pakistan, a senior (apparently still-serving) official joked “that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.” And one of Obama’s top political advisors, David Axelrod, was attending targeting meetings, injecting a political taint on the program…
There is no due process for a “suspicious” person to be marked for death by drone. Ask George Zimmerman about that. The only requirement is vague and ethereal intelligence information which, if it’s as reliable as the Iraq WMD intel, appears by all accounts to be radicalizing the affected population tenfold. This boomerang effect will inevitably please our Military Industrial Complex’s constant search for new enemies to grind into profits of war. Death by Drone smacks of a street thug mentality similar to some cheesy gangster movie script. Francine Prose notes :
As drama, the scene is reminiscent of great moments in cable TV: Tony Soprano and his colleagues deciding whom to whack, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell conferring on which of their child employees must be eliminated. But it’s one thing to see murders planned on television and quite another to read that this planning session is occurring in the White House Situation Room in January, 2010, and that President Obama has assumed the grim responsibility of casting the final vote on every death sentence that this jury (so obviously outside traditional legal channels) is handing down…
..[consider] the following quote from Michael Leiter, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center:
You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “These laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.
Get Bin Laden dead? With its execrable grammar, its calculated thuggishness, and, for all that we have been reading about the assumption of personal responsibility, its euphemistic avoidance of what is really at issue (to get dead is not the same as to kill, and it’s never laws but people who get other people dead), the quote suggests a new dispensation in which our government, at the highest level, has given Tony Soprano license to ignore the rule of law and murder actual human beings, some of them harmless civilians. Shouldn’t we feel more frightened than reassured by the knowledge that the leader of our country holds himself accountable for every one of these deaths?
The above montage of clips from the satirical movie ‘The Distinguished Gentleman‘, in which Freshman Congressman (and con man) Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) is schooled in the ways of Washington by legendary lobbyist Terry Corrigan (Kevin McCarthy), is as true today as it was back when that movie was made more than twenty years ago, so says Marty Kaplan. The following excerpts from the transcript of Bill Moyer’s latest report – Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble – tells the sorry and sordid tale of our political economy/society. This Moyer’s interview with Kaplan, a true insider to our political and media complex, is quite extraordinary. He affirms what the general populace is unable to comprehend… that we live in a society in which the news media and government institutions are entirely owned by the corporate oligarchs. The government regulators are owned by the very companies they are charged with over-seeing by way of Wall Street’s army of lobbyists and the revolving door that exists between government and private sector positions. Actual news to inform the public on the state of affairs and issues affecting them is virtually nonexistent on the media airwaves.
…what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.
…the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.
And the self-serving triviality of corporate-run ‘news’ media has become a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby stats are being kept of what is the most popular story which then gets kicked up to the top and influences what that corporate news channel reports on in the future. It’s all driven by ratings and profit rather than educating and informing people on facts and real issues. So Neil Postman was right… We are being entertained to death, literally. This nihilism plays right into the hands of those controlling the levers of power who would not benefit from a well-informed, well-eduated public. The vast majority of public discourse has been reduced to an echo chamber of the crap (divisive ‘wedge issues’, celebrity gossip, sensationalist stories, corporate propaganda, consumerist materialism, valorization of the predatory skills of the modern competitive capitalist, etc.) that fills the corporate-controlled airwaves.
…
BILL MOYERS: You wrote The Distinguished Gentleman 20 years ago. Could you write it today?
MARTY KAPLAN: Oh God, it still is the same. All you have to do is add a couple of zeros to the amount of money. And the same laws still apply. It is fabulous and miserable at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: Was Washington then, and is it now, the biggest con game going?
MARTY KAPLAN: It is the biggest con game going. And the stakes are enormous. And the effort to regulate them is hopeless, because the very people who are in charge of regulating them are the same people who are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the lobbies that run them.
BILL MOYERS: I have it on very good authority that a prominent Washington senator recently told a group of lobbyists in Washington, a room full of lobbyists, that they are the lifeblood of the city. And I thought, “Kaplan has to do a vampire movie now.” Right?
MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. The connection between the legislators and the lobbyists is so intimate that it’s not even embarrassing for a senator to say that in front of a room. The culture is so hermetically sealed from the rest of the country that it doesn’t occur to them that there is something deeply outrageous and offensive and corrosive of democracy to admit that the money side of politics and the elected side of politics belong to each other.
BILL MOYERS: You wrestle with this, you and your colleagues at the Norman Lear Center, and all the time, on how, on what the system is doing to us. So let me ask you, “How did this happen in America? How did our political system become the problem instead of the answer?”
MARTY KAPLAN: Part of it is the nexus of media, money, and special interest politics. The citizens have given the airwaves to the station. We own the electromagnetic spectrum and for free we give out licenses to television stations. Those stations, in turn, use that spectrum to get enormous amounts of money from special interests and from members of Congress in order to send these ads back to us to influence us. So we lose it in both ways. The other day, the president of CBS, Les Moonves, was reported by “Bloomberg” to have said “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re … good for CBS.” I mean, there it is. This is a windfall every election season, which seems not to even stop ever, for the broadcast industry. So not only are they raking it in, they’re also creating a toxic environment for civic discourse. People don’t hear about issues. They hear these negative charges, which only turn them off more. The more negative stuff you hear, the less interested you are in going out to vote. And so they’re being turned off, the stations are raking it in, and the people who are chortling all the way to Washington and the bank are the ones who get to keep their hands on the levers of power. So one of the big reasons that things are at the pass they are is that the founders never could have anticipated that a small group of people, a financial enterprise and the technology could create this environment in which facts, truth, accountability, that stuff just isn’t entertaining. So because it’s not entertaining, because the stations think it’s ratings poison, they don’t cover it on the news.
BILL MOYERS: They don’t cover the news.
MARTY KAPLAN: They don’t cover politics and government in the sense of issues. They’re happy, occasionally to cover horse race and scandal and personality and crime and that aspect of politics. But if you look at a typical half hour of news, local news, because local news is one of the most important sources of news for Americans about campaigns. A lot—
BILL MOYERS: You and your colleagues have done a lot of research on local news.
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, we’ve been studying it now since 1998. And each year it gets more depressing and it’s hard to believe. We, not long ago, did a study of the Los Angeles media market. We looked at every station airing news and every news broadcast they aired round the clock. And we put together a composite half hour of news. And if you ask, “How much in that half hour was about transportation, education law enforcement, ordinances, tax policy?” everything involving locals, from city to county. The answer is, in a half hour, 22 seconds.
BILL MOYERS: Twenty-two seconds devoted to what one would think are the serious issues of democracy, right?
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes. Whereas, in fact, there are three minutes about crime, and two and a half minutes about the ugliest dog contest, and two minutes about entertainment. There’s plenty of room for stuff that the stations believe will keep people from changing the dial.
BILL MOYERS: What is the irony to me is that these very same stations that are giving 22 seconds out of a half hour to serious news, are raking— and not covering politics, are raking in money from the ads that the politicians and their contributors are spending on those same papers.
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes, they’re earning hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from the ads that they are being paid to run. And not even risking running a minute of news, which might actually check on the accuracy of an ad. Truth watches, they’re almost invisible now.
BILL MOYERS: So they will tell you, however, that they’re in the entertainment business. That they’re in the business to amuse the public, to entertain the public. And if they do these serious stories about the schools or about the highways or about this or that, the public tunes out. That the clicks begin to register as—
MARTY KAPLAN: It’s one of the great lies about broadcasting now. There are consultants who go all around the country and they tell the general managers and the news directors, “It is only at your peril that you cover this stuff.” But one of the things that we do is, the Lear Center gives out the Walter Cronkite award for excellence in television political journalism every two years. And we get amazing entries from all over the country of stations large and small of reporters under these horrendous odds doing brilliant pieces and series of pieces, which prove that you can not only do these pieces on a limited budget, but you can still be the market leader.
…
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, what’s really driving it, if you think of this as a symptom and not a cause, I think what’s really driving it is the absolute demonization of any kind of idea of public interest as embodied by government. And at the same time, a kind of corporate triumphalism, in which the corporations, the oligarchs, the plutocrats, running this country want to hold onto absolute power absolutely. And it’s an irritant to them to have the accountability that news once used to play.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by that? News challenges their assumptions, challenges their power?
MARTY KAPLAN: It used to be that the news programs that aired, believe it or not, had news on them. They had investigative stories.
But then somewhere in the 1980s, when 60 Minutes started making a profit, CBS put the news division inside the entertainment division. And then everyone followed suit. So ever since then, news has been a branch of entertainment and, infotainment, at best.
But there was a time in which the press, the print press, news on television and radio were speaking truth to power, people paid attention, and it made a difference. The— I don’t think the Watergate trials would have happened, the Senate hearings, had there not been the kind of commitment from the news to cover the news rather than cutting away to Aruba and a kidnapping.
BILL MOYERS: What is the basic consequence of taking the news out of the journalism box and putting it over into the entertainment box?
MARTY KAPLAN: People are left on their own to fend for themselves. And the problem is that there’s not that much information out there, if you’re an ordinary citizen, that comes to you. You can ferret it out. But it oughtn’t be like that in a democracy. Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and to make democracy work.
You can’t do it unless we’re smart. And so the consequence is that we’re not smart. And you can see it in one study after another. Some Americans think that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists, that there’s no consensus about it. This kind of view could not survive in a news environment, which said, “This is true and that’s false.” Instead we have an environment in which you have special interest groups manipulating their way onto shows and playing the system, gaming the notion that he said she said is basically the way in which politics is now covered.
It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, “Well, we’ll have to leave it there.” Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.
BILL MOYERS: You have talked and written about “the straightjacket of objectivity.” Right? What is that?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, the problem with telling the truth is that in this postmodern world, there’s not supposed to be something as truth anymore. So all you can do if you are a journalist is to say, “Some people say.” Maybe you can report a poll. Maybe you can quote somebody. But objectivity is only this phony notion of balance, rather than fact-checking.
There are some gallant and valiant efforts, like PolitiFact and Flackcheck.org that are trying to hold ads and news reports accountable. But by and large, that’s not what you’re getting. Instead the real straightjacket is entertainment. That’s what all these sources are being forced to be. Walter Lippmann in the 1920s had a concept called “spectator democracy” in which he said that the public was a herd that needed steering by the elites. Now he thought that people just didn’t have the capacity to understand all these complicated issues and had to delegate it to experts of various kinds.
But since then, the notion of spectator democracy has, I think, extended to include the need to divert the country from the master narrative, which is the influence and importance and imperviousness to accountability of large corporations and the increasing impotence of the public through its agency, the government, to do anything about it. So the more diversion and the more entertainment, the less news, the less you focus on that story, the better off it is.
BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the people who run this political media business, the people who fund it, want to divert the public’s attention from their economic power? Is that what you’re saying?
MARTY KAPLAN: Yes.
Let us fight about you know, whether this circus or that circus is better than each other, but please don’t focus on the big change which has happened in this country, which is the absolute triumph of these large, unaccountable corporations.
This is about as dismal and effective a conspiracy, out in plain sight, as there possibly could be. So I don’t say that this is going to be solved or taken care of. What I do say is the first step toward it is at least acknowledging how toxic the situation has become.
…
BILL MOYERS: What you’re saying is that the political square is now a commercial enterprise, owned and operated for the benefit of the brand, CNN, Fox, all of those, right?
MARTY KAPLAN: That’s correct.
BILL MOYERS: How did it happen? How did we sell what belonged to everyone?
MARTY KAPLAN: By believing that what is, is what always has been and what should be. The notion that what goes on is actually made by people, changes through time, represents the deployment of political power. That notion has gone away. We think it’s always been this way. People now watching these CNN and Fox. They think this is how it works. They don’t have a sense of history. The amnesia, which has been cultivated by journalism, by entertainment in this country, helps prevent people from saying, “Wait a minute, that’s the wrong path to be on.”
BILL MOYERS: Amnesia, forgetfulness? You say that they’re cultivating forgetfulness?
MARTY KAPLAN: Absolutely.
…
BILL MOYERS: You made a very important speech not long ago at a media conference in Barcelona. And you tried and did draw the distinction between— you said the battle of the future is between big data and big democracy. In layman’s language, what is that?
MARTY KAPLAN: Big data, the age of big data that we’re supposed to be in, refers to the way in which, as we go on the internet, as we do all these media activities, watching television, which are at the center of our lives, we’re leaving a trail behind. We’re giving bits of ourselves up. And that set of bits is being collected and mined relentlessly.
So every time we buy a product or send an e-mail or vote how many stars to a restaurant, all this stuff creates a profile that companies buy and sell to each other. And that stuff is being used currently not only to market to us, to target ads toward us, but it’s also being used to profile us. There’s something called “web lining.” Which is similar to what used to be called “red lining.” The— that phenomenon, which is now illegal, in which people who were discriminated against because of the neighborhoods they live in. Right now—
BILL MOYERS: Banks drew a red line around impoverished neighborhoods that they would not then serve.
MARTY KAPLAN: Exactly. And so today imagine if you were to permit a private detective to follow you as you went to your drug store and bought a medication to help you with depression or as you made a phone call to a bankruptcy lawyer, because you needed one. Imagine if that kind of information could be put together and used against you to decide that you’re a bad credit risk or that maybe your insurance company should turn you down, because you suffer from this problem.
That kind of information, that kind of digital profiling is something which is emerging as a huge industry. And unless there are controls on it and constraints, as they have to some degree in Europe but not nearly enough even there, we are about to kiss goodbye our ownership of our privacy and also even the ownership financially of our information. We are the people who make Facebook and Twitter worth the billions of dollars that they’re worth, because we are giving up our information to them, which they are then selling and raising capital around.
BILL MOYERS: But in a libertarian era, what are the restraints and constraints against that? Where are they going to come from?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, right now, the constraints in this country are voluntary. The Obama White House not long ago issued a digital code of conduct, which included privacy. In which they asked companies and companies did step up to it to say, “We’re not going to track people if they don’t want to be tracked.” And other such efforts to get people in control.
But what we do know, the record of just the past couple of months, is that company after company was doing stuff to us that’s astonishing, that we didn’t know about. The ways in which the apps that you use on your smartphones were vacuuming up information about you, your address book and all your pictures.
Stuff that you had no idea you had consented to, which in fact usually you had not, suddenly was all owned by other people, as well. You have not given permission, but that essential part of you is now not yours. That’s the name of the game now. This is baked into the business model of data mining, which is at the heart of so much of the digital economy.
BILL MOYERS: But that’s big data. You talked about big democracy.
MARTY KAPLAN: So at the same time as our data is being mined, there is this movement to protect people using technology to give them the power to say, “I’m not going to opt into this stuff.” We’re still at the beginning of this industry. And there has to be rules of the road. And part of those rules include my attention rights. My rights to control my identity, my privacy, and my ownership of information.”
BILL MOYERS: In your speech in Barcelona, you pointed to two simultaneous covers of TIME Magazine appearing the same week. One for the editions in Europe, Asia, and South Pacific, and it was about the crisis in Europe. The other, which appeared in the American edition, featured a cover about animal friendships. You use these two covers to illustrate the difference between what you call “push journalism” and “pull journalism.” What’s the difference?
MARTY KAPLAN: Push journalism is the old days, which seem no longer to apply in the era of the internet, in which an editor, a gatekeeper, says, “Here’s the package which you need to know.” All of that is ancient history now.
Instead, now, it’s all driven by what the consumer is pulling. And if the consumer says, “I want ice cream all the time.” And whether that ice cream is Lindsay Lohan, or the latest crime story, that’s what’s delivered. And as long as it’s being pulled, that’s what is being provided. So it’s quite possible that in the U.S., the calculation was made that the crisis in Europe and the head of Italy would not be a cover that one could use. But that pet friendships would be the sort of thing that would fly off the newsstand.
BILL MOYERS: So the reader is determining what we get from the publication?
MARTY KAPLAN: On a minute by minute basis, stories that the reader’s interested in immediately go to the top of the home page. There are actually pieces of software that give editorial prominence to stuff that people by voting with their clickers have said is of interest to them. No one is there to intervene and say, “Wait a minute, that story is just too trivial to occupy more than this small spot below the fold.” Instead, the audience’s demand is what drives the placement and the importance of journalistic content.
BILL MOYERS: So George Orwell anticipated a state as big brother, hovering over us, watching us, keeping us under surveillance, taking care of our needs as long as we repaid them with utter loyalty. Aldous Huxley anticipated a Brave New World in which we were amusing ourselves to death. Who’s proving the most successful prophet? Huxley or Orwell?
MARTY KAPLAN: Well, I think Huxley is probably right, as Neil Postman said in—
BILL MOYERS: The sociologist, yes.
MARTY KAPLAN: —in Amusing Ourselves to Death. That there’s no business but show business. And we are all equally guilty, because it’s such fun to be entertained. So you don’t need big brother, because we already have big entertainment.
BILL MOYERS: And the consequences of that?
MARTY KAPLAN: That we are as in Brave New World, always in some kind of stupor. We have continual partial attention to everything and tight critical attention on nothing.
…
According to stats from 2010 for TV viewing by adult Americans, we’re glued to the boob tube in our waking hours. This explains why having an intelligent conversation with most Americans is an impossible task. All they can do is regurgitate what has been constantly programmed into their heads.
• The average American watches 35:34 (hours/minutes) of TV per week
• Kids aged 2-11 watch 25:48 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)
• Adults over 65 watch 48:54 (hours/minutes) of TV per week (Q1 2010)
And according to the latest Nielsen study, TV viewing is on the increase, notwithstanding a tiny drop in the number of households who own a TV:
…despite all the competition from cable TV, videogames, and the Internet, the average household watched 59 hours, 28 minutes of broadcast TV per week during the 2010-2011 season, setting a new record. Lanzano drew particular attention to the competition — or lack of it — from Facebook, noting that while the average person spends about 13 minutes a day on Facebook, they spend 297 minutes watching TV. “No wonder our friends at [General Motors] are making some changes,” he said. [Last month GM announced that it will stop placing ads on Facebook, after determining that they had little impact.]
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 