The Return to Social Darwinism
America’s Moral Crisis
By DAVID ROSEN | January 28, 2011
The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was more than a financial and political crisis. At root, it was a moral crisis.
Bernie Madoff and a handful of other racketeers were prosecuted, but all those actively or passively involved in the financial scam were not exposed, let alone legally dealt with.
The harm inflicted on the American people by the venal practices of those who orchestrated, implemented and/or facilitated the Great Recession is incalculable. Millions of peoples’ lives were turned upside-down, if not destroyed; America’s long-term future put in doubt.
Those morally culpable for the crisis involved many more than those who masterminded the vast plunder and got away with it. Truly, one can expect little in terms of moral leadership from the conspirators hidden in their Wall Street corner offices. A new car, an expensive bottle of wine or a couple of zeros on their paychecks is all that is needed to assuage the qualms they might have felt about the immoral if not illegal practices they consciously engaged in.
The Great Recession’s true moral crisis goes deeper, involving all those down the chain of greed that unites the system of plunder. This chain links the CEO of a major hedge fund or bank to the lowest mortgage broker or loan officer. It reaches out to still others, including credit rating agencies, government regulators and the self-serving financial media. It involves all those who knew and not only did nothing but joined in to get their own.
This shared greed is a distinguishing expression of America’s new moral order. It is rooted in a return to the all-American morality of Social Darwinism that ruled during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, a period that Mark Twain disparagingly called the Gilded Age.
Gilded Age values were rationalized in a simple dictum: I’ll get mine; screw the next guy. It’s the morality of the huckster, those who know how to artfully con the uninformed, get-rich-quick schmuck; in America, as the 21st century version of the old adage proclaims, a schmuck is born everyday.
Social Darwinism defined morality during American capitalism’s first stage of global ascendancy. The question haunting America today is whether it defines today’s deepening crisis and thus the nation’s historical eclipse.
* * *
Social Darwinism was a late-19th century belief system that applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human existence. It was especially popular among the American and British elite because it placed them, the white Christian male, at the top of evolutionary scale.
The first rule in this misreading of Darwin’s theory was a self-serving moral assumption: Humans occupy the highest rung in the evolution of animal life. Some went further, arguing that consciousness separated humans from animals and, thus, from natural life itself. Once this fundamental break with Darwin’s belief in nature’s interconnected integrity was made, humans could easily further legitimize fragmenting themselves into still more hierarchical structures, whether based on age, gender, race, geography, belief, class, sexual orientation or whatever.
Proponents of Social Darwinism, particularly Herbert Spencer, popularized concepts like “the struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest.” This belief system took different forms in different countries, sometimes with horrendous consequences. In Germany, the biologist Ernst Haeckel divided humankind into races with “Aryans” at the top and Jews and Africans at the bottom.
In the U.S., notions of racial identity were augmented by concepts of personal purity and global conquest. Teddy Roosevelt was the prime representative of this all-American belief system, turning it into a national policy. Proponents of Social Darwinism championed a moral belief system based on three interrelated principals. First, self-hood was represented by the rugged individualist, the masculine warrior who achieves his full human realization on the battlefield of laissez-faire capitalism. Second, to function at its most optimal, this social system required “social purity” of sexual repression and a eugenics-breeding program. Finally, this new American value system assumed that the globe was a terrain of conquest; it embraced an international, imperialist outlook proudly called manifest destiny, the “white man’s burden.”
These principals fashioned a moral outlook that linked the truth of one’s conduct to the social position one occupied. If one was rich, socially prominent and white one could get away with almost anything. Thus, the “crimes” of the rich and the poor were both legally and morally different. For Social Darwinists, morality was based on class privilege.
No one was more a proponent of Social Darwinism then John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil trust and America’s grandest robber baron and Christian philanthropist. He argued that his efforts were the result of “a survival of the fittest, … the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
Rockefeller, and others who shared his belief system, engaged in a great intellectual trick. They artfully suppressed the fundamental contradiction between Christian theology and scientific rationality. They collapsed Darwin’s theory, grounded in empirical observation, into Christian doctrine, a faith in Adam and Eve.
This rationalization of religion and science, of God and Darwin, facilitated the rationalization of still other intellectual and political practices. Rockefeller and many of the other titans of American capitalism of his generation felt no moral discomfort over the murderous suppression of strikes in Ludlow or military interventions in Cuba and the Philippines.
* * *
The Great Recession ushered in the immoral morality of a new, 21st Social Darwinism.
This immorality is legitimized by the growing income inequality. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson analyze this phenomenon in their compelling book, “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.” The popping of the housing bubble was the result of not simply a financial crisis, but the victory of a decades-long political campaign waged by the rich against the rest of us. The authors make clear that the Great Recession was a great diversionary smokescreen so that the financial sector and the rich could seize increased control of the nation’s wealth.
One remarkable dimension of this new Social Darwin morality is the widespread willingness to suspend disbelief. This is a lesson to be drawn from the series of crises that U.S. has faced over the last decade.
The attacks of 9/11 ‘by foreign terrorists’ took place because the U.S. intelligence services failed to connect the dots.
The Iraq invasion was undertaken due to false claims of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
New Orleans’ suffering was due to nature run wild, not the failures of the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers.
Global market forces caused the financial crisis of 2007-2009.
The Gulf Oil Spill of 2010 was an accident and BP was an inadvertent casualty of a fluke occurrence.
The Tucson shooting was the act of a psychopath; the shooter’s target was chosen arbitrarily, with no voices whispering in his ear.
Except for the Tucson shootings, no actual person/s has been held accountable. Sure, Jared Loughner, like Bernie Madoff, got busted, but each is the exception that proves the rule: No one is responsible for national crises; forces beyond human control determine events. Like 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, the Recession and the Gulf spill, unknown forces conspired and no one can be held accountable.
Today’s new Social Darwinist morality is one additional knife in the heart of the remarkable half-century of American egalitarianism that defined the 1930s through ’70s. From the Depression and World War II period through the post-WW II consumer revolution and the revolutions of the 1960s-70s, America struggled to fulfill its democratic ethos. It was an era in which America shared a deep moral vision, one expressed by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath” and many other creative works.
The last three decades have witnessed the systematic erosion of this spirit of egalitarianism and the re-imposition of class tyranny. Like a dictatorship or police state, class rule requires the complicity of a world of enablers. This complicity is the true moral order that characterizes today’s America.
Preachers, politicians and pundits may prattle on about the nation’s virtues, but anyone screwed daily by the system of greed knows firsthand America’s new immoral morality. How they deal with it as social life continues to erode remains the unanswered question.
David Rosen is the author of “Sex Scandals America: Politics & the Ritual of Public Shaming” (Key, 2009). He can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.
British PM dines with Murdoch secretly
Press TV – January 25, 2011
The UK’s opposition Labour Party has challenged Prime Minister David Cameron over dinning secretly with James Murdoch, the son of the media tycoon Rupert.
The Prime Minister has held a secret dinner with James Murdoch amid the government’s attempt to decide on the Murdoch media empire after a flurry of resignations and dismissals over telephone hacking at Murdoch’s News of the World and his bid to buy BskyB, the daily Independent reported.
The Labor Opposition questioned whether Cameron had broken the ministerial code of conduct by meeting the chairman of News Corporation in Europe and Asia.
Cameron’s secret meeting with James comes only a few days after the premier stripped Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, of the power to decide whether News Corp should be allowed to buy the 61 percent of BSkyB it does not already own.
The government was also under an all-party pressure over its links with Rupert Murdoch despite last week’s resignation of Andy Coulson, the Downing Street director of communications, over the continuing controversy about telephone hacking at Murdoch’s News of the World, which cost Coulson his job as the paper’s editor in 2007.
Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, was expected to pursue legal action against News International over his phone being hacked rather than accept an out-of-court settlement.
He told the Commons last September that while he defended freedom of the press, “this [phone hacking] is abuse and illegality. It has to end, and we must be robust about it.”
The Independent revealed that Cameron met James Murdoch at the Oxfordshire home of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International. The private dinner she hosted took place shortly before Christmas.
An Ecological Bomb in the Mediterranean
The Ships of Poison Cover-Up
By MICHAEL LEONARDI | January 21, 2011
While the global and Italian national media focuses on allegations of Berlusconi’s latest sexual exploits including reports of hedonistic orgies with teenage prostitutes at his luxurious villas, the much more devastating story of the intentional sinking of ships laden with radioactive and toxic materials into the Mediterranean Sea has quietly developed some new twists and turns in another of Italy’s notorious and grand cover-ups. Surely Berlusconi’s sexcapades make Bill Clinton’s impeachable blow job pale in comparison, but the the tabloid headlines could be replaced by the indignation of the Italian Media at least, with the intentional contamination of the beloved blue waters of the Mediterranean and the dismantling of the Italy’s social democracy rather than dedicating the entirety of their attention to prostitutes being paid to entertain one of our most sick and twisted world leaders.
We pick up this story in June of 2010 with the revelations that there is indeed what Italian state prosecutor Bruno Giordano called an “ecological bomb” in the valley of the Oliva river that flows down the mountains and past the towns of Aiello Calabro and Amantea on its way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. This is where it is believed that the cargo of the Jolly Rosso was intentionally dumped and buried. State agencies found the valley to be contaminated with thousands of cubic meters of industrial mud laced with very high levels of cobalt, nickel, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals. They found the presence of cesium 137, and they found more contaminated locations than previously anticipated, leading investigators to believe that not only was the cargo of the Jolly Rosso dumped here but that the area was then used as an illegal dumping grounds for years. There are no industries in this area that produce these materials so it is clear that they were produced and shipped in from other places. A formal request has been made to the minister of the environment Stefania Prestigiacomo to declare this zone an environmental disaster area and to begin cleaning it up. More than six months later there has been NO response.
State secrets still cloak the investigation into the case of what the Italian’s call the Navi dei Veleni Ships of Poison. State secrets still mask the murders of key investigators into the network of international business men, the Italian military, SISMI (the Italian secret service), NATO and state governments as they worked together to create and hide a network of waste and arms trafficking traversing the high Seas from the major Italian port of La Spezia to Alessandria, Egypt, Beruit, Lebanon and onward to Africa and Mogadishu in Somalia. Key investigators into the story of the Ships of Poison, Naval Captain Natale de Grazia, journalist Ilaria Alpi and cameraman Miran Hrovatin lost their lives for what many believe was their discovering of key truths that could expose an international network involving the Italian government that traded military weapons for the disposal of hazardous industrial wastes. Alpi and Hrovatin were gunned down in Mogadishu on the 20th of March 1994 by a Somali commando unit. Captain Natale de Grazia died of sudden cardiac arrest on the 13th of December 1995 only days before he was to deliver his report on his investigation into the Ships of Poison.
Now fast forward to 2011 and several recent developments that should be grabbing headlines. Two Italian journalists, Andrea Palladino, journalist for the communist daily il Manifesto and Vincenzo Mulè, journalist for Terra (Earth) News, have reported on a secret document that has come to the surface in the Parliamentary Commission on the Cycle of Garbage in Italy. This document dated December 11th 1995 describes financing by the Italian government under Lamberto Dini to the Italian Secret Service for the management of trafficking in arms and nuclear waste. While parts of this document have been acknowledged by the parliamentary commission, it still remains state secret. This document became state secret in 1995 and state secrets in Italy are supposed to be bound by a statute of 15 years that should have been up in 2010, however, this document still remains a secret.
Just this week, in an unexpected move from the Parliamentary Commission on the Cycle of Garbage in Italy, the investigation into the murder of journalist Ilaria Alpi and her cameraman Miran Hrovatin was reopened after being closed since 2006. It is believed that Italians paid the Somalis with weapons in exchange for using their sea and land as dumping grounds for toxic and radioactive wastes and that Alpi and Hrovatin had discovered too much. They were gunned down just days after Alpi had interviewed the Sultan of Bosaso, her notes from this interview were never found. Many believe that Alpi was killed because of what she had discovered about the ties between the Italian military and corrupt elements of the Somali leadership. This was all taking place during the time of Blackhawk down and the U.S. led occupation. According to the mafia turncoat Francesco Fonti, they had seen an exchange involving the Italian military and were assassinated for this reason. Their case was reopened because of a note about their deaths that was found among the belongings of Italian businessman Giorgio Comerio by Captain Natale de Grazia’s investigation.
This shady Italian businessman named Giorgio Comerio plays heavily into the reopening of this investigation. Comerio had come up with an idea for disposing of hazardous and radioactive wastes by torpedoing these wastes into the Sea floors. He was notorious for the trafficking of waste and part of a network intent on collecting insurance for old ships that were in need of disposal. His name has been associated with the purchase of the Jolly Rosso, the ship that beached on the shores of Amantea from the Messina shipping company. Old ships it seems are difficult and expensive to dispose of so Comerio and some mafia bosses came up with the bright idea of sinking them and collecting on their insurance policies while at the same time disposing of industrial wastes. Comerio has testified that “disposal at Sea was the only viable option for disposing of radioactive wastes at that time, as sending them off in the space shuttle was too dangerous because of the possibility of an explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
In Captain Natale de Grazia’s investigation he found a report about the killing of Alpi and Hrovatin in Comerio’s files. It has been stated that De Grazia also found a copy of Ilaria Alpi’s death certificate at Comerio’s house on Lago di Como, but that this document disappeared from case files that were in the offices of state prosecutor Francesco Neri in Reggio Calabria. Neri says he remembers this document in the files and that De Grazia’s investigation had discovered it a Comerio’s house but that it has mysteriously disappeared.
Natale de Grazia’s investigation was also focused on another Italian businessman linked to the waste trade from La Spezia. De Grazia was focusing on the major port of La Spezia where NATO operates its undersea research center NURC and where arms and waste shipments are a big business. Orazio Duvia was identified by De Grazia as a key figure in the trafficking of both arms and toxic and radioactive wastes. He was the owner and operator of a mega and quite possibly largest industrial hazardous waste dump in Italy, the landfill of Pittelli on one of the hills overlooking the gulf of La Spezia. According to the research of Andrea Palladino, the CIA looked to the corrupt and criminally operated Pittelli landfill as a model for industrial waste disposal. In May of 1995 De Grazia reported to a group of forest rangers that Duvia’s landfill was one of the logistical platforms for the shipping and sinking of wastes. In this presentation that he made under the code name “pinnochio” in order to protect his identity, he described the sinking of a ship called the Rigel said to be full of nuclear waste and sunk in the waters of the Ionian Sea off the coast of Calabria.
Captain Natale de Grazia was said to be in perfect health by his friends and family. He had however voiced concern about his investigation to his brother in law and had indicated that he may have been treading in dangerous waters as his discoveries led him to conclusions that would be highly uncomfortable for the entire Italian and possibly international power structure. His sudden cardiac arrest happened just days before he was to give his report.
All indicators point to a collusion of forces in this horrific saga of the Ships of Poison, a collusion between SISMI (the Italian secret service), the Italian government, big business, NATO and organized crime families from the Calabrian based crime syndicate l’ndrangheta. Many are now hoping that the reopening of the Ilaria Alpi/Miran Hrovatin case will finally bring the truth to light, but this is doubtful. The Parliamentary Commission on Italy’s Garbage Cycle is being led by a good friend and lawyer of Silvio Belusconi, Gaetano Pecorella. Pecorella began his political career as a radical communist but has moved sharply to the right over the years culminating in what is considered to be the legal mind of the Berlusconi phenomenon. Unless he’s being riddled by some kind of catholic guilt for a life of vile hypocrisy, things don’t bode well for a truly transparent investigation. Pecorella has also defended elements of the Neapolitan based mafia the Camorra noted for its traffic of garbage and creation of the continuing garbage crisis in Naples and surrounding areas.
Italy is at a very critical juncture and whether Berlusconi survives yet again or not is only part of the problem. The Italian economy is in turmoil, the public eduction system is being dismantled and the health care system is under attack while being wrought with corruption. Civil unrest over the past several months has led nowhere but to heightened tensions with an increasingly militarized police state. The country is divided and while a growing majority is crying out for change a large minority still supports the despicable leadership of the neo-fascists running the country. Only time will tell if the mass movement of the past months will bear the fruits of change toward a sustainable economy that are sorely needed. America’s military presence in Italy must be challenged and dismantled for any real change to happen and the center-left has traditionally rubber stamped America’s imperial presence on the peninsula.
Michael Leonardi is currently living in Toledo, Ohio and can be reached at mikeleonardi@hotmail.com
Previous coverage of the Ships of Poison saga.
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi09182009.html,
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi10092009.html,
http://www.counterpunch.org/leonardi11042009.html .
Related article
How Many Economists Does It Take to See an $8 Trillion Housing Bubble?
Sticking the Taxpayer (Not the Banks) With the Tab
By DEAN BAKER | CounterPunch | January 6, 2011
The answer to that question has to be many more economists than we have in the United States. Very few economists saw or understood the growth of the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. This involved a degree of inexcusable incompetence from the economists at the Treasury, the Fed and other regulatory institutions who had the responsibility for managing the economy and the financial system.
There really was nothing mysterious about the bubble. Nationwide house prices in the United States had just kept even with the overall rate of inflation for 100 years from the mid 1890s to the mid 1990s. Suddenly house prices began to hugely outpace the overall rate of inflation. By their peak in 2006 house prices had risen by more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation. Remarkably, virtually no U.S. economists paid any attention to this extraordinary movement in the largest market in the world.
Had they bothered, they would have quickly seen that there was no plausible explanation for this jump in prices in either the supply or demand side of the market. There were no major new restrictions on supply, with the builders putting up homes at near-record rates. Nothing on the demand side suggested that prices should rise. The healthy income growth of the late 90s was followed by stagnation in the last decade and population growth was relatively subdued. Finally, there was no unusual rise in rents, which just slightly outpaced inflation over this period.
Therefore it should have been easy for any competent economist to recognize the housing bubble. Moreover, the dangers for the economy should also have been apparent. The boom in construction (both residential and non-residential) had raised its share of GDP by more than 3 percentage points above its long-term average. In addition, the creation of $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth predictably led to a consumption boom, as households spend based on the new equity created by the bubble.
All of this presaged disaster for the time after the bubble burst. Construction spending was sure to plummet to below normal levels as the market recovered from the long period of overbuilding. Consumption would also fall back as households adjusted to the disappearance of the housing wealth that they expected to be available to them in future years.
Yet, almost no economists saw what was clearly in front of their eyes. They thought everything was just fine until the house of cards eventually collapsed in 2007-2008.
Unfortunately, the reign of error is not over. House prices in the United States are again declining and most of the economics profession remains clueless. The Case-Shiller 20-city house price index for October (the data is released with a two-month lag) showed a decline of 1.3 percent from September. This implied an acceleration from the prior month’s decline, which is now reported as 1.0 percent. In other words, house prices are again declining at double-digit rates.
A more careful examination of the data reveals the underlying logic. Prices are declining most rapidly in the bottom third of the market. Prices for this bottom tier of the market were in a literal free fall in recent months in several cities.
The reason is that a first-time buyers tax credit ended in June. This credit caused many buyers to move their purchase forward. People who might have otherwise bought in the second half of 2010 or in 2011 instead bought in the first half of 2010.
This tax credit had the effect of ending the plunge in house prices in 2009 and even leading to small rise in the second half of the year. But with the credit now expired, the price decline is resuming. It will likely spread from the bottom tier of the market to the middle and higher end, since the sellers of bottom-tier homes are the buyers of higher-end homes. If they must sell for much lower prices than they had anticipated, then they will have less money to buy these higher-end homes.
The further decline in house prices will have predictable consequences for the economy. If house prices drop by another 15 percent, completing the deflation of the housing bubble, this would imply a loss of $2.5 trillion in housing wealth. If consumers spend 6 cents for every dollar of housing wealth (near the middle of the range of estimates), this would mean a fall in consumption of roughly $150 billion or 1 percent of GDP. This will be a substantial drag on growth over the next two years that will no doubt surprise most economists.
The other important part of this story is that many more homes will fall underwater and there will be new losses for banks. However one result of the delay in this second round of price adjustments is that trillions of dollars of mortgages were taken out of private hands and shifted over to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that are currently owned by the government. This means that the losses on these mortgages will be the problem of the taxpayers, not the banks. Why is no one surprised?
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
Britons protest forests sell-off scheme
Press TV – January 5, 2011
Thousands of Britons have convened a protest in the Forest of Dean against the British government’s plans to sell off some of the country’s forests to the private sector.
More than 3,000 people, backed by celebrities, bishops, leading conservationists and politicians, attending the rally vowed to defend “the people’s” trees from a corporate land grab, the daily Guardian said in a report.
Based on a bill, expected to be debated in the House of Lords within three weeks, to become law, developers, charities and power companies could apply for the entire 650,000-acre forestry commission estate in England.
The government claims it wants more land to be forested and is hoping local communities will buy and manage much of the acreage put up for sale.
But protesters believe the sell-off is short-sighted and fear that woods will be bought by developers and energy companies who will limit access to trails and seek to fell as many trees as possible for a quick profit.
“It is extraordinary that one of the country’s most ancient forests – a place of great beauty that is enjoyed by so many people – is also one of its least protected. The Forest of Dean … should continue to be managed as a whole for the widest public benefit,” said the writer Bill Bryson, president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
“The green heart of Britain is not for sale,” said conservationist David Bellamy.
Today, more than 110,000 people had signed a petition against the coalition’s proposed sale of all Forestry Commission land in England.
Opposition to the sale of nearly 20 percent of all England’s wooded area is fiercest in Gloucestershire where yellow ribbons and posters have been tied around thousands of trees.
More than 30 other crown forests as well as large areas of heathland and bogs currently managed by the Forestry Commission in England are expected to be sold.
“There are no guarantees that income from sales will be used to support forestry,” said Hilary Allison, policy director of the Woodland Trust.
“No decisions have been taken on any particular sites. We will not compromise the protection of our most valuable and bio-diverse forests”, said a spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
More than 25 percent of US children now on chronic prescription medications
By Ethan A. Huff | Natural News | December 31, 2010
The rate of prescription drug use among children and teens continues to rise, with a new report from Medco Health Solutions Inc. saying that at least a quarter of all U.S. children are now regularly taking pharmaceutical drugs. And according to the report, many of these drugs were originally intended for adults, and carry with them unknown side effects for long-term use in young people.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that in addition to taking drugs for conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma, children are now taking things like sleeping pills, diabetes drugs and even statin drugs, which are typically only prescribed for adults. The report cites an eight-year-old boy, for example, who has been taking blood pressure medications since he was a baby.
Dr. Danny Benjamin, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University, admitted to the WSJ that prescribing chronic medications to children is a serious problem. “We know we’re making errors in dosing and safety,” he said, noting also that parents must do more to question the safety of medicines their doctors prescribe.
Experts worry that the increasing prevalence of children on prescription drugs is causing these young people serious harm, and that parents should instead seek out dietary and lifestyle changes for their children. But because many doctors continue to dole out the drugs like candy, despite known dangers, many parents just accept them for their children without giving it a second thought.
And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has done little, if anything, to warn the public about the dangers of using chronic prescription drugs, especially in small children. Safety studies in young people are not necessarily required in order for doctors to prescribe adult medications to children, as long as the drug is already FDA-approved.
Sources for this story include:
Julian Assange signs $1.5 mln autobiography deal
RIA Novosti | December 26, 2010
The founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has signed $1.5 million contracts with publishers to pen his autobiography, the Sunday Times said.
Assange, whose WikiLeaks website has provoked U.S. rage by releasing diplomatic documents, said the money will help him to defend himself against the sexual assault claims made by two women in Sweden, which he denies.
“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” he told the newspaper in the interview. “I have already spent 200,000 pounds [$310,000] for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”
The Australian said he will receive $800,000 from a U.S. publisher Alfred Knopf and $500,000 from a British deal with Canongate. The total sum from the deals, including those with other markets, will reach over 1 million pounds ($1.5 million).
The WikiLeaks founder was released on bail last week and vowed that he would continue his work.
Under the bail conditions, Assange must wear an electronic tag, report to police every day and observe a curfew. He is also obliged to stay at the Norfolk mansion of WikiLeaks supporter Vaughan Smith.
World leaders and diplomats have downplayed the impact of the leak of more than 250,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks site, but many have questioned the benefit of the project, alleging that some of the leaks could “threaten lives.”
The mystery of missile defence
After the latest failed missile defence tests, critics wonder why the US has spent $100bn on the system
By Chris Arsenault | Al-Jazeera | 17 Dec 2010
The cold war ended two decades ago, but dreams of an impenetrable missile shield from Ronald Reagan – who once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” – are firmly back on the US national security agenda.
Late on Wednesday, the US tested its newest round of interceptors, spending $100m to blast a missile from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean towards California.
The anti-ballistic missile system failed, as the kill vehicle designed to blow the projectile out of the sky missed its target, adding to a long-list of unsuccessful tests for the expensive weaponisation scheme.
Since the end of the cold war the US has spent “approximately $100bn” on missile defence systems, Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defence Agency, told Al Jazeera.
Wednesday’s failed long-range test was important because it involved an attempt to intercept a dummy warhead, rather than the usual testing scheme of just maneuvering the missile to a particular point in space, said Ian Anthony, the research coordinator for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank in Sweden.
Big bucks
Despite constant technological problems with the system, the White House has requested $9.9bn for missile defence programmes for the next fiscal year (2011), Anthony told Al Jazeera.
Those vast sums of money concern Theodore Postol, a professor of science and international security at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. The weapons expert, hardly a liberal dove, just doesn’t believe missile defence can work technologically.
View Mapping the missiles in a larger map
“If you look at it as an engineering and defence enterprise, it makes no sense,” Postol told Al Jazeera.
Technological failures and massive financial costs aside, if Barack Obama, the US president, is serious about reducing the possibility of nuclear war, then it seems developing new missile systems isn’t the best way to inspire international trust.
“The US will always say that missile defence is a defensive system,” said Tom Sauer, a professor of international relations at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. “The problem is that the Russians or Chinese may perceive it as threatening or offensive. When it comes to missile defence, perspective is everything.”
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and a former KGB agent who is well versed in cold war history, called US plans for a missile shield in Eastern Europe “very similar” to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.
“The Bush administration planned to have a radar station in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland,” Dr. Sauer said. Obama has not ended the missile programme in Eastern Europe, he has just amended it slightly.
“[Current] plans call for deployment of land-based SM-3 interceptors [a modified surface to air missile] in Poland and Romania to defend Europe against short to medium range ballistic missiles,” said Missile Defense Agency spokesman Lehner.
Washington hard-liners
But even though the US and its NATO partners plan on erecting shields in former Soviet bloc countries, defence hawks in Washington are not happy.
“The Obama administration is pursuing this reset policy with Russia. As far as I can tell, it has been completely one sided with Russia pocketing all of the gains,” said Baker Spring, a security expert with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.
The US and Russia have negotiated a new nuclear arms reduction treaty refered to as START, limiting the former cold war rivals to 1,550 warheads and 700 launchers each, enough to destroy the world several times over.
Some Republicans Senators including John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) have said arms reduction could limit US missile defence plans and plan to vote against it.
But blaming weaponisation programmes on Republican hawks would not be historically accurate. The Democratic administration of former US president Bill Clinton pursued a plan to launch 1000 missile interceptors into space, under its Strategic Defence Initiative, which critics call “star-wars”.
“We think the [Obama] administration’s programme should include that,” the Heritage Foundation’s Spring told Al Jazeera.
Postol laughs when asked about the Heritage Foundation, calling them “ideologues” who don’t understand the science behind the military programmes that they support.
‘Disappointed in Obama’
But, like the Heritage Foundation, the MIT professor and former naval adviser is also critical of Obama.
“The Obama administration is making false claims about the technical capabilities of missile defence, like the Bush administration before it. As someone who supported Obama, I find this very disappointing,” Postol said.
Unsurprisingly, Lehner from the Missile Defense Agency thinks the programme is technically sound, despite Wednesday’s failed tests.
“In total, we have had 46 successful intercepts in 58 tests since the integration of the BMDS [a ballistic missile defence system contracted to Boeing] in 2001,” he said.
But Postol says the tests themselves are “basically rigged” with “minimal standards applied to the contractors of what constitutes success”.
There are different kinds of systems designed to deal with short, medium or long range attacks. A basic premise behind missile defence is the idea of hitting a bullet with a bullet, either near the earth’s surface – like the patriot missile defences used in the 1991 Gulf War – or other systems designed to hit missiles high in the atmosphere, or outer-space, where intercontinental ballistic missiles fly.
“The fact that these systems try to operate at these high altitudes makes them vulnerable to simple countermeasures,” Postol said, citing ballons or decoy projectiles which are cheap, simple and effective ways to trick missile defences. “Nobody has been able to come up with an explanation of why the concerns I have raised are not true.”
‘Military-industrial complex’
North Korea and Iran, states cited by the US as justification for missile defence, can easily deploy counter-measures rendering the advanced technology useless, said Sauer, the international relations professor.
So, if the technology doesn’t work, what is driving the programme?
Postol chalks it up to domestic politics in the US, coupled with a desire to appease America from Europe. Republicans support the technology, even though they don’t understand how it works, he says, while democrats don’t want to be called wimps on national security.
NATO, which has been dangling without a clear raison d’etre since the end of the cold war, incorporated missile defence as a new mission at its most recent summit in Lisbon, Portugul.
Sauer agrees that partisan politics in the US play a role, but says the costly scheme speaks to something more profound than bickering between Democrats and their Republican counterparts. After all, the Clinton administration resurrected the programme which could have disappeared after the cold war.
Boeing, a primary contractor for missile defence systems, maintains operations in all fifty US States. Thus, if an unsuccessful weapons programme is cancelled, local politicans will rally to protect it, for fear of losing local jobs and votes, Sauer said.
“Many representatives in Congress would like to see more money for these programmes, they are part of the military industrial complex,” Sauer said.
Ukraine’s Tymoshenko under probe
Carbon Credits a Tool for Corruption?
Press TV – December 15, 2010
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been ordered to remain in Kiev as part of a criminal investigation into allegations of power abuse.
“She is under a pledge not to leave town,” the general prosecutor’s spokesman Yury Boichenko was quoted as saying by AFP.
Tymoshenko earlier said that the country’s authorities had opened a criminal investigation against her for allegedly misspending state funds Ukraine received from selling greenhouse emission quotas under the Kyoto Protocol.
“I have just learned from an investigator that a criminal probe has been started against me personally because ostensibly environmental money during the crisis was spent on pensions,” she said, adding sarcastically that the probe had been opened “because I committed a grave crime — because I paid people pensions when the country was truly in crisis.”
The former premier told reporters that investigators had questioned her earlier on Wednesday but formal charges had not yet been brought against her in the absence of her lawyer.
Tymoshenko stepped down as prime minister in early March following her loss to pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych in a hard-fought presidential election battle.
Tymoshenko was a key figure in Ukraine’s 2004 orange revolution but later became tied down with internal political disputes after falling out with former President Viktor Yushchenko.
Wall Street bonuses cashed in for sex, food and art
RT | December 9, 2010
If the impressionist artist were to illustrate something of today’s New York City, it just might be moneybags.
Amid the lackluster American economic climate, Christies Auction House is seeing sunny days, with more than 600-million dollars worth of impressionist and modern art sold this year.
“Since 2008, we have seen an increasing return of confidence to the art market,” said Conor Jordan, of Christies New York.
New York has once again, become one of the Christies premier selling sites.Just as Wall Street’s wealthy and powerful, are back to indulging.
Pampering at the La Prairie Spa at the Ritz Carlton, involves wearing decadent hors d’ oeuvres. A 90-minute skin caviar facial costs more than $300 and 3.4 ounces of La Prairie’s Skin Caviar Luxe Cream sells for $710.
“This time of year, a lot of our business comes from corporate gift certificates,” said Spa Manager, Sandra Sadowski.
As corporate America is banking record breaking profits this year, it may be no coincidence that business at Wempe Jewelers has spiked. The $158,000 dollar price tag of some luxury watches exceeds the average annual income of three US households combined.
“We’re expecting a very busy time. The busiest time of the year,” said Raik Kraise, Wempe manager.
Busyness boosted perhaps by big bonuses coming mainly from one street, Wall Street, a symbol of the finance industry, the financial collapse and record breaking compensation that will reportedly reach $144 billion dollars this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, 2010 bonuses will be up 4 percent from last year’s record haul.
If anyone would know about business, it would be those who work at Rick’s Cabaret. At the New York Gentlemen’s Club, happiness bares lots of skin and beauty, but it doesn’t come free.
“For an evening, six, seven eight thousand dollars, 10-thousand dollars, it’s hard not to have a good time when you’re surrounded by nearly naked women,” said Rick’s Cabaret Communications Manager, Allan Priaulx.
Female entertainers working at Rick’s said they are continuing to benefit from a boom in business following Wall Street’s rebound.
“These guys are getting much-deserved bonuses.They want to celebrate the bonuses and party and have a great time,” said Randi Newton, an entertainer at Rick’s Cabaret.
From sex cravings, to food cravings, some of Wall Street’s cats have gotten fat by forking up $175 for a 10-ounce Kobe beef hamburger.
“We still sell a handful of them every month. A good handful,” Heather Tierney, co-owner of Wall Street Burger Shoppe said.
On Main Street where more than 15-million Americans are officially unemployed, the US Poverty Population reached nearly 44 million, a 50-year high.
Ironically, that figure marks New York City’s most expensive residential sale this year. A seven-floor, 5th Avenue mansion was purchased for $44 million dollars. This, as more than two million homes have been swallowed up by foreclosure in 2010.
In this so-called rebounding US economy, purveyors of all things luxury are, in fact, resurging. All while the majority of Americans are left wondering when life will finally begin looking as pretty as the painting.
Mike Norman, the chief economist at John Thomas Financial explained there is an expanding gap between the rich and poor in America.
“The resources of the government have been directed almost completely towards one sector of the economy, that’s been the financial, that’s been the huge beneficiary when most working people, and by far, the rest of the economy has been left to flounder,” Norman commented. “It’s very disturbing.”
He said the US now ranks near the bottom of global income inequality lists, and it is a direct result of US government policies.
The failed policies transcend American party politics, he argued, both Republicans and Democrats continue to support the financial sector at the expense of all others. … Full article and video report
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Because no animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2, it cannot properly be termed a zoonosis.* Should we call it a labnosis? And what does that mean?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 12, 2021
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
Why did they do it? … continue
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