‘UK government wants Muslims out of London’
Press TV – March 17, 2011
An opposition Labour Party minister has accused the British government of spearheading efforts to force Muslim families out of central London.
KarenBuck, the shadow Work and Pensions Minister, told a public meeting in Islington that the government “does not want Muslims living in central London,” adding that ministers were “deeply hostile” to poor people having children, British media reported.
Buck also spoke of the government’s spending cuts program, saying that planned cuts to housing benefits were politically motivated to force poor, ethnic minority and Muslim families out of the center of London.
“They [The Government] do not want lower-income women, families, children and, above all, let us be very clear – because we also know where the impact is hitting – they don’t want black women, they don’t want ethnic minority women and they don’t want Muslim women living in central London. They just don’t. They want people to be moving out of anywhere that is a more prosperous area into the fringes of London and into places like Barking and Newham. I have nothing against Barking and Newham. The problem is they are already full of people who are quite poor,” she said.
The shadow minister also accused the Tories of thinking that families who earn less than £40,000 a year should not have any children.
“The Government is one that is deeply hostile to middle- and lower-income women having children,” she said.
“When you listen to the Tories speaking in Parliament, there is an arrogance and an ignorance that I have never known in my 13 years in Parliament: basically, thinking that anyone whose income is below the top rate of tax shouldn’t have children,” added Buck.
The Conservative Party Chairman Baroness Warsi reacted to the remarks, saying that “they were deeply offensive.”
Warsi, herself a Muslim, called on Labour Party chief Ed Miliband to remove Buck from Labour’s frontbench.
This is while government plans, which come into force next month — housing benefit will be capped at £400 a week for the largest homes and £290 a week for two-bed flats — are continuously raising concerns that many poor families will no longer be able to afford the rent in inner cities.
A report for the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research suggested that – nationwide – up to 269,000 households will struggle to pay their rent, with an estimated half of these expected to lose their homes.
The plans will hit particularly hard in London, where average rents are higher than they are in any part of the country. London Councils estimate that 82,000 households across the capital will be at risk of losing their homes under the government changes.
Stealing from Social Security to Pay for Wars and Bailouts
Instead of investing our Social Security payroll deductions the US government wasted them on blowing up infrastructure and people in foreign lands
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research | March 9, 2011
… Republicans tell us that our grandchildren are being saddled with impossible debt burdens because of handouts to retirees and the poor. $3 trillion wars are necessary and have nothing to do with the growth of the public debt. The public debt is due to unnecessary “welfare” that workers paid for with a 15% payroll tax.
When you hear a Republican sneer “entitlement,” he or she is referring to Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their wages for their working lifetime. But when a Republican sneers, he or she is saying “welfare.” To the distorted mind of a Republican, Social Security and Medicare are undeserved welfare payments to people who over-consumed for a lifetime and did not save for their old age needs.
America can be strong again once we get rid of these welfare leeches.
Once we are rid of these leeches, we can really fight wars. And show people who is boss.
Republicans regard Social Security as an “unfunded liability,” that is, a giveaway that is
interfering with our war-making ability.
Alas, Social Security is an unfunded liability, because all the money working people put into it was stolen by Republicans and Democrats in order to pay for wars and bailouts for mega-rich bankers like Goldman Sachs.
What I am about to tell you might come as a shock, but it is the absolute truth, which you can verify for yourself by going online to the government’s annual OASDI and HI reports. According to the official 2010 Social Security reports, between 1984 and 2009 the American people contributed $2 trillion, that is $2,000 billion, more to Social Security and Medicare in payroll taxes than was paid out in benefits.
What happened to the surplus $2,000 billion, or $2,000,000,000,000.
The government spent it.
Over the past quarter century, $2 trillion in Social Security and Medicare revenues have been used to finance wars and pork-barrel projects of the US government.
Depending on assumptions about population growth, income growth and other factors, Social Security continues to be in the black until after 2025 or 2035 under the “high cost” and “intermediate” assumptions and the current payroll tax rate of 15.3% based on the revenues paid in and the interest on those surplus revenues. Under the low cost scenario, Social Security (OASDI) will have produced surplus revenues of $31.6 trillion by 2085. […]
The subsidy to the US government from the payroll tax is larger than the $2 trillion in excess revenue collections over payouts. The subsidy of the Social Security payroll tax to the government also includes the fact that $2.8 trillion of US government debt obligations are not in the market. If the national debt held by the public were $2.8 trillion larger, so would be the debt service costs and most likely also the interest rate.
The money left over for war would be even smaller. More would have to be borrowed or printed.
The difference between the $2 trillion in excess Social Security revenues and the $2.8 trillion figure is the $0.8 trillion that is the accumulated interest over the years on the mounting $2 trillion in debt, if the Treasury had had to issue bonds, instead of non-marketable IOUs, to the Social Security Trust Fund. When the budget is in deficit, the Treasury pays interest by issuing new bonds in the amount of the interest due. In other words, the interest on the debt adds to the debt outstanding.
The robbed Social Security Trust Fund can only be made good by the US Treasury issuing another $2.8 trillion in US government debt to pay off its IOUs to the fund.
When a government is faced with a $14 trillion public debt growing by trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, how does it add another $2.8 trillion to the mix?
Only with great difficulty.
Therefore, to avoid repaying the $2.8 trillion that the government has stolen for its wars and bailouts for mega-rich bankers, the right-wing has selected entitlements as the sacrificial lamb.
A government that runs a deficit too large to finance by borrowing will print money as long as it can. When the printing press begins to push up inflation and push down the exchange value of the dollar, the government will be tempted to reduce its debt by reneging on entitlements or by confiscating private assets such as pension funds. When it has confiscated private assets and reneged on public obligations, nothing is left but the printing press.
We owe the end-time situation that we face to open-ended wars and to an unregulated financial system concentrated in a few hands that produces financial crises by leveraging debt to irresponsible levels.
The government of the United States does not represent the American people. It represents the oligarchs. The way campaign finance and elections are structured, the American people cannot take back their government by voting. A once proud and free people have been reduced to serfdom.
Is entertaining dictators worse than normalizing apartheid?
Nada Elia and Laurie King, The Electronic Intifada, 3 March 2011
As revolutions continue to sweep the Arab world, and the days of dictators seem numbered, we are learning a lot about the ties and alliances that have long characterized the west’s dealing with tyrants around the globe. “Stability,” apparently, requires us to make deals with the devil. And so we discover that the United States has long known about the human rights abuses of deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, deposed Tunisian president Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali, and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But it was willing nonetheless not only to turn a blind eye to these, but even to enable and fund, directly or indirectly, oppressive regimes, for the sake of what exactly? Oil? Corporations? The so-called “peace process?” Iraqi “freedom?” Israel’s security?
And as Arab tyrants are challenged, one by one, social media are abuzz with the embarrassing and numerous compliments and kind remarks that western heads of state, academics, pundits, and entertainers have given these deposed dictators. In a typical statement, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, said in 2009: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” Apparently, the Clinton-Mubarak friendship goes back about 20 years. Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, a close friend of Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth’s second son and fourth in line to the British throne, has been a guest at Windsor Castle and Buckingham palace. The list is long.
But as the people seem determined to overthrow all those oppressive regimes, liberal Americans are openly questioning the wisdom and morality of “dealing with the devil.” In a highly critical segment on Anderson Cooper’s program AC 360, Cooper, a CNN journalist exhibiting an unusual level of courage and integrity among mainstream American media personalities, called out the various US presidents who have welcomed Gaddafi into their diplomatic circles, even as they acknowledged his tendency towards malice and mental instability, best epitomized by Ronald Reagan’s name for him: “the madman of the desert” (KTH: The West and Gadhafi’s regime,” 24 February 2011).
In that same episode, Cooper was critical of American artists Beyonce, Usher, and Mariah Carey, all three of whom gave private performances for the Gaddafis. Carey apparently received one million dollars for performing four songs for the Gaddafis on New Year in 2009. The following year, it was Beyonce and Usher who graced the Libyan dictator’s New Year’s celebration. Cooper asked why artists would perform for tyrants, and suggested that they donate the money they received to the Libyan people.
The news item was quickly picked up by other media. Rolling Stone magazine also ran an article stating that the music industry is lashing out at these artists, and quoting David T. Viecelli, agent for Arcade Fire and many other acts, as saying “Given what we know about Qaddafi and what his rule has been about, you have to willfully turn a blind eye in order to accept that money, and I don’t think it’s ethical” (Industry Lashes Out at Mariah, Beyonce and Others Who Played for Qaddafi’s Family,” 25 February 2011).
Amid all this uproar, Canadian singer Nelly Furtado announced on Twitter that she would donate to charity a one million dollar fee she received to perform for the Gaddafi family in 2007 (“Nelly Furtado to give away $1 million Gaddafi fee,” Reuters, 1 March 2011).
Those of us who have long been engaged in Palestine justice activism cannot help but notice glaring double-standards in these denunciations of the various deals with devils. And at this critical point in the history of the Arab world, we must request that our readers begin to “connect the dots” throughout the region. Is entertaining dictators a lesser crime than normalizing Israeli apartheid?
Why hold artists accountable for performing at the behest of tyrants, and let them off the hook for whitewashing Israel’s regime which engages in massive human rights abuses, all subsidized by the United States government?
Why not call out Beyonce, Usher, Mariah Carey, and so many other artists, all of whom have performed in Israel, a state which practices a form of apartheid worse than anything the South African apartheid government had ever done? In 1973, the United Nations General Assembly defined the crime of Apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” As Israel’s official policy privileges Jewish nationals over non-Jewish citizens, creating de facto and de jure discrimination against the indigenous Palestinian people, it is hard to dispute that this supposed “democracy” is in reality an apartheid state.
Many of the discriminatory measures Israel practices today were unthought of in apartheid South Africa. In his powerful essay, “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” penned shortly after his return from a visit to the West Bank, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa” (“Apartheid in the Holy Land,” The Guardian, 29 April 2002).
In 2009, a comprehensive study by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council confirmed that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories.
That study was inspired by the observations of John Dugard, South African law professor and former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who wrote in 2006: “Israel’s large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassination of Palestinians far exceeded any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.” And no roads were ever built for whites only in South Africa either, while Israel continues to build Jewish-only roads, cutting through the Palestinian landscape.
Israel’s form of apartheid includes the crippling blockade of Gaza; the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land and water sources; construction of the West Bank apartheid wall declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague; the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem; the denial of the rights of Palestinian refugees and discriminatory laws and mounting threats of expulsion against the 1.2 million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship.
And as word inevitably gets out, because we are no longer pleading for permission to narrate, but seizing our right to expose these crimes, Israel is hard at work trying to fix its image, without changing the policies and actions that have tarnished that image. As it cements its apartheid policies, Israel is funneling millions of dollars into burnishing its public image as a culturally vibrant, progressive, and thriving democracy.
Among its PR moves is the cultural “Re-Brand” campaign. Israel is intentionally inviting international artists to such “hip” places as Tel Aviv to mask the ugly face of occupation, apartheid, displacement, and dispossession. If we are to hold artists accountable for their choice of performance venues and income sources — as indeed we should — then we should hold them accountable for complicity in normalizing apartheid no less than for entertaining dictators.
In an important article that appeared in The Grio, Lori Adelman also asks: “Why are black pop stars performing at the behest of dictators?” before making the comparison to Sun City, the extravagant whites-only entertainment resort city in apartheid South Africa. And she reminds her readers of the impact of the Artists United Against Apartheid music project, which contributed one million dollars for anti-Apartheid efforts and, most importantly, raised awareness about the global power of artists to influence political discourse on human rights issues (“Why are black pop stars performing at the behest of dictators?,” 24 February 2011).
Today, there is global awareness of Israel’s numerous crimes. And there is a call for artists to boycott Israel, until the country abides by international law. The call was issued in 2005 by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (www.pacbi.org/). In the US, where we live, the campaign is coordinated by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. When we learn of an artist who is planning to perform in Tel Aviv, we contact them, inform them of the reality on the ground (should they need such information), and urge them to reconsider and cancel any concerts they may have scheduled. Many have already done so, including the industry’s biggest names: Carlos Santana, Bono, The Pixies, Elvis Costello and Gil Scott-Heron. Folk legend Pete Seeger also recently announced his support for boycotting Israel.
In what may be the most eloquent statement to date, Costello wrote: “One lives in hope that music is more than mere noise, filling up idle time, whether intending to elate or lament. Then there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent. … Some will regard all of this an unknowable without personal experience but if these subjects are actually too grave and complex to be addressed in a concert, then it is also quite impossible to simply look the other way” (“It Is After Considerable Contemplation …,” 15 May 2010).
Today, Artists Against Apartheid are still around, and they are active in promoting the boycott of a country that is practicing apartheid in the 21st century, namely Israel. The question should be, then, if artists boycotted Sun City, shouldn’t they also boycott Tel Aviv? Why the outrage when Beyonce entertains Gaddafi, but not when Madonna, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and so many more, entertain apartheid in Israel?
~
Laurie King, an anthropologist, is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
Nada Elia is a member of the Organizing Committee of USACBI, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (Facebook).
Egyptian Revolution in Israeli Eyes
By Seraj Assi | Palestine Chronicle | February 14, 2011
The Arab World is suffering and in its suffering it threatens Israel. ‘Israeli citizens are frightened,’ said Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni in a moment of deep confession. In fact, what Livni was saying, to paraphrase Franz Fanon, is this: “Mama America, see the Arab! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!”
This is a typical colonial scene where the “frightening victims” are captured in a game that involves dehumanization and empowering and rendered silent and dangerous subjects at the same time. Never can they escape this colonial capacity to invite and contain contradictions and opposites.
Yet in the Israeli case the irony is far more acute. For not only does Israel see its victim as dangerous and potentially evil, but has itself become the victim. It is within this irony that the ritual of victimization came to dominate the master narrative of Israel’s colonial discourse and foreign policy. Not only has Israel become a country whose entire existence is dependent on the suppression of all Arab and Muslim peoples, but it has relentlessly contributed to their suppression.
According to Israel’s imperial logic, it is only reasonable to suppress the lives of three hundred million people for the “security” of a few million Israeli Jews, no matter how fictitious this security claim is. The irony is while Israel continues to bill Egyptian revolution as a threat to its national security, its Palestinian citizens- for decades Israel’s internal “dangerous victims”- are taking to the streets to celebrate the victory of their Egyptian brothers. Motivated by human and national solidarity, they have never felt as secure as they do now.
Israel’s security is fundamentally the security of vision. And since the vision of Arab and Muslim despotism is the only guarantee for Israel’s cultural narcissism and ethnic superiority in the region, it must be preserved by any means, and precisely by brutal force for “Arabs only understand force”, as Zionists believe.
Yet Israel’s fear has a performative colonial function. Its obsessive insistence to remain “the only democracy in the Middle East” is not merely a representational fantasy, but an effective colonial strategy. It is precisely this vision that gives Israel’s colonial policies in the region its moral justification and authentic validity. Its “civilizing mission” in the region is completely dependent on its vision of Arab and Muslim undemocratic spirit.
It is Israel’s cultivated vision on Arab despotism that permits its former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to boast that “Israel is a villa in a jungle” and its President Shimon Perez to contrast democracy with peace: “Mubarak is a great man committed to peace, but Egyptian youth want democracy.” And when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued his paternalistic warning to Egypt from “becoming another Iran” he was operating into the same imperial logic.
Here Israel’s ambition to reorder the world by the brutal force of Zionist propaganda reaches its extreme absurdity. Indeed, it is in Israel where suppression is equivalent to stability. It is there where Egypt, its people, history and culture are all reduced to one word: Camp David. And it is in Israel where international sympathy for Egyptian struggle for freedom and dignity is violently placed under what an Israeli journalist has recently called “the betrayal of the West.”
Even when the moment has arrived to contradict these proclamations, Israel continues to see itself as the civilization custodian surrounded by uncivilized enemies and unruly protestors. There is no doubt then that Israel’s fear of any prospective democracy in the Arab world is steeped in racism. For Arab democracy simply threatens Israel’s undisputed vision of Arabs that maintained itself regardless of any historical evidence disputing it. And since the evidence this time is too visible to be denied, it becomes too intimidating for the Israeli observer. As the vision is now defeated by the narrative, as it is yielding to the pressure of history, Israel’s fear turns into collective phobia and racist hysteria. The scene of an Arab getting out of the iron cage fashioned by the Israeli observer to violate the serenity of history is precisely what frightens Israel.
On February 02, 2011, an article published in Haaretz opened with the following:
“Edward Said was right. We are all infected with Orientalism, not to mention racism. For the site of an entire people shaking off the yoke of tyranny and bravely demanding free elections – instead of uplifting our spirits, fills us with fear, just because they are Arabs.”
This clearly illustrates how, by a strange change of fortune, Israel came to inherit Western Orientalist racism and produce its own “Orientals”. Indeed, it is in Israel where, to steal a line from Naomi Klein, “Jews made the shift from victims to victimizers with terrifying ease.” This ironic legacy of Western Orientalism now produced by the Zionist racist machinery is precisely what enables Binyamin Fuad Ben-Eliezer, himself an Arab Jew born in Basra in Iraq, to lament Mubarak’s departure by claiming that “Arabs are not ready for democracy.”
Yet Israeli Jews are not alone to inherit the ironic legacy of Western Orientalism in the region. Just a week after the Egyptian revolution broke up Mubarak too introduced his version of Orientalism. Not so different from Livni’s was his message to President Obama on ABC that “you don’t understand Egyptian culture and what would happen if I step down now”. One might wonder what was left of Egyptian culture under Mubarak regime but a bunch of corrupt muftis and semi-intellectuals. In fact, one does not need a revolution to discover that Mubarak is the last one in Egypt to understand what Egyptian culture is.
Perhaps the most hilarious scene of Mubarak’s Orientalist doctrine was his “camelization” of the demonstrations in Egypt. By unleashing his thugs riding in on camels and horses to crush and terrorize peaceful civilian protestors on the streets Mubarak was sending a clear message to his friends in the West. That is Egyptians, when left to their devices, are nothing but a bunch of unruly savages unsuited to democracy and civilization. His barbaric response to one of the most civilized revolutions in the region shows how deeply he believes in what he says and does.
Mubarak’s response is an extraordinary example of how local dictators act as colonial agents towards their people and how they too feed on the irony of “dangerous victims.” Victimization in Mubarak’s version depends on the same logic of radical inversion. That is by presenting Egyptian protestors as collaborators and foreign agents Mubarak is following the Arab proverb: “He hit me and cried, he raced me to complain.” Yet Mubarak certainly knows, as well as his Israeli and Western interlocutors, that one of the motivations behind the revolution was precisely his scandalous collaborative role in the region.
It is in this context that the revolution against Mubarak regime becomes an anti-colonial struggle. His dehumanization of his people tied with his brutal violence against peaceful civilians is an unmistakably colonial symptom. Here the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt should not make us forget how Western violence was exported to the Arab world from the dawn of colonialism up to the present day, how it was brought home by ruling elites whose links to neo-colonial and post-colonial metropolises are maintained through multiple forms of agency, and how authoritarian Arab regimes continue to feed on Western hypocrisy in regard to democracy and liberty, the same slogans that have provided the foot-hold for Western expansion in the region.
Nor should we forget that Western political stability in comparison to the Arab world should be interpreted against the background of its exploitation of the region which provided it with the wealth to support its relatively decorous life. To make no mistake about it, the obsessive emphasis in Arab and Western media on formal U.S. announcements and responses to events in Egypt and Tunisia can only show how deeply neocolonialism is steeped in the region.
Isn’t it then a bitter irony to expect the United State to liberate Egyptians from the very conditions that make it function in the region? Wasn’t this very same discourse on the liberation of Arabs what allowed its imperial venture to take place in the region? Don’t all kinds of critique of Israel’s support for Mubarak’s regime seem absurd given the fact that by supporting Mubarak Israel behaves in accordance with its colonial interests in the region and any critique of it must begin with its colonial foundations instead of its contemporary political hypocrisy?
– Seraj Assi is a PhD student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
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.
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The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food
Lies Are Unbekoming | January 20, 2026
Soybeans generate approximately $80 million annually in mandatory producer assessments alone, funding a marketing apparatus that has transformed an industrial commodity into one of America’s most trusted “health foods.” The campaign succeeded. Soy milk lines supermarket shelves beside dairy. Soy protein fortifies everything from infant formula to energy bars. Vegetarians rely on tofu and tempeh as dietary staples. Doctors recommend soy to menopausal women. School lunch programs serve soy-based meat substitutes to children. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods contain soy derivatives. The premise underlying this proliferation—that Asians have thrived on soy for millennia and that modern science validates its health benefits—has been repeated so often it functions as established fact.
Kaayla T. Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story dismantles this premise through systematic examination of the scientific literature. The book documents that traditional Asian soy consumption averaged roughly one tablespoon daily, consumed as fermented condiments after processing methods that neutralized inherent toxins—a pattern bearing no resemblance to American consumption of industrially processed soy protein isolate, soy flour, and soy oil. Daniel catalogs the antinutrients that survive modern processing (protease inhibitors, phytates, lectins, saponins), the toxic compounds created by industrial methods (nitrosamines, lysinoalanine, hexane residues), and the heavy metals concentrated in soy products (manganese, aluminum, fluoride, cadmium). She traces the mechanisms by which soy isoflavones—plant estrogens present at pharmacologically significant levels—disrupt thyroid function, impair fertility, and interact with hormone-sensitive cancers. The evidence emerges from peer-reviewed journals, FDA documents, and industry sources themselves.
The stakes extend beyond individual dietary choices. Infants fed soy formula receive isoflavone doses equivalent to several birth control pills daily, with blood concentrations 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than their natural estrogen levels. Soy protein isolate—the ingredient in formula, protein bars, and thousands of products—has never received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status; its only pre-1960s use was as an industrial paper sealant. Two senior FDA scientists formally protested their own agency’s approval of soy health claims, citing evidence of thyroid damage and reproductive harm. The Honolulu Heart Program found that men consuming tofu twice weekly showed accelerated brain aging and increased dementia. These findings have not penetrated public awareness because the institutions responsible for consumer protection have been compromised by the industry they regulate. The Whole Soy Story presents the evidence that has been systematically excluded from mainstream health messaging, enabling readers to evaluate for themselves what the soy industry prefers they never learn. … continue
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