Save for residual rhetoric, at the beginning of 2014 the United States lies further from its intended course than at any time during its history.

Never has it had an elite so powerful yet so removed from its purported purposes, one more loyal to multinational corporations than to domestic citizens, and one whose conscience has been drained by decades of increasing corruption.

The components of this dismal establishment includes not only the obvious such as the most reactionary right since the Civil War, but major factors that are either ignored or denied such as a national leadership without moral voices, a Democratic Party backed by its liberal fans that has been dismantling 60 years of progress accomplished by the New Deal and Great Society, an academia heavily beholden to its funding sources – whether government or corporate, a media whose Washington branch is deeply embedded in the interests of the very institutions and individuals about which it is supposed to be telling the truth, and a culture driven by the corporations that control it rather than by the artists creating it.

There are other problems, such as intelligence institutions wielding unprecedented improper powers. The NSA, for example, is the most prolific – albeit not most violent – criminal operation in the country, with its victims of illegal spying numbering in the millions. And its challengers are getting at best only mild support from a media that used to care when the government broke the law.

But then we live in an America in which every president since 1988 has had a direct or familial connection with the CIA.

In the latter category are the two Bushes, the elder having been its director. Unreported, however, is the fact that this connection is also shared by Bill Clinton who worked as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. And Barack Obama worked for a CIA front operation called Business International and reportedly had his tuition debt at Columbia paid off by BIC. Yet, as William Blum has written, “In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job.” It also appears likely that his mother and grandfather had intelligence connections.

And now the Democrats appear headed towards nominating Hillary Clinton despite her seedy past, her several criminal associates and her less than progressive politics. If she wins and survives two terms, for over 50% of the previous half century America will have been run by two of the most corrupt families to reach the top of our country’s politics. For nearly three quarters of the previous half century our country will have been run by those with direct or familial connections to the CIA. And, for a topping, for two thirds of the half century the country will have been run by graduates of Harvard Business School or the Harvard or Yale law schools.

This is not the America we were taught to love and assist in its noble purposes. But then, these days most of our children are nor even introduced to such thoughts in any meaningful way, except, say, as Answer C in a multiple choice exam.

You can’t have a working democratic republic without an education that supports it, but with No Child Left Behind and Common Core, corporate interests and their political serfs are reducing education to robotic exercises in preparation for students’ similarly robotic experiences in adult life.

But then this is the goal of the multinational corporations that have grasped control of our land and its leaders. Not since the pre-revolutionary colonial days of the British East India Company has America been so much a hostage to such alien institutions. Thanks to such expediencies as Citizens United and international trade agreements, if one follows the money, it leads inexorably away from the natural interests of the United States to huge corporations that are challenging whole countries, including ours, as major possessors of power.

And it is power that offers neither progress nor perspicuity. For example, during the very decades that America has been remodeled along lines concocted by business schools, these institutions’ graduates have led America into an economic decline matched in some ways only by the Great Recession.

The management cult run amuck can be found in Washington’s politics where, for example, Obamacare is floundering thanks in part to the corrupt intent of individual mandates – i.e. to subsidize insurance companies with payments of the healthy young (without even a public option) – and an massive inability to even make such a scheme work efficiently.

Dismal as this may all appear, it helps to remember that history is full of times when those at the top gorged their greed and created vast gaps between the strong and the weak. During such times the weak have found all sorts of solutions such as the self-sufficiency of farmers and fishers, tradesmen carrying out business far from the castles whose moats and walls symbolized not only power but fear, and the monks in the monastery.

Further, all across America there are places and people practicing the values our leaders have scrapped. While contemporary liberals are trapped in the illusion that salvation always comes from the top, we have no choice to save our country but from the bottom up. We need to move closer to the “small republics” that Jefferson dreamed of, communities where every citizen became “an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his own competence.”

Any place, any community, any gathering can become what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, an oasis of freedom, decency and hope, in which a new culture can take sprout. Name it, enjoy it, use it. It’s the best we have at the moment.

And we have some models, such as the buy local and local food movements as well as organized labor rediscovering the power of cooperatives and reaching out to the unorganized. We can learn to organize from the gay and marijuana movements. We can learn from the beats and the punks the value of rejecting establishment definitions of our culture. We can learn from some of the great organizers of the past to build new alliances on issues rather than the shared presumed purity of those involved. We can learn to stress the unity that economic policy can build across ethnic and other cultural gaps. And, in a society obsessed with commodities, we can learn to boycott those products tied to the evil at the top.

Finally, we have a whole new year in which to try it out. Go for it.

Sam Smith edits the Progressive Review.

Why do we say there “too many” of the other animals? They all seem to balance themselves perfectly well until we intrude. Which we do, everywhere. Our population is seven billion and rising. As we spread ourselves out, we devise the cultural carrying capacity idea—introduced by the ecologist Garrett Hardin to mean the limit we declare on any animal community perceived as being in our way.

In North America, after we killed most of the wolves because ranchers and hunters didn’t want the predators around, deer achieved a notable ability to thrive in our midst. Yet they are pressed by our incessant construction and road-building into ever smaller and fragmented green places; and so they are described, in many areas, as having a high population density. Government officials, goaded by media representations that alarm the public, advance the conception of deer as a problem requiring a solution.

So officials make plans and draw up budgets that include tens of thousands of dollars for deer eradication, as with the pending plan for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to kill 5000 deer on Long Island. Advocates call it “primitive and ethically indefensible.” They hope the deer can be put on birth control instead. Their online petition says “overwhelming evidence” proves contraception is “effective, humane, less expensive and sustainable over the long term.”

But do we really want a patented, FDA-approved pharmaceutical plan to control other animals? So that we achieve an officially prescribed “density” of the animals in question for any given expanse of space? Is the bio-community that surrounds us something to refashion through some macabre, Disneyesque design?

And it’s not only the highly prolific animals being controlled. Humane Society International, the international arm of the Humane Society of the United States, vaunts its experiments with contraceptives on African elephants as “a new paradigm for elephant management” and garners financial support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But the population has dropped to less than a half-million, compared to some 3-5 million African elephants in the 1930s and 1940s. Highly vulnerable populations of long-tusked elephants, such as a genetically unique community of only 230 at KwaZulu-Natal’s Tembe Elephant Park, are being reduced through contraceptive testing—perhaps, warns Pretoria wildlife veterinarian Johan Marais, to fade into oblivion.

The Humane Society’s contraception experiments involve ultrasound exams and helicopter chases, with flights close enough to shoot elephants with darting rifles. Yet the group’s report on the project asserts: “Not only has immunocontraception proven to be the least invasive and most humane population control mechanism available to us, it proved to very effective in curbing population growth.”

What is humane about forcibly preventing these elephants’ existence? If elephant habitat is shrinking, isn’t that the real issue to address? And it’s not as though this intrusive activity replaces killing.  The Humane Society maintains that “relocation and/or culling of elephants in confined reserves may continue to be necessary, but contraception will enable management to better control the frequency and extent of such interventions.”

Dissecting Deer

Not only does contraception erase animals by preventing their offspring from existing; the science itself kills.  For researchers at Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 21 white-tailed deer were captured, ear-tagged and collared, and kept in a fenced area at an army depot, with some subjected to multiple contraceptive vaccines. In October 2000, all were “humanely killed,” wrote the researchers, “by a shot to the head or neck from a high-powered rifle fired from a blind or a vehicle.”

The bodies were dissected to ascertain the effects of the vaccine known as porcine zona pellucida (PZP), the most commonly used immunocontraceptive for controlling female mammals. This substance, derived from the bodies of pigs, hijacks the deer’s immune system, making it attack the body’s naturally occurring reproductive proteins.

Most of the vaccinated group had lived with pelvic inflammatory disease, and abscesses the researchers called “remarkable”—tubercular in appearance even two years after the injections. The body of Deer Number 188 showed bone marrow fat depletion with “classic signs of malnutrition normally seen in deer struggling through an extremely harsh winter.”

Gary J. Killian and Lowell A. Miller had, just a few years earlier, published the results of six years of experiments at the Deer Research Center of the Pennsylvania State University. Deer subjected to PZP had fewer fawns, but the adults’ bodies changed so that “the average breeding days each year for the control group was 45, whereas in some years some PZP treated does were breeding more than 150 days” of the year. Thus are the social lives of deer—the schedules of their lives—commandeered by the chemical.

The researchers also tried a hormone-based substance. It stopped antler growth on male deer—whose testicles, and sex lives, also failed to develop. The female deer subjected to the hormone also failed to develop sexually.

And on it goes. A study proposal dated August 2013 and intended for implementation in 2014-2019 by Dr. Allen Rutberg at the Tufts- Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine proposes to use bait and drugs, possibly supplemented with drop-netting, to collect up to 60 female deer from Westchester County, New York. The deer will be immobilized, blindfolded and vaccinated in a comparative study of two types of contraceptive boosters, so as to predict the relative costs of using them for deer management.

Dr. Rutberg regularly contributes reports on this research to the Humane Society of the United States. Yet Rutberg’s description of collecting the deer, despite the clinical language, suggests the anticipation of a torment much like what humane groups are expected to prevent:  “Processing after capture in net will include a thorough check for cuts, abrasions, and broken bones as a result of the capture and restraint.”

The Broader View

Meanwhile, the animals that naturally curb the deer population are treated as though their roles in nature don’t count. Eastern coyotes and bobcats, along with the wolves of the West, are persecuted legally and continually. Scientists are also experimenting with the sterilization of coyotes in order to protect the profits of sheep ranchers, and even wolves, low as their numbers are, have been subjected to such experimentation.

While the U.S. government enables ranchers to graze cows on public lands at below-market lease prices, and then “protects” agribusiness or “bolsters” hunting opportunities by killing carnivores such as wolves and coyotes, free-roaming horse populations are annihilated by federal employees on the ranchers’ behalf.

And forced contraception is passing for wild horse protection.  The Annenberg Foundation has assisted the Humane Society of the United States with $1,756,850 in grant money for a project called “Assateague of the West: Protecting Wild Horses Through Immunocontraception.”  The Humane Society introduced PZP to wild horse populations in 1988, assisted by federal park administrators and the Bureau of Land Management.  Under the law, the BLM is to “preserve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance.”  Yet cattle vastly outnumber the free-roaming horses.  Erasing free-roaming horses supports ranchers’ financial interests, and not the horses’ best interests. Why can’t the Humane Society let the horses and burros be, and put serious work into resisting the commercial exploitation of public lands?

As for the direct physical and social effects of the contraceptives, some studies on horses suggest few drawbacks while others reveal the opposite. Cassandra M.V. Nunez et al. found that contraception with PZP significantly alters the social lives of the horses of Shackleford Banks, North Carolina—enough to destabilize equine group dynamics.  As usual, the researchers called for more research.

The population levels of herbivores, to the extent that they do grow, are a direct result of humankind’s past and present dominion over their natural predators; and biologists have, time after time, found that free-living populations cannot be better managed by humans than nature itself. It’s time to stop mistaking human control for humane treatment.

Lee Hall is a candidate for Vermont Law School’s LL.M. in environmental law (2014). Lee has taught animal law and immigration law, and worked for more than a decade in environmental and animal advocacy.  Follow Lee on Twitter:  @Animal_Law 

In five-star hotels on Mumbai’s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai Literary Festival: famous authors and notables drawn from India’s Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.

It is Children’s Day in India. On page nine of the Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted due to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent.  Statistics like these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.

The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India’s foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi River, in ditches, at the roadside, people are forced to defecate.  Half the city’s population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when “Shining India” was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party’s propaganda that it was “liberating” India’s economy and “way of life”.

Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coke, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless “growth” was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a “tiger”, and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the “world’s largest democracy”, they would vote and remain invisible.

There was no tiger economy for them. The hype about a high-tech India storming the barricades of the first world was largely a myth. This is not to deny India’s rise in pre-eminence in computer technology and engineering, but the new urban technocratic class is relatively tiny and the impact of its gains on the fortunes of the majority is negligible.

Indian slum: usually side by side with affluent areas.

When the national grid collapsed in 2012, leaving 700 million people powerless, almost half had so little electricity, they “barely noticed”, wrote one observer.  On my last two visits, the front pages boasted that India had “gatecrashed the super-exclusive ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) club” and launched its “largest ever” aircraft carrier and sent a rocket to Mars: the latter lauded by the government as “a historic moment for all of us to cheer”.

The cheering was inaudible in the rows of tarpaper shacks you see as you land at Mumbai international airport and in myriad villages denied  basic technology, such as light and safe water.  Here, land is life and the enemy is a rampant “free market”. Foreign multinationals’ dominance of food grains, genetically modified seed, fertilisers and pesticides has sucked small farmers into a ruthless global market and led to debt and destitution. More than 250,000 farmers have killed themselves since the mid-1990s – a figure that may be a fraction of the truth as local authorities wilfully misreport “accidental” deaths.

“Across the length and breadth of India,” says the acclaimed environmentalist Vandana Shiva, “the government has declared war on its own people.”  Using colonial-era laws, fertile land has been taken from poor farmers for as little as 300 rupees a square metre; developers have sold it for up to 600,000 rupees a square metre. In Uttar Pradesh, a new expressway serves “luxury” townships with sporting facilities and a Formula One racetrack, having eliminated 1225 villages. The farmers and their communities have fought back, as they do all over India; in 2011, four were killed and many injured in clashes with police.

For Britain, India is now a “priority market” – to quote the government’s arms sales unit. In 2010, David Cameron took the heads of the major British arms companies to Delhi and signed a $700 million contract to supply Hawk fighter-bombers. Disguised as “trainers”, these lethal aircraft were used against the villages of East Timor. They may well be the Cameron government’s biggest single “contribution” to Shining India.

The opportunism is understandable. India has become a model of the imperial cult of “neo-liberalism” – almost everything must be privatized, sold off. The worldwide assault on social democracy and the collusion of major parliamentary parties — begun in the US and Britain in the 1980s– has produced in India a dystopia of extremes and a spectre for us all.

Whereas Nehru’s democracy succeeded in granting the vote – today, there are 3.2 million elected representatives – it failed to build a semblance of social and economic justice. Widespread violence against women is only now precariously on a political agenda. Secularism may have been Nehru’s grand vision, but Muslims in India remain among the poorest, most discriminated against and brutalised minority on earth.  According to the 2006 Sachar Commission, in the elite institutes of technology, only four out of 100 students are Muslim, and in the cities Muslims have fewer chances of regular employment than the “untouchable” Dalits and indigenous Adivasis. “It is ironic,” wrote Khushwant Singh, “that the highest incidence of violence against Muslims and Christians has taken place in Gujarat, the home state of Bapu Gandhi.”

Gujarat is also the home state of Narendra  Modi, winner of three consecutive victories as BJP chief minister and the favourite to see off the diffident Rahul Gandhi in national elections in May.  With his xenophobic Hindutva ideology, Modi appeals directly to dispossessed Hindus who believe Muslims are “privileged”. Soon after he came to power in 2002, mobs slaughtered hundreds of Muslims. An investigating commission heard that Modi had ordered officials not to stop the rioters – which he denies. Admired by powerful industrialists, he boasts the highest “growth” in India.

In the face of these dangers, the great popular resistance that gave India its independence is stirring. The gang rape of a Delhi student in 2012 has brought vast numbers into the streets, reflecting disillusionment with the political elite and anger at its acceptance of injustice and a modernised feudalism. The popular movements are often led or inspired by extraordinary women — the likes of Medha Patkar, Binalakshmi Nepram, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy – and they demonstrate that the poor and vulnerable need not be weak. This is India’s enduring gift to the world, and those with corrupted power ignore it at their peril.

John Pilger’s film, Utopia, about Australia, is released in cinemas on 15 November and broadcast on ITV in December. It is released in Australia in January. www.johnpilger.com

A year ago the American media reported that the U.S. was planning to make a strategic shift in 2013 by redirecting a portion of its [strategic] resources to Asia. However, the results of this year make it clear that these politico- economic games have been canceled, first of all because of the position of China. The rapprochement of the U.S. and Asia was put on the back burner because of the “special” behavior of China. China is obviously on top.  

Recently a friend asked me whether the Chinese had icebreakers. The media reported that in Antarctica, the Russian ship “Akademik Shokalsky” in distress was assisted by a Chinese icebreaker “Snow Dragon.” My friend was puzzled why the Chinese would have an icebreaker if they had no ice. My answer was, the Chinese now have everything. China has soared to a status of the world superpower so quickly that many people still do not realize it.    The United States seem to have missed the emergence of a global competitor, a global economic supergiant with a bunch of analytical services. The current attempts to get back everything that was given away without a fight to the ubiquitous Chinese all over the world in general and in North-East Asia in particular have not been successful.    Recently the Voice of America, an information propaganda channel that aims to disseminate rose-colored glasses information about the United States throughout the world and controlled by the State Department and all sorts of advanced analytical services, said that Asia felt the new strength in dealing with the superpower rapidly losing its influence. The examples are numerous, and in 2013 they were particularly abundant.

In December of 2013, going to the North-East Asia, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden planned to convince Japan and South Korea that the U.S. was still planning to increase its investment in this region. However, the focus turned to China’s unexpected decision to expand its defense identification zone to the territory contested by Japan and South Korea. According to Biden, he openly discussed the issue during a meeting with President Xi Jinping, the Voice of America reported.

One of China’s new warships.

Speaking in a South Korean university, Biden made ​​it clear that the U.S. expected China not to perform any actions that could lead to “an escalation of tensions.”  But China dismissed the important meeting of the president of the United States with the leadership of neighboring countries as if it had not happened. As a result, the airspace over the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China was added to the extended zone of China’s defense. Partly these were active, not to say aggressive actions of China in the disputed territory that have led to calls of the United States to make ​​a turn towards East Asia, as well as strengthen the relations with key allies, Japan and South Korea.

China with its incalculable human resources and the economy growing by leaps and bounds has nearly stopped to consider the possible U.S. interests in the region and the rest of the world. Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and even to some extent Europe have long been “mastered” by the Chinese, producing a great deal of the most diverse, inexpensive goods of quite a high quality. These goods are no strangers to the United States itself. The Chinese trade expansion has become a real problem for American industry. Let us just look at the recent global crisis that is still ongoing in the West in various forms. At the end of 2000s the U.S. attempts to draw Yuan in financial, commodity and currency exchange games to support the dollar were quietly ignored by Beijing.

An incident that took place during the visit of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden in Asia is indicative. China has recently put into operation an aircraft carrier, the “Liaoning” , and conducted exercises in the South China Sea. The sea is very controversial in the sense that China participates in a bunch of territorial disputes with various countries -Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines. At the time when Biden was actively calling for a closer collaboration of the Japanese and the South Koreans, a Chinese warship accompanying a brand new aircraft carrier got in the way of an American missile cruiser and unceremoniously forced it to change its course to avoid a collision. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel immediately called China’s behavior irresponsible. The Beijing that used to be very attentive to cues from Washington in the past was deaf to them this time. Simply put, the Chinese ignored the main U.S. military. Was it possible to imagine  such behavior 15 years ago?

And finally, remember that Barack Obama has failed to get Japan to even promise to scale up the international coalition in Afghanistan. This was a very surprising development. Next the media reported that not only China but even neighboring Japan was beginning to ignore the United States.

Analysts have long been scaring the international community with the annual growth of Chinese military power. Having muscles inflated with arms, one can easily ignore the competition. In light of the rapid increase in Chinese military spending, the only point of comparison with the United States is now China. According to the media, China is constantly increasing its military budget, and over the last ten years its annual growth amounted to an average of 12 percent.

In addition, Beijing has been paying increasingly more attention to the improvement of military equipment and technology, gradually reducing the number of troops. The Pentagon has information on the construction of new submarines in China, the modernization of missile and nuclear weapons, and China is in no hurry to talk about this. In 2013, the English-language media released a message that Washington was going to place troops in Australia and send more warships to Singapore and the Philippines. But numerous experts believe that the U.S. will not be able to particularly strengthen its position in the Asia-Pacific region, it is too late.

American headlines often say something to the effect that while the U.S. is retreating, someone else is coming forward. It is obvious that by ‘someone” they mean China.