Few celebrities did more to bolster the myth of rugged individualism than John Wayne.
Self-sufficiency, a.k.a. self-reliance or rugged individualism, is one of the great fetishes of American culture. To the self-sufficiency fetishists, being able to take care of oneself and pay one’s own way is the opposite side of the coin of freedom. Sacrifice self-sufficiency and you have sacrificed freedom, they claim. Not to be able or willing to take care of yourself is to be an infant, whether your caretaker is a blood relative, a spouse, a paid caretaker or “Uncle Sam.”
The debate over health insurance reform has brought out the self-sufficiency fetishists in full force. They post comments all over the Internet decrying the idea of “socialized medicine.” They do not believe that health care is a human right but a “personal responsibility.” They are against any government role in health care because people should take care of themselves. They see taxation to help other people to get health care as “confiscation” of their hard-earned money. (Strangely enough, they never see the ever-increasing premiums charged by private health insurance companies for ever-skimpier policies as “confiscation”).
There is one problem with this point of view. Self-sufficiency does not exist. Unless you are grinding your own lenses, drilling your own teeth and making your own medicine, not to mention setting your own bones, stitching your own cuts and taking out your own appendix, you are not self-sufficient in health care. Doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, optometrists, etc. have been helping you all your life. That’s not self-sufficiency.
Oh, but you claim you are self-sufficient because you work for a living or own a business so you can pay for all this help. Well, let me not argue here the barbarism of paying to live on the planet on which you were born. I am content to ask you, Mr. and Ms. Self-Reliant, how did you get that job other than through the agency of someone else willing to employ you? Or how does your business thrive unless you have customers or clients willing to buy your goods or services? Is not the company you work for or the business you own dependent on other suppliers of goods and services? That’s not self-sufficiency.
What about you, “trust fund baby”? Never had to work a day in your life? Then somebody worked for you so you could have that inheritance. Likewise, those of you ordinary folks lucky enough to marry rich depend on your spouse’s (or ex’s ) income. That’s not self-sufficiency.
If, as a worker, you can purchase health insurance, which is a gateway to health care, not health care itself, it is because your employer provides a plan or you can afford the individual insurance market. Again, your ability to do this depends on others. The employer must provide the plan AND provide you with enough working hours to qualify, AND enough of a salary to afford your share of the premium–a 100% employer-paid plan being a rarity today–or enough of a salary for you to afford individual insurance.
And if you are like most workers, there was little or no negotiation of salary when you were hired. You took the wage and benefits (if any) package offered. The amount and frequency of raises, bonuses or additional benefits are at your employer’s discretion. Even if you are represented by a union, you may have seen a wage or benefit freeze or cut in recent years. Unionists are dependent on the skill of their negotiators. Represented or not, working “for a living” means an awful lot of dependence for someone who claims self-sufficiency.
Perhaps there was a time in this nation when there was such a thing as self-sufficiency. I remember going to a quilt exhibit in Indiana in the late ’70’s and seeing, in among the modern quilts, a 19th century quilt made by a woman who grew the plants from which she spun the thread to make the quilt, as well as the plants from which she made the dye for it. Then she made and dyed the quilt herself. THAT is self-sufficiency. (And even then, she might have had a midwife to help her give birth to her children, so health care, such as it was back then, was not always “Do It Yourself.”)
Today, when someone lauds the virtues of self-reliance, I think of the Unabomber, alone in his Montana shack, building his bombs. Yet even he biked into town once in a while for a sack of flour. If you believe the government accounts, the assassin is always a lone gunman. And I have never read a story of an old lady living alone with a lot of cats that made mention of her being on welfare. At least once a year, I read a story of someone who was discovered dead days, weeks, months, and in one case, two years after passing, without family and unmissed by neighbors or tradespeople. That’s the gold standard of self-sufficiency.
We are not independent; we are interdependent. And though it costs us something to see that our neighbor is taken care of in times of need, we also benefit from our community’s members being as strong and healthy as possible so that they all can contribute their time and effort in providing goods and services to the community according to their inclinations. That’s where freedom comes in: freedom of choice in what we do with our lives. I fail to see freedom in people working a job, or two or three, just because it was what they could get to pay the bills.
Karl Marx was correct: “From each, according to his abilities. To each, according to his needs” should be the guiding principle of economics.
“That’s Socialism!” you cry in horror. Yes, it is. So what? We are all members of a society. That is something the self-sufficiency fetishists have forgotten.
Author’s Bio:Kellia Ramares is a 50+ radio station board op and freelance journalist in Oakland, California. She is proud to be a liberal, a Pagan, and a straight person for full equality for LGBT’s. She produces a weekly public affairs audio podcast called “Broadcaster At-Large”. It’s available at radio4all.net and iTunes. The Facebook fan page for the podcast is also called “Broadcaster At-Large. She can also be followed on twitter.com/bcasteratlarge
Today, Tiger Woods, the famous, wealthy and most PR-conscious athlete on earth, finally finds himself subject to scrutiny. But, similar to Clinton’s scandal, his scandal has more to do with his personal life than more substantive issues. The media has staked out his Isleworth home for round-the-clock coverage about a bizarre “car accident” this past week involving his wife, a fire hydrant and a golf club. The questions being posed are as breathless as they are weightless: “Were Tiger’s facial lacerations the result of the car crash, or an attack from his wife, Elin?” “Is this about the rumored ‘other woman’ in New York City?” “Did Elin Woods smash the rear of his car with a golf club to rescue Tiger, or was she smashing up the car as he pulled away?” One last question: Who the hell cares? Granted, there is a “man bites dog” aspect to this story. In Woods’s roughly fourteen years in the public eye, he has never even been caught littering. His image has been cemented as a man of ungodly intensity.
This squeaky-clean reputation has helped Woods become the richest athlete in history. His career course earnings are $92 million. When you factor in advertisements, corporate appearances and other off-course aspects of “Tiger Inc.,” it makes sense that Tiger Woods is America’s first athlete to reach billionaire status.
As the saying goes, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Following his car “accident,” Woods’s agent says it’s unclear whether he will attend his foundation’s Chevron World Challenge Golf Tournament. In 2008 Chevron entered a five-year relationship with Tiger Woods’s foundation under the guise of philanthropy. But if Woods had a shred of social conscience, this partnership never would have existed. Lawsuits have been issued against Chevron for dumping toxic waste all over the planet. Alaska, Canada, Brazil, Angola and California have all accused Chevron of dumping. Even worse, Chevron has a partnership with Burma’s ruling military junta on the country’s Yadana gas pipeline project, the single greatest source of revenue for the military, estimated at nearly $5 billion since 2000.
Elin Nordegren Woods. Apparently couldn't keep Woods from straying.
Then there is Dubai, site of the first Tiger Woods-designed golf course. Located at the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, Dubai has been a symbol of economic excess and, most recently, economic collapse. It has been called an “adult Disneyland”–complete with indoor ski resorts and unspeakable human rights violations. As Johann Hari wrote in the Independent, it is a city that has been built over the past thirty years by slave labor. Paid foreign laborers work in more than 100-degree heat for less than $3 a day. Dubai also has a reputation as ground zero of the global sex trade. The project cost $100 million, and Woods said nary a word about his benefactor’s practices. This is business as usual for Woods who would sooner swallow a five-iron than take anything resembling a political stand.
Now that Woods appears to have been involved in a domestic dispute, the media are wondering if there is “another Tiger.” They are desperate to pillory the man for his personal problems. It would be more appropriate if they took this opportunity to scrutinize him for the right reasons. Woods has every right to keep his personal problems personal. But when he makes deals that benefit dictatorships and unaccountable corporations, all in the name of his billion-dollar brand, he deserves no privacy.
About Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin is sports editor. He is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and A People’s History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated.com and The Progressive. He is the host of Sirius/XM’s Edge of Sports Radio. more…
Global Warming: "Fixing the Climate Data around the Policy"
Thousands of icebergs float off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula after 1,250 square miles (3,240 square kilometers) of the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated in 2002. The area of the ice was larger than the state of Rhode Island or the nation of Luxembourg. Antarctic ice shelves have been shrinking since the early 1970's because of climate warming in the region. Image credit: NASA/Earth Observatory
More than 15,000 people will be gathering in Copenhagen for COP 15: the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Official delegations from 192 nations will mingle with the representatives of major multinational corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, The representatives of environmental and civil society organizations will also be in attendance. Parties & Observers
Heads of state and heads of government are slated to be in appearance in the later part of the Summit event. (See The essentials in Copenhagen – COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009)
It is worth noting that key decisions and orientations on COP15 had already wrapped up at the World Business Summit on Climate Change (WBSCC) held in May in Copenhagen. The WBSCC brought together some of the World’s most prominent business executives and World leaders including Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. (The World Business Summit on Climate Change, includes webcast)
The results of these high level consultations were forwarded to the Danish government as well as to the governments of participating member states. A so-called summary report for policymakers was drafted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, on behalf the corporate executives participating in the event. This report has very little to do with environmental protection. It largely consists in proposing a profit driven agenda, which uses the global warming consensus as a justification.
“The underlying ambition of the Summit was to address the twin challenges of climate change and the economic crisis. Participants at the Summit considered how these risks can be turned into opportunity if business and governments work together, and what policies, incentives, and investments will most effectively stimulate low-carbon growth.” (Copenhagen Climate Council)
The agenda of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (7-18 December 2009), is upheld both by the governments, the business executives and the NGO community as “one of the most significant gatherings in history. It is being called the most complex and vital agreement the world has ever seen.”
CO2 emissions are heralded as the single and most important threat to the future of humanity.
The focus of the Summit is on strictly environmental issues. No mention of the word “war” –i.e. the US-NATO led war and its devastating environmental consequences.
No mention of the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of “peacemaking”.
No mention, as part of an environmental debate, of the radioactive fallout resulting from the Pentagon’s humanitarian nuclear bombs. Tactical nuclear weapons, according to scientific opinion commissioned by the Pentagon are “safe for the surrounding civilian population”.
No mention of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques” (ENMOD) and climatic warfare.
No mention in the debate on climate change of the US Air Force 2025 project entitled “Owning the Weather” for military use. (See FAS, AF2025 v3c15-1 | Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning… | (Ch 1) see also SPACE.com — U.S. Military Wants to Own the Weather)
Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use is no longer part of the UN agenda on climate change. It was, however, part of the agenda of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Environmental Warfare and Climate Change, Global Research, 27 November 2005, See also Michel Chossudovsky, Weather Warfare: Beware the US military’s experiments with climatic warfare, The Ecologist, December 2007 )
CO2 is the logo, which describes the Worldwide crisis. No other variable is contemplated.
The words “poverty”, “unemployment” and “disease” resulting from a global economic depression are not a matter of emphasis because authoritative financial sources state unequivocally: “the economic recession is over”.
And the war in the Middle East and Central Asia is not a war but “a humanitarian operation directed against terrorists and rogue states.”
The Real Crisis
The Copenhagen Summit not only serves powerful corporate interests which have a stake in the global multibillion dollar carbon trading scheme, it also serves to divert public attention from the devastation resulting from the “real crisis” underlying the process of economic globalization and a profit driven war without borders, which the Pentagon calls “the long war”.
We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. War and economic depression constitute the real crisis, yet both the governments and the media have focused their attention on the environmental devastation resulting from CO2 emissions, which is upheld as the greatest threat to humanity.
The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading System
The carbon trading system is a multibillion money-making bonanza for the financial establishment. The stakes are extremely high and the various lobby groups on behalf of Wall Street have already positioned themselves.
According to a recent report, “the carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU’s emissions trading scheme… The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe.” (Terry Macalister, Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade, The Guardian, 28 November 2009)
The large financial conglomerates, involved in derivative trade, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s, Citi Bank, Nomura, Société Générale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are actively involved in carbon trading.( FACTBOX: Investment banks in carbon trading | Reuters, 14 September 2009)
The legitimacy of the carbon trading system rests on the legitimacy of Global Warming Consensus, which views CO2 emissions as the single threat to the environment. And for Wall Street the carbon trading system is a convenient and secure money-making safety-net, allowing for the transfer of billions of dollars into the pockets of a handful of conglomerates.
“Every major financial house in New York and London has set up carbon trading operations. Very big numbers are dancing in their heads, and they need them to replace the “wealth” that evaporated in the housing bust. Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, told the New York Times, “Carbon will be the world’s biggest market over all.” Barclays thinks the current $60 billion carbon market could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. Four years ago Redshaw, a former electricity trader, couldn’t get anyone to talk to him about carbon.” (Mark Braly, The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading, RenewableEnergyWorld.com, 5 March 2008)
The Global Warming Data Base
Is the Global Warming Consensus based on reliable data?
There are indications that both the concepts and the data on temperature and greenhouse gas emissions including CO2 have been adjusted and shaped to fit the agenda of the UN Panel on Climate Change.
For several years, the claims of the UN Panel on Climate Change (UNPCC) including the data base have been questioned. (See Global Research’s Climate Change Dossier: Archive of more than 100 articles)
Critical analysis of the climate change consensus has been conveyed in reports by several prominent scientists.
There has been, in this regard, a persistent attempt to silence the critics as conveyed in the writings of MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen (See Richard Lindzen, Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence., Global Research, 7 April 2007)
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. (Ibid)
ClimateGate and the Emails’ Scandal
In November 2009, barely a few weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, a vast data bank of over 3000 email exchanges between key Climate Change scientists and researchers was revealed.
While the emails does not prove that the entire data was falsified, they nonetheless point to scientific dishonesty and deceit on the part of several prominent scientists who are directly linked to the UNPCC.
The emails suggest that the data was shaped, with a view to supporting a predetermined policy agenda. “Fixing the climate data to fit the policy” is modus operandi as revealed in the email messages of top scientists, directly linked to the work of the UN Panel on Climate Change?
The British media has acknowledged that the scientists were intent upon manipulating the data on Climate Change as well as excluding the critics: [the comments below the quotes are by The Telegraph].
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of “trick” has been misinterpreted
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.
From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t… Our observing system is inadequate”
Prof Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics – that there is no evidence temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
Prof Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.
From Phil Jones. To: Michael Mann. Date: May 29, 2008
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.” Climate change sceptics tried to use Freedom of Information laws to obtain raw climate data submitted to an IPCC report known as AR4. The scientists did not want their email exchanges about the data to be made public.
From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004
“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future.”
The scientists make no attempt to hide their disdain for climate change sceptics who request more information about their work
(University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes – Telegraph, 23 November 2009).
The complete list of contentious emails can be consulted at Alleged CRU Emails – Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com:
What is significant is that the authors of the emails are directly involved in the UN Panel on Climate Change:
“[They are] the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history. (Prof. Christopher Booker, Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation, The Telegraph, 28 November 2009)
One of the contentious emails by Dr Jones (published by eastangliaemails.com) points to the deliberate manipulation of the data:
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 xxx xxxx xxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 xxx xxxx xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Source: Alleged CRU Emails – Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com
US Congressional Probe
Barely two weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, the US Congress is now probing into “the Global Warming Emails”:
“U.S. congress has begun investigating climate scientists whose emails and documents were hacked into to see if their global warming theories have misrepresented the truth behind the cause of climate change.
Investigators have begun “studying” the 1,079 e-mails and over 3,800 documents that hackers stole last week from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the U.K, Rep. Darrel Issa from California told the Wall Street Journal.
Some of the leaked e-mails and files – which were posted on sites like www.Wikileaks.org and www.EastAngliaEmails.com – show growing tensions between scientists and skeptics. Others are mundane announcements of upcoming conferences or research trips.
According to his website, Rep. James Inhofe from Oklahoma said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers “cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”
The White House Science Adviser John Holdren has also come under investigation, after one of his emails written in 2003 to Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, was hacked.
“I’m happy to stand by my contribution to this exchange. I think anybody who reads what I wrote in its entirety will find it a serious and balanced treatment of the question of ‘burden of proof’ in situations where science germane to public policy is in dispute,” Holdren said.
Meanwhile, The University of East Anglia said it will cooperate with police and proceed with its own internal investigation. The University posted a statement calling the disclosure “mischievous” and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.
The statement also quotes Jones, CRU’s director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Jones said that the word trick was used “colloquially as in a clever thing to do” and that it “is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”
The leaked data comes just two weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen will begin on Dec. 7 -18, when 192 nations will meet to discuss a solution on how to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. (International Business Times, November 24, 2009)
Meanwhile, the “international community” (supported by the mainstream media) has launched a counteroffensive, accusing the critics of waging a smear campaign:
The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, stood by his panel’s 2007 findings last week. That study is the foundation for a global climate response, including carbon emission targets proposed this week by both the US and China.
So far, climate scientists say nothing in the leaked emails [that] takes away from the fact that the climate change evidence is solid. In fact, a new study in the journal Science shows the polar ice cap melting is happening at a faster rate than predicted just a few years ago.
In a teleconference call with reporters this week, one of the scientists whose emails were leaked, Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, said that “regardless of how cherry-picked” the emails are, there is “absolutely nothing in any of the emails that calls into the question the deep level of consensus of climate change.”
This is a “smear campaign to distract the public,” added Mann, a coauthor of the Copenhagen Diagnosis, the report on climate change released this week ahead of the Copenhagen. “Those opposed to climate action, simply don’t have the science on their side,” he added.
Professor Trevor Davies of the East Anglia CRU called the stolen data the latest example of a campaign intended “to distract from reasoned debate” about global climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit. (As Copenhagen summit nears, ‘Climategate’ dogs global warming debate | csmonitor.com, Christian Science Monitor, 28 November 2009, emphasis added)
But what is significant in this counteroffensive, is that the authenticity of the emails has not been challenged by the IPCC scientists.
The scientists are not saying “we did not do it”. What they are saying is that the Global Warming Consensus holds irrespective of their actions to selectively manipulate the data as well as exclude the critics from the scientific debate on climate change.
What is the Stance of the Civil Society and Environmentalist Organizations
Civil society organisations are currently mobilizing with a view to pressuring the official governmental delegations:
“Two years ago, at a previous UN climate conference in Bali, all UN governments agreed on a timetable that would ensure a strong climate deal by the time of the Copenhagen conference. The implications of not achieving this goal are massive, and nearly unthinkable. Turn to our great partners film – the Age of Stupid – if you need to be convinced why.
The meeting – which should include major heads of state for the last three days, will attempt to reach a massively complex agreement on cutting carbon, providing finance for mitigation and adaptation, and supporting technology transfer from the North to the South.
This is a major milestone in history, and one where civil society must speak with one voice in calling for a fair, ambitious and binding deal. We are ready, but we need to let the leaders know the world is ready too. Are you? (COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Conference | TckTckTck)
Where do civil society activists stand in relation to the climate change email scandal?
Will these civil society organizations, many of which are funded by major foundations and governments continue to unreservedly endorse the Global Warming consensus?
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace are among several key civil society organizations which are pushing the Copenhagen agenda. Their position is unchanged.
Most environmentalist organizations are demanding a reduction in CO2 emissions. For them, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the “bible”. It cannot be challenged even if the climate data base which supports the Global Warming Consensus turns out to be questionable or contentious.
While the mainstream NGO lobby groups including Greenpeace and WWF continue to support the consensus, there is small but growing movement which challenges the legitimacy of the Copenhagen CO15 Summit agenda, while accusing the UNPCC of manipulating the data.
The Alternative Summit: KlimaForum09
The NGOs will be meeting in a parallel alternative summit, KlimaForum09, funded by the Danish government. More than 10,000 people a day are expected to attend the sessions of KlimatForum09
Major international NGOs and environmentalist groups will be in attendance including Friends of the Earth, Campaign against Climate Change among others.
Klimaforum09 is finalize a draft declaration which “will put forth a vision of a more socially just world society, [while] emphasizing the need to create substantial changes in the social and economic structures of society in order to meet the challenges of global warming and food sovereignty.” (See Declaration · Klimaforum09)
It is unlikely that within the Alternative Summit, the Global Warming consensus including the multibillion dollar carbon trading system will be challenged in a meaningful fashion. (All events · Klimaforum09).
In many regards, the rhetoric of the KlimaForum09’s Danish organizers ties in with that of the host government and the official summit. (Political Platform · Klimaforum09″).
There can be no real activism unless the falsehoods and manipulations underlying the activities of the UNPCC including the multibillion profit driven carbon trading scheme, are fully revealed, debated and understood.
More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas
Google employs many immigrant workers at its HQ in Mountain View, California. Now American employees themselves are outsourcing their work routines.NOTE: FOR HI FI VERSION OF VIDEO, USE THE VIDEO AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE.
Animal Cruelty and Dehumanization in Human Rights Violations
BY WOLF CLIFTON [print_link]
A L M O S T ANNUALLY people who care about animals are shocked by accounts of how the U.S. military prepares combat medics to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby, for example, described his training to C.J. Chivers of The New York Times in November 2006, almost a year after Kirby himself was severely wounded on Christmas Day 2005.
“The idea is to work with live tissue,” Kirby explained. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. Every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature. My pig? They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47, and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. Then he was set on fire. I kept him alive for 15 hours.”
In July 2008 a similar exercise conducted at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, by the 25th U.S. Army Infantry Division attracted protest from PETA.
“Shooting and maiming pigs is as outdated as Civil War rifles,” alleged PETA spokesperson Kathy Guillermo.
Responded Major Derrick Cheng, “Alternative methods just can’t replicate what the troops are going to face. What we’re doing is unique to what the soldiers are going to actually experience.”
Nine members of Congress opposed yet another such exercise, undertaken in August 2009 at Valley Center, California, by the U.S. Marine Corps.
“This is kind of the shock-and-awe treatment,” responded Corpsman Mark Litz to Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times. “A lot of these guys have never really seen blood and could freeze up the first time they do,” Litz explained. “What good is a Marine or corpsman who’s frozen up in combat?”
What the pig training is really all about has very little to do with practicing whatever medical techniques the participants use. Before the trainees ever handle a pig, they will have practiced the procedures many times with realistic mannequins and computer programs. The central purpose of the pig training is to prepare combat medics to cope emotionally with the realities of warfare: to learn to distance themselves from suffering, bloodshed, and death, even when it happens to their buddies.
Schooling medical personnel would seem to have a higher and more benign purpose than the bayonet drills that are still a routine part of military training worldwide. Yet the underlying goal is similar.
U.S. armed forces last mounted a battalion-sized bayonet charge on February 2, 1951. U.S. military officers recognized as early as the Civil War that modern firearms had made the bayonet charge an obsolete tactic. U.S. Army and Marine Corps recruits nonetheless still practice bayonet charges in basic training and boot camp, because the exercise of repeatedly ramming a bayonet into a mannequin, screaming “Spirit of the bayonet–kill!”, is believed to be of enduring value in enabling troops to take human lives, despite using much more sophisticated and distant methods. A soldier may sit safely at a desk in California while guiding a Predator drone to strike a suspected Taliban hideout in Pakistan, but killing even an avowed enemy nonetheless tends to trouble most people–until they have learned to suppress inhibition while following orders.
Killing animals in preparation for combat is no longer part of the training of most U.S. soldiers, but exceptions have surfaced. Pilots, for example, whose rockets and bombs tend to kill the most people in modern warfare, may be taught to dispatch tame rabbits and poultry with their bare hands, ostensibly as part of “survival training” in case they are shot down over enemy territory. Reality is that U.S. military pilots have not had occasion to use such “survival training” in living off the land until rescue since World War II. But the advent of rapid transmission of photographs of dead and wounded civilians hit by misdirected airstrikes may have exponentially increased the awareness of pilots of what their weapons do.
Killing animals is occasionally exposed as a part of military training abroad. Some Peruvian recruits were taught to bayonet dogs as recently as 2000. This training was apparently introduced years earlier to prepare troops for counter-insurgency work during a grisly civil war, in which the enemy was almost indistinguishable from themselves.
Within Western ideology, as distinct from the Hindu/Buddhist tradition, animals have typically been regarded as qualitatively different from humans. Standards for the treatment of humans exist in all cultures, but moral consideration of animals is usually a non-issue. Even where there are rules governing how animals may be killed, as in slaughter and sacrifice, few people–especially in the West–have ever questioned whether animals may be killed.
Thus animals may be used to desensitize soldiers to killing. More than that, excluding animals from ethical consideration may be a first step toward a society rationalizing persecution of any people it might relegate to “sub-human” status.
ANIMAL PEOPLE readers will be keenly aware of the ever-expanding body of research demonstrating the association between criminal animal abuse and violent crimes against humans. Among the landmarks, a 1983 study by E. DeViney, J. Dickhert, and Randy Lockwood found that in 88% of families where children are physically abused, animal abuse is also present. A 1999 study by Arnold Arluke, Jack Levin, Carter Luke, and Frank Ascione found that animal abusers were 5.3 times more likely to have a violent criminal record than non-abusers.
The association of violence against animals with violence against humans is scarcely limited to illegal forms of violence. ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1994-1995 discovered a positive correlation between the numbers of licensed hunters and rates of family violence at the county level in New York, Ohio, and Michigan.
None of these studies prove that animal abuse causes human-to-human violence. Yet they do show the two to be inextricably related and fundamentally similar in nature.
Cruelty to animals and human rights violations have mostly been viewed as separate subjects. However, they may be seen as part of a continuity if one considers the process of dehumanization, by which a victim or enemy comes to be exempted from ethical consideration.
Human rights violations may also be understood as the collective practice of acts that are considered criminal when inflicted on people other than the dehumanized class of victims.
Frequently human rights violations take the form of societally condoned serial killing, by secret police “death squads,” mobs, or private militias. To understand how this occurs, one might examine dehumanization as practiced by criminally prosecuted serial killers.
From the beginning of systematic study of serial killers, criminologists have recognized that the overwhelming majority kill and torture animals as well as people–sometimes as a prelude to killing humans, sometimes between killing human victims. ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out in 2006 that there is a visible association between the gender of human victims and the species of animal victims targeted by serial killers. Specifically, while serial killers who target women also tend to persecute cats, those who target males (such as John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer) display a clear preference for persecuting dogs. This suggests that in the minds of the perpetrators there is an equation of the human victims with the animal victims, and that this equation contributes to the ability and motivation of the serial killer to kill.
Dehumanization occurs quite openly and ubiquitously in comparisons of human enemies to animals. To call someone a dog is an insult in many languages, and in societies with traditional taboos against dogs the term is considered especially hateful. Thus Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi on February 14, 2008 threw his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush while screaming in Arabic, “This is your kick in the butt, you son of a bitch!” And thus Chinese propagandists under the notoriously dog-hating dictator Mao tse Tung made frequent reference to American allies as “capitalist running dogs.”
Terms such as “pig” and “snake” are used similarly.
Theodore Roosevelt offered a more visceral example of dehumanizing an enemy when he reportedly boasted that he had “killed a Spaniard with my bare hands like a jackrabbit” during the Spanish/American War.
As dehumanization progresses from insult to homicide to genocide, the victims are not only compared to animals, or treated in the same manner as animals, but are considered animals. The very word “human” can come to have a highly selective and subjective context. Slavery in the U.S., for example, was often rationalized by maintaining that Africans constituted a separate species from Europeans. Many quasi-scientific efforts were made to try to prove this. The 19th century physician Samuel Morton is remembered for ranking human races in terms of moral and intellectual endowment on the basis of skull shape, with Caucasians predictably at the top of the list. Other scientists of the time, such as Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz, proposed that blacks were not only an inferior race, but had in fact evolved from different ancestors than Europeans.
Dehumanization progressed to perhaps the best-documented extreme under the Third Reich. The Nazis literally categorized Jews, gypsies, dark-skinned Africans, and other non-Aryans as “untermenschen,” meaning sub-human, and took dehumanization to the extent of experimentally attempting to hybridize some “untermenschen” with great apes. Jews in particular were commonly described as “vermin,” “parasites,” and “microbes.” Regarded not only as animals but as parasites, Jews were killed by the millions with the insecticide Zyclon B.
The Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers, assembly lines for dismembering the dead in order to recycle their hair, fat, and gold teeth, and crematories that reduced the remnants to bone ash fertilizer were directly modeled on mechanized slaughterhouses, introduced to Europe just as the Nazis came to power.
The World War II Japanese military performed comparable atrocities, with similar pretexts. Chinese captives were used in experiments including vivisection, deliberate infection with disease, and exposure to all manner of extreme conditions. The extent of dehumanization practiced by Japanese researchers in China and Korea was so extreme that comparing the victims to animals gave way to calling the subjects “maruta,” literally meaning “logs of wood.”
Americans were also dehumanized in Japanese wartime propaganda. “Let us kill these animals who have lost the human spirit,” suggested one widely distributed cartoon.
Americans in turn dehumanized the Japanese. Merely “Japs” early in the war, the Japanese became “zips” later. This was short for “zipperheads,” but the word “zip” is also a slang synonym for “zero.”
In post-war pretense Americans who spoke of killing “zips” were said to have been referring to the top Japanese warplane, the Mitsubishi Zero–but the context of “zips” tended to be “persons who may be killed with moral impunity,” including with atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians.
Dehumanization requires sharply differentiating between “humans” and “animals,” in order to remove the victims from moral consideration. This was much more easily done when much less was known–or recognized–about human and animal nature. Charles Darwin, however, was troubled by moral constructs that place humanity at the apex of creation with more than just the theory of evolution. As well as demonstrating that humans are kin, though distant, with the “lowest” of life forms, Darwin concluded that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not kind.”
Science has increasingly revealed this to be true. Traits once believed unique to humans, such as tool use, self-awareness, expressions of empathy and mourning, and even the invention and use of language are not only ubiquitous among humans, even the dehumanized, but have also all now been identified in multiple other animal species. Conversely, human infants, sociopaths, and those with mental disabilities may lack some or all of these traits. Thus definitions of “humanity” based on behavior are defining tendencies, not absolutes.
Yet even a firm and inflexible definition of “humanity,” if one could be found, would undercut only conscious dehumanization. The propensity of animal abusers to also commit human rights violations would remain unchanged: defining terms does not destroy the basic nature of violence, or the inclination of violent people to inflict mayhem on all vulnerable forms of life.
Eliminating the contributions of dehumanization to crimes against humanity therefore requires that moral consideration not be restricted solely to humans. Extending compassion to animals can have only beneficial effects for society.
Mohandas Gandhi is often quoted as stating that, “The moral progress of a nation may be judged by the way it treats its animals.” Though Gandhian scholars have been unable to find any such explicit statement in his writings, this was among his evident insights. If animals may not be mistreated, cruelty to humans is also categorically condemned, and dehumanization may no longer be used as a pretext or rationalization for cruelty.
WOLF CLIFTON is studying comparative religion and film animation at Vanderbilt University. His mother is Kim Bartlett, a leading animal defense activist. His father, Merritt Clifton, is a veteran journalist who covers animal issues. They publish and edit the international journal ANIMAL PEOPLE, with headquarters in Clinton, WA.
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Miller, Flagg and Morain, Claudia. “Researcher Begins Study of Osama bin Laden Audiotapes.” <http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8773.>
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A L M O S T ANNUALLY people who care about animals are shocked by accounts of how the U.S. military prepares combat medics to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WOLF CLIFTON is studying comparative religion and film animation at Vanderbilt University. His mother is Kim Bartlett, a leading animal defense activist. His father, Merritt Clifton, is a veteran journalist who covers animal issues. They publish and edit the international journal