The term 'consumer' is so overdue for a diaper change that if I had a dollar for every time it was bandied around, I'd surely have blown that money on something forgettable. After all, what else am I here for? Despite our vast cultural and innate differences, a single word can ostensibly shrink-wrap all human beings into an exclusive category through the commonality of purchasing goods and services. Just like animals, people share the biological trait of converting oxygen into Co2, yet the term 'mouth breathers' would probably seem offensive, because I'm actually way above that - I'm a consumer. I live with the assumption that a stable and healthy society can be tuned to the frequency of jobs and products so comfortably charged in to the collective psyche, that I should probably never feel any conflict of interest buying anything at all. I'm not just talking about material trinkets, knick-knacks, gimmicks or one of those crappy house-cleaning robots to stub your toe on, but anecdotes, witty memes, haikus's, inspiring quotes, jokes, sayings and any video with cats regurgitating hairballs to house music. I'm a self-gratifying machine, absorbing indiscriminately. I can be serenaded by the news, ingesting micro-verses of car accidents, genocide, gossip and bridged to ads for anti-depressants in the same breath - impulsively plugged into the consumer chorus, ready to recoil those urges in a store somewhere, anywhere.
At the cusp of my imagination and hard-work I might create something that could be praised, or conversely critiqued into confetti, and in lieu of it all, there's no possibility of it being as second-rate compared to what I do with my wallet, daily. However selfishly or carelessly I buy, there's zero chance of any awkward conversation or a surprise intervention surrounded by concerned friends and family, even if those khaki pyjamas I bought were sewn at gunpoint by starving lepers.
Speaking of points and guns, it sucks to be a trade unionist in Columbia. I found this out in detail about 4 years ago after listening to a guy speak through a translator about his experience representing Sinaltrainal; a company that produces bottles for Coca Cola. Since the early-eighties and the dictum of Chicago-school economics, aggressive free-market policies have been rammed down South America's throat like a duck on a Foie Gras farm - allowing US corporations to not only skirt pesky environmental and wage legislation they might be encumbered with at home, but also to bypass any democratic interference. South America has a strong history of socialism, so the rise of unions fighting for livable incomes is seen as an affront to multi-nationals. Around 2,500 trade-unionists have been killed there in the last 20 years according to Amnesty; more than the rest of the worlds countries combined. That's not even mentioning thousands more who've been arrested, tortured or incarcerated as 'political prisoners'. At the vanguard is Coca Cola who've not only been accused of environmental malfeasance in there production standards, but of violently quashing grass-roots labor movements through the use of paramilitaries and death-squads. Whether this is being arranged through corrupt back-channels of the govt hasn't been proven, but an honest job description for any TU may as well read something like "Union Rep needed for indefinite amount of time to help raise wages to subsistence. Efficacy may also come with abrupt job termination via surprise bullet in the face standing at mailbox, or front door or outside your local bar" - any volunteers? Canada has its share of political refugees, displaced or green-lit into asylum for rocking the boat in how we titillate our taste-buds or clothe our bodies. It's no surprise that this isn't an anomaly by one culprit, in one country - but a corporate philosophy spread across the ether, immune to patriotism and borders - where profit is enforced by any means, even bloodshed, and resisted in the dirt by people we'll likely never meet or read about. In the first world, national identity isn't sprinkled from history books any more, but through advertising's ability to mimic culture, while relentless imagery reflects back like a mirror, telling me 'I'm a good person, who deserves to feel pleasure and it's ok to look the other way, not that there's anything you need to look away from' *wink. Needless to say, I boycott Coke and a handful of other companies, so I convince myself I'm also capable of getting in the trenches every now and then, because bettering the world is how I roll. But that's pretty much bullshit! I stroll the gamut of cognitive dissonance, where convenience is the boss and deep-down, my conditioning dictates that I'd rather gargle broken glass than scrutinize every brand for ethics.
And there's a hell of lot of brands! In any chain supermarket, one might find about 50 choices of cereal, 37 different bottles of water, 72 types of dog-food, 43 options of crisps and at the risk of sounding like a communist, I've never felt personally validated by a bag of maple-flavoured oats with berries. It looked sexy as hell on TV, but it's just me sitting in my underpants half-dead at 4:30am with pillow-hair, trying to stomach this goop without convulsing. The free market is a mirage, and just like free-speech, it's manipulated into a manageable part of the spectrum. My 60 flavours of herbal tea runs parallel to that one choice of fuel to keep an internal combustion engine running, one source of energy to power my home, one interest rate moulding me into into a spender or a saver and two lame political parties to vote for every few years. Would you like the centrist or the other guy 23 feet to the right? Voting conscientiously with our wallets might be one thing that could alter the tide, but it's advocated as an activity for frivolity and repetition only, 'especially if we have any hope of keeping this damn economy alive, folks!' Spend, my minions, spend! Meaningless customer choices are so abundant it's overwhelming, while real fiscal alternatives that might change the chefs and not just the background music are eliminated by govt intervention and institutionalism.
For all it's potential, Australia's most recent election was shamelessly dominated by the halo-effect - with the middle-class maximizing their banality across voting booths so $30 extra spending money could go in their pocket every month - give or take. The previous govt had initiated a Carbon Tax, which was a fairly benign cost for the majority who could afford it and beside the extra revenue raised, it was at least an acknowledgement that for 22 million people, yes, the world is warming up and we burn farms of fossil fuels for such a small population! And what an uproar it caused. Traditionally, conservatives in a resource-based economy like Australia's (and Canada's) aren't exactly imaginative when it comes to job creation. Their tendency to be heavily lobbied by mining and power companies means that maintaining a false dichotomy between honest jobs and environmental care is in their better interest, which usually means you can't have your lake and fish in it too or whatever, so let's go and merrily dig some holes in the ground! Most voters don't really care if you dredge the Great Barrier Reef as long as it boosts the economy. Just keep those illegal refugees out and some bonus cash in my wallet for participation. Time and again we'll get two mediocre candidates with moderate policy differences, using the media platform and jostling for narratable sound-bytes on patriotism, values and self-reliance between commercial jingles. Even 'democracy' has become as trivial as small-talk and consumable as Toaster Strudle, because somewhere along the line lies became palatable and we got to comfortable to fight for more! Oh how the WW2 vets would roll in their graves.
So what should we do about it? I think making something of our own would be a decent place to begin. Who says it has to be high-art either? Start a conversation, learn the trumpet, build a tree-house, fashion a Rob Ford tribute statue out of chewed bubble-gum - it doesn't matter. Either we're creating idea's and experiences that are ours or most likely we're destined to consume uninspired echoes of someone else's, and this is the legacy that'll resonate to the next generation. If I do have children, should I tell them you can be anything in this life, just maintain the status quo when it effects you? Window or aisle, caff or decaf, Liberal or Democrat and paper or plastic. If we can't make ourselves important, then we can be sure as hell that no politician or marketing expert ever will. We're creators, not consumers, and only when we begin to recapture the terminology, maybe then we can start actualizing words into greatness.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Foreword to Ralph Nader's latest analysis of the Israel - Palestinian conflict
For anybody interested in knowing more about just how insanely lopsided the Israeli-Palestinian 'conflict' actually is, it's worth reading this short run-down by Ralph Nader, who sums up why Israel looks less like a country and more like some expanding US military base with a severe god-complex on it's shoulder.
We should also understand that this has nothing to do with equally opposing struggles between vastly different nationalities, but one group of people espousing abject misery onto another under the guise of sovereignty, to insulate some quaint notion of bible-thumping entitlement. Conversely, Jews and Palestinians actually share genetic lineage proving their differences are about as significant as someone with brown eyes and another who's eyes are blue. This is the 21st century and we don't wave chickens above our heads to expel our sins. No humane, rational person respects the right to kill someone because their kings have a conflict, or because their tribe lives on a different side of a river, or because some patch of dirt has been cosmically pre-ordained by a really old book few people use a moral compass or even give a fuck about anyway. Once these ideas are lined up and given equal treatment to be relegated to the vestiges of history, maybe the people who execute these ideas to an entire nations peril will bitterly follow into the same abyss, no matter how loudly they want to hang on to the past. Now it's time to wreck it Ralph!
"An already troubling humanitarian crisis has intensified with the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, an area about twice the size of the District of Columbia that has about three times as many residents (1.8 million). Israel has been using its highly touted precise missiles to hit numerous targets. This collective punishment, a war crime per se, wreaks havoc on civilians and their life-sustaining infrastructure.
With over 1,700 explosive strikes so far, the Israeli military has pounded homes, schools, mosques, electric and water facilities, municipal buildings, health clinics, moving vehicles, a home for the seriously disabled and even tiny agriculture areas. As a result of these attacks, over two hundred and thirty Gazans have died and over seventeen hundred have been injured so far, about eighty percent are civilians, a majority of whom are women and children, according to UN observers.
That is only part of the continuing war against Gaza. For years, Israel has maintained a siege/blockade, restricting the importation of adequate food, medicine, water, electricity, construction materials and other necessities needed by the refugees in the world’s largest open-air prison. These daily deprivations have taken a deadly toll. Fatalities, sicknesses, untreated cancers have resulted. Half of the children are seriously malnourished due to the dire poverty associated with the Israeli air, land and sea encirclement. (There are even harsh restrictions on Gazan fishermen.)
Israel’s complex association with Hamas, the elected governors of Gaza, is rarely reported or discussed. First, the Israelis, with U.S. support, helped start Hamas over thirty years ago to counteract the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat. More recently, Israeli officials have been in regular communication with Hamas over the administrative details of the selective siege, custom duties and transfers of tax revenues by Israeli to pay for Hamas’ 40,000 public employees.
Even when open hostilities commence, the two adversaries remain in close communication to sense how far each can go, given their own internal political struggles, in the ensuing “lopsided battle,” as the New York Times calls it. Hamas and other splinter groups, comprising the complex dynamics of competing Palestinian factions, have launched some 1,000 feeble rockets to demonstrate that it can resist the hyper-powerful Israeli domination. The rockets obviously frighten Israelis, most of whom have access to secure shelters and are defended by the Israeli anti-missile system (which is called the Iron Dome and is funded largely by U.S. taxpayers). The Israeli military is knocking down 90% of the Palestinian rockets they target. These crude Palestinian rockets are so inaccurate that they largely fall on barren ground, including several right back on Gaza. Recently, one rocket claimed an Israeli life very close to the border where Israeli tanks lie waiting for the outright ground invasion.
Without any army, air force or navy, the Gazans have very limited military options. The Israelis have unlimited military options. The military invasion of the Palestinian enclave may unleash forces that may be uncontrollable and move Israel into a civilian catastrophe starting with no drinkable water and other human disasters.
In recent years, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have suffered at least four hundred times more civilian causalities – both fatalities and injuries—than Hamas has inflicted on the Israelis whose immensely powerful forces occupy, colonize, brutalize, and loot the land, water and people of the remaining 22% of Palestine that has not already been taken by Israel.
No one said it more candidly than David Ben-Gurion, the father of modern Israel, who years ago, was asked why Palestinians were still resisting. He summed up Palestinian grievances by saying “They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” No one has said it more eloquently than fifteen hundred reservists, combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who pledged: “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders [the Palestinian territories] in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.” And no one has better framed the challenge to Israeli leaders than several former retired heads of the Shin Bet (the Israeli FBI) and Mossad (the Israeli CIA) who publically have stated why Israel, as the supreme power can and should lead to a two-state solution already supported by a majority of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Listening to their public statements, interviews and reading their writings, along with those regularly put forth by the courageous Israeli human rights groups, such as B’Tselem, and newspaper columnists, such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, one can cut through the official propaganda used by the Israeli government that wages perpetual war instead of peace, affecting the whole Middle East and the national security budgets of the U.S. The following are two takeaways from these groups that promote peace and a two-state solution.
1. The Palestinian National Authority (PA) has long recognized the existence of Israel as an independent, secular state. So have numerous Arab and Islamic nations, belonging to the Arab league, whose comprehensive peace proposal was dismissed by Israel twelve years ago.
2. Palestinians, as oppressed people, engage in no more verbal incitement than do the Israeli oppressors from a position of political and military power. Wagers of peace on both sides know how prejudicial some Israelis can be toward the Arabs, as well as vice versa.
Besides demanding ethnic cleansing, driving all Palestinians into the desert for the goal of a “Greater Israel” covering all of Palestine, some extremists have called for annihilation. Recently, on June 30th, a leader of the Jewish Home Party, part of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling coalition posted a call for the destruction of the Palestinian people including “its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure,” adding that Israel should also not exclude Palestinian mothers because they give birth to “little snakes.” Thousands of viewers responded favorably.
Where are the more numerous, rational Israelis who can reverse this perilous drift toward what the Israeli historical scholar Professor Ilan Pappe calls “incremental genocide?” After centuries of persecution, the Jewish people in Israel hold a towering power position from a secure state. Israel should accept the Arab League’s invitation for peace and normalized relations through a two-state solution.
Where is the Obama Administration, which like previous Administrations avoids its responsibility for peace and provides annually billions of dollars in unconditional military and economic support to the Israeli government? There are direct American strategic and security interests that oblige President Obama, in spite of the Washington puppet show in Congress, to do more than parrot the AIPAC lobby’s party line.
Just about all knowledgeable people believe the status quo will continue to favor the Israeli government’s political, economic and military interests while oppressing those of Palestine, unless the U.S. weighs in with strong influence over its ally, Israel."
We should also understand that this has nothing to do with equally opposing struggles between vastly different nationalities, but one group of people espousing abject misery onto another under the guise of sovereignty, to insulate some quaint notion of bible-thumping entitlement. Conversely, Jews and Palestinians actually share genetic lineage proving their differences are about as significant as someone with brown eyes and another who's eyes are blue. This is the 21st century and we don't wave chickens above our heads to expel our sins. No humane, rational person respects the right to kill someone because their kings have a conflict, or because their tribe lives on a different side of a river, or because some patch of dirt has been cosmically pre-ordained by a really old book few people use a moral compass or even give a fuck about anyway. Once these ideas are lined up and given equal treatment to be relegated to the vestiges of history, maybe the people who execute these ideas to an entire nations peril will bitterly follow into the same abyss, no matter how loudly they want to hang on to the past. Now it's time to wreck it Ralph!
"An already troubling humanitarian crisis has intensified with the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, an area about twice the size of the District of Columbia that has about three times as many residents (1.8 million). Israel has been using its highly touted precise missiles to hit numerous targets. This collective punishment, a war crime per se, wreaks havoc on civilians and their life-sustaining infrastructure.
With over 1,700 explosive strikes so far, the Israeli military has pounded homes, schools, mosques, electric and water facilities, municipal buildings, health clinics, moving vehicles, a home for the seriously disabled and even tiny agriculture areas. As a result of these attacks, over two hundred and thirty Gazans have died and over seventeen hundred have been injured so far, about eighty percent are civilians, a majority of whom are women and children, according to UN observers.
That is only part of the continuing war against Gaza. For years, Israel has maintained a siege/blockade, restricting the importation of adequate food, medicine, water, electricity, construction materials and other necessities needed by the refugees in the world’s largest open-air prison. These daily deprivations have taken a deadly toll. Fatalities, sicknesses, untreated cancers have resulted. Half of the children are seriously malnourished due to the dire poverty associated with the Israeli air, land and sea encirclement. (There are even harsh restrictions on Gazan fishermen.)
Israel’s complex association with Hamas, the elected governors of Gaza, is rarely reported or discussed. First, the Israelis, with U.S. support, helped start Hamas over thirty years ago to counteract the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat. More recently, Israeli officials have been in regular communication with Hamas over the administrative details of the selective siege, custom duties and transfers of tax revenues by Israeli to pay for Hamas’ 40,000 public employees.
Even when open hostilities commence, the two adversaries remain in close communication to sense how far each can go, given their own internal political struggles, in the ensuing “lopsided battle,” as the New York Times calls it. Hamas and other splinter groups, comprising the complex dynamics of competing Palestinian factions, have launched some 1,000 feeble rockets to demonstrate that it can resist the hyper-powerful Israeli domination. The rockets obviously frighten Israelis, most of whom have access to secure shelters and are defended by the Israeli anti-missile system (which is called the Iron Dome and is funded largely by U.S. taxpayers). The Israeli military is knocking down 90% of the Palestinian rockets they target. These crude Palestinian rockets are so inaccurate that they largely fall on barren ground, including several right back on Gaza. Recently, one rocket claimed an Israeli life very close to the border where Israeli tanks lie waiting for the outright ground invasion.
Without any army, air force or navy, the Gazans have very limited military options. The Israelis have unlimited military options. The military invasion of the Palestinian enclave may unleash forces that may be uncontrollable and move Israel into a civilian catastrophe starting with no drinkable water and other human disasters.
In recent years, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have suffered at least four hundred times more civilian causalities – both fatalities and injuries—than Hamas has inflicted on the Israelis whose immensely powerful forces occupy, colonize, brutalize, and loot the land, water and people of the remaining 22% of Palestine that has not already been taken by Israel.
No one said it more candidly than David Ben-Gurion, the father of modern Israel, who years ago, was asked why Palestinians were still resisting. He summed up Palestinian grievances by saying “They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” No one has said it more eloquently than fifteen hundred reservists, combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who pledged: “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders [the Palestinian territories] in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.” And no one has better framed the challenge to Israeli leaders than several former retired heads of the Shin Bet (the Israeli FBI) and Mossad (the Israeli CIA) who publically have stated why Israel, as the supreme power can and should lead to a two-state solution already supported by a majority of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Listening to their public statements, interviews and reading their writings, along with those regularly put forth by the courageous Israeli human rights groups, such as B’Tselem, and newspaper columnists, such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, one can cut through the official propaganda used by the Israeli government that wages perpetual war instead of peace, affecting the whole Middle East and the national security budgets of the U.S. The following are two takeaways from these groups that promote peace and a two-state solution.
1. The Palestinian National Authority (PA) has long recognized the existence of Israel as an independent, secular state. So have numerous Arab and Islamic nations, belonging to the Arab league, whose comprehensive peace proposal was dismissed by Israel twelve years ago.
2. Palestinians, as oppressed people, engage in no more verbal incitement than do the Israeli oppressors from a position of political and military power. Wagers of peace on both sides know how prejudicial some Israelis can be toward the Arabs, as well as vice versa.
Besides demanding ethnic cleansing, driving all Palestinians into the desert for the goal of a “Greater Israel” covering all of Palestine, some extremists have called for annihilation. Recently, on June 30th, a leader of the Jewish Home Party, part of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling coalition posted a call for the destruction of the Palestinian people including “its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure,” adding that Israel should also not exclude Palestinian mothers because they give birth to “little snakes.” Thousands of viewers responded favorably.
Where are the more numerous, rational Israelis who can reverse this perilous drift toward what the Israeli historical scholar Professor Ilan Pappe calls “incremental genocide?” After centuries of persecution, the Jewish people in Israel hold a towering power position from a secure state. Israel should accept the Arab League’s invitation for peace and normalized relations through a two-state solution.
Where is the Obama Administration, which like previous Administrations avoids its responsibility for peace and provides annually billions of dollars in unconditional military and economic support to the Israeli government? There are direct American strategic and security interests that oblige President Obama, in spite of the Washington puppet show in Congress, to do more than parrot the AIPAC lobby’s party line.
Just about all knowledgeable people believe the status quo will continue to favor the Israeli government’s political, economic and military interests while oppressing those of Palestine, unless the U.S. weighs in with strong influence over its ally, Israel."
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