“Do you remember the days when oil was only $100? Although there has been speculation in recent days concerning the oil price, one of the most authoritative predictions so far has the price of crude oil at $200 within as little as six months.
The prediction by Goldman Sachs was made as benchmark US light crude passed the $123 mark for the first time. Surging demand was increasingly likely to create a “super-spike” past $200 in six months-to-two years’ time, said Goldman Sachs.
Oil prices have now risen by 25% in the last four months and 400% since 2001. Soaring global demand for oil is being led by China’s continuing economic boom and, to a lesser extent, by India’s rapid economic expansion.
Both are now increasingly competing with the US, the European Union and Japan for the lion’s share of global oil production.”
“America’s wealth and power has long rested on the abundance of cheap petroleum. The United States was, for a long time, the world’s leading producer of oil, supplying its own needs while generating a healthy surplus for export.
Oil was the basis for the rise of the first giant multinational corporations in the U.S., notably John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (now reconstituted as Exxon Mobil, the world’s wealthiest publicly-traded corporation). Abundant, exceedingly affordable petroleum was also responsible for the emergence of the American automotive and trucking industries, the flourishing of the domestic airline industry, the development of the petrochemical and plastics industries, the suburbanization of America, and the mechanization of its agriculture. Without cheap and abundant oil, the United States would never have experienced the historic economic expansion of the post-World War II era.
No less important was the role of abundant petroleum in fueling the global reach of U.S. military power. For all the talk of America’s growing reliance on computers, advanced sensors, and stealth technology to prevail in warfare, it has been oil above all that gave the U.S. military its capacity to “project power” onto distant battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Every Humvee, tank, helicopter, and jet fighter requires its daily ration of petroleum, without which America’s technology-driven military would be forced to abandon the battlefield. No surprise, then, that the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single biggest consumer of petroleum.” [Read more →]
“Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson are … typical defense contractors.”
“While the well-known giant arms makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics — remain the largest contractors, they are dwarfed by the sheer number of fellow contractors from all imaginable economic sectors. [Read more →]
“The [US] government treats its soldiers the way most corporations treat their workforce–as an invisible, disrespected, disposable means to an end that is contrary to workers’ interests. Members of the armed forces come mainly and disproportionately from the working class and from small-town and rural America, where opportunities are hard to come by. The ‘economic draft’ operates, in effect, to recruit young people from these communities as they sign up to gain job skills, experience and educational opportunities absent from their civilian lives.” [Read more →]
Paul’s collection of “examples of U.S. presidents meeting, shaking hands or dining with some of the most brutal human beings to rule nations since the end of the Second World War”
Peter W. Fulham in USA Today - “When Will Young Americans Get Angry About the War?” (April 22nd)
“Students, the usual anti-war activists, have been largely silent. We don’t support the conflict, as polls show. Even so, we have done little to make our government uncomfortable, little to demonstrate our disapproval”
Gareth Porter in The Huffington Post - “The Pentagon’s Corrupt Sock Puppet ‘Military Analysts’ Exposed” (April 21st)
An investigate reporter has exposed Iraq war propagandists who “consciously peddle the Bush administration’s talking points on Iraq while hiding their own vested economic interest in selling the public on the Bush administration’s happy talk about the war.”
Agence France Presse - “China Hits Back at US On Human Rights, says Iraq War A Disaster” (March 13th)
A Chinese government “annual report, entitled ‘The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2007,’ presented a wide-ranging attack on the Western superpower’s human rights problems, and singled out the US-led war in Iraq that began in 2003.”
Far too often, critical responses to prevailing gender arrangements have entailed a narrow focus on women.Efforts to bring about female freedom and empowerment generally have only consisted of responses to women’s lives and opportunities for women.These women-only approaches are inadequate. We cannot effectively support women with these narrow strategies and perspectives, which also have prevented us from bringing about gender arrangements that would better suit the vast majority of humanity—including women.
To pursue these greater opportunities we must set our sights beyond the lives of women (and thus beyond the approach which generally has been encouraged through uses of the term “feminism”); we must also challenge prevailing masculinity—including traditional masculine aggression and callousness, as well as traditionally masculine pretensions to omniscience. While challenging these and other prevailing masculine behaviours—by confronting traditionally masculine men as well astraditionally masculine women—we must oppose this masculinity in capitalism, in bureaucracies, in militarism, and in industrialism, as well as other areas of societies that are saturated with traditional masculinity.Such greater goals and projects would better serve women, men, and everyone else.All of us live under the violence, exploitation, and authoritarian designs of traditional masculinity.
Of course, women are—and long have been—far more oppressed.On the whole, men certainlydo have more power.Yet, opposition to these injustices usually has been limited to a divisive rallying of women against men—an approach that has not and will not receive significant male support.Many women also will continue to refuse to segregate themselves in this woman-centred camp.A sub-set of females—with the occasional male supporter—cannot dramatically remake gender arrangements on their own.Nevertheless, critical responses to standard gender positions and inter-relationships usually have consisted of these antagonistic conflicts between women and men.While some female unity and some attention to women’s lives certainly will be necessary to effectively challenge male predominance, significant gender transformations only will be reached through female-male unity—in the pursuit of shared visions and values.Everyone must be drawn toward more desirable and fulfilling forms of gender. Thus, while we address women’s lives, our interventions in gender arrangements also must include critical responses to traditional masculinity.
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I’ll be extending and revising this piece and then re-posting it. Any comments posted here will be taken into account as I’m editing what I’ve written above.
Those tentative statements were written for a local zine. I’ve since agreed to save this text for a different zine that will be published later (–hopefully later this year).
“Patriarchal systems are notable for marginalizing the feminine. That is, insofar as any society or group is patriarchal, it is there that it is comfortable — unquestioned — to infantalize, ignore, trivialize, or even actively cast scorn upon what is thought to be feminized.”
“No patriarchy is made up of just men or just of the masculine. Far from it. Patriarchal systems have been so enduring, so adaptable, precisely because they make many women overlook their own marginal positions and feel instead secure, protected, valued. Patriarchies — in militias, in labor unions, in nationalist movements, in political parties, in whole states and entire international institutions — may privilege masculinity, but they need the complex idea of femininity and enough women’s acceptance or complicity to operate. To sustain their gendered hierarchies, patriarchal law firms, for example, need not only feminized secretaries and feminized cleaners, but also feminized law associates and feminized paralegals. Patriarchal militaries need feminized military wives and feminized military prostitutes. Patriarchal corporations need feminized clerical workers and feminized assembly-line workers. Every person who is pressed or lured into playing a feminized role must do so in order to make the masculinized people seem to be (to themselves as well as everyone else) the most wise, the most intellectual, the most rational, the most tough-minded, the most hard-headed.”
From Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (2004), p. 6-7
“Women and children today form the bulk of the world’s refugees and make up the majority of the world’s poor. Despite doing more than two-thirds of the world’s labor, women own only 1 percent of the world’s assets.”
“Thousands of women and children in Gaza are being collectively punished as Israel, a neighboring state and former occupying power, withholds food, fuel and electricity.”
“We live in a world where women are facing an epidemic of rape in conflicts from Nepal to Chiapas to the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
“Recent reports of the widespread murder of educated women in Iraq by religious extremists are adding new horror to an already horrifying situation.”
“Food riots are erupting all over the world. To prevent them and to help people afford the most basic of goods, we need to understand the causes of skyrocketing food prices and correct the [causes].”
“World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March — an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone — while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.
As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.
Analysts have pointed to some obvious causes, such as increased demand from China and India, whose economies are booming. Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change have all played a part.
But less obvious causes have also had a profound effect on food prices.
Over the last few decades, the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have used their leverage to impose devastating policies on developing countries. By requiring countries to open up their agriculture market to giant multinational companies, by insisting that countries dismantle their marketing boards and by persuading them to specialize in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton and even flowers, they have driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral. [Read more →]
“Since 1990, construction of supersized homes of 3,000 square feet or more has doubled, to 24 percent of new homes. Combine that with the shrinking size of the American family, and the result is that average floor space per person has grown by three times since 1950.
As the heavy-breathing real estate market reached its zenith, square-footage mania spread from the suburbs into cities, mutating into a doubly wasteful disease: teardown fever. Normal-sized, sound, comfortable houses were demolished to free up urban lots for the biggest, flashiest structures that could be squeezed in.” [Read more →]
Most psychiatrists would have us believe that depression results from a neurochemical imbalance in the brain — one that is genetically preordained. Drug treatments can be largely effective at righting what ails us. But the sheer number of depressed people, and the rate at which this number is increasing, tells us something else is afoot. How could it be that so much of humanity, after thousands of generations of natural selection, is afflicted with such a debilitating disorder? Our genes shouldn’t be changing at the rate that depression diagnoses are rising.
Our problem today is that we no longer live so communally. Depression usually leads to social isolation, and thus, continues to spiral. Yet in some traditional societies, like the Amish or the Kaluli tribe of New Guinea, depression is almost unknown. It may well be that our idea about hte individual pursuit of happiness may be buying us the opposite instead.”
Sally Kohn on AlterNet - “Why So Many Films About Going It Alone?”
“This year’s slate of Oscar nominations show[ed that] Americans are drawn to entertainment depicting [a] lonely future [they]’re desperate to avoid.”
Exerpts -
“When Best Picture nominee There Will Be Blood begins, Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is part of a community — trying to figure out together how to more efficiently extract oil from the earth. The film tells the dark tale of his descent into loneliness, as he pushes away — or kills — everyone around him. The tragedy is not that Day-Lewis’ character ends up alone despite wanting community. The tragedy is that he chose isolation and then learned its consequence.
Films like No Country for Old Men, also up for Best Picture, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead similarly progress from being stories of community — husband-wife, parent-child, sheriff-town — to everyone being on his or her own, fighting in isolation, one against the other.
Thomas Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ leading to lives that are ’solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ is a popular story line in our culture today. From Survivor to American Idol, we enjoy watching people duke it out in mock struggles of life and death, or being voted off the show, which equals death in reality TV.”
“Our increasingly high-tech, low-touch consumerist society has force-fed us the idea that we’re nothing more than individuals.” [Read more →]
On April 23rd in the U.S. “big retailers began to ration sales of rice in response to bulk purchases by customers alarmed by rocketing prices of staples.
Wal-Mart’s cash and carry division, Sam’s Club, announced it would sell a maximum of four bags of rice per person to prevent supplies from running short. Its decision followed sporadic caps placed on purchases of rice and flour by some store managers at a rival bulk chain, Costco, in parts of California.
The world price of rice has risen 68% since the start of 2008, but in some US shops the price has doubled in weeks.
Retail experts said there was little evidence of panic hoarding by the public but that restaurants and smaller retailers were buying up stocks at wholesalers in the expectation that the cost would go even higher. Shops said Filipino residents in the US were also making large purchases to send to relatives in the Philippines, where a shortage of supplies is causing concern.” [Read more →]
