There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship – the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

It is ironic that in the era of 24-hour cable news networks and “reality” programming, the news-to-fluff ratio and overall veracity of information has declined precipitously. Take the fact Americans now spend on average about 50 hours a week using various forms of media, while at the same time cultural literacy levels hover just above the gutter. Not only does mainstream media now tolerate gross misrepresentations of fact and history by public figures (highlighted most recently by Sarah Palin’s ludicrous depiction of Paul Revere’s ride), but many media actually legitimize these displays. Pause for a moment and ask yourself what it means that the world’s largest, most profitable and most popular news channel passes off as fact every whim, impulse and outrageously incompetent analysis of its so-called reporters. How did we get here? Take the enormous amount of misinformation that is taken for truth by Fox audiences: the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that he was in on 9/11, the belief that climate change isn’t real and/or man-made, the belief that Barack Obama is Muslim and wasn’t born in the United States, the insistence that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are terrorists, the inexplicable perceptions that immigrants are both too lazy to work and are about to steal your job. All of these claims are demonstrably false, yet Fox News viewers will maintain their veracity with incredible zeal. Why? Is it simply that we have lost our respect for knowledge?

My curiosity about this question compelled me to sit down and document the most oft-used methods by which willful ignorance has been turned into dogma by Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media. The techniques I identify here also help to explain the simultaneously powerful identification the Fox media audience has with the network, as well as their ardent, reflexive defenses of it.

The good news is that the more conscious you are of these techniques, the less likely they are to work on you. The bad news is that those reading this article are probably the least in need in of it.

1. Panic Mongering. This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment. From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren’t activated, you aren’t alive. This of course raises the question: why terrorize your own audience? Because it is the fastest way to bypasses the rational brain. In other words, when people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. And when they can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. Fox does not like to waste time debating the idea. Instead, they prefer a quicker route to dispensing with their opponents: go after the person’s credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them. Fox and like-minded media figures also use ad hominem attacks not just against individuals, but entire categories of people in an effort to discredit the ideas of every person who is seen to fall into that category, e.g. “liberals,” “hippies,” “progressives” etc. This form of argument – if it can be called that – leaves no room for genuine debate over ideas, so by definition, it is undemocratic. Not to mention just plain crass.

3. Projection/Flipping. This one is frustrating for the viewer who is trying to actually follow the argument. It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you’re using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. We see this frequently in the immigration discussion, where anti-racists are accused of racism, or in the climate change debate, where those who argue for human causes of the phenomenon are accused of not having science or facts on their side. It’s often called upon when the media host finds themselves on the ropes in the debate.

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin’s mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they’ll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

5. Scapegoating/Othering. This works best when people feel insecure or scared. It’s technically a form of both fear mongering and diversion, but it is so pervasive that it deserves its own category. The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result.

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. This is more of what I’d call a “meta-frame” (a deeply held belief) than a media technique, but it is manifested in the ways news is reported constantly. For example, terms like “show of strength” are often used to describe acts of repression, such as those by the Iranian regime against the protesters in the summer of 2009. There are several concerning consequences of this form of conflation. First, it has the potential to make people feel falsely emboldened by shows of force – it can turn wars into sporting events. Secondly, especially in the context of American politics, displays of violence – whether manifested in war or debates about the Second Amendment – are seen as noble and (in an especially surreal irony) moral. Violence become synonymous with power, patriotism and piety.

7. Bullying. This is a favorite technique of several Fox commentators. That it continues to be employed demonstrates that it seems to have some efficacy. Bullying and yelling works best on people who come to the conversation with a lack of confidence, either in themselves or their grasp of the subject being discussed. The bully exploits this lack of confidence by berating the guest into submission or compliance. Often, less self-possessed people will feel shame and anxiety when being berated and the quickest way to end the immediate discomfort is to cede authority to the bully. The bully is then able to interpret that as a “win.”

8. Confusion. As with the preceding technique, this one works best on an audience that is less confident and self-possessed. The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along. Less independent minds will interpret the confusion technique as a form of sophisticated thinking, thereby giving the user’s claims veracity in the viewer’s mind.

9. Populism. This is especially popular in election years. The speakers identifies themselves as one of “the people” and the target of their ire as an enemy of the people. The opponent is always “elitist” or a “bureaucrat” or a “government insider” or some other category that is not the people. The idea is to make the opponent harder to relate to and harder to empathize with. It often goes hand in hand with scapegoating. A common logical fallacy with populism bias when used by the right is that accused “elitists” are almost always liberals – a category of political actors who, by definition, advocate for non-elite groups.

10. Invoking the Christian God. This is similar to othering and populism. With morality politics, the idea is to declare yourself and your allies as patriots, Christians and “real Americans” (those are inseparable categories in this line of thinking) and anyone who challenges them as not. Basically, God loves Fox and Republicans and America. And hates taxes and anyone who doesn’t love those other three things. Because the speaker has been benedicted by God to speak on behalf of all Americans, any challenge is perceived as immoral. It’s a cheap and easy technique used by all totalitarian entities from states to cults.

11. Saturation. There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. “Saddam has WMD.” Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation. There is a psychological effect of being exposed to the same message over and over, regardless of whether it’s true or if it even makes sense, e.g., “Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.” If something is said enough times, by enough people, many will come to accept it as truth. Another example is Fox’s own slogan of “Fair and Balanced.”

12. Disparaging Education. There is an emerging and disturbing lack of reverence for education and intellectualism in many mainstream media discourses. In fact, in some circles (e.g. Fox), higher education is often disparaged as elitist. Having a university credential is perceived by these folks as not a sign of credibility, but of a lack of it. In fact, among some commentators, evidence of intellectual prowess is treated snidely and as anti-American. The disdain for education and other evidence of being trained in critical thinking are direct threats to a hive-mind mentality, which is why they are so viscerally demeaned.

13. Guilt by Association. This is a favorite of Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, both of whom have used it to decimate the careers and lives of many good people. Here’s how it works: if your cousin’s college roommate’s uncle’s ex-wife attended a dinner party back in 1984 with Gorbachev’s niece’s ex-boyfriend’s sister, then you, by extension are a communist set on destroying America. Period.

14. Diversion. This is where, when on the ropes, the media commentator suddenly takes the debate in a weird but predictable direction to avoid accountability. This is the point in the discussion where most Fox anchors start comparing the opponent to Saul Alinsky or invoking ACORN or Media Matters, in a desperate attempt to win through guilt by association. Or they’ll talk about wanting to focus on “moving forward,” as though by analyzing the current state of things or God forbid, how we got to this state of things, you have no regard for the future. Any attempt to bring the discussion back to the issue at hand will likely be called deflection, an ironic use of the technique of projection/flipping.

In debating some of these tactics with colleagues and friends, I have also noticed that the Fox viewership seems to be marked by a sort of collective personality disorder whereby the viewer feels almost as though they’ve been let into a secret society. Something about their affiliation with the network makes them feel privileged and this affinity is likely what drives the viewers to defend the network so vehemently. They seem to identify with it at a core level, because it tells them they are special and privy to something the rest of us don’t have. It’s akin to the loyalty one feels by being let into a private club or a gang. That effect is also likely to make the propaganda more powerful, because it goes mostly unquestioned.

In considering these tactics and their possible effects on American public discourse, it is important to note that historically, those who’ve genuinely accessed truth have never berated those who did not. You don’t get honored by history when you beat up your opponent: look at Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln. These men did not find the need to engage in othering, ad homeinum attacks, guilt by association or bullying. This is because when a person has accessed a truth, they are not threatened by the opposing views of others. This reality reveals the righteous indignation of people like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity as a symptom of untruth. These individuals are hostile and angry precisely because they don’t feel confident in their own veracity. And in general, the more someone is losing their temper in a debate and the more intolerant they are of listening to others, the more you can be certain they do not know what they’re talking about.

One final observation. Fox audiences, birthers and Tea Partiers often defend their arguments by pointing to the fact that a lot of people share the same perceptions. This is a reasonable point to the extent that Murdoch’s News Corporation reaches a far larger audience than any other single media outlet. But, the fact that a lot of people believe something is not necessarily a sign that it’s true; it’s just a sign that it’s been effectively marketed.

As honest, fair and truly intellectual debate degrades before the eyes of the global media audience, the quality of American democracy degrades along with it.

Dr. Cynthia Boaz is assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, nonviolent struggle, civil resistance and political communication and media. She is also an affiliated scholar at the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace International Master in Peace, Conflict, and Development Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Castellon, Spain. Additionally, she is an analyst and consultant on nonviolent action, with special emphasis on the Iran and Burma cases. She is vice president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence and on the board of Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation. Dr. Boaz is also a contributing writer and adviser to Truthout.org and associate editor of Peace and Change Journal.First posted at Truthout

Venezuelanalysis.com – Following Monday’s decision to raise the country’s minimum wage by 26.5%, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez this week also announced increases of 40% and 45% for university-based and public administration workers, respectively. Effective on 1 May 2011, President Chávez called on working people throughout Venezuela to use their increased incomes responsibly, in the “fight against speculation, since every time we raise wages the capitalists raise prices,” and asked people to stay away from “the very consumerism that capitalism itself promotes.”

40% Increase for All University-based Workers

Speaking live on national television during Wednesday’s 12-year anniversary celebrations of the rebirth of Venezuela’s National Polytechnic Experimental University of the Bolivarian Armed Forces (UNEFA), Chávez explained the specific wage increases for the higher education community nationwide.

“For the university-based professionals; the workers, employees, and professors, those who have gone three years without a wage increase. Well, we’re going to raise their salaries 40%, starting on 1 May (2011), which is a significant amount,” explained Chávez.

“A full-time professor will soon earn 7,232 BsF per month [1,682 USD], while a professor-instructor will earn 3,335 BsF [776 USD]. And that’s just in salary, since to that figure one must add the food ticket benefits, the bonuses. All this combined means that a full-time professor could be making some 10,000 BsF [2,326USD],” he said.

To cover the upcoming wage increases, Chávez allotted 4.1 billion BsF [954 million USD], while at the same time authorizing the use of nearly 2.8 billion BsF [651 million USD] to pay debts accrued with university-based workers in 2008 and 2009.

In addition, the president designated 595.2 million BsF [138 million USD] to cover 2011 budget shortfalls in the following areas: Dining Halls (309 million BsF), transportation (191 million BsF), libraries and educational materials (54.5 million BsF), intensive courses (30 million BsF),   and finally, medical services (10.7 million BsF).

Chávez also authorized the use of 271 million BsF [63 million USD] to double (from 200 to 400 BsF) [47 to 93 USD] the monthly scholarship amount received by some 87,500 students nationwide, as well as an additional 60 million BsF [14 million USD] to incorporate an additional 12,500 students into the pool of Venezuelans who will receive the monthly subsidy.

“In the United States and Europe they are cutting salaries, cutting loans and credits, extending the retirement age, firing workers, outsourcing jobs, cutting budgets allotted for health, for education – that’s how the capitalist world works,” said Chávez in an effort to contrast the global economic situation with Venezuela’s own economic conditions.

Public Administration, Including Nurses, Up 45%

With Wednesday’s release of Gaceta Oficial Number 39.660, Venezuelan workers in the field of public administration also benefited from the Chávez administration’s decision to increase workers’ wages. On average, all public sector workers – including those who work in the public healthcare system – will see a 45% increase in wages come 1 May 2011.

According to the pay-scale tables published in Gaceta Oficial, Type 1 Public Sector Professionals – a category which includes newly-trained nurses – will have their integral wage increase from the current monthly 3,598 BsF to 4,779 BsF [837 to 1,111 USD], plus food ticket benefits. Type 2 and Type 3 Public Sector Professionals will see their integral wage increase from 3,763 to 5,011 BsF [875 to 1,165 USD] per month, and from 3,819 to 5,017 BsF [888 to 1,166 USD], respectively.

All public sector employees are granted food ticket benefits that vary depending on the number of days they work in a given month. For months with 31 days, workers obtain 27 tickets [1,026 BsF worth (239 USD)] while for months with 30 days or less they obtain 26 tickets [988 BsF worth (230 USD)].

Food ticket benefits – commonly referred to as Cesta Tickets – can be spent in any of the government’s many publicly-owned food distribution outlets, as well as numerous private vendors who accept them.

As a result of the overall wage increase, a group of nurses on hunger strike since late last month brought their protest to an end. Though their original demand of a minimum 5,000 BsF [1,163 USD] monthly salary was not met directly, protest leader Ana María Velásquez celebrated the wage increase and insisted that their “objective has been reached.”

Basic Food Basket Measurement

Speaking to teleSUR Wedensday evening, Elías El Juri, president of Venezuela’s National Statistics Institute (INE), put the wage increases into the context of basic food purchases for the average Venezuelan family:

“The basic food basket [needed to feed a Venezuelan family] is currently estimated to cost 1,589 BsF (370 USD). The minimum wage is scheduled to reach 1,548 BsF (360 USD), but add to this the legal minimum of benefits [food tickets, bonuses, etc.], and the actual minimum amount one earns is set to reach 2,523 BsF (587 USD) – sufficient to cover basic food needs and other costs,” said El Juri.

El Juri explained that, according to the INE, a “normal” Venezuelan family earns at least two minimum wages, or roughly 5,000 BsF (1,163 USD) after the wage increases scheduled for this year, more than enough to meet their basic food needs.

El Juri went on to express his concerns as they relate to price speculation.

“We need policies to confront the business community, those who are often unsatisfied with earnings of 10 to 15% – no, instead, they seek 40% profit margins…we have to win the struggle against price speculation,” he concluded.

Protecting the Wage Increase

In line with El Juri’s comments, Chávez on Wednesday called for “a powerful campaign against speculation, so that the increase in salaries doesn’t end up in the hands of speculators.”

On Thursday, Augusto Montiel, President of Venezuela’s Institute for the Defense of People’s Access to Goods and Services (INDEPABIS), warned the private sector against raising prices as a result of wage increases.

Speaking to Unión Radio, Montiel explained that INEPABIS currently has 280 inspection agents distributed nationwide, and that ‘committees against speculation’ have been established to detect speculators involved in “the criminal act” of illegally raising prices.

The institute has opened a telephone hotline (0800-reclama) for people to denounce price speculators.

Grand Rapids, Michigan (CNN) — I saw someone at the airport the other day who really caught my eye.

Her beautiful, long blond hair was braided back a la Bo Derek in the movie “10″ (or for the younger set, Christina Aguilera during her “Xtina” phase). Her lips were pink and shiny from the gloss, and her earrings dangled playfully from her lobes.

You can tell she had been vacationing somewhere warm, because you could see her deep tan around her midriff thanks to the halter top and the tight sweatpants that rested just a little low on her waist. The icing on the cake? The word “Juicy” was written on her backside.

Yeah, that 8-year-old girl was something to see alright. … I hope her parents are proud. Their daughter was the sexiest girl in the terminal, and she’s not even in middle school yet.

Abercrombie & Fitch came under fire this spring for introducing the “Ashley,” a push-up bra for girls who normally are too young to have anything to push up. Originally it was marketed for girls as young as 7, but after public outcry, it raised its intended audience to the wise old age of 12. I wonder how do people initiate a conversation in the office about the undeveloped chest of elementary school girls without someone nearby thinking they’re pedophiles?

What kind of PowerPoint presentation was shown to the Abercrombie executives that persuaded them to green light such a product?

That there was a demand to make little girls hot?

I mean, that is the purpose of a push-up bra, right? To enhance sex appeal by lifting up, pushing together and basically showcasing the wearer’s breasts. Now, thanks to AF Kids, girls don’t have to wait until high school to feel self-conscious about their, uhm, girls. They can start almost as soon as they’re potty trained. Maybe this fall the retailer should consider keeping a plastic surgeon on site for free consultations.

We’ve been here with Abercrombie before — if you recall, about 10 years ago they sold thongs for 10-year-olds — but they’re hardly alone in pitching inappropriate clothing to young girls. Four years ago the popular “Bratz” franchise introduced padded bras called “bralettes” for girls as young as six. That was also around the time the good folks at Wal-Mart rolled out a pair of pink panties in its junior department with the phrase “Who Needs Credit Cards” printed on the front.

I guess I’ve been out-of-the-loop and didn’t realize there’s been an ongoing stampede of 10-year-old girls driving to the mall with their tiny fists full of cash demanding sexier apparel.

What’s that you say? Ten-year-olds can’t drive? They don’t have money, either? Well, how else are they getting ahold of these push-up bras and whore-friendly panties?

Their parents?

Noooo, couldn’t be.

What adult who wants a daughter to grow up with high self-esteem would even consider purchasing such items? What parent is looking at their sweet, little girl thinking, “She would be perfect if she just had a little bit more up top.”

And then I remember the little girl at the airport. And the girls we’ve all seen at the mall. And the kiddie beauty pageants.

And then I realize as creepy as it is to think a store like Abercrombie is offering something like the “Ashley”, the fact remains that sex only sells because people are buying it. No successful retailer would consider introducing an item like a padded bikini top for kindergarteners if they didn’t think people would buy it.

If they didn’t think parents would buy it, which begs the question: What in the hell is wrong with us?

It’s easy to blast companies for introducing the sexy wear, but our ire really should be directed at the parents who think low rise jeans for a second grader is cute. They are the ones who are spending the money to fuel this budding trend. They are the ones who are suppose to decide what’s appropriate for their young children to wear, not executives looking to brew up controversy or turn a profit.

I get it, Rihanna’s really popular. But that’s a pretty weak reason for someone to dress their little girl like her.

I don’t care how popular Lil’ Wayne is, my son knows I would break both of his legs long before I would allow him to walk out of the house with his pants falling off his butt. Such a stance doesn’t always makes me popular — and the house does get tense from time to time — but I’m his father, not his friend.

Friends bow to peer pressure. Parents say, “No, and that’s the end of it.”

The way I see it, my son can go to therapy later if my strict rules have scarred him. But I have peace knowing he’ll be able to afford therapy as an adult because I didn’t allow him to wear or do whatever he wanted as a kid.

Maybe I’m a Tiger Dad.

Maybe I should mind my own business.

Or maybe I’m just a concerned parent worried about little girls like the one I saw at the airport.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report linking early sexualization with three of the most common mental-health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression. There’s nothing inherently wrong with parents wanting to appease their daughters by buying them the latest fashions. But is getting cool points today worth the harm dressing little girls like prostitutes could cause tomorrow?

A line needs to be drawn, but not by Abercrombie. Not by Britney Spears. And not by these little girls who don’t know better and desperately need their parents to be parents and not 40-year-old BFFs.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of LZ Granderson.

By Chris Hedges

March 07, 2011 “Truthdig” – - I have walked through the barren remains of Babylon in Iraq and the ancient Roman city of Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, which now lies buried in silt deposits. I have visited the marble ruins of Leptis Magna, once one of the most important agricultural centers in the Roman Empire, now isolated in the desolate drifts of sand southeast of Tripoli. I have climbed at dawn up the ancient temples in Tikal, while flocks of brightly colored toucans leapt through the jungle foliage below. I have stood amid the remains of the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor along the Nile, looking at the statue of the great Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II lying broken on the ground, with Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” running through my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.

The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the growing desperate human migrations and the refusal to halt our relentless destruction of the ecosystem on which life depends are the harbingers of our own collapse and the consequences of the idiocy of our elite and the folly of globalization. Protests that are not built around a complete reconfiguration of American society, including a rapid dismantling of empire and the corporate state, can only forestall the inevitable. We will be saved only with the birth of a new and militant radicalism which seeks to dethrone our corrupt elite from power, not negotiate for better terms.

The global economy is built on the erroneous belief that the marketplace—read human greed—should dictate human behavior and that economies can expand eternally. Globalism works under the assumption that the ecosystem can continue to be battered by massive carbon emissions without major consequences. And the engine of global economic expansion is based on the assurance that there will always be plentiful and cheap oil. The inability to confront simple truths about human nature and the natural world leaves the elites unable to articulate new social, economic and political paradigms. They look only for ways to perpetuate a dying system. Thomas Friedman and the array of other propagandists for globalization make as much sense as Charlie Sheen.

Globalization is the modern articulation of the ancient ideology used by past elites to turn citizens into serfs and the natural world into a wasteland for profit. Nothing to these elites is sacred. Human beings and the natural world are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The elites make no pretense of defending the common good. It is, in short, the defeat of rational thought and the death of humanism. The march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. At this rate by 2030 only 10 percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain. Contaminated water kills 25,000 people every day around the globe, and each year some 20 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now are at 329 parts per million and climbing, with most climate scientists warning that the level must remain below 350 ppm to sustain life as we know it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with overpopulation, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.

Jared Diamond in his essay “The Last Americans” notes that by the time Hernan Cortés reached the Yucatán, millions of Mayan subjects had vanished.

“Why,” Diamond writes, “did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities.”

“Pumping that oil, cutting down those trees, and catching those fish may benefit the elite by bringing them money or prestige and yet be bad for society as a whole (including the children of the elite) in the long run,” Diamond went on. “Maya kings were consumed by immediate concerns for their prestige (requiring more and bigger temples) and their success in the next war (requiring more followers), rather than for the happiness of commoners or of the next generation. Those people with the greatest power to make decisions in our own society today regularly make money from activities that may be bad for society as a whole and for their own children; those decision-makers include Enron executives, many land developers, and advocates of tax cuts for the rich.”

It was no different on Easter Island. The inhabitants, when they first settled the 64-square-mile island during the fifth century, found abundant fresh water and woods filled with the Chilean wine palm, a tree that can reach the size of an oak. Seafood, including fish, seals, porpoises and turtles, and nesting seabirds were plentiful. Easter Island’s society, which split into an elaborate caste system of nobles, priests and commoners, had within five or six centuries swelled to some 10,000 people. The natural resources were devoured and began to disappear.

“Forest clearance for the growing of crops would have led to population increase, but also to soil erosion and decline of soil fertility,” Paul Bahn and John Flenley write in “Easter Island, Earth Island.” “Progressively more land would have had to be cleared. Trees and shrubs would also be cut down for canoe building, firewood, house construction, and for the timbers and ropes needed in the movement and erection of statues. Palm fruits would be eaten, thus reducing regeneration of the palm. Rats, introduced for food, could have fed on the palm fruits, multiplied rapidly and completely prevented palm regeneration. The over exploitation of prolific sea bird resources would have eliminated these for all but the offshore islets. Rats could have helped in this process by eating eggs. The abundant food provided by fishing, sea birds and rats would have encouraged rapid initial human population growth. Unrestrained human population increase would later put pressure on availability of land, leading to disputes and eventually warfare. Non-availability of timber and rope would make it pointless to carve further statues. A disillusionment with the efficacy of the statue religion in providing the wants of the people could lead to the abandonment of this cult. Inadequate canoes would restrict fishing to the inshore waters, leading to further decline in protein supplies. The result could have been general famine, warfare and the collapse of the whole economy, leading to a marked population decline.”

Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stone images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.

The desperate islanders developed a belief system that posited that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster. This last retreat into magic characterizes all societies that fall into terminal decline. It is a frantic response to loss of control as well as despair and powerlessness. This desperate retreat into magic led to the Cherokee ghost dance, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the Spanish invaders in Peru, and the Aztec prophecies of the 1530s. Civilizations in the last moments embrace a total severance from reality, a reality that becomes too bleak to be absorbed.

The modern belief by evangelical Christians in the rapture, which does not exist in biblical literature, is no less fantastic, one that at once allows for the denial of global warming and of evolution and the absurd idea that the righteous will all be saved—floating naked into heaven at the end of time. The faith that science and technology, which are morally neutral and serve human ambitions, will make the world whole again is no less delusional. We offer up our magical thinking in secular as well as religious form.

We think we have somehow escaped from the foibles of the past. We are certain that we are wiser and greater than those who went before us. We trust naively in the inevitability of our own salvation. And those who cater to this false hope, especially as things deteriorate, receive our adulation and praise. We in the United States, only 5 percent of the world’s population, are outraged if anyone tries to tell us we don’t have a divine right to levels of consumption that squander 25 percent of the world’s energy. President Jimmy Carter, when he suggested that such consumption was probably not beneficial, became a figure of national ridicule. The worse it gets the more we demand illusionary Ronald Reagan happy talk. Those willing to cater to fantasy and self-delusion are, because they make us politically passive, lavishly funded and promoted by corporate and oligarchic forces. And by the very end we are joyfully led over the cliff by simpletons and lunatics, many of whom appear to be lining up for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Are the events of three hundred years ago on a small remote island of any significance to the world at large?” Bahn and Flenley ask. “We believe they are. We consider that Easter Island was a microcosm which provides a model for the whole planet. Like the Earth, Easter Island was an isolated system. The people there believed that they were the only survivors on Earth, all other land having sunk beneath the sea. They carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash. A crash on a similar scale (60 percent of the population) for the planet Earth would lead to the deaths of about 1.8 billion people, roughly 100 times the death toll of the Second World War. Do we have to repeat the experiment on this grand scale? Do we have to be as cynical as Henry Ford and say ‘History is bunk’? Would it not be more sensible to learn the lesson of Easter Island history, and apply it to the Earth Island on which we live?”

Human beings seem cursed to repeat these cycles of exploitation and collapse. And the greater the extent of the deterioration the less they are able to comprehend what is happening around them. The Earth is littered with the physical remains of human folly and human hubris. We seem condemned as a species to drive ourselves and our societies toward extinction, although this moment appears be the denouement to the whole sad show of settled, civilized life that began some 5,000 years ago. There is nothing left on the planet to seize. We are now spending down the last remnants of our natural capital, including our forests, fossil fuel, air and water.

This time when we go down it will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. MORE

Slate – We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women’s: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn’t so bad. This isn’t to say that all men direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don’t. But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we’d be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it’s all thanks to supply and demand.

To better understand what’s going on, it’s worth a crash course in “sexual economics,” an approach best articulated by social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have repeatedly shown, on average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it’s true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University’s campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.

And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren’t asking for much in return these days—the market “price” of sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual options—more supply for his elevated demand—it takes some measure of price control away from women. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also, quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young women look more like those of men than they once did, at least when women are in their twenties. The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than they used to be.

But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young men are faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It’s not that the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it’s that there’s a growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings—women outnumber men by significant margins. (In one Manhattan ZIP code, for example, women account for 63 percent of 22-year-olds.)

The idea that sex ratios alter sexual behavior is well-established. Analysis of demographic data from 117 countries has shown that when men outnumber women, women have the upper hand: Marriage rates rise and fewer children are born outside marriage. An oversupply of women, however, tends to lead to a more sexually permissive culture. The same holds true on college campuses. In the course of researching our book Premarital Sex in America, my co-author and I assessed the effects of campus sex ratios on women’s sexual attitudes and behavior. We found that virginity is more common on those campuses where women comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the upper hand. By contrast, on campuses where women outnumber men, they are more negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data offer other glimpses into just how low the cost of sex is for young men ages 18 through 23. Take the speed with which these men say their romantic relationships become sexual: 36 percent of young men’s relationships add sex by the end of the second week of exclusivity; an additional 13 percent do so by the end of the first month. A second indicator of cheap sex is the share of young men’s sexual relationships—30 percent—that don’t involve romance at all: no wooing, no dates, no nothing. Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they’d prefer or mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater acceptance of and use of porn among women).

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for men. Women’s “erotic capital,” as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can’t assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It’s no surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Jill, a 20-year-old college student from Texas, is one of the many young women my colleagues and I interviewed who finds herself confronting the sexual market’s realities. Startlingly attractive and an all-star in all ways, she patiently endures her boyfriend’s hemming and hawing about their future. If she were operating within a collegiate sexual economy that wasn’t oversupplied with women, men would compete for her and she would easily secure the long-term commitment she says she wants. Meanwhile, Julia, a 21-year-old from Arizona who’s been in a sexual relationship for two years, is frustrated by her boyfriend’s wish to “enjoy the moment and not worry about the future.” Michelle, a 20-year-old from Colorado, said she is in the same boat: “I had an ex-boyfriend of mine who said that, um, he didn’t know if he was ever going to get married because, he said, there’s always going to be someone better.” If this is “the end of men,” someone really ought to let them know.

And yet while young men’s failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don’t forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today’s young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year’s book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, “Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy.” They’re right. But then try getting men to do anything.

Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and the co-author of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying.

The way in which people frantically communicate online via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can be seen as a modern form of madness, according to the leading sociologist.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in her new book, Alone Together: “A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological.”

She explains that people are become isolated from reality due to such social networking sites because technology is dominating our lives and making us “less human”.

Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, technology is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world, she suggests.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” she writes.

Her warnings – and those from other cyber-sceptics – follow the death of Simone Back, a woman in Brighton who posted a suicide note on Facebook that was seen by more than 1,000 of her “friends”.

Yet none of them called for help – instead trading insults with each other on her Facebook wall.

Turkle’s book has created significant attention in the US because her previous works, The Second Self and Life on the Screen, were most positive about changing technology.

Source.

Resistance hero Stéphane Hessel stuns publishing world with 30-page work that calls on readers to be outraged about society

By Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

January 01, 2010 “The Guardian” — Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93.

The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society.

Launched in October by Indigène, a small publisher working out of an attic in Montpellier, southern France, the book had a tiny first print-run, 6,000, and sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated and kept high by the law.

Hessel’s success has stunned France. After two months on the bestseller lists, the book has spent five weeks at number one, beating Michel Houellebecq’s award-winning latest novel La Carte et le Territoire and a host of Christmas fiction. It has sold 600,000 copies and – publishers predict it will reach a million. Translations are underway for Italy and other European markets.

The book’s soaring sales reflect a general mood of French exasperation at the social inequalities of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency. But the phenomenon is mostly down to Hessel’s charisma and his life story.

Hessel was born in Berlin in 1917 and emigrated to France aged seven. His free-spirited mother, Helen Grund-Hessel, inspired the novel Jules et Jim, which became Francois Truffaut’s film about a love-triangle of two male friends and a woman who loves them both. During the Nazi occupation of France, Hessel joined the French resistance, was caught, tortured and and deported to Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps where he escaped hanging. After the war, he helped to draft the universal declaration of human rights and later became a diplomat.

Hessel’s book argues that French people should re-embrace the values of the French resistance, which have been lost, which was driven by indignation, and French people need to get outraged again. “This is an appeal to citizens, young and old, to take responsibility for the things in our society that don’t work,” he said. “I wish every one of you to find your own reason for indignation. It’s precious.” Hessel’s reasons for personal outrage include the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France’s shocking treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, protecting the environment, the plight of Palestinians and the importance of protecting the French welfare system. He calls for peaceful and non-violent insurrection.

Sylvie Crossman, a former Le Monde foreign correspondent who co-founded Hessel’s publishers, said the book was like a new, “adapted” version of Charles de Gaulle’s rallying resistance appeal from London on 18 June 1940. She said the book had been a success because it gave hope to people from a real fighter who was not just an armchair intellectual.

December 27, 2010 – www.savethemales.ca

Henry Makow © 2010

“Civilized sexual behavior is based on upholding marriage and motherhood. Only then are promiscuity prevented and females valued for their character and ability. Now they’re like cheap whores holding numbers in a Bangkok brothel.”

“We must introduce into their education all those principles which have so brilliantly broken up their order.” Protocols of Zion, 16

by Henry Makow,  Ph.D.
(From August 11, Revised Dec. 26)

In a recent article “Outraged Moms, Trashy Daughters” by Anne Kingston, (Macleans, Aug 16, 2010) mothers lament that their daughters now see “empowerment”  in terms of pleasuring males.

While the feminist mothers saw power as financial independence and rejected female “objectification,” their daughters accept the pornographic message of pop music and advertising. In the words of one mom, they “believe their purpose in life is to be sexual beings who please men.”

“A blow job is like shaking hands,” said another mom.  “Their attitude is: ‘We’re emancipated, we’re liberated, we’re in control. They see [it] as power; I see it as giving their power away.”

Indeed it is. But:  Who taught they could have sex outside of courtship, love and marriage? Who tarred the roles of wife and mother? Who tore down men i.e.”the patriarchy” ?

Feminists did. An essentially lesbian disorder, feminism brainwashed young women to see husbands as oppressors and family as bondage. There was no longer any reason to restrict sex to love and marriage.

“Women’s rights” indeed! Feminism is Communist in origin. Communists view women as a public utility. It is classic divide-and-conquer,  satanic subterfuge which now extends far beyond gender.

Civilized sexual behavior is based on upholding marriage and motherhood. Only then are promiscuity prevented and females valued for their character and ability. Now they’re like cheap whores holding numbers in a Bangkok brothel.

Understandably, feminists won’t admit they’ve been cynically betrayed by their teachers and political leaders. Feminism was created by elite social engineers to reduce population and undermine marriage and family.

FEMINISTS IN DENIAL

Even while wringing their hands, feminists are blinded by their ideology. (The article veers off into a discussion of how feminism is still relevant.)

The words “love,” “marriage,” “husband” and “family” do not appear  in the article. No wonder they can’t understand the problem and what to do about it.

In the past, men had to commit before they could have sex.  As a result, women were cherished for themselves and given a lifelong role  that satisfied their deepest emotional needs.

Both mothers and daughters are victims of deliberate social subversion. A woman’s career used to be wife and mother. She consecrated her sexuality for the man she loved, the father of her children, her protector and provider.

Young women today are up a creek. They are going to be left high and dry. Even if they land a man, they’ve lost the ability to love him.

Marriage and motherhood is a woman’s biological and social destiny. It ensures she is needed, loved and secure long after her sex appeal has faded. It’s mind blowing that young women are so heedless of their own self-interest.

TRUE BEAUTY

Young women obsess on beauty but true beauty comes from within, from a spiritual purity. This means rejecting all coarse influences and behavior. It means focusing on the qualities that make for a good person, wife and mother.

“I don’t meet many girls who feel good about themselves, even though they are totally gorgeous,” one social worker says.

How could they … giving their bodies to strangers who dump them?

Girls figure they have to or boys will get it from other girls. That’s like saying, “if I don’t let muggers beat me, other girls will.”

Apparently the saying is true: “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.”

“Father” is another word totally absent from the article.  Girls could get love, self respect and guidance from their fathers. But their feminist mothers probably drove their fathers away.

It’s not too late for girls to become women again. There can be no sex without courtship and love. If other girls give it away, let them suffer the consequences.

Girls can become feminine again by making marriage and family their first priority. If they refocus on being attractive to the right man, they can regain the path to fulfillment and happiness.

–

Pop Music Insider Warns About Sexualizing Children

Note: Reading comments on other sites, I see a lot of people still think feminism is about “equality.” Please read my book “Cruel Hoax” to understand how heterosexuality works, and the real hidden agenda behind feminism. Or see “How the Rockefellers Re-engineered Women”  http://www.savethemales.ca/001904.html

A privacy watchdog has uncovered a government memo that encourages federal agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share — and to spy on them. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS).

As of Thursday morning, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Digg had not commented on the report, which details the official government program to spy via social networking. Other websites the government is spying on include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed the FOIA request.

“Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuel a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages, and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know,” stated one of the documents obtained by the EFF. “This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities,” it said.

According to the EFF, this memo — which specifically details how the government evaluates potential citizen requests — suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date offhand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full investigation.

With this revelation, the government joins a growing list of groups using social-networking sites for purposes other than social networking. As these sites have gained popularity, scammers and spammers have become rampant, and hackers are increasingly turning to networks such as Facebook to spread viruses and Trojan Horses.

Read the full article.

This text will be presented at the Third All-Russia Anti-Global Forum, Moscow, December 2009

It is easier to manage people when they have low needs. Simply because low needs are easier to satisfy. <…> Thus the dictatorship of show business is a part of the state machine. Previously, rock music, as well as earlier the church, were separated from the state, but now they are part of it. The results are well known. Radislava Anchevskaya

There is a popular expression (attributed to various famous authors), that any “anti-” is dissolved in that, against which it is “anti-”. This phrase has a profound meaning, which consists in the fact that to unite in a bare denial of anything is counter-productive and doomed to defeat. A viable alternative may be only an independent project that contains a constructive idea and a program for implementation.

Accordingly, the Third Forum of Anti-Global Resistance diverts from the themes of criticism and exposure of the essence of imperialist globalization and seeks to create its own meaningful project, its own civilizational alternative to globalism. As a part of this task, we would like to present our positions in a succinct form.

1. Economy for man, not man for economy.

The logic of modern civilization, which represents global capitalism in the final stage of capital concentration and expansion of markets of raw materials, labor and sales, is profit maximization as the basic task of production. This approach appears to be a form of fetishism, a kind of religious ministry to a deified material idol. It breeds widespread poverty and actual purposeful genocide of the “economically unjustified” populations of entire regions of the world, escalation of class and ethnic conflicts, extremely wasteful and historically irresponsible squandering of nonrenewable natural resources, destruction of traditional cultures and moral standards, imposing standards of consumer thinking and behavior that lead to cultural and intellectual degradation of mankind, denaturalization of consumer goods, leading to an increase in the number of diseases, including the genetic degradation of the human species.

As an alternative, we propose a planned system of production, entirely subordinate to the purposes and objectives of Life and Life Reproduction, meeting the needs of a particular country in the agricultural, industrial, and information products required for the stable maintenance of a decent standard of living. Such a type of production requires as a prerequisite the nationalization of major industries and a significant preponderance of public (state) ownership over private ownership. The existence of such production should imply stable, sustainable self-reproduction, rather than unlimited growth and expansion.

Of course, this approach does not exclude the differences in the levels of development and consumption between developed regions and those lagging behind, but, at least, the present absurd situation of exterminating the “economically unjustified” population will be impossible, given that population has everything needed for sustainable life reproduction on their land.

2. The unconditional priority of the principles of national statehood and sovereignty over the international law, the authority of international organizations and the rights of transnational corporations.

Today, the capitalist system, which has reached the stage of consolidating the world in a single market, seeks to eliminate national borders and make the world completely “free” in the sense of free movement of goods, raw materials, capital and labor, thus totally fine-tuning it with the interests of capitalist profit. This results in withering away of the nationhood, associated with the interests of specific nations and populations of specific areas – that is, with the interests of socially organized populations. In parallel, a number of roles and prerogatives, at first monopolized by the state, have transferred to the extraterritorial power centers (especially TNCs), unrelated to the interests of specific people and specific areas. We observe the formation of private armies and quasi-police security forces of commercial corporations. This situation is fraught with the disappearance of law as a category and the absolutely uncontrollable and irresponsible use of armed violence by financial clans.

A special tragedy of the situation is that modern states, being inherently capitalist, primarily express the will of the bourgeois class, and, in the interests of this class, are losing out to multinational corporate structures with virtually no fighting and resistance.

We propose the shift to the revival of the sovereignty of nation-states, which is possible only if the first item on the program – the nationalization of the basic means of production – is implemented. Only in this case the state would become national, not in word, but in deed, that is expressing the will of the nation, rather than the bourgeois class. And in the modern world such a common nation-state, beyond any class interests, can exist only on the basis of a classless socialist society. Only in this case, the monopoly on armed violence remains under the control of people, and there may be reproduction of the legal relationship (although the legal principle is not absolute and should not apply to all spheres of public life, see below).

3. Priority of preserving the natural environment and cultural sites over their consumer use.

The domination of the present-day capitalocratic principle leads to the overexploitation of unique and irreplaceable objects of nature and culture, wherever the possibility of their utilization gives hope for profit. In the best case, it admits the prevention of their complete destruction based on the argument of maintaining them as a source of long-term business. The argument that they can exist in their own right is completely ignored. Everything is subjected to the paradigm of consumption, formed by advertising for the sake of the increase of business profits.

Rejecting the logic of the subordination of Life to the interest of profit-making, we also deny the principle of the rule of consumption. Of course, the monuments of nature and culture can and should be used for the benefit of man, but only in such a manner that does not contradict the conditions of their conservation and does not cause harm.

4. Preservation of national cultures as an alternative to the unification of the world.

Providing free movement of goods, raw materials and labor in order to maximize profits, capitalocracy rapidly destroys the diversity of human cultures. In place of a flowering diversity of cultures there emerges a unified space of faceless housing, English-language pop music on radio and television, advertising brands, unified fast food, consumer lifestyle, corporate standards of conduct. The masses of people, wandering the world as a free-moving labor, lose their national and cultural identity and become a depersonalized “gray race”. The notorious “multiculturalism” does not save the case, transforming cities into a sort of circus buffoonery or Babylonian fair. Such “multiculturalism” does not only protect, but even more destroys the identity of national cultures, randomly mixing their elements and destroying their internal unity.

We assert that cultural diversity is the key to development, and, on the contrary, the unification or chaotic confusion of cultures inevitably leads to cultural impoverishment and cultural degradation of humanity. We also believe that each national culture is an internal unity, and only in this inner unity of each of its elements it becomes meaningful and imbued with spiritual life. Various aspects of culture, such as elements of clothing or traditional law, have a deep inner connection. Breaking these ties, placing cultural elements, torn from their medium, in an alien context, makes them meaningless and in fact deprives them of their cultural value.

Culture in the broadest sense is a way of life of an ethnic group. It is inseparable from the social relations characteristic of this ethnic group, its accommodating landscape, methods and nature of production. The destruction of ethnic boundaries destroys the ethnicity, and, consequently, the culture as a way of its being.

Cultural development is achieved through diversity, and this diversity requires a certain (though certainly not absolute) level of isolation of cultures from each other. Cultural contacts, occurring between peoples as subjects of cultures, of course, enrich these cultures, but they should not exceed the level at which they turn into fusion and confusion, leading to the unification and reduction of cultural diversity. A national culture should have the time for processing and ethnification of the experience, obtained from external contacts, otherwise these contacts become destructive for it.

Therefore, we oppose the policies that encourage the migration processes and ethnic mixing and support limiting migration and maintaining, to the extent possible, the constancy of ethnic composition of each specific territory.

5. The same applies to the conservation of biological, anthropological and racial diversity of humanity.

6. Traditional social structure as an alternative to social atomization.

Traditional social structures ensure multiple and diverse connections and relationships between people, governed by education and customs, rather than legal norms. In this context, a particular importance is given to traditional social institutions (especially family) and the traditional social roles, specific to a particular society and a specific culture. The presence of such multiple informal relations between human beings, on the one hand, is the key to preservation and transmission of a national culture and unwritten life experiences from generation to generation. On the other hand, it protects the individual and the society as a whole from the arbitrary actions of the state and from the manipulation of consciousness.

In an effort to transform the human material into ideal subjects of labor and consumption, the capitalocracy deliberately destroys the ties that unite people into a social organism, it destroys culture, which is inexpedient in terms of commerce, divides generations in order to reduce the formative influence of parents on the child and enhance the impact of mass media, schools and other educational means under its control. The purpose of capitalocracy is the maximum atomization of society, maximum alienation of man from man, and, in the limit, the reduction of the diversity of human relationships to the standards of a legal contract.

Particular efforts in this regard are concentrated on three areas. First, capitalocracy seeks to combat all forms of non-commercial art. An attempt is made, and not without success, to completely replace the artistic creativity with commercial pop industry, which is fundamentally not only extremely primitive, but also entirely high-tech. Second, there is a consistent leveling of gender differences, i.e. the differences in the social behavior of genders. In parallel, under the hypocritical slogan of “protection from domestic violence” the capitalocracy-controlled state assumes the role of a mediator and supervisor of the relationships between man and woman in marriage and outside it. The result is the destruction of the family as the basic unit of society. Third, under the same pretext of “protection from domestic violence”, the state positions itself as a mediator and controller between parents and children, deliberately undermining the authority of parents and virtually making family education and cultural transmission from generation to generation impossible.

We put forward and defend the opposite values. We believe that only non-profit art, which arises from the inside urge for creativity, rather than from the need to satisfy someone’s demands, is full-fledged. We believe that non-conventional, non-legal, informal forms of relationships between people not only have a right to exist, but should be protected and developed. Therefore, we favor unformatted arts and informal cultures. And of all the informal ties and non-contractual relations, we put at the forefront the most traditional forms as time-tested, rooted in the culture, most stable and able to most effectively resist the destructive influences.

As a prerequisite for socio-cultural and organic unity we assert the absolute value of those types of social behavior, which are developed by culture, such as the historically established interactions between senior and junior, teacher and student, parents and children, between relatives, between friends, etc.

We affirm the naturalness of the connection between traditional gender patterns of social behavior and biological sex, and regard the disruption of this connection (under whatever specious and “socialist” slogans it is made) as totally destructive from the cultural and biological points of view.

We affirm the value of traditional social institutions, especially the traditional family, and believe that government intervention in the internal relations of family members is possible only in exceptional cases, but not everyday life. We believe that the destructive interference of state and public structures in the internal affairs of the family is a much greater evil than the notorious “domestic violence” and the hypocritical struggle with it which this interference is disguised in.

We are aware that the traditional social relations we uphold are incompatible with capitalocracy, which is why we set as the sixth paragraph of our program the protection of traditional forms of sociality, and above all put forward the need for transition from the economy of profit to the economy of Life and Life reproduction, which involves the socialization of production and elimination of the very basis of capitalocracy. It is better to pull the bad grass with the roots.

7. Traditional religions as forms of collective spiritual life, calibrated by millennia of experience of many generations.At the same time, we by no means see the main threat to spiritual tradition in atheism, materialism and rationalist philosophy, but in commercial pseudo-religions, constructed as a sphere of ritual and psychological services. We are primarily against the muddy wave of pop mysticism, pseudo-religious commercial businesses in the spirit of New Age, as well as ecumenical and renovation currents, trying to adjust the traditional religion to the standards of consumer society.

One of our tasks is the assimilation of traditional forms of spirituality by those informal cultures and subcultures, which oppose the pop-industry anti-culture.

8. Freedom of intellectual and artistic creativity as an alternative to “intellectual property”.

The so-called “copyright”, originally conceived as its name implies, to protect the rights of the author, has now taken completely distorted forms and serves the interests not of the author, but the capitalocracy machine. The system of “intellectual property” today postulates the existence of property rights not only for discovery and technology, but virtually for any text and visual image. And in most cases, the right-holder of this property does not have the slightest relation to its authorship. It reaches the absurdity, when the rights of “intellectual property” are registered for the works of long dead authors.

The consistent application of the principle of intellectual property in its modern capitalocratic interpretation makes the development of science, art and culture in general virtually impossible. Any scientific discovery is based on the synthesis of knowledge accumulated by predecessors. The copyright ban on the use of the developments of predecessors makes it impossible to promote any further development. The same can be said about art: any original work grows out of the surrounding cultural context. If the surrounding context is cut into fragments and prohibited to use, live creativity becomes impossible. An artist’s place is taken by a team of lawyers, verifying the compliance and non-compliance of a combination of sounds with the previously obtained licenses and able to prove the illegality of a piece of art. What can work in such conditions is rubber-stamping commercial pop music, rather than real art. Thus with the help of the laws of “intellectual property” the capitalocracy is able to deal with the non-profit art not only by its financial strangulation, but by direct violence – by sending authors to jail.

The copyright and patent law, however, are not only about the development of arts and basic sciences. They obstruct the development of civilization in all fields. Promising discoveries and inventions are bought up and buried by corporations in order not to create competition for their goods, whose production is already established and profitable. Drug prices are jacked up hundredfold and thousandfold, because the patent law eliminates competition and monopolizes the market. The developing countries are caught in the eternal neo-colonial dependence, being deprived of the opportunity to adopt the achievements of progress and having no funds for buying licenses.

There appears an absurd situation where people know how to produce a cheap medicine and can easily establish their own production, but under the international law cannot make it without a license and die of epidemics.

We stand on the position of unrestricted freedom to produce, copy, distribute, modify and process information of any nature, whether a scientific paper, a technical development or an artistic work, except for the information that is socially dangerous or destructive in terms of moral character. We recognize certain (though limited) rights of the author, but categorically refuse to accept the rights of the owner of a patent or license, if they are not the author himself.

The copyright law should not be standardized, and the right of the author of a literary text is absolutely not the same thing as the right of the author of a technical invention, and certainly is not the same as a registered trademark.

We recognize the right of the author of an artistic or scientific text to require the reference to his/her name when this text is quoted or distributed, as well as the identity of the text signed by his/her name. If the text has been subjected to editing or modifying, it should be stated that a text by a certain author is taken as the basis for the present text; it has been modified and is not the original. With this indication the modified text may be freely distributed and used. We reject the right of the author of a text to impose restrictions on its copying and distribution, if the author of this text or its fragments is indicated, as well as on its modification, if the fact of modification and inconsistency with the original is indicated.

We recognize the right of an inventor to a material reward for his/her invention, either in the form of a lump-sum repayment by the society, or in the form of a short-term monopoly on its use. However, after that any invention becomes in the public domain and can be used without limit as well as developed by other inventors.

The proposed approach is progressive as it removes the completely artificial limitation that “intellectual property” puts in the way of progress. Like any progressive movement, our approach is doomed to ultimate victory, since, being implemented in one country, it inevitably leads to the multifold superiority of this country’s development and willy-nilly forces others to follow its example.

9. We favor the strict supervision by the public organizations of any technology being introduced into the sphere of public administration and management.

With the introduction of various hardware, especially electronic, in management, a situation is created, in which the technical capabilities and limitations (the logic of the machine) are in contradiction with the constitutional rights of individuals and indeed triumph over them. The simplest example is the electronic system, which automatically processes documents and may require of a person parameters, which he/she may not have and not obliged by law to have (e.g. TIN, credit card number, etc.), or offer alternatives, none of which are suitable. To argue with the electronic system is impossible. It creates a situation of domination of technology over civil rights. Particularly threatening are those electronic systems which automatically accumulate and process the electronic information about citizens and create their electronic profiles.

We stand for a substantial restriction of electronic monitoring and control and strict public control over them. In particular, we categorically oppose to awarding people personal numbers. The number should be identified only with a specific document, such as a passport, but not with its owner. We stand for the categorical prohibition of the summation of information about people in a common database from different departmental sources, unless there is a direct need for it, for the technical dissociation of this kind of databases, including the dissociation of documents, under the numbers of which the information about a person is stored. For example, medical information should be stored only in the medical database under the medical record number, not matching with the data stored under the number of a bank card, passport data, etc. The purpose of this separation of information is to limit the technical capabilities of the state and, especially, non-state actors, to violate the individual right to private life.

We would also like to alert the public to monitor the timely destruction of personal information about a person in departmental, company and other databases after the cessation of actual and immediate need for its use, with a view of compulsory depersonalization of the disused numbers of his/her documents, etc.

We support the categorical rejection of the implantation of microchips in human body except in cases of extreme necessity for medical reasons. We also favor the ban on placing RFID-chips in consumer goods and installation of sensors. We oppose the introduction of bioidentification and electronically readable elements in the personal documents.

And, of course, we strongly advocate the legal prohibition of wiretapping by government services prior to its judicial authorization.

We are, therefore, for the creation of a strong social counterweight to balance the technical capacity of public and commercial services of collecting, storing and analyzing personal information about citizens.

10. We assert the priority of rights of the majority against minority rights in all respects: economic, cultural, national, etc., as well as the priority of public and national interests over group, clan and personal ones.

The modern capitalocratic society, deliberately destroying the unity of the social organism, specifically encourages minorities, opposing them to the interests of the majority. Ultimately, this leads to stripping the entire society into a set of minorities lobbying the narrow sectarian interests of their clans. The purpose of this policy is obvious: the capitalocratic oligarchy is numerically a tiny minority and can stably maintain their position only in a society fragmented into minorities, in which they are the strongest minority.

We are aware that every member of the society in some respects belongs to the majority, and in some other respects – to a minority. The principal difference in the positions is that the capitalocratic system accentuates the features of belonging to a minority, making them socially prestigious or lucrative, and obscures the features of identification with the majority, making them undesirable and unprofitable. This results in a subjective self-identification of an individual with one of the minorities, rather than with the socio-forming majority. Our approach is diametrically opposed to this. It is to encourage and promote the features of identity with the majority and level the features of attributing oneself to minorities.

Summarizing the above ten theses, we should say, that we speak from the position of domination of man, his biological, social, cultural and spiritual needs over the technosphere, state machine and impersonal economic forces. We strongly refuse to position ourselves on the political line between the “right” and “left” imposed on us by the capitalocracy. Speaking from the standpoint of socialization and nationalization of the means of production, natural resources and intellectual property, from the position of domination of the planning elements in the economy over the market, we do not consider binding ourselves with the typical “left” love of minorities, the struggle for gender equality (not to be confused with legal equality) and hatred of the traditional “patriarchal” social norms and institutions. On the other hand, being supporters of traditional religion, morality and family values, we do not believe it mandatory to burden ourselves with the typical “right-wing” absolutisation of economic freedom and individual rights to the detriment of the people as a whole.

We are located outside of the linear “right-left” political system, dictated by the world capitalocracy, and propose our own draft of the civilization development, involving, as opposed to globalist concepts, prudent self-restraint of society in material production and consumption, but unlimited freedom in creative, intellectual and spiritual self-development .

Translated by Helen V. Shelestiuk

Announcement: Readers are invited to attend the Third All-Russia Anti-Global Forum to be held in Moscow on 3-4 December 2009 ( http://www.anti-glob.ru/public-conf/index.html, email: egbor@mail.ru to Elena Borisova)