Category Archives: Crowds

The “Enough Already” Factor

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From AP, Americans signal they´ve had enough of the imperial state:

“WASHINGTON – Americans are turning away from the world, showing a tendency toward isolationism in foreign affairs that has risen to the highest level in four decades, a poll out Thursday found.

Almost half, 49 percent, told the polling organization that the United States should “mind its own business” internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own, the Pew Research Center survey found. That’s up from 30 percent who said that in December 2002.

Results of the survey appear to conflict with President Barack Obama‘s activist foreign policy, including a newly announced buildup of 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight Taliban and al-Qaida extremists.

“Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High,” the nonpartisan research center headlined its report on the poll about America’s role in the world.”

Eduardo Galeano on the Nobodies

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Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies:  the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

— Eduardo Galeano, “The Nobodies”

 

The Spectacle of General Secrecy

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Political theorist Guy de Bord on the spectacle of public life:

“The concentrated spectacle

The spectacle associated with concentrated bureaucracy. Debord associated this spectacular form mostly with the Eastern Bloc and Fascism, although today mixed backward economies import it, and even advanced capitalist countries in times of crisis. Every aspect of life, like property, music, and communication is concentrated and is identified with the bureaucratic class. The concentrated spectacle generally identifies itself with a powerful political leader. The concentrated spectacle is made effective through a state of permanent violence and police terror.[edit]

The diffuse spectacle

The spectacle associated with advanced capitalism and commodity abundance. In the diffuse spectacle, different commodities conflict with each other, preventing the consumer from consuming the whole. Each commodity claims itself as the only existent one, and tries to impose itself over the other commodities:

Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions.

The diffuse spectacle is more effective than the concentrated spectacle. The diffuse spectacle operates mostly through seduction, while the concentrated spectacle operates mostly through violence. Because of this, Debord argues that the diffuse spectacle is more effective at suppressing non-spectacular opinions than the concentrated spectacle.

The integrated spectacle

The spectacle associated with modern capitalist countries. The integrated spectacle borrows traits from the diffuse and concentrated spectacle to form a new synthesis. Debord argues that this is a very recent form of spectacular manifestation, and that it was pioneered in France and Italy.

According to Debord, the integrated spectacle goes by the label of liberal democracy. This spectacle introduces a state of permanent general secrecy, where experts and specialists dictate the morality, statistics, and opinions of the spectacle. Terrorism is the invented enemy of the spectacle, which specialists compare with their “liberal democracy”, pointing out the superiority of the latter one. Debord argues that without terrorism, the integrated spectacle wouldn’t survive, for it needs to be compared to something in order to show its “obvious” perfection and superiority.”

My Comment:

Thanks to reader J. T. Gordon for reminding me of this. I’ve posted before on de Bord and the notion of the spectacle of society. Like so much powerful analysis, this one too has roots in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most productive thinkers of the last 150 years.

What should be noted here is that in the spectacle of secrecy, the greatest emphasis is placed on openness. Thus, “freedom of speech”  occupies a central position in the culture. By this means, all barriers to privacy are brought down, all psychological barriers between the individual and the crowd. Yet, this openness at one level (in public culture) operates side-by-side with secrecy at the highest level (governments and corporate leaders).

(More later)

Back…

Reading through this again, I feel I need to question De Bord’s division, which corresponds to communist, capitalist and liberal democratic. It’s too neat. In fact, things are much more muddy

War Pigs

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War Pigs – Nothing’s Changed
Hat-tip to Brad Spangler

It’s still the bankers making money from debt and war…

While the sheeple swing their woolly heads back and forth, hypnotized –

left-right

black-white

public-private

socialist-capitalist

gay-straight, feminist-patriarchal, Muslim-Christian, East-West, poor-rich, working-class-middle-class, urban-rural, blue-state-red-state…

back-forth…democrat-republican…

Why More Swine Flu Deaths in Bangalore?

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From Sify.com:

“State health commissioner P.N. Sreenivasachari told IANS: ‘It’s difficult to say why Karnataka, more precisely Bangalore, which is endowed with adequate healthcare facilities, is witnessing large number of swine flu deaths. We too are puzzled.

‘We can say the virus is already in the air and it’s time people became more aware and cautious to stop the spread of the virus. However, from the point of view of the administration, we have provided adequate healthcare facilities to treat swine flu patients,’ added Sreenivasachari.

Principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal said people should not get panicky.

‘People with swine flu like symptoms should immediately get themselves checked, as the city is well equipped to deal with the pandemic,’ added Perumal.

On Friday, two deaths were reported from Bangalore, one came from Bijapur.

My Comment

Why? I have no idea. More international travelers is one reason and a plausible one. But I confess  I couldn’t help thinking about this piece I wrote in 2005, “Terror Hits Bangalore.”

One result of swine flu scare-mongering  will be a shift of money to influenza research – hitherto absent in India. That means funding for drug trials. I wonder who the lucky drug companies are that will benefit?

The two states hit hardest are Karnataka (where Bangalore is) and Maharashtra (where Bombay is). Those are also the states that are the destinations of most foreign travelers and where India’s IT business and stock market are located. Bangalore is the home of a booming biotech business. And a locus of the anti-globalization movement as well. Just thinking out a loud…

Deaths so far are a hundred or less. That’s in a country of roughly a billion and a quarter where tens of thousands die from traffic accidents (300 a day or around 100,000 a year) and from water-borne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and jaundice. Hundred of farmers are committing suicide. None of that has qualified for the term pandemic….OR for the accompanying switch in research funding..

Here’s some information on malaria in India in 2008:

“While the official figures state that in 2008 India had 1.5 million malaria cases, resulting in 924 deaths, the real number of deaths is higher by several orders of magnitude.

“These numbers are a joke,” said Sunil Kaul, a doctor who works for a volunteer organization called the Ant that treats villagers. “In Assam alone we had at least 1,500 deaths last year.”

The real number of malaria-related deaths in India was closer to 40,000 in 2008, according to various non-governmental sources and some government officials who didn’t want to be named.”

Under-reporting and lack of knowledge about the disease are two of the main obstacles in retarding the spread of malaria. But interestingly, it’s also international organizations like WHO that obstruct progress in many ways:

“These problems are further complicated by foreign agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which — under the influence of global lending agencies like the World Bank and big pharmaceutical companies — have pushed India to adopt prevention methods that don’t suit the local conditions and to initiate huge, ill-considered projects rather than targeted ones. ….”

More here at The Global Post.


The Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria

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A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:

The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:

1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology, Obama’s “science czar”)

2. Eric Lander, (head of the Broad Institute, MIT)

3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)

A little digging fills in the details.

1. Holdren:

Holdren isn’t just any old bureaucrat. He’s a climate change expert who holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of Ketchup king, John Heinz)

The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support for nuclear technology that Holdren believes is needed for those policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.

Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of a huge PR effort over the last 15-20 years, largely stemming from the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most influential outfit you never heard of. This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to nuclear energy.

There’s more. As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.” In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a textbook (“Ecoscience”) in which they discussed “a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls…..”

Check out this site for some truly mind-boggling quotes:

Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

Bill Blum on the Obama Cult

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Bill Blum at the Anti-Empire Report:
“The praise heaped on President Obama for his speech to the Muslim world by writers on the left, both here and abroad, is disturbing. I’m referring to people who I think should know better, who’ve taken Politics 101 and can easily see the many hypocrisies in Obama’s talk, as well as the distortions, omissions, and contradictions, the true but irrelevant observations, the lies, the optimistic words without any matching action, the insensitivities to victims.  Yet, these commentators are impressed, in many cases very impressed.  In the world at large, this frame of mind borders on a cult.
In such cases one must look beyond the intellect and examine the emotional appeal.  We all know the world is in big trouble — Three Great Problems: universal, incessant violence; financial crisis provoking economic suffering; environmental degradation.  In all three areas the United States bears more culpability than any other single country. Who better to satisfy humankind’s craving for relief than a new American president who, it appears, understands the problems; admits, to one degree or another, his country’s responsibility for them; and “eloquently” expresses his desire and determination to change US policies and embolden the rest of the world to follow his inspiring example.  Is it any wonder that it’s 1964, the Beatles have just arrived in New York, and everyone is a teenage girl?
I could go through the talk Obama gave in Cairo and point out line by line the hypocrisies, the mere platitudes, the plain nonsense, and the rest.  (“I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.” — No mention of it being outsourced, probably to the very country he was speaking in, amongst others. … “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.” — But this is precisely what the United States is trying to do concerning Iran and North Korea.) But since others have been pointing out these lies very well I’d like to try something else in dealing with the problem — the problem of well-educated people, as well as the not so well-educated, being so moved by a career politician saying “all the right things” to give food for hope to billions starving for it, and swallowing it all as if they had been born yesterday.  I’d like to take them back to another charismatic figure, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German people two years and four months after becoming Chancellor, addressing a Germany still reeling with humiliation from its being The Defeated Nation in the World War, with huge losses of its young men, still being punished by the world for its militarism, suffering mass unemployment and other effects of the great depression.  Here are excerpts from the speech of May 21, 1935.  Imagine how it fed the hungry German people.
———————
HITLER:
“….. Germany, too, has a democratic Constitution.  Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war.  None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people……….
The German Reich, especially the present German Government, has no other wish except to live on terms of peace and friendship with all the neighboring States. Germany has nothing to gain from a European war.  What we want is liberty and independence.  Because of these intentions of ours we are ready to negotiate non-aggression pacts with our neighbor States.
Germany has neither the wish nor the intention to mix in internal Austrian affairs, or to annex or to unite with Austria.
The German Government is ready in principle to conclude non-aggression pacts with its individual neighbor States and to supplement those provisions which aim at isolating belligerents and localizing war areas…….
Germany is ready to participate actively in any efforts for drastic limitation of unrestricted arming. She sees the only possible way in a return to the principles of the old Geneva Red Cross convention. She believes, to begin with, only in the possibility of the gradual abolition and outlawing of fighting methods which are contrary to this convention, such as dum-dum bullets and other missiles which are a deadly menace to civilian women and children.
To abolish fighting places, but to leave the question of bombardment open, seems to us wrong and ineffective. But we believe it is possible to ban certain arms as contrary to international law and to outlaw those who use them. But this, too, can only be done gradually.  Therefore, gas and incendiary and explosive bombs outside of the battle area can be banned and the ban extended later to all bombing.  As long as bombing is free, a limitation of bombing planes is a doubtful proposition. But as soon as bombing is branded as barbarism, the building of bombing planes will automatically cease.
Just as the Red Cross stopped the killing of wounded and prisoners, it should be possible to stop the bombing of civilians……
The German Government is of the opinion that all attempts effectively to lessen tension between individual States through international agreements or agreements between several States are doomed to failure unless suitable measures are taken to prevent poisoning of public opinion on the part of irresponsible individuals in speech, writing, in the film and the theatre.…… [1]

— End of speech excerpts —

How many people in the world, including numerous highly educated Germans, reading or hearing that speech in 1935, doubted that Adolf Hitler was a sincere man of peace and an inspiring, visionary leader?

NOTES
[1] The entire speech can be found at: http://members.tripod.com/~Comicism/350521.html

Over a Million Refugees in Somalia

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In the news on Friday, May 22:

“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”

More at Relief Web.

Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.

My Comment

This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.

Financial Follies: Condo Builders Under Water

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In the news today, AP reports:

“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”

My Comment

Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.

Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that  “raised hopes.”

Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised  – black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.

I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to  Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.

If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.

And don’t tell me they added any real value.

In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene.  I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through.  Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline,  polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.

Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.

Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.

It just doesn’t get better than that….

Record Prices for Rarities at Auction Sales

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High prices at auctions are an indication that investors are avidly interested in high quality tangible assets which will hold onto their value and are ready to pay extraordinary prices for them even in this market. Two illustrations from the auctions houses:

In Namure in southern Belgium, on Sunday, demand for Tintin, the cartoon reporter, broke national and world sales records, AFP reports. Five hand-drawn pages by Herge raised 1, 172,000 euros (1.57 million dollars) a world record for Herge as well as a national record for cartoon strips books. Buyers came from all over Europe, the United States, Lebanon and China.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that at Sotheby’s semi-annual sale at Geneva, a virgin blue diamond straight from South Africa, weighing 7.03 carats, sold to any anonymous buyer on May 12, Tuesday, for a record 10.5 million Swiss francs ($9.49 million), including commission, the highest price paid per carat for any gemstone at auction and a new world record price for blue diamonds. The sale price without commission, a record, was $1,349,752, Sotheby’s said.