Why should I care about democracy?
Every year, 12 to 20 million people starve to death, mainly children and a disproportionate amount of women. Meanwhile, agribusiness corporations burn grain to keep its price down (supply and demand) while putting advertisements on CNN claiming that they're feeding the hungry masses. It is, without any exaggeration whatsoever, an annual holocaust. Unlike most Germans under their dictatorship, the interconnectedness of our political and economic systems make us all direct collaborators.
Civilization has two paths to destruction:
Mainstream media, politicians etc. either belittle these threats, offer pathetic band-aid solutions, or simply deny them - yet change is exponential. Unless some better approach is taken soon, we are clearly headed for disaster, either from mass slavery, catastrophic war, ecological collapse, or a descent into chaos and clan warfare, or perhaps all of these, and a few more.
These problems cannot be solved by authority - these problems were created and perpetuated by authority. Our worst enemy is ourselves.
If we could, at this time, shrink the Earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:
There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere (North and South) and 8 Africans.
70 would be non-white ; 30 white.
70 would be unable to read.
50 would suffer from malnutrition.
80 would live in sub-standard housing.
Only 1 would have a college education.
50% of the entire village would be the property of only 6 people.
All 6 would be citizens of the United States.
(Source: _Black World Today_)
"If we made an income pyramid out of children's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel tower, but almost all of us would be within one yard of the ground." - Paul Samuelson (_Economics_ p 84) This was as of 1976. In the last quarter century the gap between rich and poor has widened even farther.
Take a look around your house..."strip it of its furnature. Everything goes:beds, chairs, tables, television set, lamps. We will leave the family with a few old blankets, a kitchen table, a [one] wooden chair. Along with the bureas go the clothes. Eachmember of the family may keep his "wardrobe" his oldest suit or dress, a shirt or blouse. We will permit a pair of shoes for the head of the family, but none for the wife and children. We move to the kitchen. The appliances have already been taken out, so we turn to the cupboards...The [one] box of matches may stay, a small bag of flour, some sugar and salt. A few mouldy potatoes,already in the rubbish bin, must be hastily rescued, for they will provide much of tonight's meal. We will leave a handfull [literally] of onions, and a dish of dried beans. All the rest we take away: the meat, the fresh vegitables, the canned goods.
Now we have stripped the house: the bathroom has beendismantled, the running water shut off, the electric wires takenout. Next we must take away the house. The family can move to the toolshed...
Communications must go next. No more newspapers, magazines, books - not that they are missed, since we must take away our family's literacy as well. Instead, in our shantytown we will allow one radio...
Now government services must go. [Despite the lies of conservatives, poor countries are more capitalist] No more postmn, no more firemen. There is a school, but it is 3 miles away and consists of two classrooms...There are, of course, no hospitales or doctors nearby. The nearest clinic is 10 miles away and tended by a midwife. It can be reached by bicycle, provided that the family has a bicycle, which is unlikely...
Finally, money. We will allow our family a cash hoard of 2 pounds. This will prevent our breadwinner from experiencing the tragedy of an Iranian peasent who went blind because he could not raise the 1.5 pounds which he mistakenly thought he needed to recieve admission to a hospital where he could have been cured." -Robert L Heilbroner, (The great ascent: the struggle for economic development in our time p 33-36)
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"In NYC in 1990, when 2000 jobs were advertised in the sanitation department [isn't that your dream job?] At $23,000, 100,000 people applied. Two years later in Chicago, 7000 people showed up for 550 jobs at Stouffer's, a restaurant chain. In joliet, Ilinois, 2000 showed up at Commonwealth Edison at 4:30 AM [while conservatives claim unemployed people are lazy!] to apply for jobs that did not yet exist. In early 1997, 4000 people lined up for 700 jobs at the Roosevelt hotel in Manhattan. It was estimated that at the existing rate of job growth in New York, with 470,000 adults on welfare, it would take 24 years to absorb those thrown off the rolls". - Howard Zinn, The twentieth century: a people's history
For some brain-numbing statistical horror, here is a part of _Dirty Truths_ by Michael Parenti:
"..."I've had grown men wet this floor with tears, begging for a job. We have to pray with some to keep them from killing themselves. So many say they just want to die," says Charlie Tarrance, a director of a private social agency...
...The only thing that matches their [conservatives] love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it. To their ears the anguished cries of the dispossessed sound like the peevish whines of malcontents. They denounce as "bleeding hearts" those of us who criticize existing conditions, who show some concern for our fellow citizens...
Every year [In America alone]:
[add an extra zero for each decade]
27,000 Americans commit suicide. [Many deaths in other categories could be suicides]
5,000 attempt suicide; (some estimates are higher)
26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
23,000 are murdered. [Of course, these often are mistaken for other categories]
85,000 are wounded by firearms.
38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
13,000,000 are victims of violence crime (...assault, rape, burglary, larceny, arson [etc])
135,000 children take guns to school.
5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).
125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses;
53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20% of all eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage. 31,450,000 use marijuana;
3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.
37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.
2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system. 600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.
1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults.
150,000 children are reported missing.
50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids."
900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
5,000,000 workers are injured on the job;
150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.
14,000 are killed on the job;
100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
160,000 die from diabetes, mostly caused by our addiction to sugar
60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.
4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.
2,000 die in the US military [in peacetime!]
At present:
6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole;
2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons or under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes. African Americans constitute:
13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests,
55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences.
For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly;
10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large numbers among the poor
10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is [currently] on the rise
16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the "deinstitutionalized" are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome. 10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air we breathe.
40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically when economic conditions worsen.
1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.
1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease.
950,000 school children are treated with powerful mind control drugs for "hyperactivity" every year--with side effects like weight loss, growth retardation and acute psychosis.
4,000,000 children are growing up with unattended learning disabilities.
4,500,000+ children, or more than half of the 9,000,000 children on welfare, suffer from malnutrition. Many of these suffer brain damage caused by prenatal and infant malnourishment.
40,000,000 persons, or one of every four women and more than one of every ten men, are estimated to have been sexually molested as children, most often between the ages of 9 and 12, usually by close relatives or family acquaintances. Such abuse almost always extends into their early teens and is a part of their continual memory and not a product of memory retrieval in therapy.
7,000,000 to 12,000,000 are unemployed; numbers vary with the business cycle. Increasing numbers of the chronically unemployed show signs of stress and emotional depression.
6,000,000 are in "contingent" jobs, or jobs structured to last only temporarily. About 60% of these would prefer permanent employment.
15,000,000 or more are part-time or reduced-time "contract" workers who need full-time jobs and who work without benefits.
3,000,000 additional workers are unemployed but uncounted because their unemployment benefits have run out, or they never qualified for benefits, or they have given up looking for work, or they joined the armed forces because they were unable to find work. [a sort of indirect conscription!]
80,000,000 live on incomes estimated by the U.S. Department of Labor as below a "comfortable adequacy"; 35,000,000 of these live below the poverty level.
12,000,000 of those at poverty's rock bottom suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition. The majority of the people living at or below the poverty level experience hunger during some portion of the year.
2,000,000 or more are homeless, forced to live on the streets or in makeshift shelters. 160,000,000+ are members of households that are in debt, a sharp increase from the 100 million of less than a decade ago. A majority indicate they have borrowed money not for luxuries but for necessities. Mounting debts threaten a financial crack-up in more and more families."
[Strangely enough, all of this must have been well hidden when Columbus arrived...What are the variables? Race? Technology? Or socio-econmic systems?]
"...Furthermore, the above figures do not tell the whole story...In almost every category an unknown number of persons go unreported. For instance, the official tabulation of 35 million living in poverty is based on census data that undercount transients, homeless people, and those living in remote rural and crowded inner-city areas. Also, the designated poverty line is set at an unrealistically low income level and takes insufficient account of how inflation especially affects the basics of food, fuel, housing, and health care that consume such a disproportionate chunk of lower incomes. Some economists estimate that actually as many as 46 million live in conditions of acute economic want. Uncounted are the premature deaths from cancer caused by radioactive and other carcinogenic materials in the environment. Almost all cancer deaths are now thought to be from human-made causes.
Fatality figures do not include the people who are incapacitated and sickened from the one thousand potentially toxic additional chemicals that industry releases into the environment each year, and who die years later but still prematurely. At present there are at least 51,000 industrial toxic dump sites across the country that pose potentially serious health hazards to communities, farmlands, water tables, and livestock. One government study has concluded that the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are now perhaps the leading causes of death in the United States...
...it may be that automobile accidents are unavoidable in any society with millions of motor vehicles, but why have we become increasingly dependent on this costly, dangerous, and ecologically disastrous form of transportation? In transporting people, one railroad or subway car can do the work of fifty automobiles. Railroads consume a sixth of the energy used by trucks to transport goods.
These very efficiencies are what make railroads so undesirable to the oil and auto lobbies. For over a half-century, giant corporations like General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires bought up most of the nation's clean and safe electric streetcar networks, dismantled them, and cut back on all public transportation, thereby forcing people to rely more and more on private cars. The monorail in Japan, a commuter train that travels much faster than any train, has transported some three billion passengers without an injury or fatality. The big oil and auto companies in the U.S. have successfully blocked the construction of monorails here.
Birth deformities, for instance, are not just a quirk of nature, as the heartbroken parents of Love Canal or the thalidomide children can testify. Many such defects are caused by fast-buck companies that treat our environment like a septic tank. Unsafe products are another cause; there are hundreds of hair dyes, food additives, cosmetics, and medicines marketed for quick profits which have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and other illnesses.
The food industry, seeking to maximize profits, offers ever increasing amounts of highly processed, chemicalized, low-nutrition foods. Bombarded by junk-food advertising over the last thirty years, TV viewers, especially younger ones, have changed their eating habits dramatically. Per capita consumption of vegetables and fruits is down 20 to 25 per cent while consumption of cakes, pastry, soft drinks, and other snacks is up 70 to 80 per cent. According to a U.S. Senate report, the increased consumption of junk foods "may be as damaging to the nation's health as the widespread contagious diseases of the early part of the century." All this may start showing up on the actuarial charts when greater numbers of the younger junk-food generation move into middle age.
None of these figures include the unhappiness, bereavement, and longterm emotional wounds inflicted upon the many millions of loved ones, friends, and family members who are close to the victims."
"The decline over the last half-century has been due largely to the dramatic reduction in infant mortality and the containment of many contagious diseases, largely through improvement in public health standards - in short, nothing done by capitalism. Furthermore, years of direct action by working people, especially in the twentieth century, have brought better conditions [capitalism only improves things when it surrenders!] In other words, as bad as things are now, in earlier times some things were even worse. For example, about 14,000 persons are killed on the job annually, but in 1916 the toll was 35,000, with the labor force less than half what it is today...[yet]...the climb in life expectancy has leveled off to a barely perceptible crawl in recent years.
In addition, more and more middle-income peopler are suffering from acute stress, alcoholism, job insecurity, insufficient income, high rents, heavy mortgage payments, high taxes, and crushing educational and medical costs. And almost all of us eat the pesticide-ridden foods, breathe the chemicalized air, and risk drinking the toxic water and being exposed to the contaminating wastes of our increasingly chemicalized, putrefied environment. I say "almost all of us" because the favored few live on country estates, ranches, seashore mansions, and summer hideaways where the air is relatively fresh. And, like President Reagan, they eat only the freshest food and meat derived from organically fed steers that are kept free of chemical hormones--while telling the rest of us not to get hysterical about pesticides and herbicides and chemical additives..."
Now remember, this is ONLY AMERICA! How are the other 5 billion people faring?
"The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than in thirteen other countries. And in life expectancy, 20-year-old U.S. males rank thirty-sixth among the world's nations, and 20-year-old females are twenty-first. [Interpret this as you want to: remember that while you see the number of nations that are better than the US, far more are worse!]
Copyright _ 1996 Vida Communications and Michael Parenti. All Rights Reserved.
"It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon. You have 30% of the world unemployed, a huge amount of work that needs to be done just rebuilding the society alone. The people who are unemployed want to do the work, but the system is such a catastrophic failure that it cannot bring together idle hands and work. This is all hailed as a great success, and it is a great success -- for a very small sector of the population." --Noam Chomsky, _Globalization and Resistance-
12,000,000 die of starvation, malnutrition etc. (Source: World Hunger Year) other statistics are higher.
5,000 children die in Iraq as a result of the embargo (Source: Mother Jones)
Here we are, consuming as much as 20 third-world humans would. And here we are, telling THEM to use birth control. "Overpopulation" (Which for some reason doesn't apply to the wealthy crowds Dutch or Japanese people) is a result of poverty, not the cause of it - the poor cannot invest in anything other than babies - and to add insult to injury, children are considered property. In many places children are a status symbol - like a car or ring. The poor cannot afford these - or children, for that matter, yet they feel they must keep up in the property contest. What have us westerners done to remedy this disasterous situation? We send them advertising. More demand makes them work harder.
But according to a UN statistic, isn't child health getting better?
According to this particular statistic, (mentioned by the right-wing CATO think tank, whos use of lies, damn lies, and statistics is infamous) child poverty will end by the year 2043- though of course, the think tank didn't present the information that way!
Imagine, we could justify Jefferson's owning of slaves by saying that slavery will be outlawed in a few decades (I'm not sure what state Jefferson was from, but if he's from the south, I'll change my argument to the justification of slavery in 1820). And while we're at it, why not say that Hitler was fine and dandy because if he'd conquered the world, the holocaust would be over now? Come to think of it, Stalin's purges are over, so why not embrace Stalinism, invasion of Finland and all!
Could you put some of this in perspective?
Greatest killers of all time:
Direct refers to outright murder, whereas indirect refers to starvation-related economic deaths, but not other ecnomic-related deaths like suicide, crime, drugs, pollution, work accidents, unsafe products, war etc. Of course, with war included Nazism and Stalinism would be much higher. Stalinist generals carelessly let their troops be slaughtered, but it was Nazis that invaded in the first place. Hitler decided to murder the citizens of Leningrad, while Stalin appearently did little to save them.)
However, both of them are mere jaywalkers when compared to our "business as usual".
It is the responsibility of every human being to be as informed as possible on politics and economics, and to inform others. We must be as politically active as possible, we must be scientific, educated, and altruistic. To fail is to have a hell's worth of atrocity reddening our hands.