AL JAZEERA– The US government has announced a major new aid
package for Pakistan, with hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent
on projects in Pakistan’s energy and water sectors. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, announced the $500m
package at the start of a day-long “strategic dialogue” in Islamabad
between American and Pakistani officials.
Monday’s meeting is the second such dialogue
between the US and Pakistan.
The money – part of a five-year, $7.5bn aid package approved by the US congress last year – will support a total of 26 projects.
The first, held in Washington in March, ended with promises of better co-operation
between the two countries. Clinton said on Monday that the meetings
would help to end the “trust deficit” between the two countries.
“We know that there is a perception held by too
many Pakistanis that America’s commitment to them begins and ends with
security,” Clinton said. “But security is just one piece of this vital
partnership.”
Electricity is one of Pakistan’s top priorities. A large chunk of the
new US aid will be spent on new power supplies, including the Gomal Zam
dam in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, and several
hydroelectric projects in Balochistan province.
YESTERDAY– Americans constantly obsess over the latest diet fads and skinny trends, yet we’re one of the unhealthiest nations on the planet. According to the US Surgeon General, obesity plagues more than 30% of Americans- killing over 300,000 people every year.
Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are also on the rise, with one of the main culprits in this disturbing trend being sugar. Almost 20% of our daily calorie intake comes from refined white sugar, working out to about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year.
Consumed in small amounts, sugar actually helps your metabolism and supplies a quick boost of energy. In excess, sugar adds nothing but empty calories to your body. Many people have recognized this and now opt for sugar free alternatives, allowing for the rise of the artificial sugar industry.
The most prevalent artificial sugar in our food supply today is called aspartame, which is also recognized as Equal or NutraSweet. Aspartame has made its way into more than 6,000 products including almost all diet sodas, chewing gum, frozen desserts, yogurt, and even vitamins and cough drops. 200 hundred times sweeter than sugar, aspartame is a combination of two amino acids: aspartic acid and phenylalanine.
Although aspartame is affirmed as safe by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), they receive more complaints about adverse reactions to aspartame than any other food ingredient in the agency’s history.
At least 30% of the US population is sensitive to even moderate doses of aspartame and may suffer symptoms such as severe headaches, dizziness, attention difficulties, memory loss, throat swelling, and seizures. Long term effects include blood sugar problems, insomnia, diabetes, ovarian cancer, and brain tumors.
One 2002 study from Kings College found that the more NutraSweet is consumed, the more likely it is for brain tumors to develop. A Washington University School of Medicine report from 1996 found aspartame to be the “most likely suspect” for the striking increase in malignant brain cancer in the years following its approval. Disturbingly, the FDA ended up approving this chemical posion as unequivocally safe for human consumption despite alarming evidence to the contrary.
Aspartame was first patented in the mid 60s by drug company G.D. Searle, which was later bought by Monsanto and then spun off into the NutraSweet Co. Initially, the FDA approved aspartame, but after finding glaring inconsistencies in Searle’s testing data, the administration revoked its approval. The FDA commissioner at the time declared the tests “at best… sloppy,” saying that they revealed a “pattern of misconduct which compromises the scientific integrity of the studies.”
Dr. Erik Millstone, food safety expert at the University of Sussex, details how flawed Searle’s tests really were. For example, rats had died during the course of an experiment for reasons that were never explored, and tumors that appeared in the rats during the study were simply “cut out and discarded.” According to Dr. Millstone, the tests were so inconsistent that there is no way to be sure of aspartame’s safety.
The flurry of debate about Searle’s tests incited the FDA to establish a Public Board of Inquiry, comprised of independent scientists to rule on safety issues surrounding aspartame. In 1980, the Public Board of Inquiry concluded that NutraSweet should not be approved, pending further investigations of brain tumors in animals. Searle then sued the FDA for retracting its approval of the product.
When Ronald Reagan became President the following year, his transitional team included Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of Searle, the company that manufactured aspartame. Reagan then handpicked Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to be the new FDA Commissioner. In one of his first official acts, Hayes overruled the Public Board of Inquiry’s recommendations and authorized aspartame in dry foods and carbonated beverages.
In 1983, aspartame quickly flooded the market despite urges by the National Soft Drink Association to delay its approval for carbonated beverages because of its instability in liquid form. When liquid aspartame reaches temperatures above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat breaks down known toxins, and side effects become worsened. There is an enzyme that converts the methyl alcohol into toxic formaldehyde in both the human brain and breast, causing symptoms that mimic multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. Even in low doses, aspartame can damage the brain’s memory proteins.
FDA commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes ended up leaving the FDA under allegations of impropriety and took a position with Burson-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and G.D. Searle, revealing his blatant ties with aspartame’s manufacturer.
Even in the face of its sordid past, weight-conscious Americans will still likely opt for products containing aspartame because it’s marketed as a weight loss aid. Ironically, studies have shown that it actually increases appetite and sugar intake because the empty sweetness from artificial sugars makes your body expect food and you end up craving more.
Recently, many people are jumping on the sucralose, or Splenda, bandwagon. Splenda is a competing artificial sugar that claims it is made from “real sugar.” This is true- to an extent. Sucralose is produced by adding three chlorine atoms to a sugar molecule. The FDA maintains the position that your body doesn’t actually digest the chlorine, but studies from Japan have shown that your body can digest up to 27% of it. Other potential effects of sucralose consumption include cancer, limb paralysis, infertility and breathing difficulties.
You are probably wondering what your options are once you remove refined white sugar, aspartame, and sucralose from your diet. The good news is that there are natural and healthier options. Honey and agave are two natural sweeteners that can be found in any local supermarket.
However, if you are still looking to cut calories then Stevia is the way to go. Stevia is a sweet herb that has been used as a natural sweetener in South America for the past 1500 years. It is non caloric and is 25 times sweeter than sugar. Tests have shown that Stevia intake actually helps regulate blood sugar, inhibit tooth decay, aid mental alertness, improve digestion, and users of Stevia even report less desire to smoke tobacco and ingest alcohol! Today, Stevia is finally on the market after a decade long FDA ban due Aspartame’s heavy lobbying influence.
Here is a an investigatory video report I did about artificial sugars.
When people talk
about human rights, freedom inevitably dominates the conversation.
Freedom from being restrained and beaten is a human right. Freedom from
toiling under another without just compensation is a human right. So,
too, is freedom from being held arbitrarily and indefinitely.
Human
empathy makes those rights concrete. Sympathy allows us to understand
why it’s important to be safe from beatings and slavery. Yet, there’s
another kind of human right which is not understood as well, but is just
as important.
In Burma, journalists
face death for exposing the cruelty of the military junta, and
pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains under a decades-long house
arrest. In Sri Lanka, a news editor is assassinated and reporters
receive death threats for uncovering war crimes. A young blogger in
Egypt, known for revealing police corruption, is
dragged out of an internet café and beaten to death. Iran holds
47 journalists in prisons, while it airs coerced
confessions daily on state television. At last count, 136 journalists remain in
jail across the globe. These actions block the flow of information
and ideas and constitute a desecration of human rights.
Problems
aren’t limited to the East. In the West, organizations can’t purchase equal
time on the ostensibly public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to
air messages that challenge consumerism. Front-groups for major
corporations manufacture propaganda to tilt elections. Media barons
threaten to dismantle the beleaguered media system in the United States,
cutting staff from already bare-bones newsrooms, pursuing
maximum profit at the expense of public awareness. Public media is woefully
underfunded and must routinely “pass the hat” to keep the lights
on. And amidst a communications revolution, a handful of
telecommunications giants plot
to limit people’s access to information based on the contents of
their wallets.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most
widely translated document in the world and is the basis for
international law on human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, who spearheaded
the creation of the Declaration and later chaired the UN Human Rights
Commission, in a speech following the vote that adopted the Declaration,
said: “This
declaration may well become the international Magna Carta of all men
everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an
event comparable to the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of
the Man by the French people in 1789, the adoption of the Bill of
Rights by the people of the United States, and the adoption of
comparable declarations at different times in other countries.”
There
are 30 articles that make up the Declaration. The first two articles
form the basis for the rest, that human rights are equal to all people
because of a shared humanity, and that these rights are endowed from
birth. The Declaration has articles for the former kind of rights,
relating to immediate, physical safety. It also has articles about the
latter: the rights necessary for a fully-evolved, long-term,
humanitarian civilization. Article 19 is of the second stripe; it
recognizes the freedom to impart and obtain information as a necessary
component of civilized life.
In his 2007 book “Communication
Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media,” media
critical theorist Dr. Robert McChesney declared the world was entering a
critical juncture, or “a period in which the old institutions and mores
are collapsing,” a time in which the decisions we make “establish
institutions and rules that likely put us on a course that will be
difficult to change in any fundamental sense for decades or
generations.”
This current communications revolution, brought
about by a combination of technology that undermines existing systems, a
crisis in journalism, economic upheaval and political strife, has
tremendous stakes. “If fifteen or twenty years from now, the result of
the communication revolution is merely technological wizardry or a
testament to enhanced market opportunities for the world’s most
privileged people, it will have been a failure,” McChesney wrote. “If in
a generation social inequality has not begun to be dramatically
reversed, democratic institutions are not considerably more vibrant,
militarism and chauvinism have not been dealt a mighty blow, the
environment has not been significantly repaired, then we will have had
an unfulfilled communication revolution.”
Given that the right to
communicate is inseparable from other human rights, and that the
success of our critical moment hinges on the ability to communicate, a
communication revolution requires a human rights revolution. That’s
where CommunicationIsYourRight.org comes in.
CommunicationIsYourRight.org
is a new initiative to call attention to Article 19, and educate the
public about the importance of the right to communicate. It is an
active, online petition to lobby the UN to bring the right to
communicate to a debate. It is an initiative to pursue issues concerning
the right to communicate, and to bring legislators, activists and
citizens together to enact policies that strengthen the right to
communicate. It also is a forum where people can exercise their right to
communicate, by submitting all kinds of media, giving them an
opportunity to express their perspective.
The freedom to
communicate means the freedom to be part of a global conversation. It
means giving the disenfranchised, the censored and the ignored equal
footing in this ongoing communication revolution. It means giving all
sides of an issue an even chance in the ecosystem of ideas. It means
that even if all other human rights are stripped, the oppressed have the
opportunity to declare “I am here, I am human.” Most importantly, it
means giving people a role in the things that matter to them.
MEDIA ROOTS- While at UC Berkeley I took two anthropology courses taught by Dr. Laura Nader, which transformed my perspective and approach to the social and political issues that I intended to pursue as a journalist. In these classes I learned not only about studying other cultures, but about the vital importance of critically examining my own society, culture, beliefs and perceptions.
I was taught how to question the basic assumptions of my own, and of those around me. For instance, in the United States, the idea of “progress” commonly means expanding wealth, technological advancement, political power and perpetual abundance of good. But how are such ideas created and by whom? What are the implications of the thoughts and beliefs we hold? Are there alternatives, and do we seriously consider them?
Dr. Laura Nader, one of the world’s leading anthropologist of law, founded the study of controlling processes, or the mechanisms by which ideas become unquestioned assumptions or institutionalized belief systems that influence and persuade people to participate in their own manipulation. It is a field of analysis that spans across disciplines into every arena of life from the interpersonal realm to the professional, from business, to science and the state. The processes of control include, but are not limited to, law and conceptions of order, language, war, political power, trade, coercive persuasion, sex, and gender roles.
Studying methods of cultural control taught me that a journalist’s most important job is to make the connections that uncover these processes at play in our societies. Every day our lives are shaped by mechanisms of influence and control that we are often unaware of because the mainstream media fails to provide us with the information we, as citizens, need to adequately counteract such forces. Dr. Nader wrote that in the United States “a strong belief in free will often impedes understanding of how lives are changed by cultural practices that are external to the individual and intended to modify individual behavior, for example, through political propaganda or economic marketing.”
The mass media is society’s source of information and is a central means by which these behavior and perception altering practices permeate our lives. The media produces the material that shapes our judgments, actions, and expectations. This is illustrated in the use of the media to carry out psychological operations on the US population to boost support for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; or as the forum for relentless advertising, even to young children, that promotes a culture based in the perception of ever expanding ‘needs,’ and the binds of debt.
Identifying such mechanisms of influence and control requires taking an analytical approach to the world around you, an approach that is ethnographic, historical and reflexive. Ethnography reveals the embedded customs that make control difficult to detect. For instance, our culture’s reverence for science leads many to defer to scientific experts as the ultimate bearers of truth without considering the political context or funding of such scientific work. History is important because it connects us with the past that shapes and gives context to our present experience. The political, economic and social structures of today’s society cannot be productively discussed without first understanding the history of industrialization and the shift from regional to corporate capitalism. Finally, the reflexive approach enables us to be aware of culturally dominant or ideologically tainted, perceptions and analysis. For example, our cultural views on breast implants provide the illusion of free choice but are instead the product of indoctrination to a specific beauty ideology and social imperative.
Various independent and alternative media sources offer a diversity of information and viewpoints that illuminate critical ethnographic and historical reflections on society. Conversely, the corporate controlled mainstream media does not provide enough context to allow for the development of independent, free thought. When General Electric, the owner of NBC Universal, is also the producer of weapons and aircraft engines for military contracts, the danger is that the news coverage on its networks will simplify, give little attention to, or omit information critical of war efforts. The end result is that people are inhibited from thinking critically. Tom Fenton, former CBS correspondent, highlights the media’s control over public thought in his admission that,
“Americans are too broadly under-informed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world… Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don’t have to devote more airtime or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations… Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don’t believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees.”
Good journalism will not shy away from such complexity but work to understand it. The simplified information the mainstream media provides incessantly espouses the same set of basic principles as unquestionable truth; principles that further the status quo of a shattered society by promoting relentless excessive consumption, war as means to peace, and perpetual fear of the ‘other,’ whether its Arabs, immigrants or manifestations of “socialism.” This dogmatism, or adherence to a set of principals deemed by some authority as incontrovertibly true, is essential for any journalist or engaged citizen to reject. Dogmatism reinforces control by refusing to question its own basic assumptions and how they were created. There is no room for critical analysis, self-reflection or common sense in dogma’s narrow scope.
Refraining from dogmatism’s black and white framing of the world necessitates a humble recognition of the fact that the world is a complex set of systems in which different people operate daily bringing forward their own layered and diverse experience. Our knowledge and understanding of the world is always evolving whether about social issues, science, economics or politics. Believing that one set of principles holds the claim to ultimate truth is foolish and restricts a productive, open and thoughtful exchange of facts and ideas.
Bias, on the other hand, is essential to be aware of though impossible to fully eliminate because the human mind develops values and opinions that form the lenses through which we see the world. To minimize heavily biased reporting, journalists must carefully choose the language and tone they use to reiterate fact because language holds the tremendous power to influence. It is at the core of all manipulation. Just as words trigger thoughts and emotions, they can shape lasting impressions and judgments. As journalists we must be real and clear about the difference between a fact and our interpretation of it. Furthermore, we must be willing to ask questions and seek out information that challenges our bias, rather than avoiding or ignoring it.
Citizens and consumers are not passive actors. They must take into account who produces our knowledge, how, and to what benefit or interest. The few media corporations that control what is broadcast over the airwaves share many of the same members of their board of directors with a variety of other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies. This is significant because the role of a board member is to act in the best interest of the company it directs, setting its policies and objectives. They are, after all, held responsible for the company’s performance.
With this conflict of interest in mind, the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has appropriately asked, would someone sitting on a media company’s board object to coverage that is damaging to another company that board member directs? As the highest management authority in a corporation, it is possible that the influential presence of specific board members would likely suffice to make media executives think twice about covering certain stories or reporting them honestly.
This is one example of important connections that the mainstream media doesn’t illuminate for its audience resulting in widespread ignorance among well-intentioned people of how the consolidation of the mainstream media greatly restricts, and otherwise discourages, independent and freethinking citizens. Only by seeking information from various sources, independent and mainstream, can the power dynamics and cultural controls in society be detected. Without taking an analytical approach emphasizing history and reflecting on the embedded customs and assumptions of society, we remain obliviously lost and misdirected due to manipulation by hidden patterns of control. Only by illuminating the different interests at play in the present, can we begin to see the full range of possibilities for the future.
Quite simply — information empowers. People will take different action based on what knowledge is made available to them. The media is a well-recognized mechanism of power and yet control through corporate media is a normalized, subtle means of control. Luckily, this is a pattern of control that we have the power to break from. As Noam Chomsky has said, it doesn’t require extraordinary skill or understanding to break the system of illusions and deceptions that conceals our understanding of reality. All it takes is the willingness to apply skepticism and the analytical skills that almost all people have.
Independent and alternative media sources provide an important break from the profit driven coverage of the mainstream media by giving voice to the interests and concerns of common people. These sources don’t hold the ultimate truth but many do add to the critical analysis of society required for understanding and reclaiming the mechanisms of control that shape our lives and the possibilities for our future. But the responsibility is not on journalists alone. Just as we must be honest in our bias and illuminate the connections and complexities of the world, it is the reciprocal job of citizens and consumers to critically think and engage with the world around them.
“Every man carries with him a world which is composed of all that he has
seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is
traveling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.”
YESTERDAY
MEDIA ROOTS- While at UC Berkeley I took two anthropology courses taught by Dr. Laura Nader, which transformed my perspective and approach to the social and political issues that I intended to pursue as a journalist. In these classes I learned not only about studying other cultures, but about the vital importance of critically examining my own society, culture, beliefs and perceptions. 