RT– Did you grow up hating Barbie, envious of the darling doll’s flawless features, palatial dream house, drop-top convertible and perfect (and plastic) boyfriend?
Now you have a whole new reason to abhor the iconic American effigy that has objectified women for half a century—she’s ruining the rainforest!
Activists at Greenpeace are launching an all-out war on the 11.5 inch-tall plaything, condemning the doll’s manufacturer, Mattel, for accelerating the deforestation of a South Asian haven for wildlife.
Greenpeace contests that Mattel Inc., the world’s largest toy company, packages Barbie and other children’s products in paper that has its root in Indonesian deforestation. Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), the company that provides the materials for Mattel packaging, has allegedly trashed the habitat for tigers, orangutans, tigers, leopards, elephants and other endangered species for two decades now. Now advocates are calling out the toy giant to change their ways.
The environmental activists are taking credit for a large banner that was unfurled over Mattel headquarters in El Segundo, California last week. The signage featured Barbie’s dapper boyfriend Ken projecting a frown and urging his gal pal: “Barbie: it’s over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.” A demonstration outside of the Mattel offices that day led to the arrest of ten protesters. A full-fledged attack on the manufacturer is now underway, as Greenpeace has taken to the Internet to blast the toy company.
ADBUSTERS– The unrest in the Middle
East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed
states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic
unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom
and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world
as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be
pleasant or easy.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead
ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate
consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless
war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding
to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending
it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed
system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they
embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of
members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate
change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra
that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the
unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a
seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The
corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless
mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the
inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the
one imploding in our faces – is ignored.
The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is
not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the
natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until
exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental
collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will
they get us at the same time?
Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue
to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish
stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are
destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources
are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and
deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the
globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large
quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually
asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the
ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of
unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of
masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.
We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although
the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant.
Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed.
Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists
employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are
the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income
of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to
12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40
million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living
in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced
from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank
repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the
financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in
wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the
United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to
its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and
public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was
not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the
formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of
inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of
expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate
it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the
legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda,
have been able to short-circuit the electorate.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of
participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada
offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the
cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented
into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who
are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the
Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can
make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic
Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in
an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are
always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing
little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.
It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good
healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public
education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most
polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most
citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the
centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two
opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The
viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is
actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or
Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face
value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go
back to the business of serving business.
Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and
democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done
what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart
popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the
middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The
brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made
possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again
been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap
consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly
stripped of power.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the
reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent
globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary
Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last
eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on
food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and
Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them
widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States
have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five
percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote
35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of
fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural
production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find
ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and
political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and
starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And
the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to
crush all forms of popular dissent.
The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our
social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children,
are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this
is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society,
denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by
corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate
state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it
will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs,
especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily
gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to
offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the
population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or
believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real
reform, nothing will change.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed
out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie.
It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that
most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It
does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any
democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working
class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations,
protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been
demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the
destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a
technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of
America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations
are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage
of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which
words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth.
Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God.
And those who dissent are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the
masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth
into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world
where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job
families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of
greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government
agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter
schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and
outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to
intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of
labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational
training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved
to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the
public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the
lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is
defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that
we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and
personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future
in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who
have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread
anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars
for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human
race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of
nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that
capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It
makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices
ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the
market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for
globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda
have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of
millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely
make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s
billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die
from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care.
We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see
the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its
inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is
locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle
to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in
the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These
elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will
continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem.
And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all
implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to
unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly
create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed
ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and
cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is
either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia.
It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA– Celebrated American author and poet Alice Walker will later this month be among 38 people aboard the Audacity of Hope, the ship sponsored by US Boat to Gaza as part of an international effort to break Israel’s maritime siege of Gaza.
In a conversation with Ali Abunimah, Walker speaks about her thoughts on the eve of the trip and the parallels between the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Freedom Rides during the US
Civil Rights movement when black and white Americans boarded interstate
buses together to break the laws requiring racial segregation. The
Freedom Riders were met with extreme violence — including bus burnings,
attempted lynchings, jail and torture.
Walker — who has authored more than thirty books, the best known of which is the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple
— also reflects on her recent visit to the occupied West Bank, the role
of dancing and joy in the struggle for freedom and the situation in the
United States. Her latest book, a memoir, is titled The Chicken Chronicles.
Ali Abunimah: How do you feel about going on the US Boat to Gaza? Are you excited, fearful? What are your thoughts at this time?
Alice Walker: I’m thoughtful. Because we’re told it
could be a quite dangerous journey. And so I am steeping myself in the
wisdom and the images and words of people who in my culture have
sustained us through dangerous journeys. Langston Hughes, Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King and Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer, Black Elk, Geronimo,
Crazy Horse, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Bob Marley. It’s good for
me to feel that I am surrounded at all times by the presence of all
these people who have understood American empire and who have stood
against it.
AA: You’ve made the connection with the Freedom Rides that happened fifty years ago, in 1961. Can you talk about that?
AW: Yes, it means that the
baton is being passed on to us of journeying to places in the world
where people need us and where our governments are not helpful and in
fact are destructive.
Just before my first year of college, the Freedom Riders came down to
the South; I was living in Georgia under intense segregation that white
supremacists and many black people assumed would last forever. They had
become extremely complacent after a hundred years of brutality and
subjugation of black people; and so when the Freedom Riders came down we
didn’t expect them to survive.
Just as we didn’t expect Martin Luther King Jr. to live as long as he
did. But we were very grateful because at least it assured us that
someone outside of our own community objected to the repression that we
endured every day and it meant a lot to us. It lifted our spirits, it
gave us courage, it gave us hope.
AA: I was reading about
the Freedom Riders recently and I was surprised by how little coverage
the anniversary got in some of our mainstream media. Maybe I shouldn’t
have been so surprised. But one of the things that struck me that I
learned was that the Kennedy administration at the time did not look
favorably on the Freedom Riders and said that they were being
provocative and that they should refrain from what they were doing. And
that just struck me as almost a parallel with what’s happening now.
AW: And I think that has
been our experience. The government has never said “Oh yes, go out and
protest.” It has never said that. It has always said, “we will not
support you and you shouldn’t do it and it’s wrong and it’s bad and it’s
not good for you.” But really that’s why you protest. You decide that
you know what you think is good for you and you go ahead and you do it.
AA: Some of the — let’s call them “Gaza freedom riders” — have been writing or planning to write to their members of Congress or to the State Department to inform them that they are planning to take this trip. Are you planning to do that or have you done that?
AW: I have written a letter to Senator Barbara Boxer [(D-CA)] and Senator Diane Feinstein [(D-CA)]
and Representative Barbara Lee who are my representatives to let them
know what’s going on and to ask their support and what protection they
can offer.
But I did that because I was asked to do it and it seems like a good
idea. But I can’t say that I feel that they will be all that effective. I
would like them to be but I think that at some point in all of these
ventures one realizes that you’re on your own and that this is something
that you feel you have to do because it’s a necessary work of the world
and it’s a way that our children can stop being tormented and deformed
by the brutality they see visited upon children just like themselves all
over the world.
GUARDIAN– At just after 10 o’clock on Friday morning Maha al-Qahtani swapped
places with her husband, Mohammed, and took the wheel of the family car.
For
the next 50 minutes, she drove through the Saudi capital, along the
six-lane King Fahd Road, through Cairo Square, down the upmarket Olaya
Street with its shopping malls, Starbucks, Apple store and boutiques.
“No
one tried to stop us. No one even looked,” the 39-year-old civil
servant said. “We drove past police cars but had no trouble.”
In
fact, the biggest problem for Qahtani was her husband sitting next to
her in the family Hummer. “He kept telling me to slow down or speed up.
He was very fussy,” she said.
This is Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world that bans women from driving motor vehicles.
Qahtani was part of a small but striking movement of women determined to do something about it.
The exact number of Saudi women who protested was unclear. It was certainly not a mass movement.
MEDIA ROOTS– Mickey Huff, Director of Project Censored, speaks at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, CA on May 19, 2011. He discusses different concepts of censorship and how the top down corporate media censors and manages news in the US. Mickey also speaks about the evolution and organizational mission of Project Censored and goes over some of the top stories from their 2011 book.
During the Q & A session Mickey comments on how 9/11 and election fraud are two subjects that are heavily censored among alternative and progressive media outlets.
RT– Did you grow up hating Barbie, envious of the darling doll’s flawless features, palatial dream house, drop-top convertible and perfect (and plastic) boyfriend?
ADBUSTERS
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
GUARDIAN