2009 will be marked as the year that those hopeful for change, those who believed in the natural order of things, learned a valuable lesson.  It is a year in which Americans admonished but ultimately supported millionaire auto executives who flew in private jets to Washington DC to beg for public funds to bail out their enterprises;  a year in which executives from wireless carriers whined that people were overusing their services;  a year in which the music industry continued to sue people who loved their product so much they wanted to share it with others;  a year in which we learned two equally unfortunate definitions for the term “teabagger“;  a year in which banks and insurers boldly awarded executives millions of dollars in performance bonuses after taking billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts;  a year in which a sitting US President running two foreign wars was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the eve of announcing another surge of troops, this time into Afghanistan;  a year in which the hax0rz of 4chan demonstrated the capacity for greater investigative depth than the declining ranks of real journalists;  a year in which 1,200 limousines and more than 140 private planes converged on the city of Copenhagen for discussions, but no conclusions, on mitigating climate change.  In short, in the immortal words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, it was a year in which the bastards won.

It is difficult to look back on 2009 and remain hopeful.  In fact, according to a recent Pew study it is difficult for many of us to look back on the first 10 years of our new millenium and find much cause for optimism at all:

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Much of this negativity must surely stem from the growing realization that in modernizing societies, wealth is being redistributed from the middle class to the rich in an increasingly open manner — and as a result, the hypocrises of the rich seem less and less offensive and uncommon. In China, where the UN recently warned that the gap between rich and poor is wider now than in the pre-Maoist era, resentment is growing according to a recent study published in the China Daily.  America and much of the rest of the West are not far behind this curve.

This level of wealth redistribution actually threatens long-term economic development, and democratists have long feared the rich as a corrupting force.  As he observed the growing influence of what was at that time the nation’s growing industrial-military complex at the close of the US Civil War, Abe Lincoln wrote:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
— U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

‘Money power’ is a Euphemism for the rich, specifically large corporations, which began to rise at the end of the Civil War and which flowered until their total collapse in the late 1920s, leading to the Great Depression.  Only a government willing to step in and underwrite the entire economy of the state was able to get the world economy back on its feet in the 1930s.  In the meantime, oil barons had fully hooked the Western world on their product in the form of cheap plastics, agribusiness, and transportation –an era which has lasted more than 100 years.  This legacy continues today, propped up by assertions like Peak Oil and maintained in constant crisis by wars and oppressive totalitarian regimes at home and abroad.

The point of which is to say that 2009 was more than just a lost opportunity for change.  “Change Theatre” events such as Copenhagen, Nobel Week, and countless Senate hearings and Royal Commissions nurture our growing apathy toward the decline of modern society instead of angering us — a condition one can only describe as a massive outbreak of “Stockholm Syndrome“.  In the meantime we seem to have ceded our will to power in favour of consumption.

From The Economist: 2010 could be a year that sparks unrest.

Yet still, like the shimmying flame of a candle in a hurricane, optimism lingers.  Much of this hope is embodied in the Internet, and its general ability to democratize speech.  Yet this, too, was under attack in 2009.  There are three mechanisms by which the Internet’s ability to sow disruption of the status quo are being challenged as the year turns:

1. Free Speech as Defamation
   In an obscure, tawdry case that none of us should have cared about, supposed model Liskula Cohen sued Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger, who turned out to be an acquaintance named Rosemary Port.  Ms. Port had set up a blog via Blogger.com to post some embarassing photos of Mrs. Cohen and accused her of being a “skank“.  Google attempted to defend the order to unmask Port, as did Port’s lawyer, however the judge ruled that the blog was worthy of a libel suit and ordered google to reveal her identity.  Fortunately for the rest of the internet, Cohen did not proceed with a defamation suit after unmasking her accuser, however this was the first parry in a long battle and has set a dangerous precedent for those who might otherwise speak the truth when shielded by anonymity.
2. Free Speech as Copyright Infringement
   In April 2009, Warner Music issued a DMCA Takedown notice to notable free speech activist, former Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, and founder of the Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig after he used one of their songs in a presentation.  This particular takedown challenges the concept of “Fair Use”, and for certain Larry will have a strong case; however not so for Britons accused of copyright infringement should that country’s “Digital Economy” bill pass into law.  The bill proposes, among other things, that alleged infringers not even be subjected to legal process from their accusers — instead they would just be disconnected from the internet after three “strikes”.  Similar proposals are being made by RIAA-backed lawmakers around the globe, including in France, the US, and Canada.  Just as the DMCA has been abused by Scientologists, among others, to squelch free speech, so too will laws such as Digital Economy.
3. Gaming Google
   As the algorithms which drive Google’s ranking of search results are better understood, they are increasingly gamed by those with commercial interests to advance or protect.  This makes it tougher for individuals to get attention amid a sea of MegaCorps, however this is one area where we made progress in 2009.  First, Microsoft and others have launched serious challenges to Google’s domination of Search — as these grow this means it’s no longer possible to dominate search rankings on all engines at once.  Second, Google this year redoubled its efforts to stay ahead of so-called SEO mavens and chose to even further favour content from blogs and from services like Twitter.

Finally, as the year drew to a close we were treated to our last piece of Security Theatre courtesy of would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, despite being on a list of more than 550,000 known or suspected terrorists, boarded a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam and tried to blow it up by lighting his underwear on fire.  The real terror came from the United States TSA, whose major acheievements for 2009 seem to have been the disposal of thousands of gallons of hair care products confiscated at airport terminals and, of course, the posting of its entire operations manual online in-the-clear.  In the wake of the underwear-bombing attempt, the TSA brought new restrictions into place which were cunningly concealed from passengers and deliberately inconsistent between flights, just to ensure that the only remaining people willing to put up with the heinous inconvenience of flying commercially will be the terrorists themselves.

Which leads us to contemplating the ultimate hypocrisy of all.  As Benjamin Franklin once said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

For the coming decade, let us fight vigorously against hypocrisy and oppression.  Let us hold accountable those who betray our wishes and their own words.  Let us be emboldened against scoundrels, pirates, and criminals of all kinds.  Let us balance the special interests with the will of the majority.  Let us embrace dissent as a form of patriotism and citizenhood of the world.  Most of all, let us reverse the damage that our perversions of democracy and ideology of all kinds have wrought on our nations by addressing critical shortfalls in education and social well-being.

Indeed it was a year in which we not only rewarded, but in fact we celebrated, hypocrisy.  Let us ensure that we neither celebrate, nor tolerate, hypocrisy in any form in 2010 and beyond.

Fast food in the cradle of civilisation

We need to understand what we will really be fighting for in Iraq

Jonathan Glancey Friday December 13, 2002 The Guardian

And it’s one, two, three What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn – Next stop is Vietnam

Remember Vietnam? More than two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died. Country Joe McDonald was a war veteran. He first sang the I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag in 1965:

And it’s five, six, seven Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain’t no time to wonder why Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

It was innocent Vietnamese villagers, though, who died at My Lai on March 16 1968. Led by Lieutenant William Calley, “Charlie Company”, a unit of the US Eleventh Light Infantry, massacred 500 unarmed villagers. My Lai was a turning point in the uncalled-for US invasion. How, Americans began to ask, could the US have God and “Charlie Company” on its side? In what ways was “Charlie Patrol”, President Johnson and the US morally superior to the Vietcong, Ho Chi Minh and an ancient Far Eastern civilisation? Even if it were worth fighting to keep communism and its weapons of mass destruction at bay by blasting civilians with napalm, what positive message was Uncle Sam preaching? “Men who take up arms against one another in public,” said Abraham Lincoln – quoted in Lt Calley’s trial – to Union troops during the US civil war, “do not cease on this account to be moral human beings, responsible to one another and to God.”

With the experience of Vietnam behind them, what is the moral impulse driving George Bush and Tony Blair to war in Iraq? If Washington and Westminster know what they are fighting against – Saddam Hussein and his “weapons of mass destruction” – what are they fighting for? Is there more to it than installing an oily new regime in Baghdad subservient to Sheriff Bush? Or a military administration led by Tommy Franks, a general who looks as if he has walked straight off the set of Dr Strangelove?

What can our civilisation offer this ancient land, still free of the excesses of US consumer culture, beyond “regime change”? Will we help invest in public hospitals on the one hand, and archaeology on the other, or in lucrative oil extraction and fast-food joints? How do we value this cradle of our own civilisation, its history, peoples, antiquities? Do we mean to harm Iraqi civilians who have suffered quite enough over the past 11 years, but have no way of publicly expressing their concerns? How are they meant to trust Washington or Westminster when our support has never been certain?

During the second world war, Britain had no doubts about its enemy: Hitler, Nazism and governments which believed themselves to be above international the law. But we also had an intelligent view of what we were about. The war developed a moral and positive, as well as a military and destructive, purpose. Politicians who put John Ruskin, Robert Tressel and the Bible rather than Harry Potter at the top of their reading lists, pointed the way towards a well-meant New Jerusalem, a decent, democratic society, free from poverty, TB, rickets and public services run in the interests of private gain.

This was a very different country from today’s New Britain, a land where politicians speak the language of US business schools, where our homes and public services are commodities, and greed a virtue. Before we take a wrathful, Old Testament God – nurtured at the time of Abraham in what is now Iraq – on a trip with us by B-52 and Tornado to smite Saddam and citizenry, we owe it to ourselves to state, on the international stage, what we truly believe today.

Is our creed more than a confusion of cheap energy, discriminatory education, junk food, shopping malls, cynical housing, privatised public services, property deals, celebrity culture, the machinations of multinational corporations, leisurewear, chic pornography, the right to bear arms, and a deep-seated fear of the Saracen bogeyman handed down in popular legend, and half-baked government dossiers, from the crusades? Most decent British and American citizens, not loath to protest against unrighteous war nor to fight for a just cause, want and deserve better than this. We need to know what we are fighting for, and to give more than a damn.

Of course we should be on our guard. Western civilisation is under attack by angry people around the globe. We need to present the positive aspects of our culture, not its crass, bloated, knee-jerk side, nor the less-than-secret craving of certain US and British politicians for a “good” bloody war.

On February 18 1229, Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor, achieved the return of Christian access to Jerusalem. He did this by negotiation with the Sultan, Al-Kamil. Frederick was condemned by the Pope. A peaceful crusade against the evil Ayyubid empire? His holiness didn’t give a damn. What he wanted was infidel blood.

jonathan.glancey [at] guardian.co [dot] uk

———–

This brought to my mind three points:

– Given the statistically significant percentage of American Presidents that have been shot at while in office, isn’t this alone an argument for gun control? – Given that of the three countries (Canada, Mexico, and Japan) that have attacked American soil, two have done so successfully; could one not assume that the “right to bear arms” as a national defense policy has failed? – Given that the US Civil War resulted in 600,000 Americans dying (more American deaths than World War I and World War II combined) isn’t it readily evident that perhaps American society isn’t quite stable enough to handle the widespread propagation of firearms?

-Ian.

>Delivered-To: fork [at] kragen.dnaco [dot] net
>Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 09:16:52 -0800 (PST)
>From: Tom Whore
>To: “Fork (E-mail)”
>Subject: Double zeros on a dime
>Status:
>
>http://dante.neonexus.com/~crowbot/misc/tecumseh.html
>
>n September of 1811, when America was still a young nation, a pair of
>Indian leaders underwent an attempt to unite the Shawnee Indian tribes and
>to rid themself of the curse of white men – alcohol. These two Indians
>were known as the Prophet, and his half brother Tecumseh. The American
>leaders of the time percieved this as a British attempt to stir up Indians
>on their borders (this was a prelude to the war of 1812), and in order to
>stop this potential Indian Union, Congress sent Governer William Henry
>Harrison, who would soon be a US president, to deal with the matter.
>Harrison gathered an army and marched against the Prophet’s town, and in
>the battle of Tippecanoe slaughtered the Shawnees, sacked the Prophet’s
>town, and discredited the Prophet, and in a later battle, killed him.
>Tecumseh joined with the British, and in the war of 1812 fought against
>the Americans, but nothing ever came of his Indian Union. When, in 1840,
>Harrison was elected as president of the US, the aging Tecumseh was
>enraged. He placed a curse on the nemesis who ran a campaign based on
>slaughtering Indians. The curse is said to be placed on every president
>that is elected in a year that ends in 0, and that the president will die
>an untimely and unusual death. Tecumseh then disappeared, leaving no
>trace. 1 month after he was in office, Willam Henry Harrison died of
>pneumonia, the first United States President ever to die in office. 20
>years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, during his
>second term (April 14, 1865), Lincoln was shot by John Wilks Booth. 20
>years later, in 1880, James A. Garfield was elected president, on July 2,
>1881, he was shot at the railroad station. When recovery seemed imminent
>and he seemed recuperating, he suddenly hemmorhaged and died in office,
>September 19, 1881. 20 years later, in 1900, William McKinley was
>re-elected president, on September 1901 he was shot twice by a deranged
>anarchist. He died 8 days later. 20 years later, in 1920, Willam G.
>Harding was elected president, in 1923 he was sitting in the white house
>when he died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. 20 years later, in
>1940, Franklin Delenor Roosevelt was re-elected president. During his
>third term in 1945, he died of Cerebral Hemmorrhaging. 20 years later, in
>1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president. in 1963 he was shot and
>killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. (Puts a new idea on the conspiracy theory) 20
>years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan broke the tradition of deaths,
>narrowly surviving an assassination attempt. Will this end the tradition
>of deaths? Incidentally, the assassin, John Hinkley, went insane shortly
>after being incarserated at Danamora state penetentry.