theburningplatform | The forces of tyranny are winning. Our banking, financial, political,
and media structures are wracked by corruption and controlled by a
“few” insiders for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. Smedley
Butler said war was a racket, but every institution is now a racket,
with a corrupt powerful cadre of evil men reaping riches at the expense
of the many. Their rackets are based upon nothing but lies and the
continued blissful ignorance of the masses to their flagrant criminal
activities.
The dark side of human nature has been on full display as the country
has been hijacked by organizations run by psychopaths like Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, Soros, Dimon, Bernanke, Paulson, Rubin, Zuckerberg,
Bezos and a multitude of lesser known, but equally dangerous,
psychopaths infecting government, business and the media.
Those pulling the strings of our ever-degrading society share many of
the same traits – superficially charming, pathologically deceitful,
manipulative, accepting no responsibility for their actions, lacking
empathy, absence of guilt, no humility, dishonest, treacherous, having a
grandiose sense of self-worth, and prone to dangerous destructive risk
taking. These are the people who rise to power when citizens become
lazy, disinterested, willfully ignorant, distracted by social media,
dumbed down by government run education, and easily led to believe
falsehoods peddled by a media doing the bidding of the psychopaths in
power.
Just listen to Brennan or Clapper on fake news CNN or MSNBC to get a
glimpse of psychopaths in action. It’s almost as if they believe their
own lies. The faux journalist millionaires questioning these scumbags
aren’t paid by their corporate masters to uncover the truth, but
perpetuate the narrative of lies.
Counterpunch | U.S. pundits and politicians just discovered, it seems, that Washington’s decisions harm Central American families. For the New York Times, “separating families…is something new and malicious,”
reflecting Trump’s “heartlessness” and violating “fundamental American
values.” “This, apparently, is how you turn off the idea of America,”
Alex Wagner (The Atlantic) added. The Los Angeles Timesthinks
“the administration’s cold-hearted approach to enforcement has crossed
the line into abject inhumanity,” departing– so we’re to believe– from
past practice.
These are half-accurate charges: Trump’s policy is malicious,
heartless, cold-hearted. But it isn’t new. Both in Central America and
along its Mexican border, Washington has helped rip apart families for
decades, forcing children to endure a world without their parents,
mothers to cope with their children’s sickening ends. Abject inhumanity,
in other words, is a U.S. foreign policy hallmark.
Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras– review their histories.
You’ll be crushed by evidence revealing which values shape Washington’s
conduct, which norms govern its behavior in a region where it enjoys
immense influence. And you’ll begin to understand why many had to flee
these countries. Start with Guatemala. Ríos Montt, the dictator the U.S.
funded, armed, and encouraged, oversaw the Mayan genocide there. In one episode, on April 3, 1982, the Guatemalan army overran
the village of Chel, slaughtering its residents and orphaning Pedro
Pacheco Bop, whose great-grandfather, parents, and five siblings (aged
two to 14) were all murdered, their blood draining into the Chel River
where the troops hurled the dead. Tomas Chávez Brito was two years old
when the army fell upon his village, Sajsibán, seven months later, torching
his home with his mother, sisters, and other family members inside. In
the mountains, where Tomas hid for the following year eating plants to
survive, one can only imagine how the idea of orphanhood, his new
reality, settled in his mind. Margarita Rivera Ceto de Guzmán’s family
separation was quicker. Soldiers knifed her in the stomach, killing her unborn child.
Egla Martínez Salazar, addressing this genocide, explains
that assaults on Maya households conveyed “the message that Mayas did
not live in ‘real’ families, but rather in ‘living arrangements’ that
constituted breeding spaces for ‘international communist
indoctrination.’” Erasing these spaces required
“the mass murder of children,” plus “the forced transfer of surviving
Maya children to military and paramilitary families,” tactics Salvadoran
forces also adopted in the 1980s. Apart from killing most of the 75,000 slain there from 1980-1992– the stretch when Carter, Reagan, and Bush I funneled $6 billion into the country– “soldiers [also] abducted children in what an international court says was a ‘systematic pattern of forced disappearances.’”
nakedcapitalism | As readers know, I deprecate the (informal: disparaging and dffensive)
noun “illegals,” not only because it’s a slippery slope to “frugals,”
“orals,” “regals,” and so forth, but because I can’t think of a good
reason to insult people who are, often courageously, trying to improve
their own lives and those of their families. (“Scab,” of course, is
another pejorative for people with similar motives. So, for that matter,
is “banker.” It’s complicated!) In any case, it’s these migrants[1] presence
that’s illegal, not they themselves, so, heck, maybe it’s all just an
innocent case of metonymy…. In this post, I want to straighten out not
these, but another small kink in our political discourse, which shows up
when you read this story from the Times carefully. The headline:
An ICE Raid Leaves an Iowa Town Divided Along Faith Lines
Parenthetically, and just for the record, allow me to insert this
photo of a church congregation that became a crossroads for families and
supporters of the men detained in the workplace raid in that small
town:
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have the nagging feeling
there’s something about that picture inconsistent with an important
liberal Democrat construct, identity politics. Close parenthesis.
Immediately I asked, as one should ask, why is faith the
chosen dividing line? After all, you can slice and dice a human
population as many ways as you can a pineapple, or a cake. Could it be
that there’s another, more interesting “divide” that the reporter’s
choice elides?
The reporter, slicing the pineapple by faith, ignores the question of
law. We know who is subject to the law: The migrants, caught up in the
raid. Is there anybody in the story who is not subject to the law? Why, yes. Yes, there is:
No charges have been filed against the owners
of the Midwest Precast Concrete plant in Mount Pleasant that was raided.
An ICE spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing
investigation.
Medium |Last
year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a
keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment
bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a
talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some
insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”
I’ve
never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end
up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest
technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential
investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely
interested in learning about these technologies or their potential
impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them.
But money talks, so I took the gig.
After
I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But
instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat
there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five
super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge
fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest
in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They
had come with questions of their own.
They
started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into
their real topics of concern.
Which
region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand
or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain,
and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die
and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house
explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground
bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security
force after the event?”
splinternews | Tanton’s individual persistence was at bottom made possible by the
greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States,
coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia
Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is
not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton’s
best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his
ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician or
leader or organizer, but an adroit servant of capital’s class interests,
for this is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in
democratic politics, but by creating a bulwark against it.
Ironically,
Tanton recognized this dynamic himself, however accidentally, in his
striving for an essentially American identity. “I think there is such a
thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to define,” he
once mused. “For instance, the United States is the most philanthropic
society on the face of the earth, and most of the work that FAIR and our
opponents do is supported by philanthropy. Few, if any, other cultures
have developed the idea of public philanthropy as strongly as we have
here.”
What he failed to recognize is that the very idea of public
philanthropy as it is practiced in the United States of America is
wholly the creation of the American plutocracy—wealthy industrialists
and corporate scions seeking ways to consolidate and protect their money
over time. While the practice of establishing private family trusts and
foundations and of spending copious amounts of money on ostensibly
philanthropic (though in fact political) causes is now commonplace among
the capitalist class, it was not always so. The first of these, the
Rockefeller Foundation, was formed in 1913; a century later, according
to political scientist Robert Reich, there were over 100,000 private
foundations in the United States, controlling over $800 billion. “The
tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon
preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector,”
Jane Mayer writes in Dark Money. “In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role.”
Scaife, were the beneficiaries of two charitable trusts of $50
million each, structured such that, after 20 years of donating all net
income from the trusts to nonprofit charities, the siblings would
receive their $50 million principals. Their mother did the same in 1961,
setting up a pair of $25 million trusts, and again in 1963, setting up
another $100 million in trusts for her grandchildren. Mellon Scaife, who
once called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt,”
would go on to make some $1 billion in political and philanthropic
contributions over a 50-year period, anticipating the Koch brothers’
current reign and shaping the right-wing of American politics for half a
century. In a secret memoir, obtained by Mayer, Mellon Scaife gloated,
“Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”
There is deep and
horrible irony in Mellon family money, which powered American
imperialism in Central and South America and which grew as a result of
that imperial expansion, now being spent to denigrate and punish the
children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men and women
whose countries the Mellons helped to colonize, who now come to the
United States seeking respite from their nations’ ruin. For people like
Tanton and Scaife May or organizations like FAIR and CIS, the point is
not to purge the United States of immigrants wholly but to ensure the
continued immiseration and suffering of the poor and the
dispossessed—the most destitute of whom, it is no accident, are mostly
people of color.
The activity of the Tanton network and the support it has received from
one of America’s oldest imperial families shows above all how one
faction of the ruling class, at least, imagines it can create a
permanent underclass from which to extract value: first, by dehumanizing
migrants in the minds of the citizens; then, by allowing them to sell
their labor to employers across the country; and finally, in the prisons
and detention centers where they are housed until deportation, and the
cycle begins anew. In turn, this contributes to the continued creation
of a massive population of surplus labor, which puts downward pressure
on wages for all workers.
Guardian |Kansas
City is booming. Employers and investors have poured into the
midwestern city since the recession. At least $1bn has gone into its
sparkling new downtown, revitalized arts district and shiny new condos.
So why is Sly James, its highly regarded outgoing mayor, so unhappy?
James, who steps down in July 2019, is leaving office with a sense of
disappointment that despite Kansas City’s obvious accomplishments, the
city’s recovery has left one large section of society behind: African
Americans.
About 30% of Kansas City’s population is black. Every month,
seemingly, Donald Trump uses Twitter to trumpet how well black people
have done under his presidency. Nationwide African American unemployment
is now 6.5%, down from a peak of 16.8% at the height of the recession.
But national numbers
in a country as big as the US can be misleading. For many African
Americans in the Kansas City area, the spoils of a roaring recovery have
passed them by.
“The impact of all things racial has left neighborhoods divided and
segregated and that leads to a perpetuation of things like poverty and
lack of opportunity,” says James, adding he would “have to disagree
[with anyone] who says that the real African American unemployment
situation is 5.9%”.
Kansas City may boast an unemployment rate of 3.6%. But take the
city’s Blue Hills neighbourhood. Blue Hills is 91% African American and
the unemployment rate is 17%. Neighbouring Ivanhoe is 86% African
American and the unemployment rate is even higher, at 26%.
The
ironic result of all this: the worse Mexico performs, the more powerful
that nation becomes. Many nominal American citizens believe their first
loyalty is with Mexico. Though they don’t want to live there, they don’t
want to surrender their identity. [Not a country, not even a team, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, June
26, 2018] Exporting its underclass to the U.S. spares Mexico and other
Latin American countries the need for internal reform. As Tucker Carlson
recently put it: “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s
a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class”. [Mexican presidential candidate calls mass migration to US a “human right,” by Dominic Mancini, Daily Caller, June 22, 2018]
This
phenomenon should be termed “Failure Migration.” The lower a people’s
level of civilizational accomplishment, the more that people is able to
expand its influence.
Counterpunch | To reverse angles, one need not be a self-affirmed racist to have
complied with ‘red-lining’ or ‘white-flight’, only protecting your home
value as banks and tax codes made fit. In fact, a recent survey on
immigration found Americans (along with Canadians) the mosttolerant
among 27 polled countries, of non-native speakers, the unemployed,
felons, radicals, or ethnic groups, so long as they’re citizens. I’m
not altogether sold, but we might not be the irreparable bigots we
seem. According to the findings, ‘the US has a very legalistic vision of
what it is to be an American’.[i]
(Of course, Nikki Haley stood it on its head when she told the UN it
was ‘ridiculous to look at poverty in the world’s richest nation’.
Apparently just as citizenship welcomes our most-poor, it denies them
outside protection.)
Thus it’s pertinent to ask, in both cases, should we be looking at
conceptions of race and poverty, or of law enforcement and state-power
to understand mass-incarceration or the police’ rising body count?
Consider the FBI memo that invented ‘Black Identity Extremism’ (BIE)
the same time it granted them right to oppress it. ‘Racism’, in which
case, is literally a state-authored fiction, as the group only exists on
FBI records. Moreover, as with the ‘blue lives matter’ bill which makes
resisting arrest a hate crime, their (straw) premise is that racism
‘goes both ways’. I’d prefer that were true, since, as stray
individuals, we’d have limited ability to act on it. But it’s
not. Racism has a definition: prejudice plus power.
Unlike BIE, ‘SIR’ (state-invented racism) and ‘CRP’
(capitalist-powered racism) have been the constant since answering the
mixed ranks of poor in Bacon’s Rebellion with the 1705, Virginia Slave
Codes, our first official color-line. Since then, occasionally its been
lifted due to public reckoning. But it’s never been imposed without
the help of some authority, be it state, judicial, or investment
capital. ‘Law and order’ is sympathetic to profit. The Slave-trade
launched our banking system, and the plantation supplied the
organizational model for the corporate firm.ii Post-slavery, fomenting racism was and remains an indispensable strike-breaker.
This doesn’t apply only to blacks. Today, corporations open our borders to cheap, bracerolabor
that it can throw away when its worn, or dares lift its head, while
coaxing us to blame the workers. Or stuff them in jail, along with 1 in
10 African-Americans. After all, wrenching kids from their parents
precedes our deranged president.
It’s ironic though, that the free-market is putting labor in cages, like the slave-market did.
WolfStreet | Another regional long-established department-store chain bites the
dust. One in an endless series. The 16 Magic Mart stores in West
Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky, plus a distribution center and the
company’s headquarters will be closed and liquidated, according to
Ammar’s, Inc., a family-owned company that owns the stores and started
with its first store 97 years ago.
In a letter to employees,
the company blamed “continued inadequate sales leading to substantial
financial losses,” and “difficult economic conditions that continue to
persist in the markets we operate.” All locations will be closed
“sometime around November 1.”
And then those stores, many of them located in less than booming environments, will become vacant.
Department stores have been hardest hit by online retail. Among them,
regional chains have been hardest hit. Bon-Ton Stores – which operates
department stores in 23 states under the brands of Bon-Ton, Bergner’s,
Boston Store, Carson’s, Elder-Beerman, Herberger’s, and Younkers – is
now in the process of being liquidated.
24,000 employees are losing their jobs. Numerous smaller chains have
shut their doors. Among the national chains, store closures have been
widespread: Macy’s, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, etc. have closed
thousands of large stores over the past few years. Smaller stores and
specialty stores are shutting down across the country. And these stores
become vacant.
Landlords have to find other tenants in this environment, or find
another purpose, such as redeveloping them for use by chain restaurants,
or bulldozing them and building office buildings or apartment buildings
or whatever on the land.
Bon-Ton combined with Toys ‘R’ Us – which closed its remaining stores on Friday – occupied nearly 60 million square feet of retail space. Every square inch is now being vacated.
And there’s some handwringing about the so-called “vacancy rate” in
the retail sector – a deceptively low measure for reasons that we’ll get
to in a moment.
The retail vacancy rate rose to 8.6% in Q2, the highest since 2012,
according to data from real-estate research firm Reis Inc., cited by MarketWatch. By comparison, the peak since the Financial Crisis was 9.4% in Q3 2011:
The impact is especially severe among strip malls and
other neighborhood and community shopping centers, which suffered their
worst quarter in nine years. About 3.8 million square feet of space was
emptied from April to June, pushing the vacancy rate for this type of
mall up to 10.2%, Reis said.
Note the magnitude: 3.8 million square feet were “emptied out.” This
is tiny compared to the 60 million square feet emptied out by just
Bon-Ton and Toys ‘R’ Us.
This is why the “vacancy” data, as unappetizing as they may be,
aren’t in a steep swoon, though you’d expect them to be, given the
rampant store closures.
theatlantic | In March, Toys “R” Us announced that it was liquidating all of its
U.S. stores as part of its bankruptcy process, which began last
September. Observers pointed to the company’s struggle to fight off new
competition. In its court filing, the company laid the blame at the feet of Amazon, Walmart, and Target, saying it “could not compete” when they priced toys so low.
Less
attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had
placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86
billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it
shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped
before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the
Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the
12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it
generated $11.1 billion.
Saddled with its new debt, however, Toys “R” Us had less flexibility to innovate. By 2007, according to Bloomberg,
interest expense consumed 97 percent of the company’s operating profit.
It had few resources left to upgrade its stores in order to compete
with Target, or to spiff up its website in order to contend with Amazon.
“It’s true that they couldn’t respond to Amazon,” Eileen Appelbaum, a
co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me.
“But you have to ask yourself why.”
Shortly after the buyout, the company’s CEO implemented a plan to
combine and remodel Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us locations. Customers
liked the changes, but the company was able to revamp only 146 of its
more than 1,500 stores by 2010. By that point, it was facing the effects
of the Great Recession. Most retail operations try to keep their debt
burden low to be ready for an inevitable downturn; when you sell a
product as discretionary as toys, a recession can hit particularly hard.
Thomas Paulson, the founder of the investment firm Inflection Capital
Management, which focuses on companies that serve consumers, told me
that when the retail landscape shifts, a company may need to make
investments and even adapt its business model to stay afloat. If it’s
already carrying significant debt, it’s “really handcuffed,” he said.
“That’s what happened with Toys “R” Us.”
Josh Kosman, the author of The Buyout of America,
agrees: “All it takes is for earnings to stop rising and level off, or
even decline a little bit, and you’re in a whole heap of trouble.”
Toys
“R” Us is hardly the only retail operation to learn this lesson the
hard way. The so-called retail apocalypse felled roughly 7,000 stores
and eliminated more than 50,000 jobs in 2017. For the spate of brands
that have recently declared bankruptcy, their demise is as much a story
about private equity’s avarice as it is about Amazon’s acumen.
ineteconomics | The Millennial socialists are coming,” declared a June 30 New York Times headline,
describing a surprise surge of young female candidates endorsed by the
Democratic Socialists of America who beat their establishment opponents
in primary races in New York and Pennsylvania. No longer is being a
socialist considered scary — at least if you came of age after the Fall
of the Wall. For many, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Martin Luther King, Jr., if he were around today, would likely be smiling.
The image of the handsome, be-suited King, looking like a
middle-class messenger of the American Dream as he mesmerized the masses
on the steps of the Lincoln memorial with his famous “I Have a Dream”
speech, has been embraced by everyone from Coca-Cola executives to
Donald Trump. It’s part of America’s cultural memory, our political DNA.
Some may know that there was more to his legacy than the epic fight
to end racism, recalling that in the period leading up to his
assassination in 1968, King focused on building a multi-racial movement
for economic justice with his labor activism and Poor People’s Campaign.
Consider King’s words in a letter to Coretta Scott in 1952: “I am
much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he
wrote, adding that capitalism had “out-lived its usefulness” because it
had “brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to
give luxuries to the classes.”
Counterpunch | Socialists of different varieties have been debating immigration for a long time. Some socialists argue that immigrants bring down wages and weaken the welfare state
because they raise the costs of keeping it intact. Critics think that
this is just an electoral strategy, but there may be some political
philosophy beyond the left’s immigration skepticism. Karl Marx
himself argued that immigrants would be used to separate the working
class in two camps. That being said, there are other socialists who
insist that class solidarity extends beyond borders. Socialists have been inconsistent on immigration throughout history, and the debate still isn’t settled.
The recent separation of over 2,000 immigrant kids from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border energized massive protests around America, which eventually pressured President Trump to put an end to the policy of family separation. Though it’s still unclear what will happen to the immigrant families that are already separated, some left-wing activists argue this shows why Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be abolished.
But Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the most prominent members of the
American left, surprised many when he dodged the question of abolishing ICE in an interview with Jake Tapper.
This is not the first time that Sanders hasn’t sounded as radical as
expected on the issue of immigration. In an interview in 2015 he called
open borders a “Koch Brothers idea.”
Open borders is supporting the free movement of people between
countries, an idea that many libertarians support—and yes, this does
include some people working at foundations funded by the libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch. The libertarian argument is that open immigration would boost the economy and that states don’t have the authority
to decide where a human being can live. Sanders resisted this line of
thinking, and argued that immigration would bring wages down—an argument
many socialists make, and not only in America.
But that doesn’t mean all socialists in America have the same
position on immigration. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the young woman of
Puerto Rican descent who just defeated Joseph Crowley in the recent
Democratic primaries for Congress, supports abolishing ICE.
Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a socialist and is a member of the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike other leftist
organizations, DSA is strikingly pro-immigrant.
unz |It
all began in the late 1980s when the Soviet elites realized that they
were losing control of the situation and that something had to be done.
To really summarize what they did, I would say that these elites first
broke up the country into 15 individual fiefdoms each run by gang/clan
composed of these Soviet elites, then they mercilessly grabbed
everything of any value, became overnight billionaires and concealed
their money in the West. Being fabulously rich in a completely ruined
country gave them fantastic political power and influence to further
exploit and rob the country of all its resources. Russia herself (and
the other 14 ex-Soviet republics) suffered an unspeakable nightmare
comparable to a major war and by the 1990s Russia almost broke-up into
many more even smaller pieces (Chechnia, Tatarstan, etc.). By then,
Russia was subserviently executing all the economic policies recommended
by a myriad of US ‘advisors’ (hundreds of them with offices inside the
offices of many key ministries and various state agencies, just like
today in the Ukraine), she adopted a Constitution drafted by pro-US
elements and all the key positions in the state were occupied by what I
can only call western agents. At the very top, President Eltisn was
mostly drunk while the country was run by 7 bankers the so-called
“oligarchs” (6 of which were Jews): the “Semibankirshchina”.
This
is the time when the Russian security services successfully tricked
these oligarchs into believing that Putin, who has a law degree and who
had worked for the (very liberal) Mayor of Saint Petersburg (Anatolii
Sobchack) was just a petty bureaucrat who would restore a semblance of
order while not presenting any real threat to the oligarchs. The ploy
worked, but the business elites demanded that “their” guy, Medvedev, be
put in charge of the government so as to preserve their interests. What
they overlooked was two things: Putin was a truly brilliant officer of
the very elite First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the KGB
and a real patriot. Furthermore, the Constitution
which was passed to support the Eltsin regime could now be used by
Putin. But more than anything else, they never predicted that a little
guy in an ill-fitting suit would transform himself into one of the most
popular leaders on the planet. As I have written many times, while the
initial power base of Putin was in the security services and the armed
forces and while his legal authority stems from the Constitution, is real
power comes from the immense support he has from the Russian people
who, for the first time in very long time felt that the man at the top
truly represented their interests.
Putin
then did what Donald Trump could have done as soon as he entered the
White House: he cleaned house. He began by immediately tackling the
oligarchs, he put an end to the Semibankirshchina, and he stopped
the massive export of money and resources out of Russia. The then
proceeded to rebuilt the “vertical of power” (the Kremlin’s control over
the country) and began rebuilding all of Russia from the foundations
(regions) up. But while Putin was tremendously successful, he simply
could not fight on all the fronts and the same time and win.
Truth
be told, he did eventually win most of the battles which he chose to
fight, but some battles he simply could not wage not because of a lack
of courage or will on his part, but because the objective reality is
that Putin inherited and extremely bad system fully controlled by some extremely dangerous foes. Remember the words of Khazin above: “if
he starts to cleanse this “Augean stable”, then he will be obliged to
shed blood, because they won’t voluntarily give back their privileges”. So, in a typically Putin fashion, he made a number of deals.
For
example, those oligarchs who agreed to stop meddling in Russian
politics and who would, from now on, pay taxes and generally abide by
the law were not be jailed or expropriated: those who got the message
were allowed to continue to work as normal businessmen (Oleg Deripaska)
and those who did not were either jailed or exiled (Khodorkovski,
Berezovski). But if we look just below the level of these well-known and
notorious oligarchs, what we find as a much deeper “swamp” (to use the
US expression): an entire class of people who made
their fortunes in the 1990s, who are now extremely influential and
control most of the key positions in the economy, finance and business
and who absolutely hate and fear Putin. They even have their agents
inside the armed forces and security services because their weapon of
choice is, of course, corruption and influence. And, of course, they
have people representing their interests inside the Russian government:
pretty much the entire “economic block” of the Medvedev government.
Counterpunch | Clinton lost to Trump, not because millions of poor people were mobilized by a fascist message; but because millions of poor people didn’t turn out to vote;
they understood that Obama was a friend of war, a guardian of Wall
Street, and a keeper of the neoliberal status quo. They didn’t require
more of the same in Clinton. But the actual facts of Obama’s presidency
are increasingly drowned out by the howls of ‘fascist’ which are hurled
at Donald Trump week by week, month by month. This is nothing new,
incidentally. Every single thoroughly reactionary Republican president
of the past fifty years has had this charge levelled at them: Nixon,
Raegan, both Bushes and now Trump. They were all fascists in their day.
But in allocating to an administration the label fascist – even if it
is headed by a person with clear fascist ideological tendencies – we
run the risk of underestimating not only the everyday run-of-the-mill
racist and war mongering policies enacted by the ‘respectable’ parties
of the parliamentary mainstream; we also fail to comprehend the
symbiotic connection which opens up between the period of Obama and the
time of Trump. Trump’s regime is, for the most part, more reactionary,
and more overtly and rabidly racist than the Obama administration ever
was; this cannot be denied. Trump’s accession marks a truly awful
period in American politics.
But it reached its fruition precisely because the Obama
administration had exhausted its facile promises of hope and change in
the flames of international war and the unrelenting economic oppression
of the poorer layers of the domestic population. It is the continuation
of such politics by more extreme means, with the ideological veneer of
progressivism set aside, born from the thickening disillusionment of the
poorer layers in a decaying political system and their increasing lack
of interest in the ballot box (for very good reason). It has the
features of ineptitude and corruption which are the product of such a
development.
But is not a fascist administration. It does not mark a qualitative
break in what has come before. The latest farrago involving immigrant
children is unutterably awful, but its closest parallel in US history –
if not the immigration policies of Obama himself – might be something
like the locking up of the families of Japanese Americans in WW2. That
policy was carried out by the Democratic Party headed by Roosevelt. The
same party which, by the way, supported slavery, used nuclear weapons
against Japanese cities and escalated the war in Vietnam to a shrieking
crescendo.
In describing the Trump administration as fascist we subscribe to a
liberal logic which separates out the material realities of fascism from
its ideological expression. This helps whitewash the reality of the
Democratic Party as a party of war and the financial elite, and instead
recasts it in the type of morality play where the beleaguered and high
minded liberals like Obama and Clinton become the last bastions of
reason and humanity against an ever encroaching darkness – only their
tragic struggle against barbarism is doomed to founder on the rocks of
the prejudices and the whims of an easily excitable and unsophisticated
mob. It is a vision which combines hatred of the lower classes with a
drooling sycophancy toward the elite. As tragedy goes, it is more Vanity Fair then Shakespeare.
voltairenet | After having observed Donald Trump’s historical references (the
constitutional compromise of 1789, the examples of Andrew Jackson and
Richard Nixon) and the way in which his partisans perceive his politics,
Thierry Meyssan here analyses his anti-imperialist actions. The US
President is not interested in taking a step back, but on the contrary,
abandoning the interests of the transnational ruling class in order to
develop the US national economy.
In 1916, during the First World War, Lenin analysed the reasons which
led to the confrontation between the empires of his time. He wrote - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
In this book, he clarified his analysis - « Imperialism is capitalism
which has arrived at a stage of its development where domination by
monopolies and financial capital has been confirmed, where the export of
capital has acquired major importance, where the sharing of the world
between international trusts has begun, and where the sharing of all the
territories of the globe between the greatest capitalist countries has
been achieved ».
The facts confirmed his logic of the concentration of capitalism that
he described. In the space of one century, it substituted a new empire
for the precedents - « America » (not to be confused with the American
continent). By dint of fusions and acquisitions, a few multinational
companies gave birth to a global ruling class which gathers every year
to congratulate itself, as we watch, in Davos, Switzerland. These people
do not serve the interests of the US population, and in fact are not
necessarily United States citizens themselves, but use the means of the
US Federal State to maximise their profits.
Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States on his
promise to return to the earlier state of Capitalism, that of the «
American dream, » by free market competition. We can of course claim a
priori, as did Lenin, that such a reversal is impossible, but
nonetheless, the new President has committed to this direction.
The heart of the imperial Capitalist system is expressed by the
doctrine of the Pentagon, formulated by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski - the
world is now split in two. On one side, the developed, stable states,
and on the other, those states which are not yet integrated into the
imperial globalist system and are therefore doomed to instability. The
US armed forces are tasked with destroying the state and social
structures of the non-integrated regions. Since 2001, they have been
patiently destroying the « Greater Middle East », and are now preparing
to do the same in the « Caribbean Basin .»
WaPo | Federal prosecutors concluded an 18-month investigation into a former
congressional technology staffer on Tuesday by publicly debunking
allegations — promoted by conservative media and President Trump —
suggesting he was a Pakistani operative who stole government secrets
with cover from House Democrats.
As part of an agreement with
prosecutors, Imran Awan pleaded guilty to a relatively minor offense
unrelated to his work on Capitol Hill: making a false statement on a
bank loan application. U.S. prosecutors said they would not recommend
jail time.
But the agreement included an unusual passage that
described the scope of the investigation and cleared Awan of a litany of
conspiracy theories promulgated on Internet blogs, picked up by
right-leaning news sites and fanned by Trump on Twitter.
“The
Government has uncovered no evidence that your client violated federal
law with respect to the House computer systems,” including stealing
equipment or illegally accessing or transferring information,
prosecutors wrote in an 11-page plea agreement dated and signed Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors
described in the agreement a “thorough investigation” that included
forensic analysis of computer equipment and other devices, log-on and
usage data and interviews with about 40 witnesses.
Awan
and four of his associates, including family members, worked as IT
specialists for dozens of Democratic lawmakers until they were banned
from the computer network in February 2017, accused of violating House
security rules. The ensuing investigation attracted aggressive coverage
by conservative media outlets — led by the Daily Caller — and prompted
calls from Trump to prosecute Awan, whom the president referred to in
one tweet as the “Pakistani mystery man.”
wsws | The Oxford Union has finally responded to the exposure of its
attempts to censor one of its own panel discussions, “Whistleblowing:
Exposing injustices or undermining institutions?” held on February 27.
The response came in the form of an article in Oxford University’s student newspaper, Cherwell,
June 7 under the headline “Union denies censoring whistleblowing panel video.” In it, the Oxford Union’s society bursar Lindsey Warne and
current president Gui Cavalcanti use evasions and lies against one of
the panel members, human rights activist Heather Marsh.
As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, “Records of
the event, including transcripts and videos, have been withheld from
publication.” The only plausible reason for this was to suppress Marsh’s
devastating criticism of one of her co-panelists—former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative David Shedd.
For more than three months Oxford Union have kept silent on why the
event was not reported. This is despite repeated requests by Marsh,
asking when the video of the panel would be uploaded and why this was
not being done.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) has
made its own attempts to establish on whose authority and on what
grounds the panel was censored but has been ignored.
Only after Marsh visited Oxford Union in person in April did she
receive a response. Marsh states that Warne informed her that Shedd had
pressured for the video to be withheld—something Warne now claims she
never said.
strategic-culture |The beginning of the end of the
Bilderberg/Soros vision is in sight. The Old Order will cling on, even
to the last of its fingernails. The Bilderberg vision is the notion of
multi-cultural, international cosmopolitanism that surpasses old-time
nationalism; heralding the end of frontiers; and leading toward a
US-led, ‘technocratic’, global economic and political governance. Its
roots lie with figures such as James Burnham, an anti-Stalin, former
Trotskyite, who, writing as early as 1941, advocated for the levers of
financial and economic power being placedin the hands of a management
class: an élite – which alone would be capable of running the
contemporary state - thanks to this élite’s market and financial
technical nous. It was, bluntly, a call for an expert, technocratic
oligarchy.
Burnham renounced his allegiance to
Trotsky and Marxism, in all its forms in 1940, but he would take the
tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion, (learned as a
member of Leon Trotsky’s inner circle) with him, and would elevate the
Trotskyist management of ‘identity politics’ to become the fragmentation
‘device’ primed to explode national culture onto a new stage, in the
Western sphere. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” caught
the attention of Frank Wisner, subsequently, a legendary CIA figure,
who saw in the works of Burnham and his colleague a fellow Trotskyite,
Sidney Hook, the prospect of mounting an effective alliance of former Trotskyites against Stalinism.
But, additionally, Wisner perceived its
merits as the blueprint for a CIA-led, pseudo-liberal, US-led global
order. (‘Pseudo’, because, as Burnham articulated clearly, in The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom,his version of
freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms
defined by America’s Constitution. “What it really meant was conformity
and submission”).
Trump evidently has heard the two key
messages from his constituency: that they neither accept to have (white)
American culture, and its way-of-life, diluted through immigration;
and, neither do they wish – stoically – to accommodate to America’s
eclipse by China.
The issue of how to arrest China’s rise is
primordial (for Team Trump), and in a certain sense, has led to an
American ‘retrospective’: America now may only account for 14% of global
output (PPP – Purchasing Power Parity basis), or 22%, on a nominal
basis (as opposed to near half of global output, for which the US was
responsible, at the close of WW2), but American corporations, thanks to
the dollar global hegemony, enjoy a type of monopoly status (i.e.
Microsoft, Google and Facebook, amongst others), either through
regulatory privilege, or by marketplace dominance. Trump wants to halt
this asset from decaying further and to leverage it again as a potent
bargaining chip in the present tariff wars. This is clearly a political
‘winner’ in terms of US domestic grass-roots, politics, and the upcoming
November mid-term elections.
America’s dollar hegemony has proved toxic
to the rest of the world in very many ways, and Trump - in leveraging
that hegemony so gangsterishly: “We’re America, Bitch”,
as one official described America’s approach – is fueling antagonism
towards dollar hegemony (if not yet towards America per se). It is
pushing all of non-America into a common stance of rebellion against
America’s unipolar financial dominance.
kunstler | You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second
World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial
wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now,
of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone,
the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is
a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and
accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed
rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of
your monthly income.
Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times
they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in
recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this:
the 20th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever.
The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period —
the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot
of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into
being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and
indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the
industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.
That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the
fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP
growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the
wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for
pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there
there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back —
and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have
any value.
So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute
the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is
turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.
What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:
OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US
Independent | What is really needed in dealing with cannabis is
a “tobacco moment”, as with cigarettes 50 years ago, when a majority of
people became convinced that smoking might give them cancer and kill
them. Since then the number of cigarette smokers in Britain has fallen by two-thirds.
A depressing aspect of the present debate about cannabis is
that so many proponents of legalisation or decriminalisation have
clearly not taken on board that the causal link between cannabis and psychosis has
been scientifically proven over the past ten years, just as the
connection between cancer and cigarettes was proved in the late 1940s
and 1950s.
The proofs have emerged in a series of scientific studies
that reach the same grim conclusion: taking cannabis significantly
increases the risk of schizophrenia. One study in The Lancet Psychiatry
concludes that “the risk of individuals having a psychotic disorder
showed a roughly three times increase in users of skunk-like cannabis,
compared with those who never used cannabis”.
As 94 per cent of cannabis seized by the police today is super-strength skunk,
compared to 51 per cent in 2005, almost all those who take the drug
today will be vulnerable to this three-fold increase in the likelihood
that they will develop psychosis.
Mental health professionals have long had no doubts about the danger.
Five years ago, I asked Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric
research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, about them. He said
that studies showed that “if the risk of schizophrenia for the general
population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take
ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might
push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke ‘skunk’ every day you push
it up to eight per cent”.
Anybody wondering what happens to this 8 per cent of the skunk-smoking population should visit any mental hospital in Britain or speak to somebody who has done so.
Dr Humphrey Needham-Bennett, medical director and consultant
psychiatrist of Cygnet Hospital, Godden Green in Sevenoaks, explained to
me that among his patients “cannabis use is so common that I assume
that people use or used it. It’s quite surprising when people say ‘no, I
don’t use drugs’.”
The connection between schizophrenia and cannabis was long
suspected by specialists but it retained its reputation as a relatively
benign drug, its image softened by the afterglow of its association with
cultural and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.
WaPo | For many people, leisure time now means screen time.
Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends,
and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.
But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced
that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification
manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so
many could be classified as a disorder.
Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria,
such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other
activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important
areas of life as social relationships.
Those low
numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to
worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have
been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic
devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much
more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face
than did earlier generations,and my analysis of numerous large
surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of
17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for
example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens
are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking
after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria,
they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other
activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens
actually spend less time on homework
than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around
addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.
If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate
for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common
and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time
online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor
are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a
day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely
than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for
suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.
Guardian | When I am well, I am happy and popular. It is tough to type these
words when I feel none of it. And sometimes when I am most well I am…
boring. Boring is how I want to be all of the time. This is what I have
been working towards, for 12 years now.
When friends decades older tell me off for saying that I am old, at
28, what I mean is: I haven’t achieved all the things I could have done
without this illness. I should have written a book by now. I should have
done so many things! All the time, I feel I am playing catch-up.
Always. I worry, and most of the literature tells me, that I will have
this problem for life. That it will go on, after the hashtags and the
documentaries and the book deals and Princes Harry and William – while the NHS circles closer to the drain.
Maybe it’s cute now, in my 20s. But it won’t be cute later, when I am
older and wearing tracksuits from 20 years ago and not in an ironic
hipster way but because I no longer wash or engage with the world, and
it’s like: my God, did you not get yourself together already?
When I left appointments and saw the long-term patients, walking
around in hospital-issue pyjamas, dead-eyed (the kind of image of the
mentally ill that has become anathema to refer to as part of the
conversation, but which in some cases is accurate), four emotions rushed
in: empathy, sympathy, recognition, terror. It’s one of those things
you can’t really talk about with authenticity unless you’ve seen it, not
really: the aurora borealis, Prince playing live and the inpatient
wards.
Maybe my prognosis will look up, maybe I’ll leave it all behind. I’ve
noticed a recent thing is for people to declare themselves “proud” of
their mental illness. I guess I don’t understand this. It does not
define me.
It’s not something that, when stable, I feel ashamed of, or that I
hide. But I am not proud of it. I’d rather I didn’t have it – so I
wasn’t exhausted, so I wasn’t bitter about it – despite the fact that I
know some people, in all parts of the world, are infinitely worse off.
I want it gone, so that I am not dealing with it all the time, or
worrying about others having to deal with it all the time. So I don’t
have to read another article, or poster, about how I just need to ask
for help. So that when a campaigner on Twitter says, “To anyone feeling
ashamed of being depressed: there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s
illness. Like asthma or measles”, I don’t have to grit my teeth and say,
actually, I am not OK, and mental illness couldn’t be less like
measles. So that when someone else moans about being bored with everyone
talking about mental health, and a different campaigner replies,
“People with mental illness aren’t bored with it!” I don’t have to say,
no, I am: I am bored with this Conversation. Because more than talking
about it, I want to get better. I want to live.
quantamagazine | The question most of genetics tries to answer is how genes connect to
the traits we see. One person has red hair, another blonde hair; one
dies at age 30 of Huntington’s disease, another lives to celebrate a
102nd birthday. Knowing what in the vast expanse of the genetic code is
behind traits can fuel better treatments and information about future
risks and illuminate how biology and evolution work. For some traits,
the connection to certain genes is clear: Mutations of a single gene are
behind sickle cell anemia, for instance, and mutations in another
are behind cystic fibrosis.
But unfortunately for those who like things simple, these conditions
are the exceptions. The roots of many traits, from how tall you are to
your susceptibility to schizophrenia, are far more tangled. In fact,
they may be so complex that almost the entire genome may be involved in
some way, an idea formalized in a theory put forward last year.
Starting about 15 years ago, geneticists began to collect DNA from
thousands of people who shared traits, to look for clues to each trait’s
cause in commonalities between their genomes, a kind of analysis called
a genome-wide association study (GWAS). What they found, first, was that you need an enormous number of people to get statistically significant results — one recent GWAS
seeking correlations between genetics and insomnia, for instance,
included more than a million people.
Second, in study after study, even
the most significant genetic connections turned out to have surprisingly
small effects. The conclusion, sometimes called the polygenic
hypothesis, was that multiple loci, or positions in the genome, were
likely to be involved in every trait, with each contributing just a
small part. (A single large gene can contain several loci, each
representing a distinct part of the DNA where mutations make a
detectable difference.)
How many loci that “multiple” description might mean was not defined
precisely. One very early genetic mapping study in 1999 suggested that
“a large number of loci (perhaps > than 15)” might contribute to
autism risk, recalled Jonathan Pritchard, now a geneticist at Stanford University. “That’s a lot!” he remembered thinking when the paper came out.
Over the years, however, what scientists might consider “a lot” in this
context has quietly inflated. Last June, Pritchard and his Stanford
colleagues Evan Boyle and Yang Li (now at the University of Chicago) published a paper about this in Cell
that immediately sparked controversy, although it also had many people
nodding in cautious agreement. The authors described what they called the “omnigenic” model of complex traits.
Drawing on GWAS analyses of three diseases, they concluded that in the
cell types that are relevant to a disease, it appears that not 15, not
100, but essentially all genes contribute to the condition. The authors
suggested that for some traits, “multiple” loci could mean more than
100,000.
theatlantic | But
chimeras are not just oddities. You surely know one. In pregnant women,
fetal stem cells can cross the placenta to enter the mother’s
bloodstream, where they may persist for years. If Mom gets pregnant
again, the stem cells of her firstborn, still circulating in her blood,
can cross the placenta in the other direction, commingling with those of
the younger sibling. Heredity can thus flow “upstream,” from child to
parent—and then over and down to future siblings.
The
genome, Zimmer goes on to reveal, eludes tidy boundaries too. Forget
the notion that your genome is just the DNA in your chromosomes. We have
another genome, small but vital, in our cells’ mitochondria—the tiny
powerhouses that supply energy to the cell. Though the mitochondrial
genes are few, damage to them can lead to disorders of the brain,
muscles, internal organs, sensory systems, and more. At fertilization,
an embryo receives both chromosomes and mitochondria from the egg, and
only chromosomes from the sperm. Mitochondrial heredity thus flows
strictly through the maternal line; every boy is an evolutionary dead
end, as far as mitochondria are concerned.
Beyond the genome are
more surprises. Schoolchildren learn that Darwin’s predecessor, the
great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, got heredity wrong when he suggested that traits acquired through
experience—like the giraffe’s neck, elongated by straining and
stretching to reach higher, perhaps tenderer, leaves—could be passed
down. The biologist August Weismann famously gave the lie to such
theories, which collectively are known as “soft” heredity. If Lamarckism
were true, he said, chopping the tail off mice and breeding them,
generation after generation, should eventually produce tailless mice. It
didn’t. Lamarck wasn’t lurking in the details.
Recent
research, however, is giving Lamarck a measure of redemption. A subtle
regulatory system has been shown to silence or mute the effects of genes
without changing the DNA itself. Environmental stresses such as heat,
salt, toxins, and infection can trigger so-called epigenetic responses,
turning genes on and off to stimulate or restrict growth, initiate
immune reactions, and much more. These alterations in gene activity,
which are reversible, can be passed down to offspring. They are
hitchhikers on the chromosomes, riding along for a while, but able to
hop on and off. Harnessing epigenetics, some speculate, could enable us
to create Lamarckian crops, which would adapt to a disease in one or two
generations and then pass the acquired resistance down to their
offspring. If the disease left the area, so would the resistance.
All
of these heredities—chromosomal, mitochondrial, epigenetic—still don’t
add up to your entire you. Not even close. Every one of us carries a
unique flora of hundreds if not thousands of microbes, each with its own
genome, without which we cannot feel healthy—cannot be “us.” These too
can be passed down from parent to child—but may also move from child to
adult, child to child, stranger to stranger. Always a willing volunteer,
Zimmer allowed a researcher to sample the microbes living in his
belly-button lint. Zimmer’s “navelome” included 53 species of bacteria.
One microbe had been known, until then, only from the Mariana Trench.
“You, my friend,” the scientist said, “are a wonderland.” Indeed, we all
are.
With this in mind,
reconsider the ongoing effort to engineer heredity. The motto of the
Second International Eugenics Congress, in 1921, was “Eugenics is the
self-direction of human evolution.” Since then, controlling heredity has
become technically much easier and philosophically more complicated.
When, in the 1970s, the first genetic engineering made medical gene
therapy feasible, many of its pioneers urged caution, lest some
government try to create a genetic Fourth Reich. In particular, two
taboos seemed commonsense: no enhancement, only therapy (thou shalt not
create a master race); and no alterations in germ-line tissues, only in
somatic cells (thou shalt not make heritable modifications).
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