a dear john letter

Dear free market capitalism and first-past-the-post voting schemes,

We want you to know how hard this is for us. Even as we write to you, there’s a war going inside us pitting a desire for stability and fear of the unknown with a deep-seated passion for change and hope in something both dramatically better and dramatically different.

What we’re trying to say is that this shit ain’t easy. Part of us still loves you to bits and thinks that you can and want to treat us well. But part of us knows – just knows – that you can’t change. That you won’t change. If you won’t, then we have to.

this is our one demand

It was a busy, irresponsible summer full of visiting and hiking and revisions. But not much in the way of blogging. I’m not apologizing, I’m bragging. Just to be clear. There may or may not be in increase in posting now that the weather may or may not be getting less cooperative. Then again, there’s hockey to play.

Today, however, I came across the following - a creative, subversive, beautiful, and heart-breaking response to media complaints that the Occupy Wall Street movement has not stated specific goals. That they are just protesting, willy-nilly and all, and don’t have enough direction to their dissent. How dare they not have a published set of reasons! How dare they not have made a list!

This is their response, as copied and pasted from wilderside.wordpress.com: 

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

my lack of empathy: on laws and DUI's and the loss of profits

There’s a new law here in BC. It lowers the legally acceptable blood-alcohol level for drivers of motor vehicles from 0.08% to 0.05%, gives police more authority to require breathalyzer tests and, in the absence of compliance or the failure of the test, impound cars, suspend licenses and give tickets. Even refusing a breathalyzer is now an offence. It’s making a big stir.

Why, you ask? I mean, it’s only 0.03% difference, isn’t it?

Yes, but that difference translates into an actual, practical difference when it comes to managing one’s state of impairment in anticipation of driving home from the restaurant or club or pub or casino. 0.05% means that, to be legal, we could have one drink with dinner, and then only if we wait half an hour or so after finishing it before we get in the car to drive home.

This difference has many restaurant, bar and pub owners up in arms. Apparently, this is going to hurt profits in a big, big way. The government, it is argued, has just impinged on the right to make money. Revenues will suffer. Jobs will be lost. It’s not fair.

Imagine my ambivalence.

Don’t get me wrong: Where people actually will lose jobs, I understand the stress and complication that eventuality will cause. I’m all for employment.

And I have nothing in particular against business owners making their profits…

(…even if I also think that most of them could do better things with said profits than get fat and own Hummers from which they phone into the radio station to complain about their lost revenue due to new blood-alcohol level laws in direct contravention of the other BC law that prohibits the use of handheld electronic devices while they drive.)

It’s just that I don’t see a real downside to this law that can be argued without said arguments making us all look like real dicks. (Because, remember, there is no ‘them’; there is only ‘us’.)

Here’s the thing: Laws are society’s way of managing the behavior of those of us who don’t care enough about our neighbors to do the right thing. If we were all reasonable, intelligent, compassionate human beings, then we wouldn’t generally need many laws. Pretty much every religion/belief system/philosophy recognizes the simple validity of the golden rule (or a version thereof): Act towards those around you in the manner that you would have those around you act to you. In “I-learned-everything-I-need-to-know-about-life-in-kindergarten” terms, this means that we should all play nice in the sandbox. If everyone could do that – hell, if even almost everyone could do that – there would be fewer laws. Common sense and empathy would prevail.

But we aren’t all reasonable, intelligent, compassionate human beings, so we need negative reinforcement to encourage us to play nice. We need the looming, impending doom of the law to try to keep our baser instincts in check.

And in this case, the law has been changed because too many of us bent or simply ignored the previous law. We did it when we didn’t imbibe responsibly. We did it when we over-served without giving a fuck. We did it when we didn’t take keys away and make people take taxis.

For the record, I’m guilty of all three charges. I got away with it. I know people though, people that weren’t so lucky.

And people will try to bend and ignore this law too. We’ll drink too much, get behind the wheel of our cars and trucks, and then we’ll drive, sometimes home, sometimes to other places for more drinks, sometimes to other people’s homes where various lascivious acts may or may not take place. Many of us will get away with it.

But some will not. Some will be caught. We’ll lose our cars and have our licenses suspended. We may even face jail time. It will be inconvenient for those of us that get caught. Life changing.

Some will have our lives changed in a different way. We’ll be the drivers, passengers, and innocent bystanders. We’ll be counted among the injured, the paralyzed, and the dead.

For families and friends, it will have everything to do with absences – lonely visits to graves, terrifying anniversaries, and gaping, monstrous, bleeding voids in our lives that will never, ever completely heal.

In time, the number of those that think we can bend or break the law will diminish because of those of us that try and fail. In time, the law might make a real difference. Not soon enough, but in time.

So if my compassion for those of us who make our livings selling alcohol is somewhat restrained, you’ll understand why: That inconvenience is somewhat minor compared to those of us that will be injured, or die, or remain behind after someone we love is killed. That inconvenience, in the face of all the suffering, is simply selfishness.

My apologies, forgive my lack of empathy.

What makes experimenting on women okay?

A few days ago I promised to blog on this story. Well, actually, I said I had to in order to address my overwhelming sense of angst. I said I'd do it in a few days in the hopes that I could find a second source for the story to provide me some clarification and perspective.

In regards to the former, no such luck. Just multiple versions of the original AFP piece (seen here in Google news) edited more or less depending on where it was printed, which wasn't too many places. Which is to say that barely anybody paid any attention.

In regards to the latter, I might have a little more perspective, but still most of the angst. If anyone reads this that can make an argument in favor of this kind of testing, especially the ones I'm taking issue with, please chime in. This is definitely not an area of expertise for me, but the angst is undeniable right now. If I'm wrong, please educate me.

At first glance I was mortified by the numbers - 9000 participants and no statistical difference in results between those using the prototype gel on trial and those using the placebo after 52 weeks - and the apparent risk these women were exposed to. Then I got angrier at the word "placebo". Then angrier still at the phrase "coercive sex".

You can read the articles (see above and below) to get the blurry details of this particular study and the buzz in the HIV/AIDS activism community about the promise that this research holds, especially for women in the most heavily impacted parts of Africa where "coercive sex" is a disturbingly commonplace issue. My few days of distance and reading have given me some perspective, as I'd hoped, but I still have some serious questions that I need to ask.

First, while I'm still calm, I think I'll start with the reason/excuse these trials are somewhat common in southern Africa (as best as I can explain it anyway). As the article suggests, "coercive sex" occurs too frequently in some of the regions listed, regions that sadly also possess some of the highest rates of HIV infection on the planet. An explanation for why "coercive sex" is so frequent would take pages,or hundreds of pages, not sentences, but it is a bit more complicated than the way we think of it in more developed parts of the world, partially due to extreme poverty, and largely due to dramatically different cultural perspectives on gender equality.

I'm not making a judgement call on that idea yet. Let's assume that's the way it is for now and keep moving.

In that environment, if we pragmatically accept that it's happening and will continue to happen, then the very real dangers that these kind of trials present, dangers that would never be accepted as justifiable in the "developed world", suddenly seem like a better option than no trial at all. It is, they say, that desperate.

For example, phase 2b trials of a drug called Caprisa 004, a gel form of the AIDS drug Tenofovir, were concluded in South Africa this year. Among the participants who reported using the cream according to directions, there was a 54 percent prevention efficacy rate, and a 39 percent efficacy rate overall compared to regional trends. That is definitely better than nothing. As one advocate suggested, assume that without Caprisa 004 ten women will contract HIV. With it, only six will.

I have a hard time jumping up and down in triumph over those numbers, but I can understand how it's good news just the same.

HOWEVER, the drug mentioned in the first article, the PRO 2000 gel, was in phase 3 trial, the "widest and most exhaustive" stage of testing. Like I said, 9000 participants. There's no info on how effective the drug was in earlier phases, but an insignificant difference between the test group and the control group in this double blind test is very bad news indeed. Just ask the women who contracted HIV. The article does not include exact statistics, only that there was no difference between PRO 2000 and the placebo. I guess only percentages count in East Africa.

But at least the tests concluded that it's safe for the women to use... Useless, but safe. Okay, the angst is back.

The people that run these trials will tell you that the women would have contracted HIV anyway: They were sexually active in a "coercive sex" environment in which they do not get time or the option of insisting on condoms (I really promise I'm coming back to that "coercive sex" concept), so they weren't put in any greater danger than they would have been anyway. Part of that might be true, and when the drugs being tested are like Caprisa 004 and show real potential then perhaps... perhaps there is a justification for levels of danger that we would consider unjustifiable by our privileged western standards.

But how does a drug get to stage 3 without some expectation that it's going to actually do something? And if and when it does, even with drugs like Caprisa 004, how is a double blind study justified when the scientists know that a control group will be given a placebo cream they are told will help prevent infection and then sent out to expose themselves to HIV? And that's not even including the two tests I read about where they encouraged women to either use a spermicide alone, or encouraged them to use a diaphragm with lubricant, neither of which have ever shown any reason to encourage hopes of efficacy! That makes about as much sense to me as, respectively, testing to see if Pledge is an effective protection against battery acid, or using a swim cap and sunscreen as protection from gunfire.

This is where my sense of dissonance starts to kick in.

I know that people with cancer and Huntington's and Alzheimer's participate in drug trails all the time. And I know that when they do they are told they might get the real thing and they might have a placebo. And I know that the participants weigh those risks and take the chance anyway, for a myriad of reasons.

But it's one thing to roll the dice when you're already sick and have no other hope, and quite another to be asked to do so when you aren't sick and the trial expects and requires that you expose yourself to an incurable and fatal disease. And it's a whole extra level to think that these women are being sent out with a diaphragm or spermicide to act as guinea pigs for western big pharma to effectively provide baseline data.

And that's the crux of it. We get a nice PR spin most of the time regarding these large drug tests occurring in the "developing world", but the truth of the matter is that large pharmaceutical companies go to these areas because there is a desperate population extant, uneducated in their corporate ways, and scared enough to buy the snake oil they're pedaling. And, to be clear, that population is female and deprived of power.

The pharma companies say that they are looking for new drugs to help treat the HIV/AIDS crisis, and they are, but when they find effective drugs and get approval in Europe and NA those drugs will not end up back in Africa any time soon. Just like the drugs that make up the effective HIV treatment cocktails now (which were also tested extensively on Africans), they'll be priced as high as possible and marketed like crazy to the developed world. It will take years and massive amounts of UN/NGO/activist pressure to get those drugs back to Africa where they'll actually be useful to women in desperate need.

That's the truth. Southern Africa is the incubator and petri dish of the large pharmaceutical companies right now. The companies' litigation exposure is minimal, the crisis desperate enough to make untenable practices seem reasonable, and the costs far lower than they would be in a developed nation.

These women are being used. Spin it however you like, but ultimately they are being treated like AS disposable lab animals.

The disconnect that must be present to treat people as lab fodder in this way astounds me, baffles me, makes me queasy. It makes me want to burn myself with cigarettes and play with sharp objects. It also makes me wish there were still a few Jonas Salks in the world of pharmaceutical research. (And if there are, please let me know - I could use the lift right now.)

And finally, before I let go of this: "Coercive sex"? Really? Isn't this just a denialist way of saying rape? Does it make it easier for researchers to call it "coercive" so they can sleep at night? Are they trying to distinguish between rape by a stranger and rape by a husband? And if they are, why?

A rape by any other name is still rape, and trying to blur over it with soft language does nothing except enable the rapists. Yes, there are cultural issues that might explain why rape occurs in some places and some situations more often than in others, but these reasons aren't excuses. Not fucking ever or anyplace. They stop being valid as explanations as soon as we know they exist and then do nothing to change it. I find the phrase offensive in the extreme. For the press to use it is tantamount to tacit conspiracy. Call a rape a rape, god-dammit, and quit making excuses.

And then, of course, maybe there's something we can do about it. For ideas on what to do and whom to support check the links below. I'm not saying "these are the ones!", just that it's a place to start. If you know of more, please link to them in the comments. Thanks...

Human Rights Watch
Solidarity for African Women's Rights
Equality Now
UN Women Watch

‘The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.’ Charles Bukowski

I was reading the news and came across the following stories about an activist being tried for hanging a banner, a brave whistle blower from the US military being court-martialed, and another activist turning himself in to face charges relating to G20 activities that seem, on the surface of them, spurious at best. In each of these cases there seems to be an intent  on the part of authorities to prosecute to a level that is punitive simply for the sake of retaliation, simply because these people have questioned the status quo and are thereby considered threats worthy of harassment.

The case of Mr. Manning and the accusations of leaking military video footage to Wikileaks seems particularly hypocritical to me. In any other industry other than the US military or government, Manning would be protected under US whistleblower laws. Why is it that the government and military feel they should be held exempt? (Of course, corporations feel that they should be held exempt too, but that’s another blog). I would think that they should be held to higher standards than any business. After all, they are supposed to be serving the people of a given country rather than the government of said country, are they not?

And in the case of both activists we have individuals who work tirelessly not only to support worthwhile causes, but who do so while also upholding some of the cornerstone rights upon which our ‘free’ societies are based; the right to protest, to show dissent and to question the actions of our governments and institutions; to hold accountable those in whom we have entrusted our civil liberties (because the mainstream media isn’t going to be doing it any time soon). Yet they are specifically targeted as dangerous individuals. Remember when we were up in arms about how China curtails rights; how Tiananmen was an aberration and a prime example of how the West was better than the East, democracy so much more free than communism, ‘us’ so much better than ‘them’?

I no longer believe that our politicians have anything even approximating our best interests in mind. When one does come along that actually stands for anything, stands for the people they represent and for concepts and morals that are universal, they too are singled out and driven into the mud. Libby Davies should be held up as an example of a politician that still actually stands for something. The rest just seem to bend over for anyone. Instead she’s criticized, threatened, demonized. Frankly, I’d take one of her over the whole lot of the rest of them.

And that ‘rest of them’ are the ones that have co-opted the police, those supposedly sworn to serve and protect us, and turned them into a pseudo-military force enlisted to preserve the plutocracy’s hegemony at the cost of our rights and liberties. This just will not do.

It prompted me, in a thread earlier today, to ask this: “I wonder at what point individual police officers, who might be 'nice people' and all that (and I know several), become responsible for the fact that they choose to remain working for those politicos and in support of obviously compromised institutions? Where does their moral responsibility begin and their job end? "I was following orders" hasn't been a valid excuse for 65 years or so now...”

That’s my question right now? At what point do people that are in positions to support our downhill slide ask, “Is what I’m doing wrong?”  When we look back twenty or fifty years from now, will we be looking at those who served on task forces like the ISU and be asking them “How could you?” in the same way that someone must have asked that guardsman at Trent State that question. How does a cop go to Toronto, beat up a bunch of unarmed protesters, and then go home to the wife and kiddies and look them in the eye? What has to take place in that mind to think that that’s an okay thing to do?

These are people after all, the politicians, the cops, the corrupt jurists and lawyers. Ostensibly they have the same DNA as us, the same propensity for humanism, for empathy, for decency. How do they ‘get there’, that place where threatening people with cameras is okay, and where threatening detainees with rape is appropriate? Hell, I know a few cops and, from what I’ve seen of them, they’re salt of the Earth, regular people that have to do an often incredibly difficult job going after real criminals, people that live with the nightmares of what they’ve had to bear witness to; of man’s inhumanity to man. The ones I know are great people doing a shitty job. And yet, they could very easily have been among those at the G20 smacking people with batons for no good reason, splitting their eyebrows open with shields just because, stomping seated protesters on the back with their boots in support of ‘leaders’ that don’t much care about us at all.

It tempts me to hate them for that. It takes an act of will to hate the system instead and realize that they are victims of it too, albeit willing ones. I’m just left wondering how much slack those individuals should get. When do they stop being unwilling employees or good soldiers and start being criminals themselves?

‘But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more.’ George Carlin

Easter is magic to me, simply magic.

And not in that wonderful, let’s-all-celebrate-family-and-the-death-and-resurrection-of-Jesus kind of way. I mean, really real magic in a Las Vegas kind of way. We’ve all seen magicians pull a rabbit out of a hat, but pulling a painted egg out of a rabbit’s ass in plain site of a guy hanging on a cross is a pretty cool trick, you gotta admit.

And that whole Jesus thing, that’s a David Copperfield-quality bit of misdirection in and of itself, if ya ask me. The ability of the church to turn a pagan holiday into a Christian one always astounds, doesn’t it? Always brings down the house. I can almost hear the fourth century Bishops puzzling it out:

Scene I, Act 1
Date: 325 AD
Setting: The Council of Nicaea

Christian Sect Leader One (CSL1): Okay, that’s the Winter equinox covered, and we can do that reverse-psychology thing with the fall solstice…

Christian Sect Leader Two (CSL2): …I love that Halloween thing – the irony kills me…

CSL1: …and the crucifixion/passover timing is a natural. But how are we going to tie it in with fertility rights so the pagans buy in?

CSL2: Hmm… Eggs?

CSL1: Say wha…?

CSL2: Eggs, I said eggs. They represent fertility and reproduction and profligation.

CSL1: Profligation?

CSL2: Sure! “…All your eggs in one basket”, and “ You can’t make an omelet without…” Eggs will sub-consciously encourage more extravagant offerings. We’ll give them eggs, which we can leverage for next to nothing, and they’ll feel obligated to give back.

CSL1: Brilliant.

CSL2: (Beaming) Thanks!

CSL1: I think we still need a spokes-model though. Eggs are decidedly un-sexy by themselves and, well, the dead and bloody Christ-on-a-stick thing may work for guilty manipulation, but we need something to keep people from slitting their wrists.

CSL2: Hmmm, good point.

(crickets)

Constantine: I like bunnies. They’re fuzzy and soft and taste great with eggs. And they fuck a lot, which kinda ties in with the fertility thing.

CSL1 and CSL2: (in unison) Bunnies it is.

This level of sophisticated illusion has always awed me. We celebrate this holiest of Christian pagan-holiday-conversions with a holiday on the day Jesus died, a big meal on the day that the Saviour would have been in hell, the disciples all mopey and trying to figure out what to do next (at least the entrepreneurial ones would have been), and then head back to work to celebrate his resurrection which made so much profit possible! *sniff* Heart-warming!

Here’s to bunnies and eggs, religious manipulation and all things commercial and profitable! Happy Easter!

‘It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.’ Arthur C. Clarke

I’m not a fan of nationalism in any form, extreme or otherwise. That’s a hard position to explain during the Olympics when everyone is actively encouraged, by our Prime Minister among others, to forego the traditional Canadian sense of composure and modesty to wave flags and cheer unabashedly. (Not that I’d follow Harper’s exhortation advice on anything.) It get’s even more complicated when I admit that I love the sport aspect of the Olympics. I told one friend that I’d be cheering the athletes and booing the IOC, VanOC, Harper and Campbell every chance I got. So, fair to say I found the Olympic festival to be a challenging time, full of conflicting emotions and a guilty sense of admiration.

Let me clarify by saying that I admire Olympic athletes for their athletic ability and the purity of their performances. How could you not admire some of the stories that manifested themselves? A young skater whose mother dies suddenly goes on to skate the competition of her life and take a medal; a guy throws himself down a skeleton track head first at 145 km/h to come from behind and win gold; a couple in ice dancing (is that really a sport?) pull off a gold medal in a competition perennially dominated by Europeans; both men’s and women’s hockey teams come through to take the gold medal in “our game”. And that’s a very incomplete list. It was heady stuff, and I cheered along with everyone else when Sid potted the golden puck yesterday.

I’ll admit it; I was proud to be Canadian in that moment.

The feeling hadn’t been there the entire last two weeks though, and it isn’t there today. I’m still overwhelmed by the disgrace of our government’s arrogance and their lack of integrity; still ashamed that we are lapdogs to the Americans practically everywhere except on the ice; still ashamed that the spectacle of the closing ceremonies may be a swan song for the arts in BC because of our government’s desire to line their pockets instead of support programs that made that kind of expression of artistic ability a possibility. I still consider nationalism, in even its most benign forms, to be an evil thing, pitting nation against nation at a time when cooperation should be the only word on any politician’s lips.

On top of that nationalistic fervor, seen as a positive aspect of the games by so many, there’s the fact that athletics are only a part of the spectacle. They are the draw that corporations use to attract and entertain so that we are watching all that advertising, using our Visa cards exclusively, eating the least healthy fast food possible and shopping at all the right stores for all the right products. Do you think that this is the spirit of the Olympics? Is it the true spirit of athletic competition to sell out the games and everything pure they are intended to be so that corporations can sell product more effectively, and so that local real estate investors can get rich on the public dime?

Can I share a secret? To justify watching the game yesterday, I had to think of it in terms of which team had more of my favorite players on it, clinched by who was playing my favorite goalie, rather than by what national colors the players were wearing. I’ve written before about the evils of nationalism and patriotic fervor. I won’t start again here. Suffice it to say that nationalism magnifies our differences instead of celebrating our similarities. I had to try to ignore the commercials and strategically time my smoke breaks.

This morning on CBC they were talking about the political ramifications of the games and how they might trigger an election, with Harper and his conservative slaves riding high on the euphoric high of the mass hysteria and group hypnosis brought on by the games. How sad. How cynical. They were talking about how happy everyone was too. How we threw a “good party”. One politician was impressed by how the games drew us together as a country. All for the low, low price of roughly seven BILLION dollars. How many homeless people could have been helped with seven billion dollars? How many programs like Insite could have been carried on in perpetuity or created in other places? How many jobs, permanent ones, not six-month, part-time ones, could have been created? But there’s no profit in that kind of social altruism, is there? No commercial opportunity or advertising rebound.

There are times when I sort of mourn what I see as a loss of innocence. I remember my unadulterated joy when Canada struck gold in Salt Lake City and look back on it now with a bit of nostalgia. I found myself wishing that my enjoyment of the moment yesterday afternoon wasn’t toned by the more expansive context that I see the games within now. I wished for a moment, to make a pop culture reference, that I had taken the blue pill.

But I didn’t, and I wouldn’t if I had to do it again, and how I see the world is irreconcilably changed. I still celebrate what athletes from around the world were able to accomplish these last couple weeks; the adversity they overcame, the excellence they achieved. They are amazing and heartbreaking and wonderful (especially if they did it without drugs or gene therapy or blood doping).

Forgive me if I don’t get a Canadian flag tattoo though. That part of the spectacle just makes me depressed.

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism and the free market system are held up as the cornerstones of the democratic system, the key to our advanced and sophisticated way of life. True believers in the free market system will tell you that the competitive impulse provokes in us the root of drive to create amazing technology, the advances we are responsible for as a race in the fields of science, medicine, math and even the arts. They suggest that greed is a positive impulse in that it motivates us to achieve and strive. That inequality and social stratification is a natural state created by the impulse to surpass others.

They aren’t entirely wrong. Capitalism and the representative perversion of democracy that we’ve lived with for the last 250-400 or so years has been extant during a period of unprecedented advances in technology and in our scientific understanding of the world around us. That system has allowed, and even in some ways inspired, those advances. That’s just simply the truth of it.

To say, however, that it’s the whole reason for those advances, or to suggest that the system works, and then to try to support that assertion with circumstantial evidence of those advances, is to paint a very incomplete picture. Rather than give capitalism credit for the positive things that have happened in the last few hundred years, I’d posit that we have done many of these positive things in spite of capitalism, not because of it.

In truth, capitalism generally only takes advantage of innovation when it occurs outside of the capitalist system. Rarely do truly positive innovations take place within the machinery of capitalism. Most great innovations that truly benefit mankind have been made in the environs of academia or by independent inventors and are then co-opted by capitalism in order to make them profitable. Once new technology or medicine or art makes it into the capitalist system it is monetized, its intrinsic value commuted into a means for revenue generation, often at grossly inflated rates, and the innovation then generally stagnates, turned into variations on a theme to prompt future revenue generation. Sometimes the original innovation prompts new thought, usually outside of the commercial system, and a new innovation is spawned, only to be co-opted again.

Consider electric vehicle technology: The means exist currently to replace almost every surface vehicle used for personal and light commercial use with vehicles that run entirely on electric power, yet we still use primarily fuel-based transportation with small, recent nods to hybrid vehicles that still use fossil fuels, but do it slightly more efficiently. Electric prototypes exist that can run for 1200 kms at 200 km/h on a single charge with a 4-hour re-charge time, and that technology isn’t all that new. In fact, innovations in battery technology have been being bought up by petro-chemical and auto manufacturer companies for years where they sit on the shelf. They’ll come out eventually, when it becomes less profitable to continue to exploit carbon-based fuels than to retool for electric transportation. And that dynamic repeats itself with medicine, computers and all other technologies in the same way.

In essence, capitalism holds us back from truly taking advantage of new innovations, the innovators corrupted by the huge sums of money thrown at them by the commercial giants.

Consider politics: The system we use is generally thought of as democracy, but it isn’t. It’s a version called representative democracy that, when it was developed back in ancient Greece, was the only way to facilitate a system of democracy. We don’t all have one vote except during elections and rare referendums. Instead we abdicate our true democratic ‘rights’, electing representatives to cast votes on our behalf in Parliament or Congress. The technology exists to convert our system to a truly democratic system. Computers exist in more North American homes than not, and most of those have frequent if not continual connection to the internet and secure websites, yet we still vote the old fashioned way, and still vote away our rights to democratic say in how our countries are run. We complain about how our politicians betray us and act in anything but our best interests, but they aren’t the problem – we are. We have voluntarily given up our right to democracy in favor of the lazy comfort of not having to pay much or any attention, in order to enjoy the ironic pleasure of complaining about our elected officials’ performance, and in service to the divisive nature of partisan politics.

So I won’t be saying that capitalism is responsible for any progress we’ve made. The best I can offer capitalism is a sarcastic nod for allowing some of the good things that have happened, and that, in my opinion, is far outweighed by the damage it does.

Today is Boxing Day, the biggest shopping day of the year in Canada. I’ve had the TV on a bit while writing this and watched the same commercial for a major retailer play several times. In the commercial, a family is rushing to leave the house in order to take advantage of some amazing sales that started this morning at 7am. As they run out the door, they leave their infant child in his car seat in the forefront of the picture. Dad closes the door and then, a second or two later, runs back in to grab the car seat and baby. The message? The deals are so good that you’ll forget your family, and forgetting them is okay, cute even. Nice, yeah?

In another one, this one for a cellular network, a law enforcement team is thwarted in their chase to find a criminal by the subject’s use of their more advanced and pervasive 3G network. The message? Use our service because it’s good enough for criminals! Wow… inspiring.

Consumerism is the true foundation of our capitalist/representative democracy. “Bigger, better, faster, more” is the motto. This day, this week, more than any other in Canada and on par with Black Friday in the US, is the symbol of the consumerist and capitalist system. This is the real legacy of our free market system; that we have abdicated our dignity in favor of a vain pursuit for nicer stuff, and hopefully more of it than our neighbors, and if we’re really fortunate and work hard maybe so much money and stuff that one day we won’t have to work any more or will be able to join the truly rich.

Mmmm-mmm, makes me want to go set up a tent and be the first in line with a big, happy ‘Go Capitalism’ t-shirt on to show my pride. Just kidding… You got that, right?

“The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it causes to others.” Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

I was watching the movie, The Corporation, again and pulled this quote from the introduction of the book that inspired the documentary.

If you haven’t seen the movie, check out the link to the right. I highly recommend it.

The premise of the book, and the primary conceit of the movie, involves the fact that, under international and federal laws, a ‘corporation’ is viewed as a person in the eyes of the law, given rights just like a person, and by the vagaries of law this classification as a person eliminates the liability of the shareholders that own the corporation. The book and movie then observe the behaviors of the corporate ‘person’ as it exists in our society and diagnoses it according to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Mr. Bakan and the film both make a convincing argument in support of a diagnosis of archetypal psycopathy.

In other words corporations are, as the argument goes, by legal mandate sociopathic.

This might not be news to you. It wasn’t a huge shock to me when I first watched it, but seeing the argument spread out the way it is in the book and movie was a revelation just the same.  This is the defining organization of our time, the single most monolithic institution type in existence. It is what we will be remembered for by future societies (assuming we evolve past this one).

I could go on, but it would just become a sermon, and unless you see it, hear it, and recognize it for truth, anything I have to say about it is moot. Conversely, once you do see, you won’t need me or anyone else to say anything – that’s the beauty of truth; it is self-supporting. So download the movie or go rent it at Blockbuster, or go find it at Better World Books (a sustainable business model).

You may not ultimately agree, and that’s your choice, but at least you’ll be able to say you made an informed decision.