5-24-06, 9:18 am

  How do we gauge social system failure? Sociologists understand that an ideal social system with its network of institutions, held together by a culture, functions to fulfill needs of a society. When it fails to meet those basic needs, we can conclude that it has failed or become dysfunctional. With this premise in mind, no 'failure' of any system can be worse than the fact that in the USA, 1% of the population controls more wealth than the rest of the 99% combined which means that 'life chances' are inherently unequal. No failure can be more complete than the fact that in the wealthiest country on earth over 82 million people at any point during two years; if they suffer catastrophic illness will die or seriously injure themselves because they do not have health insurance ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june04/uninsured_06-16.html ). No failure of a system can be as obvious as the contradiction in its operation regarding need fulfillment, when farmers are paid to destroy food products for the sake of price and where tens of millions of tons of food are wasted every year, and food products dumped overseas, putting foreign farmers out of business ( http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/trade/bp50_corn.htm ), there exist over 38 million that suffer from chronic food insecurity (in the US), according to USDA reports ( http://www.frac.org/Press_Release/10.28.05.html ). No failure can be more obvious than the fact that in a nation where the rich own several million dollar homes, there are over 7 million (according to some estimates, in any given year) roaming the streets in the dead of winter as homeless persons ( http://www.cohhio.org/resources/howmanyhomeless.html ). No failure of any system can match the failure of a very wealthy country, parading as 'free-market' heaven, a paragon of care and sensibility,  that ignores its masses in this manner while enriching the very few that dominate its economic and political institutions.

Fear and profit are perpetually related in the capitalist world, dominated by the US elite. If it is not fear of terrorism, it is bird flu they want you to be scared of. All along behind this fear are big contracts in the hundreds of billions, while the masses in the world are dying everyday by the tens of thousands due to poverty related causes, which are exacerbated by the real consequence that these fear tactics lead to. Destroying millions of chickens to combat bird flu, on whim of disease, will put tens of thousands of people whose livelihood depends on them on the brink of starvation. Forcing countries to alter their agendas from focus on domestic issues to fighting a 'war on terrorism' has similar consequences.

 Fear and its implied protection are always focused towards the future in such a system, while people die and live miserable lives today. And how does the system control the fallout of all this fear mongering? It blames the victims, the poor, for their own misery and hooks them up on drugs and other addictions that generate wealth for the rich or show them fictitious visions of a heaven they will never attain, through the corporate media. Here is our world as it exists today, going fast to hell with the American elite as its guide. They are the ones who declare wars for economic and political reasons, justified by images of 'ideals' that don't exist even at home, yet never fight the wars themselves but send most from the lower socioeconomic classes (as is the bulk of the US military) to do their fighting for them. They reap the benefits of such wars while killing other people's children. The people at the receiving end of these wars are ruthlessly butchered in barbarism that equals any practiced by Hitler. Nuking civilian cities in Japan, napalming civilian villages in Vietnam, using white phosphorous in Falluja, making sure that the Afghans of the countryside fought the U.S cold war with the Soviets to the last man (losing over one million) and then abandoning them, forcing the vast majority in the world, billions,  to live in debilitating poverty while concentrating wealth among their tiny group, punishing countries with back breaking sanctions that kill the most powerless members of their society, how did Hitler overshoot this barbarism?

A big deal is made of the US media's independence by citing its criticism of the Vietnam war. We have to look a little bit deeper (at the results) to uncover the media's motivations at the time. Did the US elite and their media apologize and change their foreign policy after Vietnam and the well reported atrocities of the US in that country? Did they acknowledge that the war was an inhumane, barbaric endeavor? Not at all, in fact even today this media has not apologized on behalf of the elite: look at what the media did in this past election. It picked up on Kerry's opposition to such atrocities in that era and labeled him unpatriotic. It then went further by giving the 'swift boat veterans' excessive coverage to prove the same point. Why the media opposed the Vietnam War towards the end was not because of any independent moralistic considerations but because elite agenda was turning against the war, and not because of any popular movements, reporting about which is always circumscribed by a wider political and economic agenda.

Let us look at Abu Ghraib that is often presented to us as showing the neutrality of the US media: how has the media presented it? It was presented as isolated cases of individuals and not something that had institutional precedent that required institutional restructuring. The people at the top whose policies led to such atrocities, none of them took consequential responsibility. The reporting of these incidents also fulfilled another function for the US elite, it sent their 'private' message, based upon their stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, that they consider all these Muslims hold sacred to be violable (and worthless): Part of their psychological warfare. The recent cartoons of the prophet and how the media covered reactions to them, can be seen in a similar light.

The American media has two duties to fulfill on behalf of the corporate elite, unlike the media of most 'third-world' countries who might have direct coercive state control:

1. Domestic agenda to pacify the masses 2. International agenda to justify empire.

Merely because control has shifted from explicit, coercive control to implicit bureaucratized (and cultural domination based) control, makes the emergence of so called 'whistle blowers' an effective propaganda tool in how business is conducted by this media and the US elite and their system of manipulation. Whistle blowers and their coverage by the media, is nothing more than propaganda. If it was anything more then their 'whistle-blowing' would produce results that had institutional consequence. Has there been any debate in the mainstream media stating that the Iraq war is barbaric and illegal, after the reporting of Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo? None whatsoever. So what purpose has that reporting or such 'whistle-blowing' fulfilled? Every night on this media, we still hear about 'Mission Iraq', 'Iraqi Freedom', democracy and all the other meaningless slogans that are pushed on propagandized audiences to evoke predetermined psychological responses. It has achieved zero change in the US foreign policy or in the structure of US institutions.

Poverty in the U.S: Indicators of a failed system:

The USDA report, Household Food Security in the United States, 2004, says that 38.2 million Americans live in households that suffer directly from hunger and food insecurity, including nearly 14 million children. That figure is up from 31 million Americans in 1999. Out of this 38 million that are classified as 'poor' in the US, most households are below the poverty threshold for a four-person family unit with two children of $19,157 as revealed by 'living wage analysis', which puts the living wage above $8 an hour based on this threshold, while the actual federal minimum wage is slightly over $5 given current dollars and a dollar less given constant dollars ( http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html ). So, if poor households have two TVs in the US (as Heritage Foundation authors Robert E. Rector and Kirk A. Johnson allege to 'prove' that the 'US poor' are not actually poor), how many meals will those two TVs buy if need be? And if one person in that 'household' has to work and needs a car that takes up a huge chunk of his income (as car payment, gas and insurance) leaving very little for all else, what can he or she do given a public transport system next to nothing in most US cities? Or if the 'household' cancels their $40 a month cable subscription, how many meals will that buy to make them 'non-poor'. If over 38 million are facing food insecurity in the US, it matters little if they have access to durables (which by definition last a while) like TVs that cannot even be traded in for three days of food, for a family of four. Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson are using distraction indicators; these are not real social indicators of well-being. The fact is that the poor given all human development indicators, even access to life (since they die at three times the rate and suffer from diseases much more than those above the poverty line) suffer tremendously.

Given the amount of wealth and resources used by a small percent of this country (the top 1% commanding more wealth than the rest of the 99% combined), the 13% (officially) poor, which translates into tens of millions is a huge number. Above this huge number is another huge number that is extremely poor and living on the margins. It is an ongoing system of corruption and concentration and waste, where the rich get richer and the poor, poorer. There is everything wrong when the official poverty figures place over 38 million (and the unofficial almost double that) in a country of extreme wealth. (The official poverty figures are calculated as adequate food times three, the real figures would include things like rent, actual fuel costs, health care, proper education etc, which easily doubles the official figures: http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/povmeas/papers/orshansky.html .)

I would argue the poor suffer even more in the US compared to other countries, due to greater relative deprivation, poverty amidst plenty and the breakdown of tradition and family to add to it. Empirically, as a factor of GNI, adjusted for Purchasing Power, the official US poverty percent is much worse than any country of the world. For example, in Nigeria the official poverty rate is around 58%, which is around four and a half times more than the US official rate, but the GNI per capita of Nigeria is 45 times less than the US. We can repeat this exercise for any country of the world and conclude the same. These figures are an official disgrace and signify the failure of a system that advertises its fictitious successes 24/7 and enjoys near total cultural hegemony.

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