Talkin’ Bout A Revolution lyrics
- Tracy Chapman

- from ted.com

However, according to a report by WWF-UK and the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC), that kind of advertising not only empties our wallets, but also has a significant effect both on the decisions we make and on how we choose to spend our time.

‘[There exists] a work-spend cycle whereby advertising heightens the expectations about the acceptable material standard of living, leading people to work longer hours in order to attain a disposable income that allows them to meet those expectations,’ the report explains.

Consumption and status

Central to the report is the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic values. Extrinsic values are those ‘contingent upon the perceptions of others,’ such as social status, admiration of material things, and power. Intrinsic values, conversely, are those that are ‘more inherently rewarding to pursue,’ such as spending time with friends and family, building community, and developing personal goals and passions.

Advertising, according the report, appeals almost entirely to extrinsic values.

‘We are constantly being bombarded with appeals to extrinsic values from advertising, media, celebrity culture,’ says the report’s co-author Guy Shrubsole, who is the director of PIRC. ‘Currently, society is in favour of these values, which are leading us to be more materialistic, more individualistic and less concerned about environmental and social issues.’

This reduced concern for environmental issues can largely be attributed to television, says the report. A study that examined the attitudes of two sets of school children – one that were exposed to TV each day as part of school curriculum, and another group that wasn’t – showed that the children who watched TV held extrinsic values to be far more important.

‘There is good evidence for a correlation between television viewing and a sense of apathy regarding environmental issues,’ says the report. ‘Heavier television viewing is correlated with increased prevalence of extrinsic values, and extrinsic values are negatively correlated with environmental concern.’

Once a citizen, now a consumer

Shrubsole knows that it is unlikely that people will lose their material impulses completely, but he does contend that there was a time when consuming was not the main role of citizens.

By searching the Google Books archives, Shrubsole noted that usage of the word ‘consumer’ began to eclipse the word ‘citizen’ sometime in the mid 1970s.

‘Advertising isn’t the only aspect of consumer culture and consumer culture isn’t the whole of human culture,’ Shrubsole says. ‘But, you can look back at history and find cultures that are much more intrinsically focused. I would say that Britain and the US just 30 or 40 years ago would have been societies that were much more focused on intrinsic values.’

Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor in chief of Adbusters magazine, agrees. Lasn started Adbusters over 20 years ago as a critique of consumer culture. Last summer when the publication called for an organised struggle against capitalism – which they coined Occupy Wall Street – the movement quickly swept cities across the globe.

‘If you look at the history of advertising it started off 100 years as a tiny little part of our economic system,’ Lasn says. ‘But since then advertising has started to create brands, it’s started to weave its way into our emotional lives and it has become emotionally corrosive. It’s a powerful psychological force and nobody ever talks about it too much – it’s like the shadow of capitalism.’

Occupy against advertising!

Lasn agrees that this powerful force is directly linked to our destruction of the environment.

‘Advertising has tripled the level of our consumption and it is now a very devastating ecological force – climate change is driven by advertising,’ Lasn said. ‘We have to ask ourselves: Do we really need a one trillion dollar per-year ad industry to tell us to consume more? It doesn’t make any sense – we already consume enough.’

Occupy Wall Street has, in Lasn’s opinion, done ‘a hell of a lot of good’ by capturing the hearts and minds of the middle class and by exposing the massive inequality of the capitalist system. He envisions a similar movement to tackle advertising.

‘Instead of arguing about how much it affects us, we should start dismantling the advertising industry,’ Lasn says. ‘We need anti-ads, we need subvertisments, we need to occupy Madison Avenue. We should go after these people – we need to occupy advertising.’

Opt out advertising

Advocates of the advertising sector argue that far from being ill-intended, advertising serves as a necessary communication channel for companies to disperse information.

Despite the report’s critical tone, Shrubsole says that there are indeed forms of advertising – such as that done by NGOs or charities – that appeal to intrinsic, rather than extrinsic values and convey necessary information. However, he says that even those can veer off-message sometimes.

‘There’s no communication that’s value-free and we would certainly hold to account NGOs and charities in their communication as much as we do commercial advertisements,’ Shrubsole says. ‘If we can see an ad that’s coming out from an NGO that is also promoting materialistic values – even if it thinks it’s doing that towards a “light green” or green-consumer based goal – we’re definitely critical of that.’

While an advert-free world is unlikely, the report outlines ways that the negative effects of omnipresent advertising can be reduced. Recently, cities such as Paris, Sao Paolo as well as the US states of Hawaii, Alaska, Maine and Vermont have either banned or reduced the presence of billboards. In addition, ‘opt-out’ options are becoming more prevalent online, with websites like Spotify offering subscription based, ad-free versions.

‘To me one of the great developments of the last few years was what Sao Paolo did – here is a whole city that purified itself from ads,’ Lasn says. ‘To me, that was the beginning of the mental environmental movement.’

Lasn hopes that such a movement will be adopted by the Occupy movement and that more people will begin to realise that advertising affects our mental well-beling.

‘Thirty years ago we realised that there was a connection between physical pollution and your own physical health. Now there’s a real connection between advertising and our own mental health.’

- from theecologist.org

The next time you grab a Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Sunkist Pineapple, Gatorade Thirst Quencher Orange, Powerade Strawberry Lemonade or Fresca Original Citrus, take a look at the drink’s ingredients. In Mountain Dew, brominated vegetable oil is listed next-to-last, between disodium EDTA and Yellow 5. These are just a sampling of drinks with BVO listed in their ingredients, which is required by the FDA. The most popular sodas – Coca-Cola and Pepsi – do not contain BVO.

You don’t have to be a gamer to drink these fruit-flavored sodas. In the United States, 85 percent of kids drink a beverage containing sugar or artificial sweetener at least once per week, according to a study published last month. Sodas are the largest source of calories for teenagers between the ages of 14 to 18, according to a National Cancer Institute study. For adults, soda, energy and sports drinks are the fourth largest source of calories, a federal study found.

Hold a bottle of Mountain Dew to a light. It’s cloudy. Brominated vegetable oil creates the cloudy look by keeping the fruity flavor mixed into the drink. Without an emulsifier such as BVO, the flavoring would float to the surface. The FDA limits the use of BVO to 15 parts per million in fruit-flavored beverages.

Brominated vegetable oil, which is derived from soybean or corn, contains bromine atoms, which weigh down the citrus flavoring so it mixes with sugar water, or in the case of flame retardants, slows down chemical reactions that cause a fire.

Brominated flame retardants lately are under intense scrutiny because research has shown that they are building up in people’s bodies, including breast milk, around the world. Designed to slow the spread of flames, they are added to polystyrene foam cushions used in upholstered furniture and children’s products, as well as plastics used in electronics. Research in animals as well as some human studies have found links to impaired neurological development, reduced fertility, early onset of puberty and altered thyroid hormones.

BVO may not be in use today as a flame retardant in furniture foam, but patents in Europe — granted earlier this year to Dow Global Technologies — and in the United States — granted in 1967 to Koppers Inc. — keep that possibility alive.

Soda makers and industry groups say they are not concerned about the safety of brominated vegetable oil, saying their products meet all government standards.

Some experts are unconvinced, saying that the FDA standards are based on decades-old data.

Toxicity testing has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Multiple generations of animals now can be tested for neurodevelopmental, hormonal and reproductive changes that weren’t imagined in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1970, scientists in England found that rats on a six-week diet containing 0.8 percent brominated maize oil had stockpiles of bromine in their fat tissue. The bromine stayed there even after the rats returned to a control diet for two weeks.

Around the same time, a study confirmed that bromine was building up in humans. Researchers measured the serum levels of people in the United Kingdom – where BVO was in use – and in their counterparts in the Netherlands and Germany, where BVO was not used.

Data in rats show that BVO could be toxic. A 1971 study by Canadian researchers found that rats fed a diet containing 0.5 percent brominated oils grew heavy hearts and developed lesions in their heart muscle. In a later study, in 1983, rats fed the same oils had behavioral problems, and those fed 1 percent BVO had trouble conceiving. At 2 percent, they were unable to reproduce.

The diets in that study had “whopping doses” of BVO, about 100-times higher than today’s allowable limit, said Vorhees, lead author of the 1983 study.

But two case studies in the past 15 years show that whopping doses also can occur in people – with unhealthy consequences.

In 1997, emergency room doctors at University of California, Davis reported a patient with severe bromine intoxication from drinking two to four liters of orange soda every day. He developed headaches, fatigue, ataxia (loss of muscle coordination) and memory loss.

Based on data from the early studies, the FDA yanked brominated vegetable oil from its Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list for flavor additives in 1970, said Douglas Karas, a spokesman for the FDA. BVO bounced back after studies from an industry group from 1971 to 1974 demonstrated a level of safety.

The Flavor Extract Manufacturers’ Association petitioned the FDA to get BVO back in fruit-flavored beverages, this time as a stabilizer, which is its role today. After evaluating the petition and other data, the FDA in 1977 approved the interim use of BVO at 15 ppm in fruit-flavored beverages, pending the outcome of additional studies.

The FDA determined that a 2-year feeding study in pigs established a no-effect level of 1,200 ppm. A 2-year feeding study in beagle dogs also was conducted. Although there were concerns about quality control with that particular study, Karas said, no cardiovascular effects were observed in the dogs fed BVO at levels as high as 3,600 ppm for two years. After an independent audit of the data to address the quality concerns, the FDA decided to allow BVO in fruit-flavored beverages.

More than 30 years later, brominated vegetable oil’s approval status is still listed as interim. Changing the status would be costly.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was involved with the petition to remove BVO from the “safe” list in 1970. He said it’s time for the FDA to make a decision, one way or the other.

- from environmentalhealthnews.org

Anyway, why paying money and drinking poison? Lets make food and drinks at home itself.

However, nuclear experts continue to raise doubts that such conditions accurately reflect the state of the damaged reactors at the crippled nuclear plant.

TEPCO and government officials on Nov. 17 released a revised road map for bringing the situation at the Fukushima plant under control. The document said a state close to cold shutdown had been achieved since the reactor cores were being cooled stably and the amount of radioactive materials released into the outer environment had also decreased substantially.

The revised road map reiterated earlier objectives of achieving cold shutdown before the end of the year.

“Cooling is proceeding in a stable manner,” Goshi Hosono, the state minister in charge of the Fukushima nuclear accident, said. “We will carefully confirm over the next six weeks or so if this condition can be maintained.”

Officials of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency are continuing their appraisal by hearing the opinions of experts, although they have informed their U.S. counterparts that a situation equivalent to cold shutdown had been achieved, sources said.

The final decision on whether cold shutdown has been reached will be up to Japan’s political leaders.

Through cooling of the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors that were hit by explosions and other accidents, the temperatures at the bottom of the pressure vessels were between 37 and 68 degrees, according to the document. Even if an error up to 20 degrees was included, the reactor temperatures still would be below 100 degrees, which is one of TEPCO’s conditions for a cold shutdown state.

The temperatures of gases within the containment vessel, into which some melted nuclear fuel is believed to have leaked, were also between 39 and 70 degrees, the document said.

The release of new radioactive materials was measured at levels of 60 million becquerels per hour at the gates to the Fukushima plant facility. That was lower than the provisional level of 100 million becquerels per hour detected about one month ago.

The level of additional radiation exposure caused by the nuclear accident was at a level of 0.1 millisievert over the course of a year, lower than the government standard of 1 millisievert, the document said.

But some nuclear experts have cast doubts on using the 100-degree temperature at the bottom of the pressure vessel as a condition for cold shutdown.

That temperature level is used for reactors operating under normal conditions. At the Fukushima plant, the control rods and nuclear fuel in the reactors have melted, and some may have leaked into the containment vessels.

Even at a meeting in October held by NISA officials, experts questioned the use of the temperature condition. Akira Yamaguchi, a professor of reactor core engineering at Osaka University, warned against focusing excessively on the 100-degree condition.

One reason the bottom of the pressure vessel is being used for the temperature condition is that it is relatively close to where the nuclear fuel is likely located. Moreover, few other locations are available where temperatures can be measured.

TEPCO officials can only estimate the temperatures of the fuel in the containment vessel because it is unclear where it is located.

Kazuhiko Kudo, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyushu University, said the situation at the Fukushima plant should not be described as cold shutdown. Instead, he said, a more accurate description would be a shutdown achieved through a complicated cooling system.

Normal cooling equipment was rendered inoperable by the March 11 quake and tsunami, forcing TEPCO to install temporary equipment connected by about 4 kilometers of hoses to cool the reactors.

When TEPCO first compiled the road map on April 17, there was no clear definition of what would constitute cold shutdown.

Soon thereafter, the central government and TEPCO finally acknowledged that meltdowns had occurred in the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors.

Other nuclear plants achieved cold shutdown at their reactors following the March 11 disaster. The focus on the three damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant moved to when cold shutdown would be achieved rather than understanding the actual conditions of the reactors.

- from ajw.asahi.com

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Speaks @Zuccotti park Occupy Wall Street.

Richard Wolff talking:

Fed is recognizing that another bailout is needed, that all the steps taken over the last few years to try to cope with this crisis of our capitalist system haven’t worked, and so we’re now again on the brink of a crisis, and again public money and public institutions are bailing out a private banking system and a private enterprise system that is not working and is not solving its own problems.

This is now again the Fed is bailing out not only U.S. banks, they are talking about European banks, as well.

It’s a wonderful illustration for everyone about how interdependent the world economy has become. The United States will suffer if the European situation keeps going in the direction it’s going, just as the reverse has been true: many of Europe’s problems right now come from the crisis that began in the United States in 2007. And I think the Federal Reserve realizes that to observe national boundaries is to put your head in the sand and not deal with what will happen here in the United States if something isn’t done.

The Germans are the most powerful economy. Most of that has nothing to do with Germany, per se, it has to do with the fact of history, that a few years ago, just as the European Union was coming together, the collapse of eastern Germany brought into the western German economy a highly skilled, highly disciplined, and low-paid industrial workforce that gave Germany an advantage, because of the collapse of Eastern Europe, that the other societies in Western Europe did not have. And so, Germany got a jumpstart on this thing, is doing really pretty well for a whole bunch of reasons, and wants everybody else to take all the suffering from this economic crisis. The rest of the Europeans are not willing to do it. The Greeks are fighting back—the Portuguese, the Irish, the Spanish, the Italians. And we’re only at the beginning of that process.

Fundamentally, this is a struggle to take a crisis, caused by the business community and the governments they support, and make the mass of people pay for it. That’s what austerity means. And the test here is whether the mass of people will absorb it and accept it. And I think what’s happening is that they didn’t accept it in Greece, they’re not accepting it in Italy, and so they’re trying to make it a continental austerity program, led by the powerful countries. And I don’t think that’s going to work any better than what has been done in the individual countries.

If you internationalize the pressure to produce austerity, you’re going to provoke and organize the counter, the revolution from below, that says, “We are not going to pay for a crisis we didn’t cause” and for a crisis that has been resolved by trickle-down economics, in which all the governments, like here in the United States, helped the banks, helped the big corporations, boost the stock market, leaving the mass of people to look at a recovery program that doesn’t include them. And then now to be asked to pay for the crisis—the recovery program that was never for them? It’s too much. And it’s provoking, whether it’s Occupy Wall Street here or the anti-austerity general strikes in Europe, a kind of movement from below, the likes of which we have not seen for half a century.

In England, this strike was as big as the last one that everyone remembers back in the 1920s. You saw unions and students and others coming together in huge numbers, challenging Britain’s government, which is a conservative government now. But the same thing is happening in other societies where you have left governments. Anyone that’s going along with this austerity is in political trouble and will be in deeper political trouble as this crisis deepens. And I also think, as an American, that we ought to be very careful before we call this a European crisis. What we’re seeing in Europe is highly likely to be a foretaste of what will come here.

The direct involvement of some of the major financial institutions of the United States in this crisis, obviously, because many of these governments took out loans, or huge loans, but often the governments insure those loans through various kinds of swaps, of credit swaps. And those credit swaps usually, because they’re not charted very well and there’s no exchange for them, no one really knows who holds them, for the most part. So the exposure of the U.S. banks to the crisis in Europe?

I think American banks have a closer relationship with their European counterparts than perhaps at any time before. I think that’s why the Federal Reserve is so deeply involved with banks abroad, as it was in 2008 and ’09 and now again, that we know enough to know that major economic downturn in Europe will impact the United States immediately in our credit situation. The banks, many American banks, which are already treading on thin ice—you just have to look at their stock prices to see how nervous everyone is about them—they have very little slack. And you have a problem in Europe, that’s going to take American banks over the edge, which means they will have to go back to the United States government for yet another bailout, when the American people are still angry about the first one. You’re getting politically impossible problems arising because of this interdependence. And again, it’s an illustration that the private enterprise business community that kept telling us for the last 30 years that it was the way to go, the way to prosperity, the way to well-being, it’s not working out that way. They keep demanding more and more from the government, and the problems get worse, not better.

the fundamental question is, you’ve got to deal with an economic system that isn’t working. You can’t dick around a little bit, dicker here, there, to make little adjustments, because that’s not the nature of the problem. It’s a little bit like like putting a Band-Aid on when you’ve got a cancer. You’ve got to take big steps that change the way this economic system works, or find a new system. These are not the politicians that can even think like that, let alone do it. So you watch them failing and the business community worrying and taking its own steps, making it harder for the political system. It’s as though we have a dysfunctional economic system coupled to a now dysfunctional political system, and instead of fixing each other, these two systems are making each other in a kind of a spiral downturn, and the rest of the world watches. And the working mass of people are losing confidence in this system at a pace that I have not seen in my lifetime.

None of what is being proposed, nothing that is being done, again, deals with the fundamental problem. The real wages of the American working people, which is the foundation of our economy, have been stagnant for the last 35 years. Nothing is happening now to deal with that situation. In fact, the high unemployment, which everyone in the government admits, is now here with us for years into the future, makes sure there will be no increase in real wages that workers actually get. Meanwhile, their pensions are being reduced, their benefits are being reduced. I noticed this last week, that everything from the American Airlines to the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra are going into bankruptcy in order to be able to reduce the pensions that workers have paid for. I mean, everywhere, we see austerity shrinking the American economy, not solving the problem.

And a little adjustment on the edges, again, as in Europe, is not an adequate response to this situation, let alone facing that the system isn’t working, which is the deep insight of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And nothing—when you clear them out of a camp, it doesn’t change the appropriateness and the on-target understanding that that movement demonstrates.

financial transaction tax is a very popular idea, particularly in Europe, where it’s caught on more than here, even though it’s often attributed to an American economics professor, who was my professor, as it happens, James Tobin, a Nobel Prize winner. The idea is to tax transactions, to basically hit with a sales tax on transactions, the way the rest of us pay sales tax for the things we buy in the local store. Of course it’s a good idea in the sense that it taxes something that has escaped taxes and should be paying its fair share. I think the mistake about it comes in seeing it as some kind of magic bullet. In order for it to make it really raise huge amounts of money, it would have to be substantial. And all the forces that have prevented us from dealing with our economic problem are arrayed to make sure it doesn’t happen. And they play these little games in which the British say, “We can’t do it, because then everybody will go to America, where they don’t have to pay it,” and the Americans say, “We can’t do it, because everybody will go to Europe.” And so the different groups in power use their different situations to escape it. But it is one of a package of taxes which, under a different plan, if you were to take this problem seriously and see where the money is to solve our problems, sure, this would be part of it.

This is a system that isn’t working, the traditional enterprise that we have in the United States. Shareholders, usually a few that own the bulk of the shares, select a board of directors, 15 to 20 people who make all the decisions. They’ve made those decisions—where to invest, how to invest, what to do with the profits. And here we are with the results: high unemployment, economies in collapse, bailouts needed almost on a regular basis. I think more and more people are beginning to recognize we need fundamental change.

And one of the models of an alternative would be a different way to organize a store, an office, a factory. And instead of a top-down, conventional, shareholder-driven entity, why not bring, as we say—and in your program, in particular, it would be appropriate—why not bring some democracy to the enterprise? Why not try to let the people in each enterprise make these decisions democratically and collectively, both within their enterprise and with the communities that are interdependent with these enterprises? Let’s start from that.

And, you know, think a minute with me. If the workers themselves made the decision, would they move the factory out of the country as quickly as we see capitalist enterprises do? I don’t think so. Would they use dangerous technologies that are toxic? Not likely, because they live with it, and so do their children, right there. The decision isn’t made by a board of directors thousands of miles away. And would they use the profits in a more socially useful way that benefits everybody? Well, they are everybody. That’s what democracy means. And I think we would see a lot less speculation, a lot less of the problems that have gotten us to the impasse now, if we were open enough as a society to look at alternative ways of organizing our business and make our commitment to democracy mean something, not just in the communities where we live, but in the workplaces where we spend most of our adult lives.

Discussion with Richard D. Wolff.

Richard D. Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at New School University. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

- from democracynow.org