BARACK OBAMA
ONLY
IN THIS ISSUE:
$8.95 Chris Hedges on why the
revolution must begin in America
THE ONE QUESTION THAT HAUNTS THE PRESIDENT
APOCALYPTIC
KATY PERRY
SEX, GOD &
CUPCAKES
BOREDOM
GOLDMAN SACHʼS GOLDEN BOY
LLOYD BLANKFEIN
XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX SLIT COULD KNOW II COULD ʻI KNOW SLIT ʻI
PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WRISTS AND MY WRISTS MY CHEERʼ WOULD CHEERʼ WOULD I AM RENOUNCING MY U.S. CITIZENSHIP!
TRAITOR (A1) Front Cover US.indd 2
11-05-10 3:43 PM
(B1) Intro.indd 10
11-05-06 1:03 PM
What is going on in Japan at this moment, especially concerning people’s agony and struggle, is not merely a situation particular to the nation-state in the Far East, but a new phase of human history. It embodies a new form of managing catastrophe and an unprecedented opening of history, which could lead to almost any possible path: i.e., beginning of the end of humanity, advent of a global regime of atomic capitalism, or the moment for the people to end capitalist/ nation/state by building a new planetary association. While the Japanese government is seeking desperately to sustain its sovereignty, it is revealing its incapacity to solve the problems of refugees and nuclear disaster, and in addition the national economy is falling into the abyss. Meanwhile the people are beginning to mobilize for de-nuke actions, which involve innumerable other issues and themes: labor, everyday life (reproduction), anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, refugees’ commune building (…). But many of us in Japan and elsewhere feel that the struggles might last indefinitely toward the unknown future, as the calamity is expected to last unforeseeable length of time. The situation in Japan has opened the door for a new phase of global class struggle under unprecedentedly difficult conditions. Todos Somos Japon is an international networking project calling for a new association of the struggling people of the world. jfissures.wordpress.com
(B1) Intro.indd 11
11-05-06 1:03 PM
WHY THE REVOLUTION MUST START IN AMERICA BY CHRIS HEDGES
The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch towards freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy. The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored. The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time? Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying
(B1) Intro.indd 16
cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive. We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour. “By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism. It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business. Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power. Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half
11-05-06 1:04 PM
o eal es he e. ce d at d o-
wns, ey he le e, he
d st, ll st ese nws ng is tis d he d ts he
a is ur y o se le ve nus, n ice
elf
(B1) Intro.indd 17
11-05-06 1:04 PM
Futility (2003), Wes Magyar.
Explanations for the collapse cannot be summed up in a single idea or one catastrophic event. The truth lies somewhere deeper down. What went wrong started going wrong a long time ago, perhaps as far back as the start of our evolution as human beings, certainly at the start of our own cultural evolution. Deep in the recesses of our minds and societies, there exist structures that govern our ways of thinking and being. These structures, built over centuries as a dialectic between inner mind and outer world, have a destructive power that still remains hidden from view. We must become aware of these structures and tear down all that remains of them. This is the next evolutionary step.
(C1) Now What?.indd 8
11-05-06 12:41 PM
him sitting on the sidewalk I once knew a man who couldn’t read. When I saw ned on a flower or a bird. begging for money, his blue eyes were always trai ing around him. As I passed, Without moving his lips, he conversed with everyth the rain shall wash the world he’d look up, smile and say something like “today ed to communicate with the of sorrow.” People thought he was mad, but I ach world the way he did. I thought he was a genius. book in front of the mirror Just for curiosity’s sake, I watched myself read a e possessed. I made each yesterday. My eyes twitched left to right as if I wer my head. And as I did it, word on the page into a sound that I heard inside triloquist’s dummy. my lips moved up and down reflexively, like a ven he into left and right – Philosophers and scientists split the human psyc inine of the West. the yin and yang of the East, the masculine and fem left is calculating, rational, The right brain is mystical, spiritual, emotional. The s over. analytical. Whenever you read, the left side take t was the Old Testament. The first book ever written in our Semitic alphabe dments. Somewhere in that It was a book of rules, a book with the Ten Comman now beneath the absratct first text from on high was a message: nature was d of God. world of code. The world of code contained the wor lization, a civliziation Taht code became the brikcs and mortar of our civi processors. We became of readers, knowers, data crunchers and human oius before the “knoewldge saturated in letters, in the alhapbet. It wasn’t obv accleraeted. With our fingers economy” arrived, but once it did, the satration tochued and vewied letetrs all on the keys and our eyes on the screens, we both dreed through a juglne of ad day long. Traveling to and form the office, we wna d on sihgt. slogans, all demanding our attention, all decode I turn them into sounds, How mnay trillions of lettres did I look at? (First, ’t konw. But there’s something then into wrods, and finally, into menaing.) I don ns were bmboarded with the frighteningly inhmuan about the prcoess. Our brai we really expect our way same 26 letters, over, and over, and oevr again. Did of thikning wulodn’t change? oarl to viasul. And all the Thurogh txet, our mnids wree trnasforemd form neglect, and the lfet sdie wilhe, the rghit sdie of our biarn gerw dtusy wtih an albeaphtic mstaer. beamce knig. By the end, we were mree slvaes to vr I cnofornt my emetpinss And taht is how it hppaened. Taht is why, weheen wnet form oarl, to lietral, thsee dyas, I see 26 leettrs satirng bcak at me. We to mdnaess. Timothy Querengesser
gyar.
(C1) Now What?.indd 9
11-05-06 12:41 PM
D D C
(C1) Now What?.indd 18
11-05-06 12:43 PM
Double Happiness Didier Faustino/Mesarchitecture Courtesy Galerie Michel Rein.
(C1) Now What?.indd 19
11-05-06 12:43 PM
L
Dear Adbusters, I picked up this issue from the student union of my university. I went outside to read it. When I came to the article on bipolar disorder, I cried. A few months ago, I was diagnosed as being bipolar. After a 45-minute session and a printed questionnaire, the psychiatrist decided I was bipolar and promptly prescribed Abilify, Lorazepam and Bupropion. I took the pills for about a week when I decided to read up on them. I found that the effects of Abilify are relatively unknown and one can become addicted to Lorazepam in as little as four weeks. When I told my therapist about this, he actually was angry. He told me there were no grounds to diagnose me as bipolar and that dangerously little is known about Abilify. I had been wary of psychiatrists and their interactions with the pharmaceutical lobby, and my therapist confirmed this. He told me they were at this mental health facility weekly. After taking the said medications I attempted suicide four times in five months and nearly flunked out of college. In short, fuck the pharmaceutical companies, their lobbyists and the psychiatrists they lobby. They nearly killed me and they succeeded in killing a child. For doing that to a little girl, they deserve the worst punishment that society can offer.
Dear Adbusters, Has the dependency on technology sucked the meaning out of life? So many people in our society depend on phones, internet and computers, it is pathetic. Are my children going to have childhood memories of playing outside and swimming, or of sitting in front of their computers and televisions rotting away? Has technology crossed the line? Right now I feel technology has crossed the line from helpful to addicting. Watching peers, coworkers, friends and family drop everything they are doing when their phone rings is sad. Seeing them check their Facebook statuses every hour on the hour is the depressing but true reality of our generation’s addiction to technology. Madison Miller Chico, California
Ian S.
Simon Schmitt, sycographic.com
(E1) Psycho.indd 2
11-05-06 12:47 PM
Loe Russell
“The current ideologies of success and beauty are unprecedented … students are coming in at increasing rates, saying they can’t cope.”
MEIN KAMPUS
A cultural shift is happening on university campuses across North America. Students are lining up for mental health services faster than they can be treated. This shift is defining a generation and marks a profound change in the mental environment on campuses today. There was a time not so long ago when students used to reach out for help with a particular life crisis: a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, difficulty with a major decision. Today, however, students are complaining that their life is the crisis, an allpervasive sense of bleakness about themselves and their future that didn’t exist a generation ago. This transition from the incidental to the total is nothing short of a socialized paradigm shift, one that has transformed higher learning from a space of exploration and freedom to a prison of the mind. Fueled by stress, anxiety, pressure and competition, many of today’s students are struggling not only to learn but also to survive. Dr. Erika Horwitz, associate director of health counseling services at one of Canada’s largest undergraduate universities, Simon Fraser, said the hypercompetitive environment at universities where students are pitted against each other in a perceived zero-sum game for fewer and fewer jobs, is pushing a generation of youth to the edge.
(E1) Psycho.indd 3
The upward trend of psycho trauma on North American campuses is documented each year in the Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors Annual Survey. Their results are alarming. More than twothirds of student health centers say they don’t have enough resources and counselors to deal with the growing numbers of clients. Thirty-four percent of centers have ongoing waitlists. The number one reason for visits is anxiety, at 40 percent, followed closely by depression at 38 percent. On top of this, dual diagnosis is rapidly rising with most students coming in with deadly mixes of anxiety, depression, body image disparities and suicidal thoughts. And all directors agree that the numbers are going up. These results indicate what happens when the dominant economic ideology of the age, neoliberalism, creeps into the mentality of science and arts. The campus isn’t a place to study Heidegger anymore. Nor is it a place to query the relative nature of the Bohr atom. It is a place to get a leg up on the competition, and competition is fierce. This is a place to cheat when you can, to choose easy courses with easy professors, to trade learning for sycophancy, to deliberately ask one question per class, regardless of interest, for that extra participation grade and to escape into private and isolated worlds when the curve determines only 20 percent are allowed to get that coveted A. In a generation, the message has changed. This is not a place to find your self anymore; this is not a cultural rite of passage; this is a cultural requirement. From students’ first application signature to the day they toss their cap and gown, the new message is clear: a four-year BA will not be enough; one foul grade could ruin your chances at graduate school and consequently your life. This message is snuffing out our brightest minds. Darren Fleet
11-05-06 12:47 PM
Advertising is elevated by op en culture from of the human its previous ro universe. Adve le as an acce rtising is now lerant and pl commercial pr si ngled out as aced at the ce otection in th th e only form of nter e new world anonymized expression m to come. Any and decontex eriting genuin other form of tualized to th more contex e expression is e point of mea tual and the to be remashe ninglessness content of th d, . Ads, however e ad is absolu in the margins , are to be m tely sacrosan of their websi ade ever ct. No one da te for the whi persuasion ou res to mash up tening of yello ght to be moo ad w s served te te et d. h or the sear Every penny is earning a lo ch for a lover. Google earn t of pennies. s Al su l th gg If at paid ests a failure you want to kn money. If mon of the crowd ow what’s real ey is owing – an ly d go to advertising Google ing on in a so instead of to ciety or ideo musicians, jo logy, follow th urnalists and e artists, then a more concer society is ned with man ipulation than truth or beau ty. Jaron Lanier
Disney Ad, Advertising Age, March 14, 2011
(E1) Psycho.indd 8
11-05-06 12:48 PM
How do we fight back against the incessant flow of logos, brands, slogans and jingles that submerge our streets, invade our homes and fl icker on our screens? We could wage a counteroffensive at the level of content: attacking individual advertisements when they cross the decency line and become deceptive, violent or overly sexual. But this approach is like using napkins to clean up an oil spill. It fails to confront the true danger of advertising – which is not in its individual messages but in the damage done to our mental ecology by the sheer volume of its flood. The first step to confronting advertising is to stop seeing it as a form of commercialized communication and start considering it to be a kind of pollution. Think about the long-term mental consequences of seeing a Nike swoosh dozens of times a day from birth until death, for example, or whether repetitive exposure to American Apparel’s patriarchal imagery might damage our psyches. Questions like these get at the heart of advertising and lead us to mental environmentalism. Concern over the cumulative psychosocial effects of advertisements is as old as advertising itself. The French novelist Émile Zola, to provide a notable early example, wrote what may be the first mental environmentalist short story, Death by Advertising , in 1866. He returned to the theme in 1883 with the celebrated novel Au Bonheur des Dames, a deeper look at advertising’s role in inducing a consumerist mindset. Throughout the next hundred years, mental environmentalist
(E1) Psycho.indd 9
sentiments popped up in unexpected places such as Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay “On Photography” where she wrote that “industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” Although always a dispersed movement, since 1989 Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment , has served as its center, and many of mental environmentalism’s most important documents have appeared in these pages. A key formulation was Bill McKibben’s 2001 article from Adbusters #38 , in which he explained how “mental environmentalism may be the most important notion of this new century.” But it was Kalle Lasn’s seminal 1999 book-length manifesto, Culture Jam, which not only offered the mental environmentalist critique in its fullness but also elevated it into a formula for revolutionary social change. “We will jam the pop-culture marketeers and bring their image factory to a sudden, shuddering halt,” Lasn declared. “On the rubble of the old culture, we will build a new one with a non-commercial heart and soul.” Since Zola, however, mental environmentalism has been stuck in a philosophical morass. To claim that advertising is metaphorically mental pollution is one thing, namely an easily dismissible rhetorical flourish. To say that advertising is literally a kind of pollution and that TV commercials and highway billboards are more closely related to toxic sludge than to speech is another matter entirely. And while mental environmentalists have always tried to make the latter argument, they have more often been forced
to retreat to the former. Where is the evidence that advertising is a species of pollution? Isn’t it obvious that a corporate slogan is nothing but glorified, commercialized speech? Into this difficult question has stepped one of the greatest living philosophers, the eccentric Michel Serres, who has written the inaugural philosophical work of the mental environmentalist movement. Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution? is a radical reconception of pollution that cements its primal relation to advertising. The big idea of this recently translated book is that animals, humans included, use pollution to mark, claim and appropriate territory through defiling it, and that over time this appropriative act has evolved away from primitive pollution, urine and feces, to “hard pollution,” industrial chemicals, and finally to “soft pollution,” the many forms of advertising. “Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another,” Michel Serres writes, “first the hard [pollutants], and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquid gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writings, signs, images and logos f looding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin.” >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
11-05-06 12:48 PM
n o ti es u q e th is at th t, ac to t o n r o to act that haunts Me eVerY DaY
(G1) Politico.indd 2
11-05-06 1:13 PM
oBaMa escaLates shaDoW War
Secret assassination squads and a fleet of weaponized drones now operate in over a dozen countries, from Kenya to Yemen, from Libya to former Soviet republics, carrying out surveillance and targeted killings that the White House claims are unaccountable to international law. Top White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan describes President Obama’s emerging military doctrine as a shift away from the “hammer” toward the “scalpel.” In a recent interview, Colonel Kilcullen, former Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to General Petraeus, admitted that in Pakistan 14 Al Qaeda leaders had been killed by drones in operations that also cost an estimated 700 innocent civilian lives. Often civilian deaths are impossible to tabulate, as drone bombs rip bodies literally to shreds, leaving nothing to count. “It’s not moral,” Kilcullen confessed, a sentiment that is widely held on an international level. A United Nations report drafted by
Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, condemned drone assassinations and warned that the US is ushering in a world where every government will claim the right to targeted killings. After pointing out that 40 states already have drones, some of which have been weaponized, Alston warned that “the rules being set today are going to govern the conduct of many States tomorrow ... the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Some analysts predict we may not be far from the day when Chinese robots are trailing Falun Gong leaders in San Francisco and British machines are letting off missiles against Irish Republican Army leaders vacationing in Venice. Or worse still, perhaps Al Qaeda, capitalizing on the precedent set by America, may claim the right to send remotely piloted drones against congressmen in Washington, bankers in New York City or nuclear power plants in South Carolina. Will American civilians soon know what it means to be called collateral damage? Micah White
n
(G1) Politico.indd 3
11-05-06 1:13 PM
REVOLUT WILL THE
wHAT WILL IT TAKE FIRE UP THE UK?
Facundo Arrizabalaga, facundoarrizabalaga.com
(G3) 4 Essays.indd 2
11-05-06 12:57 PM
TION
KE TO ?
‘The revolution is in the mind.’ Those words were scrawled in wobbly spray-paint on Nelson’s Column on March 26, at the end of a day that saw half a million union members and outraged citizens march against government spending cuts in central London. The plan, cooked up by students and activist groups and advertised benignly on Facebook, was to have a picnic party and ‘Turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square,’ as if some sympathetic magic could summon the regime-toppling energy of the Egyptian uprising to these soggy shores. What it turned into instead was a bloody mess.
BEGIN IN LONDON? by laurie penny
(G3) 4 Essays.indd 3
11-05-06 12:57 PM
Heather Anne Campbell, The Midnight Show
Thinner than ever.
adbusters.org
(I1) Back Cover.indd 2
11-05-06 1:00 PM