VIZ... Magazine (4th Issue)

ViZ…Issue 4, Mar–Apr 2010

The other news…

The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade

I Fought The Law

Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate Campaign Spending

Rachel Corrie1979~2003

March–April 2010 ViZ… 1

Contents:Bill Moyers On Haiti 1

Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate Campaign Spending (Democracy Now! Transcript) 2

The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade 3

I Fought The Law 4

Seeking a Cultural Revolution: From Consumerism to Sustainability 5

Rachel Corrie: April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003 6

I Feel Fat…Boulder Youth Body Alliance Helps Students Become Body Positive Activists 8

After this 60-year Feeding Frenzy, Earth Itself has Become Disposable 9

Front Cover Artist:

The painting situated on our cover was created by Iraqi artist Ihsan Al-khateeb. The work is entitled Flowers for Rachel.

The New Decade Is Off To A Roaring StartThis issue is in honor of Rachel Corrie. We hope you enjoy the art. The artists are from Iraq, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, and Russia. A brief essay and art works start on page 6.

The new decade is off to a roaring start. The most striking event was the Supreme Court decision that corporations and unions can pour unlimited amounts of money into national elections. Republican presidents appointed six of the justices and five of those six voted against the people and for corporations. Plenty of Democratic senators voted to appoint them, so there’s plenty of guilt to go around.

Will this be the event that we have hoped for? Will people come together to support a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood? My personal dream is that the people will have a national conversation and pick out a corporation to boycott. All they have to do to get our business back would be to admit they are not persons, stop lobbying our representatives, stop killing and maiming for profit, and stop trying to make us fat. How about Coke?

On top of that, we lost Howard Zinn. We will miss him greatly. Fortunately, his words are still with us. “If there is going to be change, real change,” he said, “it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That’s how change happens.”“Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments), but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can conquer the world.”

As always, it is up to us.

VIZ “Peeps”: General and Ad Sales Manager: Jim KenworthyPrint Design and Production: Greg RoblesCopy Editor: Nate KenworthyFinancial Manager: Clive ClussinContributing Writers: Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, Robert Freeman, Ernie Greenly, Matthew Berger, Jim Kenworthy, Paige Doughty, George MonbiotAd Design: Technical Consultant: Nate KenworthyContributing Editors: Ernie Greenly, Jim Kenworthy, Nate Kenworthy, Greg Robles Operations Manager: Greg RoblesCirculation Manager: Jim KenworthyWebmaster:

Jim Kenworthy

Contact Information:VizMag, LLC600 Coffman St, Unit 212Longmont, CO 80501-5418E-mail to: [email protected]

March–April 2010 ViZ… 1

BILL MOYERS: Even some of the most hardened reporters I know, old hands at covering famine, disaster, and war, are shaken by the carnage in Haiti. Over my own long life in journalism I’ve had my share of the sounds and smells that linger in your head long after you have left the scene. But I’ve found it especially hard this past week to absorb the pictures coming from Haiti.

Perhaps it’s that as we get older, we become more melancholy watching history repeat itself, seeing people suffer all over again, when you’ve already seen them suffer so much. As if you know now some things will never change.

You have to ask, why does this country suffer so? The reverend Pat Robertson gave us his answer, recycling his theology of a vindictive god.

REV. PAT ROBERTSON: Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people may not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free with the French.” True story. And so the Devil said, “Okay, it’s a deal.”

BILL MOYERS: This is the same Pat Robertson, of course, who agreed with his soul mate, the late Jerry Falwell, that God had allowed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 because America needed a come-uppance for tolerating gays, women’s rights and the separation of church and state.

But this time Robertson’s callous idiocy toward the suffering in Haiti created such a backlash that his press agent came out to explain that the good Reverend does indeed have compassion for Haitians and is actually sending relief and recovery teams to help them.

Another controversy was triggered when the conservative David Brooks offered a less superstitious explanation for Haiti’s suffering than Pat Robertson’s. Brooks opined that it’s because Haiti is “progress-resistant”—a society held back by voodoo religion, high levels of social mistrust, poor child-rearing traditions, and a lack of any internalized sense of responsibility. Critics fired back that Brooks should read a little history.

The journalist Mark Danner has done just that. He’s also lived some of Haiti’s history, almost losing his life a few years ago while covering unrest there. Writing in the New York Times this week, Danner said “There is nothing mystical in Haiti’s suffering, no inescapable curse that haunts the land.” It was brought on, he said, by human beings, not demons.

Start with the French. They ran Haiti as a slave colony, driving hundreds of thousands of slaves to early deaths in order to supply white Europeans with coffee, sugar and tobacco. In 1804, the slaves rebelled and after savage fighting defeated three foreign armies to win their independence. They looked to

America for support, but America’s slave-holding states feared a slave revolt of their own, and America’s slave-holding president, Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of Independence, refused to recognize the new government.

Their former white masters made matters worse by demanding reparations, and by exploiting and exhausting the country’s natural resources. Fighting over what little was left, Haitians turned on each other.

Coup followed coup, faction fought faction, and in 1915, our American president Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines. By the time they left almost 20 years later, American companies had secured favored status in Haiti. In 1957, the country was taken over by the brutal and despotic rule of Papa Doc Duvalier, whose son, Baby Doc, proved just as cruel as his old man. Don’t let the familial nicknames fool you. The Duvaliers were murderous thugs and thieves who enjoyed the complicity of American interests until the dynasty played out in 1986.

Five years later in 1991, when the popular former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the presidency as a champion of the poor, he spooked Washington. Said one U.S. senator, Aristide “wasn’t going to be beholden to the United States, and so he was going to be trouble. We had interests and ties with some of the very strong financial interests in the country and he was threatening them.”

The Bush/Cheney administration, in cahoots with Haiti’s privileged, helped destabilize his government.

Every president from Ronald Reagan forward has embraced the corporate search for cheap labor. That has meant rewards for Haiti’s upper class while ordinary people were pushed further and further into squalor. Haitian contractors producing Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas pajamas for American companies under license with the Walt Disney Company paid their sweat shop workers as little as one dollar a day, while women sewing dresses for K-Mart earned eleven cents an hour. A report by the National Labor Committee found Haitian women who had worked 50 days straight, up to 70 hours a week, without a day off. If that doesn’t impact the tradition of child rearing and lead to social distrust, I don’t know what will.

So, once again, beware the terrible simplifiers and remember that through all its suffering Haiti is a country born of revolution, like our own, whose people sing of their forefathers breaking their shackles, proclaiming their right to equality, and shouting “Progress or Death.” Yes, there’s still more death than progress. It’s the bitter fruit of exploitation centuries old. But even if the Devil were at work, there are Haitians determined that he will not have the last word….

That’s all for now. I’m Bill Moyers.

Bill Moyers on Haiti 01/22/10, www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

The content above is used within the spirit of Fair Use in accordance with U.S. Code. For more info visit www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.

Bill Moyers is the host of “Bill Moyers Journal,” a weelky show on PBS. His most recent book is entitled Moyers on Democracy.

2 ViZ… March–April 2010 March–April 2010 ViZ… 3

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rules corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates. One lawmaker describes it as the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case justifying slavery. We speak with constitutional law professor, Jamin Raskin.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today looking at yesterday’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that will allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates.

In a five-to-four decision, the Court overturned century-old restrictions on corporations, unions and other interest groups from using their vast treasuries to advocate for a specific candidate. The conservative members of the Court ruled corporations have First Amendment rights and that the government cannot impose restrictions on their political speech.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy described existing campaign finance laws as a form of censorship that have had a, quote, “substantial, nationwide chilling effect” on political speech.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens described the decision as a radical departure in the law. Stevens wrote, quote, “The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.” Stevens went on to write, quote, “It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process.”

To talk more about this ruling, we’re joined by Jamin Raskin. He’s a professor of constitutional law at American University and a Maryland state senator. He is the author of several books, including Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People.

Professor Raskin, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

JAMIN RASKIN: Good morning, Amy. Well, we’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions

against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of

political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics.

And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental

change in the character of American political democracy. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about President Obama’s

response? He was extremely critical, to say the least. He said, “With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics…a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Yet a number of especially conservatives are pointing out that there was—that President Obama spent more money for his presidential election than anyone in US history.

JAMIN RASKIN: OK, well, that’s a red herring in this discussion. The question here is the corporation, OK? And there’s an unbroken line of precedent, beginning with Chief Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College case in the 1800s, all the way through Justice Rehnquist, even, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, saying that a corporation is an artificial creation of the state. It’s an instrumentality that the state legislatures charter in order to achieve economic purposes. And as Justice White put it, the state does not have to permit its own creature to consume it, to devour it.

And that’s precisely what the Supreme Court has done, suddenly declaring that a corporation is essentially a citizen, armed with all the political rights that we have, at the same time that the corporation has all kinds of economic perks and privileges like limited liability and perpetual life and bankruptcy

In Landmark Campaign Finance Ruling, Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate Campaign SpendingTranscript 01/22/10

See Landmark Campaign Finance Ruling on page 11


The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decadeby Robert FreemanThe media are awash with talking heads bloviating about the top stories of the last decade. The wired-in society. The growth of organic food. The new frugality. This is the ritual that reveals their true function in the culture: pacification. It’s their way of signaling the masses that Bigger Thinkers are looking after things, so go back to your Wii or Survivor or Facebook reveries.

The amazing thing is how little is ever mentioned about the stories that really mattered, those that affected the very nature of our society, its institutions, and the relation of the people to their state and society.

Those stories paint a picture of danger, of a people who have lost control of their government and the corporations that own it. But you’ll hear nary a word about such difficult truths from any storyteller in the conventional media.

So here, in no particular order, are my Top Ten Stories of the Naughties, the ones that really matter. 1. The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential

election. This isn’t even a historical controversy anymore. Al Gore won the national popular vote by 570,000. And we now know he would have won the Florida vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme Court. This was literally a right wing judicial coup d’ etat, so it’s understandable that it’s never mentioned in the “right” kind of circles.

2. Bush knew of 9/11 long before it actually happened. Three years before Bush took office, the neo-cons’ Project For a New American Century called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to galvanize the nation into a war to seize Middle East oil. And even before the event itself, Bush-as-president was warned dozens of times of the imminent attack, the most notorious being the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S”. Amazingly nothing was done to prevent the attack. But even less is it advertised that Bush knew.

3. Iraq was all premised on lies, yet we’re still there. Saddam Hussein wasn’t pursuing Weapons of Mass Destruction. He wasn’t involved in 9/11. He wasn’t engaged with Al Qaeda. As with the 2000 election hijacking, we know all these things. And we know they were false at the time they were proffered. Yet, there we are, with no intent to leave, our very presence spitting in the face of International Law and the international community we so unctuously pretend to respect.

4. The Global War on Terror. Or more specifically, the ease with which the “GWOT” has replaced the Cold War as the justification for the ever-increasing militarization of society. What happened to the post-Cold War “Peace Dividend”? The U.S continues to spend more on the military than all the rest of the world combined. It continues to maintain over 700 military bases around

the world. And it continues to manufacture excuses for foreign interventions whenever weapons makers and military logistics companies need more profits—which is forever.

5. The fact that 2⁄3 of all economic growth went to top 1%. John Kennedy’s social contract had a rising tide lifting all boats. But over the last decade 2⁄3 of all economic growth has gone to the top 1% of income earners. Meanwhile the middle class has suffered a $13 trillion writedown in wealth as a result of the housing collapse. The banking bailout and the health care “reform” debate showed as never before the extent to which corporations have captured government and use it to redirect national wealth to themselves and their owners.

6. The Neo-Feudalization of the American economy. The top 1% of wealth holders own 41% of all the assets in the country while the bottom 40% own absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, workers are saddled with $12 trillion of national debt, an effective indentured servitude that will bind them to their corporate masters for the rest of their lives. This is the working definition of feudalism, where the rich own everything and everybody else has nothing but their proffered labor and their obligations to their masters. The Hapsburgs, the Tudors, and the Bourbons would be jealous.

7. The surrender of civil liberties. Despite the Fourth Amendment supposedly protecting us against unreasonable searches and seizures, the government can now read your email and listen to your phone calls without any probable cause. The Obama administration has gone to court to prevent the re-institution of Habeas Corpus, suspended during the Bush administration. We are much less free, much less protected from brutalization by our own government than we were just ten years ago.

8. The failure of “the free market” to sustain prosperity. The “free market” has long been an ideological dodge used to resist real government regulation of the economy. Still, the ideal was supposed to deliver prosperity in a stable, sustainable matter. Now we have the greatest global economic collapse since the Great Depression, with the government transferring $11 trillion to the banks to cover their sociopathically greedy bets that went bust. All in the name of deregulation, with future regulation vigorously resisted. Is this a deranged country or what?

9. The collapse of the media. We once imagined it would guard the hen house. Yet that was an anomaly, a freak event around Vietnam and Watergate when it slipped its leash. Since then, sixty independent media outlets have consolidated into five, all retailing the ideology

See Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade on page 12


It may have been divine retribution. I should have gone to church Sunday, but I wanted to set up my new digital TV and I needed antenna wire; so I went to the hardware store instead of church.

On my way home from the store, heading south on Main Street, I noticed the fl ashing lights of a police car about a block away. Traffi c along Main Street was heavy and it was diffi cult easing into the left lane before passing the squad car, parked as a traffi c hazard in the right hand lane with the driver-side door wide open. Suddenly the attending police offi cer wheeled around the open door and hops into the squad car. I was aghast at the offi cer jeopardizing his own safety in such a hazardous manner. At the time I thought, “Hey, bud, that badge on your chest does not immunize you from the immutable laws of physics! Be careful!” So, in passing, I indicated as much by giving the reckless offi cer a blast on the old claxon—beeeeep!—to which the lawman takes undue umbrage and immediately gives chase with lights still blazing. He trails me around the corner and to a stop a block off Main Street.

I hop out of my peek-up truck, but the offi cer shouts, “GET BACK IN THE CAR! GET BACK IN THE CAR!” Yikes, I’m being apprehended by an irate, out-of-control police offi cer! The ‘Rodney King beating’ scene fl ashes in my mind and I realize I could be pistol-whipped if I didn’t comply, which I did, forthwith!

The Longmont Lawman approached and, as I rolled down my window, I noted the lawman’s nameplate: Offi cer Owens. I produced my ID and automobile information the angry offi cer demanded. My demeanor was meek and compliant, indeed.

Offi cer Owens returned to his squad car to assess the information. He calmed down somewhat but still seemed perplexed, for he summoned another offi cer, who appeared from nowhere and also parked behind my peek-up truck. The two offi cers then spent 40-minutes searching the State Traffi c Statues hunting for a violation to fi t my crime. Finally Owens issued me a traffi c ticket for: “Illegal use of horn.” I had to laugh when I read of my heinous offense. The fi ne for “Illegal use of horn” is $30 with a $15 surtax—whatever a surtax is about—which I refuse to pay without a fi ght. I suspect a courageous Longmont Lawman may sometimes issue a ticket in hopes the recipient will simply pay the fi ne to save the hassle of a court appearance; but Offi cer Owens isn’t getting away so easy this time.

I was scheduled for traffi c court, 9 a.m. on the 10th of April; but Offi cer Owens did not show and the trial was rescheduled for the 18th of May. I began looking forward to the 18th of May to state

my case in the face of my arbitrary accuser. It was unjustifi ed, vindictive and totally fatuous of Offi cer Owens to give me that silly ticket, which—under the circumstances—constitutes a violation of my fi rst amendment right of free speech in giving a Longmont Lawman a good horn lashing!

I took a graduate course in Criminology, 495, some fi fty years ago (got an ‘A’) and the fi rst line in the textbook was, “The purpose of the Law is to protect the Innocent.” I haven’t forgotten that statement, which, I think, sums it up perfectly. Hey, it’s the principle! Ergo, I spent the next few weeks building a case—equal, I hoped, in scope to the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” in which Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney,

made a monkey of the self-righteous fundamental creationist, William Jennings Bryan, who insisted God created humans. Yes, I was eager and determined to make a monkey of Offi cer Owens; to reduce the arrogant lout into a sniveling chimpanzee, who would never again arbitrarily use the law for his own self-aggrandizement & vindictiveness. But alas, upon the morning of May 18th there was no trial. I arrived at the scene of jurisprudence early, anticipating my oratorical skills would soon set right this travesty of justice and provoke my own vindication. At exactly 9 a.m., Judge John Stone appeared in the courtroom. The bailiff instructed all to rise, to which the dozen or so traffi c offenders duly complied. Once seated at

the bench, the fi rst thing Judge Stone asked, “Is Ernie Greenly in the courtroom?” I raised my hand. “Approach the bench,” said he. I did so. He said my court trial would be cancelled because Offi cer Owens would not be present. Judge Stone further stated Offi cer Owens had quit the Longmont Police Department, had skipped town and—indeed—skipped the state of Colorado some days before. I was free to leave. I was totally surprised! I mumbled something about Offi cer Owens’ superlative dedication to duty and what a pity he would no longer be a courageous Longmont Lawman, stalwart member of the LPD.

On the drive home, I could not help but feel deprived of my chance at retribution. Offi cer Owens must have known he would face my contempt and derision and—the cowardly bozo—had chickened out.

During his 60 year driving career, Ernie Greenly has driven in many large cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington DC, et al.; but had not incurred a traffi c violation until he returned to his old hometown and encountered the diligent & sensitive Longmont Lawman, Offi cer Owens.

I Fought The Lawby Ernie Greenly


WASHINGTON - The last 50 years have seen an unprecedented and unsustainable spike in consumption, driven by a culture of consumerism that has emerged over that period, says a report released Tuesday by the Worldwatch Institute.

This consumerist culture is the elephant in the room when it comes to solving the big environmental issues of today, the report says, and those issues cannot be fully solved until a transition to a more sustainable culture is begun.

State of the World 2010, subtitled Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability, tries to chart a path away from what Worldwatch president Christopher Flavin calls “the consumer culture that has taken hold probably first in the U.S. and now in country after country over the past century, so that we can now talk about a global consumerist culture that has become a powerful force around the world.”

In this culture, says the book-length report, people find meaning and contentment in what they consume, but this cultural orientation has had huge implications for society and the planet. The average U.S. citizens, for instance, consumes more each day, in terms of mass, than they weigh. If everyone lived like this, the Earth could only sustain 1.4 billion people.

Flavin admits consumerism is not the only factor driving environmental degradation but says it is one of the key root causes on which other factors are built—and, as a cultural framework, it is expanding.

“In India and China, for instance, the consumer culture of the U.S. and Western Europe is not only being replicated but being replicated on a much vaster scale,” Flavin says.

Consumption has risen sixfold since 1960, the report says, citing World Bank statistics. Even taking the rising global population into account, this amounts to a tripling of consumption expenditures per person over this time. This has led to similar increases in the amount of resources used—a sixfold increase in metals extracted from the earth, eightfold in oil consumption and 14-fold in natural gas consumption.

“In total, 60 billion tons of resources are now extracted annually—about 50 percent more than just 30 years ago,” the report says.

Escalating resource consumption has also led to unsustainable systems of distributing and producing those resources. In the field of agriculture, for instance, every one dollar spent on a typical U.S. food item yields only about seven cents for the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution, says the report’s chapter on shifting to a more sustainable agriculture system.

It points to this as one outcome of increasingly unsustainable consumption habits. These habits have formed only recently—the same dollar yielded 40 cents for the farmer in 1900—but they have now become ingrained, it says.

This consumption is based on more than individual choices. As co-author Michael Maniates says, “We’re not stupid, we’re not ignorant, we don’t even have bad values.”

Rather, we are acting under the heavy influence of cultural conventions that influence our behaviour by making things like

fast food, air conditioning and suburban living feel increasingly “natural” and more difficult to imagine living without, he says.

To prevent future environmental damage, “policy alone will not be enough. A dramatic shift in the very design of human societies will be essential,” says the report.

In terms of climate change, for instance, the authors say that even if countries reach their “most ambitious” emissions-reducing proposals, temperatures would still go up by 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Flavin admits that cultural shift is “arguably one of the most difficult” topics to tackle, but, as project director Erik Assadourian says, “This shift is not only possible, it is already beginning to happen.”

Most of the report, in fact, discusses action that has been and can be taken to shift the cultural paradigm, rather than the damage the current paradigm has done.

The 244-page report cites a wide variety of examples such as the enshrining of the rights of nature into Ecuador’s constitution and schools pushing children to think more sustainably by giving them healthy, locally-grown lunches and encouraging them to walk or bike to class.

Everything from childbearing to burial traditions can be done in a more sustainable way, it says, and should be. In his foreword, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus points to his experience developing the concept of microcredit and overturning the cultural conception that poor people were not creditworthy as evidence that such deep-rooted conceptions can, in fact, be changed.

“Now I know that cultural assumptions, even well-established ones, can be overturned,” he says, “The book goes well beyond standard prescriptions for clean technologies and enlightened policies. It advocates rethinking the foundations of modern consumerism.”

The report also points to the roles different societal institutions can play in spurring cultural shifts. Among these, religion, government, the media, businesses and education all have key roles to play. Taken separately, their efforts might seem small, admits Assadourian, but taken together they can effect real change.

“Keep in mind that consumerism had its beginning only two centuries ago and really accelerated in the last 50 years…. With deliberate effort we can replace consumerism with sustainability just as quickly as we traded home-cooked meals for Happy Meals and neighbourhood parks for shopping malls,” he says, alluding to the tenuousness of what appear to be deep and solid cultural roots.

“Eventually consumerism will buckle under its own impossibility,” predicts Assadourian. We can either act proactively to replace it with a more sustainable cultural model or wait for something else to fill the void, he says.

“Culture, after all, is for making it easy for people to unleash their potential, not for standing there as a wall to stop them from moving forward. Culture that does not let people grow is a dead culture,” concludes Yunus.

Seeking a Cultural Revolution: From Consumerism to Sustainabilityby Matthew Berger

© 2010 IPS North America http://ipsnews.net/north.asp



Rachel Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003. She was 24 years old. A member of the International Solidarity Movement, she was in Gaza along with other activists trying to prevent the Israeli Defense Forces from destroying Palestinians’ houses, by acting as human shields.

Naomi Klen wrote “On Rescuing Private Lynch And Forgetting Rachel Corrie” Corrie went to Gaza to oppose the actions of her government. As a U.S. citizen, she believed she had a special responsibility to defend Palestinians against U.S.-built weapons, purchased with U.S. aid to Israel.”

Rachel and her friends gained the trust of the Palestinians. After a period of time the residents began inviting the activists into their homes. Rachel made the following statement to the Middle East Broadcasting network.

“I feel like I’m witnessing the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to survive…. Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I’m having dinner with.”

On March 16th, the Israeli Defense Forces were demolishing Palestinian houses near the Egyptian border. Rachel placed herself between a bulldozer and the house of Samir Nasrallah. The following is an eyewitness account by Tom Dale from Lichfi eld-Birmingham, England.

‘Many of you will have heard varying accounts of the death of Rachel Corrie, maybe others will have heard nothing of it. Regardless, I was 10 meters away when it happened 2 days ago, and this is the way it went.

We’d been monitoring and occasionally obstructing the 2

bulldozers for about 2 hours when 1 of them turned toward a house we knew to be threatened with demolition. Rachel knelt down in its way. She was 10-20 meters in front of the bulldozer, clearly visible, the only object for many meters, directly in its view. They were in radio contact with a tank that had a profi le view of the situation. There is no way she could not have been seen by them in their elevated cabin. They knew where she was; there is no doubt.

The bulldozer drove toward Rachel slowly, gathering earth in its scoop as it went. She knelt there, she did not move. The bulldozer reached her and she began to stand up, climbing onto the mound of earth. She appeared to be looking into the cockpit. The bulldozer continued to push Rachel, so she slipped down the mound of earth, turning as she went. Her faced showed she was panicking and it was clear she was in danger of being overwhelmed.

All the activists were screaming at the bulldozer to stop and gesturing to the crew about Rachel’s presence. We were in clear view as Rachel had been, they continued. They pushed Rachel, fi rst beneath the scoop, then beneath the blade, then continued till her body was beneath the cockpit. They waited over her for a few seconds, before reversing. They reversed with the blade pressed down, so it scraped over her body a second time. Every second I believed they would stop but they never did.

She died in the ambulance a few minutes later of massive internal injuries. She was a brilliant, bright and amazing person.

She is gone and I can not believe it’.

Rachel Corrie: April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003by Jim Kenworthy

Ali MohammedNew Zealand


Natali StarikovaRussia

“Rachel will remain, terror and barbarism will disappear.”

Rachel Corrie by World Artists:

Ammar SalehIraq

“Those who are killed because they defy injustice create new imperatives for humanity and World Peace.”

Entitled: Rachel Bleeding continued on page 10


Becky Goodhew was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but when she was in middle school she got very sick. Because of her illness, she lost a significant amount of weight. When she was well enough to return to school, Goodhew got some unexpected and confusing responses from her peers.

“I lost like twenty pounds. When I went back to school everyone was saying, ‘Oh my gosh, you look so good. Wow what have you been doing?’ I got really sucked into body image that way. All of a sudden I was scared to gain back the weight I lost while I was sick, I mean I was getting so much praise.”

Luckily for Goodhew, her initial urges towards thinness didn’t last long. The person who turned her around was her father.

“He was really harsh,” Goodhew explains. “And I know that’s not always a good thing for everyone but it worked for me. He said ‘Becky, if you don’t gain weight I’m going to put you in a hospital and I’m not going to pay for it, you are!’” She laughs. “Having someone who cared about me made me realize I wasn’t being healthy.”

While her father’s intervention led Goodhew to gain back the weight she was missing, it wasn’t the end of her body image struggles. She often remained silent as her peers berated themselves with comments about their appearances, in turn, taking those thoughts upon herself. She knew something was wrong but didn’t know how to respond.

During her junior year at New Vista High School (NVHS), all of that changed. In 2004 Goodhew participated in a four-day intensive study of body image as a part of her course work. One of the guest speakers was Carmen Cool, a local eating disorders therapist and activist. Little did Goodhew know, but the presentation would radically change her perceptions of herself and others.

“The ideas were so new to me!” says Goodhew. “Carmen gave a presentation to our class called Health at Every Size. The presentation forces you to look at the way you judge other people based on their appearances. I didn’t realize I was judging anyone, with everything I was raised around, it had just never occurred to me before. After the presentation I realized I could be happy with my body without compromising myself by changing it. And I realized that being comfortable with others’ bodies was a big part of that.”

After this initial presentation a weekly meeting developed between Cool and a group of students at NVHS. Soon after, Boulder Youth Body Alliance, BYBA, was born. “At first we had meetings to talk about body image. What our friends were saying, what movies said, parents, and teachers. We talked a lot about what we could have said back when it was a negative comment. We also spent a lot of time really picking apart

messages in the media. I started noticing everything.” Before BYBA Goodhew hadn’t realized how prevalent and surreptitious negative body messages were. But BYBA started to give her the language and responses she needed to stand up to comments from her community, and to messages from the media.

Estimates for how many ads Americans see on a daily basis range from 300-3000, depending on whom you ask. Whether it’s in the hundreds or the thousands, it’s a lot to sift through, especially as an impressionable teenager. And it’s not just ads that give confusing messages about body image; movies and TV shows are also culprits.

“Even if your parents are amazing, even if your family is really body-positive, you’re still going to get negative body messages from everyone else and the media,” Goodhew states. “I feel BYBA is a support against this. It gives you strategies, like what would you say back to your mom if she made a negative comment about her body.”

Goodhew feels that BYBA gave her the tools she needed to have a strong core against the barrage of media inputs she was seeing daily. She also began to find ways to respond in the moment to other people’s negative comments, including her own family.

“This stuff can be really hard to take home to your family. The women in my family are strong and athletic. I learned from my mom that it’s more important to have a strong body than to be thin. At the same time I know she worries about her weight.”

Because of multiple sclerosis, Goodhew’s mother is not always able to be active and sometimes she talks about her weight. “Now, if she says stuff we tell her, no mom, don’t talk like that about yourself, or we try to ask what’s really going on.”

Goodhew’s younger sister, Sarah, was also heavily influenced by her older sister’s involvement in BYBA. In addition to the discussion group, members of BYBA also do presentations in the community, educating at local middle schools about eating disorder awareness and how to be body positive. One of the classes in which Goodhew presented was at her sister’s middle school.

“She raised her hand at like every question. She even knew some of the statistics! It was so funny. I was so enthused about what I was learning that I talked about it all the time at home. And here was Sarah raising her hand practically before we’d even asked the question,” Goodhew laughs.

“I liked doing the middle school presentations, but the best part of BYBA were the close friends I made and the ways we were able to support each other. It taught me to really look at how our society looks at people because of their body size. If you can start to hear yourself think about other people and about yourself, you can catch it and change your behavior. You need

I Feel Fat…Boulder Youth Body Alliance Helps Students Become Body Positive Activistsby Paige Doughty

See Boulder Youth Body Alliance Helps Students on page 12


Who said this? “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Was it a) the boss of Greenpeace, b) the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c) an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d) the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society’s most subversive observation into the mainstream.

In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it were not. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

As the Guardian revealed today, the British government is now split over product placement in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers, and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.

Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and wellbeing. Last week, for instance, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”. But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak” and “gloomy”. High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.

Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world’s poor. Perhaps, but it’s a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800 million people remain

permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.

In a new paper published in “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

Most important, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for instance, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures that seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.

You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the “I’m not a plastic bag”, which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley’s nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, “the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered, ‘I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly …. We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending’”. Underconsumption was considered “positively a crime against society”. But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn’t work. Instead they used “the slower but infinitely surer methods” of conditioning: immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.

Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea that I have now heard a few times. “We need to get off

After this 60-year Feeding Frenzy, Earth Itself has Become DisposableConsumerism has, as Huxley feared, changed all of us—weʼd rather hop to a brave new world than rein in our spendingby George Monbiot

See After this 60-year Feeding Frenzy on page 12


Mohammed Fahmi Iraq

“When I painted Rachel Corrie’s face I saw Maragaret Hassan who was killed because she helped the children of Iraq. I also saw my friend who was assassinated because she worked for peace. They are all Rachel the humanist.”

Rachel Corrie by World Artists (continued from page 7):

Najat Hassan Maki United Arab Emirates“ Rachel became a martyr for a big cause, she will stay alive in the hearts of all those who stand for peace and justice. “

Entitled: We Are All Rachel


protection and so on, that mean that we’re basically subsidizingthese entities, and sometimes directly, as we saw with the Wall Street bailout, but then they’re allowed to turn around and spend money to determine our political future, our political destiny. So it’s a very dangerous moment for American political democracy.

And in other times, citizens have gotten together to challenge corporate power. The passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 is a good example, where corporations were basically buying senators, going into state legislatures and paying off senator—paying off legislators to buy US senators, and the populist movement said we need direct popular election of senators. And that’s how we got it, basically, in a movement against corporate power.

Well, we need a movement for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not persons entitled to the rights of political expression. And that’s what the President should be calling for at this point, because no legislation is really going to do the trick.

Now, one thing Congress can do is to say, if you do business with the federal government, you are not permitted to spend any money in federal election contests. That’s something that Congress should work on and get out next week. I mean, that seems very clear. No pay to play, in terms of US Congress.

And I think that citizens, consumers, shareholders across the country, should start a mass movement to demand that corporations commit not to get involved in politics and not to spend their money in that way, but should be involved in the economy and you know, economic production and livelihood, rather than trying to determine what happens in our elections.

AMY GOODMAN: This is considered a conservative court,

Jamin Raskin, but isn’t this a very activist stance of the Supreme Court justices?

JAMIN RASKIN: Indeed. The Supreme Court has reached out to strike down a law that has been on the books for several decades. And moreover, it reached out when the parties to the case didn’t even ask them to decide it. The Citizens United group, the anti-Hillary Clinton group, did not even ask them to wipe out decades of Supreme Court case law on the rights of corporations in the First Amendment. The Court, in fact, raised the question, made the parties go back and brief this case, and then came up with the answer to the question that the Court itself, or the five right-wing justices themselves, posed here.

There would have been lots of other ways for those conservative justices to find that Citizens United’s anti-Hillary Clinton movie was protected speech, the simplest being saying, “Look, this was pay-per-view; it wasn’t a TV commercial. So it’s not covered by McCain-Feingold.” But the Court, or the five justices on the Court, were hell-bent on overthrowing McCain-Feingold and the electioneering communication rules and reversing decades of precedent.

And so, now the people are confronted with a very serious question: Will we have the political power and vision to mobilize, to demand a constitutional amendment to say that it is “we, the people,” not “we, the corporations”?

AMY GOODMAN: Jamin Raskin, we want to thank you very much for being with us, professor of constitutional law at American University’s School of Law and a Maryland state senator.

Landmark Campaign Finance Ruling from page 2

For more information and to take action visit www.movetoamend.org/. Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier.

12 ViZ… March–April 2010

to step back and think, it’s not fair to stereotype myself anymore than other people. It’s all connected.”

Since moving out of her parent’s house and into a university living situation, Goodhew, now a junior at the University of Colorado, has faced a whole new host of challenges around negative body talk.

“The dorms are really bad. It’s so normal for girls who are friends to say, “I feel fat today.” In college I had to revisit that environment of being around girls who put themselves down and constantly evaluate what they eat. With the whole freshman fifteen stigma, you hear about it every five minutes in the dorms! It’s hard. You can’t change everyone’s minds. I’m happy I went to college with BYBA knowledge.”

Goodhew feels challenged on a daily basis with “fat talking” and negative comments about bodies, even in her own living situation. Sometimes there are so many comments she feels she can’t respond to them all.

“The other day a friend was standing in the kitchen making

dinner. She said, “I shouldn’t eat this, I didn’t go to the gym today.” Although Goodhew did not respond to her friend at the time, she explains a few different ways one could respond to that kind of comment. “You could say, ‘It’s good to nurture your body,’ or ‘try to think of food as something that you need, something that feels good.’”

Goodhew feels that without BYBA in her life she would have a difficult and potentially dangerous time in a college setting.

“Without BYBA I would be really affected, instead I’m able to just bounce it off. Even in the dorms when I was around it all the time, I was able to take a step back and remind myself of everything I know.”

Boulder Youth Body Alliance Helps Students from page 8

this tiny little world and out into the wider universe … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species.”

This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in the film Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.

So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and wellbeing rather than growth? I came back from the Copenhagen climate talks depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media LimitedGeorge Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com

After this 60-year Feeding Frenzy from page 9

of the powerful, the perpetrators, laundering their lies, covering up the truth, and harassing the truth tellers. In every story mentioned above, the mainstream media have worked to ensure that the people didn’t know the truth about the forfeiture of their government, their wealth, their security, and their rights.

10. The meaninglessness of elections. This is the most embittering revelation of all. Despite the greatest electoral majority since Johnson crushed Goldwater in ‘64, Barrack Obama has betrayed everything he ran on. In every case where he had the opportunity to confront power—in financial bailouts, financial regulation, health care, wars and military spending, utilities and global warming, national surveillance—Obama has sided with the rich and powerful against the interests of the American people. He has probably engendered

more cynicism, more disaffection with government than any president since Richard Nixon. It will deal a staggering blow to the hopes of mobilizing masses of people again for a real takeback of government. And he’s not even one year into it.

History paints decades with broad brushes—the Roaring Twenties, The Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country. It was the decade when all the institutions that they believed would protect them—the media, the courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president—in fact betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

But not just yet. Did I tell you about the big move to locally-grown produce?

Robert Freeman writes on history, economics, and education. Email to: [email protected].

Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade from page 3

Paige Doughty is an environmental educator and freelance writer. Her written work has been published in a variety of places, her essay “The Patience of the Wild” will be published in the 2009 Green Living Guide by Llewellyn. She currently works in Boulder Colorado teaching the Community Adventure Program at New Vista High School. She seeks to combine her passions for writing and art with transition towards a sustainable and joyful world. Learn more at www.paigedoughty.com.



12 ViZ… March–April 2010

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A significant example of collapsing oil production is Mexico’s Cantarell “complex” of oil fields, recently the largest oil field in the Western Hemisphere. From over 2 million barrels per day in 2004-2005, Cantarell is now

producing at around 700,000 barrels per day.

What now? It’s up to us…

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