As a budding Australian, I learned this week that right-wierdo Tony Abbott’s budget cuts are spurious. The agenda of the cuts is to eliminate the deficit, but it’s not a big deficit and it’s not particularly a problem. Having invented a problem, Abbott has cut “across the board”, implementing Australia’s first user fees for healthcare (including children’s immunizations!) and cuts to profitable investments in innovative enterprise. During the same week, I was lucky to attend […read the rest]
The prison industrial complex is based on the insight that bodies can be made profitable without their consent. You just need the right regulatory framework. Governments come in handy for corporate schemes. Nutritionists’ longstanding warnings that processed food is unhealthy are beginning to materialize as public health crises. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Food announced this week that “unhealthy diets are now a greater threat to global health than tobacco.” The carcinogenic tendencies of agricultural […read the rest]
Noam Chomsky is perhaps best known for the book he wrote with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, also made into a wonderful film. They show how the mainstream media is used to manufacture political consent in purported democracies. I’m interested in how consent is manufactured to other kinds of changes in our worlds. For example, biotechnology crops have been so widely introduced and with so little oversight, that we now hear that we are eating biotech […read the rest]
Amory Starr Luis A. Fernandez Christian Scholl Don’t mind the press’ stupid title, the proper one is: Out of Order: The Political Violence of Social Control in the Era of Global Governance New York University Press ISBN: 9780814741009 September 2011 Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect […read the rest]
