Download - Adbusters 102: Spiritual Insurrection

$8.9

5Ju

l/Aug

20

12

Vol.2

0 N

o.4

Dis

pla

y un

tilA

ugus

t 7,

20

12

60

2005879265

07

JULY/AUG

(A1) Front Cover US_FFFF•e.indd 2 12-05-14 6:38 PM

PSYCHOPSYCHO

(B1) Intro_FFF•e.indd 4 12-05-15 12:28 PM

Miles AldridgeLip Fantasy #4Vogue Nippon, 2006

At a recent photo shoot with a young movie starlet, make-up artist Prada Westwood was surprised at one of her requests. “The fi rst words she said to me,” Westwood recollects, “were ‘I love my foundation.’”

Westwood said that her client preferred to wear primer and foundation, even though many people would consider her gorgeous without the make-up. “Young women,” she said, “are wanting to project a ‘very done’ look these days. They want to make sure to be ready for their close-ups – at photo shoots, and in everyday life.”

The introduction of high-defi nition video cameras that cap-ture every unsightly facial feature has meant a fl ashback to the days of heavy “Pan Cake” make-up, with a few key im-provements for contemporary living. Sami Danz, founder and director of cosmetic company Make Up For Ever and Always (M4E&A), said that high-defi nition cameras really highlight imperfections like pores and wrinkles. “The prob-lem isn’t just with the colour of the face,” she said, “it’s with texture, too. Foundation needs to be fi ne-grain and thin, and simultaneously offer good structure and coverage.”

M4E&A launched an HD line last year, striking a chord with women everywhere who’ve been turning their camera-phones on themselves. Danz refers to her Healthy-Looking HD FX foundation, which features microbeads that are guaranteed to stand up in 7-megapixel conditions. “The self-portrait is a very popular social media pose,” Danz continued, “so products like the HD FX foundation are re-ally very much a part of participating socially, and entering the internet conversation.”

Heather Factor, CEO at GFO Hedge Fund Management, says she layers on Yola Yellow Vitamin-Enriched Face Base and Get Discovered cream blush before contouring her cheek-bones with bronzer so that she can look her best at the many charity events she attends. “I’m really into the matte fi nish of the Face Base,” Factor asserts, “It reduces the shine of the face for photographs. I don’t just wear it for pho-tos though. I wear it because it’s long-lasting for girls on the go – you never know when your pictures could go viral.”

Companies like Make Up For Ever and Always, and art-ists like Prada Westwood, have been working day and night on solutions for high-functioning, successful wom-en like Heather Factor. “If you look at relationships today,” Westwood says, “they’re built solely on the visual level.” Referring to products that are now in her everyday arsenal, like Flash Ready fi nishing powder and Volume 11 mascara, Westwood says that women are getting more savvy about developing and maintaining solid, fl aw-free friendships.

(B1) Intro_FFF•e.indd 5 12-05-15 2:40 PM

Istv

an B

anya

i, is

t-on

e.co

m

(C2) Logic Freaks_FFF.indd 2 12-05-11 5:27 PM

Hey you dilettantes, feinschmeckers, keeners,

Geoffrey M. Hodgson is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics.

Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

At least three Nobel laureates have expressed their concerns. At a very early stage Wassily Leontief in 1982 objected that models had become more important than data: “Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas ... Year after year, economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data.”

In 1997, Ronald Coase complained: “Existing economics is a theoretical system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world.” Near the end of his life, Milton Friedman observed: “Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.”

What happened after these prestigious complaints? David Colander lamented in 2009 that none of these prominent warnings “had any effect on US graduate economic education.” As Mark Blaug wrote pessimistically in 1998: “We have created a monster that is very difficult to stop.”

The problem is not necessarily mathematics per se, but the obsession with technique over substance. Arguably there is a proper place for some limited use of useful heuristics or data-rich models within economics. But what should determine their adoption is not their technical aesthetics, but their usefulness for helping to explain the real world.Is

tvan

Ban

yai,

ist-

one.

com

(C2) Logic Freaks_FFF.indd 3 12-05-11 5:27 PM

“Part of the issue here is also the accelerating feminization of



American culture, which has caused the increasing demonization



of relatively normal male behavior ... No, it isn’t pretty, but it’s not



that different from the way football teams psych themselves up for

that different from the way football teams psych themselves up for

games or the way that ... a big company’s sales force revs up for a



new product introduction ... And sometimes, men do dumb things.



This is one of them, and not much more.” This is one of them, and not much more.”

– Ann Marlowe, Hudson Institute, in a – Ann Marlowe, Hudson Institute, in a Wall Street

Journal op-edJournal op-edJournal

“This did not even rise to the level of a fraternity “This did not even rise to the level of a fraternity “This did not even rise to the level of a fraternity prank, because in fraternity pranks, people prank, because in fraternity pranks, people prank, because in fraternity pranks, people sometimes get hurt. Nobody got hurt. It was sometimes get hurt. Nobody got hurt. It was sometimes get hurt. Nobody got hurt. It was young people blowing off testosterone.”young people blowing off testosterone.”young people blowing off testosterone.”– Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters

(D1) Capitalismo_FFF.indd 6 12-06-07 5:07 PM

iTh

era

pis

t W

ill

See

You

Now

Te

r ri f

i ed

? A

nx

iou

s?

I so

l ate

d?

Ove

rwh

elm

ed?

Do

n’t

let

soci

al p

ho

bia

s ge

t in

th

e w

ay o

f you

r th

erap

y.A

new

lin

e o

f sm

artp

ho

ne

app

s is

be-

ing

dev

elo

ped

at

Har

vard

Un

iver

sity

to

mak

e ea

ch t

ou

ch s

cree

n, n

ot

just

a g

ate-

way

to

ente

rtai

nm

ent

galo

re, b

ut a

n in

ti-

mat

e vi

rtua

l th

erap

ist a

s w

ell.

Soon

, you

’ll

be

able

to r

eset

you

r ne

gati

ve n

euro

pat

h-

way

s w

ith

cog

nit

ive

gam

es a

nd a

rch

etyp

-al

insi

ghts

; del

ve in

to t

he d

arkn

ess

of y

our

child

ho

od

wit

h c

raft

ed i

mag

es d

esig

ned

fo

r fa

st s

cro

ll; a

nd

cli

ck t

hro

ugh

th

e u

n-

hap

py

pre

sent

into

a m

ore

rela

xed

, cal

m

and

pro

mis

ing

futu

re.

Th

e d

ays

of

dru

dgi

ng

an h

ou

r o

ut

of

you

r w

ay t

o a

stra

nge

r-in

-a-b

ad-s

uit

’s o

f-fi c

e ar

e ov

er. N

ow y

ou c

an h

ave

the

com

-fo

rt o

f you

r ow

n p

erso

nal p

sych

e-m

ate

in

the

pal

m o

f you

r h

and

.

“They were frustrated, just pissed off – their buddies had been blown up by IEDs,” the source of the photos said. “So they sort of just celebrated.”


WHAT IS LEFT OF THE COUNTRY?

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize win-ning author and former international correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

What was left of electoral politics in the United States gasped and sput-tered to its extinction with the 2010 Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United. At that point the game was over. Legalized bribery now defi nes the political process. The most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, such as the Koch brothers, are the undisputed king makers. They decide who gets elected by anonymously pouring hundreds of millions into campaigns. They hang with their SuperPACs like vultures over the heads of every federal and state legislator. Any politician who dares to challenge corporate demands and unregulated corporate capitalism knows they will be thrust from po-litical life as well as their highly paid corporate jobs once they leave offi ce. Politicians, including Barack Obama, are corporate employees. And they know it.

CHRIS HEDGES

Corporate money had corrupted the American politi-cal system even before the 2010 Citizens United ruling. We had 35,000 corporate lobbyists in Washington by 2010 writing legislation and funneling corporate donations to compliant politicians. But the ruling snuffed out even tepid and marginal resistance. It transformed us into an oligarchic, corporate state. It marked, in essence, the cul-mination of the corporate coup d’état that has slowly been established over the past few decades. We can identify our individuality through brands or choices in lifestyle, but political freedom does not exist.


WHAT IS LEFT OF THE COUNTRY?

Cou

rtne

y Sa

cco

As brutal arrests leave occupiers with broken bones and hefty hospital bills, some are embracing “de-arresting,” or breaking free from an arrest.

Our highly choreographed campaigns are bizarre spectacles, sterile and empty acts of political theater. The personal nar-rative of candidates is the central point of debate, not issues, programs or policies. The rhetoric and style is different – in short the brands are different– between Republicans and Democrats, but the substance is the same. It is impossible within the politi-cal system in the United States to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobile. Political debate is dominat-ed by opinion rather than fact. Lies are true.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation, for example, designed Obama’s healthcare bill. It was first put into practice by then-Gover-nor Mitt Romney in 2006 in Massachusetts. Barack Obama adopted it, after corporate lobbyists for the pharmaceutical and in-surance industries rewrote it to include $447 billion in subsidies. Romneycare is Obamacare. It forces consumers to buy a default corporate product. The insurance companies can raise co-payments and premiums, including for the elderly and those on fixed income. They are exempt-ed from providing coverage to chronically

ill children. Once you get sick you can be priced out of the market. Of the one million Americans who go bankrupt every year be-cause they cannot pay their medical bills, 80 percent are insured. This abuse will re-main untouched. The healthy will pay. The sick will be pushed aside.

The debate on the airwaves between Republica ns a nd Democrats over the healthcare bill, now before the Supreme Court, is part of the vast dumb show. And this is true for every piece of legislation pushed through Congress. The corporate media exists not to illuminate but to perpet-uate the mirage. Coke or Pepsi. Take your pick. As if there is a difference.

The capturing of the legislature, execu-tive and judiciary by corporate power, how-ever, is only the first stage. We have now entered the second. The corporate state, led by Congress and the Supreme Court, is rapidly criminalizing dissent. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was a bipartisan bill signed into law on New Year’s Eve by Obama, permits the US gov-ernment to employ the military as a do-mestic police force that can detain citizens

accused of supporting terrorist groups or “associated forces” without due pro-cess until, in the language of the law, the end of hostilities. Obama has employed the Espionage Act against government of-ficials who have leaked information about war crimes to the press, virtually shutting down investigative reporting. Only the of-ficial narrative now prevails. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act (FISA) retroactively made legal what under our Constitution was illegal, the warrant-less wiretapping, monitoring and eaves-dropping on citizens. And the Supreme Court, utterly inverting the concept of the rule of law, recently ruled that those who are strip-searched by police or corrections officers, even if they are innocent of a crime, couldn’t challenge the measures in a court of law. In short, there is no legal recourse to the abuse of power.

The corporations will disembowel, or in the language of business schools “harvest,” what is left of the country. The security and surveillance apparatus will lock up those who resist. This is the future. The iron cir-cle will be shut tight.


Photo by Michael Zimmerermichaelgzimmerer.com

(D2) Occupy_FFF.indd 4 12-05-14 6:25 PM

by John Ralston Saul

CANADA’S SPIRITUAL QUEST

Here we are, a good half-century into the environmental movement. This half-century could also be described as tens of millions of hours devoted by citi-zens to lobbying on behalf of the environ-ment, protesting, calling for change.

A nd we haven’t advanced ver y far. Enormous efforts have been made. Enormous numbers of wonderful people have dedicated their lives to environmental change, oversee-ing as it were, 50 years of planetary siege. Of course, there have been some changes. Here and there. Small, specific changes. Perhaps most important, the environmental cause has occupied the public language. Several genera-tions now talk with these ideas as an integral part of their assumptions.

But on any big question we seem to just slip along in the same old dangerous di-rection, the breakthroughs too small to af-fect what is happening. And at the same time, those who oppose the environmental move-ment have succeeded in ma k ing cha nges which actually worsen our situation.

How cou ld this be happening ? Is it inevitable? are our possibilities doomed by our condition? The answer – the blame – cannot be placed primarily on politics. Or fi-nancial structures. Or narrow, short-term self-interest.

John Ralston Saul is one of Canada's leading public intellectuals and President of PEN International, an organization dedicated to promoting literature and freedom of expression. His recent books include The Collapse of Globalism and A Fair Country. His latest work, Dark Diversions, is his first novel in fifteen years, and comes out this autumn.

(D2) Occupy_FFF.indd 5 12-05-14 6:25 PM

Stringer India / Reuters

On March 3, 2012, 19-year-old Tsering Kyi returned to school from winter holidays, purchased a can of gas, and set herself on fi re in a busy market in Machu, in the Gannan province of China. Kyi held still, fi st raised, her body ablaze, for several mo-ments before collapsing to the ground.

Kyi was raised in a nomadic Tibetan family, and attended Tibetan school in a town several miles away from where her family lived. According to news reports, she was a dedicated student, simultaneously passionate about her education, and committed to her family and religious practice.

In 2010, Kyi joined students and teachers at her school to protest new Chinese-language textbooks and the government decision to limit Tibetan-language teaching to a single class. The protests only resulted in more government control: Several of Kyi’s teachers, as well as her headmaster, were subsequently fi red and replaced. Kyi is reported to have told a close relative in early January of this year that she understood the motiva-tions behind the growing numbers of self-immolations in Tibet and China – that “no one could go on living like this.”

Over 30 Tibetan monks, nuns and civilians in Tibet, China and India have self-immolated over the past year, in protest of an in-creasingly repressive and violent Chinese regime that aims to assimilate Tibetan language, culture and religious practice.

In March 2012, the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) issued a statement that referenced the militarized 1912 struggle for Tibetan freedom from the invading imperial Chinese Army. After a year of fi erce fi ghting, the statement says, “Tibet re-gained its status as an independent nation.” Later on down the page, the TYC asserts that, a century later, the contemporary struggle for Tibetan independence has reached and passed a similar snapping point.

The Dalai Lama has not condoned or condemned the self-immolations. He instead referred to them as a “very, very sen-sitive political issue” in a recent BBC interview, and has been quoted by China’s Forbidden News as saying that the self-immolations were acts of desperation, a direct result of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of cultural genocide in Tibet. While the Dalai Lama remains a spiritual leader to millions of Tibetans around the world, he recently stepped down as a po-litical leader, admitting that his 50-year strategy of advocating non-violence had failed to established understanding with the Chinese government, or improve the situation inside Tibet.

The Tibetan Youth Congress has been more vocal about why the self-immolations are happening now, and what they mean for the fi ght for Tibetan independence. On April 12, 2012, they said: “Just as with the hardened earth and the grassy patches and the dusty grounds and the concrete sidewalks onto which have collapsed the 33 self-immolators (32 of them since last year alone), embers rolling out from their bodies as though ro-sary beads, the landscape of the Tibetan freedom movement now stands irreparably scorched and irredeemably altered.”

Andrea Bennett

(F1) Being Present_FFF.indd 10 12-05-11 5:39 PM

Stringer India / Reuters


Huddled Alone Outside The Meditation Tent, Occupy DC, McPherson Square, Washington, DC Gerald L. Campbell, flickr.com/photos/dcnittygritty


JUNE – #NOSTARBUCKSWe shun corporate cafes and start brewing an

indie coffee culture

JULY 4 – #OCCUPYCONGRESS A million of us surround Capitol Hill

AUGUST – #KILLACORP In the dog days of summer we punish Exxon

for lying to us about climate change

SEPTEMBER – #OCCUPYBANKS 100,000 of them worldwide – bring tent

OCTOBER – #KILLPFIZER We begin charter revocation proceedings against

this #1 criminal corp

NOVEMBER – #BUYNOTHINGDAY We participate by not participating

(and then we Occupy the US Presidential Election)

DECEMBER – #OCCUPYXMASThis year we do things differently –

we empty the malls & take the season back

2013 – #KILLCAP We start playing the planetary endgame

Revolutionary Agenda


Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.—Edward AbbeyDaniel Goodman/Business Insider

(H1) Back Cover_FFF•e.indd 2 12-05-15 12:21 PM

Liked the preview?Subscribe today to get

the complete issue!

http://adbusters.org/subscribe