Amerikanen,
vergeleken met ons fatalistische Europeanen, [blijven] op een bepaalde manier hele
optimistische mensen. Echt, dat vind ik ook fantastisch van ze! Ze blijven de
moed erin houden.
Geert Mak, woensdag 3 oktober 2012 bij Pauw en Witteman
Nu de werkelijkheid in de VS:
Almost
17 million people applied for a
background check to purchase a gun in 2012. More than 156 million
people have applied since 1998.
Americans remain world's most medicated people
U.S.
prescriptions have swelled by two-thirds over the past decade to 3.5-billion
yearly.
About
130-million Americans - many far healthier than the Heckmans - swallow, inject,
inhale, infuse, spray and pat on prescribed medication every month, the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates. Americans buy much more
medicine per person than any other country.
The number
of prescriptions has risen by two-thirds over the past decade to 3.5-billion
yearly, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical consulting company. Americans
devour even more nonprescription drugs, polling suggests. […]
More than
125,000 Americans die from drug reactions and mistakes each year, according to
Associated Press projections from landmark medical studies of the 1990s. That
could make pharmaceuticals the fourth-leading national cause of death after
heart disease, cancer and stroke. […]
The
pharmaceutical industry served up more than $250-billion worth of sales last
year, the vast majority in prescriptions, according to industry consultants.
That roughly equaled sales at all the country's gasoline stations put together,
or an $850 pharmaceutical fillup for every American.
Antidepressiva sind heute bereits die in den
USA am meisten verkauften Medikamente – ihr Konsum hat sich in 10 Jahren
verdoppelt.
Dies wurde
mittels einer Metastudie von Untersuchungen aus dem Jahr 1996 und 2005 an
50.000 Kindern und Erwachsenen festgestellt, welche in den Archives of General Psychiatry
veröffentlicht wurde. Demnach nehmen heute 10 Prozent der Amerikaner – etwa 27
Millionen Menschen – Antidepressiva ein, etwa doppelt so viele wie 1996.
Bijna een
miljoen Nederlanders gebruiken antidepressiva en niemand zal ontkennen dat dit
aantal wel erg hoog is. Hoewel: recent werd bekend dat inmiddels tien procent
van de Amerikaanse bevolking een antidepressivum gebruikt.
Gezien deze
cijfers is de stelligheid van Mak’s bewering onjuist. We mogen er vanuit gaan
dat ‘hele
optimistische mensen’ van nature zich niet bewapenen en geen ‘anti-depressiva’ hoeven
te slikken, en het percentage slikkers is in de VS is 3,5 procent hoger dan in
Nederland, ‘en niemand zal ontkennen dat dit aantal wel erg hoog is.’
De eminente
Amerikaanse historicus Daniel Boorstin schreef in Hidden History over de kenmerkende psychologische vervreemding van
een consumptiemaatschappij als de VS:
We find
that in our nation of Consumption Communities and emphasis on Gross National
Product (GNP) and growth rates, advertising has become the heart of the folk
culture and even its very prototype… They come from advertising agencies, from
networks of newspapers, radio, and television, from outdoor-advertising
agencies, from the copywriters for ads in the largest-circulation magazines,
and so on. ‘These ‘creators’ of folk culture – or pseudo-folk culture – aim at
the widest intelligibility and charm and appeal.
But in the
United States, we must recall, the advertising folk culture, like all
advertising, is also confronted with the problems of self-liquidation and
erasure.
Our folk
culture is distinguished from others by being discontinuous, ephemeral, and
self-destructive. Where does this leave the common citizen? All of us are
qualified to answer.
In our
society, then. those who cannot lean on the world of learning, on the high
culture of the classics, on the elaborated wisdom of the books have a new
problem…
The
characteristic folk culture of our society is a creature of advertising, and in
a sense it is avertising. But advertising our own popular culture, is harder to
make into a source of continuity than the received wisdom and commonsense
slogans and catchy songs of the vivid vernacular. The popular culture of
advertising attenuates and is always dissolving befeote our very eyes. Among
the charm, challenges, and tribulations of modern life, we must count this
peculiar fluidity, this ephemeral character of that very kind of culture to
which they have looked for the continuity of their traditions, for their ties
with the past and with the future.
We are
perhaps the first people in history to have a centrally organized mass-produced
folk culture. Our kind of popelar culture is here today and gone tomorrow – or
the day after tomorrow. Or whenever the next semi-annual model appears! And
insofar as folk culture becomes advertising, and advertising becomes
centralized, it becomes a way of depriving people of their opportunities for
individual anad small-community expression.
Deze
ontwikkeling behoort inderdaad tot de Hidden
History, waaraan de commerciele massamedia en hun opiniemakers nauwelijks
of geen aandacht besteden en zeker geen structurele. Toch hebben we hier te
maken met een belangrijk fenomeen: de massa staat weerloos tegenover de
virtuele werkelijkheid van reclame en propaganda die elk uur van de dag over
hen heen spoelt en waaraan ze zich telkens weer moeten aanpassen. Iedere dag opnieuw
heeft de consument tot taak zich te schikken naar de nieuwste modegril of de
laatste politieke slogan, en zo blijft hij/zij voortdurend psychisch zowel als
fysiek gemobiliseerd. In een consumptiemaatschappij is alles geregisseerd,
niets is spontaan. Het nieuwe kan niet tot wasdom komen, waardoor fouten niet kunnen
worden gecorrigeerd. Op het moment van ontstaan is het product al gedateerd, rijp om vervangen te worden. Niemand krijgt meer de rust om op enige afstand te
heroverwegen. Tegen de tijd dat de consument weet waarnaar hij kijkt is het al
voorbij geschoten. Wat Mak ziet als ‘de moed erin houden’ is doorgaans
niets anders dan een staat van totale verwarring, het individu is niet ‘optimisch’
maar reageert eerder als een willoze verslaafde. Verdwaasd loopt de consument rond in
een werkelijkheid van gefabriceerde spullen zonder enige authenticiteit, alles
omlijst met die eeuwig herhalende musac, dat op muziek lijkt maar het
niet is. Deze schijnwerkelijkheid die maar al te werkelijk lijkt is inmiddels
geglobaliseerd en verschaft de mens zijn identiteit. In Consuming the American
Century schrijft de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Emily S. Rosenberg over ‘the world’s first mass consumerist society’:
Consumer
goods seemed to confer glamour, leisure, and respect. This style of
consumerism. so in tune with a highly diverse and mobile society, became
intertwined with particular characterizations of personal ‘freedom’ and
with the political culture of ‘democracy.’ Mass consumption and mass entertainment fashioned an ‘American Dream’
of upward mobility.
American-style
consumerism thus fostered an ‘imagined
community’ out of a population divided
by language, history, and customs. During the half century between 1880 and
1930, 27 million immigrants entered the United States. In the face of this
culotural multiplicity, mass production and consumption, which flowered in the
generation that came of age after the First World War, presented commodities as
markers of national as well as personal identity. A consumere society offered a
set of common referents around which people living in the United States could
bond as ‘American.’ Especially for
first- and second-generation blue-collar ethnic immigrants, consumption
provided a powerful Americanizing agent, with the rituals of shopping
constituting a style of ‘consumer citizenship’ that rivaled older definitions of civic participation.
An
expanding array of consumer goods and entertainment offered ways to shape
communities of identification around comfort, leisure, and personal interests
rather than around the regional, ethnic, or familial associations that once
organized social life.
Het
probleem met dit systeem wordt steeds manifester; in de praktijk betekent het
consumptiemodel een permanente staat van oorlog met mens en natuur, zoals we vandaag
de dag overal kunnen zien. Mede dankzij het globaliserende neoliberalisme wordt
de mensheid nu bloot gesteld aan een klimaatverandering, waarvan niemand
precies overziet welke ingrijpende gevolgen dit allemaal heeft. Bovendien moet tegenwoordig
de helft van de mensheid zien te overleven met rond de 2 dollar per dag. Enkele
officiele cijfers:
The UN suggests that each
person needs 20-50 litres of water a day to ensure their basic needs for
drinking, cooking and cleaning.
Source: World Water Assessment
Programme (WWAP)
More than one in six people
worldwide - 894 million - don't have access to improved water sources.
Source: World Health
Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) Joint Monitoring
Programme on Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP)
Globally, diarrhoea is the
leading cause of illness and death, and 88 per cent of diarrhoeal deaths are
due to a lack of access to sanitation facilities, together with inadequate
availability of water for hygiene and unsafe drinking water.
Source: JMP
Today 2.5 billion people,
including almost one billion children, live without even basic sanitation.
Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. That's 1.5
million preventable deaths each year.
Source:
Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council
No one
really knows how many people are malnourished. The statistic most frequently
cited is that of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which
measures 'undernutrition'. The FAO did not publish an estimate in its
most recent publication, 'The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011' as it
is undertaking a major revision of how it estimates food insecurity (FAO
2011 p. 10). The 2010 estimate, the most recent, says that 925 million
people were undernourished in 2010 (FAO 2010). As the figure below shows, the
number of hungry people has increased since 1995-97. The increase has been due
to three factors: 1) neglect of agriculture relevant to very poor people by
governments and international agencies; 2) the current worldwide economic crisis,
and 3) the significant increase of food prices in the last several years which
has been devastating to those with only a few dollars a day to spend. 925
million people is 13.6 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8
billion.
More than 80 percent of the
world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.Source
2
The poorest 40 percent of the
world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20
percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.Source
3
According to UNICEF, 22,000
children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the
poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of
the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more
invisible in death.”Source
4
Around
27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be
underweight or stunted.
Als
er één ding duidelijk moet zijn dan is het is dat het winstprincipe van de
enkeling ten koste gaat van het welzijn van miljarden mensen. Het neoliberalisme is daarmee moreel
failliet. Maar niet alleen moreel. Gezien de milieurampen en de toenemende armoede -- ook in het
Westen -- plus de verwachte nieuwe kredietcrisis en de aanhoudende economische
crisis is het neoliberalisme ook als heilsleer failliet. Dat kan ook niet
anders. Rosenberg:
Twentieth-century
consumerism created an imagined community that included some and excluded others.
The amusements and the products of American consumer culture redefined
democracy and continually rearranged ethnic and class divisions. In the first
half of the twentieth century, through their participation in the consumer
republic, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews slowly became ‘white’
and ‘American.’ The entertainers and advertisers who helped fuse the trinity of
whiteness, nationality, and consumption into one compelling imaginary also
created categories of outsiders who appeared as colored and as un- (or even
anti-) American. People from African, Asian, Spanish-speaking, or Native
heritage often found themselves largely excluded from the performances and
displays of upward mobility and consumer nationalism.
Door
de globalisering doet ditzelfde verschijnsel zich nu wereldwijd voor. In
Aziatische ‘sweatshops’ werken nu
vrouwen en mannen in lage lonen landen tegen een minimuminkomen en zonder
sociale voorzieningen voor de consument elders, zoals blijkt uit de fabricage
van alles en nog wat, van trendy iPad’s
en al even modieuze leggings tot aan hippe
Nike-shoenen.
In China, Human Costs Are
Built Into an iPad…
In the last decade, Apple has
become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the
world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology
peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace
of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers
assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions,
according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents
published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work
environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive
overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say
they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age
workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have
improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to
company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered
reliable, independent monitors.
More troubling, the groups
say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137
workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were
ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months
last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four
people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous
conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.
Garment factories in the Pakistani cities of Karachi and Lahore caught fire on 11
September 2012. The fires occurred in a textile factory in the western part of
Karachi and in a shoemaking factory in Lahore. The fires are considered to be
the most deadly and worst industrial factory fires in Pakistan's history, [3] killing 315 people and seriously injuring more than
250. [4][5][6] he conditions under which Pakistan's blue-collar
labour works have often been raised by trade unions and workers' rights
organisations. There is also a controversial, yet wide use of child labour in
Pakistan. [8] […]
The
garment factory "Ali Enterprises", which is located in Plot 67, Hub
Road, Baldia Town,
Karachi, [9] used
to export its garments to Europe and
the United States, and
had employed between 1,200 and 1,500 workers. Ali Enterprises manufactured
denim, knitted garments, and hosiery, and had capital of between $10 million
and $50 million. Workers at Ali Enterprises said they earned between 5,000 and
10,000 rupees ($52 to $104) a month for their labour. [10] The
factory manufactured jeans for textile discounter KiK. KiK
claimed to control enforcement of labour laws and security standards of its
suppliers. However, a security check in 2007 revealed deficiencies in fire
protection of the Karachi plant, which KiK claimed were fixed by 2011.
According to the Pakistani Textile Workers Union (NTUF), a high working
pressure and overtime with unpayed additional work were frequent at the
factory. [11] A few
weeks prior to the fire, the factory passed an internationally recognised
safety test. [12][13] The
factory is also suspected of using child labour and locked workplaces analogous
to prison cells. The owner of the factory, Abdul Aziz, had reportedly prevented
inspections of the factory. [14]
Een
ander willekeurig voorbeeld, ditmaal uit de Britse Guardian:
Britain's appetite for fast
fashion is pushing workers into starvation conditions…
When the fashion press covers ethics it largely means whether catwalk models should eat
more, rather than whether garment workers should eat.
It's
tempting to cast retailers as Dickensian ogres but fast fashion is driven by
consumer appetites. We love fashion but we also dump two million tonnes of
textile waste (mostly clothing) in landfill each year, which suggests we don't
value it. We get the type of fashion retail we deserve and ask for. We need a
new plan.
Het
neoliberalisme, de huidige variant van het kapitalisme, kan alleen bestaan door
dezelfde uitbuiting die de westerse arbeiders kenden in het begin van de eigen
industriele revolutie. Zonder uitbuiting van mens en natuur zijn het
winstprincipe en de consumptiemaatschappij onmogelijk te handhaven. Maar omdat
de dagelijkse propaganda het doet voorkomen dat de kapitalistische dogma’s
gebaseerd zijn op natuurwetten lijkt het alsof er geen levensvatbare
alternatieven bestaan. De Amerikaanse journalist en bestseller auteur William
Greider schrijft in The Soul of
Capitalism. Opening Paths to a Moral Economy dat weliswaar sommige individuen
een positief mens- en wereldbeeld erop na mogen houden, maar datthe governing elites in business and finance as well as government, regardless of political preference, operate on bleaker assumptions about the human condition. High-minded stewardship, they tell themselves, requires a rather constant manipulation of the soft-headed populace, deftly steering the people toward correct outcomes, even if people are too stupid to understand their own best interests.
What’s
worse is that many ordinary Americans – maybe most of them – believe this too.
At least, many have internalized from experiece the notion that they have been
assigned lesser roles in the grand scheme and there’s nothing to be done about
it. Likei t or not, the obstacles are simply too formidable to overcome. The frontier
is closed; the pioneering is history. This self-doubt and resignation may be
the greates barrier to realizing an alternative future, one in which people at
large can participate from their various angles in the decisions that govern
their lives.
En dus dompelt de massa zich onder in oppervlakkige amusement en consumptie van rotzooi. Steeds meer van hetzelfde tot men in het eigen escapisme verstikt. Lethargie, onverschilligheid en cynisme zijn daarvan de opvallendste kenmerken. Meer daarover morgen.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten