97% of senior managers at Fortune 1000 industrial corporations are white men.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Glass Ceiling Commission Report.

White men are 43% of the Fortune 2000 work force. White men hold 95% of the Fortune 2000 senior management jobs.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Glass Ceiling Commission Report.

In 1965, CEOs made 44 times the average U.S. blue-collar worker's salary. In 2000, CEOs make 531 times the average U.S. blue-collar worker's pay.
Source: Business, April 17, 2000; Business Week, April 16, 2001.

White men make up:33% of the U.S. population.

"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times."
Robert W. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy

"U.S. Ieaders have striven with much success to repress (1) the emergence of competing forms of production (socialist, collectivist, communitarian); and (2) competing capital formations (prosperous autonomous capitalist economies, or mixed ones, in emerging nations, and with FTAA and GATS, all public sector services except police and military in all capitalist countries. The goal is the Third Worldization of the entire world, including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no public sector services; no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, effectively organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or medical plans, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profit rates."
Michael Parenti

These figures reveal a casualty list that runs into many millions. Consider the following estimates. In any one year:

27,000 Americans commit suicide.

5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher.

26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.

23,000 are murdered.

85,000 are wounded by firearms.

38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.

13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.

135,000 children take guns to school.

5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).

125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.

473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are nonsmokers.

6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.

5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.

1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.

31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.

37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.

2,000,000 nonhospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."

5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.

200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.

600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.

25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.

6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.

1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.

2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.

180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.

14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.

45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.

1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.

126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.

2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.

5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.

30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.

1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from white families.

150,000 children are reported missing.
50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, "Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids."

900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.

2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.

700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.

5,000,000 workers are injured on the job;

150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.

100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.

14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.

100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.

60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.

4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.

From Michael Parenti's "Dirty Truths" www.michaelparenti.org/DirtyTruths.html

"The children's market works because it lives off of deeply-held beliefs about self-expression and freedom of choice -- originally applied to the political sphere, and now almost inseparable from the culture of consumption. Children's commercial culture has quite successfully usurped kids' boundless creativity and personal agency, selling these back to them -- and us -- as "empowerment," a term that appeases parents while shielding marketers.

Linking one's sense of self to the choices offered by the marketplace confuses personal autonomy with consumer behavior. But, try telling that to a kid who only sees you standing in the way of the Chuck-E-Cheese-ified version of fun and happiness. Kids are keen to the adult-child power imbalance and to adult hypocrisy, especially when they are told to hold their desires in check by a parent who is blind to her or his own materialistic impulses."

-- Dan Cook, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Lunchbox hegemony; Kids and the Marketplace, Then & Now, LiP Magazine, August 20, 2001

"When you go into a Wal-Mart or a Toys 'R' Us store to purchase Harry Potter or Disney's Monsters Inc., Mattel's Barbie, Sesame Street, Hasbro's Star Wars or Pokemon do you ever think of the young women in China forced to work 16 hours a day, from 8:00 a.m. to 12 midnight, seven days a week, 30 days a month, for months on end, for wages of 17 cents an hour? Workers forced to work overtime, but cheated of their pay? Do you ever imagine women working all day long in 104-degree temperatures, handling toxic glues, paints and solvents, women fainting, nauseous, sick to their stomachs? Women housed 16 to a dorm room and trying to get by on four hours of sleep a night? Workers whose bodies ache, who are exhausted from racing through the same operations 3,000 times a day, day in and day out? Women who are fired when they get sick? Workers who have no rights, and who--if they try to defend their most basic, internationally recognized human and worker rights, will be immediately fired and blacklisted? Workers who are worn out and used up by the time they reach 30 or 35 years of age and are removed to be replaces with another crop of young teenagers?

Unfortunately, this is the real world behind the toys we purchase in the United States. And we do purchase a staggering number of toys each year: 3.6 billion toys in the year 2000 alone--76 million dolls, 349 million plush toys, 125 million action figures, 279 million hot wheels and matchbox cars, 88 million sporting goods items and so on. This is big industry. We spend $29.4 billion a year on toys.

Eighty percent of all the toys we purchase are imports, and 71 percent of those are from China. More than one out of every two toys we purchase in the U.S. is made in China. We purchase hundreds of millions of toys each year that are made in China, but when was the last time we heard from a toy worker in China about their working conditions and lives? Even once? Ever? Isn't it a little strange that we know so little?

In 2000, U.S. toy companies spent $837 million on advertising. The companies do not want us to know or to think, just to buy.

-- Toys of Misery; A Report on the Toy Industry in China, National Labor Committee, December 2001 (Emphasis Is Original)

""In my practice I see kids becoming incredibly consumerist," said Kanner, who is based at the Wright Institute, a graduate psychology school in Berkeley, Calif. "The most stark example is when I ask them what they want to do when they grow up. They all say they want to make money. When they talk about their friends, they talk about the clothes they wear, the designer labels they wear, not the person's human qualities."

...

""In the 1960s, children aged 2 to 14 directly influenced about $5 billion in parental purchases," McNeal [professor of marketing at Texas A&M University] wrote [in an April 1998 article in American Demographics]. "In the mid-1970s, the figure was $20 billion, and it rose to $50 billion by 1984. By 1990, kids' direct influence had reached $132 billion, and in 1997, it may have peaked at around $188 billion. Estimates show that children's aggregate spending roughly doubled during each decade of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and has tripled so far in the 1990s.""

-- Miriam H. Zoll, Psychologists Challenge Ethics Of Marketing To Children, American News Service, April 5, 2000

"The Journal of the American Medical Association has said that children between the ages of two and seventeen watch an annual average of 15,000 to 18,000 hours of television, compared with 12,000 hours spent per year in school. Children are also major targets for TV advertising, whose impact is greater than usual because there is an apparent lessening of influence by parents and others in the older generation. ... According to the [Committee on Communications of the American Academy of Pediatrics], children under the age of two should not watch television at all because at that age, brain development depends heavily on real human interactions. Nevertheless, $1 billion a year in spent on ads and commercials directed at children."

-- Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p. xxxvi

Since 1990, the U.S. government has given away, free of charge, more than $8 billion worth of "surplus" equipment from U.S. military stocks, including 4,000 heavy tanks, 500 bombers and 200,000 light arms.
Source: U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense, Foreign Military Assistance Act, Report to Congress, Financial Year 1996: Authorized U.S. Commercial Exports, Military Assistance, Foreign Military Sales and Military Imports, September 1997.

From 1989 to 1996 the U.S. sold more than $117 billion of arms, about 45% of the global total.
Source: U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense, Foreign Military Assistance Act, Report to Congress, Financial Year 1996: Authorized U.S. Commercial Exports, Military Assistance, Foreign Military Sales and Military Imports, September 1997.

9 out of 10 fatalities during war are civilians. About half of the victims are children. 8 out of 10 war refugees are women and children.
Source: UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 2000.

47% of all federal tax revenues go towards current or past military costs.
Source: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2002.

Between 1995 and 1999, the U.S. Defense Department will spend $150 billion on nuclear weapons alone. That money could fund: · Aid for 4.4 million low-income college students · Summer jobs for 2 million youth annually · Head Start for 1.4 million kids · Tutoring for 9.8 million students · Treatment for 30,000 drug addicts per year · Childcare for 2 million families
Sources: Center for Defense Information, Defense Budget Project, Children's Defense Fund.

From 1940 through 1996, expenditures for nuclear weapons ($5.5 trillion), exceeded the combined total federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general sciences and space research; community and regional development; law enforcement; and energy production and regulation.
Source: Brookings Institution, Atomic Audit: 1940-1996.

60% of all federal research funding for universities is military-related.
Source: Center for Defense Information, 1998.

Two-thirds of all U.S. scientists and engineers work for defense contractors or on defense contracts in industry or in universities. Nowhere else in the world is this true.
Source: Center for Defense Information, 1998.

From 1945 to 1997, the U.S. "lost" 11 nuclear weapons, still unaccounted for.
Source: U.S. Department of Defense, "Lost Weapons," 1997.

The U.S. Department of Defense has failed all 16 of the last 16 annual audits by the U.S. General Accounting Office. The GAO reports that more than 20% of the Department's inventory is unaccounted for.
Source: U.S. General Accounting Office, NSIAD-98-158, 1998.

Dissident, what alternative are you proposing?

I find it interesting that one of the first comments delivered upon reading statistics such as these is "Well, what's your alternative?"

It seems to me that a morally astute, compassionate person, geared towards peace and justice would first say "This is scandalous, unjust, and a shame- and probably the source of great misery and destruction...and must be stopped!"

An analogy may prove useful here:

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A child in an abusive home, under the opressive tyranny of an alcoholic dictator of a father, finally speaks up and tells the truth about the abuses and misery in the home. She carefully articulates the history of offenses, and bravely shares her story of survival under his brutal regime. The father, in true addict style and method, denies the extent of his destructiveness, and shifts the blame onto the child by saying, "Well, what alternative do you propose. Have you got a better idea?"

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Obviously, the child is under no obligation to offer any alternative in this instance. The full weight of repsonsibilty lies on the father to cease and desist in his abusiveness- confess to his offenses, stop committing them, and work to mend the mess he's made.

As for alternatives, there are many.

But, first we need to reject the dominant mantra of Global Capitalism "There Is No Alternative".

Once we commit to the obvious, that there are many alternatives- and that they are not inevitably Soviet Gulags or Talibanic Fascism - then we can start the serious business of envisioning the kind of world we want to live in.

I direct you to one such project:

The Projects for a Participatory Society

Projects for a Participatory Society exists to propose, investigate, debate, explore, and advocate radical ideas for a desirable future. It focuses on social, economic, cultural, and political life. It's membership is responsible for this site and for related projects which include struggling, writing, speaking, and acting on behalf of attaining a better world. The PPS core values include solidarity, diversity, equity, self management, justice, and sustainability.

www.zmag.org/pps.htm


Enjoy!

I would have thought that some things do not need to be said. I don't like Global Capitalism. I don't think that its a fair system. But, that said, I can't really think of any alternative that I could entirely endorse. Don't get me wrong though, that doesn't mean that I believe that we shouldn't seek to alter the status quo.

The PPS site is interesting, however it doesn't really offer an alternative. Its one thing to say that you value solidarity, diversity, equity, self management, justice, and sustainability, but its another thing to design a system that can make people's lives better.

Perhaps you would be willing to spell out what doesn't need to be said, or what about Global Capitalism you reject?

As for the Projects for a Participatory Society site, I can only assume that you didn't examine it. I mean, what about the many examinations of Gender, Work, Economy, Politics, Media, Ecology, Food and Agriculture, Kinship, Culture didn't offer an alternative vision and different future prospects?

On Tuesday, The President of the United Nations Society of Writers and Artists Hans Janitschek presented Chomsky with the Award of Excellence at the UN Correspondents Association Club in New York.

Chomsky is an institute professor and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance, 9-11, Power and Terror and many other books.

After the awards ceremony, Chomsky addressed a large crowd talking about US imperialism, Iraq, space travel and more. He then took questions from reporters.


www.democracynow.org/arti.../05/177223

I think the Union of the Republic of the United States of America is a lot stronger and more robust than people give it credit for. I remember that it survived 2 wars with Britain, a Civil War, Reconstruction, many economic tumults, suspension of Habeus Corpus, the Carter Administration, the Vietnam War, and more.

Does anyone else remember the Presidential Election of 2000? I do. I also remember the elections in Egypt that same year. Where's the endemic corruption we see in the third world where officials require bribes to do anything, the economic collapses, the periodic coups and domestic instability?

I see that people who don't like the current administration are not trying to violently overthrow the government, but trying to elect someone else. I see a country where even the most contested of elections is non-violent, where many people vote.

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World military spending in 2003 increased by about 11 per cent in real terms. This is a remarkable rate of increase, even more so given that it was preceded by an increase of 6.5 per cent in 2002.

Over two years world military spending increased by 18 per cent in real terms, to reach $956 billion (in current dollars) in 2003.

High-income countries account for about 75 per cent of world military spending but only 16 per cent of world population.

The combined military spending of these countries was slightly higher than the aggregate foreign debt of all low-income countries and 10 times higher than their combined levels of official development assistance in 2001.

... There is a large gap between what countries are prepared to allocate for military means to provide security and maintain their global and regional power status, on the one hand, and to alleviate poverty and promote economic development, on the other.

The main reason for the increase in world military spending is the massive increase in the United States, which accounts for almost half of the world total.... In the absence of [appropriations for the new war on terror, and on Iraq], US military expenditure would still show a significant increase, but at a much slower rate, and world military spending would show a rise of 4 per cent rather than 11 per cent in 2003.

... While US military expenditure is set to continue to grow and will continue to propel world military spending, the pace is likely to fall back somewhat in the next few years. In the longer term it is doubtful whether current levels will be economically and politically sustainable.

-- Elisabeth Skons, Catalina Perdomo, Sam Perlo-Freeman and Petter Stalenheim, Military expenditure, Chapter 10, SPIRI Yearbook 2004, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, June 9, 2004

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America's military is the country's biggest business. According to the House Budget Committee, in 2000, defense expenditures represented 16 percent of discretionary federal spending. Excluding entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, all nondefense spending combined was only 19 percent of the federal budget. In the Department of Defense's most recently published report, the 2001 defense budget will be more than $300 billion, of which $60 billion would be spent on procurement and almost $40 billion on research and development. The budget for national defense is expected to exceed $360 billion by 2006.

-- Mark Williams and Andrew P. Madden, New technologies may revolutionize war, Red Herring, August 1, 2001

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The United Nations and all its agencies and funds spend about $10 billion each year, or about $1.70 for each of the world's inhabitants. This is a very small sum compared to most government budgets and it is just a tiny fraction of the world's military spending. Yet for over a decade, the UN has faced a debilitating financial crisis and it has been forced to cut back on important programs in all areas. Many member states have not paid their full dues and have cut their donations to the UN's voluntary funds. At the end of December 2003, members owed the UN $1,602 billion, of which the United States alone owed $762 million (48% in total and 73% of the regular budget).

-- UN Financial Crisis, Global Policy Forum (as of December 2003)

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From 1998 to 2001, the USA, the UK, and France earned more income from arms sales to developing countries than they gave in aid.

The arms industry is unlike any other. It operates without regulation. It suffers from widespread corruption and bribes. And it makes its profits on the back of machines designed to kill and maim human beings.

So who profits most from this murderous trade? The five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China. Together, they are responsible for eighty eight per cent of reported conventional arms exports.

"We can't have it both ways. We can't be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of arms." Former US President Jimmy Carter, presidential campaign, 1976

-- The Arms Industry, Control Arms Campaign, October 2003

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The relentless assault on [U.S.] military aid restrictions that began shortly after the September 11th attacks ... has continued unabated. This spring the [Bush] administration attempted yet again to win blanket exemptions for aid distributed as part of the "war on terror" by including language in the FY2002 supplemental appropriations bill that waives most existing restrictions and reporting requirements. The administration's second attempt was more successful. Two key Defense Department funding allocations - $390 million to reimburse nations providing support to U.S. operations in the war on terror and $120 million "for certain classified activities" - can now be delivered "notwithstanding any other provision of the law." This means there will be none of the normal restrictions placed on this large sum of military aid.

The provision on "classified activities" is especially troubling because it permits "projects not otherwise authorized by law," in other words, covert actions. Not only is the language in the Supplemental opaque, attempts to get more information from a defense committee staffer led nowhere. He refused to answer questions about the intended use of the funds, the applicability of foreign aid restrictions, and reporting requirements on the grounds that all of that information is "classified." In other words, there will be no public scrutiny of this aid, and that's just fine with Congress.

The Bush administration may also be successful in its campaign to ease restrictions on military aid and training to Indonesia despite that country's utter failure to improve its military's human rights practices. In May, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that it is "time for [the restrictions] to be adjusted substantially." If the results of the Senate Appropriations committee mark up are any indicator, Mr. Rumsfeld is likely to get his wish.

... This latest round of military aid has made one thing clear: the U.S. military has found a new excuse to extend its reach around the globe, arming regimes that had previously been blacklisted for human rights abuses, weapons proliferation, or brutal conflict. What remains to be seen is how long Congress and the American public will accept this formula, especially when they see no concrete results in return.

-- Military Aid Post September 11th, Arms Sales Monitor, Federation of American Scientists, No. 48, August 2002

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This rush to globalize arms production and sales ignores the grave humanitarian and strategic consequences of global weapons proliferation. Already, profit motives in the military industry have resulted in arms export decisions that contravene such U.S. foreign policy goals as preserving stability and promoting human rights and democracy.

-- Globalized Weaponry, Foreign Policy In Focus, Volume 5, Number 16, June 2000

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Last year [200 the U.S. controlled half of the developing world's arms market with $12.6 billion in sales, according to an annual report published by the Congressional Research Service. This dominance of the global arms market is not something in which the American public or policy makers should take pride in. The U.S. routinely sells weapons to undemocratic regimes and gross human rights abusers.

-- Uncle Sam World's Arms Merchant Again; In 2000 U.S. Sells $18.6 Billion Worldwide, $12.6 Billion to Developing Countries, Arms Trade Insider - #53, Arms Trade Oversight Project, Council for a Livable World, August 20, 2001

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In the period of 1990-1999, the United States supplied 16 of the 18 countries on the [U.S.] State Department list with arms through the government-to-government sales under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, or through industry contracted Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) programs, or with military assistance. Recipients included Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka ..., where, arguably, the risk of diversion is high. In addition, the U.S. military (and the CIA) has trained the forces of many of these 18 countries in U.S. war fighting tactics, in some cases including individuals now involved in terrorism.

-- A Risky Business; U.S. Arms Exports To Countries Where Terror Thrives, Center for Defense Information, November 29, 2001

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A pattern is developing wherein U.S. weapons exports and new weapons procurement are driving each other.

After, and occasionally even before, new weapons roll off the assembly line, they are offered to foreign customers.

Each overseas sale of top-line U.S. combat equipment represents an incremental decrease in U.S. military superiority.

This gradual decline in military strength spurs politicians, the military and the defense industry to press for higher military spending to procure increasingly sophisticated equipment superior to weapons shipped overseas.

This latest technology is again offered to foreign customers, and the cycle begins anew.

-- U.S. in arms race with itself, Council for a Livable World, Arms Trade Insider - #51, August 9, 2001

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