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The Myth of Human Progress

https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_human_progress_20130113/

By Chris Hedges

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

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Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

via:  http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/12/the-second-great-betrayal-obama-and-cameron-decide-that-banks-are-above-the-law.html

By William K. Black
One of the “tells” that reveals how embarrassed Lanny Breuer (head of the Criminal Division) and Eric Holder (AG) are by the disgraceful refusal to prosecute HSBC and its officers for their tens of thousands of felonies are the false and misleading statements made by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about the settlement.  The same pattern has been demonstrated by other writers in the case of the false and disingenuous statistics DOJ has trumpeted to attempt to disguise the abject failure of their efforts to prosecute the elite officers who directed the “epidemic” (FBI 2004) of mortgage fraud.
HSBC was one of the largest originators of fraudulent mortgage loans through its acquisition of Household Finance.
Three recent books by “insiders” have confirmed earlier articles revealing the decisive role that Treasury Secretary Geithner has played in opposing criminal prosecutions of the elite banksters and banks whose frauds drove the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
Bair, Sheila, Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself” (2012); Barofsky, Neil, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (2012); Connaughton, Jeff, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins (2012).
Geithner’s fear is that the vigorous enforcement of the law against the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) that caused the crisis could destabilize the system and cause a renewed global crisis.  I have often expressed my view that the theory that leaving felons in power over our largest financial institutions is essential to producing financial stability is insane.  Geithner, it turns out, is very sensitive to that criticism.  I will return to that subject after setting the stage.
The UK authorities admit openly the arrival of “too big to prosecute”
The title of the article in The Daily Telegraph says it all:  “Banks are ‘too big to prosecute’, says FSA’s Andrew Bailey.”
The FSA was the U.K.’s faux financial regulator during the run-up to the crisis.  The U.K. “won” the regulatory “race to the bottom” that destroyed effective regulation and supervision in the U.K. and Europe and helped degrade to near impotence in the U.S.  The FSA’s goal was to attract the world largest financial firms to relocate much of their operations to the City of London.  The FSA offered “light touch” (non) regulation and (non) supervision to firms operating in the City of London.  The results were the typical result – the City of London attracted the worst of the worst.  The “control frauds” produced a “Gresham’s” dynamic (Akerlof 1970) because the frauds gained a crippling competitive advantage over honest competitors and dishonest and unethical officers became wealthy through fraud and modern executive compensation’s perverse incentives.  “Control fraud” refers to criminal enterprises in which the people that control a seemingly legitimate enterprise use it as a “weapon” to defraud.  Control frauds can create a Gresham’s dynamic causes markets to become so perverse that bad ethics drive good ethics out of the marketplace.  The result was that the City of London became an intensely criminogenic environment and many of the largest financial firms in the world became criminal enterprises.
The newly designated head of the FSA decided to endorse the concept of “too big to prosecute.”

Mr Bailey told The Daily Telegraph that some banks had grown too large to prosecute. “It would be a very destabilising issue. It’s another version of too important to fail,” he said,
“Because of the confidence issue with banks, a major criminal indictment, which we haven’t seen and I’m not saying we are going to see… this is not an ordinary criminal indictment,” he said.
His comments come days after HSBC’s record $1.9bn (£1.2bn) settlement with the US authorities over money-laundering linked to drug-trafficking. US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said of the decision not to prosecute: “In this day and age we have to evaluate that innocent people will face very big consequences if you make a decision.”

The U.S. and U.K. have made noise lately about how they had ended the pernicious doctrine of “too big to fail.”  As I explained in a prior column, this pretense lasted about four hours before both nations’ true preferences were revealed.  The systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) already had crippling competitive advantages because the government bailed out their general creditors.  Conservative economists agreed that this advantage was so large that it made “free markets” a farce.  The doctrine “too big to prosecute” grants SDIs that are control frauds two additional advantages over their smaller, honest competitors.  First, fraud pays enormously for the controlling officers.  It is a “sure thing.”  (Akerlof & Romer 1993.)  The HSBC compliance officers (the minnows) may lose, but the controlling officers were made very wealthy by HSBC’s manifold frauds. (continued at link above)

Episode 370

­Every week Max Keiser looks at all the scandal behind the financial news headlines. 
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert ask, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the global financial system?” and find an answer: “The shadow banking system knows!”  The shadow banking system has grown to $67 trillion, and has the power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see the fraud. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Jan Skoyles of the Real Asset Company about clients wanting to park their gold in Singapore, and about what is happening in the gold market in China.

Via:Fire Dog Lake news desk

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/11/08/boehner-opens-grand-bargain-negotiations-by-proposing-the-romney-plan/ By: David Dayen Thursday November 8, 2012 6:26 am

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I touched on this yesterday, but let’s take a closer look at John Boehner’s opening offer on revenue, designed to avoid the fiscal slope (it’s not a cliff). I think it will become familiar to you if you look at the exact language.

For the purposes of forging a bipartisan agreement that begins to solve the problem, we’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions. What matters is where the increase revenue comes from and what type of reform comes with it. Does the increased revenue come from government taking a larger share of what the American people earn through higher taxe rates? Or does it come as a byproduct of growing our economy, energized by a simpler, cleaner, fairer tax code, with fewer loopholes and lower rates for all? And at the same time we’re reforming the tax code, are we supporting growth by taking concrete steps to put our country’s entitlement programs on a sounder financial footing or are we just going to continue to duck the matter of entitlements, thus the root of the problem?

So Boehner is calling for an across the board rate cut, paid for by (and actually with a revenue gain from) closing loopholes and deductions. All the while, he wants to “reform” entitlements to reduce the cost to government.
Now where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, it’s the Mitt Romney platform. The one defeated at the polls. Boehner’s opening bid is just the Romney tax plan, made even more ludicrous by the notion that you can increase revenue with it. Romney was widely mocked during the election for trying to make a large rate cut revenue-neutral; here Boehner wants to add to the fantasy world. He also alludes to the idea that lowering tax rates will increase economic growth and therefore tax receipts. This is precisely the claim that was debunked by the Congressional Research Service study of 65 years of tax rates, which Republicans found so dissonant and offensive, they got the study torpedoed.
Boehner’s lower-the-rates, broaden-the-base gambit has already been rejected by the likes of Chuck Schumer. He’s already blown up the tax reform con. And he got backed up by the Democratic leadership in the Senate. So if it comes back, we know exactly where it came from – the White House.
Apparently the President was busy calling leaders of Congress yesterday:

In phone calls made overnight and this morning from Chicago, Obama said much the same thing to Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). He said he believed that the American people sent a message that leaders in both parties need to put aside their partisan interests and work with common purpose to put the interests of the American people and the American economy first.

Boehner said yesterday that “We’re closer than many think to the critical mass needed legislatively to get tax reform done.” Which I suppose he has to say. But he’s offering nothing more than the Romney tax plan, PLUS cuts to Social Security and Medicare! And he wants a $100 billion in spending cuts, replacing the sequester, by the end of the year, as a show of good faith in getting to a deal.
It’s like campaign 2012 never happened.

editor's note- Sorry for the lapse in the site I've been all caught in the Matrix for three months,...so...stay tuned for the story and all the gory details straight from the horses mouth.Thanks for your patience, and keep the love coming .
-Figg

Insider Report on Big Pharma’s Corrupt Marketing and Phony Science

Posted: 04 Jul 2012 11:01 PM PDT

Francois T pointed to a post at the blog Health Care Renewal that summarizes an important insider report at the British Medical Journal on how much so-called medical research is of dubious validity, and performed to give talking points for marketing rather than to improve the lives of patients.
The reports on the corruption is big Pharma “research” are so rife that this account hardly qualifies as news. For fun, I dug up the notes from a 2004 study in which I interviewed some experts on drug company marketing. The reason? Even then, it was seen as the most effective, and a big financial services client was keen to see what techniques they could adopt from it. Even then, it was clear “research” was seen as key to effective selling. Per one interviewee, on sales reps:

Creativity is NOT what you want for this job. You do not want someone who is creative in their dealings with doctors. Everything they say is according to very strict guidelines…The words they can share with the doctor are all carefully crafted and screened by the FDA. They can’t deviate from the script. If they deviate, they get in trouble, they get the company in trouble along with them. All the scandals in the industry were the salesforce management and the company, not the sales reps.
One reason Pfizer is effective is new product introductions. There is so much revenue and expectation behind it that they get the sales force keyed up about it. They know from the FDA when a product is going to be coming to market. They have the launches in nice places. They fly all the salesforce in, 500 people to a launch in Florida. They bring in entertainment, motivational speakers. Senior management flies down. There is a rigorous presentation fo the program and the product, information on the product, its advantages and disadvantages relative to the competitors.
They also have three times a year meetings to update the sales management on all the currently marketed products. They are called POA, plan of action meetings. It is whatever that will be new from a marketing standpoint over the next six months Each brand marketing group has to come up with new material to keep the sales force interested, like new data from recent studies. If they don’t have something new, the salesforce loses its edge. It also includes promotional pieces, like notepads, pens, It may seem silly, but the doctors love this stuff. And if a doctor says, bring me 5 more of those pens, my friends like them, it does maek a difference. You don’t like to think that stuff like that influences what a doctor prescribes, but it does.

And keep in mind, the costs of manipulated research findings are real. Cathy O’Neil, aka mathbabe, wrote up one of the most deadly cases, Vioxx. The summary of her detailed post:

Madigan has been a paid consultant to work on litigation against Merck. He doesn’t consider Merck to be an evil company by any means, and says it does lots of good by producing medicines for people. According to him, the following Vioxx story is “a line of work where they went astray”.
Yet Madigan’s own data strongly suggests that Merck was well aware of the fatalities resulting from Vioxx, a blockbuster drug that earned them $2.4b in 2003, the year before it “voluntarily” pulled it from the market in September 2004. What you will read below shows that the company set up standard data protection and analysis plans which they later either revoked or didn’t follow through with, they gave the FDA misleading statistics to trick them into thinking the drug was safe, and set up a biased filter on an Alzheimer’s patient study to make the results look better. They hoodwinked the FDA and the New England Journal of Medicine and took advantage of the public trust which ultimately caused the deaths of thousands of people.

To give an idea of the significance of the Vioxx withdrawal: per O’Neill, it led to a meaningful drop in the overall death rate in the US in the following 12 months.
Nevertheless, what is chilling in this insider account at BMJ is the sense of how pervasive and institutionalized the subordination of science, and worse, concern for the public, is to pushing drugs.
I strongly urge you to read the post in full (I’d love to read the BMJ article, but it is seriously paywalled). This section is key (emphasis original):

Research Studies Designed Primarily as Marketing Vehicles
In general, the anonymous author suggested that at least some studies were done for marketing, not scientific purposes:

some of the studies I worked on were not designed to determine the overall risk:benefit balance of the drug in the general population. They were designed to support and disseminate a marketing message.
Whether it was to highlight a questionable advantage over a ‘me-too’ competitor drug or to increase disease awareness among the medical community (particularly in so called invented diseases) and in turn increase product penetration in the market, the truth is that these studies had more marketing than science behind them.

Furthermore, the studies were supervised not by physicians or scientists, but by marketers in the marketing department,

Although the medical department developed the publication plans, designed the study, performed the statistical analysis, and wrote the final paper (which when published was passed on to marketing and sales to be used as marketing material), the marketing team responsible for that product were directly involved in all stages. They also closely supervised the content of other educational ‘scientific’ materials produced in the medical department and intended for potential prescribers. Instructions from marketing to the medical staff involved were clear: to ensure that the benefits of the drug were emphasised and the disadvantages were minimised where possible.

Manipulation of Research Design, Implementation, or Analysis
The author described how the marketers manipulated research studies so they would produce the results desired from a marketing perspective, regardless of their underlying truth,

Since marketing claims needed to be backed-up scientifically, we occasionally resorted to ‘playing’ with the data that had originally failed to show the expected result. This was done by altering the statistical method until any statistical significance was found. Such a result might not have supported the marketing claim, but it was always worth giving it a go to see what results you could produce. And it was possible because the protocols of post-marketing studies were lax, and it was not a requirement to specify any statistical methodology in detail. On the other hand, the studies were hypothesis testing (such as cohort studies, case-control studies) rather than hypothesis generating (such as case reports or adverse events reports), so playing with the data felt uncomfortable.
Other practices to ensure the marketing message was clear in the final publication included omission of negative results, usually in secondary outcome measures that had not been specified in the protocol, or inflating the importance of secondary outcome measures if they were positive when the primary measure was not.

Given how much of what passes for medical research is performed by drug companies, and how much of medical education revolves around pharmaceuticals, the adulteration of research is profoundly disturbing. We’re rolling back the underpinnings of medicine to the days when quackery reigned, except this time, with the authority of the medical profession and the mysticism of science behind it.
So to summarize, the marketers would control the statistical analyses, promoting multiple analyses to attempt to come up with the “right” result that would support the marketing message (although the more kinds of analyses one tries, the more likely one is likely to come up with false results by chance alone). Presumably the marketers did not care whether or not the results were really true, which is perhaps why even they felt “uncomfortable” in some circumstances.
They would also foster the suppression of negative results, and the dredging of data for extra outcome measures when analysis showed no advantage in terms of the real primary outcomes. Suppression of negative results could be viewed as plain lying. Deliberate analysis of multiple end-points again risks identifying random error as true results.