40 LESSONS FROM THE NEW MILLENIUM

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Tue Jan 3, 2006 11:30am

40 LESSONS FROM THE NEW MILLENIUM

Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:56:41 -0500 (EST)

 

 

 

 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_richard__060101_40_lessons_from_the_.htm

 

 

January 1, 2006

 

40 LESSONS FROM THE NEW MILLENIUM

Secret webs, scared bullies, a global mind shift

 

by Richard Neville

 

http://www.opednews.com

 

1. Of whatever persuasion, religious fundamentalism is a global curse.

 

2. As is market fundamentalism.

 

3. The CIA is probably the mother of all terrorist organizations.

 

4. The world's " most powerful democracy " is not a democracy. It is an

oligarchy. The US is run by a surprisingly small number of power

brokers who revolve through the doors of the White House, Big Oil,

Defence, Security, Trade, Embassies, the World Bank and numerous blue

chip boardrooms.

 

5. This elite, plus the CEO's of major global corporations, are the

true manipulators of the modern world. Yet few have faced elections.

 

6. Those who screw up, attract unwanted attention, or are caught with

hands in the till, are often promoted out of the way.

 

7. A handful of boardroom tycoons own and control the mainstream media.

 

8. Anyone who aspires to high office in a Western democracy must

cultivate the media and accept that boardroom power is today's major

driver of global affairs.

 

9. The high players embedded in these institutions – corporations,

banks, media, government, IMF, WTO, etc – the " corporatocracy " – are

united by a core credo: THERE IS NO GOD HIGHER THAN PROFIT.

 

10. This is the mindset that fuels endless growth, even as fossil

fuels choke the planet.

 

11. Such a mindset imperils the future.

 

12. It is this mindset that says its okay to Wallmart the world,

because the consumer gets more choice, even although the choice is

largely illusory. What's the point of offering 30 brands of toasters

at the cost of " one-quarter of all plant and animal species " being

doomed to extinction, because of global warming? (Nature magazine).

 

13. The greed-is-good philosophy is justified on the grounds that it

spreads the wealth around. True, it spreads the wealth around the

boardrooms. The income gap between the rich and the poor keeps

widening. The richest 1% of Americans own more assets than the other

99% combined. Is this fair? Both within countries and between

countries, such wealth gap keeps expanding, but few Western

politicians will talk about it for fear that Rupert Murdoch's media

will call them Communists.

 

14. The top 5% of the world's pop has an income 200 times greater than

the bottom 5%. (In 1980, the ratio was only 6 to 1). Worldwide,

downward mobility is more common than upward mobility.

 

15. A future of dramatic wealth redistribution is inevitable.

 

16. And is gathering momentum in Latin America.

 

17. Popular culture promotes global warming. It fans the flames of

consumer desire and hastens obsolescence. Mainstream media, the

movies, marketing, advertising, branding, celebrity endorsements, etc,

put hyper consumption at the core of human existence. The Shopping

Religion dwarfs traditional faiths.

 

18. By 2050, the world population, barring pandemics and/or climate

shocks, is expected to reach 9.1 billion. At today's consumption

levels, this will increase the demand for oil tenfold. Yet the supply

of oil is nearing its peak, or past its peak.

 

19. Which is why the wars to secure future supplies of oil (and water)

have already begun.

 

20. Hollywood cultivates a taste for violence. Just as the Westerns of

the 1950's endorsed the slaughter of Native Americans, today's

blockbusters legitimise sadism. In this season's highly acclaimed hymn

to collateral damage and spouse bashing, Mr & Mrs Smith, it is taken

for granted that the CIA has a right to liquidate anyone on the

planet. Further, that the assassin's role is noble, as well as

lucrative, sexy and cool. All of life's problems, including a grim

marriage, can be solved with guns, explosions and a vicious beating.

Followed by orgasm.

 

21. In 2005, global military expenditure was expected to reach $1

trillion.

 

22. In the last 5 years, doublespeak has thrived. More than ever, the

statements of political leaders are the reverse of the truth. When

Condoleezza Rice tells the world that America is the land of laws, she

is the mouthpiece of outlaws. While George Bush was saying he does not

condone torture, he had already authorised torture and was denying its

use, even as footage from Guantanamo Bay showed unconscious prisoners

on stretchers returning from interrogation.

 

23. Hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay are being force fed with plastic

tubes inserted into their stomach through the nose, a painful

procedure, even at the hands of medical specialists. Some tubes used

by guards are said to be " larger than normal " .

 

24. Prior to the turn of the century, only a few intellectuals

publicly argued that America was no longer a noble nation, as

advertised. By now, it has become obvious to anyone with a passing

acquaintance with foreign affairs, that George Bush's America is the

world's deadliest Rogue State.

 

25. The plague of lying and law-breaking began to spread from the

White House to its allies on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq,

itself regarded as illegal by the world's most eminent lawyers.

 

26. Among the few invading nations who lined up to brown-nose Uncle

Sam without being bribed, no tongue licked longer or more vigorously

than that of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister. He disallowed

a debate in Parliament. He dismissed the huge turnout of peaceful

protesters as " a mob " . He was still pretending he hadn't made up his

mind about the war, long after authorising the Special Forces to

blow-up Iraqi infrastructure.

 

27. Australian protestors have been jailed for burning their country's

flag. The men who ordered the torching of Iraq have still not been

arrested.

 

28. Howard's enthusiasm for war was not driven by revenge. He seemed

to act from fear. Perhaps the fear of 242 million Indonesian Muslims

on Australia's doorstep. His long held terror of The Other may have

bonded him to Bush and his seemingly invincible legions. Or was

Howard's fear even deeper, a fear of a values shift, a fear that the

status quo was under threat, a fear that a new consciousness might

arise and seek from him more than he could give, more than bread and

circuses? Meanwhile, there is no crime that America could ever commit

in its terror wars, that will shake the loyalty of John Howard, who

George Bush rightly calls his deputy sheriff.

 

29. Truer now than ever: Even if you are not interested in politics,

politics is interested in you.

 

30. When the Australian military became aware of the porno-tortures at

Abu Ghraib, it tried to hush them up. One of its officers, then

attached to the Pentagon, wrote to the International Red Cross, trying

to refute the rumours of abuse.

 

31. The deaths of well over a 100,000 Iraqis and the mutilation of

many more, is still being justified by George Bush as the price of

" spreading freedom " . What is this freedom? It is not freedom of the

press. The US military has shot and jailed non-embedded journalists,

it has closed down independent newspapers, it has bombed media

offices, it has paid bribes to publish false stories. Is it political

freedom? Iraq is in the process of moving from a secular tyranny to a

fundamentalist theocracy. No-one knows for sure what will happen, but

it is unlikely to replicate the golden age of Athenian democracy.

 

32. The US has used more illegal weapons on Iraqis, including chemical

weapons, than were ever used by Saddam Hussein, (either on his own

people, or on anyone else).

 

33. At least 35 nations have weapons of mass destruction in their

military stockpiles, the U.S. more than all others combined.

 

34. The ferocity of the November 04 assault on the citizens of

Fallujah exceeded by far the 1937 Fascist bombardment of Guernica, but

as yet no Picasso has emerged to immortalise the atrocity. While

mainstream journos were a-bed with the perpetrators, it was left to

freelancers and the bloggers to blow the gaff. (The terror-war mindset

has turned us into what we're supposedly fighting against -

http://www.richardneville.com/satire/satire030605.html).

 

35. The heads of Halliburton, Boeing, Bechtel and other defense giants

are seated on the boards of corporate media. The Carlyle Group, an

investment bank with a huge stake in the arms industry, graces the

board of the New York Times. The Washington Post hosts Lockheed

Martin, whose latest warhead " successfully demonstrates lethality

against urban structures " . Bombing the cities of Iraq does more for

the corporate bottom line than publishing true accounts of the impact

of the bombs.

 

36. Which is why to Western eyes, the nightly air strikes on Iraqi

dwellings are invisible.

 

37. Among major defense contractors with shares that trade on Wall

Street, the average pay for CEOs has tripled. And these are the wimps.

DHB Industries makes bulletproof vests. Prior to the 2003 invasion of

Iraq, its chief executive, David H. Brooks, took home an annual salary

of $525,000. Three years later, Brooks collected $70 million, a pay

increase 3,349 per cent.

 

38. Both NBC and the Washington Post have board members who sit on the

board of Coca Cola. The NY Times shares a board member with Pepsi,

another board member with drug giant, Eli Lilly, another board member

with Ford … and so on. So while the media has been dragged kicking and

screaming to accept the likelihood of climate change, don't expect a

feverish promotion of a carbon neutral lifestyle any time soon.

 

 

39. As Einstein pointed out, you can't solve serious problems with the

same mind set that created them. You can't deal with climate change

without experiencing a change of consciousness. We're already half way

through the first decade of a new millennium, and our leaders are

still stuck with a medieval mindset. And we're stuck with them.

Meanwhile, many thousands of citizens have moved on from the Newtonian

view of the world, with its focus on certainty, dualism,

us-against-them, good-against-evil. A post-modern age requires a fluid

sense of strategy, deep empathy, the acceptance of multiple stories.

It seeks from leaders a way of coping with paradox, a flair for

handling complex projects in surreal environments, an understanding

that holistic thinking matters more than spin, trickery and photo ops.

While such a mind shift is gathering speed at the grass roots, the

mentally decrepit " survival of the fittest " war-horses at the top are

trying to quell the new awakening with the age-old strategy of

invoking FEAR. It is a strategy that comes easy, as their own demons

rise up to haunt them, and they desperately seek to unloaded their

terror. But the global mind shift required for a sustainable future is

underway, and grass-roots groups are cleaning up waterways, reforming

third world aid, shining a light on injustice. Their rallying cry

becomes ever more relevant: " Another World is Possible. Let us build it. "

 

40. Among these activists was Nkosi Johnson the heroic South African

AIDS sufferer who was asked, not long before he died, aged 12, what

motivated him at such a young age and with such a debilitating illness

to campaign so tirelessly for his fellow sufferers. His answer speaks

for everyone: " Do what you can with what you have, in the time you

have, and the place you are " .

 

http://www.richardneville.com

 

www.richardneville.com

 

Richard Neville has been a practicing futurist since 1963, when he

launched the countercultural magazine, Oz, which widened the

boundaries of free speech on two continents. He has written several

books, including Playpower (71), the bio of a global serial killer

(79), his sixties memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake (95) and his latest

handbook of social change, Footprints of the Future. A social

commentator and a professional futurist with a sharp tongue, Richard

is based in Australia, where he continues to " stir the possum " .

 

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