OpEds: Bradley Manning’s statement: A forced “confession” concludes a drumhead tribunal

By Eric London, wsws.org

Above, the CBS fully collaborative (with the government) “report” on the Manning trial. Short, flat, uncritical of the government treatment of the accused, and peppered with material to degrade Manning’s character. Surprised? Their blurb:

Bradley Manning apologizes for docs leak, hurting U.S.

Army Pvt. Bradley Manning has apologized for leaking sensitive documents about the U.S. war in Iraq to the Web site WikiLeaks. At his court martial, the former army intelligence analyst said his actions hurt the U.S. Norah O’Donnell reports.

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Bradley Manning’s statement: A forced “confession” concludes a drumhead tribunal
By Eric London, wsws.org

Army PFC Bradley Manning addressed the military tribunal at Ft. Meade, Maryland yesterday in the eleventh day of post-trial sentencing hearings. The 25-year-old whistle-blower was found guilty last month on 19 counts, including six charges of espionage. He faces up to 90 years in prison.

Manning’s comments yesterday reflect the tremendous element of coercion in the entire proceedings. In all, the episode more closely resembled a Stalinist show trial than a democratic court of law.

“First, your honor, I want to start off with an apology,” he told Army Col. Denise Lind, the military judge overseeing the proceedings. “I’m sorry that my actions hurt people, and I’m sorry that it hurt the United States. I understand what I was doing and the decision that I made. I’m sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions.”

Noting that he would “have to pay a price for my decisions and actions,” Manning pled for a lower sentence.

“How on Earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over those with the proper authority? I know that I can and will be a better person. I hope that you can give me the opportunity to prove, not through words but through conduct, that I can return to a productive place in society.”

Manning delivered these comments in a visible state of despondency—he shook and grew tearful as he spoke. That a defendant in a legal proceeding is forced to apologize for and denounce his acts of opposition underscores the advanced state of decay of American democracy. Such sordid events bear the badge of a police state.

In fact, Manning’s actions did not hurt anyone but the politicians and military officials that have waged one illegal war after the next. In providing documents to WikiLeaks, he performed an immense service to the population of the United States and the entire world.

Moreover, in verbally repudiating the suggestion that he, as an individual, “could change the world for the better over those with the proper authority,” Manning implicitly condemns the state and the Obama administration. It is as if the American ruling class, through this confession, is seeking to convince the population, and itself, that opposition is useless.

That the state feels compelled to extract this mea culpa is a reflection of its own deep-seated fear. Those with the “proper authority” are well aware that they have committed grave crimes, even as they dare to stand in judgment of those who, like Manning, have revealed them.

Considering his past treatment, it is understandable that Manning wants to put an end to the entire antidemocratic charade perpetrated against him.

In his three years in captivity, Manning has been subjected to mental and physical forms of torture, including being placed for months in a 6 foot by 12 foot cell for 23 hours a day. This so-called pretrial detention was in direct violation of the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to a speedy trial, and the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners.

His sham military trial, like his imprisonment, has been a mockery of due process. Judge Lind has barred the utilization of any politically motivated defense by Manning. The court has drastically limited the rights of journalists covering the trial. The proceedings occur under censorship—the military has been able to limit access of key information to journalists and the public, ostensibly on account of potential damage to national security.

There is a sharp contrast between Manning’s comments yesterday and a statement he made in February, in which he asserted that the American people had the right to know the “true costs of war.”

“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this that it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.”

In an attempt to neutralize Manning’s potential as an icon of opposition, both the prosecution and the defense have worked at length to portray Manning as mentally unstable and plagued with eccentric personal insecurities. The trial has been marked by an obsessive focus on Manning’s sexuality, his psychological motives. Photographs of Manning dressed in make-up, wig, and women’s clothing have been published.

One reads with sadness Manning’s verbal repudiation of his noble actions, a repudiation extracted through psychological and physical abuse and the threat of a life in prison. That the Obama administration and the state apparatus feel the need to extract such statements and to compel political prisoners to speak in this way only adds to their own moral degradation, giving further proof of the putrefaction of what passes for American democracy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric London is a political commentator and analyst with wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party.

Warren Buffet’s prescription for basic democratic governance

Editors’ Note: We got this communication a couple of days ago. We don’t know if this is a genuine Warren Buffet memo but the advice seems sound, as far as it goes, so we endorse the recommendations—as part of an incipient unity platform with real progressive teeth. True socialists have been advising things of this nature for quite a while, but the implementation is always a matter of political dexterity in a game totally rigged by the enemy. From that perspective it may be said that such programmatic proposals remain largely Utopian, although who knows what social media can accomplish. Buffet’s prescription is not new. Indeed the idea of making those who govern share the living circumstances of those they rule is an old precept for true democratic policymaking. I would add that in the event of war the politicians’ closest kin should be obligated to serve in the combat lines. This country needs tons of structural fixing, a cultural revolution to “cure” the nation of its chauvinism and corporate-driven foreign policy; its belief in capitalism and hyper-individualism as the best way to organize society; a massive democratization of the mass media to insure it delivers a popular message and not simply the corporate point of view, and the scrubbing off of thick layers of lies it has operated for over a century, among many other things. Still, what Buffet proposes is a start.—P. Greanville

Subject: THIS SHOULD DO THE JOB

I’m not sure; it may do something. Forward if you think it has any value.

Winds of Change….Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have this message.

This is one idea that really should be passed around…

*Congressional Reform Act of 2013

1. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose .

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 2%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 12/31/13 . The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in

Congress is an honor, not a career.

The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their

term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Don’t you think it’s time?

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

You are one of my 20+ – Please keep it going, and thanks.

The Rise of the Internet Dissidents

Manning, Snowden and Assange

by NOZOMI HAYASE

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s volcanic revelations of ubiquitous US surveillance are in their third month. The aftershocks felt around the world continue. As Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum, the White House fell into anger and dismay.

Computer scientist Nadia Heninger argued that leaking information is now becoming the “civil disobedience of our age”. The late historian and activist Howard Zinn described the act of civil disobedience as “the deliberate, discriminate, violation of law for a vital social purpose”. He advocated it saying that such an act “becomes not only justifiable but necessary when a fundamental human right is at stake and when legal channels are inadequate for securing that right”.

Snowden’s act was clearly one of civil disobedience. John Lewis, US Representative and veteran civil rights leader recently noted that Snowden was “continuing the tradition of civil disobedience by revealing details of classified US surveillance programs”.

Snowden is not alone. In recent years, there have been waves of dissent that revealed the depth of corruption and abuse of power endemic in this global corporate system. Before Snowden, there was Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond who shook up the trend of criminal overreach within the US government and its transnational corporate and government allies. Private Bradley Manning blew the whistle on US war crimes and activist Jeremy Hammond exposed the inner workings of the pervasive surveillance state. They took risks to alert the world about the systemic failure of representative government and the trend toward a dangerous corporate authoritarianism.

After Snowden was charged with espionage, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called for global support to stand with him:

“Edward Snowden is one of us. Bradley Manning is one of us. They are young, technically minded people from the generation that Barack Obama betrayed. They are the generation that grew up on the Internet and were shaped by it….”

Snowden, Manning and Assange are all part of an Internet generation that holds that transparency of governments and corporations is a form of check and balance on power. They believe in the power of information and in the public’s right to know. In an interview with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Snowden described how his motive was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” He advocated for participation of ordinary people in decision-making processes as a vital part of democratic society indicating that the policies of national security agencies that he exposed should be up to the public to decide. This belief is shared by his forerunners.

Manning, who inspired Snowden, wrote in his infamous chat log with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo: “I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He confirmed this conviction once again when he testified at the providence inquiry for his formal plea. After admitting that he was the source of the largest leak of classified information in history, he spoke again about the motivation behind his actions:

“I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.”

In pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy for hacking into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, computer whiz Jeremy Hammond stated that he believed, “People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors”.

Barrett Brown, journalist and director of a website called Project PM, which crowd-sourced information exposing the activities of the cyber-intelligence industry, also held a similar conviction. Brown now sits behind bars with a possible maximum sentence of 105 years for his daring investigation of the growing private intelligence contractor industry. In an interview with NBC’s Michael Isikoff, Brown described“information freedom” as “the value of this age”. He spoke of how this belief motivates many cyber-activists to engage in civil disobedience against those in positions of power who act unethically.

The motto of these activists is: privacy for the public, transparency for government officials and corporate executives. It was this care for privacy and protection of personal information that motivated Snowden to risk his freedom and also caused Andrew ‘Weev’ Auernheimer to expose a security flaw inside AT&T servers. “Auernheimer’s crime was not a hack” Natasha Lenard of the Salon clarified his position. She explainedhow “he did not illegally access a private server. Rather, his conviction hinged on what data gets to be authorized or unauthorized and who gets to decide this”. Though his actions didn’t harm anyone, Auernheimer was sent to prison for pointing out the company failure to protect user’s data.

It is this common theme of information freedom that motivates this new generation of activists. Their fight against a corrupt system required great personal sacrifice; they have been incarcerated, stripped naked, put on show trials, stuck in an airport transit space and immobilized in an Ecuadorian embassy.

A Vision of a New World

These digital dissenters speak truth to power. By way of the new digital medium, they revealed the deep fraud of an arrogant system that enables governments and corporations to look into the private lives of others while concealing their own immoral actions from the public. But, this was not all; these young activists also saw a vision of a new world and of a more open and just society.

With the release of the classified NSA files, Snowden stated that he was acting in defense of what he cherishes:

“I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

In the chat log, Manning pointed to the idea of open diplomacy, elaborated in a New York Times article as “the opposite of secret diplomacy, which consists in the underhand negotiation of treaties whose very existence is kept from the world”. Discretely referring to the release of Cablegate, he described the material as the “non-PR-versions of world events and crisis” and called it “open diplomacy”. Later he noted that “information should be free” as it “belongs in the public domain” and shared his view stating “if information is out in the open”, no one can take advantage of it and “it should do a public good”. Here he showed his longing for an honest society where there is some form of transparency for what leaders are doing in the dark.

This vision of the world is tied to certain values that are encouraged by the open structures of the internet. Unlike the age of the printing press when information tended to be centralized, the era of the internet fosters an interactive and direct peer-to-peer form of communication. Anthropologist Paul Jorion noted that the inherently democratic nature of the internet means “there’s no hierarchy and everyone can express themselves”.

The life of late activist Aaron Swartz exemplified these new values born in tandem within this digital communication medium. Swartz stood up for the people’s right to free information. The 2008 manifesto he co-authored stated that sharing information was a “moral imperative” against “privatization of knowledge”. “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive”; Swartz urged us to “fight for Guerrilla Open Access.” It is his belief in the freedom to connect that led Swartz into a battle to defeat the Hollywood-based Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that was camouflaged as a solution to copyright infringement, but that actually threatened the ability to communicate and share freely over the Internet.

Hammond, who believed in creating “an army so powerful we won’t need weapons” fought for the same vision as Swartz. Upon Swartz’s death Hammond wrote in his memory:

“What is needed is not reform but total transformation -not amendments but abolition. Aaron is a hero to me because he did not wait for those in power to realize his vision and change their game, he sought to change the game himself, and he did so without fear of being labeled a criminal and imprisoned by a backwards system of justice”.

Before Snowden’s whistleblowing, Julian Assange saw the increasing force that was subverting the internet and alerted people to the spying networks created by transnational corporate allies. In the book Cypherpunks: Freedom and Future of the Internet, co-written with Andy Müller-Maguhn, Jérémie Zimmermann and Jacob Appelbaum, Assange showed how the internet can be used as an instrument for both freedom or oppression.

“Once upon a time in a place that was neither here nor there, we, the constructors and citizens of the young internet discussed the future of our new world,” Assange wrote in the introduction. Pioneers of this net culture seemed to have recognized a democratizing force inherent in the technology of the internet and how its power, when truly freed, could transform the existing structures of control and ownership. The founder of WikiLeaks articulated the vision of Cypherpunks, a group of activists who woke up to the potential of cryptography in bringing societal and political change:

“We say that the relationships between all people would be mediated by our new world, and that the nature of states, which are defined by how people exchange information, economic value, and force, would also change. We saw that the merger between existing state structures and the internet created an opening to change the nature of states. … The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute atoms, longed for independence …”

Assange saw how the internet is moving in a manner contrary to his vision and how it “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen” and indeed has become “a threat to human civilization”. He elaborated in a Guardian article how the control of oil resources has been a major denominator for granting certain countries geopolitical power and “the war for oil pipelines” has been driving the world. He explained how now this battle has shifted over into “the war for information pipelines: control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland”.

Now, the situation is accelerating. In the last couple of years we have seen a tremendous assault on internet freedom. The force to squash the vision of this generation has infiltrated cyberspace. The battle has begun.

The Frontier of Digital Liberation

The trend toward centralized control or restriction of information flow has become an antithesis to the way of life experienced by this generation of digital activists. Richard Stallman who inspired figures like Assange also warned about the surveillance scheme. Stallman, a founder of the Free Software Movement, promotes freedom respecting software, which gives users control over their technology. He pointed to an unfolding battle between corporations and a growing body of people who believe software and communication venues should be free of insidious covert control. He described how this control is exercised by a form of propriety where, for example corporations and governments subjugate users with insidious features such as converting cell phones into spying and tracking devices and creating software backdoors to make changes to programs or install intentionally malicious software without user’s consent.

In the name of copyright and intellectual property, the act of sharing has in many cases become a crime, yet some have found creative ways to circumvent the systemic clampdown. One of those on the frontier of digital liberation is Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, alias anakata, a Swedish computer specialist who co-founded the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, which facilitates peer-to-peer file sharing. Similar pioneering work was done by Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur who launched the Hong Kong- based company Megaupload, which enables massive file storage and viewing. Such actions were legally attacked by the corporate-government information cartels. Svartholm Warg was charged with illegal downloading of copyrighted material and sent to jail, while the US government overextended its arrogant imperial power byattempting to shut down Megaupload and extradite founder Dotcom.

While the founder of Pirate Bay sits behind bars, Torrent Site continues to combat the censorship. It is releasing a customized Firefox called PirateBrouser that enables users to go around the censorship. After the stories of NSA mass spying became public, Dotcom announced the upcoming release of an encrypted secure message apps and email service. He stated that he might move this privacy service overseas to Iceland, which is known as a strong advocate for protesting citizen’s privacy.

Now, more people are joining together to defend the values of the Internet generation. In the last few years, the online collective Anonymous has become the ubiquitous face of cyber-activism. With V for Vendetta “Guy Fawkes” masks, this loosely tied decentralized network acts whenever and wherever their radar catches classic abuses of power. They fiercely mobilize to take on the powerful, whether it is arrogant government contractors like Aaron Barr, religious organizations like Scientology, child sexual abusers or immoral governments and corporations. “Beneath this mask there is an idea …” They are united with shared sense of justice and conviction that “ideas are bulletproof”. Repeatedly, Anonymous has shown to be a champion of the downtrodden and those that challenge illegitimate power.

Ideals of the Heart

The common struggles in what these young people are fighting against bind them together, but the true mark of this generation is a shared vision of a world with virtues like sharing, love and creativity that have been suppressed in the trend toward extreme capitalism within the transnational corporate-state.

Along with a new found courage, these young people reveal a strong sense of compassion and trust in ordinary people. In the online chat logs, Manning showed his extraordinary empathy for others when he wrote,“I can’t separate myself from others … I feel connected to everybody… like they were distant family.”

At OHM 2013, a five day outdoor international festival for hackers and cyber security workers, retired CIA officer Ray McGovern remarked how both Snowden and Manning acted with empathy when they witnessed human suffering. They trusted the general public over governments and found hope in the actions of ordinary people to change the course of society for the better. Manning said:

“ … its important that it gets out … I feel, for some bizarre reason … it might actually change something … hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms … if not… than we’re doomed as a species.”

The same sentiment was shared by Snowden when he said, “The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change”. It is those human attributes that the empire is trying to punish.

On July 30th, the military judge delivered a verdict in the case of Bradley Manning. Manning was not found guilty for the most ridiculous charge of “aiding the enemy” for leaking state secrets and evidence of war crimes that were published by major news outlets and posted on the internet. Yet, he was found guilty of multiple counts including six Espionage Act offenses. He faces punishment of up to 136 years in prison, which during the sentencing phase, was reduced to maximum of 90 years.

In responding to the verdict, journalist Norman Solomon wrote about how the problem the U.S. government had with Manning was that he acted out of “caring, with empathy propelling solidarity”.

Darker Net called for a miracle in the freeing of Bradley Manning, ringing a similar note:

“The US Government wants to lock him away forever. Why? Because he had compassion. Because he had a profound sense of justice. Because he understood the difference between right and wrong. Because he saw aspects of war that horrified him. Some might say he had an innocence; was naive. But perhaps if we all had that same innocence, the world might be a better place.”

In this sense of naïveté there lies a strength that makes it possible for us to act toward a vision of a world that we imagine. “It takes a little bit of naivety in order to jump in and do something that otherwise looks impossible. Many great advances in science, technology and culture have a touch of naivety at their inception”, WikiLeaks wrote in their about page describing how the organization was first formed.

What at first appears as naïveté is what plants seeds for higher ideals. Sharon Staples, who helped care for Bradley Manning when he was a child, recalled her interaction with him when she visited him in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: “I asked him if he wanted me to send him anything and he said, ‘Everything I want is in here and here.’ …. As he said the word ‘here’, he pointed to his head, then his heart.”

Ideals grow in the minds and hearts of many in this generation and help cultivate a moral sensibility that allows each person to make unique contributions to the world. Janet Reitman, who wrote a defining piece on Hammond, ended the article by highlighting Hammond’s idealism, “He was an idealist who even after being jailed kept fighting at every occasion and he never betrayed himself”.

For those in power, the idealism of this generation and their conscience is an existential threat to their order. The ‘crime’ of aiding the enemy here is really the act of aiding democracy and acting for the public good. In the end, it has shown that we the public have become the enemy of the state.

Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner said of the younger generation:

“The question is not: what knowledge or skills does a person need to have in order to benefit the existing social order. But: what pre-disposition does this person have, and what is capable of development? Then it would be possible to channel new energies from the rising generation into the social order. Then the rising generation will not be fitted into the mould of the existing society, rather society will be what these newly recruited adults make of it.”

What is really happening with the growing trend of crackdowns on dissents and truth-tellers? Our society has failed to listen. Those in power are actively shutting out the voices of those with conscience. Obama’sunprecedented war on whistleblowers and equating these heroic deeds with treason are simply a symptom of this deafening of society. How did we get to this place? How has our society become so degraded?

We Are Winning

This totalitarian surveillance state wasn’t built in a day. There was a warning. Back in 1975 the late Senator Frank Church at the famous Church Committee hearings challenged the burgeoning potential of total surveillance in the US:

“[The National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide”.

38 years later, this young courageous whistleblower stepped forward to once again alert the people of the world to the severity of Big Brother moving into a digital dystopia, which he assessed as “turnkey tyranny”. All the US government would need to do would be to give the order and this once-great nation would spiral into overt despotism.

The battle continues in earnest between two forces; freedom and control, transparency and secrecy, sharing and proprietary ownership. It is in this fight that the Internet generation has found itself.

Speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange said, “We are winning … We are a part of a new international body politic that is developing, thanks to the internet”. He predicted to see the inevitable defeat of the national security state, saying that young people of ages between 20 and 30 are the ones who are recruited into the NSA and the CIA and those who are exposed to the Internet are shaped by certain values. He saidthat they will find “the agencies that they work for do not behave in a legal, ethical or moral manner.” This is already happening and this new form of information dissent is spreading.

For instance, at the Black Hat conference, a gathering of computer experts and cybersecurity professionals in Las Vegas, NSA head Keith Alexander was repeatedly interrupted by the audience. As Alexander stated NSA’s mission for freedom, a critical voice emerged to oppose the NSA surveillance.

Despite Obama’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers, the climate of fear doesn’t seem to hinder the will of those who act with conscience. Edward Snowden spoke of how he learned from others who came before him and that the power of ones conscience is something that cannot be imprisoned or stopped:

“Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers.”

The recent Snowden asylum victory is just the beginning. Debates over reform are happening. Now privacy has a chance to at least have a front seat debate. Snowden’s revelations led to a major House vote on an amendment that would defund one single NSA program to end their blanket collection of US phone records. Even though the bill was defeated, it was lost by only 12 votes. It brought huge shifts in public opinionabout the security state and government secrecy. A grassroots organization called “Restore the Fourth” quickly formed, which had its first round of protest on July 4th to challenge the unconstitutionality of NSA mass surveillance after it was revealed by Snowden. The group recently launched mass protests, calling for “1984 Day”, named for George Orwell’s classic novel about a Big Brother surveillance state. This movement is gathering momentum. Across the US in major cities, people marched calling to end the government spying.

The founder of a US-based encrypted email service, reportedly used by Edward Snowden, Ladar Levison announced he was shutting down the operation. The decision was made after being given a difficult choicebetween becoming “complicit in crimes against the American people” or walking “away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He chose the latter instead of submitting to US government’s secret order to give them access to customer content.

While government surveillance brings pressure on internet companies to collude with them, more and more people are coming together to resist this insidious force. Three of Germany’s largest email providersannounced their plans to partner up to strengthen the security of messages sent between them. Mailpile, an Iceland-based free/open source email service is crowd-funding a secure private email client/cloud service that is an alternative to US-tied services such as gmail. After the revelation of the Xkeyscore spying program that is shown to specifically target Wikipedia users, the WikiMedia foundation stepped forward to take extra measures to protect users privacy.

Nothing can stop this generation infused with a new sense of justice and shared vision for humanity. Similar to online connections, where when one link is broken, another emerges; when one person is taken out, several more emerge because courage is contagious. This desperate empire might stop one individual, but it cannot lock them all up.

Call them whistleblowers, dissidents, hackers or geeks, the youth of today’s Internet generation is uncovering for the world the level of deceit and corrupted state power. Our connections, our genuine care for one another is a power in the ether and creates a network that can lead us into a future that is imagined in our collective heart. Whether or not this generation can help move the world beyond the inhumane system of illegitimate governance is up to us, as we too are a part of this rising Internet generation.

Nozomi Hayase is a contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between politics and psychology to share insight on future social evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.

ELYSIUM: New Matt Damon flick comes uncomfortably close to our reality

We offer several takes on a film with some of the most thought-provoking premise in a long time. By touching upon the taboo issue of class, director Blomkamp parts ways with the vacuity and silliness of most action flicks, or Hollywood fare in general, but there’s still too much frantic movement devoid of substance in this blockbuster to make Elysium a truly great film. See what four perceptive critics, Dave Walsh, Rob Kall, Chris Mandel, and Jonathan Kim, have to say.—PG

(1) By David Walsh, wsws.org
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium: To have or have not

The principal challenge in writing about a film like Elysium is to make neither too much nor too little of it.

Neill Blomkamp, the South African-born director (District 9, 2009), sets out certain provocative premises for his new film. By 2154, according to a title, the earth’s “wealthiest inhabitants” have “fled” to an orbiting space station, Elysium, some twenty minutes away by space shuttle. There, under sunny skies, gleaming mansions with luxuriant lawns and swimming pools prevail. Everything is light and elegant and clean. Medical science has developed equipment (Medi-Pods) that repair broken bones and cure even the most lethal diseases instantly.

The earth (whose scenes were shot in Mexico City), on the other hand, resembles a giant polluted, overcrowded slum. Its inhabitants are prevented, as undocumented “non-citizens,” from entering the paradise in the sky. They have little or no access to elementary social services such as health care. Police-state methods prevail, with armed robots controlling and brutalizing the seething, poverty-stricken population.

Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) works in a factory owned by Armadyne, the conglomerate that has built Elysium. An industrial accident, due to the company’s ruthless speed-up and drive for profits, results in his being contaminated by radiation and given five days to live. Much of the film is taken up by Max’s attempts to reach Elysium and provide himself with a cure for his condition.

Max’s predicament and his struggle to stay alive intersect with a crisis on Elysium, where Delacourt (Jodie Foster), a fascist-minded government official in charge of “Homeland Security,” who uses a vicious mercenary (Sharlto Copley) to liquidate “illegal immigrants” arriving from earth, is planning a coup that will place her in power. She justifies her plan on the grounds of the need to “protect our liberty.” At a certain point, Delacourt has a powerful motive for getting hold of Max and the information he (literally) carries in his head.

Max also encounters a childhood friend and former sweetheart, Frey (Alicia Braga), with whom he shares important memories. She too has compelling reasons for reaching Elysium: to obtain medical care for her daughter, suffering from an advanced stage of leukemia.

The events unfold in a violent, dense fashion.

There are numerous interesting things here: in particular, the focus on social inequality and its connection to political reaction and repression. In Elysium, as in life, the defense of the elite and its immense wealth requires intense violence against the disenfranchised, impoverished mass of the people. The references to Homeland Security, “Big Brother”-type surveillance, mercenary-like contractors, the plight of the undocumented, industrial murder, corporate corruption and malfeasance and anti-democratic conspiracies have an obvious significance. The events of the past two decades did not pass unnoticed, even in artistic circles.

Blomkamp grew up in South Africa during the latter stages of the struggle against the apartheid regime and attended film school in Vancouver, his current home. He seems a bit distant from the contemporary American film industry and its stifling, stagnant atmosphere, and thus capable of allowing realistic elements to enter into his work. A colleague explained, “He [Blomkamp] grew up in a racist, fascistic empire, watched it be overthrown, collapse into chaos, all while walking to school every day. Imagine the impression that leaves on you.”

Elysium has elicited a well-deserved venomous response from ultra-right commentators, who have referred to it as “Matt Damon’s Sci-Fi Socialism” and “socialist trash,” along with other insulting phrases. A spokesman for the right-wing Media Research Center told Fox News, “This is just the latest of several Hollywood movies this year to try and co-opt Occupy Wall Street plotlines into their films.”

Other media outlets have somewhat more objectively registered the film’s concerns. The Associated Press headlined a piece, “In Elysium, a cosmic divide for rich and poor.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of “Inequality at the movies.” In its review, Variety asserted that Elysium advances “one of the more openly socialist political agendas of any Hollywood movie in memory, beating the drum loudly not just for universal healthcare, but for open borders, unconditional amnesty and the abolition of class distinctions as well.” When was the last time Variety used the word “socialist” in reference to a major studio film?

Blomkamp told the LA Times that sections of contemporary Johannesburg, along with Bel-Air and Beverly Hills in the Los Angeles area, inspired his vision of Elysium. He commented to ScreenCrave, “I don’t think the film is speculative science-fiction. It’s so much more a metaphor for today in my mind.”

In an interview with Reuters, Matt Damon noted that the film’s premise was not far-fetched: “If you look at the difference between the bottom billion people on planet Earth and the top 10 million, the contrast is as stark as living on a space station and living in a third world urban centre.”

Blomkamp further explained to the Times, “Most of the time I just walk around annoyed. Would I describe myself as relatively happy, I suppose, but society gets to me. … If there isn’t a deep core reason for a film existing, what is the point? … For me to be known as a filmmaker that makes films that have a point, I’m stoked.”

It is to the filmmaker’s credit that he has his eyes open and thinks about the way the world is. (An ominous score, by Ryan Amon, and some impressive special effects make their contribution as well.)

Elysium, as a result, has some genuinely moving moments. The factory sequence in which Max receives his fatal dose of radiation is effective and convincing. The unfairness of Frey’s situation, her child dying while the affluent receive the most advanced medical treatment without having to think about it, is compelling.

However, such moments are the exception. Much of Elysium takes the form of a relatively tedious action film, dominated by a great deal of noise and mayhem, to no great effect. There is hardly a single figure who deviates from his or her predictable course. The dialogue is largely uninspired, and uninspiring. The exposition of the complicated plot, given at top speed by the characters, often seems awkward and unconvincing.

Spider (Wagner Moura), a Che-like figure, and his entourage seem almost entirely extraneous, except as a device to move the unlikely story forward. Foster’s Delacourt and Armadyne chief John Carlyle (William Fichtner) are so icy, villainous and without nuance that they might well have stepped out of a comic book. The scenes of the Los Angeles slums have, at times, that almost hysterical, inauthentic look one associates with a dark and skeptical view of humanity. Generally speaking, cartoonishness never helped anyone.

Perhaps most damagingly, Max is transformed from an individual whose situation shows dramatic promise into, alas, a conventional, unreal “superhero,” possibly the most boring of all fictional creations. As a consequence, one loses a good deal of interest in his particular fate, and even his final act of self-sacrifice is largely unmoving.

One of the difficulties is that Blomkamp has chosen to reproduce identifiable social and political elements of contemporary life without seriously turning his attention to the content of everyday life, to the drama of it, to its relationships and emotions. Elysium presents a peculiar combination of accurate physical and institutional facts, on the one hand, and contrived, overblown, schematic relations between its human figures, on the other.

Both Blomkamp and Damon have gone out of their way to deny any particular social message in the film. “The first order of business for a big summer popcorn movie is to make a kick-ass movie with great action,” says the actor. Blomkamp told the LA Times, “To be pigeonholed into political films, I would put a gun in my mouth if that’s how my career ended up.” No artist wants to be pigeon-holed, but the director’s over-reaction reflects an accommodation to a retrograde industry climate.

It is not astonishing, one supposes, given the pressures that a $100 million budget inevitably generates, that the filmmakers seek to “reassure” potential audience members that nothing much will be asked of them. Not astonishing, but not terribly worthy either. Elysium’s marketing is some reflection of its production: there is a pandering here to preconceptions about what an audience will or will not accept. In my own view, Blomkamp has weakened his film and made it less appealing to audiences through his insistence on dull, pumped-up action sequences. Hollywood at one point made enormously popular and insightful films that were something other than “big summer popcorn movies.”

Without offering excuses for the filmmakers’ failings, who, after all, do present some intensely intriguing material, one has to take into account as well the general political situation. Although many are only waiting for the other shoe to drop, there has not yet been a major social explosion in response to the catastrophic social inequality and attacks on the lives and livelihoods of millions. That remains the decisive issue, both for social development as a whole and art in particular.

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(2) By Christopher Mandel

The Future According to Elysium

Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster, Elysium creates a disturbingly realistic vision of the future.

Last weekend director Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium came out in theatres. The film serves as de facto sequel to Blomkamp’s breakthrough District 9 which was nominated for a “best picture” Academy award in 2009. This article is not meant as a review but rather an analysis of the futuristic setting of the film. That having been said, let me just say that my opinion is similar to the bulk of reviewers. The film is quite good, but somewhat disappointing given the brilliance of its predecessor.

Perhaps the best element of the movie is its well crafted vision of a worst-case scenario (let’s hope) for the future of humanity. Most critics are treating the setting as a heavy handed analogy for our current state, but if you look carefully at the various elements of Blomkamp’s 2154, much of his vision is disturbingly within the realm of possibility.

The central theme of Elysium is class. The world features two distinct classes: the ultra wealthy citizens of Elysium, an orbiting paradise of green lawns, mansions, and high-tech regeneration beds that can reverse aging, reconstruct mangles limbs, cure disease, and even bring back the dead. This medical technology may strike viewers as complete fantasy, but the reconstruction of complex tissues has already been accomplished in tests and is currently being developed (although it is a bit unrealistic to suggest such medical marvels will be possible without a doctor on hand and take less than a minute!).

The citizens of Elysium are a ruling class. They enjoy monopolistic control the political bodies, military, and police. They are also the primary movers and shakers in the market place. Nevertheless, their primary relationship to the non-citizens stuck on Earth is not based on exploitation, but avoidance. Blomkamp’s world is not based on a Marxist critique of capitalism where the owners exploit the workers. 2154 is even worse. The majority of Earth dwellers simply aren’t needed in the marketplace at all, and most Elysium citizens would prefer to be shielded from the sad ugliness far below them.

Elysium was created so the elite could escape an overpopulated planet, stricken with underemployment and environmental collapse. Blomkamp cleverly uses subtle imagery, such as an entirely brown African continent floating past the window of a spacecraft to tell the ecological story. Blomkamp seems to understand that he doesn’t need to explain the details, anyone who has read an article about climate change or even the descriptive placards at the zoo can easily fill in the gaps.

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/25569106@N00/9363592716/: One of Elysium's many robots.

One of Elysium’s many robots. by PatLoika

One element of this motion picture that annoyed me as I left the movie theatre was the main character’s job. Max gets paid a low wage to stand in one place, periodically pushing a button in a robot factory. “Why in the world would a robot factory have unskilled laborers?” I thought. “Wouldn’t the first line of super robots coming off the line replace the workers?”

In his recent book “The Future,” Al Gore introduces the term, “robosourcing.” Economists have been discussing the effects of automation on labor and class since the dawn of the industrial age. The fear has always been that machines would dominate production to such a degree that there wouldn’t be enough jobs for humans to fill. Thankfully, in the industrial age this never happened, the technology always managed to create enough skilled jobs to offset the loss of low skilled roles. Now in the information age there is “robosourcing.” As artificial intelligence and robotics advance, the proportion of jobs which machines can fill is growing exponentially. In a modern factory, it simply doesn’t take very many people to build a car because robots do most of the work. Have you ever used a self checkout stand at a grocery store? Do you hire an accountant every April, or let your computer do your taxes? Right now in 2013, there are even computer programs writing news stories and composing symphonies!

The reason our hero Max works in a factory is because in the world of Elysium, the market for manual labor is so utterly bent in favor of the employers, that hiring Max is cheaper than building a robot to push buttons all day. In Blomkamp’s world, robots haven’t replaced the working class, they’ve replaced the middle class. They serve as soldiers, police officers, and parole officers. On Elysium technology has even replaced doctors.

Most interestingly is the role of AI in politics, law, and infrastructure. In Elysium, machines haven’t literally taken control, as is the case in the Matrix and Terminator series’ but they are more than powerless tools; the computer network running the space station defines everyone’s legal status, and by extension, destiny, in its database. Hence, a coup d’état can be achieved simply by telling Elysium’s computer system to change the identity of the president, and society itself is rebooted when the network is rebooted.

Elysium is a violent, summer sci-fi flick; it is not a footnoted dissertation on present trends and probable outcomes. Many of the Blomkamp’s ideas are pure make-believe and extremely unlikely (single-person space ships the size of cars?). But most of the defining characteristics of the film’s world are realistic conjectures based on present trends. This world, although a bit exaggerated perhaps (and certainly more action packed!), is possible. Let’s hope it’s not the one we pick.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author’s Website: http://www.cloudlessrain.net/

Christopher Mandel is a writer, activist, musician, and Sunday school teacher in Denver, CO. He was a dedicated organizer in the Occupy movement and published his memoirs of that experience as MY OCCUPY: AN ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON’S ADVENTURES IN THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT.

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(3) Rob Kall, OpEdnews

Movie Review: Elysium; It Will Make Your Blood Boil

By Rob KallI watched Elysium last night. It was successful. It made my blood boil and my teeth clench. The movie delivers a powerful message. We are already living in a hellish world where the elite and powerful are living lives of luxury off the backs, off the deaths of the 99.9 percent. It’s no wonder that this movie has been panned by so many mainstream critics. To be honest, this is not a perfect movie. It is made to pander to the tastes of today’s movie-goers, with far more violence than necessary to support the story. But this is a movie worth seeing. Without spoiling the plot, I can tell you that this movie shows the banal evil of the ruling, moneyed class, the brutal treatment of workers, the dehumanization and, beyond militarization, robotization of the police– police programmed to be cruel and inhuman. The defense secretary, played by Jodie Foster, is a brilliant but lethal psychopath. The head of a military manufacturer is a despicable sociopath who sees worker fatalities as annoying production line slow downs. But they hire an earthbound psychopath to do their dirty work. In the movie Elysium, the people on earth are a down-trodden, hopeless lot. The people of Elysium live on an orbiting habitat that supports 250,000 people, with houses selling for $250 million and up.

As you’ve probably concluded , the movie Elysium throws some futuristic trappings on the actual situation that exists in the world right now. Watching the contrast between the lives of the elite and the rest of the people on earth is what made my blood boil and my teeth gnash. Spoiler alert. Reading beyond this point will give away some of the plot developments. Matt Damon plays the hero of this story– a reluctant hero who accepts “the call” because he has no other choice. He has been exposed to radiation that will kill him in five days. Because of his dire situation, he seeks a very high risk solution with very low odds for success. That solution involves violating all kinds of laws of Elysium. As he embarks on this journey we learn that the elites who live on Elysium, a massive space station with green verdant lawns, waterways and clean air, control the laws and life on the surface of the planet. I’ve long believed that it will take heroes and heroines who are literally dying, people who know they have a short time to live, to engage in revolutionary acts of courage, standing up to the machine, fighting for justice and humanity. That’s what Matt Damon’s character does in this movie. There are many wisdom sources that say that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. That’s true for this movie. The end is not really realistic or satisfying. It does show that the people take the tools for healing the sick back from the billionaires on Elysium. It does show that the people of earth are all made whole, treated equally. But as most Hollywood stories go, this one also portrays the solution as one resolved by a lone hero. Showing a courageous soul who is willing to sacrifice his life is a good example. But Howard Zinn and Woodie Guthrie have both said that it will take millions of small acts to save the world. Here’s what Zinn said in an interview I did with him:

“How could you predict that four students,in 1960, would do is sit in Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and this would spark dozens and dozens of sit-ins and this would lead to freedom rides? In other words, there’s no way of predicting how a movement develops. All you can do really – you do your part, you do whatever you can, you organize with other people, you try to get some kind of change, and if enough people do enough things, even if they’re little things, they will add up. Because that’s what happens in movements: just millions of people doing small things which they cannot predict in it’s results.

And Woodiy Guthrie said, “A lot of little things, millions of little things is what will save this world.”

Last year, I interviewed, for my Bottom Up Radio Show, Chris Vogler, a movie consultant who wrote THE book, The Writer’s Journey, on incorporating Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey into movies. I invited him on my radio show to discuss whether it was possible to make a movie in which there is an Occupy Wall Street, horizontal version of the hero’s journey, in which there are many people who come together, from the bottom up, to save the day. He jumped at the idea and opportunity to discuss it and came up with the term “collective hero.” Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Chris: This reorientation you’re talking about of getting it off of this hierarchical, leave everything to the secret elite team at the top, which is the idea of “The Avengers” and rewriting this or redefining this is. No, this has to be from the people. The people in “The Avengers” movie are like sheep. There’s one woman who’s given a couple of lines and she’s supposed to represent all the people but she’s just like a big sheep looking up at, “Oh, the heroes they’re saving us. Oh, that Iron Man. He’s so cool,” or whatever it is. It’s a very weak attempt to acknowledge the power of the people. So, that’s something that I think we could grow more of this kind of consciousness in our story.

Rob: Of course the Marvel Comics brand is built upon this kind of superhero and I know Disney spent billions to buy the brand, right?

Chris: That’s certainly true yeah.

Rob: They’re investing in maintaining that kind of hero archetype, but I wonder, this is a question I’ve been meaning to discuss with you and we haven’t hit all the archetypes but I think we hit enough of them.

Chris: Yeah.

Rob: What’s the chance of a major movie company doing something like this?

Chris: Well, I think that the very fact that you have so many of the certain kind of the elite team of the G.I. Joe’s or whatever it is or exceptional heroes like Indiana Jones, the very fact that those have such dominance creates a hunger for the other thing, so then you can get back to more grounded collective things. And to be fair with Marvel Comics, the original idea of many of these things was more like the Spiderman model, where it’s just a kid and he’s put together a costume out of stuff from the junk store and old athletic equipment.

Rob: It’s true and actually some of the commenters from my article observed that many superheroes start out as average people who are victims of chemical spills or radiation or things like that.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a very interesting thing. Yes, there is some working out of maybe collective guilt about that or trying to show that there’s an interaction between these environmental choices and what happens. They’re very positive that way that usually the environmental change is positive. Not always, because some of the Batman villains, for example, are horribly deformed by it, like Two Face. It poisons their nature, but sometimes it brings out something good. Spiderman has these powers, but the whole point of Spiderman is the powers have to be used responsibly. So, if you’ve got this wonderful new tool of tablet computers and e-mail and so forth that has to be used responsibly as part of this hero contract.

Rob: When it comes down to making a blockbuster movie, underneath it there has to be a great story that people are going to care about and be able to relate to.

Chris: Um-hum.

Rob: Where the story will be able to lure them into the story trance.

Chris: Yes, that’s true and a couple of things may happen along these collective lines we’ve been discussing. One is that you present the collective hero like a village or a tribe or a street or a family or something like that and then the audience picks one or two that they like the best or that they relate to the most and so they kind of turn those into the heroes of the peace. The other thing you can do, and I like this idea, is to really spend some time creating a character that is that village or that street or that family so that the filmmakers use their tricks and techniques to create the sense of the community as a real entity that has its own consciousness and its own goals and settings, and that those need to be adjusted a little bit and that can be a great movie of material; a great piece of material. Something that shows us, here’s a microcosm of your society in one family or one street.

Rob: Has that been done?

Chris: Well, I think that this is what Spike Lee was after in “Do the Right Thing.” He was giving you of a sort of Charles Dickens view of this is a whole array of different types of people in this one location. I thought that was a successful effort there and you could pick out certain people and say, “Okay, it was really this guy’s story or that’s guy’s story.” But I think he did the right job there of creating the sense of the collective and that that itself can be a character. So I like things like that. Or another example from far a field from that, there was a movie about U-boats, “Das Boots,” and very clearly the intention there was the boat itself. The crew of the boat is a collective and this is the main character; not the captain, not anybody on the crew. It’s that boat. So, I think there are plenty of examples that show how you can do that very effectively. John Ford did it during the war a number of times. He took movies like “They Were Expendable,” where he was studying a certain unit and giving you the story that collective military unit. So, there’s lots of precedent for this.

It takes courage to make movies like this– for the studio, the actors, the director, the distributors. This is one movie I encourage you to watch. You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll show, financially, that movies with this kind of message can be economic successes too.

By the way, the Elysium official movie website has a number of interactive features, like an application to become a part of Elysium– that no matter what you answer, you fail. Of course, anyone seriously interested in such an elite program would not get in through an on-line application– they’d be invited, or would communicate with a real person. The application would just be for show. Think of the millions who applied for foreclosure relief.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and website architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), and publisher of Storycon.org, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and an inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com

(4)

Jonathan Kim

ReThink Review: Elysium — The 1 Percent in Orbit

Posted: 08/09/2013

Neill Blomkamp’s latest sociopolitical sci-fi masterpiece, Elysium, is being called dystopian for portraying a world in the year 2154 where the ultra wealthy have abandoned an earth wracked by poverty, disease, crime, and pollution to live in the ultimate gated community aboard an orbiting space station. But if you read the news — which is full of stories about impending environmental catastrophe, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a republican party obsessed with lionizing the wealthy and making those in need suffer — Elysium seems more predictive than pessimistic. After all, the 1 percent already live in a world so different from ours — where they can flout the law, enjoy the best in medical care, and be untouched by the planet’s problems, concerns, and priorities — that they might as well be on another planet.

However, making on observation like that appears to be too much for the small minds of many, like republicans who have been quick to denounce Elysium as socialist liberal Hollywood nonsense, or others whining that Elysium‘s social commentary is simply too heavy-handed for the movie to be enjoyed. But don’t listen to either of them, since Blomkamp’s ability to weave sociopolitical themes into stunning, powerful sci-fi films is what makes him one of the best directors working today. And I was so blown away by Elysium that I need two reviews to describe why I think it’s the best movie of this summer by far, and probably of 2013. Watch my ReThink Review of Elysium below, followed by my take on why Elysium‘s sociopolitical commentary is so accurate, needed, and welcome.

Watch the reviews on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKMtbwmkIp4
Source page for this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kim/rethink-review-emelysiume_b_3730374.html

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Hypochondriacs Cost Our Healthcare Industry Billions (Annotated)

Prefatory comment by Patrice Greanville

When it comes to hypochondria, perhaps the most dissed of all real conditions in the medical canon, American sufferers are at a serious disadvantage.

U.S. television brims with expensive prescription drug spots, causing enormous amounts of anxiety in their ranks. This is quite unnecessary, as I argue below, but first it’s worth noting that, of all western nations, only New Zealand and the United States allow this nonsense to go on. All other major nations (capitalist, too, but probably less corrupt or burdened by our savage strain of capitalism) have historically (since the 1940s for Australasia, North America, and Europe) banned direct advertising of pharmaceuticals to consumers. Such elementary sense of shame is lacking in the U.S. as the so-called leader of the “Free World” is today almost in a class by itself when it comes to the high-handed manner in which the government consistently betrays the public interest.

Anxiety sells
Market fundamentalism, which permeates U.S. media/political culture, largely accounts for this deformity, and the bandits take full advantage of such official favoritism. This is the context in which Big Pharma’s meretricious direct-to-consumer’s illness reminders aggravate the situation for people who already harbor deep doubts about the loyalty of their bodies, but such campaigns inevitably inflict disquiet among the “normal” public, too. And that’s not all. The toxic refrain leveled by the commercial entities is augmented by the ubiquitous noise made by scores of nonprofits hawking constant tests and financial support for research into grave illnesses, such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer, heart disease, prostate cancers, leukemias, depression, melanoma, nerve wasting conditions, and so on, ad nauseam (literally). As Alexander Nazaryan has noted,

It doesn’t help that we now live in what Barbara Ehrenreich has denounced as “ribbon culture” in “Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America,” her book about breast cancer. What started with the red AIDS ribbon, in 1991, as well as a pink one for breast cancer that same year, has evolved into a full spectrum of colors, commemorating everything from autism (multicolored puzzle pieces) to celiac disease (lime green). Alertness campaigns tell us to check suspicious moles and get fibroids removed. Yet we should not, like a Woody Allen character, run to the neurologist after every migraine. Unless, of course, that migraine is accompanied by occluded vision and ringing in the ears. Then you really should see someone. (1)

Amid this unrelenting avalanche of alerts, no one in America stops to think that all of this media noise, this insolent torrent of intrusion into our peace of mind, all this pleading, would be (and is) entirely superfluous in a society in which social priorities were straight and the search for cures was simply entirely funded by public monies.

[pullquote] System-induced insecurity and helplessness —especially during medical or old age crises-—permeate the American psyche. Due to rampant, rarely questioned, individualism, Americans live in fear of being unable to meet their expenses should such a calamity strike. The medical and insurance industries thrive in this unsavory brew, but the idea is relentlessly stoked by their lobbyists in Washington and massive advertising. The American Way of Life is really an insane way of organizing society. What kind of civilization can be balanced on an ethos of every man for himself? [/pullquote]

For that, of course, Americans would have to shed their conditioning to sheepishly accept “volunteerism” in the name of sacred privatism, as Papa Bush so candidly recommended in his “points of light” speech, and regain control of their society. Only then could they begin to reshuffle the way tax monies are spent (and frequently wasted) on military projects and programs that can only benefit the 0.001% already controlling society. The bankster rescue program implemented by the Bush-Obama regimes, under a heavy curtain of disinformation and secrecy, dipping into the public treasury to the tune of trillions of dollars, is just one instance of this. It remains a shining example of bad—nay, cynically rotten— government because these enormous sums were thrown at a crisis completely caused by private, unregulated financial corporations, yet the white collar criminals behind the scandal are still at large, thriving and defiant. Thus it’s no use—short of a real public mobilization—to ask why JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon is not in jail and unlikely to end up there any time soon, and why the financial industry has again escaped any form of effective control. As a result, another financial disaster of similar or bigger proportions could strike any day. It is in this manner and many others like it that American culture is a profoundly unhealthy one, injecting monumental loads of unwarranted stress into people’s lives simply for the sake of corporate aggrandizement. Now, there’s something to really worry about.

—Patrice Greanville is TGP’s founding editor.

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(1) Confessions of a Hypochondriac, A. Nazaryan, The New Yorker, 8.3.12

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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)

Hypochondriacs Cost Our Healthcare Industry Billions

AlterNet [1] / By Jodie Gummow [2]

“What’s the matter?” “I have a headache,” “Maybe it’s a tumor?” “It’s not a tumor!” In pop culture, we like to poke fun at individuals who fuss over every little ailment with numerous TV characters based on those who possess hypochondriac personas. However, for the sufferer, living each day in constant fear of contracting a serious life-threatening illness is no laughing matter.

Hypochondriasis, as it was previously known in the medical field, is a serious mental condition that places a major physical, emotional and financial strain not only on the sufferer, but also on relationships, family members and the entire health care industry. To date, there has not been significant medical research dedicated to understanding the condition and many doctors are unsure about how to manage patients who exhibit symptoms. A working definition was only formulated in the last few decades [3] by the American Psychiatric Association [4] (APA), which defined the disorder as, “the fear or belief of serious illness that persists six months or more despite physician reassurance.”

More recently in May 2013, the condition was re-termed Illness Anxiety Disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) [5] of the APA in an effort to shift the focus away from the symptoms of the condition and instead toward the abnormal behavior and feelings evoked by the symptoms. This made it clear that this is primarily a mental disorder where people worry excessively and unnecessarily about medical problems.

In the absence of concrete medical studies it is uncertain how many people actually suffer from illness anxiety disorder, but according to Brian Fallon, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and co-author of Phantom Illness: Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Hypochondria [6], at least 25 percent of patient visits to doctors are believed to have no identifiable medical cause. Moreover, approximately 12 percent of the population suffers from some form of a fear of illness.

“A factor that contributes to illness anxiety disorder is a person’s genetic makeup,” Fallon told AlterNet. “If you have genes in your family aiding obsessional anxiety, it is likely you will suffer from obsessional anxiety. It is also true that if you grew up as a child where a parent was quite ill or suddenly afflicted with serious illness then this can create a channeled fear that you will develop a disease and also adds to a lack of trust in the world. Others can develop the disorder after losing a loved one to a serious illness or as a secondary illness to depression or anxiety disorder.”

Sometimes, the condition is so extreme that individuals can actually experience physical symptoms created through the mind. Such worry wreaks havoc on the immune system causing a lack of sleep and severe anxiety which can lead to further physiological conditions. As Arthur Barsky of Harvard Medical School and author of Worried Sick: Our Troubled Quest for Wellness [7] told WebMD [8], the illness then becomes part of the hypochondriac’s identity and as a result, the individual’s work, family and relationships begin to suffer.

“Contrary to what some skeptics think, hypochondriacs are not pretending or just trying to get attention. They’re absolutely not fakers or malingerers […] They really feel the distress they’re talking about. It’s just that their feelings don’t have an obvious medical basis,” Barsky said.

So how does one differentiate between a hypochondriac and a person merely concerned about their health? According to Benjamin Liptzin, chair of the department of psychiatry at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, the primary distinction lies in the extent to which a person believes he or she has a serious illness. As he explained to AlterNet:

“A certain amount of concern about one’s health is a good thing. This gets us to visit the doctor, to watch our diet, to exercise, take medication – healthy normal people should be concerned about their health. What distinguishes people with the disorder is that it is excessive – these people are not reassured by good news from the doctor or when test results come back negative. They are just convinced there is something their doctor is missing.”

Fallon agrees.

“Hypochondriacs live in constant or intermittent fear that they might be dying or afflicted with a serious illness whereas people who are generally concerned about their health are conscious about their wellbeing rather than live in incessant apprehension of a threat to their health or contracting a serious illness,” he said.

This inability to accept negative test results at face value or a doctor’s assurances leads to a rampant abuse of the healthcare system whereby hypochondriacs spend large amounts of money on numerous and unnecessary medical appointments and procedures like blood tests and MRIs even after results indicate they do not have an illness.

A study by Barsky [9] found that those with unexplained physical symptoms with no medical basis accounted for 16 percent of all medical costs, with the annual cost of hypochondria in the billions of dollars. Fallon believes this to be an accurate figure in light of the ease and freedom with which patients in the US can visit multiple doctors at any given time, at the expense of the insurance companies which beart the costs.

The disorder places a major strain on the doctor-patient relationship as doctors struggle with having to determine to what extent they should investigate a physical medical complaint in the absence of any substantial symptoms. This often results in a doctor ordering excessive medical tests not out of necessity, but merely to ease a patient’s state of mind.

Such measures serve as a double-edged sword whereby exploring phantom illnesses only heighten the insecurities of the hypochondriac patient who already believes he/she has some rare disease. Many doctors feel pressured to succumb to a patient’s irrational demands to avoid a malpractice action based on misdiagnosis.

Physician Rahul Parikh describes the lack of faith between doctor and patient in his article, “The real reason hypochondriacs drive doctors crazy [10].” He wrote:

“Today’s medical system encourages the approach of hurrying difficult patients out the door. Doctors, unlike lawyers or consultants, don’t bill for their hours. Most of us get reimbursed by insurance companies for tests, and procedures, and prescriptions, often regardless of whether they’re necessary. A hypochondriac on our schedule is a time and money sink. The ugly truth is that modern medicine doesn’t reward those physicians, like primary care doctors, whose main work is to listen to and think deeply about patients and their ailments, whether they are physical or psychological.”

It doesn’t help that we live in a society of medical paranoia where self-help books are encouraged and when we turn on the TV we are confronted with public health messages stressing the benefits of early detection in the absence of symptoms. Even 30-second drug advertisements manage to provide every possible life-threatening side-effect of taking medication.

The plight of the hypochondriac is amplified by the Internet. Historically, those interested in investigating their physical symptoms had to trek to a library to borrow a book in order to research an illness. Today, one only needs to Google a symptom of an illness and instantaneously thousands of serious medical conditions appear, often displaying a worst-case diagnosis that happens to match the seeker’s problem.

As Fallon explains, “cyber-chondria” [8] is the addiction to researching medical conditions online whereby the more access a person has to learn about an illness, the more the person thinks he/she has it. He said:

“There is a tremendous temptation for people with illness anxiety to type in their symptoms on the Internet to see if they can find a diagnosis to explain their symptoms. The problem with that is that the web is filled with information which is both accurate and inaccurate, as well as other patients trying to give people advice and warnings against horrible doctors. This only causes people to feel worse. My recommendation is that if you have a pre-existing illness anxiety, stay away from the Internet!”

So how should a doctor proceed when treating a patient who is exhibiting hypochondriac traits? Liptzin says that when a doctor is faced with a person suffering from an obvious illness anxiety disorder, it is better not to submit to patient pressure.

“Doctors should only do what is necessary and if they are confident that they have ruled out a series of illnesses, they should explain that to the patient and say, Let’s see how you do over the next six months,” he said.

Fallon believes the key for doctors is to differentiate between illness and obsessional anxiety disorders.

“It is hard for doctors at an initial consultation to diagnose hypochondriasis because of the limited amount of time they have with their patients,” he said. “However, if a patient returns after medical tests come back negative, and the doctor has the opportunity to get to know the patient, it is important for the doctor to show compassion and kindness and explain carefully that the cause of the problem may be an underlying anxiety disorder and encourage treatment for anxiety or depression.”

Whether such measures by physicians actually curb erratic patient behavior is debatable, considering that many patients who are unhappy with a diagnosis are likely to continue doctor shopping in search of a validation of their illness. Fallon acknowledges that those who believe they are hypochondriacs can take matters into their own hands to help alleviate the problem.

“People suffering from illness anxiety disorder can do things to help themselves by reducing the focus on physical symptoms and enhancing interpersonal physical relationships,” he said. “Psychotherapy has also proven effective by concentrating on positive behavioral strategies. If the illness anxiety is severe, it is important to see a mental health professional or at the very least learn about the disorder.”

Liptzin believes that while attending clinics with group sessions for those who suffer from the illness may be helpful, it can have the opposite effect.

“Sometimes these clinical sessions only reinforce the disorder as sufferers end up supporting each other’s irrational thought patterns,” he said. “There is not much evidence that medication helps either. Rather, any type of relaxation technique or meditation or mindfulness is recommended to help reduce the anxiety of the person. What you really need to do is to take your mind off the symptoms and anything that is upsetting you.”

People who believe they may be suffering from illness anxiety disorder can take the Whitley Index Test [11], which has been developed to help identify hypochondriacs. The Mayo Clinic [12] recommends sticking with one doctor, no self-checks or self-diagnosis and attending group therapy sessions. In severe cases, medications like Prozac can be prescribed to treat anxiety disorders with mixed results of success.

It is important to remember that even hypochondriacs do get sick at times. Therefore, it is important to always listen to your body and seek medical assistance when it comes to general health concerns.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/hypochondriacs-cost-our-healthcare-industry-billions

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[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jodie-gummow-0
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/08/11/030811fa_fact?currentPage=all
[4] http://www.psych.org/home/search-results?k=illness%20anxiety%20disorder
[5] https://www.mayoclinic.org/medicalprofs/somatoform-disorders-psye0313.html
[6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0395859921
[7] http://www.amazon.com/Worried-Sick-Troubled-Quest-Wellness/dp/0316082554
[8] http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/internet-makes-hypochondria-worse
[9] http://www.prx.org/pieces/65216-living-with-hypochondria-the-real-costs-of-imagin
[10] http://www.salon.com/2011/08/07/hypochondriac_patients_poprx/
[11] http://www.thehypochondriac.com/hypochondria_diagnostic_test.htm
[12] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/hypochondria/DS00841/DSECTION=coping-and-support
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/abnormal-psychology
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/american-psychiatric-association
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[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/anxiety-disorders
[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/anxiety
[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/arthur-barsky
[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/as
[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/baystate-medical-centre
[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/benjamin-liptzin
[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/brian-fallon
[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chair
[29] http://www.alternet.org/tags/clinical-psychology
[30] http://www.alternet.org/tags/columbia-university
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[33] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fallon
[34] http://www.alternet.org/tags/forensic-psychology
[35] http://www.alternet.org/tags/harvard-medical-school
[36] http://www.alternet.org/tags/health-0
[37] http://www.alternet.org/tags/hypochondriasis
[38] http://www.alternet.org/tags/illness-anxiety-disorder
[39] http://www.alternet.org/tags/liptzin
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[48] http://www.alternet.org/tags/phantom-illness
[49] http://www.alternet.org/tags/professor-clinical-psychiatry
[50] http://www.alternet.org/tags/prozac
[51] http://www.alternet.org/tags/psychiatry-0
[52] http://www.alternet.org/tags/psychotherapy
[53] http://www.alternet.org/tags/quotation
[54] http://www.alternet.org/tags/rahul-parikh
[55] http://www.alternet.org/tags/somatoform-disorders
[56] http://www.alternet.org/tags/united-states
[57] http://www.alternet.org/tags/webmd
[58] http://www.alternet.org/tags/anxiety-disorder
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[67] http://www.alternet.org/tags/medical-paranoia
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[69] http://www.alternet.org/tags/obsessional-anxiety-disorders
[70] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B