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Heartbeat 06
From cclash@web.net Mon Sep 30 09:08:43 1996
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 96 13:24:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jocelyn J. Paquette Bob Ewing" <cclash@web.net>
To: ftp@etext.org, twn@igc.apc.org
Subject: Heartbeat #6
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^^^^^^^^^^^^ #6
^^^^^^^^^^^^ http://www.izad.com/cultureclash
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^^ ^^ EARTBEAT \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
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STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART
I enjoy baseball, especially the American league and
the Toronto Blue Jays. When I first discovered that the
Jays had lost Roberto Alomar to the Baltimore Orioles, I was
quite annoyed. Sure, Alomar was a spoilt brat, a big baby with
a great glove and hot bat, but he was fun to watch. However,
after, Alomar's disgraceful performance in Toronto, spitting in
an umpire's face, I'm glad he's gone. This way his disgrace
is Baltimore's. A disgrace the team compounded by allowing him
to play, a disgrace because a five game suspension is not
sufficient action against his display of crude, unprofessional
violent behaviour. A season suspension seems appropriate. Of
course , it seems that winning is everything in sports, and
as long as a player performs on the field leave him alone. Well
this attitude is unacceptable. Baltimore should be ashamed. What
a role model for young ball players! Come on New York!!!!
TV.
A recent tv ad for Canadian Tire has pushed my tolerance for
commercials over the top. I accept that tv is an advertising
medium and that it exists to deliver an audience to advertisers.
Yet, a little reason or sense won't hurt. This ad begins with the
line; "Fall is nice but Canadian Tire is nicer". Give me a break.
You cannot compare a season to a store. If we are so reduced in
our humanity to actually get a bigger charge out of a trip to a
retailer's than a walk in Nature's beauty we may indeed be
doomed.
/* Written 5:57 PM Sep 28, 1996 by peg:jclancy in web:reg.cuba
*/
/* ---------- "Cuba Biotech Vaccines" ---------- */
from: jclancy@peg.apc.org subject: Cuba -Biotech Vaccines
Granma Intern'l reports on the success of the Cuban Genetic
Engineering and Biotechnology Centre (CIGB), established ten
years ago. Almost a dozen high-tech products are being exported
to 20 countries, to the benefit of the island's economy. Numerous
specialists were 'inaugurated' along with the Institution, the
founding member of which was Dr.Manuel LIMONTA.
The Centre concentrates on work related to human health,
agriculture and industry, and is able to market products based on
its own research, backed by a team of highly qualified
scientists. It has, above all, made a remarkable contribution to
the health of the nation. One example is the Hepatitis B vaccine.
In May 1988, when the vaccine was still in the experimental
phase, US scientist Saul Krugman, who discovered the vaccine,
said that given the health strategy being developed on the
island, it could become the first country in the world to
eradicate this disease.
Barely 8 years later this prediction looks set to become a
reality. For several years now, more than 150,000 children who
are born every year and other risk groups have received this
vaccine. Furthermore, Dr.LIMONTA has announced that the
production levels of this vaccine (registered in 23 countries so
far) are such that the entire CUBAN under 20-year-old population
will be protected against this disease by the year 2000. The
three doses of Hep.B vaccine required for complete immunisation
would cost between 60 and 100 US dollars in any non-Cuban
pharmacy. Here they are administered free of charge.
Another product elaborated on the basis of the centre's
research is recombinant streptokinase, effective in the
prevention of heart attacks. This drug can be found in every
intensive care unit in the country. The list of advances in
population benefits also includes the epidermal growth factor,
interferons, and the transfer factor designed to strengthen the
immune system, all of which are used in the country's health
system.
The CIGB is also elaborating kits for the detection of AIDS,
Hepatitis C and other disorders, for sale on the internat'l
market, while working on the small-scale production of
recombinant inter-leukina-2, a promising product used in the
treatment of some types of cancer. The first samples of a drug to
treat anaemia will be available shortly.
AIDS, of course is in the spotlight. CIGB research group is
coordinated with various scientific institutions to come up with
a vaccine. A trial to do so will this month, test the first of
four clinical phases needed to determine its true effectiveness
in
humans. Each phase will last a year or even a little longer. Once
the rigorous laboratory tests have been completed, the vaccine
will be used to inoculate a group of volunteers from the centre
itself - at no risk, as it will be an artificial genetically-
engineered virus.
One of the CIGB researchers' objectives now is to have an
impact on agriculture and food production through the use of
advanced technology. Once a genetically modified plant leaves
the laboratory, it should be disseminated, and the follow up it
is given by those specialized in that stage of production is of
great importance. Another remarkable success is in animal health,
with the recent discovery of the first vaccine to protect cattle
from ticks, which is being sold in BRAZIL. Another vaccine has
succeeded in combatting diarrhoea in newborn pigs. etc JC
'THE GLOBAL MARKET THREATENS WORLD SECURITY'
According to the writer, the global market, the integrated
economy, and the world order are actually a declaration of war
upon security meaning the peoples of the world at peace with one
another, and security as an assured livelihood for those same
peoples.
By Jeremy Seabrook
Third World Network Features
The word 'security' has taken on great resonance in recent
years, in what appear to be separate spheres - both in terms of
the 'defence' of the county, and at the level of livelihood,
meaning labour, jobs and income, without which even a half-decent
life in an intensive market economy is impossible. It soon
becomes clear, however, that these two areas of experience are
far from exclusive; indeed, they converge, and are profoundly
interdependent.
'Security', in the sense of 'national security', contains a
number of compacted assumptions. The national integrity of
certain territories self-named or named by others as 'nations',
is already clearly fraying in many parts of the world.
For one thing, the dissolution of empires, the classically
colonial as well as that of the Soviet Union, has uncovered
identities of people long submerged by alien rule, and has led to
an upsurge in the assertions of religious, ethnic, tribal and
regional belongings, in Africa, Asia and Europe, West as well as
East. Many of these remain under the 'security' apparatus of
groups who are guarantors of no such thing, but appear as
oppressors, conquerors or even liquidators of such groups - the
former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi and Burma are only some of the
most obvious examples; while the continuing pressures on
indigenous peoples all over the world lead to the dwindling of
their numbers and a continuing assault upon their very survival.
Secondly, the nation-states of Europe whose shape and
historical heritage became the basis for creating a whole world
in their own image, are themselves beset by unforeseen new
concentrations of power which threaten their sense of self. The
creation of a global economy leads to the dilution of national
control over the development of vast transnational entities who
owe allegiance only to the mysterious and supraterrestrial
country of profit, and who relocate themselves from place to
place around the world, destroying livelihoods, wiping out
traditional skills and functions of people, leaving behind a
trail of human, material and moral wreckage, which 'local' (i.e.
national) governments have neither the will nor the resources to
make good. In such a volatile context, the idea of 'national
security' takes on a quite different aspect.
The efforts to retrieve some of the damage created by what
are primarily predatory creations of the highly industrialised
world (the G-7), new transnational institutions have been
created, including the modernising of the Bretton Woods
institutions, and more recently, the World Trade Organisation, in
order to safeguard the retention of wealth and power with those
countries who regard dominance as their birthright. If, however,
these 'benign' modes of global control should fail, a monopoly of
weapons of destruction is held in reserve, a kind of high-minded,
unspoken, but ubiquitous blackmail of those who would contest
this view of the order of things, the new world order, as it is
sometimes tendentiously called, even though its resemblance to a
far older order is striking.
The inherent instability of this construct is rendered all
the more threatening by at least two further elements. Firstly,
the single global economy leads to growing inequality, both
within every single country in the world which is 'integrated'
into it, and between rich and poor countries. Forty years ago,
the richest 20% of the world's population were receiving 30 times
as much as the poorest 20%. They now receive 60 times as much. In
Britain, the distribution of wealth has regressed in the 1990s to
roughly the same levels that prevailed in the 1890s.
Secondly, in order for this rigid and institutionalised
model (whereby the only hope for the poor to become a little less
poor is for the rich to become even more excessively, abusively
rich) to continue its growth and expansion in the world, the
resource-base of the world would have to be infinitely more ample
and flexible than it is. In other words, the model itself cannot
be sustained. The flow of wealth from poor to rich is already
leading to increasing insecurity of livelihood across the globe:
the fears for insecurity of employment in the rich Western
societies are mirrored in the fears over survival itself among
the poorest of the earth.
'Security' in such a situation is an impossibility. It is
clear that the heaping up of arms and weaponry in the world has
more to do with the management of insecurity (and extremely
violent and repressive management at that) than with the
peaceable assurance that countries, nations, states or whatever,
can go about their business unhindered. Indeed, the great
majority of the arms sales on which the rich countries depend,
are deployed in imposing upon the populations of those ruling
elites which purchase them, the same model of exacerbated
inequality which they have inherited from their former and
present colonial mentors - the incursion of Indonesia in East
Timor, for example, was such a colonial venture, and the
repression of the workers of Jakarta and Medan by the military is
only another aspect of the same phenomenon.
The unexamined pursuit of 'security' in such a context can
only lead to even greater levels of violence, upheaval and
discord. It is significant that the only time when the rulers of
the West talk about defending the jobs of the people is when it
comes to the maintenance of arms sales: in every other area of
manufacture, livelihood and skills are snuffed out without a
qualm. 'Security' has become iatrogenic medicine - it exacerbates
the ills it is supposed to cure.
Security meaning the peoples of the world at peace with one
another, and security as an assured livelihood for those same
peoples, are indivisible. The global market, the integrated
economy, the world order (which means the institutionalisation of
inequality and subordination) are actually a declaration of war
upon this simple and attainable end.
It is no accident in the global market economy that so noble
an abstraction as 'security' should have been transformed into
something tangible, objects and commodities - guns, weapons,
missiles; for in this form they become marketable, and highly
profitable.
Security is an impossibility in human life: we yearn for it,
and it eludes us at every level. It is usually part of the
function of human cultures to assuage this perpetual
contradiction, at least to mitigate and console for it. Not in
ours; insecurity, social as well as existential, is somebody
else's business opportunity. The busy engines of capitalism will
not leave either the most material necessities or the most
sublime ideas to be what they are, but must take them up and
transform them into some marketable entity.
This is how social security comes to mean, in the West, pale
anxious faces waiting at the counter behind glass 'security'
screens (to protect the workers from those whose labour is that
of offering security to them), the signature for the giro, the
cheque, the notes passed through the aperture beneath the window
of the post office, where elderly trembling hands drop the small
change and try to scoop up the banknotes before the next
impatient customer elbows her out of the way to collect her child
benefit.
Whole industries have grown up devoted to making profit out
of contrived and exacerbated insecurities - the makers of bolts
and locks, chains, time-switches that turn on the lights in
uninhabited houses, alarms and bleepers that emit human-like
screams when someone touches a window or approaches a car, like
the harp in Jack and the Beanstalk that cried 'Master, master'
when someone touched it.
The security industry protects those who are alone, old and
frightened, from marauders, intruders, burglars, robbers. But
they do not protect from fear; indeed, they are the
materialisation of fear rather than a means of allaying it. The
security industry rushes in to protect the empty spaces where no
people are. It replaces protective flesh and blood, it seeks to
offer shelter from the worst depredations of those who have
become strangers to each other. The security industry also spies
on people in public places, security cameras record the comings
and goings of people in social security offices, in shopping
malls, in oily echoing car-parks, in department stores, in town
centres when the shoppers have departed, reinforcing the sense of
our desertion of one another.
We have heard much about 'job security' - or the lack of it
-
in recent years. The only way in which the work of society can be
accomplished, apparently, is to create an added and artificial
sense of insecurity, to add to the substantial insecurities that
are irremediable. In order to get the necessary 'performance',
'productivity', a profitable intensity of labour out of the
workforce, it is now thought effective to make them wonder
whether, when they turn up for work each morning, they may not
find themselves surplus to requirements, redundant, their desk
cleared and their name mysteriously effaced from the office door.
These gratuitous insecurities have nothing to do with
efficiency; on the contrary, the levels of stress, disorder and
breakdown in individuals furnish ample evidence that the opposite
is true. It is for purely ideological reasons, many of them
historical, a retaliation against a once-refractory and still
potentially untrustworthy workforce.
Of course, 'national security' is the ultimate
rationalisation for further turns of the screw on the insecurity
of people. It is not merely that the heaping up of destructive
weaponry is calculated to strike terror into a potential enemy,
but this contributes directly to the unquiet, troubled sense of
safety of the citizens thus theoretically made secure.
This happens in at least two ways: one is, that the
resources diverted to the manufacture of armaments takes
resources away from those kind of economic activities which might
contribute a little more to the security of the people, in the
sense of an assured income below which no one would be allowed to
fall, for instance. Secondly, the threat to the potential
'aggressor' by the accumulation of the instruments of destruction
creates familiar retaliatory and destabilising responses - the
spiral that produced the Cold War.
Security is at best a fragile, temporary and menaced moment
of peace in which people can bring up their children, feel
confident that if they are sick, when they are old, if they are
unemployed, they will not become destitute. The only guarantee of
even the most modest and frail shelter against the insecurity of
being human comes from one another; from the kind of solidarities
and collective defences of humanity against the necessary and
certain ravages of age, time and misfortune.
A street in Bombay. It is close to midnight. On the dusty
pavement three ragged children are sleeping: a girl of about
nine, a boy perhaps a year younger, and a child of three. The two
older children are facing each other, their knees raised, their
heads touching, so that their bodies form a closed space, in
which the youngest sleeps, utterly secure in the protective
chamber formed by their defenceless bodies. - Third World Network
Features
-ends-
About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance
journalist based in London.
When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network
Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency
involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us
cuttings.
For more information, please contact:
Third World Network
228, Macalister Road, 10400 Penang, Malaysia.
Email: twn@igc.apc.org; twnpen@twn.po.my
Tel: (+604)2293511,2293612 & 2293713;
Fax: (+604)2298106 & 2264505
1502/96
