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" To: ftp@etext.org, twn@igc.apc.org Subject: Heartbeat #6 ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ #6 ^^^^^^^^^^^^ http://www.izad.com/cultureclash ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ EARTBEAT \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ ^^ ^^ __________________________________________\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ cclash@web.net {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} FREE WEEKLY EMAIL }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ ADVERTISE HERE! FOR INFORMATION EMAIL CCLASH@WEB.NET 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. 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