A Practical Policy

For Preventing the Children and Youth of Palestine and the World from being a Burden to Their Parents and Lands, and for Making Them Beneficial to Empire

Preface: I wrote this satire against American Empire nearly a quarter century ago in response to the American sanctions and invasion of Iraq, and as an update of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) — with the focus primarily on America and Iraq rather than England and Ireland. Some of the form and text of Swift’s piece has been incorporated. This revised text is basically unchanged in focus except in specifying mainly Palestine, as today the satire applies most obviously to the ongoing American and Israeli primetime genocide of Palestinians, extending in recent days in a massive way into Lebanon by brutal bombing invasion.

America supplies countless funds and weapons to Israel to carry out the genocidal bombings and terror attacks in this war of annihilation. America could have stopped the slaughter at any point by not participating in it, enabling it, and de facto authorizing it. This is blatant and sheer Evil — war the ultimate crime of aggression — as with basically every American onslaught, invasion, and terror strike in the past 75 years. Meanwhile, American economic, social, and political sanctions hurt, harm, and kill the most vulnerable in many lands and are even more routine and pervasive than exploding ammunition — but with the similar personally lethal and socially pulverizing effects. “Sanctions” is such a soft-sounding word, whereas the intent and results are that of a militant blow — hideous expressions of Evil, demonic in intent and outcome, while passed off as principled deprivations and rules.

The American War Empire is fully engaged in a mass spree of murderous and profiteering material conquest, brutalizing and blowing up entire lands and peoples, not least their children and youth. These deranged genocidal offensives are the endlessly bloody and diabolical acts of pillaging for profit and power driven by the longstanding policy of American Empire — to monopolize money and land and violence that brings no security to anyone anywhere but pumps riches into the pockets of gun lovers and war mongers, high finance, the corporate-state, and plutocrats and oligarchs of Empire. The Satanic policies continue today as from the start of the American and European empires — which crush democracy everywhere in favor of the form of plutocracy known as capitalism.

For “Palestine” and “Palestinians” in this satiric account of the viciousness and depravity of Empire, one can readily substitute the names of many other attacked peoples of color in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia who have borne near constant military and economic assault by white Empire for many decades now. America is the biggest and most destructive Empire the planet can suffer before total implosion. The Empire threatens to kill everything by final war or climate collapse and ecocide — the result of a profiteering plutocracy against democracy that uses the (literally) infinite dollars of the one tenth of The One Percent, weaponized against the People by the doomsday machines and doomsday politics of Imperial economics, culture, and war.

Nearly two decades past, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimated 655,000 Iraqi deaths caused by the first three years of the American invasion of Iraq. Currently, The Lancet estimates that the death count of Palestinians follows a similar trajectory. Palestinian parents trapped in a land blown apart by American Empire often find themselves unable to keep their families and their children alive or to provide for the basic needs of youth — nutritional, educational, medicinal, limbnal. Trying to keep the heads and limbs of their sons and daughters from being exploded by the maniacal rampage of American Empire is often not possible, such is the carnage of the American and Israeli genocide against Palestinians.

The respectable halls of Empire crawl with weaponized officials who order and allow the insane and infernal butchery. All the while they are garbed in eerie and menacing corporate-state decorum, rationale, and dress. Perfectly fitting that the establishment’s de rigueur male centerpiece of uniform is the necktie, which originated with European mercenaries and was then copied by Louis the Great, the “Sun King” of France who ruled in the “Age of Absolutism” and whose “legacy is widely characterized by French colonial expansion, the conclusion of Eighty Years' War and the expansion of the French Colonial Empire.” This is the telling heritage. The full corporate-state uniform, the suit, likewise derives from the Imperial Sun King and his contemporary autocrat King Charles II of England who in 1666 “decreed that in the English court men would wear” a suit “per the example of King Louis XIV's court at Versailles.” And so in sartorial splendor, Empire rules and administers today — every official of the realm presenting as mini Kings and Queens of conquest, by Royal design.

Whether you think you are safe or not, complicit or not in your Imperial home, these officials in the regular exercise of Empire demand your vote, your brain, your money, your labor, your obedience, and often your own blood and life. These are the blood-drenched masters of Empire who find ever more odious, devious, and scandalous ways to kill democracy and human rights while advancing capitalist plutocracy and Empire.

America is an Empire based on its genocidal founding against the indigenous, and its kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. Current forms of subjugation are poverty, imprisonment (and incarcerated enslavement), police state violence, and much else. Two and a half centuries on from the founding of the American Empire, the conquest continues, having originated several centuries prior as the pillaging and colonizing of the world by the equally savage European empires. Massively more powerful today, the American Empire leads the lesser European empires toward what may be the final destruction of plants and animals, women and children, and peoples of color first. People rising need to stop and reverse the terminal policies, acts, and onslaughts of Empire before the terminal aggression and profiteering obliterates itself and everything else.

I write about decisive, common-sense, and revolutionary ways forward domestically and internationally in my serialized novel Most Revolutionary — ways in which many people of conscience are engaged or might be. I spell things out anew in the long second half of the most recent Chapter Nineteen where a genuinely practical program for sweeping change is proposed and planned for implementation, if only the People can rise — and be helped to rise — in support of the powerful new actions of a desperately needed revolution.

Most Revolutionary is a partisan literary thriller novel originally designed for a visual, as well as serial, medium, in its aesthetic dramatization of personal and social, cultural and political transformation and revelation. Meanwhile, “A Practical Policy” satires (“satirizes” seems too klutz a word) the economic and military war machine of Empire in Western Asia and beyond. Given the visuals and Hellscape reality of blasted Palestine and now Lebanon omnipresent in social media (the People’s media), the apocalyptic eradication of Palestine and the extermination of Palestinians may seem too horrific to render as any thing of art.

But Imperial bloodbaths are too horrific not to condemn in any form possible. Aesthetic experience, art of an imperfect human revolution, and art of the ghastly nature and fatal ends of Empire can help catalyze great change, on the one hand, and crystalize on the other hand the profound depths of bigotry and inhumanity, fraud and terror, death and torture, bludgeoning and bone-melting insanity perpetrated daily by the plutocracy that is Empire.

The immiserating and shattering depredations of Empire at home are like the gruesome depredations of empire abroad in the sense that both should be easy to understand as criminal, official crime, infinitely wrong and wicked, despicable and terrifying. Partisan liberatory art, among its other powers and duties, must engage in the present and emblazon it for all time in ways that impel and compel a far better world.

Aesthetic normative expression — art — gives meaning to experience that can make life more knowable and practicable, able to be grappled, navigated, and changed. Whether this makes art a weapon, a companion, or a challenging and instructive experience, a guide or an inspiration for action, tyrants and tyrannies throughout history have attacked and suppressed partisan creators and their liberatory art in the attempt to crush revolutions of all kinds and to further brute Empire. No less today than before.

Art can also be made that is mentally gutting, brainwashing, and diversionary — the zombie art of Empire, and it is everywhere, for a reason. It eats brains, devours the planet, and grows richer by the minute.

When Empire conquers and controls peoples’ art, especially the art of revolution, it sabotages prospects for life in ways that may be difficult to realize. Both the administrators and shock troops of Empire seem to know exactly how to fight revolutionary art, ideas, and acts, whether or not they really understand or care what it means to be a force for tyrannical conquest and control versus that of humanity and revolution.

The leadership of a grisly Empire portrayed as ethical requires a remarkable amount of con art and a deep bench of con artists, the better to create more con artistry and to inculcate true believers. Mostly though not entirely gone are the ranting pop-eyed speeches of tyrants and marauders of past horrors. The Imperial Con Don Trump from the Empire State of New York is a nightclub act by comparison, willing to sling piss on everything and then deny or laugh it off, then double-down to give the battered, bigoted, and brainwashed spectators a tizzy of attention, a circus of hate and insults against the despised others for their time and vote.

Con Don Trump uses every ancient story technique beginning with recognitions and reversals to affirm and distract, thrill and enthrall, to build support for the All-American fraud — Con Don, the country’s meanest clown, debauched Fun King, and most toxic villain. The leaders and practitioners of Empire style their particular form of con art to match their personalities and circumstances. Racist, rich, thug buffoon being but one option.

Most executors and executers of Empire devise or actualize the Practical Policies of Empire with a casual yet professional nonchalance of vengeance and aggression, as befits the well-rehearsed bureaucracy of a vile and gory age. Then they call it a day, and repeat the next. The “banality of Evil” is all based on a con and on immense violence. Both the American police state and military state are enormous. The perpetual long con normalizes violence and the con itself so that the raving and ravaging deranged displaces the sane as familiar and commonplace, necessary and good.

In America, the commander of Empire says vote for me once every 1,461 days to continue to foster Empire — as will happen again and again until the end, unless people do some mighty thing about it, what should have been done a very long time ago. There’s no time left in Palestine, and in the other graveyards of profit that eviscerate and decorate Empire. If there are words and combinations of words that can be found to attack this monstrous madness, we need find them and use them to the greatest effect possible.

A PRACTICAL POLICY

For Preventing the Children and Youth of Palestine and the World from being a Burden to Their Parents and Lands, and for Making Them Beneficial to Empire

It is a melancholy object to observe the plight of children in the ancient land of Palestine during this dynamic era of American led economic sanctions and invasions. By now, it can only be agreed by all sane observers that the grotesque mortality rate and mass suffering of Palestinian children and youth cannot be considered worth even the most high-minded motives behind invasion and occupation; and, therefore whatever might be discovered to be a just, affordable, and compassionate solution to this dreadful situation should be implemented immediately — a Practical Policy for the betterment of Palestinian children and youth everywhere.  

It seems only fair that any such policy benefit not only the children of Palestine, Lebanon and other attacked lands but also those whose power and authority is needed to enact the solution — America and its fans, the global elite, the plutocracy, the leaders of nation-states, executives of transnational corporations, bankers and privileged investors in whose care rests the prosperity of civilization and the teeming military supplies of Empire.

Along with helping beleaguered children — which is of course my greatest concern — it is my dearest hope that a viable policy will solve many such problems bedeviling the American Empire, not only in Western Asia. Although the suffering of Palestinian children today is truly awesome, the general degradation of youth is not completely novel anywhere. Thus my Practical Policy is designed for successful application to anguished peoples everywhere, including those who suffer from the unpredictable acts of God, in this volatile epoch of climate collapse, war, sanctions, and social unrest.

One great advantage of my timely invention is that while improving the plight of imperiled children and their parents, the Practical Policy simultaneously creates checks on the belligerence of any people who would dare to fight Empire. Under my philanthropic proposal, disciplinary bombings and sanctions may be maintained against any rebellious land for as long as deemed necessary by those who call the shots. Thus my highly Practical Policy need not disrupt time-tested means of regal containment and intervention. On the contrary, the Practical Policy will supplement and enhance these long-standing prerogatives of power. After all, as far as America is concerned, in the words of one of its magisterial leaders, George Bush the First, and echoed by every Imperial President: “What we say goes.”  

After many years of earnest and devout work as an American foreign policy advisor, after serving on countless transnational corporate boards and investment councils, and after unusually intense introspection, I have at last arrived at a solution that I trust will be found in respectable circles to be quite laudable, if not altogether surprising. So let me judiciously advance “A Practical Policy,” which I expect will not be liable to the least objection, for easing the troubled situation of children in Palestine and Lebanon and beyond.

It is my well-reasoned suggestion that there be implemented a carefully regulated expansion of commercial trafficking in children worldwide — that is, the compassionate cannibalism of children and youth — closely monitored to ensure the dignity of all.

The time has long since come to officially support and expand the body parts trade, with its great potential of many corporate byproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore unimagined. I have recently been advised by virtually every corporate and financial executive I’ve encountered throughout the American Empire that children of impoverished nations principally, though not solely, are to be understood in explicit terms as the next great global growth industry — children as a prolific cash crop.  

Palestinian children and countless other youths of the world, having little to no use or prospect, would be harvested for their own sake, and be mercifully removed from hopeless predicaments of hunger, disease, danger. In many cases, the children might be sold abroad, their cut-rate labor placed in service of others in more profitable situations. Or the children might simply be released from their degraded, agonized state of being — that is, they would be terminated, offered as providence for those fortunate enough to live in more bountiful circumstances.  

Regrettably, in Palestine nowadays medicines and food are so expensive, scarce, or non-existent that Palestinian children and youth might best be sold, traded, and shipped abroad at the first onset of illness or thirst or hunger, or even at birth, given their likely grim future. Alternatively, for any children who survive well into their spirited youth, these spunky, gutsy, heroic, valiant, and courageous young creatures should be allowed every opportunity to market themselves piecemeal or in whole, for sale and distribution at home or overseas.  

It only makes smart business sense that Palestinian children — and their unfortunate like — be bought and sold under international regulation — as opposed to the chaotic, unauthorized, and inefficient current illicit manner — perhaps as defined and invoked by a new round of global trade agreements, or by some minor modification of the preeminent institutions for global economic development, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. By auctioning off their children, the peoples of hopeless poverty and smashed lands — and, indeed, the poor in the aggrieved areas of any nation — may raise much badly needed capital for paying off debts to creditors of every type, American banks above all.  

As one might expect, the nature of the vending process for Palestinian youths and others at risk would be multifaceted. Mature children might market themselves via body part sales — a kidney here, a lung there. I am informed by numerous industry specialists that discreet patches and strips of tender young skin can be Swiftly peeled off and sold as raw material for the manufacture of leather car seats or even for exceptionally fine wallets and unique handbags.

I think it a creditable thing that today’s global youth be as thrifty and imaginative with their brains and bodies as possible so that in this way they might begin to pay for food, medicine, water, or school — at least where there remains some small chance of learning, where all the universities are not blown up, as in Gaza. However, no one should presume to get in the way of perceptive and responsible children who wish to contribute all their flesh and blood at once, in dignified and selfless commercial gesture, to benefit their families and the Gross National Product of whatever land they might wish to call home.  

Who knows, such resourcefulness may crop up as laudable fashion among even more fortunate youth of Empire who not infrequently copy the styles and trends of their less prosperous peers in speech, dress, body art, and other forms of personal expression, whether fun, indolent, or rebellious. Semi-affluent children too might wish to re-envision themselves as dismembered and edible raw material for the benefit of their families, and communities, corporate commerce and high finance. 

Why not give youth of every economic stripe the chance to pursue legally a broader, more lucrative array of fiscal opportunity in the well-regulated sale of their skin and flesh, bones and non-vital organs? How many organs are truly vital, in the end? Sometimes it’s best to let children decide their own fates within the rigorous constraints of Empire.

Since so many youth are already engaged, where economic conditions allow, in the practice of renting their bodies and lives to sundry employers for pittance wages in a wide variety of lawful and unlawful manners, conscientious adults would do well to encourage these children to take legally the next logical step, most compelling, to further integrate themselves into the market by selling their bones and blood for high-end soups or sculptures, decorations and cheerful amenities. What color is more cheery and uplifting than blood-red? The human body has 206 bones. There is not a single impoverished, jeopardized youth in the world who needs them all. Infants have 270 bones before some fuse together. Savvy and thrifty fathers and mothers could make big bank by their smart and humane application of parental love in these trying times. Bones, flesh, and blood — as well as brains — make for great solicitation materials and opportunities for immediate consumption.

Indeed, doting parents might wish to trade abroad any number of infants, or infant parts, to help support the household. There is no need to risk their tots being wasted beneath 2,000 pound bombs — blown to useless bits while sleeping or playing. Foolish parents who pray that their children die of illness due to sanctions on supplies, rather than be vaporized or pulped in bomb strikes, are gambling on having the remains of a mortal body to market. Gambling should be left to the experts of Empire who bet with the House and always win.

The commercial possibilities and personal recompense of this Practical Policy for Palestinian children and their parents alike seem virtually infinite — never mind the boost such inspired activity would give to any stricken land’s Gross Domestic Product. How better to tie more tightly local economies into the hungry maw of Empire?

The revenue raised by exporting children from youth-rich regions might be recycled into the coffers of Empire additionally by being expended on large quantities of quality imports such as cigarettes, alcohol, soda, even old weapons, and other fine products that wealthy nations like America produce in great abundance for the betterment of humankind everywhere.

And so it is that there can be no more wholesome or Practical Policy than compassionate cannibalism for the children and youth of Palestine — a policy that gives new meaning to “arms sales” with results that grease the golden gears of Empire, truly as ever before.

I suspect there may be some naysayers who doubt the possible financial benefits of internationally regulated traffic and consumption of children and youth, either retail or wholesale. These skeptics would do well to consider the sound advice and impressive data I have gathered from a wide variety of world-renowned investment bankers, politicians, CEOs, media magnates, weapons manufacturers, military commanders, advertising experts, and many other respectable officials. This data indicates that simply by harvesting the mere non-vital organs of several moderately healthy young Palestinian infants and young children, a family of four may provide themselves with their minimal nutritional needs for several months — under favorable market conditions.

For those ultra-sensitive families who find the consumption of one’s own flesh and blood to be too stomach-turning to contemplate, no worries: sales of the organs and limbs of loved ones to stores and markets in neighboring towns or camps may be an even more admirable exercise of business acumen. Times being as lean as they are for the world’s majority — direct consumption of youth victuals is not as economically feasible as it was centuries ago during the infant-flesh-eating age of that altruistic and preeminent policy planner for English Empire, Jonathan Swift.   

I suppose that my sensible proposal, which I intend in all modesty, might at first sound too elevated in aim and optimistic in result.

I expect that some of the brightest students of world affairs may wonder if there is some prohibitive limiting factor I may have overlooked.

On the contrary. Much of what once seemed unthinkable in political and economic arenas throughout the world, due to stubborn lack of popular appeal, now has become far more widely accepted amid the glorious ravage of Empire.

The unfettered trafficking and cannibalism of children has become a booming trend, a simple necessity — a staple in tough times. Though in the past a boy or girl younger than twelve years old might be thought of as no easily saleable or disposable commodity, the modern reality is that largely due to IMF and World Bank-imposed austerity programs, along with the blooming sanctions and offensives of Empire, the global market is now wide open to child commerce, the wholesale dispersal of body parts and lives, by kindly abduction and dismemberment.

The history of Empire serves as guide. Right at the cusp of American intervention in its own hemisphere a few decades past, there were reports from all corners of Latin America about unregulated trafficking in children. The Catholic Church, national governments, human rights groups, and university-based intellectuals reported the increase of such unauthorized commerce. It seems that under certain economic and military conditions the kidnapping and organ transplant industries become surprisingly fluid. Exciting profits are to be made in direct correlation to conditions of life become ever more vexed and fleeting during Empire’s big-hearted and noble attempts to make Pax Americana permanent planet-wide.

For example, the transplant industry: with a tool as simple and affordable as a common teaspoon, a grieving parent, or plucky entrepreneur, can scoop out a dying child’s eyes and, by selling the corneas, realize a substantial profit in the markets of Empire. And all other organs and limbs slice right out and off a dying child’s body, with minimal additional difficulty, to readily sell as well.

With such exquisite enterprise, we feed the free market. Benevolent investment banks and corporate boards of the world know how to facilitate organ and limb harvests and shipments to match supply with demand. In this inspiring way, my Practical Policy fully assimilates youth and children of the remote and blasted lands of Earth into the vivacious markets of the American Empire.

The lesson to be learned by all — one that has long been understood in Washington D.C., on Wall Street, and in other centers of wealth — is that the children and youth of the world represent one of the most profitable parts of Empire. One wonders how nations — both the attacked and the attacking — will fund and fuel the endless wars of our time without making ever more productive use of the valuable commodity of youth.

The most demolished lands of the world offer the greatest prospect for military expenditure and child consumption both, a most fortuitous coupling. While perpetual war sustains the Imperial economy by fueling the sales of major weapons dealers — primarily American corporations and their financiers — how better to alleviate the demolition effect on society of weapons-rich conflict than by enacting the most honest and humane, moral and good, virtuous and principled, merciful and profitable policy measures that fully authorize the well-considered cannibalism of children and youth?

Of course America is uniquely positioned to continue profiting off weapons sales, since it is by far the leading arms maker and vendor, so bullets and bombs alone may be enough to bankroll the economy in lieu of tyke auctions and kiddie sales. Coincidentally, and conveniently, America keeps troops stationed in over 140 of the 190 or so countries in the world, in nearly one thousand military installations, the better to peddle and employ weapons everywhere. American corporations not only produce and sell more weaponry than any other nation, the ever-charitable American citizenry have more of their tax dollars taken to buy battle gear than any other people in the history of the world. Blessed is the United States of America for exalting its military expenditures to equal that of every other nation on Earth combined. A well-armed planet is a polite planet. We can see the God’s honest truth in the goodness of guns in the neighborly ways these killing machines are used in countless rural and urban war zones — and schoolyards — in America. Sure, people die en masse, but the extreme degree of politeness to be found amid all the blood and terror is truly mesmerizing.

For the most well-heeled and deep-pocketed, high-minded and empathetic citizens of planet Earth, let me hasten to add that my Practical Policy to legalize child trafficking and compassionate cannibalism would not only quicken the blood of global finance, it has the salutary effect in this lofty age of ecological concern of easing much environmental strain, resource depletion, refugee camp overcrowding, even climate collapse, especially in ravished lands, as well as in the urban slums and trashed rural areas of rich nations. An imploded economy and collapsed climate is no worry when first entirely depopulated. By profitably harvesting and consuming destitute children and youth, my Practical Policy promises to simultaneously cure pubescent despair while making life more pleasant and roomy for those far more gifted and able to live a full and rewarding life. An Imperial win-win!

Many more such advantages of enlightened international child trafficking and compassionate cannibalism might be enumerated in this newly explosive age of Empire with its cutting-edge humanitarian 2,000 pound bombs and ceaseless celebrations of snipers and all things mortiferous and Halloween, but in the interest of concision, and with all due modesty, I will leave any fancy, special, and speculative details to the keen and charitable imaginations of others.

One caution, to all the conscientious consumers of culture in Empire — do not ever consult the elders of the indigenous anywhere about anything. I mean, what do they know about the vagaries of Empire — its duties and trials, its sublime policies and projects, its searing economic and military needs? Nothing at all. They predate all that. And in any case, they have mostly not survived. At least, I certainly don’t know any one of the rumored individuals of the mythical indigenous.

And so it is that I can think of no sensible objection that might be raised to my Practical Policy of compassionate cannibalism, unless there is fear that increased trafficking and consumption of children and youth might lead to too-rapid global depopulation of vital consumers for the market to bear.

This concern however can be readily dismissed, given the limited cash flow of impoverished youth. For the vast majority of children and youth, their hides alone are worth far more than their wallets and purses will ever be. I personally guarantee it. Best then to officially carve a way for our desperate youth to enter straightaway into the global economy of Empire — with most profits going to banks and other financial vehicles that can appreciate and deftly transact the goods. As there is no lack of history for Imperial analogies of such sophisticated social and economic policy and operations, I am hard pressed to envision serious objections.  

Let no one speak of nefarious and impossible solutions for vastly reducing child and youth mortality and misery in Palestine or anywhere like it, such as foregoing sanctions and invasions, occupations and bombings against a disobedient people. There’s no moral, practical, nor civilized way to stop the showering of 2,000 pound bombs on their razed cities and countryside, on their family houses and orchards, hospitals and schools blown to smithereens. These things happen in Empire. Fiends? Barbarians? Devils? Seriously — who would the anti-interventionists take us authorities and modulators of Empire to be? Our work of Empire is sacred and we shall not contaminate it. Our orders derive from the Whitest of Houses. Our Church is the Pentagon. We owe our lives to Empire, to all its martial and monetary Laws and Commandments. Anyone who opposes us is sick, indeed.

Let no one speak of a free and secure independent state for the Palestinians, as everyone in the world except the Americans and the Israelis demand.

Let no one speak of enforcing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, though both agreements have been signed and adopted into international law by every nation — however grudgingly, conditionally, and belatedly by America, we may note with no small pride.

Let no one speak of protecting and building local economies at the expense of the corporate and military will of Empire, or allowing subsidies and services for the public to address basic needs of any kind — least of all food, education, housing, sanitation, clean water, clean air, vital medicines, vaccines and other commodities whose domain rightfully and naturally belongs to the private and lucrative aspirations of Empire.

And precisely because so many rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, rioters, secessionists, separatists, agitators, anarchists, antagonists, apostates, demagogues, deserters, heretics, iconoclasts, malcontents, mutineers, nihilists, nonconformists, renegades, revolutionaries, subverters, seditionists, traitors, turncoats, and other enemies and opponents of Empire in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and beyond refuse to bend the knee and pay homage to the illustrious Euro-American order of things, let no one consider for a treasonous moment using any fraction of the behemoth military budget of Empire to improve standards of health and conditions of life anywhere for anyone on Earth, ever.

And let no one mention — as they hardly do anyway, in responsible, respectable society — any public solution at all for improving the welfare of children in Palestine or anywhere in the world until there is some significant hope that there might be a hearty and sincere attempt to put it into practice.   

Fortunately, we will never see that day, there can be no doubt, because the illusions, phantasms, figments, ghosts and specters, the fantasies of public solutions of peace and prosperity, humanity and security run counter to natural economic, political, and human law as divined by the IMF, the World Bank, Washington D.C., Wall Street, capitalists around the globe, as well as the corporate charters of Empire — the private sector and high finance, which rightly rule. Any contrarian utopian schemes of public well-being are correctly dismissed as the pipedreams of children, lies against Empire, and hallucinations most foul.  

I must say, however, that I am not so forcefully attached to my own ideas that I am utterly opposed to any profitable, therefore practical, method to mitigate and remediate, allay and assuage, mollify and pacify, to ease the sorry state of the world’s children and youth, especially a program that might prove to be as effective, enlightened and excellent as the policy offered herein.   

However I challenge even the most well-intentioned human rights groups to top my plan for solving what heretofore has been viewed as a financially and morally intractable problem — What of Palestine and Palestinians? — a problem customarily solved by simple genocide — their removal from the face of the Earth through standard flesh and blood obliteration in the bombs of Empire.

It is my eternal argument that with only a slight though powerful and gainful shift in perspective, the unyielding wretchedness of the Palestinian people, their children and youth not least, can be best attended to in terms of market and profit rather than annihilation and damnation — though any unforeseeable eventual market failure would of course necessitate an unavoidable liquidation.

My Practical Policy is the most modern way forward for Palestinians everywhere, the sanctioned and the invaded, the occupied and the bombed, no matter the claims of human rights groups and health professionals, given their notoriously biased, ill-informed, and politicized judgment. What is needed above all is a paradigm shift of breathtaking intellectual and moral scope — legalized child trafficking and consumption — a duly considered and considerate cannibalism. I offer this no-nonsense ethical and profitable solution as a fitting and magnificent testimony to many similar Practical Policies of Empire today, tomorrow, and yesterday.

As we all know, the children are our future. They are not the future, they are not a future, they are not even their future. They are ours. As such, our children constitute a great resource, ripe for the plucking. Though at first there may be, I suppose, some misguided half-baked youth-led resistance to this ennobling policy of consumption, I have no doubt that continued education, media persuasion, corporate and governmental public relations, proper religious meditation, and other such efforts of conventional mental cleansing will readily persuade youths to make themselves everywhere more willing and alive to the moment, more open to the hypnotic final grip of the almighty power and glory of our fervently capitalized economy and militarized society.

As the gap between the magnanimous haves and the wretched have-nothings grows increasingly wide, I challenge anyone to come up with a better and more Practical Policy than my own urgent proposal for cannibalizing and trafficking children. Only in this way might Empire eradicate the widespread misery that creates the vast inequality in the conditions of life. How dare the children and youth of our day allow such inequality to exist? Where still alive, they are obligated to prosper, and failing that to throw their whole bodies into the market to remove themselves from the inequality equation by any self-consumptive means necessary.

I declare from the utter and bottommost depths of my heart that my intention here — regarding the plight of the multitudes of afflicted children and youth who are irredeemably suffering and perishing in Palestine and Lebanon and around the world — even in the blighted boulevards and byways of America — is strictly a professional concern, which happens to contain my best, most remunerative, ideas for improving the world. Despite being a long-time consultant to leading monetized sectors of the American Empire, I seek no personal financial gain. This proposal represents not the least bit a pecuniary interest of my own, since it has been my good fortune to have found great wealth already in and around Wall Street and Washington D.C. over the course of a fine few years. No direct profit would accrue to my family, either, since my own children have long since grown well beyond the age of consumption and trade, dismemberment and cannibalism. I can act only to present and preserve these praiseworthy and self-effacing culinary options for the other children and youth of Empire.

Though I myself and my family have nothing to gain personally, given my advanced years and overflowing bank accounts, it is my firm hope, faith, and conviction in all that is true and holy that this Practical Policy might be best known for what it is — the beating and profitable heart of one of the great documents of our time that illuminates the American way and the very soul of life in Empire.

It is my great wish and desire that this document be read and discussed and enacted everywhere that hearts may be stirred to do so — as in Palestine among the Palestinians who are certain to gain much by it. Perhaps they might even invite me to speak on their behalf. I would be willing to wander into one of their splendid refugee camps arm-in-arm with the superb President of the United States of America where I am sure we would be met with dying love and affection. Perhaps they would show the President and me into one of the ornate and tremendous bomb craters carved into the belly of their camp and give us a tour that we would never forget — a moment in time to linger with us forever.

Ah! You see, Kind Reader, like an almost priceless child, I too am susceptible to sweet daydreams. At least it is my hope that this Practical Policy for the compassionate cannibalism of our Palestinian children and youth be known as one of the most remedial and constructive, distinguished and prodigious, transcendent and era-defining White Papers that the history of Empire has ever produced. I view this taut treatise, though composed in brief, as a kind of great novel of Empire — for our time and for all time.

Who would begrudge me any acclaimed literary or political reward in my esteemed and senior years, for the further luster and resplendence of Empire?

My ardent wish is that the good peoples of the world circulate this Practical Policy wherever it will do the most good. I daresay it would be irresponsible not to. There’s nothing like being on the Right side of history.

Palestinian parents and teachers, not least, should read this Practical Policy to their children beginning in the first several weeks of infant daycare, or at the latest during the first days of school — where they have schools anymore — at about the age of four or five, not later, so that the kids might become responsible for understanding their role in Empire, and grow hopeful for the future, and know and respect the Empire that endures them. God willing, so be it, Amen.

On behalf of the many officials and executives who have toiled for years in the creation and guidance of fiscal policy at home and abroad — and most of all on behalf of the great capitalist system of Empire itself — I advance this judicious, profitable, and Practical Policy wholly in good faith and sound reason.

I advance this Practical Policy primarily for the children and youth who suffer and only secondarily for the greater power and glory of Empire, happy corollary. The melancholy and weak peoples of the world need to learn that their salvation lies through consumption, the righteous way — let none call it wrath — of the world’s greatest superpower, the police state of police states, the weapons maker of weapons makers, the fortress of fortresses, the mightiest purveyor of persuasion and bombs the world has ever known.

There can be no alternative to the fundamental, universal, and natural laws of Empire, which demand that we give up the finest parts of ourselves each and every day — our children and youth not least — for the market to function at its well-oiled best.

Owing to the anticipated great reception and inarguable success of my Practical Policy for trafficking and cannibalizing Palestinian children and youth, I’ve already begun to plot several sequel Policies for the betterment of Empire and the planet:

1. The removal of the tongues of all college students — protestors first.

2. The conversion of all schools into factories — primarily for making bombs.

3. Mandatory heart transplants for all parents — enough with the coddling.

4. A permanent ban on all minorities from social media — speaks for itself.

5. Death by hanging for every critic of Empire — during church services.

6. The abolition of money for workers — like in the good old days in the South.

7. Lobotomies for all officials of Empire — to ensure their intelligence.

By these modest measures, Empire might be made more of what it already is and be otherwise improved.

A Practical Policy for the compassionate cannibalism of Palestinian children and youth seems the obvious place to start, given the current insult to authority posed by the continued existence of Palestine.

Such Practical Policies must be understood as the moral obligation of responsible citizens of Empire, and as the acts of a supreme civilization that uplift the least among us to new if unforgiving heights of consumption and profit.

Children may be wholly digested into this marvelous system of power as much as any surviving adult is conditioned to embrace the Empire and the Policies that make it great — fabulous Policies rapidly driving our dear planet Earth to its ultimate manifest destiny.

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Notes — on the original Iraq-based version of this satire of Empire:

The Lancet study “estimated 654,965 excess [Iraqi] deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006. The new study applied similar methods and involved surveys between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths.” –Wikipedia

“As Unicef has reported, Iraq in 1990 had one of the healthiest and best-educated populations in the world; its child mortality rate was one of the lowest. Today, it is among the highest on earth.” –John Pilger; Iraq Under Siege; 61.

“The average monthly salary of a doctor, which used to be about $1,000 (£670), is now between $3 and $5… ‘What we are seeing is the disintegration of a society,’ said Rao Singh, a UN official. ‘Iraq had invested heavily in social and health care and in 1989, before the war, 90 per cent of the people had access to clean water and 95 per cent had access to good health care. Iraq was in transition to reaching First World standards. The rate of child mortality was one of the best in the world. There has been a fourfold increase, and it is now one of the worst. In 1990, an Iraqi child with dysentery had one chance in 600 of dying, now it is one in 50’.” –Kim Sengupta “The Pariah’s Den,” Common Dreams

“The only computers officially allowed by the sanctions committee in New York are at least 10 years old. Anything newer, it is declared, will help ‘Saddam’s war machine’. Of course, like everything else, modern computers are available in Baghdad. But they are smuggled in and affordable only to the rich. ‘In the poor schools we have got a shortage of everything, even pencils. They do not want us to have pencils because they say the military can use the lead. Can you believe it?’ Mr. Al Sharifi shakes his head…. A range of drugs, from vaccinations to pain killers and even cleansing agents such as chlorine, are banned because they can be used for ‘dual purpose’. … At the Children’s Hospital, Dr Mohammed Firas lists the drugs he needs but cannot have. ‘I have not seen any improvements in supplies, none at all,’ he says. ‘It is upsetting when you see little boys and girls die in front of you and there is nothing you can do’… A half-million Iraqi children have contracted cancer since Saddam launched his disastrous invasion of Kuwait 10 years ago. In the war that followed in January 1991, the West used weapons coated with depleted uranium, which, it is claimed, contributed to the massive rise in cancer. After the war, sanctions imposed by the UN have blocked essential supplies of medicine and equipment that could have saved many…. George Robertson, when he was Defence Secretary, repeatedly declared that Saddam has $275m worth of medicine stockpiled in his warehouses that he refuses to distribute… I could not find anyone in Unicef, the World Health Organization, or the relevant charities who would endorse these figures. Hans von Spaneck, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said the amount held in stock was about 12 per cent. Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef’s senior representative in Iraq, said inspections show the figure to be between 10 and 15 per cent – the standard minimum that should be held for emergencies. Even Scott Ritter, the UN arms inspector the Iraqis kicked out claiming he was a spy, told me in London that there was no evidence of medicine being stockpiled by the regime. ‘The sanctions’, he said, ‘are pointless and self-defeating. They are not hurting Saddam, they are hurting the people of Iraq’.” –Kim Sengupta, “The Pariah’s Den,”

“US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked on national television in 1996 what she thought about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. She agreed that this was ‘a very hard choice,’ but she said that ‘we think the price is worth it.’ So, that’s the way in which we deal with Iraqi human rights violations, by killing 500,000 Iraqi children. ‘We’re’ willing to pay that price. That’s nice to hear.” –Noam Chomsky, Iraq Under Siege

“Since World War II, American military actions, in one form or another, have caused more death and destruction around the world than the actions of any other country. Some of these interventions have been conducted overtly, with large scale deployment of U.S. troops and air power. Still others have involved proxy armies armed, trained, funded directed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency” and intelligence gathering agencies and military institutions in the U.S. “Almost all of these slaughters have been directed at people of color, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central America. These are the unseen and unheard victims of the relentless drive by the United States’ corporate and military” and political “elite for global economic domination…” –David McGowan; Derailing Democracy

In Ancient Greek mythology Pluto (‘wealth’) is the god of the underworld, the abode of the dead. Originally named Hades (‘unseen’), he became known as Pluto because people feared the word Hades, and because crops and precious metals come from below ground. Pluto is of course the root of ‘plutocracy’—rule by the rich. Hades is synonymous with ‘hell’. Side-by-side, Hades and Pluto at their roots may be interpreted as ‘unseen wealth,’ an apt description of CEOs and their corporate boards that dominate the economy and polity.

“The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy to the control of a corporate plutocracy… Each time the cycle of corporate plutocracy has lengthened, injustices and shortcomings proliferate… Harnessing political power to corporate greed leaves us with a country that has far more problems than it deserves, while blocking ready solutions or improvements from being applied.” –Ralph Nader

“More than 50 percent of the people in the world’s 46 poorest countries are without access to modern health care… Approximately three billion people in developing countries do not have access to sanitation facilities…. Of the 10 million deaths among children under five in 1997, 97 percent occurred in developing countries and the majority could have been prevented. While the infant mortality in the world has declined steadily in the last 50 years, there is a 16-fold difference between the present rate in the 26 wealthiest countries and the rate found in 48 of the least developed countries.” –Joyce Millen et al., Dying for Growth

“Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or ‘disappeared,’ at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.” –Amnesty International, Rogue State, introductory quotation.

The following quotations are listed in David McGowan’s Derailing Democracy—The America the Media Doesn’t Want You to See: “From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. government sold, approved, or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on earth.” –The Mojo Wire. “The last five times U.S. troops were sent into conflict, they found themselves facing adversaries who had previously received U.S. weapons, military technology, or training.” “U.S. arms dealers currently sell $10 billion in weapons to non-democratic governments each year.” –Project Censored 1998. “In 1986 the United States accounted for 13 percent of worldwide arms exports, but today its share of the weapons market is an astounding 70 percent.” –British Medical Journal, October 14, 1995. “According to the Pentagon, the defense industry laid off 795,500 American workers between 1992 and 1997.” –The Mojo Wire

“State Department planner George Kennan set out the basic framework for understanding US foreign policy in the Middle East [and for that matter, in general] in 1948: ‘We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.’ New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put this same argument in more contemporary terms when he wrote in 1999: ‘McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas… And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’” –Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege; 11.

“In Third World morgues, shantytowns, prisons and hospitals, Berkeley anthropology professors Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Lawrence Cohen, investigate…the finding and selling of human body parts for transplantation. In many countries, laws fail to protect organ donors from exploitation… In India, for instance, Cohen discovered poor women forfeiting a kidney to pay back money they’d borrowed to feed their families… In Brazil, the government declares everyone a universal organ donor at birth, Scheper-Hughes added, and people in poverty are terrified of becoming fodder for the organ trade. ‘The exchanges tend to be poor-to-rich,’ said Scheper-Hughes. On the black market in India, added Cohen, an impoverished person’s kidney, destined for an affluent Indian, can fetch $1,000. ‘I call it neo-cannibalism,’ [a play on neo-liberalism, the dominant capitalist economic theory] said Scheper-Hughes, ‘the notion that we can eye each other greedily as a source of spare body parts.’ Organ trafficking has been denounced by all international medical and human rights groups, she said. Still, there is little surveillance over what is increasingly a black market where both doctors and the so-called ‘body mafia’ serve as organ brokers… ‘We are creating a type of apartheid medicine,’ Scheper-Hughes said. ‘I’m no longer neutral about these body practices that strike terror in poor people increasingly afraid of dying in the hospital.’ A few years ago, a conversation with an Indian man piqued Cohen’s interest in black market organ sales. ‘He talked about how he might sell his kidney to pay for his sister’s dowry,’ said Cohen. ‘To him, that dowry stood for all the obligations of economics, and his kidney stood for all the horrible possibilities of survival. Here you have a family that has to give away its kidneys to give away its daughters.’ Cohen and Scheper-Hughes joined forces when she asked him to fill her in on the organ trade in India. Cohen speaks lovingly about the ‘kidney belt’ villages in India where selling one’s body parts is a way of life. After seven years of working and living among the villagers, he has grown fond of and respects them. Crippling debt, he said, has villagers in India lined up to sell kidneys to underground brokers even though it’s against the law to provide a kidney to anyone but a relative. The villagers approach the brokers, usually after failing to repay a loan. When loan sharks demand repayment, villagers have no choice but to sell their own kidneys.” –Kathleen Scalise, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/magazine/summer_99

“Child slavery has long been documented in the traditional service areas. India alone is reported to have some 14 million child laborers, aged six and up, many working under conditions of virtual slavery for up to 16 hours a day. As always, this is a reflection of general social conditions… The deteriorating conditions result from the ‘frenzied export drive’ and accompanying ‘strategy of taxing the poor and pampering the rich,’ policies to be accelerated under the IMF-designed structural adjustment policies for which India in now widely praised.” –Noam Chomsky, Year 501

“Uruguayan journalist Samuel Blixen reports that in Guatemala City, the majority of the 5000 street children work as prostitutes…In Peru, children are sold to the highest bidder to pan for gold; according to a young campesina who escaped, they work 18 hours a day in water up to their knees and are paid with a daily ration sufficient to keep them alive. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, some 100,000 children from 4 to 14 work 10- to 12-hour shifts for low wages, many of them victims of sexual abuse…UNICEF reports that 69 million children in Latin America survive by menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution. A study released by the health ministers of the Central American countries in November 1991 estimated that 120,000 children under five die annually in Central America from malnutrition (one million are born annually), and that two-thirds of the survivors suffer from malnutrition.” –Noam Chomsky, Year 501

“Until recently,” Blixen writes, “the image of the abandoned Latin American child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today the image is of a body, lacerated and dumped in a city slum—those who survive that far. A leading Mexican journal reports a study by Victor Carlos García Moreno of the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), presented at a conference on “International Traffic in Children” in Mexico City. He found that about 20,000 children are sent illegally to the United States each year “for supplying illegal traffic in vital organs, for sexual exploitation, or for experimental tests.’ Mexico’s leading daily, Excelsior, reports that ‘Another element of abuses against minors [in Guatemala] is the existence of various illegal ‘crib houses’ responsible for the ‘fattening’ of newborns who are sent out of the country for their organs to be sold in the United States and Europe.’ A Professor of Theology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Father Barruel, informed the UN that ‘75 percent of the corpses [of murdered children] reveal internal mutilation and the majority have their eyes removed.’ The President of the Episcopal Council of Latin America, Archbishop Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, stated in July 1991 that the Church ‘is investigating all the charges concerning sale of children for illegal adoption or organ transplant….’ There have been numerous allegations about kidnapping of children for organ transplant in Latin America; whether true or not, the fact that they are taken seriously, from the press to academic researchers and government agencies, is indicative of the conditions of existence for children. And other superfluous creatures as well. The British Medical Journal reported an Argentine judicial investigation that led to the arrest of the director of a state-run mental hospital, doctors, businessmen and others, after ‘evidence of the trafficking of human organs’ was unearthed, among other crimes. AFP reported that ‘Argentines were aghast at the near-hallucinatory revelations of the horrors involving disappearances, trafficking in corneas, blood, babies, contraband and corruption’ for more than a decade at the hospital, and the discovery in Uruguay of a ‘gang of organ smugglers headed by Argentinians.’ ‘There is traffic in children and organs,’ the Argentine Minister of Health reported…. A novel idea was implemented in Colombia, where security guards of a medial school murdered poor people and sold the bodies to the school for student research; reports indicate that before they were killed, organs that could be sold on the black market were removed. These practices, however, scarcely make a dent in one of the worst human rights records in the continent, compiled by security forces that have long benefited from U.S. training and supply and have now become one of the hemisphere’s top recipients of U.S. military funding [the top recipient by year 2000 as atrocities escalate, the familiar pattern]. As elsewhere, the main targets for mutilation, torture, and murder are priests, union activists, political leaders and others who try to defend the poor, form cooperatives, or otherwise qualify as ‘subversives’ by interfering with the neoliberal economic model implemented under instructions from the U.S. and the World Bank.” –Noam Chomsky, Year 501

“In 1986 UNICEF estimated that 40,000 children were dying every day from malnutrition-related diseases. In 1993 the UN estimated that over 700 million people in the world are subject to famine, and that 2 billion or more are malnourished. And such conditions worsen steadily.” –Doug Dowd, Blues for America

“In his final speech as U.S. surgeon general, [the very conservative] C. Everett Koop stated: ‘It is the height of hypocrisy for the United States, in our war against drugs, to demand that foreign nations take steps to stop the export of cocaine to our country while at the same time we export nicotine, a drug just as addictive as cocaine, to the rest of the world.’ Peter Bourne, former president of the American Association for World Health, adds: ‘Despite our great concern about the effect of Colombian cocaine on young Americans, more Colombians die today from diseases caused by tobacco products exported to their country by American tobacco companies than do Americans from Colombian cocaine’… During the 1980s, with the aggressive use of Section 301 of the trade act and the threat of retaliatory trade sanctions, the U.S. trade representative forced countries in Latin America and Asia to open their markets to U.S. tobacco corporations… Based on current rates, tobacco will prematurely kill almost 10 percent of the world’s population. These grim prospects are due in large part to the spectacular U.S. infiltration of overseas markets.” –Joyce V. Millen and Timothy H. Holtz; Dying for Growth

“Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to corporate advertising and promotional schemes. Transnational soft drink companies are among the most aggressive advertisers in poor countries. In many of the world’s poorest countries they have succeeded in shifting young people’s tastes away from healthier, cheaper, indigenous juices that were enjoyed before the arrival of soft drink companies.” –Joyce V. Millen and Timothy H. Holtz; Dying for Growth

The U.S. supplies more conventional weapons to developing countries than do all other countries combined. “At least 85 percent of U.S. weapons sales go countries the U.S. State Department deems undemocratic or repressive, such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.” –Jennifer Washburn, 07-09-96; http://www.pacificnews.org

“The global trade in weapons affects the health of the poor in multiple ways. The most obvious impact is the use of arms to maim and kill. Since the Second World War, wars kill more civilians than soldiers; noncombatants, in fact, suffer 90 percent of the casualties of current conflicts. In the 150 conflicts fought since the end of World War II, more than 14 million civilians have been killed. These civilian casualties are not simply accidental… Globally, the nearly $1 trillion annually spent on arms in the 1980s was equivalent to the combined annual incomes of 2.6 billion people in the 44 poorest nations, one-half of the world’s population during this period. The denial of essential nutrition, housing, education, and health services to the poor must be considered in the context of the diversion of money to armaments.” –Joyce V. Millen and Timothy H. Holtz; Dying for Growth

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)—an Englishman, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland—wrote Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal” among other works of satire and advocacy for social justice. In “A Modest Proposal,” Swift suggests satirically that poor Irish parents sell the flesh of their children to the wealthy, for the benefit of family and country. Swift writes, “I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.” Swift devoted much of his writing to the struggle of the Irish people against the English hegemony.

“Some estimate that as many as 200 million children work worldwide as “bonded laborers” (a euphemism for slavery), factory and agricultural workers, domestic help, and sex workers. Many of these children are sold by their parents, while others are kidnapped from poor communities by slave dealers who sell them to manufacturers seeking cheap labor… Children are not only sought after as laborers because they are considered cheap or because they have small and nimble fingers. They are preferred by employers because they do not engage in labor disputes, they accept longer working hours, and they are easily subdued…” –Jim Yong Kim and Joyce V. Millen et al., Dying for Growth

“The last 25 years has contributed to the history of horrors of humanity a new form of exploitation of men by men: organ trafficking.” –prestigious Spanish transplant pioneer and former president of the Committee of Experts on Transplants of the Council of Europe, http://www.el-mundo.es; translated by José-Luis Vivas, who adds in summary of part of the above article: “According to Matesanz, organ trafficking has been surrounded by legends, but it is a reality. As an example he puts forward the TV documentary produced by the Spanish EL MUNDO TV, showing how organs can be bought in the city of Mexico. He compares organ trafficking to slavery and sexual exploitation. The rich may obtain from the poor what they need. He believes trafficking in kidneys is extensive and proved… Organ trafficking is a universal phenomenon, according to him, maybe with the exception of Europe. He mentions India, the Philippines, Thailand, East Europe and Latin America.” –email to author, 11/15/00.

The term “structural adjustment” often refers to privatization of industry and services and/or to cutbacks of social spending on education, health care, and food subsidies, etc., along with other conditions—harmful to the general population but profitable to the wealthy elite and foreign investors—which are routinely imposed by the lending requirements of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank upon less developed nations. Or “structural adjustments” may refer to so-called reforms made by any government against the mass of citizens, even in highly developed nations, such as the U.S.

“Trafficking in persons—the illegal and highly profitable transport and sale of human beings for the purpose of exploiting their labor—is a slavery-like practice… The number of persons trafficked each year is impossible to determine, but it is clearly a large-scale problem, with estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of victims worldwide. The State Department estimates that each year, 50,000-100,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States alone, approximately half of whom are trafficked into bonded sweatshop labor or domestic servitude. Trafficking is also a truly global phenomenon. The International Organization for Migration has reported on cases of trafficking in Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America, Central America, and North America.” –Regan Ralph; Human Rights Watch

“There are over 100 million street children worldwide…and the numbers of street children are increasing everywhere.” –oneworld.org

“Eleven years after the end of the Cold War, the US spends tens of billions of dollars maintaining 200,000 troops in Europe and Asia, where our strong, prosperous allies themselves have military budgets far larger than those of their prospective enemies.  Every year the U.S. spends over $70 billion, in up-front and back-up expenses, keeping U.S. troops in prosperous, friendly Western European and East Asian countries, and over $20 billion maintaining a needlessly large nuclear weapons arsenal.  For this amount of money, the U.S. could provide every student in a public university or community college with free tuition and meet the need of every working parent seeking child care for their children, with billions left over.” –Ralph Nader; http://www.votenader.org, 11/3/00.

“To define an evil in terms of a specific group [or person], where such an evil is not inherent in the group [or person] but capable of springing up anywhere, is to remove responsibility from ourselves…. Thus, for present purposes, it is enormously useful to show (as Hannah Arendt did) how genocide could result from the piling up of mundane bureaucratic decisions by ordinary men… To respond to an act already consummated, by punishing the specific ones who were guilty is to leave us free to act, unnoticed, in the same way, until the day of judgment—always one disaster behind.” –Howard Zinn; The Politics of History

Noted Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt reported for The New Yorker at a war crimes trial in 1961 following the recent capture of Otto Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s “first reaction to Eichmann—who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—was that he was ‘not even sinister.’ Arendt argues that ‘The deeds were monstrous, but the doer…was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.’ Arendt’s perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann’s ordinariness implied an incapacity for independent critical thought: ‘… the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.’ (emphasis added) …it was not only Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters. One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were monstrous. Behind such terrible normality of the bureaucratic mass, who was able to commit the greatest atrocities that the world has even seen, Arendt addressed the question of the banality of evil…[which] find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen, who has not reflected… Almost 10 years after Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reaffirms in Thinking and Moral Considerations this same dimension of evil: ‘…the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.’” –Bethania Assy, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

“The words of playwright Arthur Miller come to mind. ‘Few of us,’ he wrote, ‘can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.’” –John Pilger; Iraq Under Siege; 61.

“Well, the truth is” the United States “is Number One, but not the way the politicians and experts would have us think. America is, for example, Number One in billionaires—and we’re Number One in children living in poverty among the nineteen major industrial nations. We’re Number One in health care spending and we’re Number One in infant mortality. We’re Number One in belief in God and we’re Number One in murder… Reflecting trends that have roughly held steady, as of 1992, out of the 19 major industrialized countries, based on per capita figures, the United States was Number 15 in life expectancy though Number 1 in total health spending, Number 13 in public health spending and Number 1 in percentage of population without health insurance. Additionally, the United States was Number 1 in all of the following: infant mortality, infants born at low birth weight, death of children younger than five, and in not offering paid maternity leave; in beef consumption, snack food consumption, and coronary bypass operations; in marriage, divorce, belief in God, the devil, heaven, and hell; in respect for authority and willingness to fight for the country; in percentage of people who think it’s all right to keep money they have found; in billionaires, and in children and elderly in poverty; in real wealth and unequal wealth distribution; in big homes and homelessness; in military spending and in not spending on the poor, the aged, and the disabled; in military aid to developing countries, and in not giving humanitarian aid to developing countries; in executive salaries, inequality of pay, and in not offering paid vacation days; in not voting; in U.N. dues outstanding and U.N. Security Council vetoes since 1980; in not ratifying international human rights treaties; in the murder of children, deaths by gun, gun ownership, deaths by capital punishment, reported rapes, drunk driving fatalities, and leniency toward drinking and driving; in incarceration; in greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutants, and contributions to acid rain; in forest depletion, garbage creation, hazardous waste, cars, gasoline consumption, televisions, radios, VCRs, and in book titles not published annually.” –Andrew L. Shapiro, We’re Number One!

“The smuggling of women and children into the United States who are forced into prostitution and other forms of slave labor…is especially prevalent in Southern California, where authorities believe tens of thousands of people are being forced to work in sweatshops, restaurants, mom-and-pop stores and even underground brothels…. As many as 10,000 Asian women are believed to be working in underground brothels in Southern California alone, said Hae Jung Cho, project director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking…. According to U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, ‘Trafficking is the new slavery of the world… Worldwide, trafficking nets at lest $7 billion a year—exceeded only by international drug and arms trades.’ The exact number of victims is difficult to determine, experts and advocates say. But a CIA report found that about 50,000 people—many of them women and children—are brought to the United States under false pretenses each year and held in servitude… ‘They face tremendous physical, psychological and sexual torture,’ Cho said. ‘There is a labor shortage, as we know, and unfortunately people—instead of paying decent wages—look to find slaves who they don’t have to pay.’” –Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2000

“It is only fair to add that the wonders of the free market have opened up alternatives, not only for rich landowners, speculators, corporations, and other privileged sectors, but even for the starving children who press their faces against car windows at street corners at night, pleading for a few cents to survive. Describing the miserable plight of Managua’s street children, David Werner, the author of Where There is No Doctor and other books on health and society, writes that ‘marketing shoe cement to children has become a lucrative business,’ and imports from multinational suppliers are rising nicely as ‘shopkeepers in depressed communities do a thriving business with weekly refills of the children’s little bottle’ for glue-sniffing, said to ‘take away hunger.’ The miracle of the market is again at work, though Nicaraguans still have much to learn… Some of the distance yet to be traveled was revealed in a Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary, The Body Parts Business, ‘a gruesome litany of depredation,’ reporting murder of children and the poor to extract organs, ‘eyeballs being removed from living skulls by medical pirates armed only with coffee spoons,’ and other such entrepreneurial achievements. Such practices, long reported in Latin America and perhaps now spreading to Russia, have recently been acknowledged by one of the most prized U.S. creations, the government that upholds ‘our values and aspirations’ in El Salvador, where the procurator for the defense of children reported that the ‘big trade in children in El Salvador’ involves not only kidnapping for export, but also their use ‘for pornographic videos, for organ transplants, for adoption and for prostitutions.’ Hardly a secret, Hugh O’Shaughnessy observes, recalling an operation of the Salvadoran army in June 1982 near the River Lempa, where the U.S.-trained troops ‘had a very successful day’s baby-hunting,’ loading their helicopters with fifty babies whose ‘parents have never seen them since.’ O’Shaughnessy’s report on ‘Takeaway babies farmed to order’ appeared in the London Observer…” –Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New

“Marijuana growing in America has evolved…into a burgeoning high-tech industry with earnings that are estimated at $32 billion a year. That makes it easily the nation’s biggest cash crop, [not] corn ($14 billion) or soybeans ($11 billion)…” –Michael Pollan, New York Times Magazine, February 19, 1995“The number of Colombians who die from U.S.-produced lethal drugs exceeds the number of North Americans who die from cocaine, and is far greater relative to population. In East Asia, U.S.-produced lethal drugs contribute to millions of deaths. These countries are compelled not only to accept the products but also advertising for them, under threat of trade sanctions. The effects of ‘aggressive marketing and advertising by American firms is, in a good measure, responsible for…a sizeable increase in smoking rates for women and youth in Asian countries where doors were forced open by threat of severe U.S. trade sanctions,’ public health researchers conclude. The Colombian cartels, in contrast, are not permitted to run huge advertising campaigns in which a Joe Camel-counterpart extols the wonders of cocaine. We are therefore entitled, indeed morally obligated, to ask whether Colombia, Thailand, China, and other targets of U.S. trade policies and lethal-export promotion have the right to conduct military, chemical and biological warfare in North Carolina. And if not, why not? We might also ask why there are no Delta Force raids on U.S. banks and chemical corporations, though it is no secret that they too are engaged in the narcotrafficking business. And why the Pentagon is not gearing up to attack Canada, now replacing Colombia and Mexico with high potency marijuana that has already become British Colombia’s most valuable agricultural product and one of the most important sectors of the economy, joined by Quebec and closely followed by Manitoba, with a tenfold increase in just the past 2 years. Or to attack the United States, a major producer of marijuana with production rapidly expanding, including hydroponic groweries, and long the center of illicit manufacture of high-tech illicit drugs (ATS, amphetamine-type stimulants), the fastest growing sector of drug abuse, with 30 million users worldwide, probably surpassing heroin and cocaine.” –Noam Chomsky, Z Magazine, June 2000.

A recent Associated Press headline and article: “Granny Arrested For Organ Sales” “The boy thought his grandmother was taking him to Disneyland, but Russian police say she had other plans: to sell her grandson so his organs could be used for transplants. Police in Ryazan, 125 miles southeast of Moscow, said Saturday that they arrested a woman after they were tipped that she was trying to sell her grandson to a man who was going to take the boy to the West. There his organs were to be removed and sold, a Ryazan police duty officer said. After a surveillance operation, police moved in to arrest the woman Tuesday, capturing the event on a videotape that was released in part Saturday. Police did not reveal the woman’s name. The woman was helped in the scheme by the boy’s uncle, who told police the child was being sold for about $70,000. When asked how he could sell his nephew, the uncle replied: ‘My mother said that it is none of my business, he is her grandson.’ The boy, whose age was not released, lived with his grandmother. Police said she told him he was being taken to Disneyland. Body parts have been smuggled out of Russia in the past for sale in the West as organ replacements.” –www.washingtonpost.com, AP, 10/28/00.

“Between 300,000 and 800,000 children work as hired laborers in commercial U.S. agriculture today. These farm-worker children weed cotton fields, pick lettuce and cantaloupe and climb rickety ladders in cherry and apple orchards. They often work 12 or more hours a day… They risk serious illness, including cancer and brain damage, from exposure to pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from working with sharp tools and heavy machinery. Despite long and grueling days, some child farmers are paid only $2 an hour. Many of them drop out of school, too exhausted to study. Nearly half of them never graduate from high school. Lacking other options, many are relegated to a lifetime of low-wage field labor that perpetuates the cycle of farm-worker poverty through generations… An estimated 100,000 children suffer agriculture-related injuries annually in the United States… The 14-hour days worked by a 13-year-old are not prohibited by law in the U.S. Children as young as 12 can legally work unlimited hours in agriculture… [which] amounts to de facto race-based discrimination, since the vast majority of farm-worker children are Latino and other racial minorities.” –Victoria Riskin and Mike Farrell, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2000.