Now take 30% away for state federal tax
Joe Legal now has $31,231.00

 

 

Jose Illegal...$15.00 per hour x 40 hours $600.00 per week, $31,200.00 per year
 

Jose Illegal pays no taxes...
Jose Illegal now has $31,200.00

$1000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
Joe Legal now has $19,231.00
 

Joe Legal pays for food
$1,000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
Joe Legal now has $ 7,231.00
 

Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00

$1,000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
 

 

Jose Illegal pays rent

$500.00 per month
$6,000.00 per year
 

Jose Illegal still has $25,200.00

 

When Margaret Chan, head of the World Heath Organisation, raised the pandemic threat alert from four to five in response to the swine flu outbreak, she had no qualms about using the language of fear. 'All of humanity is under threat', she declared.

When, in the future, historians look back on this performance of fear, and on the swine flu panic more broadly, they will surely ask themselves: was Chan speaking as a public health official or as a moral entrepreneur? It is striking that Chan, like most fear entrepreneurs, does not perceive her behaviour as being in any way illegitimate or unduly alarmist. Indeed, she, like other fearmongers, qualified her warning with a reassuring statement: 'Don't panic.'

This combination of fear-promotion with the rhetoric of reassurance is a key aspect of the modern-day narrative of fear. Consider Chan's warning that WHO is likely to raise its flu alert to the top of its six-point scale and declare a pandemic. This time she did not talk about the threat to 'all of humanity' and the danger of human extinction. 'Level six does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world', she said, before noting that 'it is important to make this clear because [otherwise], when we announce level six, it will cause unnecessary panic'.

So Chan raised the spectre of human extinction with the elevation of the threat level from four to five, but when it came to the possibility of raising it to level six she appeared to take a more relaxed attitude towards the potential for global catastrophe. Of course, her very attempt to sound reassuring was framed in the sort of rhetoric that is likely to have the opposite effect. Informing the public that 'we are not facing the end of the world' implies that we might face it some time soon, and indicates that apocalyptic thinking is no longer confined to the world of religion. Chan's secular version of apocalyptic thinking is powered by a contemporary cultural script that both exaggerates health threats and also links these threats with human malevolence more broadly. From this perspective, every virus, every disease, every new outbreak of flu, is potentially a weapon in the armoury of Evil.

The protagonists in today's market of fear have forcefully sought to demonise flu as a threat to the world, as something that might even be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology now advertises a course on 'Pandemics and Bioterrorism'. It claims that 'swine flu is only the most recent of the challenges posed by threats of bioterrorism and global pandemics'. The casual manner in which the threat of bioterrorism is introduced into the discussion of swine flu, by one of the most respected scientific institutions in the world, provides disturbing evidence that fearmongering has become a respectable pastime and pursuit.

Today, fear entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are moral crusaders who genuinely believe that the very fabric of society is threatened by evil forces. At the other end of the spectrum are the salespeople and hustlers of the market of fear. It is useful to distinguish between the different species of scaremonger, so here is your 'Guide To Spotting The Different Actors In The Dramatisation Of Fear'.

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