Democracy At A Crossroad?

The Australian

CRISIS TIME: WE CAN TAKE A STAND — OR SOLVE A PROBLEM

PAUL KELLY
EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Everyone loses when our democracy is at loggerheads with economic progress
The question for Australia and many Western nations in the Trumpian age of populism and debt is whether democracy’s selfdestructive flaws are reaching a tipping point — is democracy becoming incompatible with economic progress?

This is the debate Australia needs to have. It is the debate the US, one way or another, cannot avoid under Donald Trump. It is the debate Britain, post-Brexit, is starting to confront. It is the central dilemma facing Europe, from France to Italy.

In their 2014 book The Fourth Revolution, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write: “For better or worse, democracy and elephantiasis have gone hand-in-hand. Our politicians have been in the business of giving us more of what we want — more education, more healthcare, more prisons, more pensions, more security, more entitlements. And yet — there is the paradox — we are not happy.

“Having overloaded the state with their demands, voters are furious that it works so badly. From Seattle to Salzburg the worry is that the system that has served the West so well has become dysfunctional, that ‘things are on the wrong track’ … In America the federal government has less support than George III did at the time of the American Revolution. America continues to tax itself like a small government country and spend like a big government one.”

This critique of US polity remains true today. It is increasingly true of Australia. Have you noticed Australians getting even more angry and raging about rotten, hopeless, inept politicians yet demanding governments must do more, spend more money, intrude into more aspects of daily life, resolve more problems, regulate the path to solving every problem from racism to childcare needs to obesity to corporate greed?

Voters loathe the system yet demand more of it — and the more the politicians fail, the angrier the public gets.

In her recently released book Still Lucky, social researcher Rebecca Huntley asks of Australians: “Why do we hate politicians but love government?” Good question — it is the great Australian paradox.

Huntley finds “an almost permanent sense of insecurity exacerbated by economic downturn, the disruptive effects of new technology, cuts to the public service and changes to industry conditions”. She suggests “the idea of secure, protected and well-paid employment” — one of the pillars of the old lucky country — “has been destroyed”.

Fear and insecurity drive people to protect what they’ve got. They drive their anger about inequity, the sense the better-off are ripping off the system. This is the universal narrative flowing from the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Worried about income and job pressures, people fight politicians to retain every cent of benefit from welfare, health and education spending and, fearing they now live in a rip-off society, say it’s time companies and high-flyers paid their own way. The social contract is deteriorating.

The political debate in Australia today is 80 per cent redistribution and 20 per cent income and growth generation.

This typifies a nation turning on itself. It is the western European disease. If perpetuated, it will end in grief.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge say the Western state is in a condition of “bloat” and that it is the direct consequence of democracy. They brand the state an “omnipresent nanny”.

Politicians of the left and right bid for votes by raising nearly endless expectations the state can do more. It is extraordinary to think historian AJP Taylor said that in 1914 “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state”.

Life got a lot better in the century after 1914 but the “happiness of the greatest number” is hardly working in 2017.

As current numbers prove, every effort to reverse the growth of the state has failed — from Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton in the 90s, to the Hawke-Keating-Howard era, to deluded hopes that globalisation would do the job.

State expansion is now fuelled by huge forces — demography, the ageing population, benefit entitlement culture, weak growth and poor productivity. The Abbott and Turnbull governments have tried to restrain state expansion and spending, but the opposing forces are too great.

While the government has made some progress in spending restraint, you need only to read Senate Hansard to grasp the hopelessness of the situation. Senators rage about the injustice of any spending cuts (outside the top end), compete with each as the battlers’ friend, and almost always prefer tax rises as the means to resolve the nation’s unsustainable spending levels.

They do so with public support. There is scant evidence the government has persuaded the public that deficits and debt are the public’s problem. We are in the eighth year of budget deficits under which borrowings are being used to finance living standards because of the annual gap between spending and revenue.

The consequences are documented each year in budget papers, the latest evidence coming from the Business Council of Australia 2016-17 budget submission. It says: “A perfect storm is looming. Structural spending pressures continue to build rather than abate. These pressures come principally from an ageing population which will significantly increase demand for pensions, health and aged-care services and new programs such as the NDIS.

“Structural deficits of at least 3 per cent are being locked in creating (in today’s terms) some $50 billion additional debt each year. The consequences are inevitable and unpalatable. Closing this gap would require taxes to rise by $5300 per household per year or $2000 per person.”

The government’s late 2016 budget review projected real spending growth will blow out to 3 per cent a year beyond 2020-21 compared with 1.8 per cent for the current four-year period.

The BCA report says: “Put simply, this means that spending growth will outpace the economy’s capacity to pay. We are facing a structural spending and deficit problem that will not correct itself. Without action, the fiscal gap will grow ever wider — until it provokes a painful economic correction involving both cuts to services and higher taxes.”

There is an absence of will in the parliament to correct this problem. The electoral incentives to act do not exist. The Senate is a veto chamber, dominated by gesture politics where it is more important for parties, big and small, to take a stand rather than solve a problem. Taking a stand is good politics; it plays to your sectional voting base, big or small.

This week the Menzies Research Centre released the first of its reports on our national challenges, headed by businessman Tony Shepherd, who says “the average Australian” no longer cares “about the deficit and the borrowing required to fund it”. It is unsurprising Shepherd says the nation faces a “genuine crisis” over the budget.

In Australia the trend is unmistakeable — it is the growing nexus of bigger government and populist democracy. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge say: “People have voted again and again for the state to do more. But it is not as if either democracy or the state looked any better for it. Government backed by the general democratic will … has seldom been as unloved or inefficient. Freedoms have been given up but the people have not gotten much in return.”

Democracy in Australia is sinking into a self-destructive spiral. The sickness at its heart is the demise of individual responsibility and expecting more from the state when the national interest says state responsibilities should be cut, not increased. Our democratic system now works to undermine economic progress.

We are facing a structural spending and deficit problem that will not correct itself

Future Union Movement

BATTLE PLAN READY FOR SALLY’S ARMY

GRACE COLLIER

Businesses have two years to establish fortifications against a union power grab
Like a ray of sunshine beaming through storm clouds, some cheery news has arrived. The ACTU elected a new secretary this week. Despite our gloomy national predicament, no doubt you will take a moment to send Sally McManus congratulations.

Whoever leads the ACTU must act as the public interface between the union movement and the rest of society, so they must be a palatable cleanskin. Naturally, this somewhat narrows the pool of contenders.

As well as having a PR role, the ACTU houses the bureaucratic brains of the union movement and what is left of its heart: true believers who think they hold “light on the hill” values. These Labor values are a set of “working-class” beliefs mostly imbibed at middle-class institutions, for instance by university students who listen to Billy Bragg and rail against capitalism before becoming student union operatives, then expand their cred by working seven hours and 36 minutes a day, nine days a fortnight, in a public service job before heading into the union movement.

Consequently, the ACTU is the hallowed place where passionate union theorists with limited experience in the real world attempt to administer the labour movement. Don’t think McManus is condemned to a boring existence, though. Any ACTU secretary must tiptoe down a hazardous path.

For a start, there are meetings to chair with the people who run the unions. Important discussions about divvying up other people’s money can become heated and must be adjudicated. The union secretaries all passionately hate each other, almost as much as they hate the concept of private profit, the bosses and Tories.

Bitter arguments rage over union coverage of various worker categories. For Australian unions, there are slim pickings out there. The shrinking pool of union members and the revenue they generate is a regular topic. Like seagulls fighting over chips, union bosses wheel and swoop, screeching all the while. Anyone trying to referee will find themselves deafened, pecked and shat on.

ACTU people also think up grand industrial relations policies to inflict on the economy, and hope to get as many of them in place as possible. It is important to leave a legacy before jetting off to a better job in politics, industry superannuation or a posh union bureaucracy in Europe.

The policies are designed to be implemented by the political arm of the union movement, the Labor Party, through which the unions anticipate taking back control of the nation. So, like sleeper agents activated by a secret signal, brainiacs are springing out of the woodwork with grand policy suggestions for their future prime minister, Bill Shorten, to implement.

In The Australian this week, on ABC TV and in an address on Facebook, McManus gave us a few clues about union thinking: “radical change” is needed because working people are at “breaking point”. A people’s movement for fairness will form an army and fight for serious amendments to law. In the meantime, unions will simply break laws they find unjust.

McManus says her priority is to “lead a movement to take on corporate greed”. There will be demands for less red tape around going on strike, limits on the use of casuals and labour hire, and a reversal of penalty rate reductions. It is intended the Fair Work Commission will be given increased power to arbitrate on disputes between companies and unions. Conversely, the FWC is to lose its power to cancel enterprise agreements and move employees back on to the award.

Recently, at a conference in Canberra, two people from the National Tertiary Education Union presented a brief and clearly written paper called The Future of Trade Unions in Australia. This fascinating paper provides valuable insight into union thinking. If all goes according to plan, legislative change will ensure 50 per cent of Australian workers become union members within five years. This will eliminate “the free-rider problem”: when unions in bargaining represent workers who don’t ask them to, then become cross because they won’t join up.

The ACTU, unions and employer groups are to get together and determine “bargaining electorates” of at least 2000 employees. Once a bargaining electorate is declared, unions can apply for a ballot and within 60 days employees would vote to establish a “collective bargaining unit”. Employers could send written material urging staff to vote against the move but not “hold meetings with employees individually or in groups to discuss it”.

If most employees vote yes, all employees in the electorate would be forced to join the relevant union and pay dues. After that, only the union could negotiate enterprise agreements with employers, and workers would be denied the right to vote on these agreements.

Don’t dismiss these ideas as outlandish. What this paper describes is essentially the American model of industrial relations. Australian unions have always coveted the American system and it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that they might achieve their goal one day.

Australian businesses better get their industrial relations management strategies in order, pronto. They have two years to terminate their enterprise agreements, exit the bargaining system and escape the reach of the FWC, forge great relationships with their staff and build protections against unwanted union interference.

FakeStateOfPalestine

'Palestinian' Is a Fabricated Nationality


By Dan Calic


While talk of a comprehensive Arab - Israeli peace agreement seems never ending, newly elected President Trump has described securing such an agreement as the “ultimate deal.” However there is ample reason why no deal has been struck, and why likely it will remain beyond reach.

The most important factor in reaching an agreement is both sides must want peace. However in this conflict, indisputable evidence shows only one side actually wants genuine peace and co-existence. A sober look at the facts reveals the Arab “Palestinians” have no interest in peace. In order to draw reasoned conclusions it’s also essential to separate fact from fiction.


While talk of a comprehensive Arab - Israeli peace agreement seems never ending, newly elected President Trump has described securing such an agreement as the “ultimate deal.” However there is ample reason why no deal has been struck, and why likely it will remain beyond reach.

The most important factor in reaching an agreement is both sides must want peace. However in this conflict, indisputable evidence shows only one side actually wants genuine peace and co-existence. A sober look at the facts reveals the Arab “Palestinians” have no interest in peace. In order to draw reasoned conclusions it’s also essential to separate fact from fiction.

Who’s Who?

The Arab Palestinians are in a different category than the rest of the Arab world, which consists of 22 sovereign Middle Eastern nations. They do not have the distinction of being a sovereign nation, which they feel they are entitled to. However, shouldn’t we first understand who they are, as well as their motives?

They are a mix of Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese etc. who settled within the area known as the British Mandate of Palestine. This land encompassed 43,000 square miles and was promised to the Jews as a national homeland in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Yet, in 1922 the British turned over 75% of it to create the nation of Transjordan, (today’s Jordan). This left roughly 25% or 11,000 square miles of land to be dealt with.


In 1947 the British decided to leave the area and turned the issue over to the United Nations, which by a 72% majority voted to partition two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab. However, the surrounding Arab nations rejected the vote and attacked the new Jewish state one day after its independence, intending to destroy it. This is all indisputable fact.

The coming storm

Regional leadership directed local Arabs living in the area to relocate temporarily, while the armies of the surrounding countries carried out their plan to destroy the UN partitioned Jewish state. Thinking they would soon be able to return and grab a huge windfall, the majority of Arabs chose to leave.

However, their destructive aspirations failed, and the tiny nation of Israel not only was reborn, it remains and flourishes.

One can only lament how different history might have been if the Arab nations chose to accept the UN partition vote. Yet they chose war and have never taken responsibility for their action. What’s worse is the nations of the world have never required it of them.

So what happened to those Arabs who left hoping the Jews would be wiped out, allowing them to reclaim their homes, plus those of the defeated Jews? Many ended up in “no man’s land,” which gave birth to the so called “Palestinian “refugees.” Yet are they truly refugees? They did not leave with the intention of relocating elsewhere to start a new life as refugees typically do. They left because they were hoping the Jewish state would be destroyed and they could return to claim what was theirs, plus what wasn’t theirs. An honest assessment disqualifies them from being classified as “refugees.” It was nothing less than bloodthirsty greed.

Since then they have portrayed themselves as victims deserving of compensation; not from the Arab nations who directed them to leave in order to launch their attack, but from Israel or Britain. If anyone is to blame for their plight it surely rests with Arabs, not the Jews. Unquestionably their fate was driven by hatred, greed and destructive intentions.

Have they ever admitted this? No. Instead they went on the offensive and to this day the Arab nations and the “Palestinians” lay blame elsewhere. This is precisely what Yasser Arafat did when he founded the first “Palestinian” terror group in 1964, the PLO. He blamed the Jews, and took no responsibility for the intent of the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state. He also rejected the United Nations partitioning of a sovereign Arab state, because it meant the existence of a Jewish state, which he refused to accept. His PLO charter defined the “Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them null and void.” (PLO Charter Article 20)

Moreover, his organization’s charter specifically calls for the “Palestinian people to assert their absolute determination and firm resolution…to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and the right to return to it.” (PLO Charter Article 9)

So much for peaceful co-existence.

“Their Country”?

Moreover, what country is he talking about? The so-called “Palestinians” did not have their own country. The area he is referring to was under the British Mandate and was turned over to the UN who voted to partition an Arab and Jewish state, which was rejected by the Arab nations. The fact is the “Palestinians” never had “their own country,” to return to and “liberate.” They could have had a country if the UN partition had been accepted. However, hatred of the Jews and refusal to accept the existence of a neighboring Jewish state outweighed the gift of having their own state. This abhorrent fact renders Arafat’s statement about the existence of “their country” as a lie.

It should also be noted the Jews have had a constant presence here dating back over 3,000 years. Plus, since they were victorious in defending themselves in the Six Day War of 1967, international law allows them to claim the disputed land, which gave them the legal right to build communities.

It’s time to call a spade a spade. The entire premise on which the PLO was founded is a fabrication. There was never a “Palestine” and no “Palestinian” people. What is correct is there were Arabs of various ethnic origins living together with Jews in an area which was under the control of the British. Arafat himself for example, was a transplanted Arab Egyptian, not a “Palestinian.”

Part of the challenge of this unending conflict is separating fact from fiction. Suggesting the “Palestinians” have the right to “liberate their country” assumes they have or had one. They don’t and never did. This cannot be overstated. Any reference otherwise is pure fabrication. However, this has not stopped them from spreading outright lies and others from buying into it. This includes defining the land they claim as “occupied Palestinian territory,” while blaming Israel as the cause for a lack of peace.

The charters of all the ‘Palestinian’ terror groups, including Fatah, (which means “conquest”) -- the party of Mahmoud Abbas -- don’t merely speak of self-determination within the area commonly referred to as the” West Bank.” Each charter places equal weight on the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel through armed struggle, and replacing it with one “Palestinian” state. It makes clear their goal is to eliminate the world’s only Jewish country, and replace it with another Muslim dominated country. This would bring the total to 23 in the Middle East, while the Jews would have none, and be subjected to live (or die) under Muslim rule in what used to be their own country.

If the community of nations decides to reward those who seek Israel’s destruction with nationhood without requiring them to alter their charters, renounce terror and recognize the Jewish state of Israel, it will be a black mark on humanity.

Then again the community of nations has ample history of treating the Jews unfairly. Evidence today’s United Nations for starters.

PC World

Crisis Magazine

MARCH 10, 2017

The Iron-Fisted Tyranny of Political Correctness

REGIS NICOLL

In the span of a few years, the dictatorship of relativism has given way to the tyranny of political correctness. Under the first regime, universal truth was supplanted by personal truth; under the current one, it is exchanged for outright falsehood. Consider the rise of statements such as,

Sexual orientation is inborn and fixed.
Gender is not inborn or fixed, or binary.
Homosexuality is not abnormal, unnatural, or disordered.
Marriage is a matter of love not gender.
Children flourish as well (or better!) with same sex caregivers as with their biological parents.
Islamic terrorism is not driven by religion.

Each is factually false (as are all politically correct statements) and, yet, advanced through tautology, pimped out in sophistic lip gloss, and enforced by intimidation, has become Western orthodoxy. So entrenched is the groupthink that those who challenge it can find themselves outside of the camp of polite company.

Think not? At your next social gathering, try explaining why you believe marriage is not the right to marry “whomever you love.” If the guests don’t blanch as if a skunk had leapt out of your pocket, it will set off a wave of fidgeting even among Christians who have made rationalizations for gay friends or relatives or who fear coming across as bigoted and intolerant.

The Cost of DissentWhile sharing your beliefs over cocktails can result in social shunning, owning a business, supporting a cause, or belonging to an organization that runs afoul the PC canon puts you at risk for everything from public shaming to loss of livelihood.

Just ask bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein who were fined and put out of business, not for refusing to serve homosexual customers, but for declining to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Or David and Jason Benham who lost their popular HGTV program, Flip it Forward, for statements David made about genderless marriage. Statements that would have been uncontroversial a decade ago, and, in fact, were uncontroversial in 2008 when presidential nominee Barak Obama told Rick Warren, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Or Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, who were threatened with the cancelation of their show and financial ruin, not for anything they had said or done, but for membership in a church that affirms the natural heterosexual design of marriage.

Then there’s the state of North Carolina that is being boycotted by entertainers, professional sports organizations, and Fortune 500 companies for legislation that, in accordance with physical reality and common sense, protects girls in rest rooms from the prurient enthusiasms of males.

Most recently, St. Joseph’s Healthcare System, a Catholic institution, is being sued for declining to perform an elective hysterectomy on a transgender woman.

As PC agitations have spread from the boardroom to the bedroom to the bathroom, many people have chosen to remain silent or self-censure their remarks to avoid the untoward attention of the thought police. It all serves an Alice in Wonderland reality with a history.

Tracing the rootsThe PC culture is a product of progressivism that approaches reality as a social construct that must be changed to achieve the claimed progressive ends of prosperity and peace. Originating under communism, political correctness was institutionalized in the 1930’s to promote the Party’s reality “above reality itself,” writes Claremont Institute senior fellow Angelo M. Codevilla.

For all progressive movements, the supernal reality is the creation of a new humanity in a utopian existence where all conflicts and contradictions are resolved: in Communism, by dismantling all class distinctions; in Freudianism, by overcoming sexual repression; in social liberalism, by gaining public acceptance for any and all lifestyle choices; in secularism, by exalting science and extinguishing religion. Each requires a revolution against realities that do not bend to the “realities” of progressives.

For instance, a scalpel and lifetime supply of hormones cannot change a sex chromosome from a Y to an X; a judicial ruling cannot make a same-sex coupling a marriage (any more than it can make two sodium atoms salt); free, no-consequence sex ends not in a Freudian utopia, but in a post-Sexual Revolution dystopia of marital infidelity, divorce, STD’s, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and abortion; and, despite the rise of secularism in a time that has seen more religious persecution than in any other, the religiously-affiliated population is increasing and projected to rise from 84 to 87 percent of the global population by 2050.

“Soft” ExploitationThe job of political correctness, Codevilla explains, is to overcome these and other intransigent realities by silencing dissent, delegitimizing opposing points of view (particularly those informed by the moral foundations of Western civilization), marginalizing people who hold them, and possibly criminalizing those who act on them. So, the revolution rages on.

With no compelling vision of truth, beauty, goodness, or conspicuous value added for the masses, the progressive interest is not in winning society over with rational argument and civil discourse, but in subduing it with the threat of social censure, or worse. The sad irony, to paraphrase economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s quip on Communism, is that “Under Capitalism man exploits man; under Progressivism, the situation is reversed.”

The success of this “soft” exploitation requires the clever appropriation of language by the PC architects. Terms like justice and equality are retained, but their definitions and applications are changed.

Justice, in the classical understanding, is giving people their due; in the Christian view, it is giving them what they need; to the progressive mind, it is giving people what they want, or what the ruling class has decided they need which, under the umbrella of social justice, includes economic justice, climate justice, environmental justice, resource justice, and reproductive justice.

Equality, according to our nation’s founding, is about equal opportunity and the fair and unbiased treatment of all people regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. Its progressive stepchild is about equal outcomes, which, by necessity and contrary to the principle of equal treatment, disadvantages some people through progressive tax structures and diversity, inclusion, and affirmative action policies. Whereas, the former gave birth to the great social movements of abolition, emancipation, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, the latter has sired everything from the legalization of abortion and same-sex “marriage” to bathroom laws and the elimination of honorary distinctions in public schools.

Engaged in a movement with no definable end—there is always “progress” to be made, an enemy to defeat, a wrong to right—progressives are always sniffing around for some reality to deconstruct and another to create. Which explains why the legalization of same-sex “marriage” was followed so rapidly by the recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. And why LGBT activists and their sympathizers are not satisfied with winning legal battles and gaining their rights; offenders (bakers, florists, photographers) must be punished and ground into the dust.

Such fulfills a deep yearning for personal absolution. As Codevilla rightly notes, “feeling better about one’s self by confessing other people’s sins, humiliating and hurting them, is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction.”

But for the victims of PC and those who refuse to be cowed by its tyranny, it produces resentment that can build into a counter revolution—one which, arguably, Donald Trump’s improbable ascendency to the presidency, over the best crop of prospects the GOP has ever fielded, is the opening salvo. If so, whether it will be the end of one tyranny or the beginning of another, one thing is certain: it will be a bumpy ride; so fasten your seat belts.

CFS

newscientist

13 February 2017

Metabolic switch may bring on chronic fatigue syndrome

By Andy Coghlan

It’s as if a switch has been flicked. Evidence is mounting that chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is caused by the body swapping to less efficient ways of generating energy.

Also known as ME or myalgic encephalomyelitis, CFS affects some 250,000 people in the UK. The main symptom is persistent physical and mental exhaustion that doesn’t improve with sleep or rest. It often begins after a mild infection, but its causes are unknown. Some have argued that CFS is a psychological condition, and that it is best treated through strategies like cognitive behavioural therapy.

But several lines of investigation are now suggesting that the profound and painful lack of energy seen in the condition could in many cases be due to people losing their ability to burn carbohydrate sugars in the normal way to generate cellular energy.

Instead, the cells of people with CFS stop making as much energy from sugar as usual, and start relying more on lower-yielding fuels, such as amino acids and fats. This kind of metabolic switch produces lactate, which can cause pain when it accumulates in muscles.

Together, this would explain both the shortness of energy, and why even mild exercise can be exhausting and painful.

Sex differences

Øystein Fluge of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, and his colleagues studied amino acids in 200 people with CFS, and 102 people without it. The levels of some amino acids in the blood of women with CFS was abnormally low – specifically for the types of amino acid that can be used by the body as an alternative fuel source.

These shortfalls were not seen in men with CFS, but that could be because men tend to extract amino acids for energy from their muscles, instead of their blood. And the team saw higher levels of an amino acid that’s a sign of such a process.

“It seems that both male and female CFS patients may have the same obstruction in carbohydrate metabolism to energy, but they may try to compensate differently,” says Fluge.

Both sexes had high levels of several enzymes known to suppress pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH), an enzyme vital for moving carbohydrates and sugars into a cell’s mitochondria – a key step for fully exploiting sugar for energy.

Fluge thinks PDH is prevented from working in people with CFS, but that it can spontaneously recover.

Starvation effect

Several studies have now hinted that defects in sugar burning can cause CFS, but there is still uncertainty over how exactly this is disrupted. However, a picture is emerging. Something makes the body switch from burning sugar to a far less efficient way of making energy.

“We don’t think it’s just PDH,” says Chris Armstrong at the University of Melbourne in Australia, whose research has also uncovered anomalies in amino acid levels in patients. “Broadly, we think it’s an issue with sugar metabolism in general.”

The result is not unlike starvation, says Armstrong. “When people are facing starvation, the body uses amino acids and fatty acids to fuel energy for most cells in the body, to keep glucose levels vital for the brain and muscles as high as possible.”

“We think that no single enzyme in metabolism will be the answer to CFS, just as no single enzyme is the ‘cause’ of something like hibernation,” says Robert Naviaux of the University of California at San Diego, who has found depletion of fatty acids in patients suggesting they were diverted as fuel.

Not psychosomatic

So what could flick the switch to a different method of metabolism? Fluge’s team thinks that a person’s own immune system may stop PDH from working, possibly triggered by a mild infection.

His team has previously shown that wiping out a type of white blood cell called B-cells in CFS patients seems to relieve the condition. These white blood cells make antibodies, and Fluge suspects that some antibodies made to combat infections may also recognise something in PDH and disable it.

The team is now conducting a large trial in Norway of the cancer drug rituximab, which destroys the cells that make antibodies, in people with CFS. Results are expected next year.

Together, these metabolic approaches are suggesting that CFS has a chemical cause. “It’s definitely a physiological effect that we’re observing, and not psychosomatic, and I’ll put my head on the block on that,” says Armstrong. However, he adds that psychological and brain chemistry factors might be involved in some cases.