http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27943.htm
Velkommen to Banktopia
Let's talk turkey. The dollar is getting hammered by the day. And the dollar is getting hammered by design, because the Fed wants a weaker currency to boost exports and lower the real burden of debt on the banks. (Yes, Martha, the banks are still insolvent) So, down goes the greenback, lower and lower, pushing up gas and food prices while the buying power of the average US worker vanishes down the plughole. And this process will continue for the foreseeable future because--as Obama stated earlier in the year--Washington is committed to "doubling exports in the next 5 years." Think about that: "the next 5 years". That's the same as saying that the American worker will be reduced to third-world poverty in a half decade or so. It's a death sentence.
And none of this has anything to do with lowering unemployment or raising GDP. In fact, the revisions of first quarter GDP reveal the lies behind the policy. The first announcement from the Commerce Department put GDP at 3.2%. Remember that? Now we've slipped to 1.4% and some predict the final revision could actually show negative growth. This is from the New York Times:
"Earlier this week we wrote that several prominent economic forecasters had lowered their estimates of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter of this year. Today saw even further declines. Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, lowered its estimate to just 1.4 percent annualized, when just a few months ago they had pegged the number at 4.1 percent.
Capital Economics likewise brought its estimate down to 1 percent, writing in a client note:
Every data release last week seemed to necessitate a further downward revision to our first-quarter GDP growth forecast. By the end of the week when the dust had finally settled, that estimate was down to only 1% at an annualized pace. Indeed, there is now even a decent outside chance that the economy contracted outright." ("G.D.P. Estimates Slide Further", New York Times)
So, it's all baloney. The economy isn't growing. How could it be? Wages are flat, credit is still shrinking, (excluding student loans) and the only reason the unemployment numbers keep dropping is because more and more people are falling off the unemployment rolls. Everyone knows that. So, while there may be a slight uptick in consumption and retail; don't be fooled. It's just because it costs more to put food on the table or drive to work, not because people are scarfing up trinkets at the mall or living the highlife.
And the American people know what's going; they can see through this "green shoots" charade. That's why the latest survey from the New York Times showed that the "Nation’s Mood (is) at the Lowest Level in Two Years" and that "Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office when the country was still officially ensnared in the Great Recession." ("Nation’s Mood at Lowest Level in Two Years, Poll Shows, New York Times)
People have lost faith in Obama, the congress, and the political process itself. They can see that the system is broken and no longer responds to the will of the people, which is why they're throwing up their hands and giving up. It's obvious. Gallup found the same thing. Here's a clip from their recent poll:
"Americans' optimism about the future direction of the U.S. economy plunged in March for the second month in a row, as the percentage of Americans saying the economy is "getting better" fell to 33% -- down from 41% in January....Optimism about the future of the economy declined across all political parties during the first quarter....Gallup's Economic Confidence Index, which includes the economic optimism measure, also plunged in March..." ("U.S. Economic Optimism Plummets in March", Gallup)
So, all the "happy-times" propaganda has had zilch effect. The public's not buying it. They know we're in a Depression. How could they not know? They're underwater on their mortgages, they can't get a loan, their kids and Uncle Arnie can't find work, and the guy in the Oval Office won't do a damn thing to help out. Is it any wonder why so many people are giving up on capitalism entirely. Just take a look at this survey from Globescan for a real shocker:
"American public support for the free market economy has dropped sharply in the past year, and is now lower than in China, according to a GlobeScan poll released today.....When GlobeScan began tracking views in 2002, four in five Americans (80%) saw the free market as the best economic system for the future—the highest level of support among tracking countries. Support started to fall away in the following years and recovered slightly after the financial crisis in 2007/8, but has plummeted since 2009, falling 15 points in a year so that fewer than three in five (59%) now see free market capitalism as the best system for the future.
GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller commented: “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system. This is not good news for business.”
The results mean that a number of the world’s major emerging economies have now matched or overtaken the USA in their enthusiasm for the free market. The Chinese and Brazilians, 67 per cent of whom regard the free market system as the best on offer, are now more positive about capitalism than Americans." ("Sharp Drop in American Enthusiasm for Free Market, Poll Shows", GlobeScan)
Can you believe it? The Chinese like capitalism better than Americans. How's that for irony? And, don't kid yourself, the average working slob isn't spending his evenings thumbing through the Communist Manifesto while strumming L'Internationale on his 6-string. That's nonsense. Americans are practical people. They know they're getting screwed by both parties which is why their support for capitalism has eroded even faster under Obama. It fell "15 points in a year" since 2009. Way to go, Barry.
And things will only get worse when congress starts hacking away at the budget deficits, eliminating popular programs and services. That will just add more fuel to the fire and convince people that the system is beyond repair. Bottom line: Conditions will steadily deteriorate, activity will slow, and economy will enter a period of protracted stagflation.
But that doesn't mean Wall Street will suffer. Hell, no. The markets will continue to bubble ever-higher fueled by lavish injections of monetary stimulus from the Fed just as they have for the last 3 years. As Bloomberg reported earlier in the week, Bernanke does not plan to end QE2 at the end of June as scheduled, but will continue to recycle the proceeds from maturing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into bond purchases to ensure that the Blue Chips continue to post record profits while 42 million workers scrape by on food-stamps, and a couple million more wait to get booted out of their homes. Sounds fair, doesn't it?
So, if it seems like the big banks are writing the policy; it's because they are. Think of it like this: The US government keeps two sets of books. One is a record of all the public's revenues and debts. The other is an off-balance sheet operation run by the Fed. When congress spends money, it must be approved through the normal democratic process. When the Fed spends money, it simply writes a check on an account backed by "the full faith and credit of the US Treasury" without any oversight or supervision. And, the debts that it rings-up, do not add to the budget deficits or force policymakers to impose constraints on the banks. No way. The $2 trillion in junk mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other handouts the Fed has given to Wall Street since Lehman collapsed, should have sent the deficits into the stratosphere and forced the resolution (bankruptcy) of the nation's largest banks. But they didn't, because the Fed's losses are kept "off-budget", where they don't attract congress's scrutiny. So, anything goes. The only problem is that the Fed's trillion dollar Bank Welfare Project has led to diminished buying power and a plunging dollar. So, it would be more accurate to call QE2 a stealth tax on working people, instead of "monetary stimulus".(which it is not.) The truth is, Bernanke is deliberately flogging the dollar to help his underwater bank buddies stay afloat and to keep stocks "frothy". But the net-result is a huge loss of personal wealth for everyone else. These are the real losers in Bernanke's QE shell game.
Looking ahead, it will be more of the same. Stocks will continue to rally, the red ink on the Fed's balance sheet will continue to build, and the dollar will continue its agonizing descent into oblivion.
The Fed is running the whole shooting match now and the rest of us are just bystanders with no say-so. Velkommen to Banktopia.
Monday, April 25, 2011
SC105-13
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/14-1#comments
Interstates and States of Grief
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of southern denial. The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio. But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.)
I arrived in Georgia by route of the US interstate system.
Traveling US interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression.
Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon.
Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all to often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.
"Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?" Rainer Maria Rilke
Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.
The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.
When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.
Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.
Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel -- we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive. Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.
Even the landscape itself of the US is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars. As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks -- the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past -- the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.
The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay -- a death-swoon operatic in scale. Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land. Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the US spread before us … are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.
Manifested en mass, as our collective way of existing in the world -- the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame … There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to own names … We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.
Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?
Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, "Private, why are you running?" The soldier replied, "General, I'm running 'cause I can't fly."
The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one's rear.
Depression is what catches us.
I have been accused being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity -- or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.
The salesmen of the eternal, big happy ... are just that -- salesmen ... One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart ... The commercial come-ons insist that the heart's grief and a lost soul's emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, "hope and change". By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated -- even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude -- all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.
"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."--Carl Jung.
What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job -- until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall ... clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one's jowls. Aint that the life -- or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.
This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life ... Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.
Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase …
But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
--Samuel Beckett
But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.
Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well "spill" (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world's oceans … The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me … Ever since, this dream image has lived within me ... I carry the fish's suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home -- this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into ... My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage … bottomless ... Who will speak for the voiceless -- who will make amends for their suffering?
In childhood, I loved this body of water … loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters … Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf's living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.
Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world's oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)
Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can't wrap our minds around it … In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.
I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste -- the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all. I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, "Stop it.
God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you?
Didn't anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?
This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die off.
But listening to the pronouncements of Washington's political class and the mainstream media's ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.
Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over. When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn't mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.
Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.
And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth … singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.
Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.
Frank O’Hara suggests: “In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
Things are going to work out -- but not in ways we can predict.
There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.
If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.
Don’t you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man’s war is a virtue; don’t buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth."
Interstates and States of Grief
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of southern denial. The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio. But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.)
I arrived in Georgia by route of the US interstate system.
Traveling US interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression.
Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon.
Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all to often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.
"Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?" Rainer Maria Rilke
Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart. When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.
The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.
When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy. These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.
Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.
Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel -- we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive. Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.
Even the landscape itself of the US is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars. As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks -- the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past -- the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.
The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay -- a death-swoon operatic in scale. Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land. Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the US spread before us … are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.
Manifested en mass, as our collective way of existing in the world -- the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame … There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to own names … We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.
Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?
Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, "Private, why are you running?" The soldier replied, "General, I'm running 'cause I can't fly."
The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one's rear.
Depression is what catches us.
I have been accused being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity -- or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces. Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.
The salesmen of the eternal, big happy ... are just that -- salesmen ... One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart ... The commercial come-ons insist that the heart's grief and a lost soul's emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, "hope and change". By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated -- even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude -- all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.
"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."--Carl Jung.
What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high fat, low quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job -- until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall ... clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one's jowls. Aint that the life -- or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.
This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life ... Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.
Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase …
But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
--Samuel Beckett
But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.
Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well "spill" (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world's oceans … The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me … Ever since, this dream image has lived within me ... I carry the fish's suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home -- this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into ... My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage … bottomless ... Who will speak for the voiceless -- who will make amends for their suffering?
In childhood, I loved this body of water … loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters … Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf's living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.
Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world's oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)
Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can't wrap our minds around it … In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.
I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste -- the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all. I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, "Stop it.
God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you?
Didn't anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?
This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die off.
But listening to the pronouncements of Washington's political class and the mainstream media's ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.
Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over. When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn't mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.
Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.
And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth … singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.
Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.
Frank O’Hara suggests: “In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
Things are going to work out -- but not in ways we can predict.
There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.
If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.
Don’t you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man’s war is a virtue; don’t buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth."
SC105-12
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_united_states_is_destroying_her_education_system_20110410/
Why The United States Is Destroying Education
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”
The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.
“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”
The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.
“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.
Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
Why The United States Is Destroying Education
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”
Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.
“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”
The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.
“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”
The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.
“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.
Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
SC105-11
http://www.alternet.org/economy/150416/wall_st._stands_at_the_pinnacle_of_5%2C000_years_of_human_exploitation/
Wall St. Stands At The Pinnacle Of 5000 Years Of Human Exploitation
In an earlier day, our rulers were kings and emperors. Now they are corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers. Wall Street is Empire’s most recent stage. Its reign will mark the end of the tragic drama of a 5,000 year Era of Empire.
Imperial historians would have us believe that civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great empires that emerged some 5,000 years ago. Much is made of their glorious accomplishments and heroic battles.
Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, the pillage and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished, and the lost creative potential.
Nor is there mention that most all the advances that make us truly human came before the Era of Empire—including the domestication of plants and animals, food storage, and the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature.
As the institutions of Empire took root, humans turned from a reverence for the generative power of life to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword.
The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of often ruthless kings. Social pathology became the norm and society’s creative energy focused on perfecting the instruments of war and domination. Priority in the use of available resources went to military, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage.
Great civilizations were built and then swept away in successive waves of violence and destruction. War, trade, and debt served as weapons of the few to expropriate the means of livelihood of the many and reduce them to slavery or serfdom. Whole empires were subjected to the delusional hubris and debaucheries of psychopathic rulers.
If much of this sounds familiar, it is because in the face of the democratic challenge, the dominator cultures and institutions of Empire simply morphed into new forms.
The ideals of the American Revolution heralded the possibilities of a new era of equality and popular democratic rule, but it was a more modest beginning than we have been taught to believe. Once the former colonies gained their freedom from British rule and declared themselves the United States of America, their new leaders put aside the pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and enjoy a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and set about securing their own power.
The king was gone, but the Constitution they drafted with a promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for “We the People of the United States” effectively limited political participation to white male property owners and secured the return of escaped slaves to their designated owners. Colonial expansion followed soon after as the new nation expropriated by armed force all of the Native and Mexican lands between themselves and the distant Pacific Ocean.
Global expansion beyond U.S. territorial borders followed. The United States converted cooperative dictatorships into client states by giving their ruling classes a choice between aligning themselves with U.S. economic and political interests for a share in the booty or being eliminated by assassination, foreign-financed internal rebellion, or military invasion. Following World War II, when the classic forms of colonial rule became unacceptable, international debt became a favored instrument for forcing poorer nations to open to foreign corporate ownership and control.
Most of the economic, social, and environmental pathologies of our time—including sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction—originate in the institutions of Empire. The resulting exploitation has reached the limits that the social fabric and Earth’s natural systems will endure.
As powerful as Wall Street appears to be, its abuse of power has so eroded the economic, social, and environmental foundations of its own existence that its fate is sealed. We the People have a choice. We can allow Wall Street to maintain its grip until it brings down the whole of human civilization in irrevocable social and environmental collapse. Or we can take control of our future and replace the Wall Street economy with the values and institutions of a New Economy comprised of locally owned businesses devoted to serving their communities by investing in the use of local resources to produce real goods and services responsive to local needs.
Either way, Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.
Wall St. Stands At The Pinnacle Of 5000 Years Of Human Exploitation
In an earlier day, our rulers were kings and emperors. Now they are corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers. Wall Street is Empire’s most recent stage. Its reign will mark the end of the tragic drama of a 5,000 year Era of Empire.
Imperial historians would have us believe that civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great empires that emerged some 5,000 years ago. Much is made of their glorious accomplishments and heroic battles.
Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, the pillage and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished, and the lost creative potential.
Nor is there mention that most all the advances that make us truly human came before the Era of Empire—including the domestication of plants and animals, food storage, and the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature.
As the institutions of Empire took root, humans turned from a reverence for the generative power of life to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword.
The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of often ruthless kings. Social pathology became the norm and society’s creative energy focused on perfecting the instruments of war and domination. Priority in the use of available resources went to military, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage.
Great civilizations were built and then swept away in successive waves of violence and destruction. War, trade, and debt served as weapons of the few to expropriate the means of livelihood of the many and reduce them to slavery or serfdom. Whole empires were subjected to the delusional hubris and debaucheries of psychopathic rulers.
If much of this sounds familiar, it is because in the face of the democratic challenge, the dominator cultures and institutions of Empire simply morphed into new forms.
The ideals of the American Revolution heralded the possibilities of a new era of equality and popular democratic rule, but it was a more modest beginning than we have been taught to believe. Once the former colonies gained their freedom from British rule and declared themselves the United States of America, their new leaders put aside the pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and enjoy a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and set about securing their own power.
The king was gone, but the Constitution they drafted with a promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for “We the People of the United States” effectively limited political participation to white male property owners and secured the return of escaped slaves to their designated owners. Colonial expansion followed soon after as the new nation expropriated by armed force all of the Native and Mexican lands between themselves and the distant Pacific Ocean.
Global expansion beyond U.S. territorial borders followed. The United States converted cooperative dictatorships into client states by giving their ruling classes a choice between aligning themselves with U.S. economic and political interests for a share in the booty or being eliminated by assassination, foreign-financed internal rebellion, or military invasion. Following World War II, when the classic forms of colonial rule became unacceptable, international debt became a favored instrument for forcing poorer nations to open to foreign corporate ownership and control.
Most of the economic, social, and environmental pathologies of our time—including sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction—originate in the institutions of Empire. The resulting exploitation has reached the limits that the social fabric and Earth’s natural systems will endure.
As powerful as Wall Street appears to be, its abuse of power has so eroded the economic, social, and environmental foundations of its own existence that its fate is sealed. We the People have a choice. We can allow Wall Street to maintain its grip until it brings down the whole of human civilization in irrevocable social and environmental collapse. Or we can take control of our future and replace the Wall Street economy with the values and institutions of a New Economy comprised of locally owned businesses devoted to serving their communities by investing in the use of local resources to produce real goods and services responsive to local needs.
Either way, Wall Street’s days are numbered. Ours need not be.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
SC105-10
http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/04/blowing-green-smoke.html#more
Blowing Green Smoke
"We also have Secretary Steven Chu, my Energy Secretary. Where is Steven? There he is over there."
- President Obama at Georgetown U last week
Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes to America's energy predicament, the president has been woefully misinformed. Mr. Obama pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost everyone of these ideas is inconsistent with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents some kind of magical thinking. What they have in common is that they're ideas the public wants to hear, whether they are truthful or not, because we don't want to change the way we live.
The central idea in Mr. Obama's speech is that we will reduce our oil imports by one-third in a decade. This is a gross distortion of reality. The truth is that our oil imports will be reduced automatically, whether we like it or not. The process is already underway. The nations that export oil to us are using much more of their own oil even while their supplies have passed peak production and entered depletion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico have some of the highest population growth-rates in the world. They sell gasoline to their own people for less than a dollar a gallon. At the same time China and India are driving more cars and importing a lot more of the world's declining supply. (China has perhaps the equivalent of a four-year supply of its own oil in the ground, and India has next-to-zero oil of its own).
One meme circulating around the Web these days is that the USA has the equivalent of "three Saudi Arabias" in the shale oil fields of North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That is not true. A lot of this magical thinking focuses on the Bakken fields of Dakota. We're currently producing less than 400,000 barrels a day out of Bakken and the projected maximum ten years from now is around 800,000. We use 20 million barrels a day in the US running suburbia, Wal Mart, and the US military. By the way, Bakken shale oil requires extensive rock fracturing operations - "fracking" - which means a lot of horizontal drilling, which means a lot of steel pipe. It is not just a matter of sticking a steel straw in the ground like we did in Texas in 1932.
Note: much of the shale "oil" in other western states is not actually oil. It is kerogen, an organic precursor to oil, in effect organic polymers that have not been subjected to enough heat and pressure to turn into oil. If you want to turn it into oil, you have to cook it - which takes energy! That's after the mining operation to scoop it out of the ground. That takes energy too. Or, you can send machinery into the ground and cook it in place. That takes energy, too. We are not going to get oil out of there anytime soon - and perhaps never.
The "drill drill drill" gang is under the impression that North America has vast unexplored regions where oil is just begging to be discovered. This is not true. The New York Times reported after Obama's speech - in a disgracefully dumb story by Clifford Krauss - that the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coast contain 3.8 billion barrels of oil. Really? Hello! The US uses over 7 billion barrels of oil every year. Does the Arctic National Wildlife refuge contain between 4 and 11 billion barrels (US gov estimate)? Great, that averages out to about a year or so of US supply. And I'm not even against drilling there, only against the idea that it represents a meaningful "solution" to our problem.
Meanwhile, the old standby Alaskan oil fields at Prudhoe Bay are depleting so remorselessly that there may not be enough flow in a year or so to move the oil through the famous pipeline.
How about Canada's tar sands? Well, first of all, they belong to Canada, not us, unless we want to change that - and that could be politically messy. The tar sands will never produce more than 3 million barrels a day. The operations are already too huge, costly, and damaging to the northern watershed. Canada is our number one source of imported oil, but China would also like to buy Canadian oil. Are we planning to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada from selling its oil to parties outside the Western Hemisphere? That could be messy, too.
Mr. Obama returned to the popular theme of bio-fuels. Our initial venture into this area was the ethanol fiasco which, predictably, took more energy to make than it produced, and had disastrous effects (still does) on corn commodity prices - in effect stealing from the food supply in order to drive to the Wal Mart. The next venture will apparently be in algae. We'll discover (once again) that what works as a science project doesn't scale to run millions of cars.
Mr. Obama told the nation that we have a 100 year supply of natural gas. (The moronic Larry Kudlow of CNBC told his audience it was 300 years). Neither of them knows what he is talking about (and evidently Energy Secretary Chu doesn't either). So far, proven reserves of shale gas amount to about a 4 to 6 year US supply at current rates, and total natural gas reserves - including conventional gas, the kind that doesn't require fracking - amounts to about a 12 year supply. The idea that we are going to ramp up an entire natural gas fueling system for America's tractor-trailer trucks is an absurdity.
Ditto the notion that we are going to electrify the US auto fleet.
Here's something to chew on: we run about 250 million cars in the USA. Let's say we ramped up an electric vehicle fleet of 10 million cars - which, by the way, is a purely hypothetical and wildly optimistic number. Do you think it might be a political problem if 10 million lucky Americans get to drive electric cars while everybody else either pays through the nose for gasoline, or can't even afford to own a car anymore?
There are a few things you can state categorically about the US energy predicament and the national conversation we're having about it - including the leaders of that conversation in government, business, and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our collective ass. None of these schemes is going to work as advertised. The disappointment over them will be massive and probably lead to awful political consequences.
Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.
The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all about the cars. That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get over the cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.
A special shout-out here to The New York Times, whose abysmal reporting on these issues, once again, is due to their reliance on a single source: the IHS-CERA group, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the paid public relations auxiliary of the oil industry, led by that mendacious sack of shit Daniel Yergin, whore-in-chief.
Blowing Green Smoke
"We also have Secretary Steven Chu, my Energy Secretary. Where is Steven? There he is over there."
- President Obama at Georgetown U last week
Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes to America's energy predicament, the president has been woefully misinformed. Mr. Obama pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost everyone of these ideas is inconsistent with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents some kind of magical thinking. What they have in common is that they're ideas the public wants to hear, whether they are truthful or not, because we don't want to change the way we live.
The central idea in Mr. Obama's speech is that we will reduce our oil imports by one-third in a decade. This is a gross distortion of reality. The truth is that our oil imports will be reduced automatically, whether we like it or not. The process is already underway. The nations that export oil to us are using much more of their own oil even while their supplies have passed peak production and entered depletion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico have some of the highest population growth-rates in the world. They sell gasoline to their own people for less than a dollar a gallon. At the same time China and India are driving more cars and importing a lot more of the world's declining supply. (China has perhaps the equivalent of a four-year supply of its own oil in the ground, and India has next-to-zero oil of its own).
One meme circulating around the Web these days is that the USA has the equivalent of "three Saudi Arabias" in the shale oil fields of North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That is not true. A lot of this magical thinking focuses on the Bakken fields of Dakota. We're currently producing less than 400,000 barrels a day out of Bakken and the projected maximum ten years from now is around 800,000. We use 20 million barrels a day in the US running suburbia, Wal Mart, and the US military. By the way, Bakken shale oil requires extensive rock fracturing operations - "fracking" - which means a lot of horizontal drilling, which means a lot of steel pipe. It is not just a matter of sticking a steel straw in the ground like we did in Texas in 1932.
Note: much of the shale "oil" in other western states is not actually oil. It is kerogen, an organic precursor to oil, in effect organic polymers that have not been subjected to enough heat and pressure to turn into oil. If you want to turn it into oil, you have to cook it - which takes energy! That's after the mining operation to scoop it out of the ground. That takes energy too. Or, you can send machinery into the ground and cook it in place. That takes energy, too. We are not going to get oil out of there anytime soon - and perhaps never.
The "drill drill drill" gang is under the impression that North America has vast unexplored regions where oil is just begging to be discovered. This is not true. The New York Times reported after Obama's speech - in a disgracefully dumb story by Clifford Krauss - that the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coast contain 3.8 billion barrels of oil. Really? Hello! The US uses over 7 billion barrels of oil every year. Does the Arctic National Wildlife refuge contain between 4 and 11 billion barrels (US gov estimate)? Great, that averages out to about a year or so of US supply. And I'm not even against drilling there, only against the idea that it represents a meaningful "solution" to our problem.
Meanwhile, the old standby Alaskan oil fields at Prudhoe Bay are depleting so remorselessly that there may not be enough flow in a year or so to move the oil through the famous pipeline.
How about Canada's tar sands? Well, first of all, they belong to Canada, not us, unless we want to change that - and that could be politically messy. The tar sands will never produce more than 3 million barrels a day. The operations are already too huge, costly, and damaging to the northern watershed. Canada is our number one source of imported oil, but China would also like to buy Canadian oil. Are we planning to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada from selling its oil to parties outside the Western Hemisphere? That could be messy, too.
Mr. Obama returned to the popular theme of bio-fuels. Our initial venture into this area was the ethanol fiasco which, predictably, took more energy to make than it produced, and had disastrous effects (still does) on corn commodity prices - in effect stealing from the food supply in order to drive to the Wal Mart. The next venture will apparently be in algae. We'll discover (once again) that what works as a science project doesn't scale to run millions of cars.
Mr. Obama told the nation that we have a 100 year supply of natural gas. (The moronic Larry Kudlow of CNBC told his audience it was 300 years). Neither of them knows what he is talking about (and evidently Energy Secretary Chu doesn't either). So far, proven reserves of shale gas amount to about a 4 to 6 year US supply at current rates, and total natural gas reserves - including conventional gas, the kind that doesn't require fracking - amounts to about a 12 year supply. The idea that we are going to ramp up an entire natural gas fueling system for America's tractor-trailer trucks is an absurdity.
Ditto the notion that we are going to electrify the US auto fleet.
Here's something to chew on: we run about 250 million cars in the USA. Let's say we ramped up an electric vehicle fleet of 10 million cars - which, by the way, is a purely hypothetical and wildly optimistic number. Do you think it might be a political problem if 10 million lucky Americans get to drive electric cars while everybody else either pays through the nose for gasoline, or can't even afford to own a car anymore?
There are a few things you can state categorically about the US energy predicament and the national conversation we're having about it - including the leaders of that conversation in government, business, and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our collective ass. None of these schemes is going to work as advertised. The disappointment over them will be massive and probably lead to awful political consequences.
Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.
The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all about the cars. That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get over the cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.
A special shout-out here to The New York Times, whose abysmal reporting on these issues, once again, is due to their reliance on a single source: the IHS-CERA group, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the paid public relations auxiliary of the oil industry, led by that mendacious sack of shit Daniel Yergin, whore-in-chief.
SC105-9
http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/80488
Vampire Squid Economics: A Case Study in Full-Blown Wetiko Disease
In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.
Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy'), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.
The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the "Big Wetikos," who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race' in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,' as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook' through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash' and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the "Big Wetikos," who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.
Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy's fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement' resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn't bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.
The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace,' in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based on, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like, apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market' and ‘sell' their creation as nonfiction, and we, as consumers, are ‘buying' it, believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.' The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con' game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.
A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream, or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural, self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.
Just as a vampire can't stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features' of wetiko finance. Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books' so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam. A monstrous, planet-wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards, who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous, semi-conscious masses, who are more than willing, based on their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.
At first glance, an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further, we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model' approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid, concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it, built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate, and wetiko-ized trajectory. The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political, which is why political change doesn't result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, however, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice - the artifice - of fake finance, like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.
The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy, however, is based on and supported by violence or the threat of violence, from a personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war, both visible and invisible. The ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion, for to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion, which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy, ‘might makes right.' The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.
The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi's infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a "vampire squid" that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor, and the formerly middle class, into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This "great vampire squid," to quote Taibbi, is "wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global, organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.
The Big Wetikos, are debt 'pushers,' in that they inject credit into the would-be victim, artificially enlarging, pumping up and ultimately poisoning the recipient. The more money owed the better, as the bigger the meal of debt off of which the predators will be able to cannibalistically feed. The bigger the debt, the deeper the pockets they can pick, and the more blood there is for the vampires to drink. They create VSID -- ‘Vampire Squid Induced Debt,' whose victims become its slaves and indentured servants. As it says in Proverbs (22:7), "The borrower is servant to the lender." The modern-day, debt-based wetikonomy is designed to have an exponentially, ever-increasing debt that in principle can never be paid off, analogous to how in wetiko disease there exists an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. The economic system imposed on humanity by the rapacious Big Wetikos is a perversion of the original, wholesome meaning of the word ‘eco-nomy,' which has the same root as the word ‘eco-logy,' and refers to the harmonious management of a household. The wetikonomy, instead of creating value and wealth that can be shared by all, impoverishes and enslaves the vast majority of humanity while simultaneously enriching the Big Wetiko predators. Big Wetikos are the ‘anti-Robin Hoods,' as they rob from the poor to give to the rich (themselves). The Big Wetikos buy up all of the assets that have tangible, real world value, like land for example, in exchange for their made-up fiat currency. Once the exchange is made, and they are in possession of the stuff of real value, they then devalue and debase the currency, which becomes ‘worth less' as time passes. The people are left holding an empty bag, while the Big Wetikos are increasingly in possession of everything else of value. The Big Wetikos are financial terrorists, actively engaged in warfare against humanity, using weapons of financial mass destruction (WFMD's).
In a wetikonomy, a perverse synergy occurs in the revolving door between government and high finance. The political system becomes a front for and extension of the banks. The United States Treasury is bankrupt, which is to say that it is owned by the banks. Having the upper hand, an international clique of banking elites are the ones who give the orders and, appearances to the contrary, choose the politicians who will occupy the positions of power to do their bidding. This is clearly evidenced by President Obama stacking his cabinet with the very same people who created the economic crisis in the first place, all of whom have intimate insider connections with and allegiance to a corrupt cabal of high financiers.
In a wetikonomy such as ours, the Big Wetikos who create economic crises get rewarded for their actions, gaining untold riches. Think of the bank bailouts, a criminal heist of historical proportions, where the banks blackmailed our nation, putting a metaphorical gun to our government's head, threatening that if we don't give them what they ask for, they will crash the global economy and we will have martial law. We acquiesced at the expense of our national sovereignty. True to form, there was very little accountability regarding how the banks used this money, and much of what happened to it is still a mystery. In the total opposite of what happens in a ‘real' economy, in the bailout, money was invested and sucked into the least productive aspect of the economy -- the financial system -- all at the expense of the taxpayers. The Big Wetikos get the booty, and the risks and liabilities are then dumped onto the general population, increasing our nation's debt, and turning almost everyone else into ‘serfs.' The inevitable austerity measures, e.g., cuts in retirement benefits and social services, will then be put squarely on the backs of the working people. Taxpaying citizens will be forced to pay off the debt over decades of hard work and toil, as they become indentured servants to the bank. As it is said, ‘Crime that pays, stays.' We live in a ‘klepto-plutocracy': a ruler-ship by really wealthy thieves. We need to ‘wake up' to that we are being taken for all that we are worth.
The result is the largest gap in the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor since right before the 1929 Great Depression, which creates enormous economic instability, a situation that the Big Wetikos can then use to their own advantage. This transferring of assets from the broad class of working people and entrepreneurs to the super-rich is no accident, but is purposefully being implemented by the cold-blooded, Big Wetiko banksters and power brokers, who operate as a global banking cartel, so as to continually centralize their power and control. Unfortunately, this isn't some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. The evidence is all around us, fully visible to anyone who has the eyes to see. A global robbery is in progress; the Big Wetikos are enacting a financial coup d'etat of staggering proportions right in front of our eyes. It is quite symbolic that the one time in the New Testament that Jesus got really pissed was towards the money-changers. Big Wetikos in positions of power in high finance, manipulating the markets so as to loot the planet's treasuries and precious resources, have become the modern-day pirates, ransacking and pillaging humanity and all living things. This real world process is an externalized reflection of the psychic coup d'etat being perpetrated by the wetiko bug within our own psyche. This is to say that we can recognize a deep process within ourselves as it is revealed to us in the seemingly outside world. Seeing this is to begin to spiritually awaken, as we aren't just ‘waking up' to the fact that we are being robbed, but are ‘waking up' to the deeper, dreamlike nature of our overall situation.
The Big Wetikos are not just draining the resources of individuals, but are sucking up the real assets of and taking down the economies of entire nations around the world (Think of what is happening in Europe now, i.e., Greece and Ireland, and ever more so in the U.S.). One striking symbol of this process is the IMF (International Money Fund), a vampire squid-like entity if there ever was one. The IMF is essentially a bankrupt institution backed by a cadre of banks that are themselves mostly insolvent. The IMF is constantly on the lookout for real assets to scarf up so as to sate its voracious debt-driven hunger. When a country finds itself in financial dire straits (a crisis oftentimes created by a coordinated, criminal cabal of financial terrorists that are in league with the IMF), the IMF swoops in, and offers a seemingly beneficent, helping hand in the form of bailouts to the ailing country in their time of need. The IMF, however, effectively loots and pillages the country that it is purportedly aiding, for once the country accepts the IMF's ‘help,' the IMF winds up taking over the country's real assets to pay back the loan, thus turning it into an economic hostage. Each country that the IMF subjects to its ‘economic shock therapy' becomes a laboratory experiment by which it continually refines and perfects its financial weaponry. The crisis in Greece is a recent example of this sinister experiment in how to financially take down and extract the wealth from an entire country. The resulting austerity measures imposed upon the now enfeebled and hobbled country are akin to a modern form of feudalism. Subsequent to Greece, Ireland was taken down using the same tactics, and other nations (Portugal, Spain and Italy to name but a few) are in the cross-hairs of this internationally organized form of financial warfare.
As the wetiko infection progresses in the global body politic, the global economic system becomes gradually redesigned to exert more and more effective top-down control by the few over the many, to the benefit of the elite few. These very hard economic times we live in, unbelievably, are the times of the greatest profits for certain select corporate conglomerates in all of history. Are people aware of this eye-opening and mind-blowing fact? It is revealing that the very phrases used to describe the grand larceny occurring daily in and as the global financial system are terms that specifically apply to the psycho-pathology of wetiko disease, such as ‘predatory lending,' ‘liar loans,' ‘zombie banks,' ‘disaster capitalism,' ‘financial terrorism,' ‘monster capitalism' ‘voodoo economics,' and ‘tapeworm economics,' to name but a few.
The one thing the Big Wetikos are most afraid of, however, is large numbers of people seeing through their charade and realizing that the emperor has no clothes. If enough people clearly see what the Big Wetikos are doing -- committing unconscionable crimes against humanity on a grand scale while they play roulette with our planetary inheritance -- their gig will be up. This is an externalized reflection of how the wetiko virus within ourselves is terrified of being seen, for once the bug is seen, it is ‘out of business.' The global financial system is a symbolic reflection openly revealing the psycho-spiritual disease of wetiko ‘in business.'
The wetiko economic system is a bribery system. The Big Wetikos give us a tiny, overflow trickle of the over-the-top profits they unjustly reap, in which we gladly share. We then pretend that we are ‘clean,' that we are not complicit in the systematic evil that is playing out. We fall under the self-inflicted illusion that we are not responsible and are merely victims of the system, and yet, we are simultaneously feeding off and supporting the very evil of the system as it kills us. Energetically, on the level of the deeper, underlying field, we pay a steep price if we are buying into this Faustian pact with the Devil. We receive what appear to be benefits, wetiko ‘frequent flyer miles,' so to speak, but at the ultimate cost of our own genocide. Similar to accepting candy from a predator, the rush of immediate gratification provides an apparent short-term benefit at the cost of our integrity, our freedom and ultimately, our lives. Our true power comes when we see our culpability and complicity in this process and accept our responsibility, thus enabling our ability to respond, which gives us the power to choose differently and change things.
The wetikonomy is both a symbol of and a portal through which we can see the bug of wetiko as it in-forms a living, yet diseased system emerging from the human mind. When we see the workings of the wetiko virus in any system, be it the financial system, the family system, or within our own selves, we are at the same time generating a living antibody of awareness which neutralizes the virulence of wetiko. Seeing how the global financial system is literally being animated and driven by the wetiko virus is to pop into a heightened state of awareness in which we are seeing a wetiko-ized system from outside of itself. We could only do this if we are beginning to see with healthy, wetiko-free eyes, and are thus separating and freeing ourselves from the toxic system. As we increasingly illumine the workings of wetiko, we more and more ‘distinguish ourselves' from it.
Our real debt is to ourselves; we owe it to ourselves to take a closer look and in-form ourselves and see through the business of wetiko. We can discover how money can be used as a tool that helps us cultivate and share true abundance. The return on our investment of attention will truly stimulate the neglected real economy and further inspire deeper heights of lucidity. This allows us to tap into the place within ourselves that is untainted by wetiko, through which we can consciously leverage and redesign the system to our collective advantage, which is to say, for the benefit of all. Herein lies our power to overcome the plague of wetiko, and in so doing, to build a world that works for everyone.
Vampire Squid Economics: A Case Study in Full-Blown Wetiko Disease
In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.
Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy'), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.
The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the "Big Wetikos," who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race' in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,' as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook' through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash' and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the "Big Wetikos," who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.
Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy's fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement' resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn't bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.
The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace,' in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based on, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like, apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market' and ‘sell' their creation as nonfiction, and we, as consumers, are ‘buying' it, believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.' The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con' game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.
A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream, or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural, self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.
Just as a vampire can't stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features' of wetiko finance. Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books' so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam. A monstrous, planet-wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards, who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous, semi-conscious masses, who are more than willing, based on their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.
At first glance, an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further, we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model' approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid, concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it, built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate, and wetiko-ized trajectory. The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political, which is why political change doesn't result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, however, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice - the artifice - of fake finance, like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.
The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy, however, is based on and supported by violence or the threat of violence, from a personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war, both visible and invisible. The ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion, for to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion, which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy, ‘might makes right.' The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.
The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi's infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a "vampire squid" that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor, and the formerly middle class, into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This "great vampire squid," to quote Taibbi, is "wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global, organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.
The Big Wetikos, are debt 'pushers,' in that they inject credit into the would-be victim, artificially enlarging, pumping up and ultimately poisoning the recipient. The more money owed the better, as the bigger the meal of debt off of which the predators will be able to cannibalistically feed. The bigger the debt, the deeper the pockets they can pick, and the more blood there is for the vampires to drink. They create VSID -- ‘Vampire Squid Induced Debt,' whose victims become its slaves and indentured servants. As it says in Proverbs (22:7), "The borrower is servant to the lender." The modern-day, debt-based wetikonomy is designed to have an exponentially, ever-increasing debt that in principle can never be paid off, analogous to how in wetiko disease there exists an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. The economic system imposed on humanity by the rapacious Big Wetikos is a perversion of the original, wholesome meaning of the word ‘eco-nomy,' which has the same root as the word ‘eco-logy,' and refers to the harmonious management of a household. The wetikonomy, instead of creating value and wealth that can be shared by all, impoverishes and enslaves the vast majority of humanity while simultaneously enriching the Big Wetiko predators. Big Wetikos are the ‘anti-Robin Hoods,' as they rob from the poor to give to the rich (themselves). The Big Wetikos buy up all of the assets that have tangible, real world value, like land for example, in exchange for their made-up fiat currency. Once the exchange is made, and they are in possession of the stuff of real value, they then devalue and debase the currency, which becomes ‘worth less' as time passes. The people are left holding an empty bag, while the Big Wetikos are increasingly in possession of everything else of value. The Big Wetikos are financial terrorists, actively engaged in warfare against humanity, using weapons of financial mass destruction (WFMD's).
In a wetikonomy, a perverse synergy occurs in the revolving door between government and high finance. The political system becomes a front for and extension of the banks. The United States Treasury is bankrupt, which is to say that it is owned by the banks. Having the upper hand, an international clique of banking elites are the ones who give the orders and, appearances to the contrary, choose the politicians who will occupy the positions of power to do their bidding. This is clearly evidenced by President Obama stacking his cabinet with the very same people who created the economic crisis in the first place, all of whom have intimate insider connections with and allegiance to a corrupt cabal of high financiers.
In a wetikonomy such as ours, the Big Wetikos who create economic crises get rewarded for their actions, gaining untold riches. Think of the bank bailouts, a criminal heist of historical proportions, where the banks blackmailed our nation, putting a metaphorical gun to our government's head, threatening that if we don't give them what they ask for, they will crash the global economy and we will have martial law. We acquiesced at the expense of our national sovereignty. True to form, there was very little accountability regarding how the banks used this money, and much of what happened to it is still a mystery. In the total opposite of what happens in a ‘real' economy, in the bailout, money was invested and sucked into the least productive aspect of the economy -- the financial system -- all at the expense of the taxpayers. The Big Wetikos get the booty, and the risks and liabilities are then dumped onto the general population, increasing our nation's debt, and turning almost everyone else into ‘serfs.' The inevitable austerity measures, e.g., cuts in retirement benefits and social services, will then be put squarely on the backs of the working people. Taxpaying citizens will be forced to pay off the debt over decades of hard work and toil, as they become indentured servants to the bank. As it is said, ‘Crime that pays, stays.' We live in a ‘klepto-plutocracy': a ruler-ship by really wealthy thieves. We need to ‘wake up' to that we are being taken for all that we are worth.
The result is the largest gap in the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor since right before the 1929 Great Depression, which creates enormous economic instability, a situation that the Big Wetikos can then use to their own advantage. This transferring of assets from the broad class of working people and entrepreneurs to the super-rich is no accident, but is purposefully being implemented by the cold-blooded, Big Wetiko banksters and power brokers, who operate as a global banking cartel, so as to continually centralize their power and control. Unfortunately, this isn't some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. The evidence is all around us, fully visible to anyone who has the eyes to see. A global robbery is in progress; the Big Wetikos are enacting a financial coup d'etat of staggering proportions right in front of our eyes. It is quite symbolic that the one time in the New Testament that Jesus got really pissed was towards the money-changers. Big Wetikos in positions of power in high finance, manipulating the markets so as to loot the planet's treasuries and precious resources, have become the modern-day pirates, ransacking and pillaging humanity and all living things. This real world process is an externalized reflection of the psychic coup d'etat being perpetrated by the wetiko bug within our own psyche. This is to say that we can recognize a deep process within ourselves as it is revealed to us in the seemingly outside world. Seeing this is to begin to spiritually awaken, as we aren't just ‘waking up' to the fact that we are being robbed, but are ‘waking up' to the deeper, dreamlike nature of our overall situation.
The Big Wetikos are not just draining the resources of individuals, but are sucking up the real assets of and taking down the economies of entire nations around the world (Think of what is happening in Europe now, i.e., Greece and Ireland, and ever more so in the U.S.). One striking symbol of this process is the IMF (International Money Fund), a vampire squid-like entity if there ever was one. The IMF is essentially a bankrupt institution backed by a cadre of banks that are themselves mostly insolvent. The IMF is constantly on the lookout for real assets to scarf up so as to sate its voracious debt-driven hunger. When a country finds itself in financial dire straits (a crisis oftentimes created by a coordinated, criminal cabal of financial terrorists that are in league with the IMF), the IMF swoops in, and offers a seemingly beneficent, helping hand in the form of bailouts to the ailing country in their time of need. The IMF, however, effectively loots and pillages the country that it is purportedly aiding, for once the country accepts the IMF's ‘help,' the IMF winds up taking over the country's real assets to pay back the loan, thus turning it into an economic hostage. Each country that the IMF subjects to its ‘economic shock therapy' becomes a laboratory experiment by which it continually refines and perfects its financial weaponry. The crisis in Greece is a recent example of this sinister experiment in how to financially take down and extract the wealth from an entire country. The resulting austerity measures imposed upon the now enfeebled and hobbled country are akin to a modern form of feudalism. Subsequent to Greece, Ireland was taken down using the same tactics, and other nations (Portugal, Spain and Italy to name but a few) are in the cross-hairs of this internationally organized form of financial warfare.
As the wetiko infection progresses in the global body politic, the global economic system becomes gradually redesigned to exert more and more effective top-down control by the few over the many, to the benefit of the elite few. These very hard economic times we live in, unbelievably, are the times of the greatest profits for certain select corporate conglomerates in all of history. Are people aware of this eye-opening and mind-blowing fact? It is revealing that the very phrases used to describe the grand larceny occurring daily in and as the global financial system are terms that specifically apply to the psycho-pathology of wetiko disease, such as ‘predatory lending,' ‘liar loans,' ‘zombie banks,' ‘disaster capitalism,' ‘financial terrorism,' ‘monster capitalism' ‘voodoo economics,' and ‘tapeworm economics,' to name but a few.
The one thing the Big Wetikos are most afraid of, however, is large numbers of people seeing through their charade and realizing that the emperor has no clothes. If enough people clearly see what the Big Wetikos are doing -- committing unconscionable crimes against humanity on a grand scale while they play roulette with our planetary inheritance -- their gig will be up. This is an externalized reflection of how the wetiko virus within ourselves is terrified of being seen, for once the bug is seen, it is ‘out of business.' The global financial system is a symbolic reflection openly revealing the psycho-spiritual disease of wetiko ‘in business.'
The wetiko economic system is a bribery system. The Big Wetikos give us a tiny, overflow trickle of the over-the-top profits they unjustly reap, in which we gladly share. We then pretend that we are ‘clean,' that we are not complicit in the systematic evil that is playing out. We fall under the self-inflicted illusion that we are not responsible and are merely victims of the system, and yet, we are simultaneously feeding off and supporting the very evil of the system as it kills us. Energetically, on the level of the deeper, underlying field, we pay a steep price if we are buying into this Faustian pact with the Devil. We receive what appear to be benefits, wetiko ‘frequent flyer miles,' so to speak, but at the ultimate cost of our own genocide. Similar to accepting candy from a predator, the rush of immediate gratification provides an apparent short-term benefit at the cost of our integrity, our freedom and ultimately, our lives. Our true power comes when we see our culpability and complicity in this process and accept our responsibility, thus enabling our ability to respond, which gives us the power to choose differently and change things.
The wetikonomy is both a symbol of and a portal through which we can see the bug of wetiko as it in-forms a living, yet diseased system emerging from the human mind. When we see the workings of the wetiko virus in any system, be it the financial system, the family system, or within our own selves, we are at the same time generating a living antibody of awareness which neutralizes the virulence of wetiko. Seeing how the global financial system is literally being animated and driven by the wetiko virus is to pop into a heightened state of awareness in which we are seeing a wetiko-ized system from outside of itself. We could only do this if we are beginning to see with healthy, wetiko-free eyes, and are thus separating and freeing ourselves from the toxic system. As we increasingly illumine the workings of wetiko, we more and more ‘distinguish ourselves' from it.
Our real debt is to ourselves; we owe it to ourselves to take a closer look and in-form ourselves and see through the business of wetiko. We can discover how money can be used as a tool that helps us cultivate and share true abundance. The return on our investment of attention will truly stimulate the neglected real economy and further inspire deeper heights of lucidity. This allows us to tap into the place within ourselves that is untainted by wetiko, through which we can consciously leverage and redesign the system to our collective advantage, which is to say, for the benefit of all. Herein lies our power to overcome the plague of wetiko, and in so doing, to build a world that works for everyone.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
SC105-8
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_collapse_of_globalization_20110328/
The Collapse of Globalization
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.
The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.
The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.
We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”
The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.
The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.
None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.
The Collapse of Globalization
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.
The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.
The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.
We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”
The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.
The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.
None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.
SC105-7
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant12102010.html
AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? ...... Ignorance and Courage in the Age of Lady Gaga
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don’t even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us — those elites who run the institutions — very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution’s members. “Hey, they’re a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?”
Doubting readers may consider America’s health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians’ lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.
Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman’s right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff.
That’s why they are called dumb.
But throw in sixty years of television’s mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain’t a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.
The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol’s bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama’s plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That’s a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to “refutiate” the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to “misunderstimate” her. After all, we’re still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Christsake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.
Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.
In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be “deployed,” find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.
But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.
Save my spot in the gulag, I’m off to Wal-Mart
Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance — especially the middle class Babbitry — from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.
Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet “thank god for his bounty” in the nation’s churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations’ resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism — using up exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.
The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, “Well you commie bastard, I ain’t ever seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I’ve got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!”
Uh, don’t look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.
Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can’t afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.
But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.
(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)
Like the old song says, “Them that don’t know don’t know they don’t know.” I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world.
A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, “quality of life” under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical considerations. “I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I’ll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!”
Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Guy R. McPherson points out, “79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won’t pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn’t it?”
Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.
Taser the tots
The “American Lifestyle,” increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is at this very moment is stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don’t let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.
It’s profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.
This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation — fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.
Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes. For instance, that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it’s ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it’s a paycheck for somebody — usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.
With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with — needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha’s Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.
In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?
But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.
Soooo . . .
It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer’s prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.
The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.
This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They’ve amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, “What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?”
The information racketeers
It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That’s why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.
Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.
Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.
Take the world recent shaking WikiLeak’s “revelations” of Washington’s petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government’s response — which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China’s. Millions of us in cyber ghettoes saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.
Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.
The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age — which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture — that they are the players and we are the pawns.
Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Noble Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time — momentarily fucking up government control of information. But “potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency,” (BBC) it ain’t.”
Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?
Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak’s PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.
The transparency scam
It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to “start a new American Revolution,” by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party “a historic populist movement.”
Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn’t get on TV unless it’s important.
Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.
In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machinelike harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?
Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we’ve convinced ourselves we’re in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.
What America needs is some balls
GOP honcho Mitch O’Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).
What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people’s insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.
Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American’s present material situation.
And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century’s successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history’s evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution).
So if we are talking change through revolt, we’re necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.
Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.
Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.
Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.
But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.
Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism’s faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it’s personal now.
Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.
Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.
AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? ...... Ignorance and Courage in the Age of Lady Gaga
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don’t even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us — those elites who run the institutions — very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution’s members. “Hey, they’re a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?”
Doubting readers may consider America’s health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians’ lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.
Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman’s right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff.
That’s why they are called dumb.
But throw in sixty years of television’s mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain’t a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.
The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol’s bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama’s plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That’s a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to “refutiate” the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to “misunderstimate” her. After all, we’re still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Christsake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.
Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.
In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be “deployed,” find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.
But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.
Save my spot in the gulag, I’m off to Wal-Mart
Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance — especially the middle class Babbitry — from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.
Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet “thank god for his bounty” in the nation’s churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations’ resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism — using up exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.
The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, “Well you commie bastard, I ain’t ever seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I’ve got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!”
Uh, don’t look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.
Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can’t afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.
But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.
(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)
Like the old song says, “Them that don’t know don’t know they don’t know.” I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world.
A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, “quality of life” under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical considerations. “I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I’ll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!”
Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Guy R. McPherson points out, “79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won’t pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn’t it?”
Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.
Taser the tots
The “American Lifestyle,” increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is at this very moment is stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don’t let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.
It’s profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.
This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation — fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.
Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes. For instance, that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it’s ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it’s a paycheck for somebody — usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.
With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with — needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha’s Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.
In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?
But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.
Soooo . . .
It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer’s prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.
The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.
This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They’ve amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, “What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?”
The information racketeers
It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That’s why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.
Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.
Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.
Take the world recent shaking WikiLeak’s “revelations” of Washington’s petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government’s response — which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China’s. Millions of us in cyber ghettoes saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.
Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.
The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age — which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture — that they are the players and we are the pawns.
Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Noble Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time — momentarily fucking up government control of information. But “potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency,” (BBC) it ain’t.”
Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?
Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak’s PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.
The transparency scam
It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to “start a new American Revolution,” by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party “a historic populist movement.”
Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn’t get on TV unless it’s important.
Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.
In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machinelike harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?
Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we’ve convinced ourselves we’re in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.
What America needs is some balls
GOP honcho Mitch O’Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).
What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people’s insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.
Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American’s present material situation.
And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century’s successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history’s evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution).
So if we are talking change through revolt, we’re necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.
Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.
Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.
Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.
But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.
Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism’s faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it’s personal now.
Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.
Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
