Tupac Shakur Speaks

OneLove 

:::MME:::

A Descent Into Madness

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
– John le Carré


America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.  The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism. Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.   Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.  Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible.  And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless demonstrations. It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change. Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education, and communities of solidarity and support for young people. At stake here is a politics and vision that informs ongoing educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to be educated not only to think outside of a savage market-driven commonsense but also to struggle for those values, hopes, modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that infuse democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social justice. For this reason, any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism. As I have argued elsewhere, too many progressives are stuck in the apocalyptic discourse of foreclosure and disaster and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a “sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.” This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities that stretch from Chicago to Athens, and other dead zones of capitalism throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values, and infrastructures that make critical education and community the core of a robust, radical democracy.  This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a democracy that extends not only the meaning of politics, but also a commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.

The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. There are no towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories interweave moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough.  Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it, overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of agency to the imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a permanent war economy.

These neoliberal stories are all the more powerful because they seem to undermine the public’s desire for rigorous accountability, critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue  for by right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to fill the content needs of corporate media and educational institutions. Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine both greed and indifference encouraging massive disparities in wealth and income. In addition, they also sanctify the workings of the market, forging a new f political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction version that preached the neoliberal gospel of wealth:  there is nothing beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.

The stories that dominate the American landscape embody what stands for commonsense among market and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties:  shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the poor, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter ID laws and rig electoral college votes;  full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself;  an ongoing attack on unions, on social provisions, and on the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions incarcerated in our nation’s prisons.

All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.” That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people.  Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they inflict on Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.

Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives spun by politicians whose arrogance and quests for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-mindedness, power-hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded in the policies they advocate.  The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in politicians such as Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who believes that even assistance to those unemployed, homeless, and working poor suffering the most in his home state should be cut in the name of austerity measures.  We hear it in the words of Mike Reynolds, another politician from Oklahoma who insists that government has no responsibility to provide students with access to a college education through a state program “that provides post-secondary education scholarship to qualified low-income students.” We find evidence of a culture of cruelty in numerous policies that make clear that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American society—whether low-income families, poor minorities of color and class, or young, unemployed, and failed consumers—are considered disposable, utterly excluded in terms of ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.

In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted that fall primarily on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the most.  For instance, Texas has enacted legislation that refuses to expand its Medicaid program, which provides healthcare for low-income people.  As a result, healthcare coverage will be denied to over 1.5 million low-income residents as a result of Governor Perry’s refusal to be part of the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion. This is not merely partisan politics; it is an expression of a new form of cruelty and barbarism now aimed at those considered disposable in a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest society.  Not surprisingly, the right-wing appeal to job-killing and provision-slashing austerity now functions as an updated form of medieval torture, gutting myriad of programs that add up to massive human suffering for the many and benefits for only a predatory class of neo-feudal bankers, hedge fund managers, and financiers that feed off the lives of the disadvantaged.

The general response from progressives and liberals does not take seriously the ways in which the extreme right-wing articulates its increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society. For instance, the views of new extremists in Congress are often treated, especially by liberals, as a cruel hoax that is out of touch with reality or a foolhardy attempt to roll back the Obama agenda. On the left, such views are often criticized as a domestic version of the tactics employed by the Taliban—keeping people stupid, oppressing women, living in a circle of certainty, and turning all channels of education into a mass propaganda machine of fundamentalist Americanism. All of these positions touch on elements of a deeply authoritarian agenda. But such commentaries do not go far enough. Tea Party politics is about more than bad policy, policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude. The hidden order of neoliberal politics in this instance represents the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempt to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory, prevent needless human suffering, protect the environment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good. Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from progressive government regulation, they are removed from any considerations of social costs. And where government regulation does exits, it functions primarily to bail out the rich and shore up collapsing financial institutions and for what Noam Chomsky has termed America’s only political party, “the business party.”  

The stories that attempt to cover over America’s embrace of historical and social amnesia at the same time justify authoritarianism with a soft-edge and weakens democracy through a thousand cuts to the body politic.  How else to explain the Obama administration’s willingness to assassinate American citizens allegedly allied with terrorists, secretly monitor the email messages and text messages of its citizens, use the NDAA to arrest and detain indefinitely American citizens without charge or trial, subject alleged spies to an unjust military tribunal system, use drones as part of a global assassination campaign to arbitrarily kill innocent people, and then dismiss such acts as collateral damage. As Jonathan Turley points out, “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”

At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to homelessness. In the end, these are stories about disposability in which growing numbers of groups are considered dispensable and a drain on the body politic, the economy, and the sensibilities of the rich and powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now work simply to survive in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting ahead and accumulating capital, especially for the ruling elite, is the only game in town. In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or redundant. But what is new about the politics of disposability that has become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which such anti-democratic practices have become normalized in the existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty soaked in blood, humiliation, and misery. Private injuries not only are separated from public considerations such narratives, but narratives of poverty and exclusion have become objects of scorn. Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such stories might get heard are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that produce them.  This suggests a critical analysis of how various educational forces in American society are distracting and miseducating the public. Dominant political and cultural responses to current events—such as the ongoing economic crisis, income inequality, health care reform, Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the  crisis of public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities—represent flashpoints that reveal a growing disregard for people’s democratic rights, public accountability, and civic values. As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them. From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these criminogenc and death-saturated forces in everyday life is undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social supports and restricting opportunities for democratic resistance. Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the neoliberal machinery of social death effectively weakens public supports and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and speaking about politics in the twenty-first century. But even more than neutralizing collective opposition to the growing control and wealth of predatory financial elites—which now wield power across all spheres of U.S. society—responses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of marginalized groups as disposable populations. All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the technologies and mechanisms of disposability. One consequence is the spread of a culture of cruelty in which human suffering is not only tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural order of things.

Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. We also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise.  Why are millions not protesting in the streets over these barbaric policies that deprive them of life, liberty, justice, equality, and dignity? What are the pedagogical technologies and practices at work that create the conditions for people to act against their own sense of dignity, agency, and collective possibilities?  Progressives and others need to make education central to any viable sense of politics so as to make matters of remembrance and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical and engaged citizens.

There is also a need for social movements that invoke stories as a form of public memory, stories that have the potential to move people to invest in their own sense of individual and collective agency, stories that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. If democracy is to once again inspire a populist politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social movements in which the stories told are never completed, but are always open to self- and social reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our collective imagination and struggles against injustice wherever they might be.  Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations, politics, and democracy be challenged and hopefully overcome.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and  a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent book is  The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth

Musings

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Reading Rant: "Zealot: The Life & Times of Jesus of Nazareth" by Reza Aslan

This is the next book on my Summer Reading List. This interview alone is enough to make everyone want to read it. It's well worth the time to (re)examine one's faith.......

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mankind: Death by Corporation By Dr Brian Moench

The word "corporation," derived from the Latin corporare, means to physically embody. In his History of the Corporation, Bruce Brown notes how in the first thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, "the world's most powerful corporations were all trying to embody the Christian God." In 1534, Saint Thomas More spoke of Jesus Christ as the ultimate corporation. "He [Jesus] doth . . . incorporate all christen folke and hys owne bodye together in one corporacyon mistical."


Needless to say, in the 21st century, corporations as creations of civilization make no pretense of embodying the Christian God. In fact, today, corporations come much closer to embodying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein than Jesus Christ. Ironically, created by and managed by humans, corporations have become almost robotic monsters, perpetrating, even feeding off human misery, threatening every aspect of human life - the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat - and even the future of mankind itself. What have these corporate Frankenstein monsters done for us lately?

At least 1,127 people have died in a collapsed garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the deadliest such accident in world history. As of this writing, the largest American clothing corporations, Gap, Walmart and Target, who are end users of these death-trap factories, are still unwilling to commit to any safety improvements. Fifteen people were killed and over 200 injured in West, Texas, from an explosion at a fertilizer plant. Despite the deaths of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary school, no meaningful legislation to subdue ongoing gun slaughter in the United States will get passed.

All of these recent tragic headlines have a common denominator. Corporate profits were, and are, allowed primacy over all other considerations. Even Wayne LaPierre's foaming-at-the-mouth speech about freedom, liberty and second amendment rights is a smokescreen for ginning up profits for gun manufacturers, because American gun owners are on a steady, 30-year decline. The death certificate of all these victims - at Dhaka, West and Sandy Hook - should read, "Death by corporation."

But rummaging over the current and historical larger-scale threats to entire societies, countries and mankind in general, we see a grotesque, recurrent theme - corporations willing to kill, maim and destroy even their own creators in the name of profit.

The science on the broad consequences of cigarette smoking was well established in Nazi Germany by the early 1940s. Nonetheless, tobacco corporations successfully fought any substantive regulation for the next three decades, while tens of millions of people died early deaths in the name of tobacco profits. Recall the testimony in 1994 from the CEOs of the seven largest tobacco corporations before Congress unanimously declaring that nicotine is not addictive, knowing full well that killing people was part of making them rich. Marketing cigarette addiction to children was an integral part of the strategy.

But the tobacco industry was no worse than the lead industry for the first 70 years of the 20th century.  Awareness of lead's serious health consequences - including madness and death - dates back to the Romans, the first to use it extensively. Symptoms of "plumbism," or lead poisoning, were already apparent as early as the first century BCE. Mental incompetence from lead exposure came to be synonymous with the Roman elite, manifest by the shockingly imbecilic emperors Caligula, Nero and Commodus.

Fast forward to 1980. In paint, gasoline and a myriad of other products, Americans were using 10 times more lead per capita than the Romans according to Jerome O. Nriagu, the world's leading authority on lead poisoning in antiquity. The average American lost about 6 IQ points from leaded gasoline and paint. Much worse for the nation as a whole, that loss of IQ also decreased the percentage of the population qualifying as "intellectually gifted" by about 40 percent and increased the population of "mentally challenged" by a similar amount. Numerous studies also showed a tight correlation between blood lead levels and aggressive, anti-social and criminal behavior

For over 50 years, the Ethyl Corp., General Motors, Standard Oil, Du Pont and the American Petroleum Institute obscured, obstructed and lied about the mounting evidence of a public health catastrophe from tetraethyl lead, aggressively marketing it worldwide and fighting every attempt to regulate or curtail its use. Ethyl Corp. even increased its overseas business 10-fold between 1964 and 1981 while its product came under growing harsh scrutiny in the United States.  C.M. Shy, of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, in a paper published by the World Health Statistics Quarterly, declared leaded gasoline is "The Mistake of the 20th Century."

A report commissioned by the United Nations calculated the yearly global cost of lead in gasoline had reached 1.1 million deaths, 322 million lost IQ points, 60 million crimes committed and an economic loss of 4 percent of global GDP, or $2.4 trillion. Lead didn't even benefit engine performance. Lead, like other heavy metals, does not degrade, is not combustible and is never destroyed. The world was permanently blanketed with this deadly metal purely for corporate profit.

By 1898, asbestos was declared in Great Britain to be an extremely hazardous dust. By the 1920s, lawsuits began to be filed against the asbestos industry. The Johns-Manville Corporation then successfully lobbied for national legislation - shunting asbestos workers' claims to workers' compensation panels and away from juries. With the industry effectively shielded from costly plaintiff lawsuits, they proceeded to fund medical studies, whose published results were falsified, exonerating asbestos as a cause of cancer. When independent studies revealed widespread disease from asbestos, internal corporation memos callously mocked their workers, stating, "if you have enjoyed a good life for working with asbestos products, why not die from it?"

Publicly, asbestos companies claimed there was no evidence people could become sick and die from asbestos exposure. Internally however, asbestos executives admitted that the disease process begins as soon as asbestos is inhaled, is progressive and irreversible, and is very advanced by the time it is diagnosed. Eventually, Johns-Manville filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. David Oster, the attorney in charge of the Manville trust, said the documents show that corporations knew the dangers of asbestos back in 1934 and that there was a corporate conspiracy to prevent workers from discovering that their exposure to asbestos could kill them. "Manville officers, directors and employees held secret information, that had it been revealed would have prevented the deaths of thousands of people." 

The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide 125 million people are still exposed to asbestos in the workplace, and over 107,000 people die every year from asbestos-related diseases. Corporations in countries like Russia, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Canada still mine and sell massive quantities of the deadly mineral. Approximately 600 asbestos companies producing 60,000 asbestos-laden products operated worldwide in 2011. None of them can claim ignorance about their deadly product. None of the people who run these corporations can claim they don't realize that they make their living serving up a slow, miserable death for others.

Enter Monsanto. Forbes Magazine gave Monsanto its "Company of the Year Award" in 2009. Perhaps it is no surprise that readers of Natural News overwhelming awarded Monsanto a slightly different award, "World's Most Evil Corporation." What has Monsanto done to achieve this lofty perch? None other than seek to monopolize the world's food supply with expensive genetically modified (GM) seeds that have to be purchased each year and require expensive and toxic pesticides, which Monsanto also happens to produce. It doesn't take the geniuses at Forbes magazine to figure out that if you own the rights to all the food grown everywhere, you literally rule the world.

In pursuing this business model, Monsanto has managed to do more damage to the world's food supply and public health than any other single entity. About 90 percent of all US-grown corn, soybeans, canola, and sugar beets are genetically modified versions, which means that virtually all processed food items contain at least one or more genetically modified ingredients. You simply cannot avoid Monsanto's genetically modified food, no matter how hard you may try.

Exactly none of the supposed benefits of GM crops - increased yields, more food production, controlled pests and weeds, reductions in chemical use in agriculture or drought-tolerant seeds - have actually materialized. The Global Citizen's report on the State of GMOs points out that, in fact, the opposite has occurred. GMOs have resulted in greater pesticide use and the predictable emergence of herbicide resistant super weeds. In fact, 130 types of weeds in 40 states are now herbicide-resistant, increasing costs, cutting yields and leading to the use of more powerful and increasingly toxic chemical herbicides.

Numerous studies with animals and humans call into serious question the safety of GMOs - even disregarding the added pesticide exposure. In particular, Monsanto's Bt toxin, the genes of a toxic bacteria inserted into the seed DNA of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, squash and cotton, kills insects by splitting open their stomachs when they bite on the plant. Monsanto claimed that Bt toxin is broken down in the human digestive system, so "don't worry, be happy." A new study shows that claim to be Monsanto propaganda. When humans eat Bt toxin, it transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines, which continue to function like mini-pesticide factories. Blood samples from 93 percent of pregnant mothers and 80 percent of fetuses show the presence of active Bt toxin.

Studies in humans are limited, something much to Monsanto's liking. But numerous animal studies have linked Bt toxin and GMOs to allergic reactions, infertility, immune dysregulation, gastrointestinal and kidney disease, and accelerated aging (1).   There is circumstantial evidence in animals and humans that GMOs may be contributing to the epidemic of autism. Calling for a moratorium on GM foods, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) in 2009, citing several animal studies, concluded, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects," adding, "GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health."  The consensus among scientists at the FDA was that GMOs are dangerous, but key Monsanto executives, appointed to federal agencies under multiple administrations, including Obama's, squashed that information. For example, Obama appointed Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former vice president, as food safety czar at the FDA.  That’s like having a tobacco executive crafting regulations on cigarettes.

Virtually every branch of the US government, including the Supreme Court and the World Bank, has acted as Monsanto's handmaiden, often times using taxpayer money to do so. Monsanto's ruthless business practices, high seed prices and vicious legal attacks have played a key role in the disappearance of small and medium-size farms, bankrupting small farmers and driving world agriculture further toward huge monocultures and complete control by a handful of agribusinesses and food-processing corporations. There is a growing epidemic among small farmers in many countries, especially India, where in the past 16 years, well over 250,000 have committed suicide, most of them small cotton farmers where Monsanto controls 95 percent of the cotton seed and makes its living off of suing farmers trapped in debt.

In part two of "Death by Corporation," we'll talk about the fossil fuel corporations, the nuclear industry, financial, and pharmaceutical corporations and the TransPacific Trade Partnership that is poised to let all of them rule the world like a gang of Frankensteins.

Part II: Death by Corporation, Part II: Companies as Cancer Cells

( Dr. Brian Moench is president of  Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.)

OneLove

:::MME:::

A Never-Ending Spiral

This is an eye-opener. Jeremy Scahill represents the best of adversarial journalism which is my preference over the bankrupt, state-sponsored/entertainment-driven crap that passes as news. 

Listen & learn....

OneLove

:::MME:::

Culture Rot: America’s Real Enemy Within

America has a long list of enemies – Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela, hackers, WikiLeaks – but these are mere blemishes on the surface of the apple. Instead of maintaining 1000 military bases overseas and spending half the national budget on weapons to fight foreign wars, America might want to consider taking a moment to focus on a potentially greater enemy ... the enemy within: a rotting culture. 

Depressed. Obese. Poor. Diseased. Raped. Bullied. Suicidal. Armed.

Here’s a portrait of America’s future – an average class of 100 students graduating high school today:

• 71 have been physically assaulted
• 39 have been bullied
• 64 have had sexual intercourse
• 28 have been sexually victimized
• 21 have had a sexually transmitted infection
• 29 have suffered serious symptoms of depression
• 34 are overweight or obese
• 22 live in significant poverty
• 16 have carried a weapon in the past year
• 14 have contemplated suicide and 6 have carried out an attempt
• 10 have been raped

Source: Child Trends

OneLove

:::MME:::

Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime by Kevin Drum

I know, I know: I'm a broken record on the subject of lead exposure in kids and crime rates 20 years later. But there's lately been a renewed focus on black crime and black incarceration rates, as well as the racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics in New York City's stop-and-frisk program. Guess what? The lead theory has something to say about that.

For starters, did you know that arrest rates for violent crime have fallen much faster among black juveniles than among white juveniles? They have, as the charts below show. Rick Nevin explains why:

African-American boys disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system were also disproportionately exposed to lead contaminated dust as young children, because black children were disproportionately concentrated in large cities and older housing. In 1976-1980, 15.3% of black children under the age of three had blood lead above 30 mcg/dl (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood), when just 2.5% of white children had blood lead that high. In 1988-1991, after the elimination of leaded gasoline, 1.4% of black children and 0.4% of white children under the age of three had blood lead above 25 mcg/dl.

In other words, black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate. In the early 80s, black kids had elevated lead levels at 6x the rate of white kids. After the elimination of leaded gasoline, black kids still had elevated lead levels at 3x the rate of white kids, which explains some of the continued disparity in juvenile crime rates, but that still represented enormous progress. Not only was the ratio lower, but the absolute numbers were far lower too.

There have been, and still are, lots of potential explanations for the disparity in violent crime rates between black and white teens: the toxic legacy of racism and slavery; poverty rates in inner cities; gang culture; and many more. But as Nevin points out, none of the popular theories explains the dramatic rise and fall of crime over the past 50 years, nor in particular why black crime declined more than white crime starting in the early 90s. That's because none of the usual suspects has varied dramatically in the past 20 years. Family structure in black households has been largely unchanged; poverty went down but then went back up; and incarceration rates haven't increased.

But the number of kids with toxic levels of exposure to lead has decreased steadily throughout the entire period, and it decreased far more among black kids than white kids. It's true that black juvenile crime rates are still higher than white juvenile crime rates, but they're nowhere near the levels that caused so many people to live in fear in the 70s and 80s. Nevin wishes more people knew about this:

If the public were more aware of the magnitude of the ongoing changes in juvenile arrest rates, then law-abiding youths might not be unfairly viewed as interchangeable with juvenile criminals....The fact that black children still had disproportionately elevated blood lead in 2007-2010 is an egregious racial injustice. The fact that the news media fails to recognize the magnitude of ongoing declines in juvenile arrest rates creates other injustices, sometimes veiled in a cloak of sympathy, sometimes in the form of an ominous lecture, and sometimes in the form of arrest rate trends for minor offenses.

No one pretends that lead exposure is the only source of crime, or the only source of disparity in crime rates. But it's a big part of the picture, and the plain fact is that a lot of people are still living in the past when it comes to fear of black teens. Thanks to falling lead exposure, both black and white teens are far less violent than in the past, and the fall has been most pronounced among blacks. If we wanted to, we could produce even further declines by reducing lead exposure among black toddlers to the same levels as white toddlers, but we're not there yet because blacks still live disproportionately in old housing and in areas where lead dust from nearby highways settled into the soil decades ago. That's due to the toxic legacy of racism, redlining, poverty, and more. But we could fix it, even if we can't entirely overcome racism itself.

The bottom line is simple: We poisoned them. We owe it to them to clean up the poison, not just lock up their kids.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Murdering The Wretched of the Earth by Chris Hedges

 
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code that prohibits alcohol, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a cauldron of blood and suffering.  

The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give followers of the movement a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You cannot get married. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing global economy, a world where the wretched of the Earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. It will not be lifted soon.  

The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand it will ignite a war that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were convinced by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank-and-file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs and explosive devices will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as it did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for the New York Times, although this time the scale of the attacks will become fiercer and wider, far harder to control or ultimately crush.

What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, declining crop yields caused by climate change, overpopulation and rising food prices. Nearly half of Egypt’s 80 million people—33 percent—are 14 or younger and live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at $2.00 a day. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food, and often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians or 17 percent of the population suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared to 14 percent in 2009, according to the report by U.N. World Food Program (WFP) and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children with 31 percent of children under 5 being stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at over 70 percent.

Victor Hugo described this war with the poor in Les Misérables as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, whose persecution and deprivation was ignored until it morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”

The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the Earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry so global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like visit any city morgue in Cairo. 

OneLove

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The Hunted & The Hated

This past Monday,  a federal judge ruled that New York City’s controversial stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional and amounts to "indirect racial profiling" as officers routinely stop "blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white." An avalanche of bullshit has come down since the ruling defending this odious policy. The billionaire mayor of New York, for example, stated that this ruling will negatively impact the city's crime rate. This claim flies in the face of the facts which is that nine out of ten people stopped were not arrested or even given a summons. Guns were found in 0.12% of stops with men and .013% for women. In a nutshell, the vast majority of those questioned were innocent of any wrongdoing. To make any correlation between stop and frisk and major drops in crime is just ignorant and, in truth, uncovers some ugly truths. Listening to the young brother in the above clip gives us a glimpse of the human toll these stops take and it is important that everyone understands this. The clip below is equally powerful - listen to the good preacher's words carefully.....
OneLove

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Stop & Frisk the Real Bandits

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

Well played... 

OneLove

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Genocide & Empire II : An Indonesian Case Study

(See Genocide & Empire: A Namibian Case Study )

A policy of permanent warfare, degradation and suppression of the humanity of the population (especially those not in the "conquering class")  has been a model for every empire. Let's not forget the role of keeping the population "happy" with entertainment and sporting spectacles. This has played out from the time of the Romans to the present.This cycle will continue to repeat until enough people wake up to change this and elevate human societies to another level. What will it take? Catastrophic climate change? Destructive wars? Ecological disasters? Famine? Food/Water shortages? Global financial meltdowns? 

OneLove

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Why Hierarchy Creates a Destructive Force Within the Human Psyche

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask. 
~Erich Fromm

Short but thought-provoking clip.....

OneLove

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The Four Horsemen

Check out this summary of The Four Horsemen Survival Manual which accompanies this important documentary. 
 
Sometimes when things are going well for you personally - family, job, friends, vacations, quiet times for reflection, etc- life seems fine. Yes, there are problems, but for you personally, nothing really to complain about. The thing is change is often gradual. Sometimes it takes decades for us to see things clearly, but if we are not affected personally, we may not see anything at all - until one day the things we were blind to knocks at our door. The only problem is it might be too late to do anything about what we are about to behold.

This documentary builds on this simple insight. It starts with the premise of a “cognitive map” which determines our perspective on the world at large — and might be seen as the modern-day battle field where the fate of this civilization will be decided upon. Throughout the feature we hear from an impressive group of thinkers who  dissect the clockwork of the global economy and the catastrophic implications if the people who rule the world are allowed to see their agenda through. The modern-day “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” encompasses -

 A rapacious financial system
 Escalating organized violence
 Abject poverty for billions
 Exhaustion of Earth’s resources

Denial runs deep in the USA. People just don't want to see what is standing right in front of them out of fear, apathy, ignorance/stupidity, comfort or some other deep-seated cause. Yet I suspect that even within this sad group, there are those who have a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong.

Although this documentary fails to adequately incorporate the role of the mass media and education, it is nonetheless an important contribution to our collective quest to understand what is really going on in this upside down world and things we can do to resist. 

Share this with your entire family.

OneLove

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Education as a System of Indoctrination of the Young

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” 

― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

OneLove

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Technoslave by Eric Slate

Once, while I was riding on a crowded bus, the man sitting next to me threw his cell phone out the window. When his phone rang, instead of dutifully answering it, he casually tossed it away. I was stunned. He looked at me, shrugged and looked away. I had no idea if it was his, if it was stolen or if he even knew what a cell phone was. But in one seemingly careless motion, he managed to liberate himself from something that has completely consumed me.

When my cell phone rings, it's an incessant and incensed vibration that demands my immediate attention. I curse its calling, but am unable to refuse. Whether I'm in the middle of a conversation, in the shower or sound asleep, the ringing causes such panic and excitement that I feel forced to answer.

"The pressure to answer the pulse or ring in a flash has Technoslaves hopping to grab the message, scrambling away to find clearer signals and/or deal with the urgency of the moment as though it borders somewhere on the fringes between life and death," writes The Trends Journal editor Gerald Celente." ... And for what, to say hello, to bitch and moan or do business on the phone?"

Technology is supposed to free us from the shackles of work and give us more leisure time. But it has proven to do the exact opposite. A 2005 Leger Marketing survey for the technology newspaper Computing Canada found that the majority of people feel technology has meant more work and less time with the family. Whether it's cell phones, Blackberry's, video games or email, we have become a culture enslaved by our electronics.

As people fall further into their personal gadgets, scientists and psychologists are now beginning to classify technology dependency as a major health problem, putting it in the same categories as alcoholism, gambling and drug addiction. The stress it creates is causing arthritis, migraines and ulcers. These physical attachments are causing weight gain, back problems and bad skin. But most troubling, it is having a powerful impact on our personal development. It seems the more 'connected' we are, the more detached we become.

"Humans are being trapped in a high-tech cycle that is freezing their minds away from living in the moment, looking at life and taking in what's around them," writes Celente. "While technology has radically altered the externals of life, it has done nothing demonstrable to enhance the internals: moral, emotional, philosophical and spiritual values."

As I stare blankly into a computer screen for hours on end, sometimes I wonder if there's a secret message hidden in this technological maze. But the more I stare, the more I keep coming up with the same answer: I am trapped.


(See also Cyborg Nation  and Machine Zone. )


OneLove


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Musings

“The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree. . . . Ultimately such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians.” 

—Lewis Mumford

OneLove

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Poet's Nook; "Things I Want Decided" by Izumi Shikibu

Which shouldn’t exist

in this world,

the one who forgets

or the one

who is forgotten?

Which is better,

to love

one who has died

or not to see

each other when you are alive?

Which is better,

the distant lover

you long for

or the one you see daily

without desire?

Which is the least unreliable

among fickle things—

the swift rapids,

a flowing river,

or this human world?

OneLove

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