(It starts looking like a video all about youth obesity, but keep watching — that’s just setup for the real discussion. He also spends a minute perpetuating the myth that high fructose corn syrup is somehow magically worse than sugar despite their being nutritionally and chemically the same and broken down and used by the body in the same way, but that’s also not the focus of this video.)

(Update: Quick addendum. I previously mentioned that high fructose corn syrup was chemically identical and metabolized identically to sugar. I was wrong. They are indeed different.
However, as this recent science blog points out in its refutation of the highly biased, inappropriate, and premature suggestion made in a study regarding HFCSs and possible pancreatic cancer connection, the end result between HFCS and table sugar is negligible at best.
Also, this science blog also points out the chemical and metabolic differences between HFCS and refined sugar, but likewise establishes that HFCS is not a significant factor (no more than table sugar) in obesity. It’s an easy to blame scapegoat that distracts from the fact that obesity and diabetes come from too many calories and too little exercise. Period.)

Ebert makes the analogy:

“A big tree blew over over on our property. That was an act of God. Parts of it landed on my neighbor’s property. Another act of God. It was my responsibility to pay for its removal. If I’m going to go around growing trees, I have to pay if they get blown over. You can be sure my neighbor will pay if one of his trees blows this way. And if my neighbor could prove that I was trying to cut the tree down (for fuel, let’s say) and it fell the wrong way, he’d have grounds for a lawsuit. Especially if it fell on his house and he could no longer live there.
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BP had a very big tree that blew down in the Gulf. It was not looking after it properly. It ignored or evaded safety regulations. It possibly bore criminal responsibility. The tree fell on my property. BP should have to pay to remove that tree, right? What if it enlisted cops to prevent me from even walking over and taking photos of what they were doing on my property? What if they issued statements saying it wasn’t such a large tree, and my property would soon recover? What if it landed on my house, and BP said it wasn’t much of a house in the first place?”

If BP were a neighbor, their expectation to pay for damages would be obvious. Their avoiding responsibility would be criminal. But in the corporatocracy we have now, we have lawmakers apologizing to BP and equating the demand for damage-repair funds from them as a “shakedown,” and those with a veneer of ethics making some grumblings about responsibility but doing nothing to hold BP accountable in any real sense.

Ebert remarks:

“What I don’t understand is how corporations were granted their immunity. How it is axiomatically understood that their interests come before those of people or even their governments? Why must they be defended against reform?”

Isn’t that the kicker? Somehow, as modern capitalism in the U.S. grew as the robber-barons began buying laws and politicians in the late 1800s, the culture was crafted for us in a way that made us forgive corporations of their crimes, their sociopathology, their activities that would put individuals found guilty of equivalent behavior behind bars for life. Corporations have become the heart and soul of America, the beacons of freedom and democracy, sacrosanct symbols of good ol’ God-fearin’ American capitalism. We have come to value the idea of the corporation as more valuable than the ideas of civic duty and responsibility, of civic service, of representative government and the ideas of democracy that used to stand for being American.

Ebert observes:

“Corporations know no patriotism. They are multi-national. They deal with all markets. It is hard to say just where a big corporation is actually centered. They may have a corporate edifice, but it can be anywhere. Halliburton is in Houston, in theory, but it opened an major office in Dubai, and that is where its chairman, president and CEO lives and works. BP, the fourth largest company in the world, is in London and Houston. Enron seemed to be in Houston, but it turned out not to be a company at all. The largest company in the world is Wal-Mart, which has had great success in China, where its profits will eventually outstrip those in the U.S. It effectively decides the minimum wage in the United States.”

There was a time, during early modern capitalism, when corporate identity and nationalism were interchangeable. When company names like US Steel and American Oil Company weren’t ironic. But the entire point of the corporation, the entire purpose of capitalism, is greatest profit at the lowest cost. So the second national boundaries became elastic enough for countries to locate factories in other countries, place tax shelters in others, relocate service elsewhere, the nationalism of corporate identity evaporated faster than wages and benefits as corporations fell over themselves to become multi-nationals.

And now the Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are people, and may spend as much as they want to influence elections. Glenn Smith in that linked article said:

“Ask yourself this question. If you had to persuade your community about political opinion X, but corporations opposed your view, would you stand a chance knowing that their “political speech” was worth much more than your political speech? The answer is obvious. Mere people have been thrown on the scrap heap. The U.S. Supreme Court is lifting corporations to the top of the evolutionary ladder.
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Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.
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I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.”

Blanket hating of government is ridiculous. A government can take any of many, many forms. And the U.S. is designed, originally, to be of, by, and for the people. That means that in essence, hating the government is hating the people — hating yourself and your fellow citizens.

Of course, that would have made more sense before modern capitalism. Over the last 100 years or so, there’s been a massive shift going on under our very noses. The government is not the problem, not if it were of, by, and for the people. If that were the case, it wouldn’t matter how big or powerful it is, it’d still be in service and beholden to us. But that’s not who the government represents or serves anymore. It is now the legislative and enforcement arm of multi-national corporations. Like BP. Politicians are so bought and paid for by corporations that they should be wearing NASCAR race outfits.

And this foundational shift in our government coincides with a cultural shift that serves to protect the corporation no less. We the people have been trained over a few generations to give corporations a pass. Value their interests over our own.

Unions? Why, their goal of aiding and protecting the worker is evil because it harms the poor maligned CEO and shareholders and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be a worker and we’ll be CEOs!

Regulations? Why, trying to protect the consumer from fraud and exploitation and safety hazards is evil interference in the Holy Free Market which harms the CEO and the shareholders, and we don’t want that because one day we’ll no longer be consumers, we’ll be CEOs!

The economy collapses and the middle-class crumbles and corporations get giant bail-outs with our money. But that’s not the corporations’ fault, that’s the fault of the government — government is inherently evil. This is a no-lose position for the corporatocracy: so long as government has power, buy it so that it serves the corporate interest and not the peoples’. And if the people wise up, make government the enemy. If government loses power and becomes ineffectual, “small enough to drown in a bathtub,” who’s there to fill the power vacuum? The monopolies and the megacorps and transnationals — and the oligarchy that owns them, that have held the real power in this country for the last 40 years.

What’s the solution? That’s the question that’s always on my mind, nearly constantly for the last 5 years or so, since I really started paying attention to where we are and especially how we got here. Pfft, don’t ask me; I’m just an armchair amateur cultural critic wannabe. The fantasy solution is for the workers to rise up, revolt against the 5% who own 90% of the wealth, the corporate owners and the CEOs, abolish private ownership of large corporations, redistribute that inherited and stolen wealth back to we the 95% it was stolen from, and return the government to the people and not corporate-owned career politicians. But to be honest? I think we’re on a one-way track of corporate despotism, two-class society (the working poverty and the rich), and nothing can be done except feel at home in our chains.

I imagine that may be how the French peasant class felt by the 1780s. Before the utterly unthinkable happened and they rose up and changed the entire course of history, in a blink of an eye, and abolished royalty, wrested power from the wealthy elite and put it back into the hands of the masses.

Imagine! Before the French Revolution, royalty was a divine right, God-given and decreed! To contemplate revolting against royalty was blasphemy. Was for most people not even comprehensible. People can change the foundations of everything most take for granted as immutable, permanent, always-has-been-and-always-will-be. But we know from history that every great advancement in society has come from the abused class revolting against the abusers.

Government isn’t our enemy. It’s a tool that serves whoever controls it. Right now, the oligarchy controls it to serve them. And they’re laughing themselves into pants-wetting as we fight amongst ourselves over race and immigration and religion and the distractions of Republicrat and Demopublican differences, completely oblivious to the real problems. We’re fighting over the positioning of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Peter Schiff wrote an article titled, “Why Not Another World War.” It’s actually an interesting article in which he explains how we all agree that World War II ended The Great Depression and sparked the greatest American economic trend, so why not have another? This Gulf War is too small to do the same thing again. Except, war sucks and has this annoying tendency to be deadly and break things — so let’s make it a great World Water Balloon War!

Go ahead and read the article; it’s short and entertaining. But, then at the end of it he takes a sharp turn into La-La Land.

After laying a good case for describing the World War as the biggest socialized employment program, evah, (major props to Schiff on this — most right-leaners usually berate the New Deal as being evil socialism and shout that it was the war that saved the country… and then conveniently ignore the fact that how the war saved the country was by creating government jobs for millions and spending truckloads of taxes on government programs known as weapons manufacturing), he explains how his proposed Fun War of the same scope of government spending wouldn’t work because the government couldn’t afford such a project like it did 70 years ago: We’re already too taxed and there’s no savings.

“Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult.”

(Keep that in mind for a moment.)

And again, I give Schiff a hand for observing:

“If all of this seems absurd, that’s because it is. War is a great way to destroy things, but it’s a terrible way to grow an economy.

What is often overlooked is that war creates hardship, and not just for those who endure the violence. Yes, US production increased during the Second World War, but very little of that was of use to anyone but soldiers. Consumers can’t use a bomber to take a family vacation.”

It amuses me when libertarians like Schiff and Marxists share the same opinion. The base of our modern capitalist economy has been the military industrial complex. Nearly half our taxes go to the Pentagon to help create metric craptonnes of ammunition and rockets and equipment that gets spent out in some foreign land, and in support of politics which makes sure we continue to have a reason to spend massive amount of natural resources and labor in sending stuff overseas to help kill people and get left there.

OK, so, war is bad. Got it. We’re on the same page. But what suggestion does Schiff have to revitalize the economy? Well, after spending paragraphs outlining a doomed-from-the-start Global Liquid-ular War, and then more to explain how we can’t afford it, his plan is explained in his final paragraph:

“What we need is more savings, more free enterprise, more production, and a return of American competitiveness in the global economy. Yes, we need Rosie the Riveter – but this time she has to work in the private sector making things that don’t explode. To do this, we need less government spending, not more.”

Why, of course! Let’s just do that! Here we go– oh, wait… How? See, I left my magic wand at the dry cleaners, and my Genie isn’t returning my calls.

Look, first of all, you, Schiff, already agreed that it was government spending that pulled us out of the Depression, so already we can establish that theoretically, yes, government spending can be an answer. What it gets spent on is important, and it’s better that it gets spent on infrastructure, for example, and not eternal war. But where is this magic savings, production, and private sector making-of-things going to come from? If it were as simple as saying, “Hey, let’s do that now,” it’d be done. But the problem of why Schiff’s hand-waving solution can’t work is the very reason we’re stuck in this economic melt-down in the first place:

High unemployment means less people with jobs to have money to spend on consumer goods, and lowering wages means less money for people to spend on consumer goods. The excuse of “We’re overtaxed!” is utter nonsense and here’s why:

U.S. citizens are already one of the lowest tax payers in the developed world.

(http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/international.cfm)

And yet, some of the most taxed countries have higher rates of general “happiness,” and higher standards of living on many criteria. Based on other examples around the world, there’s no reason why we in the U.S. couldn’t pay a little more in taxes. Most modern nations do pay more and are getting their money’s worth.

In fact, the current average tax rate for the average middle-income wage-earner is between 25% and 28%. During World War II, the lowest tax rate for anyone was 39% with middle-income tax rate in the 50% region. So where Schiff gets this idea that our current tax burden is already greater than it was for WWII and we couldn’t stand any more, I have no idea. Convenient since he provides no numbers or sources and just seems to pull “facts” out of his… hat.

But you know what, it’s not even necessary to raise taxes on the middle-class. There’s another group is not only not at any kind of breaking-point, but is so far away from the tax rate they were paying in the 40s and 50s that they can’t even see it from where they are: The top 1 to 5% of the wealthiest in the country. Back during WWII, the 5% of the nation who owned 80 to 90% of the nation’s wealth, were paying 80, 90, even 95% in taxes! Can you imagine? Now, guess what they’re paying today? 60%? 50%? Try around 35%. Mr. Schiff claims we’re already taxed to death, beyond WWII levels, and yet the people who own nearly all of the nation’s wealth are paying a third in taxes from what they were paying during WWII and throughout even the 50s!

Now, one might protest the idea of taxing the rich more. I mean, why should they have to pay more taxes? Just because they have more? Well, actually, yes. It’s as simple as that.

Take yourself, your family, everyone you know. It’s a safe bet that you and everyone you know earns less than $1 million a year or so, yes? If you’re earning a middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and 25% is going toward taxes, that’s $12,500. What if that increased by 10%? You’d be paying another $5,000 a year. In your budget, what would that mean? That’s your car payment, or mortgage payment. That’s eating out money for a year. Maybe have to take a part-time job. You would be immediately impacted.

If the top 1% wealthiest had to pay a measly 10% more on their $750,000 income, their 10% would be more than your entire annual income. Honestly, do you think a person making half, a quarter, a million dollars a year has to stick to a grocery budget really close? Has to consider whether they can afford daycare or not? Has to decide whether they can afford to go to Applebee’s this Friday? Yeah, the rich have more they can afford to lose, it is right that they should have a higher burden supporting the social services and infrastructure and military apparatus that they take advantage of to maintain and increase their wealth. As I already pointed out recently, the wealthy already aren’t even paying a fair share of burden off their wealth, much less are they burdened by taxes.

And let’s not forget, this is all assuming they’re paying the percent for their bracket — which they’re not! The wealthiest have tax loopholes, breaks, shelters, and strategies available to them to pay even less-to-no taxes than you or I have available to us. When we have to pay our 25 percent, we’re actually paying our 25%. When the wealthy are told to pay their 35% (remember, as opposed to the 91% they used to pay), their accountants and lawyers are getting them out of paying even that. (Tax law that, by the way, often get voted in by the poor and middle class who will never ever come close to being in the top even 20%, because the conservative mindset is deluded into thinking they will one day earn a quarter of a million a year, if they just work hard enough! So they vote against their own interests.)

There’s that other pesky problem to Schiff’s magic buy-stuff-so-stuff-can-be-made solution: unemployment and lowering wages. Despite what Republicans are spouting, that the unemployed are lazy and not looking for work (yeah, that $250 a week unemployment check is a king’s ransom!), there are more people looking for work than there are jobs. Do the math. But the more significant problem with the economy is even deeper and more entrenched. Labor wages are at best holding steady over the last 30 years while cost of living, cost of education, cost of debt, continues to increase. The value of the dollar for the average household is actually less every decade since the mid-60s (coincidently, the same period in which tax on the wealthy dropped precipitously and GOP-led deregulations and New Deal dismantling began. Odd timing, that.) Meanwhile, capital gains have increased, corporate profits increase, CEO compensations increase… In case you’re just now joining us, what’s going on here the last few decades, and fast and heavy since Reagan, is a destruction of the middle class and elevation of the rich back into a new Gilded Age.

“One of the major trends in income inequality that began in the 1980s was dramatic increases in executive compensation. From the 1980s on, compensation for the average American worker has barely kept pace with inflation, yet compensation for executives running the same companies at which worker’s pay has barely kept pace with inflation have seen their compensation levels increase by orders of magnitude.”
~ R.G. Price; source coming up…

(notice that Schiff wants more productivity, yet, GDP and other indicators of productivity in the U.S. show a constant increase already. Hmm, maybe something to do with labor getting less and less of the pie they are baking, maybe?)

Ever wonder why it was that after WWII, during the 50s, into the mid-60s, the average middle class family had only one working adult and still bought a car and a house and went of yearly vacations, sent their kids off to college, and did so without significant debt? What really has happened since then?

R.G. Price has an extensive, extensive, article explaining the beginning of the end of the middle class in the 60s, and the hammer-fisted pillaging of the middle class and Jaws of Life widening of the class divisions Reagan facilitated, in “How Reagan Sowed the Seeds of America’s Demise“. And his arguments are held together by copious (but easy to understand) charts and graphs and numbers and actual data, as opposed to the fantasy-land wishes of Invisible Market Hand libertarians like Schiff.

“In the 1980s Reagan talked about restoring America, yet his policies were designed to do the exact opposite economically, they were designed to undo the America that middle-class Americans had come to think of as the “good ole days” to which America would be restored. The America of the 1940s and 50s was an America of a strong central government, with a highly regulated economy, built through the extensive use of federal programs and massive federal subsidization of the white middle-class. And that is what it was really all about. “Restoring America” always meant “restoring white dominance”, yet it could never really be admitted that the white dominance of the 1940s-1960s was itself a product of government programs.”
~ Price

There’s a hilarious video I can no longer find of a British comedy show sketch. Four stereotypical young anarchists come into a messy flat, and one of them passes out copies of Marx and Engles’ Capital. He says something like “OK, if we’re going to proper revolutionaries, we need to actually read this book, yeah?” “Yeah!” And with great, revolutionary gusto, they all open their copies and the leader starts reading: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity….” As he reads he starts getting more despondent and the others start looking distracted. After a few weighty sentences, he finally slams the book and says, “Ah bugger this. Let’s go kill someone!” “Yeah!” And off they go.

The sketch pointed out what most people, especially people who live in the U.S., have no clue about:

Karl Marx’s greatest work is not a revolutionary propaganda, it’s an political/economics theory book. There’s a reason why it’s called Capital and not Socialism or Communism. It’s a very, very detailed examination of capitalism as a basis of socio-economy. I can be tough to get through but it’s the best examination of capitalism there has been. Because it was written during early capitalism and Marx and Engles couldn’t have predicted global market capitalism, they did get some things wrong — but the basic explanation is sound as much today as it was 150 years ago.

To help the average person understand the tome, SF author Steven Brust has followed up his fascinating blog series on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (arguably the father of capitalist economics) with a series presenting and discussing Capital. In his latest posting, he highlights a passage in which Marx quotes Benjamin Franklin!

“…It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and that it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.”

Here we have a footnote, in which Marx cites Ben Franklin, quoting him as saying, “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is…most justly measured by labour.” The point, here, is that, just as we are able to reduce the linen and the coat to values because they embody human in labor, so, too, the labor of producing them is, economically, reduced to abstract human labor.

(Emphasis mine.) I was quite intrigued by this inclusion, and I can’t help wondering what the American founding fathers might have thought about modern capitalism and Karl Marx’s assessment of it. I do know Thomas Paine would be turning in his grave if he knew what Glenn Beck and the Tea Party were doing with him. Check out some of these Paine quotes:

“Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

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“It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread… pay to every such person of the age of fifty years … the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty… This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

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“Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.

Yeesh! Sounds like a socialist, don’t he.

Speaking of Glenn Beck, back to Ben Franklin, in that same paragraph in that same essay Franklin wrote that Marx quotes from, Franklin wrote, “Now Silver and Gold being of no permanent Value….” That must be very awkward for Beck and his “BUY GOLD NOW before the inevitable  mass economic collapse occurs!” advertisers.

Anyway, with the intent of blogging a comment on just this Franklin quote used by Marx, I started searching for an image of Marx and Franklin together with absolutely no anticipation of actually finding something I didn’t have to Photoshop together. But then I found one: a still from a short video advertising Glenn Beck’s How to Argue With an Idiot. (Ugh! I feel dirty linking to that. But don’t let is be said I’m not fair in providing info.) It’s a short that is essentially a blatant ad hominem attack in which animated Marx and Franklin provide no info specific to the real people and serve only as mouthpieces in an extremely juvenile screed.

So this video makes Marx sound like an idiot in suggesting a progressive tax (which I’m not even sure Marx ever advocated) and then Beck-Ben “counters” not-Marx’s progressive tax by illustrating that the current tax situation is unfair. So…what’s Beck’s stance? Is the progressive tax Marx-level stupid? If so, why point out we don’t have a progressive tax situation? And why present the current unfair tax situation as if promoting a progressive tax as a solution while mocking it? It makes no sense. (Not surprising from the guy who professes churches who advocate Christianity, er, social justice I mean, are preaching Naziism and Communism; and warns that government “czars” is the Obama’s way to endorse socialism. 1. Nixon started the whole czar thing and Reagan made it famous with his “Drug Czar,” and 2. the Russian czar was the king that the communists rebelled against and expelled. Idiot.)

That aside, Beck-Ben presents the evil unfair tax numbers:

The top 1% are responsible for 40% of income tax,
the top 10% are responsible for 71% of income tax, and
the top 50% are responsible for 97% of the income tax.

OMG! Doesn’t that look evilly unfair!? You know what? Le’s just assume these numbers are correct. I’ll give him that. But any fact can look however you want it to look with divorced from any context. Of course, that’s what Beck’s best at: taking spurious and unconnected information and making false conclusions. Let’s add some more facts.

In 2007:

The top 1% owned 43% of the nation’s financial wealth,
the next 19% owned 50% of the nation’s financial wealth.
(The bottom 80% of the population owned 7% of the nation’s wealth.)
(source)

So, according to Beck, the top 50% paid 97% of the income tax; yet, the top 20% owned  93% of the wealth. Catch that? Even though half the nation paid 97% of the tax, only 1/5th owned 93% of the wealth.

Yeah, those tax numbers are unfair…in the direction opposite what Beck suggests!

Finally, Beck reveals the sociopathic outlook of the conservative when his pseudo-Franklin dumps on the poor for having the audacity of getting a tax refund. Oh no! The people in our society that struggle to even afford food and shelter aren’t having to pay income tax, when those who have problems deciding between the 3rd multi-million-dollar house or the 2nd private jet have to pay less than their fair share based on the grotesque percentage of wealth they own?

Why, that’s eeeviiil! Those slackers who work two jobs just to make ends meet and are still below the poverty line, need to belly up and give up their daycare money so that the 1% who own nearly half the nation’s wealth can feel better about using lawyers and accountants to take advantage of tax shelters and loopholes that no one in the lower 80% of the population have available to them.

Note that this bill was passed in both the state’s House and Senate when she says:

“It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude be made by one individual or a small group of elected officials.”

This person obviously has now idea how a representative government works. The entire role of the legislature is to represent the people.

Although, her hypocrisy isn’t surprising, as a Republican: they’re more than happy to use the power of government when it serves their desires, then turn around and pose as populists and claim government is evil when it’s tasked to actually serve the people and protect liberty and civil rights.

I wonder how much of a populist she would be about putting decisions of such magnitude as war and war funding to a popular vote. Think she’d whistle the same tune?

It’s one thing to put issues of taxes and such to popular vote, but you do not have a popular vote in regards to civil rights and liberties! It’s the role of government, the single governors and the small groups of elected officials, to protect the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority!

Again, not surprising. She stated herself that she always has and always will fight against gay marriage. She, like most ideologues, can’t see the irony that her very act of intentionally vetoing the bill that the congress passed is itself putting a single person in charge of making a monumental decision that affects many.

Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet:
“Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative
(Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)”

“When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, self-described liberals strongly tend to prioritize fairness and harm as the most important of these core values — while self-described conservatives are more likely to prioritize authority, loyalty and purity.”…

In the past (mostly on Facebook) I’ve proclaimed that the conservative value-system is inherently a selfish, xenophobic, authoritarian one that has tried to stop all historic efforts to better humanity with social justice and equality. Greta is a lot nicer than I am and makes a case for the necessity for standard conservative values.

However, I think her arguments that liberal (I prefer “progressive”) values (that’s values, not people) are inherently better to be the best argument I’ve heard made.

Oh my! It’s hard to argue with that cartoon! Look how evil and scary unions are.
Are you an American who believes unions are organized extortion, protecting the lazy and demanding luxuries like Bon-Bons for workers?
Please take 30 minutes of your day to listen to the 1st half of this Small World podcast for the interview with Cory Doctorow. They mainly discuss his new YA novel, but they also talk about unions and workers organizing. I think it’s well worth the listen!

Then, after you listen, give this and this a read for some of the evils of organized labor.

Continuing my theme of simply reposting others’ blogs: “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has an entertaining recent post: “Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws?”

I’ve blogged on the topic a few times, including: “Religious Government Possible? No, and…Yes!”, and specifically on the different versions of the (not actually ten) Ten Coomsndments found in the one Bible, in “Amending the Commandments”.

But Phil’s article is much better written and entertaining.

See, here’s the situation: Under capitalism you are an owner of capital (the richest 1 to 5% of the population), you are a laborer, or you are unemployed. Now, most people in the world are part of the labor class. (This includes those who own their own businesses. Unless you actually own production factories, airlines, a media conglomerate, a bank, you are not a capitalist. You are a laborer.) But here’s the switcheroony: labor costs is the most despised, inconvenient, troublesome cost to those who own and run businesses. All this piles of money handed out to the necessary evil of workers. Business owners (including the bourgeoisie who own small businesses), work and work (ironically) to minimize labor costs–cut benefits, lower pay, decrease the number of employees costing the company money.

Seeing the problem here? The grand majority of human beings in the world are the enemy of business (so long as they’re labor and not consumers). Business grudgingly pays labor, as little as it can get away with, in order to give the masses the means to buy the commodities and services capitalism produces at obscene rates and worthlessness. The majority of the world’s population is the enemy of the very socio-economic base that they live under and serve.

Now, I’m not one to believe the whole “humans rule the earth by divine providence” or we’re masters of the animal kingdom or any of that hogwash. But let’s be honest: we humans, like it or not, regardless of any imbued esoteric meaning, are kind of in a position of power on this planet. We have species-wide sovereignty, agency, sentience, and capability. When you think about it, shouldn’t we be living under a socio-economic system where we’re in actual control? Where humans have a privileged place in our own societies to determine our own value and not be considered both an expendable commodity and a liability by the socio-economic base?! I mean, shouldn’t that simply be obvious?

In this world of commerce where labor (i.e.: most everyone) is an annoying liability to management and owners and shareholders–business as normal, in general–unions try to fight for the basic right of people to have an exchange value for their labor closer to the output value their labor produces.

Ah! says the average American. Labor unions?! They’re as bad as soviet commies. Well, here’s where things get fun….

Let’s grant for a moment that when you start scouring the land far and wide for unions, there are some that are as corrupt as the corporations they are fighting for workers’ rights against. (Co-opting and assimilation of labor-friendly things is a tool of capitalism to undermine its effort, but that’ll be addressed later.) But let’s talk generalities and averages here. What is the goal of the union?

To bilk workers of union dues, Joe American says.

No no no, that’s one of those rare instances. Back to general intent here. Unions fight to increase worker wages, benefits, leave time, insurance, etc. Now, fellow worker of the world, how in the world is that a bad thing?

Because they’re greedy and they ask for too much pay!

Uh huh. And what exactly is too much pay? Is it compared to what you make? Is it sour grapes and jealousy? Is it that you think the average steel worker, mine worker, nurse, actor, teacher, auto assembler, any of the millions of jobs served by unions, are buying multiple houses and several cars and taking trips at a whim’s notice to Europe on their ill-gotten union negotiated wages? Oh, no, sorry–I got workers confused with the owners of capital.

If things worked the way they should, the 80%+ of the world’s population who labor and toil and work for a living should not have to negotiate for an extra $5 and hour against the 1 to 5% of the population who own literally 90% of the world’s wealth.

This is an important point worth repeating: The super-majority of workers in the world, including you and everyone you likely know, should not have to also toil and fight to extract a few bucks more pay out of the 5% who own 90% of the world’s wealth.

Ah, says Joe, but when the union (or even non-union workers) fight for higher wages (which are always lower than the value of what their labor produces, by the way), that means products and services have to cost the consumer more! Unions and even wages themselves harm society!

Really? Here’s the really crazy thing about capitalism: When labor costs are forced to increase (e.g.: wage increases), the very same companies who raises the prices of their products and services tend to pay their CEOs and presidents and owners multi-million dollar compensation packages. Labor fights tooth-and-nail for more porridge, the consumer is forced to pay more for consumption, but the wealth that flows up the pyramid stays untouched and protected, allowing the rich to get richer.

And, here’s the joke of it all: We, the massive majority who are the labor class, are convinced to protect that flow of wealth up the pyramid, that it’s the right and natural way of things. We’re convinced to hate unions, to see other laborers as greedy, and put the capitalists on pedestals like royalty–behavior that harms ourselves and benefits those with the power and wealth! The labor class produces the goods, provides the services, has the expertise and skills, and the overwhelming numbers; the top 1 to 5% only have the wealth. But they control the masses and convince them, us, to work and vote and live against our own best interests in order to protect theirs.

Think about this: You’re in a room of a hundred people. You want to rule and control the other other 99. Do you do it by force? Yeah, see how far that gets ya. Or do you get the other 99 to do what you want by convincing them that what you want is the natural, proper way of things–even if it’s against their own interests? That’s what the capitalists have done with our entire cultural logic: convinced us greed is good, consumption is good, buy more stuff; that unions are greedy (uh oh! another contradiction!) and people should be thankful for the few bucks an hour their labor gets them and that to demand more compensation for their life-absorbing labor only harms everyone; and to ignore the fact that the only people who aren’t harmed by any of this are those to who all profits flow upward toward; and to accept as the natural and proper Way of Things that a tiny few (who are good at trading companies among each other), continue to get obscenely wealthy off the struggling labor of the masses who fight to keep their own wages and benefits as low as possible to make more profit for others.

Once more for effect: and to accept as the natural and proper Way of Things that a tiny few (who are good at trading companies among each other), continue to get obscenely wealthy off the struggling labor of the masses who fight to keep their own wages and benefits as low as possible to make more profit for others.

It’s an entirely upside down world we’re living in. When and how will it change?

(Facebook? Essay originally published: http://www.celticbear.com/weblog/2010/02/17/laboring-upside-down)

Well, sadly, I no longer have the joy of saying that with a hint of hyperbole. With the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, wherein the majority judges eliminated regulations that have been put in place preventing corporations (and unions, sure) from buying off elections, we now truly have a corporatocracy. From this moment on, multinational corporations which may have their money in the Camen Islands or Dubai, and major labor forces in China and Mexico, can spend as much money as they want to support the legislators they want and the laws they want.

Supporters of this move say it’s a free speech issue (which, after all, that’s how SCOTUS couched it). So, what this means then, is that money, wealth, now equals free speech. So, let me ask you now that wealth is the same as free speech: do you feel that your amount of speech (real or potential) is as free and equal as that of Haliburton’s? Or KBR’s? Or Phizer?

The best way to put the implications of all this is to let Keith Olbermann spell it out. And don’t worry, this isn’t just a bleeding-heart liberal warning, he points out exactly how this cuts the throats of conservatives and right-wingers alike:

(If you can’t see the embedded video, go here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/34985508#34985508 )

This truly is the beginning of the nightmare scifi scenarios of corporate-owned-reality of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. There’s a reason Thomas Jefferson said the following:

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

He saw even then that the interests of the nascent capitalist, for-profit corporation, lay not in democracy and liberty, but in market dominance and crushing the interests of free markets and free speech and individual choice. Corporations don’t want competition and free markets, they want the advantage against anyone and anything that will stop their drive for profit.

Sure, some corporations are non-profits, or little guys, or special interest groups. But let me ask you this as well: do you think any non-profit or special interest or local home-grown corp will have a sliver’s of a chance buying laws and legislators against multinational, billions of dollars a year in profit, mega corps? Our government in just a few election cycles, will effectively be run by the richest, dynastic multinational corporations which will seek to destroy anything resembling dissent.

After all, they’re already trying tooth and nail to control government in their favor–think now that they can bring the full power of capital gains to bear they’ll stop? Take for example AT&T’s democracy-riddled and free market tactics (sarcasm) of buying charities to support elimination of ‘net neutrality, and a glance at this list of legal cases the Electronic Frontier Foundation is involved in shows a long list of corporations fighting not for truth, justice, and the American way, but to crush competition, stifle free speech of we the people, and twist government regulations to serve their private interests.

This new development simply paves the way for them to just buy all the legislators they want.

Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has this brief message regarding the implications of this court decision and what can, maybe, be done to fight it:

Lessig on Citizens United: Sign Up to Learn More

Another site attempting to fix this very broken situation, is:

Move to Amend: A Project of the Campaign to Legalize Democracy

We think it can’t end, this great American experiment. I’m sure that’s what the citizens of all the great, fallen empires have thought. We, you and I, have grown up in this “land of the free and home of the brave,” and we can’t possibly imagine it coming to an end. But it can. One day, most certainly, it will. What we’re witnessing this last week is possibly the beginning of the end: the end of (pseudo) democracy and the rise of corporate ownership of life.

When you think about it, it’s been heading that way since J. P. Morgan first bought legislation to favor the United States Steel Corporation. Corporations have been controlling which presidents get to the primaries and the debates. They’ve been buying legislators with lobbying money (a fraction of the money they can now spend on campaigns). Really, when you get right to it, being a true corporatocracy overtly and in the open is really a more honest, forthright way of being what we already are at the very base. All we need now is a new branding to Corporate States of America and a new, fresh logo!

Addendum: A BoingBoing commenter has a great reply to people who still hold that this decision is somehow a win for free speech:

Shareholders are the owners of corporations, and shareholders each have a single vote as citizens (those that are citizens.)

The sum representation of a corporation in America is equal to the portion of its capital that is owned by americans. That is honestly a very fair system already.

What corporations wanted in this ruling is not fair representation, but rather an advantage, which is what businesses crave. Advantage over competition.

In this case, the competition is popular opinion. Corporations want to compete against governance in a 1-person, 1-vote system and are essentially attempting to make their shareholders have more clout than people who do not hold shares.

To not recognize that this philosophy is at odds with egalitarian democracy is a serious crime against your own best interests. You may attempt to see how you yourself could benefit from this if you are a businessperson, but remember that there will always be another, larger company who does not have your best interests in mind and who will gain even more from this than you do. They will not take mercy upon you the way a functional democratic government can be made to.

Over the couple frigid weeks I’ve seen more than a few comments on the Intertubes mocking “global warming” because of the unusually cold weather. A few on Facebook, some on Twitter, a few blogs, and even a Web comic I follow made a snarky global warming mock.

If the mockery is meant as an ironic joke, I tee-hee right along with it. But I suspect that most, if not maybe all, of the comments I’ve seen have been meant as a sincere dig at the idea of global warming. (Interestingly, nearly every one has been by someone who appears to hold a “conservative” worldview. I have suspicions why, but for this post I’m only going to focus on science, not socio-politics.) And, naturally, when you have a concept called “global warming” and yet you’re in weather that freezes skin within minutes, it’s only natural to play with the apparent contradiction. But I think it’s important to understand why this is not a contradiction at all.

The most important thing to remember, (whether it’s in this case or other topics that involve complex trends, theories, or processes), is to not confuse a data point with the trend. That is: the particular weather in a particular area on a particular day, with the overall average climate for the entire planet over the course of decades. See the huge difference in these two things? The weather for, say, southwest Missouri, or even the entire middle America, for two weeks in 2010 is just one tiny data point in a trend for an entire planet over the course of 100 years. An extremely cold patch of weather does not disprove the concept of “global warming” (which is a subset of “global climate change”) any more than a very hot patch proves global warming! An unusually hot summer is also just a data point in the trend and should not be examined independently when a much larger trend is being investigated.

A recent musing of mine on anarchy and democracy: link

An excellent (and scary-sad) collection from Classically Liberal of examples of police state abuse and misconduct.

* Like most things in postmodern culture, this topic is well filled with contradictions. Guy Fawkes, for example, was not truly an anarchist (as far as I can tell). He, along with his cohorts, were simply p.o.ed that Catholics were being descriminated by the Protestant British government and decided to get rid of it, hoping to establish a Catholic-friendly one. (*sigh* what, religious violence again!?)

Guy Fawkes ironically became a symbol of later anrchistic movements despite his basically being just a religious terrorist.

Guy Fawkes was also appropriated by the British cultural hegemony as a symbol of celebrating the God-protected and ordained rule of proper British royalty. (Much like how Hitler propagandized his surviving the Valkyrie assassination attempt as a sign that God protected his divinely ordained Third Reich. [I may have just Godwined myself, but it just goes to show that anyone and everyone can and does invoke God's favor when things go well for them.])

And now there’s this Anonymous group appropriating Guy Fawkes to protest Scientology. Interestingly, as this is a quasi-religious fight, this may actually be a more “appropriate” use of Guy’s image… if not for the fact that what they’re really doing is using the image created by the film “V for Vendetta”. They’ve taken an image crafted for entertainment consumption, based on a hyperreality of an appropriated image, of a man whose purpose has been fictionalized by one group and celebrated for it’s failure by another group for ideological justification…

Ow. Jean Baudrillard is probably laughing in his grave over this a-historical postmodern pastiche! (I think I see a scholarly paper in this!)

The Tyranny of the Majority:
If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us – and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

[...]

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.
“Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,” they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ll eat you.”
The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!”

–From THE PARTY’S OVER: BEYOND POLITICS, BEYOND DEMOCRACY
http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/pdfs/democracy_reading.pdf

So, I’ve discovered this Web site: CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective (http://www.crimethinc.com). They have some blog posts on the G-20 protests…and most interestingly, a non-protest that was treated as a violent protest by the police and resulted in more than a hundred arrests (including a great many who weren’t doing any protesting) and many injured. (State Repression at the G20 Protests) From this I started looking over the site. It’s an anarchists’ site, filled with info and publications geared toward helping people find the anarchist within and fight the system.

This is what’s struck me as interesting: Their reason for existing, their criticism of the system, their complaints of capitalism and democracy, I completely agree with–and I’ll explain why in a moment. But their explanation of their remedy, their idea of anarchy, I’m having trouble with. (Note, that anarchy does not mean violence or chaos in the sense of abuse of others, harming people. It simply means no government, no rule of imposed law, no masters.)

Ironically, these anarchists have, from what I can see, I great disdain for socialism, communism, any -ism apparently derived from Marxism. I say “ironic” because their entire criticism of the current state of capitalism and authoritarian democracy comes straight from Marxist criticism, 101. Take for example this page from the book Days of War, Night of Love:

(page image link: “How Does Capitalism Work“)

This is capitalist criticism straight from Marx’s Kapital (not verbatim, of course). Everything this anarchist site decries about the current state of capitalist economy, culture, and the police state used to protect the hegemony and the owners of capital, is Marxism stripped of the Marxist lingo (like “hegemony”). There’s nothing about their critique of capitalism I don’t agree with (my being a Marxist). However, and this is where things get uncomfortable, their ideas of overcoming the system I don’t know if I can support. Well, let me clarify…

At the core, I consider myself an anarcho-socialist. I too believe that the best path for humanity, for human advancement, equality, justice, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the complete lack of government and forced adherence to someone else’s majority rule. However, I also believe that married to that must be a social contract of mutual cooperation, shared resources, publicly owned and operated resources, manufacture, distribution…capital. This is different from anarcho-libertarianism, or Objectivism (vis-à-vis Ayn Rand) which believes that in addition to lack of any forced rules or regulations, private ownership is valued above all. That humans are selfish and greedy by nature, and that we should live to acquire as much for ourselves as we can and help others only so much as we can gain from it ourselves. Pretty much ethically and morally bankrupt, in my opinion.

As I read through the CrimethInc site, most of what they believe (and what they purport anarchists believe) matches up with my anarcho-socialism. They support cooperation, mutually beneficial action, gift economy. Hey, great! But they also support a sort of worship of anti-social behavior, crime, vandalism, activities that make me cringe (e.g.: shoplifting). Although, all the anti-social behavior they support, is all geared toward the state, corporate America, the power structure, and not against other individuals and their personal rights. OK…that sounds good… I guess.

So, I’m left to question: Is my cringing because I’ve lived my entire life controlled by the hegemony, brainwashed into subservience to conformity with passivity, being a good little worker bee who keeps his head down and continues to make profit for his capitalist lords without making any trouble for them? Well, yes I have. We all have. That’s the entire goal of hegemony, be it capitalist or feudal or slave economy. Those in control use whatever sociological means available to control the other 99% of the people for their own benefit. This requires blind obedience to their laws. It requires complete acquiescence to state-supporting meek mildness.

When I remember these things, which I’ve been studying and contemplating for some years now, it reinforces my belief in the anarcho-half of my anarcho-socialism. So, why does the action of subversiveness bug me?

Since President Dubbya started taking away civil liberties after 9/11, I started studying libertarianism and even anarchy–but always from a level of personal rights and liberties. It wasn’t until I started grad school and my first professor, Dr. Burling, introduced me to Marxism that I learned that Bush, civil liberty removal, the corporate ownership of the government, wars, all of it, are a result of the economic foundation: capitalism. It is essentially the base on which everything is a superstructure built extending from it. Everything is about the material question: Who uses it and what is it for? With that in mind it’s easy (easier) to understand power, wealth, who benefits from it most, and how they exploit those without it. Dr. Burling helped change my entire outlook on culture, laws, economy, politics, etc.

But when asked why doesn’t he live outside the corruption and control of capitalism, his response was, in essence: you can’t escape it, it affects everyone, might as well not make your own life unnecessarily difficult fighting it. And this is a guy who, in addition to being an unashamed Marxist, was also a musician with a focus on rock (meaning nothing exactly, except an implication that he has a rebellious spirit).

And it also makes me think of vaunted Marxist cultural critic and major figure of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who it is said that during the Paris riots of 1968 when asked by his students why he didn’t participate or support the student protests, he replied “How can you actively fight for something before you fully understand it?”

There is “theory,” and there is “praxis.” Praxis is putting theory into action. Is it that these Marxist critics and theorists I look up to, who happen to be intellectuals and educators, don’t know how to put their words into action? Do they not have the courage of their convictions? Or are all they are about is understanding and criticizing the current system, but not about doing anything about it? When asked what good is knowing how culture develops, knowing how the hegemony controls and influences our decisions and our wants? They have replied that it helps you understand why you make the decisions that you do, why you choose what products or how you sell your labor. But is that enough?

Frederic Jameson (Marxist cultural critic) has developed a concept of applying “cognitive mapping” to cultural criticism, which is a theory of mapping the contradictions in capitalism, where it affects our lives, and finding and exploiting the holes in it. And it’s a step toward praxis, which gives people like me hope of doing something to make a difference. To help turn the tables on capitalist exploitation and help the “seeds of rebellion” grow. But…what is that rebellion? What are we Marxist intellectuals waiting for? We who study culture, and politics, and socio-economics? Dr. Burling had cryptically referred to the biopic about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, in which a young, pre-revolutionary Guevara is asked about how to spark the South American peoples into revolution against their oppressors, he responds that you can’t have a revolution without guns.

But then, Dr. Burling often referred to other ways to create such drastic upheaval as to eliminate capitalism, without revolution and war, and used as examples Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and 40, 50, 60 trilogy. Stories in which the only way to evolve from capitalism to egalitarian socialism is either to colonize another planet, or deal with Earth-shaking environmental disaster. So, do we just wait for change?

Back to my point: Are these anarchists doing what we intellectuals fear to do, but are a natural and proper result of the same Marxist-rooted criticism of capitalism we both share? Am I a hypocrite for complaining about and railing about capitalism and its ills and evils, but I continue to lust after home ownership and getting a better job and obeying all the laws of the land so I don’t draw the attention of the state’s police apparatus?

Is it because I have a family to care for? I don’t risk rocking the boat, and so I participate, if grudgingly, in my own commodification and the orgy of consumerism? Of course, this is exactly what the hegemony counts on, this conservativism that we’re all supposed to grow into. We’re allowed to rebel a little as a youth, test the bounds of social acceptance, and then “settle down.” Grow a family, buy a home, get a job you can’t leave because you can’t live without the insurance benefits. You become a productive worker bee who has too much to lose by questioning authority, bucking the system, making waves. Be a quiet little worker bee, and you get to go (somewhat) unnoticed by the system that exploits you and uses you and extorts you, giving little in return except an addiction to mass consumption.

Are anarchists heroes I fear to admire? Or are they the hemp clothing wearing, organic food growing, dumpster diving neo-hippies that I can easily dismiss and marginalize, exactly as I’ve just done, because they threaten the social stability and conditioning I’ve internalized because I grew up brainwashed to become a quiet and non-trouble-making worker bee? Is that why when asked, I say I’m an anarcho-socialist “in theory” but “in practice” I’m a democratic-socialist? Isn’t that just a way for me to marginalize myself?

I don’t know. But this Fighting For Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer is at the very least thought-provoking reading.

Ah, that ol’ “liberal media,” avoiding the truth and spreading lies. Well, part of that statement is correct.

(Feel free to skip the following introductory diatribe and go right to the featured link at the end of this essay. What it has to say is certainly more interesting and coherent than my ramblings.)

Until I gave up XM Radio, I used to listed to Air America all the time. It’s a very, unabashed, left-leaning radio media. And for the few years, during the Bush administration, that I listened to it, I would often hear of some new event, or disclosure, or revelation, or news of some sort that implicated Bush, Cheney, or any number of their cohorts, in war crimes at worst and outright deception at best. Now, knowing that I’m listening to a truly left-wing media outlet, (unlike most people who watch FOX news and listen to Limbaugh who think what they’re getting is “fair and balanced”), I would try to validate what I heard with other sources and gauge its certainty before I went around talking about it. If nothing else, I hate the idea of propagating a story to then turn around and find out it’s unfounded–but mostly, I worship at the altar of truth and try to live my life in discovery of what is and isn’t true.

Anyway, so when I would check out a story and find that it has enough credible, independent support to be true, I’d wait for this important, vital discovery or revelation to appear on mainstream news. And what would happen is maybe, maybe it might make a tiny appearance on Keith Olbermann’s show. Sometimes, rarely, it might get mentioned on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show (which is null of any affect since the context is it’s a comedy show). And if it did on either, it’d be the once and then never hear about it again. Would it get mentioned on other MSNBC shows? Nope. CNN? Never. ABC News and the like? Not hardly. The idea of the mainstream media being “liberal” was laughable!

For a long time, well…most of my life, I believed in the press as being on the whole fair and interested in the truth. It was our “fourth estate,” charged with uncovering the sometimes painful truth where those in power would want it buried. And then a few years ago, as I started to learn about who actually wielded socio-political power and discovered it was not the politicians by and large, but the top 1-5% richest people in the country (and the world), and that all aspects of our society are controlled and regulated (both intentionally and subconsciously) by capitalist hegemony, some truths started to come to light for me.

The mainstream news, the media, are all corporate owned. Major transnational, global market capitalist corporations which have as their bottom line…the bottom line, and not truth, news, fairness, balance. The money defines what becomes newsworthy and what gets ignored. The corporate media’s very close ties to the Bush dynasty helped keep his administration’s war crimes out of the news or its import minimized to insubstantial.

Now, at one time I would have argued that this control surely wouldn’t filter down to the reporters and the editors who research. Well, yes, it does. A climate, a culture, an agenda filters down from the top to the bottom and when people need work and can’t afford to be too choosy about who exploits their labor, er, pays them and provides their medical benefits, they’re willing to push what the overarching corporate agenda wants pushed and ignore what it wants ignored. And if that’s too much for a reporter to deal with, the editor above them, who has an even greater vested interest in his job, will help make sure the message conforms to the corporate agenda. And as the agenda becomes obvious and doesn’t remain latent, and the employee can’t handle being silenced, they’re free to work on the edges of society and blog, where they’re ignored by all but the fringes and are dismissed by society as irrelevant.

All this to introduce a recent SALON article which discusses this very corporate controlled media dynamic, even in what is thought of by most people as the most “liberal” of all media, Keith Olbermann. Enjoy:

• GE’s silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC’s sleazy use of Richard Wolffe

… Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily “political analyst” –  is exactly tantamount to MSNBC’s just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist.  Wolffe’s role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover.  Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and ”political analyst” on one of its prime-time political shows.  What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this….

(Facebook viewers: Any images or video from this post have been stripped by FB. To view the original blog post, go to: http://www.celticbear.com/weblog/)

This will be a quick post by me; I can discuss my thoughts on this at great length, but I think it’s more important that one just simply read this fantastic article:

• Canadian Perspectives 2009: The Failure of Capitalism and the Need for a Socialist Alternative

“Capitalism has failed. This fact conditions all future developments.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, all the mouthpieces of capitalism repeated the mantra, ‘socialism has failed, capitalism has won, there is no alternative.’ Francis Fukuyama declared it was ‘the end of history.’ Free-markets, privatization, corporate tax-cuts, deregulation, and outsourcing were seen as the only way forward. In short, there was a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The workers had lost and there was very little pity from the victors.”

It is kind of a long article, but please don’t let that dissuade you from reading–it has excellent material from beginning to end, especially as the thesis starts to really pick up steam about halfway through. This article is vital for anyone of any political bent: If you’re a die-hard capitalist, this article may give you a better understanding of real socialist perspectives so you can fight against actual socialism (if you continue to wish to do so) and not some false cartoon propaganda mockery of socialism that hasn’t existed since Stalin; people curious about what socialism is all about, this will give you a great, practical, real-world idea; socialists, well, I don’t need to say anything to you.

Bottom line: anyone interested in what’s going on in politics and economics lately, and what the future may hold, should read this article. As Kim Stanley Robinson mentioned a couple of weeks ago, humanity’s survival may depend on becoming post-capitalism!

Now that Democrat Obama (corporatist) is president, and Democrats control Congress (corporatists and oligarchs); just because the overtly fascist, corporatist, imperialistic, evil Bush regime is gone, doesn’t mean the threat of USSA, Amerika, is over.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” – Thomas Jefferson

The Obama administration still has to repair a lot of erosion that has occurred to our civil liberties, for example: stopping the NSA from monitoring and recording all domestic phone and Internet usage…and it doesn’t look good that’s going to happen.

Another, recent display of how this country seems to have crossed over the line into an unstoppable slide toward fascism, to fight the war ‘gainst them ter’rists! is a recent New York Times story on how the Boy Scouts (Explorers) are encouraging and training your future Brown Shirts, er, Blackwater mercenaries, er, I mean, warriors ‘gainst terrahism.

Better than what I can say, check out these articles reacting to the story:

• A truly frightening story.
• Scouts training to fight immigrants and terrorists

I was a Boy Scout in the 80s, as the organization was being taken over by Christian fundamentalists, and becoming a tool of the Mormons. I did learn a lot as a scout, and I do have some great memories of it. Well, in Colorado most certainly, and in Missouri under one particular Scout Master…the following leaders my troop had were kind of scary racists who looked more like they’d be at home in an Idaho compound. But the best experiences I had I could have had without the Boy Scouts; what the BSA was mainly responsible for in my life was an attempt to instill worship of authoritarian power structures and a reverence for conformity. Yep, pure and simple.

KSR is an award winning Utopian author (with a PhD) who’s written, among many other critically acclaimed works, the Mars trilogy and the “Science in the Capital” trilogy. The former is about terraforming Mars and “Utopian” society that develops there, and the latter is about the effects of global warming. In his regular life, KSR is an “American-leftist” and works for social change and climate change awareness. (He made interesting comment that when he started writing, “utopian fiction” meant writing about perfect society, nowadays it means simply society surviving. Kind of indicative of some significant social change.) His talk was in dedication to Dr. Bill Burling who he collaborated with and edited a book of critical essays about KSR. (Dr. Burling was my professor and mentor who I recently mentioned passed away.)

Alright, so, what he said:

(Yikes, I got pretty busy and sick the last week, so this has been delayed; sorry. Hope my notes still make sense to me….)

So, KSR started off by telling us he comes from an American-leftist perspective, and that he sees the world though a particular ideology. But, the point is, we all experience the world through various ideologies–and it’s not something to be avoided, even if you could. He remarked that when people use the term “ideology” it’s usually as a negative: “I see things the way they are, but he sees things through ideology!” It is through ideology that we translate our experiences and make sense of the world we live in, whether it’s a leftist or conservative, humanist or religious, or any other ideology. The point it so identity the ways in which we make sense of the world, find the overlaps with other people and cooperate where we can to make things better.

He then talked about something that has always intrigued me about we as people and society: he observed that at each stage of our cultural development we as a culture believe we’re at the top of the ladder, the best we can be. After all, if there’s more we can do to be better and more advanced as a people, wouldn’t we be doing it already? Yet every ten or twenty years we look back and are amazed at how ridiculous we were as a culture–whether it’s something like clothing and music trends or the way we act in general. We must always strive to “become more sophisticated than your own cultural moment.” If we know that in a couple of decades we’re going to look back on what we are today, what we’re doing and how we’re behaving, and be amused or aghast or ashamed–let’s go ahead and start moving toward that better moment around the corner.

Our brains as hominids have grown larger and more capable over time. Our brains, as homo sapiens, are about as big as they can be and still more often than not pass through the birth canal; evolution caused our brains to advance faster than the rest of our bodies. Why? What was going on in our relatively stable environment millennia ago to cause our brains to advance so drastically? (Uhm, I don’t remember the exact point he got to from there, but he went on to say) we used to live in a world in which we experienced what we call the sublime on rare, amazing instances….

The sublime is the combination of  natural beauty and terror. It’s a kind of experience that fundamentally shakes our sense of reality. To the paleolithic human, the sublime was experienced when a lightning strike would explode yards away. Or when you run for your life from a wildcat and make it to the tribe alive. These are experiences of the sublime. Amazing and wonderful and terrifying.

But in our modern world, we still have the brains we maxed out on as paleolithic humans, but experience what our brains interpret as sublime on a constant basis! Riding in a car at amazing speeds whizzing past other zooming hunks of metal–that’s fundamentally sublime. Flying, easy to get food, ability to stay warm or cool without effort, constant shelter, these are mundane modern experiences that our brains evolved to find as unusual and awesome, but we’ve sublimated the experiences into white noise, and so our still in many ways anciently-wired minds strive to experience that heart-racing and hormone pumping reaction to the sublime experience that we should be having to this constant “technological sublime.” With the help of computers, games, drugs, television, we perform virtual rock throwing to strike down a charging enemy–in the form of watching sports or playing a first-person shooter game. Virtual travel, virtual sex, we use our cultural production to try to fulfill the experiences our brains evolved to experience, and feel the sense of accomplishment and success they were wired to feel–and we don’t quite get it. We earn 100,000 points at Game X, yea, yippie…but it’s an empty accomplishment. Hmm, maybe if I earn 200,000 points I’ll fill fulfilled. Easy food, no accomplishment. Maybe if I eat more I’ll feel like I caught my hunt. Easy clothing, comfort, everything. But we don’t feel truly happy much less the results of experiencing the sublime–so we consume more and more and more in constant search for fulfillment and happiness. And of course, a billion and a half corporations are more than happy to take advantage of our spiraling and recursive need/non-fulfillment by producing and selling us more and more and more.

The result: addiction to consumption.
The result: Global ecological impact = appetite x population x technology.

KSR then talked about the GINI figures and wealth distribution. During feudal period, power came from land ownership. In capitalism, power comes from money ownership. However, between the two periods, the power structure didn’t really change all that much. The powerful land owners became rich land owners.

What we have in capitalism wealth distribution is a pyramid where at the very top is 1% of the world’s population owning 99% of the world’s wealth. (In the US, the top 5% own 95% of the nation’s wealth. Go us.) The most damage to the ecosystem actually comes from the top and th bottoms of the pyramid. The top engages in hyper-consumerism. The bottom (and population-wise, the largest world group) is poverty stricken, they have to feed their children tonight, so the thought of sustainable natural resources don’t (can’t) factor in what they need to do to earn enough to feed their family.

The best wealth-to-population “shape” that we can have would be a flattened oval, where the majority of the population have the majority of the wealth reasonably equally distributed. This paradigm would be best not just because it’d be “nice,” but because it’s vital for the survival of our species.

Social justice, just like language and law, is a technology. It’s a development that changes and improves over time and to social conditions. We can change our concepts of social justice for the better for more people. Interestingly, the places on the world where women enjoy full legal rights and social justice, the “replacement rates” (childbirth rates) is low and sustainable. Where childbirth rates are high (and potentially socially and ecologically damaging) are where social justice is rare. (On a personal note, I find it interesting in the middle of the US where in general social justice is moderate (not near as good as many northern European countries) there are pockets of social injustice and high birth rates among the evangelical religious Christians. For example, “Quiverfull Families,” where women are expected to be baby-making machines and are considered second-class and second-rate people. “Helpmeets” at best!)

Back to consumption without happiness, by every statistical measurement of happiness over the last 50 years, we in the US aren’t any happier than people in other countries despite our increased ability to consume and 5x the consumption rate as [notes illegible here. I believe compared to comparable Western nations].

We as individuals conform to the norms of our culture. If we truly want to be happier people and/or less consuming people, we need to make big group decisions to change culture what equals happiness. In a manner of speaking, the impending climate change, though dangerous, is an opportunity to make massive social change across the board, including improvements to social justice and global living conditions!

(KSR advocated a resurgence of awareness for Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.)

At this point KSR started taking questions from the audience. In response to a question regarding his view on healthcare, he very much believes healthcare is a right for all. As was the saying among Italian workers: “health is not for sale!”

Something we have to remember as we desire change, is the government is us. He’s always found it amazing when people curse the government because the government if “for the people, of the people, and by the people.” When you curse the government, simply replace the word “government” with “us” and see what kind of sense that makes.

(Here’s where I diverge from KSR’s opinions, and when I had a moment with him I asked him about how I, and many of us, do not see the government any longer as by, of, and for us. The government is a corporatocracy, run by, for, and of corporations. People may still have some influence over government at local levels, which is vital and often ignored! People forget that change can start at home as all focus is on state and federal levels. But it’s at those levels where corporate interests hold sway. KSR’s response was basically that we still have the right of the vote, who we vote for. Yeah, well, that’s a great symbolism but it’s pretty much meaningless as the only people that are allowed by the corporate run campaign and election machines are corporate lackey X and a nearly identical corporate lackey Y. Their only differences are in superficial “wedge issue” topics that create a conflict between the voters that cause them to ignore the more important, fundamental issues rotting the core of society.)

He mentioned the site http://www.350.org and the data than can be found on it regarding how to sustain human and most current life on the planet, the CO2 in the atmosphere can’t be (on a long-term level) more than 350 parts per million. We’re currently at 389 and climbing rapidly.

There are a lot of great ideas that are floating around about geoengineering, but the bottom line is we need to get CO2 out of the atmosphere (and not into the oceans where it’s currently being soaked up and screwing up the food chain.) The best option is reforestation. And it’s possible that just a little effort and improvement can result in huge chain-reaction of thriving greenery. We can’t assume the problem is too big and out of control to deal with–then crisis is assured. We can’t stand around paralyzed, waiting for the next gee-whiz technology to get invented that will save us all. It might not come in time.

We need to promote “mindful consumption,” increase wind-powered technology, and absolutely 100% not burn coal. And “clean coal” is non-existent. It’s a marketing term that’s essentially meaningless.

Smart consumption. Interestingly, junking your current car for a hybrid may be more ecologically damaging as the increase in hybrid car production causes more of a carbon footprint than what’s saved by the hybrid cars.

“Sustainable development,” one of the buzzwords found on the printed materials for this day’s events and printed on a 50-foot wall banner in the theater, is also a marketing term that’s simply code for “capitalism”. We need to become post-capitalists. One thing we have to get past is this idea that capitalism is the end-all be-all of socio-political developments. There are better alternatives, and it doesn’t mean embracing Ludditeism. Low tech is not necessary to become post-capitalist.

We have to face that because of our ability to affect the world, we have stewardship over it. It’s a scary thought because we’re pretty ignorant as a species when it comes to world-building. We don’t even know how to make soil–we have to grow soil. We have to realize as we make change to save the eco-system (and human society) that we’re not giving up comfortable lifestyle, we have to give up a neurotic lifestyle!

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There’s an addage that anyone who can spend 10,000 hours at something will become accomplished at it and can start producing quality after that. When you have socialized healthcare you can start your writing career at young age because you don’t have to worry about the cost of illness and injury. (Author and technology guru Cory Doctorow (Canadian) after living in the U.S. for many years, moved to the U.K. with his wife to start their family and has said he’ll never live anywhere again where there’s not socialized healthcare.)

Listening to Sawyer explain how socialized healthcare is the greatest gift a society could give to it’s people and the arts in particular brought up angry tears. My life since undergrad has been all about working for that “gift” of American for-profit health insurance. Every job I worked, every job I overworked, jobs I desperately wanted to leave, decisions not to work jobs I wanted more, have all been predicated on making sure my family had health insurance. My desire and drive since childhood to write has taken a back- to non-existant seat to slaving away for g–d– health insurance.

And the freakin irony is even with the generous and patriotic boon of for-profit health insurance, we’ve still had to pay thousands in medical bills and premiums and deductables. And even with god’s gift of health insurance upon the only modern nation to not have socialized healthcare, should my family become visited by a little more significant of a health issue, we could become broke, bankrupt, broken.

I’m middle-aged now, barely able to eke through the beginnings of my 10,000 writing hours, and I’ve done shitall except work 40+ hours a week as a drone at mind draining jobs for the gift of health insurance that’s STILL a financial drain on us. I fucking hate capitalism.

I have a love/hate relationship with the blog “Classically Liberal“. I couldn’t agree more with his analysis on the failed War on Drugs, the criticisms of institutional education, his disgust for the encroaching police state, police abuse of power, face-palming frustration at the destructive and absolutely absurd criminalization of sexuality, and pretty much anything having to do with civil rights. But his hatred of socialism based on as terrible misunderstanding and misrepresentation of it as the creationist “understanding” of evolution, really crinkles my spleen. His economic libertarianism is based on a very elitist, self-righteous, belief in immutable “human nature” and the inherent existence of an objective sense of “the good the true and the beautiful” in class-defined artistic production.

But, I have to say I’m really starting to agree with his criticism of this horrific spending-spree the government is on in bailing companies out. I wish I could remember who I heard recently say: “If a company is so big that it can’t be allowed to fail, then it’s too big for the ‘free market’ and must be broken apart.” Yep.

Anyway, check out this alarming video he has linked on his site under Spending our Future: The Bailout Crisis:

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BoingBoing has an article: “Marx was right!” in which the author discusses his move from being a dot-com capitalist to a return to a respect for Marx’s criticism of capitalism. (His wife, who said of his return to Marxist studies that it’s “worse than your reggae phase!”, could commiserate with mine!)

[quote] The work of Karl Marx is ultra relevant to understanding the world’s current financial mess, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marx has become intellectually indispensable to me again, as if there ever should have been any doubt. It’s fascinating to consider that during the time period when Marx was writing “Capital,” there were few factories in England –it was largely an agrarian society still– yet somehow Marx was able to see clearly the mess that we would be in today. He’s the most accurate prophet in all of history, there should be no doubt about this. Marx viewed history with a very, very long telescope. How he was able to see so far into the future is a mystery of his particular genius, but Marx accurately extrapolated how capitalism’s endgame would play itself out at the very birth of the system. Marx saw how utterly destructive this system would ultimately become. Look around you: Marx was right.[/quote]

(On a related note, Richard Metzger posted a followup: “Marx was… second???” about Thomas Jefferson’s essay on “fictitious capital” decades before Marx wrote about it.)

Well, I could write for a long time regarding my thoughts and history in Marxist studies, but you don’t care, do you? Instead, let me link to this great page that helps explain both Marxist and anarchist theories in ordinary terms that speaks to the common person:

Questions about Capitalism and Class

Yes, it’s Chumbawamba’s Web site. They live the spirit of anarcho-socialism, and their answers to common questions about materialist criticism of capitalism is really fantastic! I really encourage you to read at least this one page I just linked top to bottom. That’s it, all I ask.

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(Drawing of Marx and Engles stolen borrowed from http://www.hermes-press.com/distinctions.htm)