Thursday, December 15, 2011

She Deserves Better!


Yesterday I spent a few hours with a 74-year-old woman as she waited to visit with her eye doctor. She needs injections every two months to combat encroaching blindness. The shots cost $4.350.00.
At 74 Betty Lou (not her real name) works 27-30 hours a week for a national grocery chain. She is paid $9.17 per hour. She has worked in the same store for the last 15 years. She stays because she needs the health care benefits and the little that goes towards some dream of retiring, for at least a few years. She lives in subsidized housing constantly afraid she will lose the meager monies that keep her in her tiny apartment.
Betty Lou never attended high school because she needed to help out at home with the children that followed her on to the planet. As a young adult she tried to get back into school while she held down various waitress jobs.  Her father’s untimely death and the onslaught of Parkinson’s to a sibling brought her back home to care for her brother. A younger sister had arrived with Down syndrome, requiring a watchful eye, resources and time from mom. A year after beginning to care for her brother her mother had a stroke debilitating her. Years went by taking care of these three family members. She got some state help and some help from family but that soon dried up. She shored up the financial challenges by babysitting after school for neighbors.
Years rolled by with Betty Lou meeting each challenge as best she could with the limited options at her disposal.
She never married. She told me she only had two dates in her life. She isn’t sorry about never marrying or having children of her own. She has story after story about the kids she sat for and how they are doing such and such now. She is invited to one family’s home for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year.
She is content. She may or may not be happy. I don’t know.
Betty Lou got her GED last year through a local community college. She is very proud of the certificate and reminds any who will listen that “education is one of the keys to bringing one to the doorway of opportunity.”
It’s too late for Betty Lou. No big new opportunities are likely to jump up at the store beyond the hoped for “dime” an hour the union is attempting to bring to her pocket book.
Betty Lou is just one of many trying to cope in a system that seems to be way out of whack. She is afraid when she hears politicians talking about cutting back this and that, as she knows without the little income she gets from her job she will die on the streets. She has outlived family and has no where to go if anything else should happen to her…
We can help all the Betty Lou’s if we just take the time to re-visit our priorities and define what kind of a country we really want to live in-

Friday, December 2, 2011

Is It My Mind That Is Lost - Or Theirs?


Lets hope the shotgun isnt loaded!!

Earlier today I strolled into Sterling Savings Bank, in Seattle, to cash a check drawn by one of their customers. When I approached the teller he gave me one of those hand signals telling me he would help me when he got off the phone. I endorsed the check placing it along with my identification on the counter. When he got off the phone he picked up my ID and checked it against the name on the check. He then raised my ID to the light like you would if you were doing a TV version of checking to see if money is counterfeit. I thought that was a little weird but said nothing-
After examining my identification he told me I had to take off my hat and glasses. I thought that maybe he needed to check my photo with “my actual face” so I went along with it. I didn’t get the glasses part, as I’m wearing glasses on my drivers license, but did as he asked. Figuring I was identified I put my hat and glasses back on. He told me very sternly that I could not wear a hat or dark glasses in the bank. My glasses, by this time, had returned to their inside mode.
I asked him if he was serious!
He was very serious referring me to a note on the front door stating no hats or dark glasses could be worn in the bank.
I got my money and proceeded to the Managers “desk” to clarify this policy. The Assistant Vice President, Assistant Branch Manager failed to see me occupying space at the proper distance from her desk, nor did she acknowledge me, while she carried on with a phone call. When I re materialized, and was bid to step forward, I asked why they had such a policy? She referred me to the note on the door. When I admitted I had blown right by the note she got very defensive asking me “how I’d like to look down the barrel of a gun held by a robber!!” When I asked her if only robbers wore hats and glasses the communications went straight down hill.
I suggested they construct a large “boot room” adjacent to the front doors where customers could check their hats and glasses prior to entering the bank inner sanctum. You can see where this headed.
You’re wrong!
I asked her if I could quote her and headed for the freedom of the streets.
Okay!
Really!
Lets see.
If I were considering an illegal withdrawal of cash from the bank the game would be afoot before the teller told me to take off my hat and glasses. It is too late when I’m already inches from the filthy loot.
What about customers that are packing iron into the bank under the imprimatur of a concealed weapons permit?
Can anyone imagine what I could be packing under my well-worn baggy Simms fishing jacket?
Long rain jackets, enormous over the shoulder purses, back packs, canes, crutches, who knows what lurks in the saddle bags attached to walkers, could potentially create a similar scenario of fear and knee jerk reactions towards customers.
Many banks, in the third world, have shotgun-packing guards controlling access at the front doors. They look you over and allow in a few at a time if they feel you present no risk- (Photo taken in Antigua, Guatemala) One can only pray that all those guns down there are issued without bullets, as dying in a crossfire between the bank guard and the guard on the Pepsi truck, who is sporting a shotgun and a pistol, would lack a certain sense of style.
So, where are we going with this? Scanners at the doors, being frisked, fingerprints, eye scanning, blood drops, DNA, ID implants similar to the one my canine friend sports…
Perhaps a little humor shown by the bank as they mildly apologize for asking customers to "bare all" would go a long way towards building customer understanding and appreciation. For customers to feel they are presumed to be in the bank for nefarious reasons isnt building trust or confidence in the bankers or in each other. Yes, banks get robbed and its tough on the people who experience that but lets not run amuck fueled by fear of each other just beause we can-
I finished my banking adventures by depositing the cash at the Stagecoach Bank. I chatted with the manager there about the previous bank’s policy. He laughed at their policy from behind Plexiglas so thick that Superman and the entire Justice League would be hard pressed to dent.
We need a flash mob to show up for a little nude banking….
So, is it me that’s nuts??

Friday, November 25, 2011

1936,as current as today!!


John J Barret and Anne in Venice

Seems mighty current!!

The following is from the Jeffersonian Democrats of Northern California. Publish date fall 1936. This would have been the 1936 election.

     American Institutions
The following radio address was delivered by John J. Barrett, noted California attorney and life-long Democrat as his reasons for voting for Alf. M. Landon as President.

“…A serious fault in the American people is their complacency.  We have a sense of superiority over other nations.  We have a sense of immunity from their perils.  We have abiding conviction that no tidal wave can engulf this land even though it submerge the Continent. We are certain that we are safe against all the malign agencies that assail the rest of the race. “It can’t happen here.” That makes these times doubly dangerous for us. Because here and now the life-and-death struggle is under way. And to us primarily, at this very moment, applies the ancient admonition that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
What is the particular threat against us in conditions at home and abroad? It is a threat against our democratic institutions. That is the fundamental threat; all the others are dependant on it. What are these democratic institutions? They are certain safeguards of individual freedom and individual opportunity. Where are they lodged? In the foundation of the government, in its framework and constitution. What is their idea? To divide the power of government. But why divide the powers of government? To prevent their concentration in an individual or group. Why prevent the concentration of all the powers of government in an individual or group?  Because that is the definition of a dictator, and, since time began it means the death of individual freedom and individual opportunity. Even if the dictator is sincere and well disposed?  Yes. All dictators are sincere and well disposed to begin with.  There are no sincerer men on earth today than Mussolini, than Hitler, than even Stalin.  Somebody said that virtue is more dangerous than vice, because it knows no limitations.  There is a grain of truth in that.  The criminal knows he is wrong and will go only as far as he has to.  The good fanatic knows he is right, and will stop at nothing.  That very sincerity of the dictator, his consciousness of the purity of his intentions and the benevolence of his purpose, becomes the mainstream of his regimentation of the lives and activities of his subjects.  That is the uniform history of unbridled political authority. That is the devouring and insatiable appetite of power…”

Any thoughts on the relevancy of these comments today?


Advocacy for Those Seeking a Voice


     "...  Tiocfaidh ár lá..."





Monday, October 31, 2011

Occupy Seattle et al...


Photo by M Barrett Miller

Do you feel the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is having any impact on the movers and shakers? 
Do you have any ideas on how to get actual changes made to the 99% of us trying to hang on? 
What would you like to see?
The following is from the Huffington Post.
"...Occupy Seattle protesters, now in their fourth week of demonstrations, haven't given up the ghost yet -- far from it. They had fun with the Halloween-themed weekend to focus attention on their cause, staging a mock funeral service for the death of Corporate America, complete with a brass band; a Sufi priest; mourners in black with umbrellas, and funeral dancing. The protestors have moved their encampment to Seattle Central Community College, but go back to the original site at Westlake Park during the day, providing a route for frequent marches.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in the park on Saturday, October 29, bowing their heads to pay their final "respects" to the faceless concept of corporate greed and oppression. Mourners gathered around a draped coffin, dressed in black and huddled beneath a sea of black umbrellas.
It didn't take long after the final "amen" for a brass band to kick into high gear with tunes like "Down by the Riverside," while the crowd broke out into spontaneous modern versions of the fox trot and mambo.
Skeletons and zombies joined mothers, babies, grannies and men in business suits to celebrate the death of unequal economic practices that have held the world in what protesters consider a death grip for way too long.
The funeral service was led by Michael Douglas, a local Sufi priest. Sufism is loosely defined as the inner or esoteric dimension of Islam, and those who practice it have spanned several continents and cultures for over a thousand years. When he's not presiding over the death of corporate greed, Douglas teaches sacred art, music, and religious history to Seattle middle-schoolers.
After marching through the downtown core at 5 p.m. on Saturday, protesters settled in at the grounds of Seattle Central Community College on Capitol Hill. A Halloween party erupted at sunset, but costumes were far from frivolous. A man introduced himself as "Big Money" and proceeded to tell sinister stories of his power over America, then laughed hideously before asking "Why so serious?" and slithering into the night.
Another costume urging the break-up of the "big gambling banks," revived Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell's warning exactly two years ago that "Wall Street has a gambling problem." Senator Cantwell then stated that "Americans want to know when Congress will put an end to the Wall Street's secret off-book gambling schemes and restore our capitalist system by requiring real transparency and true competition." Judging by the Occupy movement still raging across the country, Americans are still wanting to know - and they're getting tired of waiting.
Another protestor in costume dressed as a young woman of privilege. Her sign described her character as a member of the 1%, stating that she had no student debt, plenty of family money, was well-connected, and had a corporate job. "I am not entitled, I am just lucky -- raise my taxes."
One participant wearing a t-shirt that read "One Nation Under God" pushed the envelope by holding up a sign to the protesters with an ultimatum: "Morans, Get Out." (sic)
"If God wants some people to have more money than everyone else, then that's just the way it is. It's God's will," the man told the crowd, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. "Jesus was a carpenter; he didn't have no union."
Unaware at first that the man's identity was a costume, the crowd's anger simmered and hostility filled the air. The young man kept a straight face as long as he could, but finally decided that he needed to say "trick or treat" before things turned ugly. Satire is just as prevalent as passion in the Occupy Seattle camp.
During a "speak-out" on stage lasting over two hours, the hand painted sign that marched with protesters from the site at Westlake Park to their new home on Capitol Hill waved in the increasing wind and absorbed scattered raindrops. Tents went up about 8:30 p.m., while the party and the protest settled into the damp Seattle night..."

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Pig Bankers!!!


Recently, on 1 October, a friend ordered new checks from his bank.
He wasn’t paying attention to the pending charge and wound up over drafting his account by $3.31.
On the 3rd of October he called the bank to tell them he had goofed and there would be a fairly good deposit that would be made on Thursday the 6th. He informed the bank that there would probably be around $36.00 worth of charges coming in before he could make the deposit. He was told he would be charged $25.00 plus $8.00 a day until Thursday.
Outrageous, but manageable!
On Thursday he went to the bank to make a cash deposit of a few hundred dollars. He didn’t have a deposit slip so the teller had to look him up. While standing there he told the teller he was a few bucks over if that helped her identify his account. After a moment she said she had found the account and he was actually $232.00 overdrawn.
He was stunned but not too stunned to pass her the cash, which he knew would be used to balance the account. He stepped back asking if she could do a print out, as he had no idea how his account could be in such dire straights.
She printed him a couple of pages so he could see what was going on.
Well, there were eight debits at $25.00 a pop and four at $8.00. When he asked one of the people sitting at a desk what was going on he was told those were standard overdraft charges.
He staggered out of the bank to find a phone and call his branch. When he finally got to an officer he told them there would be a large automatic deposit on the 11th and would they consider reducing the accumulated charges. He was told that was not possible and charges would accrue until the account was back in the black. After a bit of conversation he was told that out of courtesy to his 23 years with the bank they would consider reversing some charges when the deposit arrived.
On the 11th his automatic deposit came in to be reduced by $328.00 for the accumulated charges.
He called the bank asking if they could flip the charges to his old line of credit so he could access the full amount of the deposit. He was told no that wasn’t possible. When he asked about reducing the charges he was told that if he looked at his statement they had already reduced them by a considerable amount.
Okay, lets make this simple; you borrow $30.00 for nine days from your bank. You are okay paying a fee but are you okay paying a total of $328.00 for the pleasure? That converts to a 1,100% interest charge for borrowing $30.00 bucks for nine days!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, 1,100 % unless my math is faulty.
If your bank has a breaching Orca on its masthead you might consider running for your life.
My friend has ventured over to where the stagecoaches roam in hopes he won’t be crushed by runaway horses.
1,100 % !!!!!
The European banks drove the little guy out of the system decades ago. That is why so many in Europe use their local postal office to buy money orders, pay bills, make phone calls etc.
With the Republicans vowing to take down our Post Office you can see the day when you’ll be banking at a FedX, postal, bill paying, payday check cashing office with a giant symbol of the $ outside where the old flagpole stood welcoming you to the Post Office-
Ah, anything to protect those who praise money above all. The job creators who only charge you what the market demands of them to turn a profit.
Good luck-

Monday, October 10, 2011

What is the right thing to do????


    Seattle street art    Photo by M Barrett Miller

If It Feels Right ...
During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.
Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”
Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism. (This was the summer of 2008, just before the crash).
Many of these shortcomings will sort themselves out as these youngsters get married, have kids, enter a profession or fit into more clearly defined social roles. Institutions will inculcate certain habits. Broader moral horizons will be forced upon them. But their attitudes at the start of their adult lives do reveal something about American culture. For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism.
Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.
Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.
In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.


Friday, August 12, 2011

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

(Submitted by a guest) 
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.  
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.  
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 
1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life. 
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients). 
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.  
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities. 
5. Shaming Young People Who Take EducationBut Not Their SchoolingSeriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade. 
6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities? 
7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite. 
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.  

These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Written by: Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite  (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

 

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Don’t Lose Hope!



       Vladimir Illich Ulyanov  Photo by MBM
Quite a while before now I lived in Moscow, Russia. I was there when the godless communists were in charge of every layer of society. Everybody worked, everybody had medical care, everybody had housing, and everybody spent endless amounts of time slogging through their days in pursuit of basic staples in the state run shops. Everybody carried a “just in case” bag should a particular product pop up in a store for sale.  Men usually carried mostly empty briefcases and women carried string bags, “just in case.”
Everybody was extremely cautious about expressing opinions, as the legacy of informers and punishment had touched most people directly or indirectly.
Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, Lenin looked down off building facades, from park and square pedestals and up from the money in your hand.
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives and Lenin will live,” called out to remind the citizens that their sacrifice for the motherland was well worth the few challenges.
I didn’t think the Russian people would ever demand a better life!
I travelled through the wall in Berlin confidant that the East Germans would never give up that slice of power.
I read about Nelson Mandela feeling secure in my oft-voiced opinion that he would die in prison.
I never thought Idi Amin Dada would be chased from his murderous ways in Uganda.
I never thought peace would come to Northern Ireland.
Well, I was wrong about all those closely held beliefs.
When I walk along the parade in Freemont, a Seattle neighborhood, looking at a statue of Lenin I can only shake my head in wonderment, as his step down in history was an impossible consideration when I walked various streets across the Soviet Empire.
I hear a lot of talk today that we are in an impossible situation here in America. Yes, we have challenges but we also have opportunities few referenced above ever had-We have the ability to speak up!
We have the ability to organize.
We have the ability to call on elected officials reminding them of who they work for-
We have the right to run for office or support any candidate.
Most importantly we have the ability to educate ourselves rather than being feed government speak! 
Times change.
Don’t look back wishing you had done something-