Friday, February 11, 2011 3:41:41 PM
Embarrassica The Mutilated
What to do? Just plug on i guess. Trying to counter the lies that are continually told by the rich and powerful, to present reality in an organized and expert way as well as those of the rich and powerful lie. The lies and propaganda can only be countered with reality. It's really about education.
nwsun, you say it as concisely as possible. This, which i've decided to reproduce in toto just because in looking for bits
there was too little left. It expands on what you have said and reminds us just how long the situation has been recognized.
Embarrassica The Mutilated .. continued ..
by David Michael Green | August 1, 2010 - 5:22pm
Sometime presidential candidate and full-time lunatic Steve Forbes recently wrote a column on "Obama's Soft-Core Socialism [ http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/fact-and-comment-opinions-steve-forbes.html ]".
In case the title wasn't already enough to knock you off your chair and have you rolling on the floor laughing, consider the big ol' photo that leads in the article. Is it of Barack Obama, the subject of the piece? No, it is not. Is it a picture of Steve Forbes, the author of the essay? No, I'm afraid it isn't. Instead, it's yet another obligatory hagiographic rendering of Saint Ronald the Raygun, complete with jaunty smile, plastic Gumby hairdo, and obligatory American flag in the gauzy background. How very... er, relevant. Check my math, would ya, but wasn't it thirty years ago that this guy was elected president? Before cell phones and CDs, let alone MP3s? And wasn't Reagan the dude who tripled the national debt, shredded the Constitution, and began the process of cutting the legs out from underneath the American middle class?
As if this isn't bizarro enough, consider Forbes' title and thesis. He's arguing that the guy who threw massive mountains of taxpayer money at Wall Street banks to save them from collapse because of the bad casino capitalism bets they had made is a socialist. (Actually, Forbes is not quite so sure - like many apoplectic freaks on the right, he simultaneously wants to call Obama a fascist too, and sorta does so.) He's arguing that the guy whose health care solution involves forcing thirty to forty million private Americans to buy crappy expensive insurance from private companies who provide absolutely no value added in the delivery of a crucial product is a socialist. He's telling us that the president who opened up massive tracts of offshore areas for private sector (read BP) oil extraction in unprecedented quantity, location and scope is a lockstep adherent of Marx and Lenin.
It's really quite breathtaking. If we hadn't learned already (and almost no one in the Democratic Party or the American public seems to have) just how insidiously ingenious and recklessly disingenuous these monsters on the right are when it comes to the art of political framing, it would otherwise be tempting to conclude that people like Forbes must be snorting enough cocaine every day to launch a herd of elephants into space and park them in low earth orbit. That's how paranoid they are.
The piece is riddled with more bad lies than a local Rotary Club golf tournament - after a liquid lunch - and is packed with more stupidity than a truckload of Texas state GOP party platform photocopies coming back from Kinko's. But the line that really caught my eye was this one: "The truth is that not even the Franklin Roosevelt Administration was as hostile to and ignorant about free enterprise as this Administration is. Almost every action Obama officials take underscores their belief in the stereotype that businesspeople are mostly amoral, corner-cutting, consumer-shafting, pollution-loving menaces."
Clearly, Steve Forbes and I read different newspapers. I mean that both literally and figuratively. But it might be more
accurate to say that we live in different countries. His is America The Beautiful. Mine is Embarrassica The Mutilated.
I'm sure there are tons of good-hearted small business men and women out there, trying to do an honest day's work for an honest day's wage, and serving their communities in every way they can (in fact, there happens to be someone just like that living in my house). But the big business corporate actors who meet such a description may well be as rare as a fundamentalist preacher who would actually be going to heaven, if there was such a thing. Even if they're not polluting or scamming or downsizing the rest of us with wild abandon, at a minimum these corporate porkers all seem to be lobbying the government (or, what used to be called 'buying Congress') for subsidies, tax exemptions and deregulation, at the expense of the rest of us.
In Steve Forbes' America The Beautiful, these corporations are "doing god's work" as the astonishingly oblivious Lloyd Blankfein described his Goldman Sachs cancer - er, corporation. They're waging battle against the government which seeks to take away all our freedoms. Well, not quite all, of course. For example, the freedom to breathe clean air, eat safe foods, drink clean water, maintain our health, keep our pensions, receive a pathetic minimum wage, work in a safe place, etc.
In my Embarrassica The Mutilated, on the other hand, corporations and the associated plutocracy of the ueber-wealthy in this country form an economic dictatorship of unparalleled greed, power and arrogance. Nor am I alone in this regard, and nor is this exactly a flash headline shouting out breaking news.
In fact, this is a very old story, and I'm keeping some pretty good company in retelling it. This guy called Jefferson that you might have heard of once said, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country". I don't remember seeing that in my sixth grade civics textbook for some odd reason, but that does not diminish the significance of the sentiment. The same might be said of that Madison dude's observation that, "The growing wealth acquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses".
Or there was Andrew Jackson's take on this question (thanks to Thom Hartmann for collecting these): "The question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
Or Grover Cleveland's: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
Or Teddy Roosevelt's: "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
I haven't even included FDR's impassioned eloquence on the subject, Lincoln's complaints about banks that he feared more than the Confederate Army, or Dwight (career military man, five-star general, commander of the Normandy invasion, Supreme Commander of NATO, Republican, conservative) Eisenhower's famous invocation against the all-consuming power of the military-industrial complex.
In fact, against the authors of these passages, the actions and rhetoric of Barack Obama look ridiculously tame, passive and corporately compromised by comparison. Which means that, according to the 'thinking' of Steve Forbes - notwithstanding his widespread fame as a profound philosopher and saint-like man of unbridled compassion - Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Eisenhower and both Roosevelts were even bigger socialist-fascist-whatever-label-paranoid-freaks-will-come-up-with-next than you know who - Commissar Trotsky's just-activated sleeper agent currently ensconced in the White House. Golly, that seems like an awfully big collection of revered and iconic Americans to lump out there in the radical left. By the time you get done dynamiting these traitors' faces off of Mount Rushmore, only Washington would remain (and maybe he said the same sort of things too, for all I know). I know it sounds preposterous, but it almost seems that the problem isn't so much that all of America is way out on the left as it is that people like Steve Forbes are way out there on the right (and, Steve, just so you know - that's what we mean by the word 'fascist').
And, really, does the wisdom of these former presidents or the pathetically mild scolding that occasionally emerges from the current one require such a lengthy leap of logic to comprehend? I mean, what would happen if, for example, Mr. Forbes poked his head out from behind the Wall Street Journal, or the magazine produced by the empire he valiantly pulled himself up by his bootstraps from to inherit from his father, only to read just the few reports of corporate predation still available in the rest of the (largely corporate) media? What might he observe there?
Maybe he'd read about the nice folks on Wall Street who crashed the economy of the entire globe by taking outrageous risks with other people's money, knowing that if their bets went bad the taxpayers and the hated government would ride to their rescue, a hundred pennies on the dollar, and they'd continue to make record salaries and bonuses while nearly one out of five Americans left in the wake of their disaster can't find a job.
Maybe Mr. Forbes would see the same articles I've been seeing about British Petroleum, and its completely unmatched record for greed and disregard of worker and environmental safety that led to producing a series of catastrophes, culminating (we hope) in the Gulf oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in American history.
What if he were to read "Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been Dumping Site" in the New York Times this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30gulf.html ], which notes that "at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water - a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals - are dumped into the gulf every year." The article also describes how "Even the coast itself - overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms - is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930. 'This has been the nation's sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,' said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. 'What we're seeing right now with BP's crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.'"
Perhaps Mr. Forbes would read the investigative piece revealing that "Millions of Americans are being duped by life insurance companies that have figured out a way to hold onto death benefits owed to families. MetLife and Prudential lead the way in making hundreds of millions of dollars in secret profits every year on money that belongs to relatives of those who die, an investigation by Bloomberg Markets magazine found. Among the people being tricked are parents and spouses of U.S. soldiers killed in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-28/fallen-soldiers-families-denied-cash-payout-as-life-insurers-boost-profit.html ; also http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128799983 ]." The scam is to issue a fake checkbook to beneficiaries, rather than the payout they are owed. The insurance companies then pay the families a whopping 0.5 percent interest on the funds, keeping five to ten times that amount for themselves on all the returns harvested from investing those dollars. Such patriotism, eh? Support Our Troops! Don't forget your yellow ribbon sticker!
Maybe Steve Forbes could take a gander Bob Herbert's latest column [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52858854 ], detailing how corporations are doing great right now, in part because they're holding onto gobs of cash rather than hiring workers or paying a decent wage to the ones they've got. "They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output," said Professor [Andrew] Sum. 'Here's what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.' ... As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery 'has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history'."
And while he's at it, perhaps Mr. Forbes might want to take a look at the country that's been created by thirty years of bowing to the interests of corporations and other oligarchs, as institutionalized by the Washington whores of both parties whom they've purchased to do their bidding. The US median wage is the same as it was decades ago, and even fell during the Bush years. Today the richest one percent of Americans take home almost a quarter of all income in the country, just like it was in the good old days of 1928, but way up from the less than 10 percent they got in the pre-Reagan years. Meanwhile, millionaires realized a growth in their wealth of fifteen percent last year, rather a different experience than most of the rest of us, I'd say, especially the more than 15 million unemployed people, along with another ten million who either work part-time or have quit looking for work altogether, not to mention the 39 million people in this country who are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat, or the 47 million without health insurance.
This is just for starters. We could go on and on here. There doesn't appear to be any bottom to the well of greed. It is the Tragedy of the Commons cranked up on a killer cocktail of amphetamines, steroids and radioactive pellets. Our greed seems entirely boundless. Good luck to any geese out there who lay golden eggs, or for that matter geese of any kind. Or the ground they walk on. Or the rivers they drink from. Or the air they breathe. Is there not a way that's been found yet to commoditize and profitize air? If they can't sell it, some good folks will at the very least insist on getting rich polluting it.
This society has just lost its way. But looking at its history of stealing land from Native Americans and then abusing them, slavery, prison labor, oppression of women and minorities, and neocolonialism throughout the developing world, it may be that it never did know its way - or at least a decent, humane way. It just seems so much more grim today.
Today we raise our children with the sort of values that make them (and especially us) seem as though they were never raised at all. Gimme-gimme greed is an embarrassing attitude associated with toddlers. Oh, and adult Americans. Bullying exploitation is a shameful behavior generally left behind on the playgrounds of junior high. Unless, of course, you're a corporate CEO or a leader in American government. Lying is something people are supposed to learn to stop doing when they're kids. Unless you're a regressive, that is.
Plutocratic plunderers just can't seem to wreck this world, its people, and the planet which sustains us all fast enough.
We are now rapidly reaching the natural limitations of such exploitation, and the planet is beginning to bite back.
If we're lucky, people will too.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.
© 2010 Smirking Chimp Media
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-michael-green/30459/embarrassica-the-mutilated [with comments] [links other than the first one my adds] [also at e.g. http://www.opednews.com/a/116191 and http://www.eurasiareview.com/201008016261/america-the-beautiful-or-embarrassica-the-mutilated.html ]
===
this also in reply to hogsgeteaten's http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48838033 and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52859220 , and hap0206's http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52155513
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52862196&txt2find=military|industrial|complex
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking about people biting back, What do we do? How can we do it better? Consider ..
Being Seen, Felt, and Remembered in Our World of Illusions and Walls
William E. Powell
EDITORIAL NOTES
“A group of altruists will beat a society of selfish individuals
every time.” –E. O. Wilson
In a get-to-know-you initial meeting for a group of pregnant teenage
girls who were patients of a new health care program for
young mothers-to-be the unanticipated happened. Without any
more than minimally extended warmth, the person in charge began
by waxing eloquent about all the statistical demographic “truths” of
people in “their” condition; essentially, “According to studies, this is
you and this is why you got pregnant, and this is what you need to do
to produce a healthy baby.” After a half hour of impersonal, statisticbased
stereotypical script-talk by the worker without one scintilla of
insight about what it might feel like to be in the young women’s situations,
one of them stood up in tears and yelled, “You don’t know me,
you don’t know me at all!” and stormed out of the room.
Being dealt with by emotion-blind people is sometimes akin to being
spoken to by a brick. Perhaps the young woman felt that being
pregnant and dealing with a personal dilemma largely unknown to
the speaker, often walled off from the humanity of real people, was a
smidgen too impersonal. Perhaps the process of being assumed to be
another bit of statistical cannon fodder collected in other places and
times missed a few too many important nuances of her humanity—
her uniquely felt and narrative shaping “black swans” (Taleb, 2010).
It is often offensive to be told who you are without anyone having
ever bothered to inquire what you think or feel. Perhaps looking at
people and at evidence is not really the same as seeing real people or
things—certainly, statistics rarely evoke empathy. Indeed, “If there’s
anything I’ve learned from my childhood…it’s that we are more likely
to see the minimums of a person’s potential rather than what their
optimum performance could be if they were nurtured and made full
members of the human family” (Powell, 2004, p. 104). People in positions
of power or prestige more often look for flaws than promise.
That experience of watching a distraught young woman reminded
me that there are a lot of un-empathic people floating in our communal
pond—people who face people but only see and serve things (e.g.,
“consumers”)—if they even see or feel much of anything at all.
The writer Barry Lopez (1989) speaks rather scathingly about proprietary
scrutiny, the tendency to impose analytic thought and logic
on circumstances of life that are perceived quite differently by people
directly involved. In the meeting mentioned above, the emotion-laden
circumstances and issues of being a pregnant teen were viewed and
weighed quite differently by the teen herself when contrasted to the
stereotyping of a dispassionate worker trying to assure them that everything
to be offered was “evidence-based.”
This vexing issue of an apparent decline in empathy and of really
seeing one another has been studied and the results, already known
and felt by others, are disquieting. It is easy to ignore the implications
of waning empathy, but I suspect we would do well to safeguard our
souls, our humanity, and our right to actually empathize with the circumstances
and humanity of our clients. What if we feel the subtle
pressure to not be empathic with students and clients—to not acknowledge
or be swayed by feeling and emotions or take the time to see them
more deeply? Is being business-like the same as being empathic?
The poet Dylan Thomas (1954), in his epic work Under Milk Wood,
addressed that concern many decades ago in the prayer of Eli Jenkins
who desired an attentive god that “sees our best side, not our worst.”
The implications of subtle yet pervasive social pressure to change our
human capacities for relating to one another may speak in whispers
about what is declining, but the need is for us to pay attention and do
something to preserve what is clearly one of our strengths. Empathy,
one of the bases of our innate capacity for practical wisdom and moral
reasoning, is silently screaming for our attention (Varela, 1999).
As Lopez (1989) noted, it is commonplace for people in organizations
and businesses to define, frame, and interpret things differently
than the people being served—the media is positively abloom with
examples of such imposition. It is so commonplace we often do not
even realize it anymore: “Oh, you’re saying ______.” (No one ever
politely responds, “No, I’m not saying that at all, read my lips and try
again!”) In our professional and public literature we have become
phobic about hearing the voice of the first person, the I. The impersonal
third person, that golem, has become a mallet to enforce the
boundaries between ourselves and others and the being that denies
our emotions and perspectives and asserts the primacy of our seemingly
rational minds.
“Objective” outsiders can often frame and measure things in ways
that are oblivious to the lives and views and emotional universes of
people living in particular circumstances—dominance is sometimes
the privilege of putting a particular callous spin on others’ lives and
events. Dominance is also the privilege of ignoring things on others’
behalf. For example, imagine a Mississippi River flood resulting in
damage to the environment and human life; the media often uses
money rather than well-explained human dilemmas as the measure
of its effect: “A flood in Iowa caused $___ million damage.” This is a
permutation of imperialism, imposing one group’s yardstick as the
accepted way of measuring the lives of others. Knowing that can inform
us and enlighten our work. (Families in Society | Volume 92, No. 1 4)
Emerging science suggests that the capacity to understand others’
beliefs and worldview develops in infancy, yet many of us lose that
natural ability as part of our enculturation and professional preparation
(Kovacs, Teglas, & Endress, 2010). A good social worker cultivates
and safeguards their capacity to apprehend the worldview and
emotions of others and hesitates to impose their personal logic on
the world in which clients actually live (Hamer, 2006). Empathy, attention,
and consideration afford us better abilities and direction for
walking in the shoes of others.
In my group work classes I often bring in the notion Shulman
(2008) embedded in his text about creating the conditions in practice
wherein change can take place. We discuss how to create conditions
in groups where people can do what they need to in order to empower
themselves. We talk about how circumstances around us affect our
moods and how we behave, and the likelihood that we can act efficaciously.
In such discussions I hope that eventually the notion comes
automatically that creating a proper environment can help people do
things that they have not done before: gain insight and caring, learn to
help others, sense how others see things, and be thoughtful about the
interplay of emotions and thought.
In the most recent class discussions on this topic, students talked
about the conditions of their own work and how they are affected: “I
am a cashier earning minimum wage and I can go days without anyone
even addressing me as a person. Most likely, if they say anything,
customers will dump on me because of problems in their own lives.”
“No one takes the time to know me deeply anymore—they just text me
instead of seeing me in person and have no idea how I really feel. How
can anyone remember me if they don’t make an effort to really know
me in the first place?” “I wish someone would just be nice to me once
in a while, not the cold business-like crap that passes as friendliness.
No one really ‘sees’ anyone anymore.” When asked if any of them had
people around them in school who took the time to really know how
they felt, and help them succeed, everyone replied “no one!” One student
stated, “One thing I like about this class is that we’re not pitted
against each other. In most classes it feels like all we do is compete: no
one wants to help their opponent, no one seems to care about helping
make anyone else successful.” The class then set a learning goal: to create
a “we” and learn to create the conditions that allow us to see what is
concretely among us and help one another to blossom.
The following quote from Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) on practical
wisdom might profitably be considered in light of the studies by
Kraus, Cote, and Keltner (2010) concerning the interface of empathy
and social class:
Moral imagination—the ability to see how various options will play
themselves out and the ability to evaluate them—is thus critical to
perception. It represents, philosopher John Dewey explained, “the
capacity to concretely perceive what is before us in light of what
could be.” Not surprisingly, then, empathy—the capacity to imagine
what someone else is thinking and feeling—is critical to the perception
that practical wisdom demands. Such empathy involves both
cognitive skill—the ability to perceive the situation as it is perceived
by another—and emotional skill—the capacity to understand what
another person is feeling. (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010, p. 22) Kraus et al.
found that, in aggregate, poor people may be better at empathizing
than the wealthy and powerful. Imagine if our clients are as
good as us (or better) at reading one another and can (perhaps) read
our emotions as good as or better than we can read theirs. Ooooops!
Imagine also the implications of the difference in people that Kraus
and colleagues found—those more wealthy and powerful among us
as being people often less capable of empathizing with others (as well
as ruder, less inclined to help others, and less adept at reading others
than poor people). Imagine the tone deaf policy making they influence
or the effects of economic decisions they shape. Yet, these are
the very people who shape these policies that affect others’ lives. How
does that trickle down to us and the clients we serve? What shapes
their capacity for empathy and those of less affluent people—what are
we missing?
Martha Nussbaum (1995, p. 66) notes that people who deny themselves
the use of emotions (or simply cannot feel the circumstance of
others or have empathy) cannot reason well—they are deprived of
much of the information needed for rational decision making. Without
felt emotions they are less likely to be moved to do needed things.
So, lower empathy leads to the possible lowering of rational decision
making and less actual doing? Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) also suggest
that this quandary leads to a general lessening of wisdom and increased
likelihood of folly. Like canaries in mine shafts, small changes
can presage major problems.
As social workers, do we capture the heft of people or do we just
write down required notes and check boxes, or turn data into numbers
for statistical purposes? Does our empathy trigger our imagination?
Do we look closely at people and, for that matter, how often do others,
in turn, really see who and what we are? How many wealthy and
powerful people really comprehend the best ways of addressing the
needs and potential among the people we serve—who can both feel
and understand what life is like when stuck on the lower rungs of the
social ladder? Who can comprehend a viable path out of the mire?
NWSUN, BUFFETT AND GATES AND THE OTHERS JOINING THEM IN GIVING SOME OF THEIR
WEALTH BACK, ARE SOME OF THE WEALTHY AND POWERFUL PEOPLE WHO DO THE ABOVE.
How many among us see others as kindred spirits or sense that we
are like them in some ways? Or, importantly, feel that there, but for
grace, go I? How do we, as social workers, safeguard and nourish our
own empathy?
References
Hamer, M. (2006). The barefoot helper: Mindfulness and creativity in social work and
the caring professions. Dorset, UK: Russell House.
Kovacs, A., Teglas, E., & Endress, A. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to
others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.
doi 10.1126/science.1190792
Kraus, M., Cote, S., & Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic
accuracy. Psychological Science, 21, 1716–1723.
Lopez, B. (1989). Crossing open ground. New York: Vintage.
Nussbaum, M. (1995). Poetic justice. Boston: Beacon.
Powell, W. E. (2004). Becoming Quasimodo: The shaping of a life. In R. J. Berger
& R. Quinney (Eds.), Storytelling sociology (pp. 91–106). Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Schwartz, B., & Sharpe, K. (2010). Practical wisdom. New York: Riverhead Books.
Shulman, L. (2008). The skills of helping individuals, families, groups, and
communities (6th ed.). New York: Brooks/Cole.
Taleb, N. N. (2010). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable (2nd ed.).
New York: Random House.
Thomas, D. (1954). Under milk wood: A play for voices. New York: New Directions
Publishing.
Varela, F. (1999). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
http://www.familiesinsociety.org/Article.asp?ID=186
What to do? Just plug on i guess. Trying to counter the lies that are continually told by the rich and powerful, to present reality in an organized and expert way as well as those of the rich and powerful lie. The lies and propaganda can only be countered with reality. It's really about education.
nwsun, you say it as concisely as possible. This, which i've decided to reproduce in toto just because in looking for bits
there was too little left. It expands on what you have said and reminds us just how long the situation has been recognized.
Embarrassica The Mutilated .. continued ..
by David Michael Green | August 1, 2010 - 5:22pm
Sometime presidential candidate and full-time lunatic Steve Forbes recently wrote a column on "Obama's Soft-Core Socialism [ http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/fact-and-comment-opinions-steve-forbes.html ]".
In case the title wasn't already enough to knock you off your chair and have you rolling on the floor laughing, consider the big ol' photo that leads in the article. Is it of Barack Obama, the subject of the piece? No, it is not. Is it a picture of Steve Forbes, the author of the essay? No, I'm afraid it isn't. Instead, it's yet another obligatory hagiographic rendering of Saint Ronald the Raygun, complete with jaunty smile, plastic Gumby hairdo, and obligatory American flag in the gauzy background. How very... er, relevant. Check my math, would ya, but wasn't it thirty years ago that this guy was elected president? Before cell phones and CDs, let alone MP3s? And wasn't Reagan the dude who tripled the national debt, shredded the Constitution, and began the process of cutting the legs out from underneath the American middle class?
As if this isn't bizarro enough, consider Forbes' title and thesis. He's arguing that the guy who threw massive mountains of taxpayer money at Wall Street banks to save them from collapse because of the bad casino capitalism bets they had made is a socialist. (Actually, Forbes is not quite so sure - like many apoplectic freaks on the right, he simultaneously wants to call Obama a fascist too, and sorta does so.) He's arguing that the guy whose health care solution involves forcing thirty to forty million private Americans to buy crappy expensive insurance from private companies who provide absolutely no value added in the delivery of a crucial product is a socialist. He's telling us that the president who opened up massive tracts of offshore areas for private sector (read BP) oil extraction in unprecedented quantity, location and scope is a lockstep adherent of Marx and Lenin.
It's really quite breathtaking. If we hadn't learned already (and almost no one in the Democratic Party or the American public seems to have) just how insidiously ingenious and recklessly disingenuous these monsters on the right are when it comes to the art of political framing, it would otherwise be tempting to conclude that people like Forbes must be snorting enough cocaine every day to launch a herd of elephants into space and park them in low earth orbit. That's how paranoid they are.
The piece is riddled with more bad lies than a local Rotary Club golf tournament - after a liquid lunch - and is packed with more stupidity than a truckload of Texas state GOP party platform photocopies coming back from Kinko's. But the line that really caught my eye was this one: "The truth is that not even the Franklin Roosevelt Administration was as hostile to and ignorant about free enterprise as this Administration is. Almost every action Obama officials take underscores their belief in the stereotype that businesspeople are mostly amoral, corner-cutting, consumer-shafting, pollution-loving menaces."
Clearly, Steve Forbes and I read different newspapers. I mean that both literally and figuratively. But it might be more
accurate to say that we live in different countries. His is America The Beautiful. Mine is Embarrassica The Mutilated.
I'm sure there are tons of good-hearted small business men and women out there, trying to do an honest day's work for an honest day's wage, and serving their communities in every way they can (in fact, there happens to be someone just like that living in my house). But the big business corporate actors who meet such a description may well be as rare as a fundamentalist preacher who would actually be going to heaven, if there was such a thing. Even if they're not polluting or scamming or downsizing the rest of us with wild abandon, at a minimum these corporate porkers all seem to be lobbying the government (or, what used to be called 'buying Congress') for subsidies, tax exemptions and deregulation, at the expense of the rest of us.
In Steve Forbes' America The Beautiful, these corporations are "doing god's work" as the astonishingly oblivious Lloyd Blankfein described his Goldman Sachs cancer - er, corporation. They're waging battle against the government which seeks to take away all our freedoms. Well, not quite all, of course. For example, the freedom to breathe clean air, eat safe foods, drink clean water, maintain our health, keep our pensions, receive a pathetic minimum wage, work in a safe place, etc.
In my Embarrassica The Mutilated, on the other hand, corporations and the associated plutocracy of the ueber-wealthy in this country form an economic dictatorship of unparalleled greed, power and arrogance. Nor am I alone in this regard, and nor is this exactly a flash headline shouting out breaking news.
In fact, this is a very old story, and I'm keeping some pretty good company in retelling it. This guy called Jefferson that you might have heard of once said, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country". I don't remember seeing that in my sixth grade civics textbook for some odd reason, but that does not diminish the significance of the sentiment. The same might be said of that Madison dude's observation that, "The growing wealth acquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses".
Or there was Andrew Jackson's take on this question (thanks to Thom Hartmann for collecting these): "The question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."
Or Grover Cleveland's: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
Or Teddy Roosevelt's: "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
I haven't even included FDR's impassioned eloquence on the subject, Lincoln's complaints about banks that he feared more than the Confederate Army, or Dwight (career military man, five-star general, commander of the Normandy invasion, Supreme Commander of NATO, Republican, conservative) Eisenhower's famous invocation against the all-consuming power of the military-industrial complex.
In fact, against the authors of these passages, the actions and rhetoric of Barack Obama look ridiculously tame, passive and corporately compromised by comparison. Which means that, according to the 'thinking' of Steve Forbes - notwithstanding his widespread fame as a profound philosopher and saint-like man of unbridled compassion - Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Eisenhower and both Roosevelts were even bigger socialist-fascist-whatever-label-paranoid-freaks-will-come-up-with-next than you know who - Commissar Trotsky's just-activated sleeper agent currently ensconced in the White House. Golly, that seems like an awfully big collection of revered and iconic Americans to lump out there in the radical left. By the time you get done dynamiting these traitors' faces off of Mount Rushmore, only Washington would remain (and maybe he said the same sort of things too, for all I know). I know it sounds preposterous, but it almost seems that the problem isn't so much that all of America is way out on the left as it is that people like Steve Forbes are way out there on the right (and, Steve, just so you know - that's what we mean by the word 'fascist').
And, really, does the wisdom of these former presidents or the pathetically mild scolding that occasionally emerges from the current one require such a lengthy leap of logic to comprehend? I mean, what would happen if, for example, Mr. Forbes poked his head out from behind the Wall Street Journal, or the magazine produced by the empire he valiantly pulled himself up by his bootstraps from to inherit from his father, only to read just the few reports of corporate predation still available in the rest of the (largely corporate) media? What might he observe there?
Maybe he'd read about the nice folks on Wall Street who crashed the economy of the entire globe by taking outrageous risks with other people's money, knowing that if their bets went bad the taxpayers and the hated government would ride to their rescue, a hundred pennies on the dollar, and they'd continue to make record salaries and bonuses while nearly one out of five Americans left in the wake of their disaster can't find a job.
Maybe Mr. Forbes would see the same articles I've been seeing about British Petroleum, and its completely unmatched record for greed and disregard of worker and environmental safety that led to producing a series of catastrophes, culminating (we hope) in the Gulf oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in American history.
What if he were to read "Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been Dumping Site" in the New York Times this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30gulf.html ], which notes that "at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water - a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals - are dumped into the gulf every year." The article also describes how "Even the coast itself - overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms - is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930. 'This has been the nation's sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,' said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. 'What we're seeing right now with BP's crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.'"
Perhaps Mr. Forbes would read the investigative piece revealing that "Millions of Americans are being duped by life insurance companies that have figured out a way to hold onto death benefits owed to families. MetLife and Prudential lead the way in making hundreds of millions of dollars in secret profits every year on money that belongs to relatives of those who die, an investigation by Bloomberg Markets magazine found. Among the people being tricked are parents and spouses of U.S. soldiers killed in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-28/fallen-soldiers-families-denied-cash-payout-as-life-insurers-boost-profit.html ; also http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128799983 ]." The scam is to issue a fake checkbook to beneficiaries, rather than the payout they are owed. The insurance companies then pay the families a whopping 0.5 percent interest on the funds, keeping five to ten times that amount for themselves on all the returns harvested from investing those dollars. Such patriotism, eh? Support Our Troops! Don't forget your yellow ribbon sticker!
Maybe Steve Forbes could take a gander Bob Herbert's latest column [at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52858854 ], detailing how corporations are doing great right now, in part because they're holding onto gobs of cash rather than hiring workers or paying a decent wage to the ones they've got. "They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output," said Professor [Andrew] Sum. 'Here's what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.' ... As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery 'has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history'."
And while he's at it, perhaps Mr. Forbes might want to take a look at the country that's been created by thirty years of bowing to the interests of corporations and other oligarchs, as institutionalized by the Washington whores of both parties whom they've purchased to do their bidding. The US median wage is the same as it was decades ago, and even fell during the Bush years. Today the richest one percent of Americans take home almost a quarter of all income in the country, just like it was in the good old days of 1928, but way up from the less than 10 percent they got in the pre-Reagan years. Meanwhile, millionaires realized a growth in their wealth of fifteen percent last year, rather a different experience than most of the rest of us, I'd say, especially the more than 15 million unemployed people, along with another ten million who either work part-time or have quit looking for work altogether, not to mention the 39 million people in this country who are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat, or the 47 million without health insurance.
This is just for starters. We could go on and on here. There doesn't appear to be any bottom to the well of greed. It is the Tragedy of the Commons cranked up on a killer cocktail of amphetamines, steroids and radioactive pellets. Our greed seems entirely boundless. Good luck to any geese out there who lay golden eggs, or for that matter geese of any kind. Or the ground they walk on. Or the rivers they drink from. Or the air they breathe. Is there not a way that's been found yet to commoditize and profitize air? If they can't sell it, some good folks will at the very least insist on getting rich polluting it.
This society has just lost its way. But looking at its history of stealing land from Native Americans and then abusing them, slavery, prison labor, oppression of women and minorities, and neocolonialism throughout the developing world, it may be that it never did know its way - or at least a decent, humane way. It just seems so much more grim today.
Today we raise our children with the sort of values that make them (and especially us) seem as though they were never raised at all. Gimme-gimme greed is an embarrassing attitude associated with toddlers. Oh, and adult Americans. Bullying exploitation is a shameful behavior generally left behind on the playgrounds of junior high. Unless, of course, you're a corporate CEO or a leader in American government. Lying is something people are supposed to learn to stop doing when they're kids. Unless you're a regressive, that is.
Plutocratic plunderers just can't seem to wreck this world, its people, and the planet which sustains us all fast enough.
We are now rapidly reaching the natural limitations of such exploitation, and the planet is beginning to bite back.
If we're lucky, people will too.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.
© 2010 Smirking Chimp Media
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-michael-green/30459/embarrassica-the-mutilated [with comments] [links other than the first one my adds] [also at e.g. http://www.opednews.com/a/116191 and http://www.eurasiareview.com/201008016261/america-the-beautiful-or-embarrassica-the-mutilated.html ]
===
this also in reply to hogsgeteaten's http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48838033 and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52859220 , and hap0206's http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52155513
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52862196&txt2find=military|industrial|complex
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking about people biting back, What do we do? How can we do it better? Consider ..
Being Seen, Felt, and Remembered in Our World of Illusions and Walls
William E. Powell
EDITORIAL NOTES
“A group of altruists will beat a society of selfish individuals
every time.” –E. O. Wilson
In a get-to-know-you initial meeting for a group of pregnant teenage
girls who were patients of a new health care program for
young mothers-to-be the unanticipated happened. Without any
more than minimally extended warmth, the person in charge began
by waxing eloquent about all the statistical demographic “truths” of
people in “their” condition; essentially, “According to studies, this is
you and this is why you got pregnant, and this is what you need to do
to produce a healthy baby.” After a half hour of impersonal, statisticbased
stereotypical script-talk by the worker without one scintilla of
insight about what it might feel like to be in the young women’s situations,
one of them stood up in tears and yelled, “You don’t know me,
you don’t know me at all!” and stormed out of the room.
Being dealt with by emotion-blind people is sometimes akin to being
spoken to by a brick. Perhaps the young woman felt that being
pregnant and dealing with a personal dilemma largely unknown to
the speaker, often walled off from the humanity of real people, was a
smidgen too impersonal. Perhaps the process of being assumed to be
another bit of statistical cannon fodder collected in other places and
times missed a few too many important nuances of her humanity—
her uniquely felt and narrative shaping “black swans” (Taleb, 2010).
It is often offensive to be told who you are without anyone having
ever bothered to inquire what you think or feel. Perhaps looking at
people and at evidence is not really the same as seeing real people or
things—certainly, statistics rarely evoke empathy. Indeed, “If there’s
anything I’ve learned from my childhood…it’s that we are more likely
to see the minimums of a person’s potential rather than what their
optimum performance could be if they were nurtured and made full
members of the human family” (Powell, 2004, p. 104). People in positions
of power or prestige more often look for flaws than promise.
That experience of watching a distraught young woman reminded
me that there are a lot of un-empathic people floating in our communal
pond—people who face people but only see and serve things (e.g.,
“consumers”)—if they even see or feel much of anything at all.
The writer Barry Lopez (1989) speaks rather scathingly about proprietary
scrutiny, the tendency to impose analytic thought and logic
on circumstances of life that are perceived quite differently by people
directly involved. In the meeting mentioned above, the emotion-laden
circumstances and issues of being a pregnant teen were viewed and
weighed quite differently by the teen herself when contrasted to the
stereotyping of a dispassionate worker trying to assure them that everything
to be offered was “evidence-based.”
This vexing issue of an apparent decline in empathy and of really
seeing one another has been studied and the results, already known
and felt by others, are disquieting. It is easy to ignore the implications
of waning empathy, but I suspect we would do well to safeguard our
souls, our humanity, and our right to actually empathize with the circumstances
and humanity of our clients. What if we feel the subtle
pressure to not be empathic with students and clients—to not acknowledge
or be swayed by feeling and emotions or take the time to see them
more deeply? Is being business-like the same as being empathic?
The poet Dylan Thomas (1954), in his epic work Under Milk Wood,
addressed that concern many decades ago in the prayer of Eli Jenkins
who desired an attentive god that “sees our best side, not our worst.”
The implications of subtle yet pervasive social pressure to change our
human capacities for relating to one another may speak in whispers
about what is declining, but the need is for us to pay attention and do
something to preserve what is clearly one of our strengths. Empathy,
one of the bases of our innate capacity for practical wisdom and moral
reasoning, is silently screaming for our attention (Varela, 1999).
As Lopez (1989) noted, it is commonplace for people in organizations
and businesses to define, frame, and interpret things differently
than the people being served—the media is positively abloom with
examples of such imposition. It is so commonplace we often do not
even realize it anymore: “Oh, you’re saying ______.” (No one ever
politely responds, “No, I’m not saying that at all, read my lips and try
again!”) In our professional and public literature we have become
phobic about hearing the voice of the first person, the I. The impersonal
third person, that golem, has become a mallet to enforce the
boundaries between ourselves and others and the being that denies
our emotions and perspectives and asserts the primacy of our seemingly
rational minds.
“Objective” outsiders can often frame and measure things in ways
that are oblivious to the lives and views and emotional universes of
people living in particular circumstances—dominance is sometimes
the privilege of putting a particular callous spin on others’ lives and
events. Dominance is also the privilege of ignoring things on others’
behalf. For example, imagine a Mississippi River flood resulting in
damage to the environment and human life; the media often uses
money rather than well-explained human dilemmas as the measure
of its effect: “A flood in Iowa caused $___ million damage.” This is a
permutation of imperialism, imposing one group’s yardstick as the
accepted way of measuring the lives of others. Knowing that can inform
us and enlighten our work. (Families in Society | Volume 92, No. 1 4)
Emerging science suggests that the capacity to understand others’
beliefs and worldview develops in infancy, yet many of us lose that
natural ability as part of our enculturation and professional preparation
(Kovacs, Teglas, & Endress, 2010). A good social worker cultivates
and safeguards their capacity to apprehend the worldview and
emotions of others and hesitates to impose their personal logic on
the world in which clients actually live (Hamer, 2006). Empathy, attention,
and consideration afford us better abilities and direction for
walking in the shoes of others.
In my group work classes I often bring in the notion Shulman
(2008) embedded in his text about creating the conditions in practice
wherein change can take place. We discuss how to create conditions
in groups where people can do what they need to in order to empower
themselves. We talk about how circumstances around us affect our
moods and how we behave, and the likelihood that we can act efficaciously.
In such discussions I hope that eventually the notion comes
automatically that creating a proper environment can help people do
things that they have not done before: gain insight and caring, learn to
help others, sense how others see things, and be thoughtful about the
interplay of emotions and thought.
In the most recent class discussions on this topic, students talked
about the conditions of their own work and how they are affected: “I
am a cashier earning minimum wage and I can go days without anyone
even addressing me as a person. Most likely, if they say anything,
customers will dump on me because of problems in their own lives.”
“No one takes the time to know me deeply anymore—they just text me
instead of seeing me in person and have no idea how I really feel. How
can anyone remember me if they don’t make an effort to really know
me in the first place?” “I wish someone would just be nice to me once
in a while, not the cold business-like crap that passes as friendliness.
No one really ‘sees’ anyone anymore.” When asked if any of them had
people around them in school who took the time to really know how
they felt, and help them succeed, everyone replied “no one!” One student
stated, “One thing I like about this class is that we’re not pitted
against each other. In most classes it feels like all we do is compete: no
one wants to help their opponent, no one seems to care about helping
make anyone else successful.” The class then set a learning goal: to create
a “we” and learn to create the conditions that allow us to see what is
concretely among us and help one another to blossom.
The following quote from Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) on practical
wisdom might profitably be considered in light of the studies by
Kraus, Cote, and Keltner (2010) concerning the interface of empathy
and social class:
Moral imagination—the ability to see how various options will play
themselves out and the ability to evaluate them—is thus critical to
perception. It represents, philosopher John Dewey explained, “the
capacity to concretely perceive what is before us in light of what
could be.” Not surprisingly, then, empathy—the capacity to imagine
what someone else is thinking and feeling—is critical to the perception
that practical wisdom demands. Such empathy involves both
cognitive skill—the ability to perceive the situation as it is perceived
by another—and emotional skill—the capacity to understand what
another person is feeling. (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010, p. 22) Kraus et al.
found that, in aggregate, poor people may be better at empathizing
than the wealthy and powerful. Imagine if our clients are as
good as us (or better) at reading one another and can (perhaps) read
our emotions as good as or better than we can read theirs. Ooooops!
Imagine also the implications of the difference in people that Kraus
and colleagues found—those more wealthy and powerful among us
as being people often less capable of empathizing with others (as well
as ruder, less inclined to help others, and less adept at reading others
than poor people). Imagine the tone deaf policy making they influence
or the effects of economic decisions they shape. Yet, these are
the very people who shape these policies that affect others’ lives. How
does that trickle down to us and the clients we serve? What shapes
their capacity for empathy and those of less affluent people—what are
we missing?
Martha Nussbaum (1995, p. 66) notes that people who deny themselves
the use of emotions (or simply cannot feel the circumstance of
others or have empathy) cannot reason well—they are deprived of
much of the information needed for rational decision making. Without
felt emotions they are less likely to be moved to do needed things.
So, lower empathy leads to the possible lowering of rational decision
making and less actual doing? Schwartz and Sharpe (2010) also suggest
that this quandary leads to a general lessening of wisdom and increased
likelihood of folly. Like canaries in mine shafts, small changes
can presage major problems.
As social workers, do we capture the heft of people or do we just
write down required notes and check boxes, or turn data into numbers
for statistical purposes? Does our empathy trigger our imagination?
Do we look closely at people and, for that matter, how often do others,
in turn, really see who and what we are? How many wealthy and
powerful people really comprehend the best ways of addressing the
needs and potential among the people we serve—who can both feel
and understand what life is like when stuck on the lower rungs of the
social ladder? Who can comprehend a viable path out of the mire?
NWSUN, BUFFETT AND GATES AND THE OTHERS JOINING THEM IN GIVING SOME OF THEIR
WEALTH BACK, ARE SOME OF THE WEALTHY AND POWERFUL PEOPLE WHO DO THE ABOVE.
How many among us see others as kindred spirits or sense that we
are like them in some ways? Or, importantly, feel that there, but for
grace, go I? How do we, as social workers, safeguard and nourish our
own empathy?
References
Hamer, M. (2006). The barefoot helper: Mindfulness and creativity in social work and
the caring professions. Dorset, UK: Russell House.
Kovacs, A., Teglas, E., & Endress, A. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to
others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.
doi 10.1126/science.1190792
Kraus, M., Cote, S., & Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic
accuracy. Psychological Science, 21, 1716–1723.
Lopez, B. (1989). Crossing open ground. New York: Vintage.
Nussbaum, M. (1995). Poetic justice. Boston: Beacon.
Powell, W. E. (2004). Becoming Quasimodo: The shaping of a life. In R. J. Berger
& R. Quinney (Eds.), Storytelling sociology (pp. 91–106). Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Schwartz, B., & Sharpe, K. (2010). Practical wisdom. New York: Riverhead Books.
Shulman, L. (2008). The skills of helping individuals, families, groups, and
communities (6th ed.). New York: Brooks/Cole.
Taleb, N. N. (2010). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable (2nd ed.).
New York: Random House.
Thomas, D. (1954). Under milk wood: A play for voices. New York: New Directions
Publishing.
Varela, F. (1999). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
http://www.familiesinsociety.org/Article.asp?ID=186
Jonathan Swift said, "May you live all the days of your life!"
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
