Category Archives: Sociology

Kind is the New Cool

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By Charles Eisenstein

Source: A New and Ancient Story

When I was in high school, I remember social banter consisting of a lot of subtle put-downs and one-upsmanship. The popular kids were generally not very nice, certainly not to us unpopular kids but not even to each other. I remember a few popular kids being nice to me on the sly, but in group settings even those nice ones would join in the dominating behavior, or, at best, surreptitiously divert attention away from the victims. If they were overtly kind, they risked being grouped in with the losers. Social status came from winning, from dominating. Kindness was a recessive gene in the social DNA.

Until recently, I thought this is just how teenagehood is in our culture. Not that kids are inherently cruel, but that deeply entrenched social conditions cast the majority into a state of insecurity from which bullying behavior inevitably arises. But over the last few years I am seeing more and more evidence of a profound sea-change in youth culture.

My first glimpse of it came from witnessing my teenage sons’ interactions with their friends. Almost never did I hear the kind of aggressive, belittling talk that was so common when I was that age. Granted, they may have been censoring themselves because “dad” was present, but if so the censorship was irrationally selective – I also overheard a lot of conversations that no teen in his right mind would let his friend’s father overhear. Moreover, it wasn’t just an absence of overt put-downs that I noticed. They rarely said anything unkind about people who were not present in the room. I almost never heard them label so-and-so as a dweeb, geek, bitch, loser, wimp, or anything like that. The exceptions were very few; in general, a normative ethic of gentleness prevailed.

These young people were not the math geeks and band nerds either. My eldest son Jimi in particular is socially confident and popular, as were many of his friends.

At the same time, I am aware of horror stories of social media bullying that drives some teens to suicide. It looks like things are getting simultaneously better and worse. In order to find out what’s going on, I’ve been asking Jimi and some other young people.

Jimi confirmed what I’d semi-consciously become aware of. There is a kind of split, he said, among his peers. Some are still clinging to the “old story” and all that goes along with it, but more and more are leaving that behind. “It is the opposite of how you describe your high school, dad,” he said. “For us, social status comes from being kind, and even authentic. If someone is mean, or boastful about a sexual conquest, we call him on it.”

I found his reference to sexual discourse particularly significant, since misogyny is perhaps the most primal expression of what Riane Eisler calls dominator culture. In my youth, women were a kind of social currency. If you “had” a pretty girlfriend, you were a winner, you were worthy, you were desirable. We men sought sex to prove our worth and demonstrate it to other men. Sexual intercourse was a “score,” a “touchdown,” a “home run.” I never saw any sign of that among my sons’ peers. I spent most of my adult life under the lingering shadow of an objectifying culture, seeing sex as proof of my worth. Maybe I’m still not completely free of it. Fortunately, from what I am seeing, what my generation struggled so hard to achieve imperfectly is becoming the new normal.

Misogyny, racism, intolerance, bullying, homophobia, disrespect, unkindness… these are becoming the recessive gene now, at least among a significant subculture of young people. Nothing gives me more optimism for the future than this.

Jimi also described (what was to me) an astonishing absence of bullying from the high school he attended before transferring to an art school. It wasn’t an elite school: sixty percent minority, it ranked well below average in terms of academic performance. Occasionally there were fights, he said, but not a lot of the strong picking on the weak. Racial comity and acceptance of LGBT students was the norm. Nor was there widespread labeling of various cliques as there had been at my school. The hicks, the jocks, the brains, the weirdos… none of that.

When we watched Breakfast Club together, a film that my peers and I revered as a consummate encapsulation of the high school experience, Jimi and his brother Matthew didn’t identify with its social milieu at all. I want my generation, the 30-somethings and 40-somethings, to know this. The world is changing. The nightmare that we took to be reality itself is coming to an end.

Perhaps the trend I’m describing here is not yet dominant; part of me feels naïve for even thinking it is real. But more and more, I hear teenagers and 20-somethings express thoughts that basically didn’t exist in my universe when I was that age. “I’ve noticed that my inner conflicts are reflected back to me through my relationships.” Holy crap, did I just hear a 21-year-old say that? These people are born into a place that took us decades of struggle to inhabit even part-time.

Maybe you are one of those young people, or maybe you are poised between two worlds. Either way, I’m sure you can feel the call to join the new cool of kindness, generosity, nonviolence, authenticity, emotional courage; to stop tolerating anything else; to join together in forging a new normal. If it isn’t quite here yet, it is very close at hand.

What will the world be like, when Jimi and his cohort move fully into adulthood? What social institutions, what politics, will come from people for whom kindness is the norm and not the exception? When unkindness is intolerable in social life, how will it be tolerable in ecological life, economic life, or political life?

As we celebrate the young, let us also offer thanks to those of the older generations who carried the flame of kindness through the dark times. Some names come to me of those popular, kind kids: Eric Heiser, Doug Edmunds, Jenny Gibson… and that angelic boy who died in a car crash. I’m sure you can think of some as well. Light them a candle in your heart. They sustained the field into which the new generation is born.

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy… But I knew it wasn’t a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head… The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Don’t believe me?

Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself. The landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

The Executive Branch: Whether it’s the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy, executive orders and specious legal justifications. Rest assured that no matter who wins this next presidential election, very little will change. The policies of the American police state will continue.

The Legislative Branch:  It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 86 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

Shadow Government: America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He or she will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. In the latest move to insulate police from charges of misconduct, Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation to keep police officers’ names secret, ostensibly creating secret police forces.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

That brings me to the final and most important factor in bringing about America’s shift into authoritarianism: “we the people.” We are the government. Thus, if the government has become a tyrannical agency, it is because we have allowed it to happen, either through our inaction or our blind trust.

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who’s in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of the presidential candidates, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today. What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state. In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

Rent Strikes: ‘together we can defeat the housing market’

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By Matt Broomfield

Source: RoarMag.org

As they revive a long-dormant form of protest, rent strikers in London and San Francisco must learn lessons from the great strikes of the 20th century.

When you can no longer afford to pay your rent, only one course of action remains: stop paying it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tenants are militating against the unbearable pressure of the housing market via the only locus of power available to them — going on rent strike.

Midtown Apartments, San Francisco

Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments.

But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

LaCrosby’s treatment is symptomatic of the way Midtown is being used as an asset to be stripped for cash, says long-time resident and Save Midtown organizer Jay Majitov. “This community is being displaced by the greed and avarice of property pimps preying on the weak and the disenfranchised,” he explains. Many of Majitov’s neighbors moved into Midtown after being socially cleansed from other areas of San Francisco in the 1960s, on what they understood was a rent-to-buy agreement.

But though Midtown paid off its collective mortgage in 2007, the city reneged on its agreement to hand the building over to the tenants. Instead, Midtowners were hit with a threefold increase in rent, far outstripping the maximum increase set by San Francisco rent controls. Appalled by this betrayal of trust, the tenants of 65 Midtown apartments have been withholding their rent increase since August 2015.

University College London

On the face of it, LaCrosby’s working-class neighbors in Midtown have little in common with the primarily middle-class, primarily white students of University College London. But the price of UCL accommodation has risen by 56 percent in the last six years, and the university extracts £16 million annually in pure profit from their residences. The halls remain shabby, cramped and infested with cockroaches.

As a result, around 150 students are currently striking for a 40 percent rent decrease. “UCL call residents in halls customers, not students,” says David Dahlborn of UCL, Cut The Rent (UCL-CTR). “It’s sheer exploitation.”

There have been rumblings about wider rent strikes across the British left for months, while US activists in Portland and elsewhere are now looking to copy Midtown’s example. Yet until a couple of years ago, no one was talking about rent strikes at all.

The problem(s) with rent strikes

Once a cornerstone of tenants’ rights activism, since the 1980s the rent strike has largely been absent from the arsenal of the left. The most famous rent strike in history occurred in 1915, when the fear of a Bolshevik insurrection forced the UK government to appease strikers in Glasgow by introducing rent controls. As the Communist threat faded after the second Red Scare, so too did the need to form housing policy with one eye on the Kremlin, and the government’s attitude toward rent strikers hardened accordingly.

Given that many rent strikes occurred in mutual relation with industrial strikes, their decline in popularity can partially be ascribed to the decimation of workers’ right to strike by Thatcher and her successors. The UK now loses a tenth as many days to industrial action as it did in the 1980s, and “strike” has become a politically toxic term. (UCL-CTR advise their activists to avoid the word altogether when door-knocking.) The fragmentation of the left and the castration of the trade unions have left Britain without left-wing superstructures capable of amplifying wildcat rent strikes into a broader social movement.

There are also delocalized issues inherent in the mode of protest. The vulnerable people who stand to gain the most from a reduction in rent are also those most imperiled by eviction: working-class people, people of color, single mothers and the disabled, often living in social housing. According to Jay Majitov, many Midtowners will be forced out of state or onto the street if their strike is broken. There is no legal protection for rent strikers in the UK or the USA.

Recrimination can be brutal: after the arrest of rent strikers in Kings’ Cross in 1960, crowds of protesters were baton-charged and violently dispersed by mounted police. Mary Barbour and her army of Glaswegian housewives were forced to fight off heavy-handed bailiffs with wet clothes, rotten food and flour-bombs. Barbour would stomp round the tenements whirling a football rattle to summon her troops as the “factor” moved in.

Midtown property managers Mercy Housing have kept up an aggressive campaign of intimidation, towing residents’ cars for minor infractions and muscling into pensioners’ homes. “They came in as an occupying force, a colonizer. There’s no regard for cultural sensitivity or the long-term tenants,” says Majitov. Tenants have been told they face eviction if their grandchildren visit more than twice a week, or if they hold barbecues on their own property. “I’m sorry, man, but barbecues are what we do,” Majitov adds.

Making rent strikes work

An industrial striker does no work and so loses her pay, but rent strikers actually save money while they agitate, as astronomic rents stop crippling working people and start depreciating from the profits of housing companies. The more unbearable the financial burden on the renters, the keener the loss suddenly felt by the landlord, in an efficacious reversal of power dynamics.

Last year, UCL-CTR organized students from UCL and SOAS in a successful strike, securing £400,000 compensation after the university conceded it had left students in unlivable conditions among cockroaches, rats and incessant building works. London’s first genuine rent strike for 40 years only involved 50 students, but each individual striker made a tangible, measurable impact on the university’s finances. Glasgow 1915 and UCL-SOAS 2015 are century-spanning testaments to the fact that a well-executed rent strike can be devastatingly effective.

Historically, successful mass rent strikes have benefited from a united left providing the infrastructure to exponentially increase the strike’s effect across multiple homes and into the industrial sphere, rather than leaving isolated strikers at the mercy of the bailiffs. A New York strike in 1907 relied on the backing of a strong, active Socialist Party, and the Glasgow strikes would not have succeeded without union support.

As noted above, the male-dominated superstructures traditionally capable of supporting mass direct action have diminished in size and power. If they want to achieve this vital escalation, 21st century rent strikers must look to alternative, grassroots networks of activists.

Alternate support networks

Most successful rent strikes have been led by women. The distinction between rent strikes and industrial strikes should not be collapsed into a crude dichotomy between the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere. In 1907, 16-year-old Pauline Newman led strikes which secured rent reductions for 2000 New York families. She worked till 9pm in a textile factory before campaigning all night in the slums of Manhattan. Working-class women have always worked formally in the marketplace, as well as informally (and unpaid) in the home.

But Newman, the “East Side Joan of Arc”, was supported by housewives who spent the day going from tenement to tenement urging other families to join the strike. Working-class shop-floor networks intermeshed with female-dominated domestic networks. The Glasgow rent strike was sparked by landlords seeking to cow women into submission while their husbands were away fighting in the war. Again, Mary Barbour and her army rapidly spread information through the slums whenever the factor descended, militating via a social infrastructure which their landlords grossly underestimated.

Half of all British housing benefit recipients are single women. The average female flat-sharer in London earns £4236 less than her male counterpart, and twice as many women as men spend over half their salary on rent. Women have a disproportionate stake in the housing crisis, and male politicians continue to underestimate their ability to organize and resist. Though not a rent strike per se, the success of the Focus E15 mothers in resisting eviction attempts by Newham Council illustrates the continued power of localized, female, working-class support networks.

Interlocking working-class communities and communities of color have proven similarly capable of disseminating information and resistance. Rent strikers in 1930s Peckham relied on a rolling guard of unemployed laborers to defend their homes while successfully agitating for an improvement in living conditions. Majitov repeatedly emphasizes the importance of working-class solidarity in Midtown: “We don’t build apps, we don’t code. We drive buses and we deliver mail. And if this working-class community of color hadn’t stood together we would have been out a long time ago. ”

African-American Jean King (another woman) secured rent controls in St Louis after a year-long strike in 1969, while Majitov proudly notes that Save Midtown has the support of civil rights luminary Andrew Young, who successfully organized a rent strike alongside Martin Luther King in 1960s Chicago. Just like in Glasgow in 1907, Save Midtown have appointed tenant organizers with responsibility for contacting strikers across the development, and they are now reaching out to other African-American communities being abused by Mercy to launch a nationwide class action against the housing company.

The university bubble

A rent strike is a very different proposition for students, who are typically more privileged than the general population — a state of affairs maintained by the inaccessible rent conditions UCL-CTR are striking against. Many students have family homes to return to, and this can be leveraged against universities.

David Dahlborn explains: “When nothing had happened by the end of summer 2015, the international students who were on strike said ‘well, fuck it, I’m going home’. The university realized they couldn’t really send bailiffs to Mexico.” UCL capitulated soon after. Again, rent strikes reverse a power dynamic familiar to anyone who has tried to secure the return of a deposit from a suddenly evanescent landlord.

Students can also leverage the disjuncture between the public face of the academic university and its profit-making operations. “They say they’re concerned with education,” says UCL striker Aleksandra Tomaszewska. “But they’ve cut funding and bursaries while raising rent and tuition fees.”

Where housing companies are not hugely concerned with positive public relations, university authorities are at pains to emphasize that they provide a caring, nurturing environment. It would be a PR disaster for UCL to forcibly evict white, well-spoken, middle-class students. As with much student activism, student rent strikers can trade on their privilege to enjoy a much greater degree of security than their counterparts in council housing.

Universities constitute a ready-made network for the expansion of a strike. A successful rent strike at Sussex University in 1972-3 rapidly spread to 23 other universities. UCL-CTR is sharing advice and materials with student activists from SOAS, Imperial and Goldsmiths, as they seek to expand the current rent strike across the capital.

“Anyone could do it,” says Dahlborn, who repeatedly emphasizes the lateral organization of UCL-CTR. “Everybody on the strike is a potential organizer.” Students have more free time than workers; they have access to condensed bodies of left-leaning tenants paying vastly excessive rent; and they are keyed in to networks of information exchange between these bodies.

Rent strikes for the 21st century

Paradigms established by 20th century rent strikers could be instructive for those on the radical left wrangling about their relationship with Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Newman and Barbour instigated their strikes alone, but willingly worked alongside hierarchical, party-rooted structures to replicate these actions on a wider scale.

But as Dahlborn argues, a successful general rent strike must ultimately emerge from coordinated grassroots action, as multiple localized organizations “replicate and generalize” tactics that have worked well elsewhere. An emphasis on the dispersal of power underpins much recent left-wing strategizing, and rent strikes can operate particularly effectively through decentralized, lateral organization.

“Together we are powerful, and united we can defeat the market,” Dahlborn says. The unity he describes is not monolithic but dispersed, varied and multiple. Strikes should be generated through grassroots networks, not mandated by top-down frameworks.

Networks of university activists provide one such structure. London’s Radical Housing Network, which unites housing co-ops, community action groups and union representatives, is another. (This organization could also facilitate liaison between university students and working-class activists).

Roger Hallam’s concept of “Conditional Commitment” involves assuring potential strikers that a strike will only go ahead once a certain number of other tenants have committed to the action. Successfully implemented by UCL-CTRE, this system of collective responsibility would function well in enabling dispersed networks of rent strikers to operate in unison.

Industrial strikes expose the gulf between the evaluated worth of employees’ labor and the evaluated worth of the products they manufacture. The fact that a rent strike is even tenable as a concept illustrates the fact that tenants, like workers, are treated as profit-making organs.

Historically, the establishment has therefore reacted ferociously to rent strikes, which expose the cruelty of market logic. A general rent strike called by a hypothetical national tenants’ union would likely meet with overwhelming opposition. But it would be much more difficult for the establishment to defeat a network of localized, coordinated strikes breaking out on university campuses and council estates across the country.

There’s an Awakening Happening and You’re a Part of It (with Gregg Braden)

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By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Society is slowly evolving into a collective consciousness that has disengaged from the false narratives that have been manipulated into official ‘truths’ for humanity. That’s right, if you don’t know yet; we’ve all been deceived in many ways and we all have a responsibility to do our research and play our small part to help out our fellow man and our future generations.

The good news is that individuals are unplugging from this matrix of delusion at an ever-increasing rate, which is fueling a tipping point for basically the whole world to awaken in a domino-like effect. This global awakening has been a long time in the making and is characterized by two equally important parts.

The first is that we all need to come together to facilitate the social changes we desperately need as a uniting global culture. We have made some great progress and shown some genius qualities to get to where we are today; however the tragic reality is that our collective and environmental health is suffering on a wide-spread scale.

There are epidemics of dysfunctional, disharmonious and destructive realities which have resulted from not just the shadow government that runs our world, but also the fact that we continue to ‘choose’ to organize, collaborate and act on a global scale in the manner that we’ve been provided. For a straightforward introduction to these issues, 11 Toxic Realities Society is Finally Waking Up About is a must read.

The second is a philosophical shift which understands that consciousness, not matter, is the core component of our interconnected reality. Individuals and even entire cultures and traditions have known this for centuries; however for the first time in our known history this is being embraced on a planetary scale.

Given that science has now taken the lead for how humanity views the world, we should expect it to be an unbiased and progressive description of it. The harsh truth though is that science has been hijacked by a false philosophy of reality called materialism, so it has not ethically done its job of bringing this spiritual ‘truth’ into the mainstream mindset.

The fields of quantum physics, psychology and parapsychology have conclusively shown why we need to move to a post-materialist era of human consensus. Scientists and laymen alike are awakening to this fact through not just the art of science, but also the art of experience. Simply, with the right type of perspective, we can open our minds and hearts to the symbolism that exists in our day to day experience, as well as the subtle and explicit synchronicities that occur throughout our lives.

Time for Reflection

Can you feel the momentum building for the conscious society? One in which the masses have awoken to both the spiritual and systemic revolution that is required for humanity’s evolution?

You’d have to be deep in the matrix if you can’t sense it. Yet, even if you are, look within yourself and feel the changes that have been happening in your own life. They are a reflection of what’s happening outside of you; the energy of our era is propelling us towards the inevitable moment when the people take back the power to organize their lives in a way which is actually conducive to their physical, mental, emotional, intellectual and spiritual health, as well as their life vitality.

Beware though; we need to be patient. This is a spiritual process which has been happening for all of eternity.

So, given we’re all a part of this process, you need to ask yourself: “How awake am I?”:

  • Are your beliefs about the world continuing to be shaped by the matrix-media, or have you accepted that the mainstream channels are limiting your potential in mind and heart?
  • Do you realize yet that the materialist paradigm is a shallow, dogmatic and inaccurate conception of existence?
  • What about the fact that our world is run by a shadow order in which the banking sector, along with the media, are their primary control mechanisms?
  • Do you see that the political framework has been hijacked by big money and big business?
  • Is it obvious that the wars that our families have been thrown into are part of the agenda of the military-industrial-media-politico-banking complex?
  • Is the corporate monopolization of our resources obvious to you?
  • Have you locked it in that the pharmaceutical giants want customers, not cures?
  • Are you conscious that our food, medicine, water and air is becoming more toxic?
  • Does the way that we treat our fellow sentient beings through the animal-agriculture industry disgust you?
  • Do you acknowledge that so-called experts are less hit than miss, including journalists, doctors, politicians, scientists, academics and gurus?

I mean shit, this stuff is clear as day once you’ve been shaken from your slumber. The entire official narrative on life makes those who see right through it feel like they’re living in crazy town. Really, it’s so embrassing for our species that I feel like at any stage now our so-called leaders are going to come out and say “Haha, got ya’s, it was just a joke”.

But it’s not; this is as real as fuck. There’s no need to be afraid though; there’s plenty of amazing people who have designed the progressive and honorable ways forward for humanity.

So, in that light, let’s look forward:

  • Have you been able to accept that there are radically different ways in which we can organize and economize our societies, so that everyone benefits?
  • Is it clear to you that your human and animal families deserve justice?
  • Are you living a life which connects you to the deeper truths of your spiritual nature?
  • Do you recognize the real values of life such as connection, community, compassion and creativity?
  • Are you tapped into the real reflections of self-worth such as love, honor, truth, authenticity and giving back to those around you?
  • Have you compelled yourself to think and act beyond your own personal bubble?

Let’s hope so, but it’s understandable if not, because it is bloody challenging. We live in a world characterized by both positive and negative energy, so unfortunately many people get lost in the victim mentality. If that’s you, I’ll give you a tip; embrace and respect both sides of the duality and contextualize it into the oneness that permeates our entire existence.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, the truth remains that we’re in a particularly dark part of the macro-cycle right now which is why the mainstream reality is full of fraud, lies, deception, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery. But, it’s moving fast, it’s changing fast, and so should we.

Seriously, you should stand up and be counted as a genuine agent in the transformation of our collective mindscape so that we can make the process of weeding out the social dysfunctions and systemic oppressors as effective and efficient as we can.

Simply, it’s all of our responsibility. Own it.

For a short and sharp account of the ‘choice point’ that humanity is faced with, watch this interview by The Conscious Society Youtube Channel with the renowned Gregg Braden. And for follow up research, there are many articles linked below too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. He best identifies as a writer, guide and truthseeker. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

FURTHER READING

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/08/we-are-the-people-weve-been-waiting-for.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/08/this-is-how-to-create-true-freedom-for-humanity.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/07/why-after-a-decade-of-education-are-our-kids-so-uneducated.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2016/01/how-to-say-no-to-war-with-ken-okeefe-2.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2016/01/12-methods-to-unplug-from-the-matrix.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/12/information-that-society-needs-to-wake-the-fuk-up.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/12/the-problems-and-solutions-missed-by-the-paris-climate-change-conference.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/09/the-dirty-secret-about-money-that-is-finally-being-exposed-to-the-masses.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/09/what-the-fuk-is-going-on-with-the-world.html

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/07/how-to-reconnect-with-nature-supply-our-own-resources-and-rebuild-local-communities.html

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

Normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing. It is so frightening because it is so final; much like death, there is simply no coming back. Rather than a physical death, normalcy bias represents the death of reason and simple observation. It is the death of the mind and cognitive thought instead of the death of the body.

Ever since the derivatives collapse of 2008 the public has been regaled with wondrous stories of recovery in the mainstream to the point that such fantasies have become the “new normal”. These are grand tales of the daring heroics of central bankers who “saved us all” from impending collapse through gutsy monetary policy and no-holds-barred stimulus measures.

Alternative economists have not been so easy to dazzle. Most of us found that the recovery narrative lacked a certain something; namely hard data that took the wider picture into account. It seemed as though the mainstream media (MSM) as well as the establishment was attempting to cherry-pick certain numbers out of context while demanding we ignore all other factors as “unimportant.”

We just haven’t been buying into the magic show of the so called “professional economists” and the academics, and now that the real and very unstable fiscal reality of the world is bubbling to the surface, the general public will begin to see why we have been right all these years and the MSM has been utterly wrong.

Mainstream economists have done absolutely nothing in the way of investigative journalism and have instead joined a chorus cheerleading for the false narrative, singing a siren’s song of misinterpreted statistics and outright lies drawing the masses ever nearer to the deadly shoals of financial crisis.

Why do they do this? Are they part of some vast conspiracy to mislead the public?

Not necessarily. While central banks and governments have indeed been proven time and again to collude in efforts to cover up financial dangers, most economists in the media are simply greedy and ignorant. You have to remember, they have a considerable stake in this game.

Many mainstream economists tend to have sizable investment portfolios and they base their careers partly on the successes they garner in the annual profits they accumulate playing the equities roulette. They also have invested so much of their public image into their pro-market and recovery arguments that there is no going back. That is to say, they have a personal interest in using their positions in the media to engineer positive market psychology (if they are able) so that their portfolios remain profitable. Not to mention, their professional image is at stake if they ever acknowledge that they were wrong for so long about the underlying health of the real economy.

This atmosphere of deluded self interest also generates a cult-like collectivist attitude. There is a lot of mutual back scratching and mutual ego stroking in the MSM; a kind of inbred conduit of regurgitated arguments and unoriginal talking points, and people in the club rarely step out of line because they not only hurt their own investment future and career, they also hurt everyone in their professional circles.  Meaning, no more cocktail party invitations to the Forbes rumpus room…

This is not to say that I am excusing their self interested lies and disinformation. I think that many of these people should be tarred and feathered in a public square for attempting to dissuade the public from preparing in a practical way for severe economic instability. I do not think they see themselves as being responsible to the people who actually take their nonsense seriously and their attitude needs adjustment. I am only explaining how it is possible for an entire profession of supposed “experts” to be so wrong so often. Mainstream financial analysts WANT to believe their own lies as much as many in the public want to believe them.

Like I said, normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing.

One of the root pieces of disinformation in the mainstream that feeds all other lies is the disinformation surrounding falling global demand. MSM pundits cannot and will never fully admit to the cold hard reality of collapsing demand within the global economy. If they are forced to admit to falling demand, then the facade of a steady or recovering U.S. economy crumbles.

I covered the facts behind falling global demand for raw goods and consumer goods last year in part one of my six-part article series, ‘One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes.’ The hard evidence and numbers I presented have only become more important in recent months.

For example, U.S. inventories are building and freight shipments are declining in the U.S. as retailers cite falling demand for goods as the primary culprit. Official retail sales numbers for the holiday season of 2015 have come in flat. When one takes into account real inflation in prices, consumer sales are actually far in the negative. According to the more accurate methods the U.S. government used to use in their calculations of CPI in the 1980’s, we are looking at annual price inflation rate of around 7%. Price inflation does not necessarily equal improved sales.

Energy usage has been crushed since 2008. Despite a growing population and supposedly a growing economic system, oil consumption in 2014 according to the World Economic Forum dropped to levels not seen since 1997.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening and it is the opposite of mainstream projections for oil consumption made back in 2003. This is why inventories and storage for oil across the globe are reaching capacity in a manner never seen before. American demand for oil is not growing exponentially as expected because Americans cannot afford to support such growth anymore. Falling energy demand at these extreme levels is an undeniable indicator of a failing economic system.

Of course, mainstream economists in their desperation to keep market psychology rolling forward and the equities casino producing profits seek to spin this problem as an “oversupply” issue rather than a demand issue. And this is where the disparity in their arguments begins to bleed through.

Here is the problem presented in the mainstream; what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did falling demand lead to oversupply and thus a fall in prices? Or, is demand remaining steady and is overproduction the cause of falling prices?  Yes, let’s confuse the issue instead of looking at the obvious.

As already linked above, it was falling demand which came first in 2008, and demand which continues to fall in relation to past trends. Have producers failed to reduce oil production to match falling demand? Yes. But this does not change the fact that oil demand today is well below levels needed to sustain the kind of economic growth markets have come to expect. Mainstream economists attempt to distract by hyper-focusing on supply, or twisting the discussion into an either/or scenario. Either it is a supply problem, or it is a demand problem, and they assert it is only a supply problem. This is not reality.

In fact, both can and often do exist at the same time, though one problem usually feeds the other. Falling demand does tend to result in oversupply in any particular sector of the economy. The bottom line, however, is that in our current crisis demand is the driving force and supply is a secondary issue. Supply is NOT the driving force behind the volatility in oil markets. Period.

This same chicken and egg distraction rears its ugly head in discussions on shipping markets as well.

The mainstream claim that the historic implosion of the Baltic Dry Index is nothing more than a problem of “too many ships” operating in the cargo market has been throttled, dissected and debunked so many times that you would think that it is surely dead. But the lie just will not die.

Mainstream propaganda houses like The Economist and Forbes continue to produce articles on a regular basis which deny the issue of falling demand for raw goods and claim that oversupply of vessels is the root cause of the BDI losing around 98 percent of its value since its highs in 2008.

I haven’t seen any of these articles offer actual stats or evidence to back their claims that oversupply of ships is the culprit and that demand is not a legitimate issue. But beyond that, why does the mainstream seem so hell bent on dismissing the BDI as a reliable economic indicator? Well, because shipping rates fall when demand falls, thus, when the BDI falls, it signals a lack of global demand. This is a fact they refuse to accept. When the BDI falls by 98 percent since the 2008 highs preceding the derivatives crisis, this signals a disaster in the making.

So, let’s stamp out the “too many ships came first” disinformation once and for all, shall we?

Shipping companies like Maersk Lines have already publicly admitted that falling global demand is the core problem behind falling rates and that supply is a secondary driver. They view the current financial crisis to be “worse than 2008”.

The fact that the largest shipping company in the world is warning of falling demand does not seem to be having any effect on the mainstream talking heads, though.

So, what do major shipping companies do when demand is falling and too many ships are operating on the market? Do they field those ships anyway and drive rates down even further? No, that makes no sense.

What companies do is either leave ships idle in port or scrap them. According to BIMCO (Baltic And International Maritime Council), 2015 was the busiest year since 2012 for the scrapping of older ships to make way for new arrivals. This process of scrapping ships or storing them idle destroys the argument that too many ships are driving falling rates in the BDI. In fact, as chief shipping analyst Peter Sand of BIMCO stated last year:

“The increase in Capesize scrapping comes at a much needed time for the market. Looking at the development so far this year the fleet growth has actually been negative, with a reduction of 0.8 %.”

I hope the garbage peddlers at Forbes and The Economist caught that — NEGATIVE growth of ship supply, not massive over-growth of ship supply. The scrapping increase was also across the board for other models of ships, not just the Capsize, and the increase of cargo capacity by new ships has been negligible.  Yet, shipping rates continue to plummet to historical lows.  Only falling demand, as Maersk Lines admits, explains the crash of the BDI in light of this information.

China in particular has been offering considerable incentives to those companies that do scrap older ships, to the point that some are even scrapping semi-new ships in order to cash in.

Now, this is not to say there is not an “oversupply” of ships. There are indeed many ships within cargo fleets that are not in operation. But again, this is because demand has declined so completely that even with increased scrapping and idling, shipping companies cannot keep up.  Falling demand OCCURRED FIRST, and oversupply is nothing more than a symptom of this root problem.

So, mainstream hacks, can we please put the “too many ships” nonsense to rest and get on with a real discussion on obvious issues of demand?  Stop focusing on the symptoms and examine the cause for once.

These are just a few of the hundreds of fundamental problems plaguing the global economy today, and they are all problems that the mainstream continues to ignore or dismiss out of hand. Which brings us to the now accelerating volatility in stock markets.

Stock markets are crashing, there is no other way to paint it. They are crashing incrementally, but crashing nonetheless. When you have violent swings in equities and commodities between 5 percent and 10 percent a day, then something is very wrong with your economy and has been wrong for some time. If global consumption and demand were really steady or growing, then you would not see the kind of systemic backlash in the financial system that we are now seeing.  If companies listed on the Dow were making legitimate profits due to a healthy consumer base and enjoying solid expansion, stocks would not be increasingly volatile.  If investors and mainstream analysts actually looked at the real numbers in demand (among other things), then the strange behavior in markets would be easy for them to understand. They will not look at such numbers until it is too late.

Instead, markets have chosen to chase headlines, and here is where the ugly circle of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance completes itself. There are no positive indicators within the fundamentals today to energize market faith or market investment. So, investors and algorithmic trading computers track news headlines instead. The MSM hacks now have the power (along with central banks and governments) to create massive stock rallies with one or two carefully placed news tags, such as “Russia To Discuss Oil Production Cuts With OPEC.”

Market speculators and trading computers jump on these headlines without verifying if they are true. In most cases, they end up being false or just hearsay from an “unnamed source.” And so, the markets then crash further down into the abyss, waiting for the next headline to bolster activity even for a day.

The sad truth is, if any of these headlines turned out to be legitimate, their effect would still be meaningless in the long run as the overwhelming weight of the fundamentals continues to topple poorly placed optimism. Now that the investment world no longer has the certainty of central bank intervention as a useful tool, they don’t know if bad news is good news or if good news is bad news. The fact that the system is moving into a death spiral without the psychological crutch of central bank stimulus measures should tell you all you need to know about the supposed recovery since 2008.

No society wants to admit economic failure or economic sabotage, and this is why the con-game is able to continue in the face of so much concrete truth. Ultimately, the market trends and economic trends will flow into the negative. In the meantime, expect massive market rallies, rallies which will then disintegrate in a matter of days. And, whatever happens, never take what mainstream economists say very seriously. They have failed the public for long enough.

From Shanghai to San Francisco, the rent is too damn high

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By Jerome Roos

Source: RoarMag.org

Capitalism is a strange beast. Though incredibly resilient in the face of systemic crises and remarkably adaptive to ever-changing conditions, it never truly overcomes its structural contradictions. As the Marxist geographer David Harvey often points out, it merely displaces them in space and time.

The global financial crisis of 2008-’09 has been no exception in this regard. In fact, the very response to that calamity has already laid the foundations for the next big crisis. And just like its immediate predecessor, it looks like this one will be centered, at least in part, on a massive speculative housing bubble.

Officials and investors may still be turning a blind eye, but the warning signs are flashing red everywhere. From Shanghai to San Francisco, from London to L.A., a wave of real-estate speculation is washing over the world, gentrifying popular neighborhoods, pushing housing prices and rents to historically unprecedented highs, and forcing low-income tenants out of their increasingly unaffordable homes. The result is widespread social displacement and deepening discontent.

Unlike the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-’08, which was centered on the complex packaging of risky loans to low-income households across the U.S., the new housing crisis is a product of real-estate speculation in the world’s major metropolitan areas. Take London, which according to the Financial Times finds itself confronted with “its biggest housing challenge since the Victorian era.” Residential property prices in the British capital have risen 44 percent since 2008, and are now well above their pre-crisis highs.

According to an analysis by the UK charity Shelter, there are currently only 43 homes in Greater London that could still be considered affordable to the average first-time buyer, pushing everyone but the richest of the rich into the rental market, where landlords are known to exact more than a pound of flesh in return for a roof and running water. In the majority of London boroughs, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now over £1,000 per month. On average, Londoners spend about 60 percent of their income on rent.

A similar picture has emerged in New York, where property prices — in the words of the BBC — “have gone turbo-ballistic, as global capital in search of a safe haven has rocketed in.” The average monthly rent in Manhattan now exceeds $3,800, even as half of New York’s urban population lives near or below the poverty line. As a gubernatorial candidate for New York once aptly pointed out, “the rent is too damn high.”

Again, the unsurprising result has been widespread social displacement. Al Jazeera recently reported that “evictions [in New York] have reached epidemic proportions and created a new homeless crisis born out of an affordable housing shortage.” Other major cities like Boston and Los Angeles are not doing much better, as gentrification proceeds apace from coast to coast. Today, even the downtown area of derelict Detroit is rapidly gentrifying, while much of the city still languishes in a state of post-industrial decline.

It is San Francisco, however, that has emerged in recent years as the most paradigmatic case of unbridled gentrification. With median monthly rent hitting $3,530, the city has become the most expensive in the U.S. Desperate to get rid of old tenants who still enjoy rent controls and attract high-income professionals from the tech industry in their place, landlords have gone on an eviction spree: in the past five years, the eviction rate has soared more than 50 percent. Immigrant and working class neighborhoods like the Mission have been reduced to multi-million dollar playgrounds for the “bohemian bourgeois”, complete with snazzy coffee places and expensive vegan restaurants.

The urban sociologist Saskia Sassen has encapsulated the nature of this violent process in strikingly succinct terms: the social reality of financialized capitalism, she argues in her book Expulsions, is all about “systemic complexity producing simple brutality.” And as usual, those feeling the brunt of this brutality are the urban poor and marginalized communities, especially immigrants and people of color, who — along with artists and precarious youths — are increasingly being displaced from city centers towards the periphery.

It is not just cities in the advanced capitalist countries that have been undergoing this turbulent process of urban stratification: the major metropolitan areas of the Global South are firing on all cylinders as well — with the notable difference being that the bubble in emerging markets already appears to be in the process of popping, raising fears of a new international financial crisis centered on China, Brazil and Turkey, among others.

In China’s biggest cities, property prices shot up 60 percent between 2008 and 2014, with residential prices in Shanghai and Beijing rapidly closing in on those of London, Paris and New York. According the consultancy firm McKinsey, some$9 trillion — almost half of China’s total debt, excluding financial sector debt — “is directly or indirectly tied to real estate.” Price increases have exceeded the rise in income by 30 percent in Shanghai and by 80 percent in Beijing.

Other major cities that have been experiencing similar real-estate booms include São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where residential property prices in the most-desired neighborhoods doubled between 2008 and 2013, and Istanbul, along with the other big cities of Turkey, where a credit-fueled construction boom has accounted for 30 percent of GDP in the period since Erdogan’s AKP came to power on the heels of a previous financial crisis in 2002. Since 2007, property prices in Turkey have shot up 36 percent.

To be sure, the local specificities vary from place to place. In London, the housing crisis has been fueled at least in part by massive capital inflows from wealthy elites in countries like China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, as well as the municipality’s failure to build adequate housing for the large influx of new inhabitants. In Barcelona, by contrast, it has been driven primarily by the tourism industry, while in San Francisco it is largely driven by the tech industry. In Rio, the process has been intensified by preparations for the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, while widespread cronyism and corruption have been an important catalyst for the construction boom in Istanbul.

Yet for all differences between them, the gentrification processes and housing crises in each of these global cities share two crucial commonalities: first in their causes, and second in their consequences.

In terms of the underlying causes, the new housing crisis should be seen as a direct outcome of the response to the previous crisis, which was based on massive bank bailouts and central banks opening the floodgates of cheap credit. With the notable exception of the ECB, which only embarked on quantitative easing earlier this year, the world’s largest central banks dropped interest rates to historic lows, kept them there for years on end, and pumped trillions of dollars of fresh liquidity into the global financial system, effectively subsidizing private investors out of bankruptcy.

This unlimited flow of free money (for the 1% only, of course) produced a tide of surplus capital that had to be absorbed somewhere. With “secular stagnation” taking hold across the developed world, investors were still wary to direct this surplus towards the productive economy, where profit margins remained relatively low. And so, in their insatiable quest for yield, they turned to speculative investment in various asset classes instead: stocks, bonds — and, once again, real-estate. The profits were phenomenal. By 2012-’13, the resulting speculative boom had led U.S. corporate profits back to a new all-time high.

But now that the first signs of overheating have become apparent, we can already begin to identify the second crucial commonality between today’s urban housing crises; a commonality that sets the current crisis apart from the last one: in almost all of the major world cities today, ordinary citizens are already actively mobilizing and fighting back against processes of gentrification, dispossession and displacement, building innovative social movements and powerful political platforms in the process.

From urban insurrections to defend the last-remaining green space of Istanbul or the favelas and public transport system of Rio, to the local direct action of anti-gentrification activists targeting Google buses in the San Francisco Bay Area and reclaiming housing projects in London, it is already clear that the next major crisis, unlike the last one, will not go uncontested.

Of all the urban struggles that have ignited across the globe in recent years, the radically democratic municipal platforms of Spain are undoubtedly among the most advanced and the most promising. With the left-wing anti-eviction activist Ada Colau now holding the mayoralty of Barcelona, an important sign is being sent to the landlords, gentrifiers and real-estate speculators of the world: even in the deepest crises, there will be a limit to your capacity to evict us from our homes and destroy our cities — and that limit, ultimately, is us.

Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @JeromeRoos.

The Popular Myth of Democracy in America

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

No nation in world history promised more and delivered less to its citizens and people worldwide. None more greatly threatens world peace – putting humanity’s survival up for grabs like never before.

None did more harm to more people globally over a longer duration. None matches the menace it represents – a presstitute media supported fascist gangster state willing to risk destroying planet earth to own it, run by a bipartisan criminal class.

From inception, America was always run by the people who own it, as first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay explained.

John Adams believed power belonged exclusively to the rich, well-born and able. Today it’s about monied interests in charge – deciding who holds all top positions in government, elected and appointed.

People have no say whatever. Ignore electoral politics, intended solely to deceive – manipulating people to believe new bums are more worthy than current ones.

Voting is a waste of time, accomplishing nothing. Duopoly power rules.

America is a one-party state with two wings, indistinguishable from each other on issues mattering most – militantly pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist no matter what names and faces hold top positions.

Police state laws enforced by powerful security forces at the federal, state and local levels assure wealth and privilege interests are exclusively served at the expense of public welfare.

Elections are farcical, exercises in theater, not democracy. Candidates for the nation’s top offices are cardboard cutouts of each other, distinguishable only by their disingenuous rhetoric – promises made, forgotten and broken once in office.

The public interest be damned. People are used, not served, deceived to believe politicians represent them.

Embedded power runs America, politicians serving entrenched interests exclusively, chosen for that reason. Ordinary people thinking their enfranchisement matters are living in a fantasy world.

Government of, by and for the people is the grandest of grand hoaxes. Media scoundrels perpetuate the myth with all the familiar slogans and high-minded posturing.

Jimmy Carter was right last summer calling America an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

Republicans and Democrats operate by the same corrupted standards. “(U)nlimited) money” serves their interests at the expense of constituents they represent.

America’s system is too debauched to fix. It’s too late for tinkering around the edges.

A complete makeover is needed – a popular revolution, replacing oligarchy with grassroots democracy for the first time in the nation’s history, freed from money control.

Today is the most perilous time in world history. We have a choice.

Accept the status quo, its endless wars, oligarch control over the greater good, unprecedented wealth disparity between rich and all others, along with harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers and risk of potential humanity destroying nuclear war – or refuse any longer to tolerate a system responsible for so much harm and misery to so many people worldwide.

Survival depends on choosing wisely. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind do you want your children to inherit?

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Forget Techno-Optimism: We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Inequality

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By Chris Lehmann

Source: In These Times

Toward the end of his 250-page hymn to digital-age innovation, The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross pauses to offer a rare cautionary note. Silicon Valley may have incubated all the wonders and conveniences one can imagine—and oh, so many more! But for the international business elites looking to remake their emerging market economies in the Valley’s gleaming, khaki-clad image, there’s some bad news: It can no longer be done. A “decades-long head start” has granted too great a competitive advantage to the charmed peninsula along the Northern California coast.

Not to worry, though! On-the-make tech globalists can still make a go of it, provided they’re prepared to embrace “specific cultural and labor market characteristics that can contradict both a society’s norms and the more controlling impulses of government leaders.”

Stripped of the vague and glowing techno-babble, this is a prescription for good old-fashioned neoliberal market discipline. Everywhere Ross looks across the radically transformed world of digital commerce, the benign logic of market triumphalism wins the day. When Terry Gou—the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, the vast Chinese electronics sweatshop that doubles as an incubator for worker suicides—plans to eliminate the headache of supervising an unstable human workforce by replacing it with “the first fully automated plant” in manufacturing history, why, he’s simply “responding to pure market forces”: i.e., an increase in Chinese wages that cuts into Foxconn’s ridiculously broad profit margins. And you and I might see the so-called sharing economy as a means to casualize service workers into nonunion, benefit-free gigs that transfer economic value on a massive scale to a rentier class of Silicon Valley app marketers. But bouncy New Economy cheerleaders like Ross see “a way of making a market out of anything, and a microentrepreneur out of anyone.”

When confronted with the spiraling of income inequality in the digital age, Ross, like countless other prophets of better living through software, sagely counsels that “rapid progress often comes with greater instability.” Sure, the “wealthy generally benefit over the short term,” but remember, kids: “Innovations have the potential to become cheaper over time and spread throughout the greater population.”

Ross first stormed into political prominence as an architect of Barack Obama’s “technology and innovation plan” during his 2008 presidential campaign, and he has spent four years captaining his own charmed, closed circle of tech triumphalism as the White House’s “senior advisor for innovation” under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This renders The Industries of the Future something more than another breathless, Tom Friedman-style tour of the wonderments being hatched in startups, trade confabs and gadget factories. Ross’ book is also a tech-policy playbook for the likely Democratic presidential nominee, who has spared no effort in soliciting the policy input—and landing the campaign donations—of the Silicon Valley mogul set. As such, it should give any Hillary-curious supporter of economic justice considerable pause.

To be sure, Ross raises some vague concerns about how, for example, the runaway growth of the sharing economy drains workers of job security, healthcare benefits, pensions and the like. He avers that “as the sharing economy grows … the safety net needs to grow with it,” but, much like his politically savvy boss, he offers nothing in the way of policy specifics besides the inarguable yet unactionable truism that if the sharing economy “generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.”

The larger point for Ross, in any event, is that the innovative megafirms of tomorrow will come to spontaneously serve the public good. Not to mention that many IPO investors “are pension funds,” Ross coos, which “manage the retirement funds for people in the working class like teachers, police officers, and other civil servants.” Never mind, of course, that the neoliberal logic of the Uber model means that we’re creating a workforce that’s unlikely ever to come within shouting distance of a pension benefit again.

This kind of terminal Silicon Valley myopia also accounts for the vast economic and political blindspots that continually undermine Ross’ relentlessly chipper TED patter. To take just one instructive instance, in a book that devotes considerable real estate to the innovations of “fintech” (the streamlining of global digital currency exchanges and investment transactions) nowhere does the author acknowledge the pivotal role that tech-savvy Wall Street analysts—the “quants” as they’re known in Street argot—played in stoking the early-aughts housing bubble that led to the near-meltdown of the global economy.

That’s because it’s an axiomatic faith for this brand of techno-prophecy that innovation can never actually make anything worse—in just the same fashion that the quants were insisting, right up until the end, that there could never be a downturn in the national housing market. If this is the kind of wisdom Hillary Clinton relied on to promote her global innovation agenda at the State Department, one shudders to think of how it might run riot through the White House come next January.

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