Vero Beach, Florida and the Manufacturing of Consciousness: How the GOP Will Give Obama a Victory in 2012

January 28, 2012 Leave a Comment

At the height of the GOP primary race in South Carolina, I was in Vero Beach, Florida, and suddnely what came over me was the uncanny feeling that I was in-between worlds, a kind of vertigo, a foreboding I was not expecting since I was happily running up A1A.

In South Carolina, the reformed Catholic, Newt Gingrich, surged ahead by deploying a recognizable racist attack — Obama, the European socilaist, as food stamp president — rejecting his lobbyist self — though we know Newt was (Congress wrote the rules to ensure this kind slippage for themselves, post-Tom Delay, increasing their wealth on our backs) — and admonishing the poor for being lazy, resolving that it’s best to give poor children brooms and mops to clean schools.

(Am I the only one that’s reminded of Mussolini and Juan Perón, here — the self-righteous tauting of fundamentalism cloaked by the Church’s altar, the word of God Almighty?).

Benito Mussolini

Newt Gingrich

Juan Perón

In Vero Beach, as I went for runs, I was ovewhelmed by the illusion of reality — MacMansions by the sea (guilty: I was in one!), gated communities, vegetation that is not indigenous (all of it has been imported, except for sea graves and the St. Augustine grass,) and a constant burning of fossil fuels to maintain lavish lawns — mowers, blowers, chain saws, large trucks, off-road vehicles and yachts; the late-model luxury automobiles that are required in a place where pedestrain traffic is, as in L.A., non-existent and strip malls and golf courses that have become the new valhala.

And not a single person of color within sight — unless cleaning houses, mowing lawns and on garbage runs standing behind large trucks.

It’s not surprising that Vero has it’s own Disney Resort. The master of illusion has made Florida its own. Does this illusion follow the America psyche or does it help construct it, as do our politics, I wonder?

I was shaken by the very plastic nature of this living — and perhaps the very plastic, constructed lives we lead that scream unsustainability.

Vero Beach is the American Paradox: the extraordinary cost of creating and maintain such lavishness and the economic drain of a lifestyle that is characterized by total mechanization, as the pudgy elderly try to stave off the inevitable by walking and biking, their lives well kept by Latinos and some, very few, African Americans usually found at Publix markets, gas stations and sanitation trucks. The divide is the evolution of manifest destiny that has assumed a contemporary look and feel.

The BMW’s and Cadillacs and late model SUV’s abound. It is prosperity writ large; it is also a final sign, at the last third of someone’s life, that I’ve arrived, I’ve achieved. It’s what Mitt Romney argued in the GOP debate in Florida: this wasn’t handed to me, it was earned. This is the American way now.

But our American way has become divisive, we know that now — we can feel it. The left and the right are so distant from what we the people perceive our American mission to be, that we’ve lost any real understanding of Representative Democracy. Who is representing what and whom?

If it was only that we’re in an economic quagmire, the way out would be simple; we would collaborate and cooperate, plan and execute. But our condition is beyond being simply a bind — it’s a new construction that sprinkles old, recognizable American rhetoric over a new order that is redefining Representative Democracy: we no longer vote for people who represent us, the people; rather, we vote for representatives of multinationals and narrow special interests; we vote for extreme special interests that only comply with a very fine line defined by those holding the purse strings — or worse, with interests that comply with ultrathin social ideology, such as the complexities of marriage, civil unions and a woman’s right choose.

In an enlightening interview on the PBS News Hour, Thomas Edsall, a longtime Washington Post reporter, now a New York Times columnist and professor of journalism at Columbia University, who has written a new book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, said, “Well, what’s happened, I think, in the past — really since the collapse, economic collapse, is that the country now is — has become dominated by the issue of debt and deficits.” Edsall goes on to say that, “Somebody’s going to take a hit. It’s no longer a nice and friendly game. It’s who’s going to get hurt. That makes for — we already had a polarized politics. When you add this notion that politics now is one not just of what can I get out of it, but what do I do to the people to get what I want, that makes it a much nastier and much more hostile circumstance.”

Thus our confusion. We don’t understand this bifurcation characterized by a nastiness and indifference to the well being of most Americans.

At the heart of this problem are the psychologies of liberals and conservatives, respectively, says Edsdall:

Liberals are very concerned with compassion and fairness. Conservatives have what one person describes as a broader spectrum, but not as much focus on compassion and fairness, but also on issues of sanctity, of a different kind of fairness. Their opposition to affirmative action, for example, is a different kind of fairness.

Edsall clarifies, saying, that

…the idea that conservatives are willing to inflict harm is not necessarily a criticism. If you are in a fight, and you’re fighting to protect what you have, being loyal to your own people is not necessarily a bad thing. If you and your family had to protect what your child is getting what your husband and so forth — if they face serious threats of lost goods, in effect, you’re fighting for them, and, in fact, if that meant someone else had to get hurt, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

This is the crux of the matter because, as Edsall says, “There is a stronger natural instinct among conservatives to see contests in zero sum terms, (witness: GOP debates AND NEWT — which is why I’m reminded of Mussolini and Perón), that there are going to be losers and winners. Therefore, I want to get into this and be sure that I am the winner and that people that are around me are winners” (parenthetical inclusion mine).

This is short term thinking, not long term planning that is creative; it takes away and does not build. It is destructive in nature since it means, by design, to push certain people away.

In “The Obama Memos: How Washington Changed the President,” by Ryan Lizza (The New Yorker, January 30, 2012), we learn from Thomas Mann, “of the bipartisan Brookings Institute,” and Norman Ornstein, “of the conservative American Enterprise Institute,” in a “forthcoming book about Washington Dysfunction, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, that,

One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, and scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Ultimately, this kind of hostility ensures that none of us sees clearly, least of all politicians. It’s by design. While Obama came into office with a spirit of change, trying to direct the country in new, fertile directions, Lizza tells us that the President, “was the most polarizing first-year President in history — that is, the difference between Democratic approval of him and Republican disapproval was the highest ever recorded.” Obama, we learn from Lizza, had to change in order to survive. And we also learn that, “Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street.”

It’s because of Obama’s accomplishments, I would argue, that, alongside dwindling resources, the Republican willingness to inflict harm, divide and (try) to conquer, even by waging war on voting, has become the strategy that is overwhelming this run to the 2012 elections.

What’s left, then, is a populace running towards Vero Beach, running to escape this violation of our rights, close our eyes, and enjoy what small, square plot of earth we can call our own, even though much of the American people will be left out.

Welcome to the new, uncanny presidential election cycle where we might see how inflicting pain may become the winning solution for the GOP — or it may undo them to such an extent that, perhaps, Obama’s willingness to work for change, his 2008 promise, can become something closer to the truth during a second term.

What we do know, is that the system is broken and it’s unsustainable.  This is certain.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, Fundamentalism, golf, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, The New Yorker Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Place of Alienation in the American Political Consciousness

December 19, 2011 4 Comments

I seem to be looking for meaning everywhere I turn. But meaning I cannot find today.

Looking for meaning ought to point to something, a thing that corresponds to it. It’s a temptation to try to find some object that we might call “the meaning.” But there is no such object. This temptation — to find the meaning – needs to be cured.

Baffled, I look and wonder about our state of affairs — why we are the way we are, today’s American — and find not a single hint of an answer anywhere. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is obvious. Perhaps, as mathematicians might suggest, the deterministic nature of our system — capitalism flag waving as democracy — does not allow for predictability.

The world is perpetually in flux, yet Americans operate as if it’s static. We speak boldly about Morality and Utility, but these extract demands from our propensity for pleasure — oral, visual, sexual (not so much sensual, which would then move us towards aesthetics and a re-engagement with philosophies concerning Beauty, which would be too much to think about, too complex).

We are very much alone and plugged in — iPads, iPhones, computers, social networks. We are solitary — the self in perpetual solitude. Our experiences, like no other time in history, are profoundly solitary. In solitude we have intense experiences and can, for a short time, transcend the very real flux, the natural course of Being, existence.

Americans are then always in contradictions — solitary experiences that momentarily transcend the flux that is always present. Ironic — we are in a constant state of Irony. The prodigal child of irony is Alienation, a ongoing theme, for instance, in our American Literature that begins with Emerson to Hawthorne and Melville to Henry James and William Faulkner and Wallace Stevens to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Alienation gives us a form of rooted rootlessness, security in insecurity, an sense of alienation that has been historically a confirmation of community.

Alienation, rather then any ideology, is the construct of politics in America today. Alienation presupposes the always ongoing struggle to find the meaning that alludes us. There is no meaning — it’s the temptation we follow.

The rhetoric of politicians, keenly orchestrated to appeal to media, exploits the temptation to find the object that will give us the meaning. No one is telling the truth, though. The only truth is that our masquerading democracy seeks exploitation to survive, using Divine Providence — the false notion that we are the Chosen — to embellish our tendency for denial of what we see — or don’t see.

We signed up and followed Obama’s Change Rhetoric, only to find out that change meant more of the same: a rounding up of the Bush-era foreign and domestic policies and greater intimacy with Wall Street, passed down to us by Reagan. We’ve been lead, with our acceptance, down the wrong path. And the alternative, the crazy, Ahab-like Newt of destruction and the indifferent and the callous and blindly ambitious Romney, who made his fortune on destruction, promise a profound exploitation of resources.

In The Ship chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville tells us that, “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” What we chase is profoundly irrelevant, says Melville.Moby-Dick

We long for men that promise the meaning; we chase after their ambition, as poor Ishmael did when he stepped onto the Pequod and said, “this ship is for us.” But the Pequod is not a democracy; in its appeal to be considered the meaning, what we find, as a microcosm of American culture, in 1851 and 2011, is a totalitarian regime disguised as a democracy fully grounded in self-reliance. And nothing could be further form the truth, which is where we find ourselves today in America — far from any sense of truth.

In the end, now, as did Ishmael, we are orphaned, floating in a sea, only the sharks do not have “padlocks on their mouths.”

Filed under American Literature, Citizenship, cultural studies, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, prostate, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Inverted Totalitarianism and OWC: Chris Hedges and Cornel Welst

November 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

A very short post for me. Chris Hedges and Cornel West say it all, OWC and the affects of Inverted Totalitarianism

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , ,

Hope Springs Eternal Amidst Decline: The Bard College Model

July 29, 2011 1 Comment

Witness today: the pathetic — and uncanny — Washington circus concerning the debt and the debt ceiling crisis; the economy is still moving at a snail’s pace, now reacting even more negatively to Washington’s ideologically based idiocies; evidence of climate change is everywhere around us; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan baffle the mind, forever responding to terror and poor Western management; U.S. public education is in the toilet, put there by more controversial political brinkmanship, and continuing to ensure we live in a bifurcated society; unemployment is stagnant, as a result, and more and more people out of work or working in jobs well below their capacity; production is at a standstill, and in some places, such as Ohio, industry has left town — Main Street is emptying out; children and women, some of the most vulnerable in our society, are without health care; the gap between the riches of the privileged white and Hispanics and blacks is wider then it’s ever been in history; some of our cities — Newark for instance — are being left in the dust kicked up by the materialism of the few.

These tragic items are but the results of our manmade decline. Let me say this again: if you look around — health care, education, finance, industry, the environment, our deteriorating infrastructure, the decline of certain cities, particularly those inhabited by people of color and immigrants — every single problem we have today exists because we’ve made it so. Our educated elite have taken us down.

How can the most powerful nation in history come to this? The answer, I dare, is simple: we’ve educated the elite — politicians, lawyers, doctors, CEO’s, and so on — into beings that have long ago left their humanity at the curb, supplanted by delusions of grandeur, the avarice that so carefully destroys everything it touches. Education has become school for profit and self-gain.

As I’ve said in these pages before, what we have here is a crisis in — and about — EDUCATION, writ large (see here, too). Education has forgotten — or repressed — it’s allegiance to Humanity, its very real purpose of creating empathetic, creative citizens.

We can learn something from the models we say we follow, in this case, the Greek Stoics. The Stoics had a radical point, as Martha S. Nussbaum tells us in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, “that we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, not temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.” We’ve moved far from this goal, this reality; it’s no longer a compass point.

Of course, the failure of our EDUCATION — the educating for excellence, efficiency and production, education focused solely on the means of production and accounting, the creation of cogs on the wheel of mediocrity — is devoid of any moral posture. It is an immoral education.

When morality fails or is oppressed, ideologies spring to the rescue. In every tragic circumstance we face today, each can be said to be driven by ideologies — not rationality, not dialog, compromise and bargaining, the hallmarks of Democracy.

Ideologies give us a false sense of reality, an artificial view of the world — and ourselves. Ideologies, as we can see today in Washington, scorn knowledge; these are motivated or, better, are narrated by the corporation. Who will win, whether or not the debt ceiling is raised? Who will win if US ratings are reduced? That’s right: the banks, no matter what happens, win. They win the world. (This is, of course, the grand example, the ultimate example of inverted totalitarianism, where the corporations dictate and the witless masses, sleeping away in illusions of plentitude, are lead to slaughter.)

How did this world come about?

Ken Robinson, for instance, in Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, demonstrates how uncreative our education has been:

The rise of industrialism influenced not only the structure of mass education but also its organizational culture. Like factories, schools are special facilities with clear boundaries that separate them from the outside world. They have set hours of operation and prescribed rules of conduct. They are based on the principles of standardization and conformity.

Robinson could be describing the modern prison, instead — separate …from the outside world, prescribed rules of conduct, standardization and conformity.

What schools have done is effectively standardize and conform and therefore shut down the imagination, killed creativity, in the words of Ken Robinson. What then can grow from here? What we have, says John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, is a “human … reduced to a measurable value, like a machine or a piece of property. We can choose to achieve a high value and live comfortably or be dumped unceremoniously onto the heap of marginality.”

Can we change this? Can we combat this?

Yes, we can. There are examples. One primary example is Bard College. This institution is not held to a separation from the outside world; it is in the world, creatively addressing our culture’s greatest challenges.

Leo Botstein, Bard College President since 1975, is perhaps the best and, likely, the most enlightened of college presidents. He has lead this college from prescribed — and accepted — rules of conduct and carefully defined new rules of conduct that follow a moral understanding of our human responsibilities to each other. This is, indeed, for my money, the only real example, today, of a classical liberal arts education.

Bard has embarked on several endeavors: Bard High School Early College seeks to provide an alternative to the traditional high school, a “rigorous course of study that emphasizes thinking through writing, discussion, and inquiry.” Imagine if other elite liberal arts colleges learned from Bard and took up alternatives to high schools like this? What can we do? Bard has announced its collaboration with the Newark Public School System as well.

The small college is involved in the Bard Prison Initiative, creating opportunities for incarcerated men and women to earn Bard degrees. In From Ball and Chain to Cap and Gown: Getting a Degree B. A. Behind Bars, a PBS special story about the Bard Prison Initiative, we can see the essence of the liberal arts education at work.

But Bard has not stopped there.

It has a Masters of Arts in Teaching Program, too, allowing students to be certified in New York and California. It is a program focused on “both rural and urban-high needs school districts.” No one is doing this. Absolutely no one. Bard is in the vanguard.

And if this is not enough, Bard has established an Honors College in collaboration with Al-Quds — the Al-Quds – Bard Partnership, in Jerusalem. Along with St. Petersburg State University, Bard has developed “The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences … the first Department in Russia to be founded upon the principles of liberal education. It emerged from Smolny College (officially the Program in «Arts and Humanities»), which was created in 1994 by St. Petersburg State University  in close collaboration with Bard College (USA). Bard College’s interest in curricular  innovation  and the reform of international education coincided with the interests of a group of creatively-minded scholars from St. Petersburg State University.” In other words, in the international arena, Bard is not going to the usual places, as all other schools do; rather, Bard has opted to go where there are obvious challenges — and opportunities.

How is it possible that a small school in Upstate New York can do so much? Endowments of other liberal arts institutions tower over Bard’s, approximately a mere $270 million. How is it possible to do so much with what in higher education is so little these days? It has 1800 students. A faculty of about 224 professors. The cost of attending Bard is comparable to other elite liberal arts colleges, $55, 480 — so what’s the difference? It has a beautiful campus. It has all the accoutrements we expect from these schools — the arts, wonderful grounds, athletic facilities, new technologies abound. So what gives?

Answer: imagination and will, a conviction that what we must do in education, if we’re going to contribute to the reversing of the tide of malaise, complacency, avarice and the blind pursuit of materialism is not compete, but rather, join hands and cooperate, collaborate, listen and learn by thinking critically, dialog and bargaining. Like no other institution for its size Bard is doing more for humanity than most larger — and more distinguished — universities.

Might we jump on this wagon and see where creativity can take us, rather then staying on the ideological tracks to despair?

Filed under Afghanistain, america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, education, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Militarism, Newark, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fresh Examples of Inverted Totalitarianism

June 24, 2011 10 Comments

It’s uncanny, but it’s very difficult to keep up with the numerous examples of inverted totalitarianism appearing daily in our popular media. That these events are routinely covered by the popular media without question and concern should give us pause.

Yesterday, in Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election,  I gave the following example:

The NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.

Today, we learn that the US Supreme Court has given pharmaceuticals twin wins:

In one case, a First Amendment decision, the court, by a 6-to-3 vote, struck down a Vermont law that barred the buying, selling and profiling of doctors’ prescription records — records that pharmaceutical companies use to target doctors for particular pitches. And in a second, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the makers of generic drugs are immune from state lawsuits for failure to warn consumers about possible side effects as long as they copy the warnings on brand-name drugs.

The US Supreme court ruled that the State of Vermont was infringing on the pharmaceutical’s first amendment rights. “The amendment prohibits the making of any law “respecting an establishment of religion“, impeding the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”  This is untrue, the State of Vermont is not trying to restrict the first amendment, rather they are trying to restrict pharmaceuticals from getting private information concerning different drug protocols doctors use for specific patients.

“Basically, it’s going to allow the drug companies to have more influence on doctors’ prescribing practices, to manipulate their prescribing practices, and to promote the use of more expensive drugs. Almost certainly, health care costs are going to be driven up,” said Dr. Gregory D. Curfman, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Information privacy experts also criticized Thursday’s ruling. “One of the practical consequences of the court’s decision will be to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies and data-mining firms and marketing firms to get access to this very sensitive information,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The states are going to have to go back to the drawing board.

Ever since the Bush v Gore election, we’ve learned quite a a bit about where the US Supreme Court stands. The Court is aligned with right – wing conservative government and big business, this we know. The appointment of Justice Roberts, adding to the Court’s extreme conservatism, demonstrated a move to activist justices for the right.  The Court thus becomes the legal thread essential for big business to control government.  The  Court is the “bag man,” if you will.

In Eduction a story from the mainstream, Republican Challenges Administration on Plans to Override Education Law.  I’m no fan of Arne Duncan and Obama’s education policy, but what we find when we look under the hood of Representative John Kline’s, the Republican chairman of the House education committee, forceful attack on Duncan policies and maneuvers is an attempt to move closer to the privatization of education.

“He’s not the nation’s superintendent,” Mr. Kline said of Mr. Duncan, who assumed powers greater than any of his predecessors when, in 2009, Congress voted $100 billion in economic stimulus money for the nation’s school systems and allowed the secretary to decide how much of it should be spent.

Kline wants control of outcomes and we know that the outcome sought by the right is privatization. This move, by conservatives, is linked to a greater effort for student vouchers, creationism and an anti-gay agenda.

Imagine if all these efforts are also supported by the US Supreme Court.

And now we can look at the Obama withdrawal from Afghanistan proposal — 10,000 soldiers this year (roughly 7 percent of the occupation force) by the end of the year.  No one in the main stream press is covering what’s likely to happen:

“There’s going to have to be an accompanying increase in private security for all the activities of the new soldiers going in,” says Jake Sherman, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan who is now the associate director for Peacekeeping and Security Sector Reform at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation.  ”It’s ludicrous. It’s completely implausible.”

The mainstream media is stuck wondering why the usually war hungry Republicans — except for McCain — is going along with the withdrawal. The real story is that as we withdraw — and as the French and the British withdraw as well — there will be a void.  Private sector security companies will fill this need — and they’re the darling of the right, a pay for service military force.

Up and down the economy and culture — pharmaceuticals, energy, education and defense — we see the big reach of business; more importantly, though, we can readily see how government is stepping in and doing the bidding for this new world order. That it’s happening right in front of our eyes and that the mainstream media is simply going along suggests that the media is yet another arm of this move.  The media is not, as pundits would argue, a liberal enterprise; it’s just the opposite and simply looking at who owns the media should tell anyone that story.

Filed under arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, global health, jonathan kozol, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, Phamaceuticals, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Public Health, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Constitution of the US Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election

June 23, 2011 13 Comments

Whether Obama retains the White House in 2012 or a Republican wins, nothing much will change. The evidence is overwhelming.

It no longer matters who sits in the Presidential seat or in Congress — unless, of course, the Republican is Newt Gingrich, the extremely nasty former Speaker of the House who wrote a doctoral dissertation excusing the brutal colonization of the Congo, or the absolute dizzy opportunist, Michele Bachmann , who is convinced that CO2 is a natural byproduct of nature.

But even if the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin were to win, all candidates will succumb to the law of the land: the state and the corporation are the main sponsors and coordinators of an “unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalitarian tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries — political, moral, intellectual, and economic — but whose nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself,” says Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The Kock Brothers’ exertion is a perfect example. Thus, all candidates — in the White House and Congress — must adhere to the demands of this imbalance of power that invents and disseminates “a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasure while accepting political passivity,” argues Wolin.

We live in less democratic times; we wallow in a “collective identity” that is imperial rather than republican. The consequence is that we interiorize an artificial vision of civilization created by the political coming- of – age of corporate power and its concomitant myth making apparatus.

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation.

Let’s take a look under the hood at the engine that runs the inversion of power in our current ideological state apparatus.

The top 5 contributors to the 2010 campaign committee of Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, are:

  • Comcast Corp, who actively lobbied “net neutrality” legislation, FCC programming issues, and general telecommunications issues. In 2010, Comcast focused its lobbying efforts on a getting a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal approved by the federal government. People and political action committees associated with Comcast Corp. together generally favor Democrats when it comes to political campaign contributions. The monopolization of expression.
  • McGuire, Woods, et al –recently represented BVT Institutional Investments in the sale of 10 shopping centers located in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The $130 million transaction was one of the country’s largest retail real estate transactions of 2011 and marks the conclusion of McGuireWoods’ representation of BVT in connection with its U.S. Retail Income Fund VIII portfolio & in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the whistle blower provisions in Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) do not protect employee leaks to the media. Rather, the statute’s plain language protects only disclosures made to federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, Congress and employee supervisors. McGuireWoods, defending Boeing, moved for summary judgment on the grounds, among others, that SOX does not protect complaints and disclosures to the media. The District Court agreed and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
  • Dominion Resources — Electrical Utilities, Gas and Electric
  • Goldman Sachs — we know who they are, all the way to their involvement in the Obama administration and their creation of financial instruments that lead to the recession, the demise of the American economy
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield, through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association proved to be particularly active lobbying Congress during the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010. It has also lobbied Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.

The next 15 contributors to the Cantor camp follow the same pattern — KKR & Co, which sees itself as the leading global alternative asset manager, Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance, McKesson Corporation, pharmaceuticals and health products, and so on. We get the picture: insurance companies, lawyers, financial firms — banks too big to fail — tobacco (Altria Group, the world’s largest), pharmaceuticals. Representative Eric Cantor has reported a total of 2,849 contributions ($200 or more) totaling $3,057,540 in the current cycle.

Who is Cantor listening to? Cantor is an example of the “tendencies of our system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin.

Let’s look at another leading figure, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, elected to represent the Eight Congressional District of Ohio for an 11th term in November 2010, raised $9,796,947. His five leading contributors are AT&T, Murray Energy, First Energy Corp, American Financial Group and the Boehner for Speaker Committe. The top industries contributing to the Boehner effort are: Retired, Securities & Investment, Insurance, Electrical and Health Professionals.

Boehner’s portfolio is just about identical to Cantor’s. Major international companies have their hold on the two top leading Republican leaders. The tragedy we are currently living is that we seem unaware of the deeper consequences of these relationships. “We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia,” Wolin tells us. “Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today succeeds change. The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation.” If we take a look out our front doors, take a walk down the block, in our cities and in our villages, we can taste “undercut consolidation.” It’s everywhere — city and state workers, public institutions, the NBA, the NFL; neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are; hope is on a tightrope, the future bleak.

The Democrats don’t fair much better. The top Democratic donors are ActBlue (composite of many, many small, grassroots donations), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Union, Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, EMILY’s List (composite of many, many small grassroots donations), Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, National Assn of Letter Carriers, Ironworkers Union, United Auto Workers, United Transportation Union, American Postal Workers Union, UNITE HERE, AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. This suggests that unions are the primary donors.

But a closer look tells a different story. Let’s take Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of The US Senate. In the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, his re-election committee raised $24,815,104. The top 5 contributors were MGM Resorts International, Weitz & Luxunberg, mesothelioma and asbestos lawyers, Girardi & Keese, trial lawyers, Simmons Cooper LLC, also specializing in mesothelioma and Harrah’s Entertainment, hotels, resorts and casinos.

The top 5 industries contributing to the Reid campaign are lawyers, Securities & Investment, Lobbyists ($1,052,801 total!), Real Estate and Health Professionals. Reid is a carbon copy of Cantor and Boehner — so what, in fact, is the difference,  unions under attack because we need change?

In American’s Future After an Obama Victory, which I wrote in 2008 during the presidential campaign, before turning to Wolin, I was already suggesting that the Obama Administration was going to be challenged forcefully by the extremes in our culture. The last 3 years give us plenty of evidence. Obama has followed, even energized Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan (think drones), education and healthcare (think privatization and insurance lobbyists), energy and, sadly, race.

Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fund-raising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.

The top supporters of Barack Obama were the University of California ($1,591,395), Goldman Sachs ($994,795; note the connections to his staff: Summers [World Bank, President of Harvard that nearly bankrupted the endowment], Rubin [spent 26 years at Goldman], and Paulsen [former CEO of Goldman], all of whom influenced Geithner [worked for Kissinger, IMF Director of Policy Development and Review Dept, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York]), Harvard University ($854,747), Microsoft Corp ($833,617), Google Inc ($803,436).

This list of contributors to Obama continues unabated — and all other contenders pale by comparison: Citigroup (who laundered Mexican cartel money), JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner (Patrick Leahy, another top Democrat, was Time Warner’s largest recipient, 2009-10, $61,400). Of the top 20 contributors to the Obama effort, 4 are universities, and the rest fall in step with the ongoing search, by the corporation, for opportunism (which is not to suggest that the new corporate university is not after the same). “Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what is exploitable, and soon (following a trajectory since WW II), that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human well-being,” says Wolin. “Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.”

This is where we find ourselves today — in the name of change we are unchanging in the face of an uncompromising corporate will. The corporation owns the House and the Senate. These folks, our elected officials, are spokespersons for the corporate elite. If we wonder why CEO’s make so much money, this is why. If we want to know why education is being dismantled and privatized, benefitting the upper classes, this is why. The dissolution of collective action is here, too. The privatization of schools. And the increasing gap between the wealthy few, the middle class and the poor is here. Our forgotten communities, Newark’s South Ward, the South Bronx, Compton, others — it’s all right here in this negotiation between corporations and our officials.

And since we’re now on the verge of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, private security firms are smiling. Is this the world we want? It’s already just about out of our hands.

Though I’m speaking to deaf ears, knowing full well that I write to no one, as I speak, the NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.  How is that not inverted totalitarianism?  What about us, the people of Vermont?

The tragic story is that this inversion of power is happening while citizens go on with their lives not conscious of the consequences.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, education, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Can Obama be Obama

March 18, 2010 2 Comments

Guantanamo is still open for business, following the Bush-Cheney doctrine.  Iraq is on a tighrope.  Afghanistan is a quagmire — confusing and violent with no end in sight, corruption at every turn and the Taliban negotiating a come back with their tribal leader, Karzai (he brought them in to begin with).  Unemployment is a plague upon our house.  The economy is stagnant, for the lack of a better or more optimistic word — nothing new or promising in the not so distant future.  Wall Street is totally out of touch with the rest of the country, mired in its hubris, having drawn up the bridge, leaving the illusion they helped create on our side to work through.  Health care — what can we say about health care, the single most significant sign of how unbelievably short sided we are in government?  And government, the crux of the problem, cowardly and ignorant, lacking any sense of an imaginative approach to a future that already is here, pushing us further down as if a great weight is upon us.

Obama showed promise during his campaign.  Many of us voted for Obama because of the promises — change, yes we can.  Well, no, apparently not, we can’t.  Obama is stuck in age old partisan politics complicated by special interests that circulate about him like sharks looking for prey.  Obama can’t function and live up to his potential, preferring a professorial approach that, as a professor myself, know to be a way to conceal the truth of things, the passion that’s not to interfere with the reasoned sense of reality, the illusion of objectivity that students — the citizens — know quite well does not exist, not even in the sciences.  Thus, Obama can’t be Obama — he’s become something else.

The problem with Obama not being Obama is not the upcoming mid-term elections; the dilemma is that we will all be so dissolutioned by the time the next presidential election that we will be hard pressed to vote for him again, leaving the presidency wide open for the fascist-like remains, the crumbs left in the wake of  Bush-Cheney — the racist Tea Party contingency that’s followed by the ignorant bliss of Sarah Palin.  The picture gets uglier and uglier as we look further and further.

Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio has come over to the Obama Health Care Senate plan – what’s left of the original and approved by the Senate — because he feels that this legislation is so important that it could literally be the first of the blocks taken from underneath the Obama Presidency and topple it.

It’s not the merits of the plan that warrant Kucinich’s vote, but rather, saving the Presidency from the extraordinarily negative and bigoted sharks nibbling at the President’s ankles that inspired his allegiance.

This is a mark of our decline, not a gesture of progress and creativty.  While the world clamors for diversity and difference to solve problems, our government — and those that want to run our government — aspire to homogeneity, sameness, the status quo. This will kill us completely.

Filed under corruption, cultural studies, Obama Administration, politics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

The Economics of Legalized Corruption and the Consolidation of Power: Some Historical and Critical Realities Behind the Bail-Out

September 28, 2008 5 Comments

for Adeeb and his fellow classmates, and others who live these ideas and topics in our troubled times

I often cite Napoleon’s famous words to my students, “Dress me slowly I’m in a hurry.” Students, particularly American students, often look puzzled. What does that mean? How can you go fast by moving slowly? How does approaching the world by proceeding with little or less than usual speed or velocity, requiring a comparatively long time for completion and contemplation, enable better solutions to immediate problems?

American culture is addicted to many things but mainly to sugar and speed, anything labeled “new” and deception. William Burrough’s Naked Lunch was viewed as obscene and censored not because of wild pictures of dark characters shooting up but because it demonstrated American’s obsessive compulsive addiction to anything. Power, sugar, horror, violence and destruction, speed, the “new” as well as the decadent, and corruption.

The current attempts by the US Government to bail-out our banking system has all the markings of an addicted culture that in fact enables corruption through laws meant to protect only the wealthiest–the property of the wealthiest. “Corruption is why we win.“

We are now rushing into yet another scheme laid out by those that raced into Iraq and who left Afghanistan in the dust; these are the same folks that can’t work to make our education and healthcare systems stronger and better for all Americans; the same people that can’t run Amtrak.

This is perhaps the reason why the Paulson and Bernanke proposal to stem the financial crisis is a plan “that everyone can find something in it to dislike. The left accuses it of ripping off taxpayers to save Well Street, the right damns it as socialism; economists disparage its technicalities, political scientists its sweeping powers” (The Economist, Sept 27th, 2008; 17).

The truth of the matter is that it’s none of the above. We have to add another condition: The human condition has entered into the mix and no one, but no one trusts “the other.” “In economics and in the remainder of the social sciences as well, the translation from individual aggregate behavior is the key analytic problem. Yet in these disciplines the exact nature and sources of individual behavior are rarely considered. Instead, the knowledge used by the modelers is that of folk psychology, based mostly on common perception and unaided intuition, and folk psychology has already been pushed way past its limits” (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998; 202).

Money is not the root of all evil, but our perception of money is. When wealth is involved, we Americans are addicted to outdoing “the other” by any means necessary. Long term repercussions are not in our plans. Immediate short term and costly gain–derivatives and predatory lending–is all we see. The devastation and suffering we leave behind is for others. Even when Paulson and Bernanke unveiled their plan before Congress, callous indifference reared its ugly head when they never even mentioned a word about the middle class, the working class that’s going to carry the burden imposed on it by greed.

Working Americans are going to pay more for greed and corruption because it’s permissible.

Globally there is money. Markets are not standing still–it’s the law of survival. Stand still and you die. Warren Buffett and Japan’s Mitsubishi-UFJ agreed to buy stakes in Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. There are more enterprises–and governments–with money to bail-out corruption in Wall Street. We can’t be nervous that foreign capital is buying up America. This has been going on for quite some time since foreign capital knows that when push comes to shove, we will make the mistake of rushing towards immediate gratification. America is fat and now we got caught, one too many times, with our hand in the cookie jar. One bad apple can spoil the bunch. Many rotten apples, supported by laws that enable graft, deceit and corruption, have brought us to where we now are.

But where are we?

Historically, we can argue that this is the culmination of vituperative actions that began at the dawn of World War I, the War to End All Wars, which was the sure sign that it was the war to begin all notions of modern warfare. This is the war that was dominated by an aggressive attempt to control power, which is another way of saying that we sought to control wealth by a very few. There are many obvious reasons why we went to war–Mexico potentially allying with Germany, sabotage, and more–but none is more poignant than “a movement on behalf of Big Government in all walks of the economy and society, in a fusion or coalition between various groups of big businessmen, led by the House of Morgan, and rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals. In this fusion, the values and interests of both groups would be pursued through government” (World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals).

Since WWI, the agenda has been the consolidation of power. Government’s role is to protect the few with the most power–the extreme form of John Locke’s economic theories. It’s not surprising that Goldman Sachs, as it becomes “a bank,” will be one of the two firms who will benefit most from the bail-out. Hank Paulson, “the hammer,” as he was called at Dartmouth College, was Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at The Pentagon from 1970 to 1972. He then worked for the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, serving as assistant to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973. Finally he became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs. Is this former eagle scout operating with our best interests in mind, given his uncanny allegiance to the most powerful in society? Or is Paulson finalizing the work that began during WWI, the complete consolidation of all power in the hands of the smallest number of powerful men? Our laws show the history and evolution of this crisis to these ends.

Much as we did in WWI, we could be headed towards the illusion of victory (illusion is the prodigal son of avarice, greed and corruption; we can’t see these and live these as real solutions unless we believe illusions as truth). But if we don’t want to go as far back as WWI, we can look at more recent events.

John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out one of the causes of the Great Depression was “The large-scale corporate thimblerigging that was going on. This took a variety of forms, of which by far the most common was the organization of corporations to hold stock in yet other corporations, which in turn held stock in yet other corporations.” Galbraith tells us that, “during 1929 one investment house, Goldman, Sachs & Company, organized and sold nearly a billion dollars’ worth of securities in three interconnected investment trusts—Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; Shenandoah Corporation; and Blue Ridge Corporation. All eventually depreciated virtually to nothing.”

When Franklin Roosevelt took office, both the President and Congress knew the banking crisis demanded immediate action. The result was one of the crown jewels of the New Deal: the Glass-Steagall Act, officially known as the Banking Act of 1933.

A Frontline report on the repeal of Glass-Steagall shows how those with money end up with pens from the President of the United States on their walls:

Sandy Weill calls President Clinton in the evening to try to break the deadlock after Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Citigroup lobbyist Roger Levy that Weill has to get White House moving on the bill or he would shut down the House-Senate conference. Serious negotiations resume, and a deal is announced at 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 22. Whether Weill made any difference in precipitating a deal is unclear.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government?”

When Bill Clinton gave that pen to Sanford Weill, it symbolized the ending of the twentieth century Democratic Party that had created the New Deal. Although the 1999 law did not repeal all of the banking Act of 1933, retaining the FDIC, it did once again allow banks to enter the securities business, becoming what some term “whole banks” (Bill Clinton’s Role in the Mortgage Crisis).

The house of cards begins to topple, the inevitable fate of coalitions fused by greed and avarice.

In “Experts Predict Money Crisis,” Christopher Ruddy (August 2007) writes that “there is evidence that this global boom is anything but natural and sustainable, but is really the artificial result of a global liquidity bubble, a bubble that could now be on the verge of bursting. In this global bubble, literally hundreds of trillions of dollars in leveraged debt are at risk. It’s no secret that in today’s society, everyone from the family next door, to major corporations, to the U.S. government is deeply in debt. But while some debt statistics are widely reported, such as our $8 trillion national debt, other debt figures are never mentioned.”

Everyone knew. The US Government–and the White House–knew. The candidates knew. Banks knew. And, most importantly, media knew. Why didn’t anyone act? When silence of this magnitude ensues, something is indeed rotten somewhere.

The role of modern day government is to ensure enough instability to maintain levels of power in the hands of few. This is how it works. (See also: The Conservative Origins of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis: Everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage meltdown but were afraid to ask.) We can see evidence of this in Dick Cheney who, we can argue, has moved vice-presidential powers beyond what we have known in the past.

In journalist Barton Gellman’s Angler, (Cheney’s CIA cover name is “Angler”) we learn the details of Cheney’s forty-year political career that gives evidence of subterfuge for the sake of power and mission. His first act, according to Gellman, is Cheney’s self-selection to vice-president. Prior, Cheney, from 1979 to 1982, voted “yes” on all bills for oil tax breaks and for indexing income tax (H.R. 1176, H.R. 2225, H.R. 5318); between 1984 to 1986, he voted to keep mortgage bonds and loosen capital gains rules; he brought in Paul O’Neill, for instance; he mislead Congress and the American people about Iraq; and, to support our discussion, here, Cheney was behind tax cuts for the rich and the reduction of capital gains (see more about Cheney the economist). Cheney believed very strongly that there should be a capital gains cut to unleash producers, which has never worked but has indeed made the wealthy wealthier.

Furthering the irony that by enabling a loosening of rules and regulations–and taxes–for the rich is healthy for the economy, we learned that McCain, for instance, defended the “Enron loophole” and “oppose(d) the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also want(ed) to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.” In fact, “Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.”

We can see, therefore, how carefully and in ways that may seem complex to the general public, we have politicians as front men for powerful corporations that are looking to consolidate power. The fusion of power at the highest levels is the aim. In September, for instance, McCain said that he thought “deregulation in banking worked well (what is he smoking?) and wants to borrow from Wall Street’s brilliant success to help reform healthcare.” (more on how the Wall Street crisis has been helped by the McCain – Gramm team, here) Any changes in McCain’s rhetoric are merely means by which to soften his image to voters; he is beholding to the most powerful men and their corporations and he’s evolved his political life, not as a maverick, but as a bold advocate–and mouthpiece–for the extraordinarily wealthy. John McCain is a scam artist, applying media-rich extravaganza, like parachuting into Washington the other day to save the day and to continue the pursuit of the fusion of power that began long ago. In fact, John McCain is the most influential supporter of gambling, as reported by The New York Times.

What are we then to expect from Obama? He has not been tested on this yet given his short term in the Senate; however, real estate, Wall Street financiers, and lawyers, all support Obama. In their first debate, when Obama had ample room to really attack–and address–McCain on this, he did not, which raises suspicions, of course. Or is it the continued Obama problem that he may be too cerebral for the American public?

I also often say to some of my “econ majors” to practice the following: “Would you like french fries with that?” They laugh nervously. But suffice to say that “the econ major” is such, not because s/he is trying to work out strange and interesting theories about future markets, but rather, s/he studies economics in a rush to gain a foothold, to have “the good life,” which more often than not means luxury and enough money to buy leisure–the most expensive commodity today.

The only hope I have in Obama is that, perhaps, given that he seems to enjoy deliberation, he’ll be able to speak across differences–our own and those we have with aggressive nations; that he might be able to begin to quell our thirst for more and more and more; and that he may begin to at least entertain a dialog, among us, about who we might want to be when we grow up. This is romantic, of course, but given the signs of the times–the aggressive push to consolidate and fuse centers of power–it’s the only thing I have left. Can you imagine Sarah Palin in this world?

Filed under cultural studies, Media, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , , , ,

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