Category Archives: Consumerism

Free Market Blinders and the Coercion of Industrial-Corporate Capitalism

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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I think many of us intuitively understand that free market ideologues have a narrow path to walk in order to keep afloat their construct of a world that is best run by the omnipotent and omniscient capitalist market system. Perhaps the idea that our globalized capitalist economy knows best is as damaging to society as the teachings of a fanatical cult urging all its members to drink from the poisoned chalice. Certainly the needs of the global capitalist economic system, currently propped up by money printing, supersedes all other considerations, including compassion for our fellow man and the well-being of the environment which is the forgotten lynchpin of the economy, not to mention the crucial factor in determining whether or not humankind continues to survive on this planet.

In the realm of the worker and the capitalist elite(the ones who own the means of production), the exploitation of humans on such a large-scale amounts to a society of wage-slave toiling zombies:

The distinguishing feature of a capitalist society is the commodification of human labour—and it is this that differentiated early modern England from any other nation. England was not the first country to develop long-distance trade or to plunder other parts of the world; throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countries like Portugal, Spain and Holland exceeded England in these regards. What set English society of the time apart from its European rivals, however, was that it alone established an extensive labour market, the key to capitalist development. […]

On the labour market, every economic transaction touches directly on essential qualities of human life—material, social and moral. In exchange for wages, those who sell their labour power surrender to the capitalist ultimate control over the work to be done, its conditions, pace and organization. Rather than treating our creative energies as a unique source of personal identity, “the owners of the conditions of production treat living labour-power as a thing” (Marx, Capital, v. 1, trans. Fowkes, 1976, p. 989). The result is a profound personal alienation, a hollowing out of the meaning of life. This is why the poor, as we shall see, have historically resisted being driven into the labour markets as their only means of survival.

Reflecting on this relationship, Karl Marx described work under capitalism as alienated labour: Relinquishing control over her labour, the worker suffers an estrangement from an essential part of her humanity. As Marx (Wage Labour and Capital, Progress Publishers, 1952, p. 20) put it in one succinct passage:

“But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus, his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. […]”

For the worker, in other words, work is a means to life, but not life itself. Real life begins after work, during “free time”. The familiar expression, “Thank God It’s Friday”, is a depressing acknowledgement that work for the majority is oppressive, alienating, boring and dehumanizing. Of course, things look very different from the vantage point of the capitalist.

Since the worker alienates control of her labour to the employer, the capitalist is in a position to exploit that labour—to force the labourer to perform an amount of work that exceeds the value of the wages paid. Indeed, this is the whole point of the transaction for the capitalist: to make a profit on the purchase of labour by getting workers to produce more value than what they are paid. And this difference between labour’s output and the wages paid—called surplus value—is the secret to the massive inequalities of capitalism: enormous amounts of the wealth produced by workers accumulate in the hands of the owning class.

And our economic system labels everyone the cold and dehumanizing term of “consumers”. Your behavior is methodically studied and cataloged so that the system can exploit your consumerist tendencies:

When you accept the label of ‘consumer’, you accept that you have become a financial object, willing to be manipulated by whatever marketing tricks abound. Consumer choice would be far better entitled ‘Conchoice’, a term describing the true level of choice that individuals are provided with, should they find themselves within the consumer culture.

Here is an email from Darbikrash, entitled ‘Buy or Die’, which illustrates the mind-numbing, invasive nature of corporations and the consumer culture:

…As there are too many goods chasing too few consumers (with any money left) the end game is to invent markets, to cajole and hoodwink people into believing they need something that they really don’t, and then to create products to port into this fabrication, rotating through product ideas at high speed to “see what sticks”.

What is really laughable is the degree of planning, co-ordination and control that exists in a typical retail outlet, say for example, Bed, Bath and Beyond. Every square inch of that jumbled, packed to the rafters collection of junk and useless assorted trinkets is planned. The product lineout is planned seasonally, and rotated to reflect the calendar quadrant. Each product, each one, is placed at the precise height, shelf location, and aisle location to optimize traffic and elicit the best response to a shoppers’ buy signals. The orientation of the aisles, the sequence to which high demand products are placed to maximize traffic to get to that product is profound. They know with statistical certainty which direction you will turn your shopping cart when you enter the store and when you reach the end of a given aisle.

They run full scale mock-ups or “focus groups” to optimize traffic patterns to increase the sales volume of the highest margin items. Shelf placement is determined by the highest margin. Products with lower margins are back charged to the manufacturers with “slotting fees”, bribes in effect to obtain higher shelf placement in a more lucrative aisle.

The store locations and real estate acquisition decisions are made with greater precision than a military invasion of a foreign country, and in many ways it is just that. They know to 6 significant digits the average household income within a 40 mile radius of each store location. They know how many times you leave the house to buy a product, and how far you are willing to drive to get it. They know if you’re male or female, married or single, and they know the preference curves of your demographic. They know how close to the entrance you will want to park before you drive off in disgust, and they know what type of music to play over the loudspeaker to increase your propensity to buy. They know how many visits you’ll make (on average) per calendar quarter, and the average amount of money you’ll spend at each visit, to incredible accuracy.

But just try and pass a law that restricts a multi-national from acting as a sovereign state. Just try to pass something that will put consumer protections in place. Imagine the uproar if there was an initiative to place healthy food in the front of a store and unhealthy food in the back, for example. There would be riots in the streets, with calls of Communist and Police state tactics shouted from every corner.

Who runs this country?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality

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When I agreed with Mike that I’d run with the baton for a lap or two on his website, I began to think of a way to conjure up a good reason why so many world ills could be written of to an audience in mute silence, even if provoked.

And so, here is my take on why too few understand, and why too many would stop reading this article at this point to find their entertainment elsewhere:

In his 1869 book The Man Who Laughs, Victor Hugo wrote:

In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a certain refinement of industry and art. It is the art of molding a living man. They take a child, two or three years old, put him in a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the day the vase is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep. Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This development in a bottle continues many years.

After a certain time it becomes irreparable. When they consider that this is accomplished, and the monster made, they break the vase. The child comes out — and, behold, there is a man in the shape of a mug!

Give me the child under the age of seven, and I care not what you do with him after, has rung true with me for some time. I’ve written previous articles elsewhere to such effect. But after finding my own conclusions with the support of the author and school teacher John Taylor Gatto, whose article The Six Lesson Schoolteacher led me to his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, it appeared that even though it is a revelation, again, only a handful paid attention.

I had put the books down and was hoping to leave them be a while longer, becoming a people watcher and bystander, viewing the world and defining an answer, and I’d near given out.
Then, in June, BBC Radio 4 aired a radio play of Robert M. Pirsigs Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, dramatized by Peter Flannery. I sat in my car in the UK for the full hour of the play, completely rapt with the broadcast, and afterward – aware that there is a limited time the BBC chooses to allow hearing it again on-line, I transcribed a salient part of it, hoping some day soon I’d find a place to post it:

Phaedrus arrived at the university of Chicago already in a world of thoughts so different from mine or yours I doubt we could understand it. He decided to write a doctorate or thesis on the meaning of Quality; but in which discipline? It would take quite a program to accept a PHD in which the candidate refused to define a central term. And then he found the Chicago Inter-disciplinary Program in analysis of ideas and study of methods.

Phaedrus – Professor?

Professor – Yes?

Phaedrus – I was told you wanted to see me about my application for a scholarship?

Professor – Aah, you are the gentleman who’s going to tell us all about quality.

Phaedrus – Well, I’d like to try.

Professor – Yes. I’m sure you would. There’s something I’m not clear about. What is your substantive field?

Phaedrus – English composition.

Professor – English composition is a methodological field, not a substantive one – (laughs) – I’m afraid I cannot recommend a scholarship. In fact, I cannot for the dear life of me understand how the university has admitted a candidate who is ignorant of the difference between method and substance. If you’ll excuse me.

Phaedrus – I do-not accept the division of method and substance. I think this is maybe where you’ve all been going wrong.

Professor – I beg your pardon?

Phaedrus – It is just an outgrowth of Aristotle’s ideas about form and substance. What I intend to show is that the concept of quality drops away with this dichotomy.

Professor – Oh! I See! You’ve managed to prove Aristotle wrong?

Phaedrus – I’m working on it. And where better to present this thesis than a great university like this?

Professor – Perhaps because it contradicts everything ‘we’ believe in?

Phaedrus – A university that can’t accept a thesis that contradicts its fundamental beliefs is in a rut, don’t you think?

Professor – A rut?

Phaedrus – Look at it this way; you want some other university to come up with an historic break-through between eastern and western philosophy? You want to be behind the game here? Besides, this is Chicago. This is where guys get rubbed out. It’s time Aristotle got his.

Megalomania. Delusions of grandeur. Though they couldn’t stop him from writing his thesis, Phaedrus was already done for. He had declared war on the ancient Greeks because they had invented reason. The analytical tool with which to understand and classify life and set it up over quality; the instinctive response to life that creates beauty and goodness and allows you to experience them.

In circus trapeze terms, everybody in life is either a catcher or a fly-er. In Greek philosophy terms, everybody is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Plato is the fly-er – the essential Buddhist seeker – soaring ever upward toward the ‘One’, and Aristotle is the catcher – the eternal motorcycle mechanic, endlessly sorting the things of life into piles and putting labels on them. It was ironic that Phaedrus – the teacher of rhetorical Greek soon revealed Plato’s hatred of all rhetoricians – especially those known as Sophists.

The Sophists were teachers of wisdom. But they didn’t teach fixed principles – truth for instance – they taught about the improvement of man – the good. A ready excellence. The duty of man to himself to be the best he could be. So a thousand years before Aristotle’s mind and matter, there had been a thing called ‘Excellence’, which sounded awfully like ‘Quality’.

He read it again. A ready excellence – duty of man towards himself – and saw this was an exact translation of the Sanskrit word ‘Dharma’ – sometimes described as ‘The One’. He stood for a moment – totally still – then lightening hit all around him. Quality and Excellence – Dharma – that’s what the Sophists had been teaching before the church of reason – before substance, before form – before mind and matter – a thousand years before dialectic itself. ‘Quality’ had been absolute.

Rain hits us like pellets. The twentieth century – that’s all around us now. The mediocre built-in towering edifice over the dust of the good. Time to finish this twentieth century Odyssey of Phaedrus the madman and have done with it.

The next time the class in Ideas on Methods met, they’d been assigned another Platonic dialogue which went by the name of Phaedrus. The young man Socrates is talking with. Our Phaedrus had read the dialogue so thoroughly, he practically knew it by heart.

He was ready.

Professor – – Well then, today we are to discuss the Phaedrus dialogue. Who would like to begin – Mr Quality, how would you characterize Phaedrus here?

Phaedrus – He prefers solitude – he is an outsider – he is aggressive.

Professor – He is indeed aggressive. Does he not threaten his master Socrates with violence at one point? I trust we’ll be having none of that? Phaedrus means what?

Phaedrus – Wolf.

Professor – Wolf.

Phaedrus – Umm hmm.

Professor – Indeed it is so. And with your long beard and your rather piercing eyes Mr Quality, there is something of the wolf in you. I will ask you to take us through the dialogue, if you’ll please, Mr Phaedrus.

Phaedrus – Plato was using his dialogue to allow Socrates to describe to us the soul – the One. What I have been referring to as Quality. The source of all things including reason – and therefore not something that can be understood or defined – or reached by reason.

Professor – Then it doesn’t exist. This is tiresome. But well done Socrates and Plato for somehow managing to agree with you three thousand years before you were born.

Phaedrus – No, I am simply pointing out that the ‘One’ in India and the ‘One’ in Greece must be the same entity, otherwise there would be Two. But though it cannot be defined, it can be described; approached, as it were. And in this dialogue Plato lets Socrates approach the idea of Quality by using the notion of two horses pulling a chariot. In the chariot is the seeker. His goal is the soul – the ‘One’ – Quality. The two horses are the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion. The dialects suggest that reason will be the truer guide to finding the ‘Oneness’ of existence, but of course all this is just an opinion …

Professor – Stop! Plato was not suggesting anything, and this is not simply Socrates opinion. Socrates has sworn to the gods that this is the truth. That reason – rational thought – is the only way to understand existence. If what he says is not the truth, then he is forfeiting his own soul.

Phaedrus – Well, ahh, no.

Professor – Socrates does not say it is the literal truth?

Phaedrus – Well, yes.

Professor – Thank you.

Phaedrus – But, two pages earlier he also tells us that it is all just an analogy; a way of describing the journey towards the ‘Oneness’ of existence. The white horse of reason is just an analogy; a figure of speech – therefore we are not being told that reason stands above everything, so why, I wonder, do you teach that when it isn’t true?

Professor – My Goodness – I thought all the Sophists were long dead.

Phaedrus – So did I, but there you sit, using the power of your words and of your authority in the church of reason to defend a palpably untrue position – that reason is everything – is a lie! But of course, it is a lie that keeps the world in the hands of guys like you.

Professor – Guys like me?

Phaedrus – Yeah. Intellectual bullies. Guys who can only function in a system based on weakness. What you really want from us here today isn’t ability, it’s inability. A truly able student is a threat to you. The perfect student in this institution is the one who is willing to accept the bowing and scraping and the intellectual prostration you need from us to maintain your power. Sheep is what you want. But mark what I’m saying here: sometimes the shepherd goes above the timber-line, and he calls and he calls for his sheep to come but he doesn’t find himself looking in the eyes of his sheep – he finds the eyes of a wolf – staring right back at him. So by all means, call me Phaedrus, if you’d like to.

Phaedrus looks at the professor struggling to make brave face of it but lost for words. When the bell rings to end the class, he walks out and leaves the university for ever.

Books and plays are likened to incendiary bombs. Sometimes when they are written and published they can change a world from a status where the sun goes around it as a flat earth held up on pillars, to a globe third in line from a sun that it orbits. A book can invert and disprove a lie with a truth, as much as it can conjure a proof in a lie as a truth. It is up to every reader to fight with facts over falsehood – then act – which requires inordinate energy to stand for a conviction, as those without proof defend as argument without basis of fact.

Many an ideology come and go. It is which that is fertile and which that is barren that can prove which is mankind’s sustainable path. That chosen path is the one instilled in our children of today who are the future generation, and our legacy of tomorrow.

The System Has Reached Entropy

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Transnational Capitalism’s ‘Great Wall of Propaganda’

19 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

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Imagine a world where the elite’s professional frontmen, aka TV pundits and ‘talking heads’, framed the public debate and steered public opinion for a nation of 350 million people. In such a world, journalism became an infomercial formulated by such apparatuses as spin alley and fed to the masses as expert opinion and deep intellectual insight. Now imagine that virtually the entire nation voluntarily bought an electronic device for their home that would pipe all these fabricated talking points, along with the mind-numbing bread & circus entertainment, into their living space. We have, as Gore Vidal described, entered a digital fun house from which we cannot escape.

A novelty called television had begun to appear in household after household, it’s cold, grey distorting eye relentlessly projecting a fun house view of the world. Those who followed the ugly, new-minted word media began to note that often while watching television we kept fading in and out of the chamber of horrors… ~ Vidal

Occasionally an insightful article will be written which lifts, if only briefly, the veil of the American hologram and allows, for those brave enough to look, a glimpse of the conniving little man behind the curtain furiously working the levers to create the Great and Powerful Oz. Depending on how much you reveal of the dark truths lurking behind the curtain, you may eventually find yourself subject to unrelenting persecution and holed up in a dark solitary cell or some South American embassy situated in a vassal state. The long arm of Empire has a way of reaching those who cross her.

Lawyer and blogger Jonathan Turley is someone I frequently follow. Amongst his humorous work he also posts about serious subjects, one of which is the recently published The Pretense of Punditry by guest blogger Mike Spindell. In this post, Mr. Spindell sheds light on the inner workings behind the face of TV punditry that bombards you 24/7 and molds the conventional wisdom of the day. 

What all of these shows have in common is that they are repeatedly populated by the same people, whether politicians, journalists, economists or political operators. This link gives the background of the truth of Sunday morning “journalism”. The casts rarely change and in all but the rarest of cases these guests make up what could be called our nation’s “Pundit Class”. They are seen as the “Serious People”, who lead America’s national debate on vital issues. I’ve been a “political junkie” since the age of ten. For many years I was misled into believing that these “Serious People” were really my intellectual betters when it came to public affairs and that political discussion must only exist within the ground rules of debate established by our “Pundit Class”. Beginning with the murder of JFK and in the ensuing disillusionment of the Sixties I’ve come to see that not only is this “Pundit Class” inherently corrupt, but only a rare few can barely be called intellectually informative. This group is in reality the paid propagandists of the elite 1% that rule this country and their main task is to limit the scope of our national debate.

The essay then goes into the recent plagiarism case of one of the “most esteemed members of the Pundit Class, Fareed Zakaria.” Zakaria, born in India and from the elite group of that country, is a courtier to the present Transnational Capitalism & Globalization that has been wreaking havoc on the working class and natural environment of every nation on earth.

 

On 8/12/12 Eric Zeusse, an investigative historian, posted an article titled: “Fareed Zakaria Is Bitten by His Own Tale: How He Helped Create the System That Bit Him Back”.  He began the article in this manner and in doing so exposed me to an idea that frankly hadn’t occurred to me.

“When Fareed Zakaria was suspended on Friday from Time and CNN, for plagiarism, this wasn’t merely justice, it was poetic justice: it rhymed. What it rhymed with was his own lifelong devotion to the global economic star system that he, as a born aristocrat in India, who has always been loyal to the aristocracy, inherited and has always helped to advance, at the expense of the public in every nation. He was suspended because, as a born aristocrat, who is a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, and many other of the global aristocracy’s primary organizations, he is so well-connected that his writing-commissions are more than any one person can possibly handle, and he consequently cannot possibly actually write all that is attributed to him. He certainly cannot research it all.”

As a paid public relations person for the corporatocracy, Fareed Zakaria is armed with a cadre of writers who produce the carefully vetted, status quo viewpoints that he spoon feeds his millions of viewers. As Spindell points out, it was no surprise that a few days after the plagiarism accusations, an article appeared which exonerates Zakaria and brushes the case under the proverbial rug.

 

I think back to graduate schools papers I’ve written and wonder how I would have fared if I had “made a terrible mistake” in them through plagiarism. Would an investigation of my “isolated incident” and remorse have allowed me to continue in school?  However, protecting Mr. Zakaria, one of the chosen, is not only important for his sake, but for the sake of these “News Entities” that rely so heavily on the “connected” pundit class to provide their“cogent” analysis of major issues.

How many other “Pundits” acting as the “serious” people are setting the parameters of the national debate through their appearances on Sunday Morning talk shows, News Channels, the PBS News Hour and it appears as paid guest speakers at supposedly meaningful conferences and conventions? The person who first came to mind as I read this article on Zakaria was Thomas Friedman. Friedman is a son of privilege who married into a billionaire family. He has been a champion of “Globalization”, which to me has always meant unbridled support for the multinational Corporatocracy…

…what is obvious and known about Friedman is that he is a pundit star, ranking with, or possibly above Zakaria in the firmament of “Serious People” who frame our national debate and dominate our national media. This is really nothing new in our country. In the past the “serious people” were the likes of Walter Lippman,  and Scotty Reston.  These past pundits and “cold warriors”, share a commonality with Zakaria and Friedman, in that they all serve(d) the interests of the Corporate and Monied Elite that run this country from behind the scenes. Indeed, I’m sure that you the reader could expand this very small list of those who are deemed acceptable to lead the “serious” discussion of our national/international issues.

I assert that the entire Liberal versus Conservative debate in this country is but a smokescreen that distracts us from the one most vital issue. Our nation and indeed the world is and has been controlled by an Elite representing those with most money and power. Their first allegiance is to themselves, their class and to the belief that they alone are fit to rule us all. Call it what you will, but to me it is the continuation of feudalism in modern guise. Just as in feudalism there were “Courtiers” who gladly did the bidding of their “Royal Masters”, in order to enrich their own lives. Most of the “Courtiers” were either born to, or became part of the elite, while maintaining the pretense of speaking for the benefit of all humanity…we are surrounded by experts, who in reality are propagandists purveying non-existent mythology to keep us in the thrall of the Elite…

Interestingly, Matt Taibbi has also written about the fraudster Thomas Friedman, hypnotist to the boob-tube worshipping consumers, here and here:

 

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors…

Matt has also written about the master propagandist Fareed Zakaria here:

From a distance I’ve always vaguely admired the skills of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who is maybe this country’s preeminent propagandist. Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull, the outrageous commonplace, and rendering horrifying absolutes ambigious and full of gray areas.

Wheras most writers grow up dreaming of using their talents to stir up the passions, to inflame and amuse and inspire, Zakaria shoots for the opposite effect, taking controversial and explosive topics and trying to help rattled readers somehow navigate their way through them to yawns, lower heart rates, and states of benign unconcern. He’s back at it again with a new piece about the financial crisis called “The Capitalist Manifesto,” which is one of the first serious attempts at restoring the battered image of global capitalism in the mainstream press.

This writer has done work like this before, using a big canvas to rework an uncooperative chunk of history in the wake of a crisis. Zakaria is probably best known for his post 9/11 “Why Do They Hate Us?” article, a sort of masterpiece of milquetoast propaganda that laid the intellectual foundation for a wide array of important War on Terror popular misconceptions, not the least of which being the whole “They hate us for our freedom” idea. One of Zakaria’s central arguments in that piece was that poor struggling Arabs were driven to envious violence by the endless pop-culture reminders of American affluence and progress. It was just too much to take, seeing all those cool blue jeans and all that great satellite TV.

In one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that?

I thought the old Arab’s comment was funny, but Zakaria imbued it with serious significance. “This disillusionment with the West,” he wrote, “is at the heart of the Arab problem.” And while witty Arab potshots at tacky southern strip-mall meccas like Houston were significant enough to put high up in Newsweek’s seminal piece about the root causes of 9/11, things like America’s habitual toppling of sovereign Arab governments and installation of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran were left out more or less entirely (Zakaria managed to write a whole section on the Iranian revolution without even mentioning that the Shah come to power thanks to a CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, whose crime was ejecting Western oil companies from Iran)…

Just as American journalism has become a paid spokesman for the exploitive economic system controlling the world, so too has the entire economic profession been bought off: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession…

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

And for one more example, the Great Wall of Propaganda extends to our system’s need for perpetual war as well…

 

If it’s too loud- you’re too old.

19 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State

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That epiphany from the ‘60’s would seem just as relevant today in separating the grey suited establishment war mongers from the more enlightened artistic underclass- if one is to follow the travails of the Russian all girl punk band, Pussy Riot.

MOSCOW — The face of dissent in Russia was once that of the outcast intellectual such as Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Then it was the oligarch who grew rich in the post-Soviet chaos and used his wealth to challenge the Kremlin.
The torch was passed again on Friday.

A Moscow court convicted three young punk rockers, members of the provocatively named group Pussy Riot, of “premeditated hooliganism” and sentenced them to two years in prison. The crime: a February “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in which the balaclava-clad, mini-skirted rockers appealed for the downfall of President Vladimir Putin.

The litmus test for any societies tolerance for free speech and freedom of expression has for several decades been vulnerable to exposure by punk music. Designed specifically to shock and mobilize awareness, the overclass has historically been unable to process the messaging intrinsic to this form of expression, as its unformed, inchoate rage is destabilizing to a political economy that requires compliance, conformity, and coercion in addressing normative society.

A fiction writer from the Golden Age of Russian literature could never have dreamed up a scenario as absurd and a story as far-fetched as the persecution of the punk rock band Pussy Riot,” two activists with the Human Rights Foundation, chaired by Kasparov, wrote in an article for Forbes magazine’s website.

Sneering at the faux teen rebellion embodied by the ‘50’ and ‘60’s rock music movement, the punk movement disavowed any necessity to even play a musical instrument, as listening to a track or two from Pussy Riot will bear witness.

This result is confusing, and at the same time profoundly disturbing to the criminal overclass (deservedly) hypersensitive to the ground swell of unpredictable social movement as evidenced by recent OWS protests, riots in Paris suburbs, and similar uprisings across the world. These flare ups are symptomatic of a deep and profound buildup of rage that is slowly recognizing, en masse, the failure of capitalism and the rapidly manifesting loss of social mobility perhaps best expressed by the two word anthem of a violently nihilistic generation – No Future.

In an apparent show of solidarity, an apartment dweller across the street from the courtroom blared one of the group’s songs loud enough to disturb the judge’s reading of the verdict. Police scrambled to cut the electricity to the apartment and silence the protest.

Relatives, friends and other spectators in the courtroom shouted, “Shame!” when the judge imposed the sentence. Outside, police detained supporters thronging the building, roughing up and arresting at least 60, independent Russian media reported, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

A generation that has lost hope is a dangerous generation indeed.

With its origins in places like Manchester, England, New York, and Los Angeles, disenfranchised youth banded together under the auspices of loud and violent music to commiserate, and at the same time ventilate, pent up fury upon discovery of the grim future first posited under the Reagan and concomitant Thatcher administrations. Lashing out first at any authority figures, the diffuse wave of anger soon settled on corporations and neo-liberal figureheads such as Reagan and Thatcher to receive the brunt of the vehemence.

This renewed focus soon enjoined the intelligentsia, always watchful for a grass roots movement to carry forth a sympathetic political message, the poli-sci majors and other college students soon joined their working class brethren to reject the on campus messaging of the likes of the Young Republicans and other social groups and class structures designed to advance the education, furtherance, and maintenance of the rentier class.

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter theorized in the late ‘30’s that Marx’s prediction of a revolt initiating from the working class was wrong, he disagreed, suggesting instead that the spark would come from déclassé intellectuals-a point furthered by Chris Hedges’ assertion that this movement would be joined by under utilized (and unemployed) professional workers.

Though the rockers’ plight could fade from public attention over time, they represent “a potential spark out there,” said Paul Gregory, a Russian scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, pointing to the power of international cultural figures in the volatile political atmosphere in Russia.

But if something were to happen to one of the young rockers in prison, like a suspicious death or suicide, that could be “the kind of thing that could bring millions of people out on the streets,” Gregory said.

Indeed.

With names like The Slits, The Raincoats, Pylon, Au Pairs, Blood on the Saddle, Kleenex, and the Bush Tetras, the pioneering girl punk bands of the late ’70 and early ‘80’s brought a notable message to the scene.

The torch has been passed.

Agent Orange

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism

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mozilo

Dateline 1981, Orange County, CA and what was to become ground zero for global mortgage fraud, perpetrated by the likes of Angelo Mozilla, nicknamed by the media Agent Orange for his decadent fake (and very nearly orange) tan of the criminal overclass, we begin with the nascent dawn of Reagan’s “Morning in America” on the cusp of the soon to break Savings and Loan Crisis.

The scene was a 2 ½ hour drive to a nondescript 3 bedroom tract home in Huntington Beach, about a mile or two from the ocean. It was the parent’s home of a fellow college student who was taking advantage of their parent’s vacation to host a party, replete with backyard keg and the requisite single light bulb lamp nearby to prevent spills.

With all the irony of the two working parent hierarchy of the times, the homeowners were so busy with their jobs that neither had time to go to the beach, the dreary patina of tract home living had quietly subsumed the idealism of living near the beach.

This was not lost on the college aged son, who upon learning that the house would be vacant, promptly released word of the party. We arrived to the house after the considerable drive, and found amplifiers and a drum set already assembled in the living room, with microphone stand at the ready. After mingling aimlessly for an hour or two amongst the preppy college students with Izod shirt logos and sweaters with arms carefully folded around their necks, the cacophony of Bob Seger and the “Silver Bullet Band” began to grate on our nerves.

There is only so much you can take, but we knew something they did not-there was to be a special guest.

Indeed, after another stultifying hour, a beat up van pulled up out front, and three guys wearing surfer shorts and tee shirts came inside and plugged in their guitars. They played but three songs, and this was one of them:

Afterwards, they abruptly left. In the vacuum left behind, there was a palatable unease, sweaters were nervously adjusted, no one really said anything. Someone put the Bob Seger album back on, which thankfully was put out of its misery with the elliptical trajectory of an angry beer bottle.

Forward to 2008, high rise office towers with names like “Dieco”, “Countrywide”, and “Indy Mac” prominently displayed, which housed platoons of tens of thousands of mortgage workers who filled these towers every day. Their “products” were mortgages and refi’s, doling out money to whoever had a pulse and a desire to own a piece of the American dream, then securitizing these phony loans to sell off to pension funds and other unsuspecting investors.
The well publicized financing arm of the mortgage crisis gets all the attention, but behind the scenes we have something much more interesting occurring. To illustrate, we again go to the epicenter of all that went wrong in the mortgage cum real estate biz, Orange County, CA.

To enable the construction of vast numbers of new homes that will serve as the collateralization of these new dollars to be leant, we need institutional infrastructure designed to encourage inventor participation and insure equity growth. In other words, we need giveaways.
With infrastructure too big a charter for small independent developers and investors, a new entity emerged, that of the Master Planned Community. Usually dominated by large regional landowners with significant political connections already in place, they began in earnest to create circumstances favorable to large scale tract development, a process that was prototyped with the first large scale master planned community in the ‘70’s (Irvine, CA), and then rapidly ported to other states and counties.

In California, Prop 13 limits the amount of YOY property tax that can be assessed. But to grow and develop hundreds of thousands of new homes, this requires infrastructure, such as schools, utilities and roads. In the first major attempt to privatize large swaths of the public domain, a bond mechanism legislation called “Mello-Roos” was enacted, enabling developers to externalize all of the infrastructure costs onto the homeowners in the form of a tax supplement, which is not governed by Prop 13. It is very nearly impossible to buy new construction in CA without falling under this forced bond payment. It is often very near 100% of the standard (mandatory) State property tax. The bonds are nominally for 20 years, but most homeowners will tell you they never go away, constantly renewed with no redress for residents.

This privatization sets in motion the walling off of entire communities, and in so doing, of course some type of privatized governance must be constructed and imposed on the new homeowners so as to “protect their investment”. This is done in the form of an H.O.A, or homeowners association, who govern and regulate the homeowners under a privatized army of volunteers, enforcing a Byzantine set of rules and regulations. They do so by collecting the H.O.A dues, which can range up to $800-900/month in some communities, paid monthly by each homeowner, and it should be noted that failure to pay will result in forfeiture of your property.

The bylaws and regulations that are administered by the H.O.A are published in a lengthy document (usually several hundred pages) listing all the infractions that can result in a penalty being assessed. They govern what color you can paint your house, what contractor you must use for painting your house, how neat your yard must be (mandatory landscaping) strict architectural rules (no changes allowed) and incredibly, how long your garage door may remain open during the day, how long your trash cans may remain on the street after pickup, and strict “lifestyle” provisions.
If you violate any one of the hundreds of regulations, you will be assessed a fine, and if you fail to pay the fine, you will forfeit your property. To enforce this, a group of volunteers usually “walks” the neighborhood, clipboards in hand, to note any and all infractions that can result in fines being assessed.

Hell hath no fury like a HOA privatized government volunteer with clipboard in hand and hard hat jauntily worn, the stern gaze of compliance ready to stare down errant homeowners foolhardy enough to think their carbon copy “Plan B” faux Mediterranean air conditioned nightmare is their castle. The lender has collateralized 30 years of any and all possible equity appreciation in the form of a mortgage, the HOA has established a privatized, regulation filled “government” that under the guise of mutual contractual consent has put in place rules and regulations that no public government on earth would get away with, sublimely forfeiting many constitutional protections (such as due process), including specifically forfeiting the ability to file homestead claims on your own property (protection for the primary residence from creditors in the event of a personal bankruptcy), the authoritarian noose of end stage capitalism begins to tighten the slipnot of compliance around the necks of the middle class homeowners, who almost universally wave their tiny flags and shout liberty, down with government, and up with free markets, blissfully unaware just how far down the river they have been sold.

Home ownership was originally advocated at the national level in the late ‘40’s just after WWII as a means to give the middle class a “stake” in their future, but mostly to discourage civil unrest under the principle that property ownership was an impediment to middle class organization of anti-establishment activities.

My, look how far we’ve come.

Rest in Peace, Gore Vidal, for the Empire is Not Far Behind You

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Growing up in the seat of American power gave Gore Vidal, historian and scathing critic of the Empire, a front row seat to its inner workings. He was raised in Washington, D.C. at the home of his grandfather, Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore. Being related to Jacqueline Kennedy, he held close ties to the Kennedy clan. He was also distantly related to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Gore Vidal himself ran for public office twice, once for Congress in 1960 in New York and once for the U.S. Senate in California in 1982. He knew his subject well enough to speak of the skeletons in its closet and the truth behind the glossy facade. In fact, he once said, “You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.”

 
My belated tribute to Gore Vidal will simply be to present twelve quotes from him and let his words speak for themselves. You could do much worse with your time than to spend it studying the writings of Gore Vidal:

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

~~~~~~~

…fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues…we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…

~~~~~~~

We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

~~~~~~~

…I think it is tragic that the poor man has almost no chance to rise unless he is willing to put himself in thrall to moneyed interests.

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Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

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We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

~~~~~~~

We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

~~~~~~~

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

~~~~~~~

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

~~~~~~~

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

 at the FDL Dissenter Blog has a nice post remembering the perceptive brilliance of the now-deceased author entitled, Gore Vidal on the ‘National Security State’ of America. Here are a couple choice quotes from the video-taped speech by Gore Vidal:

…In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes…

…Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy–communism, the star of the chamber of horrors–then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few enemies of the national security state were known.

Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5 trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to the White House…

Mr. Vidal, you told the truth with wit and wisdom and may you now rest in peace for that valuable legacy.

Direct Democracy

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Cyberwarfare, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Intro, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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I found this very interesting : –

I took a look into Direct Democracy for Switzerland at Wikipedia [link], where I found : –

In Switzerland, single majorities are sufficient at the town, city, and canton level, but at the national level, double majorities are required on constitutional matters. The intent of the double majorities is simply to ensure any citizen-made law’s legitimacy (Kobach, 1993).

Double majorities are, first, the approval by a majority of those voting, and, second, a majority of cantons in which a majority of those voting approve the ballot measure. A citizen-proposed law (i.e. initiative) cannot be passed in Switzerland at the national level if a majority of the people approve but a majority of the cantons disapprove (Kobach, 1993). For referendums or propositions in general terms (like the principle of a general revision of the Constitution), the majority of those voting is enough (Swiss constitution, 2005).

In 1890, when the provisions for Swiss national citizen lawmaking were being debated by civil society and government, the Swiss adopted the idea of double majorities from the United States Congess, in which House votes were to represent the people and Senate votes were to represent the states (Kobach, 1993). According to its supporters, this “legitimacy-rich” approach to national citizen lawmaking has been very successful. Kobach claims that Switzerland has had tandem successes both socially and economically which are matched by only a few other nations, and that the United States is not one of them. Kobach states at the end of his book, “Too often, observers deem Switzerland an oddity among political systems. It is more appropriate to regard it as a pioneer.”

Unfortunately, I found the political spin in the states worth giving emphasis from the same wikipedia link above : –

Direct democracy was very much opposed by the framers of the United States Constitution and some signers of the Declaration of Independence. They saw a danger in majorities forcing their will on minorities. As a result, they advocated a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic over a direct democracy. For example, James Madison, in Federalist No.10 advocates a constitutional republic over direct democracy precisely to protect the individual from the will of the majority. He says,

“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence said,

“Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state — it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”

Alexander Hamilton said,

“That a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity…”

Interestingly, Edward Bernays, that wonderful spinmeister of double speak – worthy of debate, due to the outcome of much of his folly in the present world – had this to say at the opening of his (1928) book Propaganda [PDF] : –

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Which leads me to use a relevant passage from page 770 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 book On Democracy in America. : –

I therefore believe that the kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples is unlike any the world has seen before. Our contemporaries will find no image of it in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces my idea of it and captures it fully. The old words “despotism” and “tyranny” will not do. The thing is new, hence I must try to define it, since I cannot give it a name.

I am trying to imagine what new features despotism might have in today’s world: I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country.

Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living?

Every day it thus makes man’s use of his free will rarer and more futile. It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville ~ 1835

I sense that the work is almost complete, since the exportation of most every wealth – with its replacement of exhorbitant debt – complete a nation without appeal to their constitutional rights – has squandered; for want of a stance in sensibility, even what abilities are left remaining to resolve it …

The Joke’s on Us: Guns in a Sociopathic Society

21 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street Fraud

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He looked like an assassin ready to go to war,” said Jordan Crofter, a moviegoer who was unhurt in the attack early Friday, about a half-hour after the special midnight opening of “The Dark Knight Rises.

Just a half hour drive from Columbine is the city of Aurora Colorado in which the latest ritual blood bath has been carried out in a hail of bullets. 71 hit and 12 dead.

Clad in a gas mask, ballistic helmet, and body armor from the neck down to the legs, the gunman burst into a theater after tossing in a couple of gas canisters. Was this a terrorist act from some fundamentalist Middle East group? No, it came from 24-year-old American James Holmes, described as “shy”, “high-achieving” and from a “good family.” He was in fact a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. Tom Mai, a retired electrical engineer, said “the mother told him Holmes couldn’t find a job after earning a master’s degree and returned to school.” Holmes even left his apartment booby-trapped, a sort of double tap assault for those hunting him.

What can be said of this most recent disturbed outcry from modern civilization’s youth? I see it as a reflection of the perverse and twisted culture which this young person was faced with, an atomized society which commodifies everything in its site and turns all it can into a financial transaction of some sort. What is worth preserving of a society which destroys the future of its offspring with mountains of social debt in the form of exorbitant college loans, a degraded and polluted environment, no option for meaningful work, a two-tier class system of haves and have-nots, a rising Security and Surveillance State, and a world at war for the last of the earth’s resources? Of course this is all normal for a country that glorifies sociopathic behavior:

…Sociopathic behavior becomes normalized and even glorified in business culture, and the businessmen who are less sociopathic get eaten alive by the more sociopathic ones.

The entirety of business sociopathy is glorified by the nation’s culture, in art, media, etc. as tens of millions of Americans long to be the next Bill Gates, who is nothing more than a White Crips/Bloods gang member with glasses and a high IQ.

Less sociopathic businessmen who try to act decent are destroyed and then, for their decency, are attacked in common culture as losers, failures and even scum. Women avoid them and their families look at the ground when someone brings up their name. At the individual level, people who try to play fair and be nice are told that they are displaying loser attitudes and ordered to harden up and act more sociopathic.

Capitalism is really the normalization, rationalization, glorification and even deification of sociopathy across society.

My only surprise is that we don’t see more of these meltdowns taking place in this bankrupt and systemically corrupt system of ours. If you read medical journalist Robert Whitaker, America’s rise in mental illness has gone up in lockstep with “our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications.”

Another factor for America’s escalating random violence is the entrenched gun culture. America was awarded the dubious honor of being the ‘most armed country in the world’ by Reuters back in 2007. And lest we forget, America is the largest arms dealer in the world.

 
Surely the lack of effective gun laws that would prevent such massacres also is worth mentioning, thanks to the legendary lobbying power of the NRA whose motto was best exemplified by their now deceased spokesman Charlton Heston who said you can pry the gun “from my cold, dead hands.” America just loves its guns:

 
If there was a fast and sudden collapse of the economy and industrial civilization, America might be one of the last places you’d want to find yourself due to the above reasons I have described.