Sunday, March 22, 2015

ANS -- How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us Into the Economic Mess of the Century

Here's an article about what's going on in the world and America's economy and why -- and you don't have to know much of anything about economics to understand this broad overview.  read it. 
find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-right-wing-billionaires-and-business-propaganda-got-us-economic-mess-century
--Kim



ECONOMY


How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us Into the Economic Mess of the Century

The corporate Right obscured how they've rigged the "free market" so they always come out on top.
By Joshua Holland / AlterNet
March 17, 2015
Print
5 COMMENTS

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Joshua Holland's book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy (And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America).

*****

The Great Recession that began in 2008 wiped out $13 trillion in Americans' household wealth ­in home values and stocks and bonds­stoking the kind of anger we've seen from pissed off progressives and from the Tea Partiers who dominated the news in the summer of 2009.

But although a lot of people threw around some angry rhetoric­and even invoked the specter of armed revolution­the reality is that when the economy nosedived, we basically took it. We didn't riot; we took the bailouts, tolerated our stagnant wages, and accepted that Washington wasn't about to give struggling families any real relief.

Yet the meltdown was global in nature, and it's worth noting that citizens of other wealthy countries weren't so complacent. As the Telegraph, a British tabloid, reported, "A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads toward 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia." Another British paper, the Guardian, reported scenes of "Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers" in France. French officials went so far as to delay the release of unemployment data, "apparently for fear of inflaming the protests."

You might wonder why Americans are so docile compared to others in the face of such a brutal economic onslaught by a small and entitled elite. Any number of theories have been offered to explain the apparent disconnect. Thomas Frank argued eloquently in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? that wedge social issues­"God, guns and gays"­that the American Right nurtures with such care, obscure the fundamental differences between rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Class consciousness, common to other liberal democracies, has been trumped by social anxieties, according to Frank.

I would offer two additional explanations. First, the 90 percent of Americans who haven't seen a raise in 35 years compensated for their stagnant incomes and kept on consuming, buying televisions and going out to dinner. How did they do it? First, by bringing women into the workforce in huge numbers, transforming the "typical" single-breadwinner family into a two-earner household. Between 1955 and 2002, the percentage of married women who had jobs outside the home almost doubled.  Workers' salaries stayed pretty much the same, but the average family now had two paychecks instead of one.

After that, we started to finance our lifestyles through debt­mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded, and the government started to run big budget deficits, year in and year out. In the period after World War II, while wages were still rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away 7 to 12 percent of the nation's income in savings annually (the data only go back as far as 1959). But in the 1980s, that began to decline­the savings rate fell from around 10 percent in the 1960s and the 1970s to about 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at less than 1 percent (it's rebounded somewhat since the crash­to 3.3 percent at the beginning of 2010).

The second reason Americans seem complacent in the face of this tectonic shift in their economic fortunes is more controversial: the "New Conservative Movement" built a highly influential message machine that's helped obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself.

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let's return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that's more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that­a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there's a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn't reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We've all grown accustomed to conservatives' conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call "intellectual infrastructure" ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

In 1973, brewer Joseph Coors kicked in $250,000 for seed money to start the now highly influential Heritage Foundation (with the help of the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos foundations). In 1977, Charles Koch, an oil billionaire, started the libertarian CATO Institute. Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy right-wing philanthropist who would later fund the shady "Arkansas Project" that almost brought down Bill Clinton's presidency, bought the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1970. The American Enterprise Institute, which was founded as the American Enterprise Association in the 1930s and remained relatively obscure through the 1960s, was transformed into an ideological powerhouse when it added a research faculty in 1972. The Hoover Institution, founded by Herbert himself in 1928, saw a huge increase in funding in the 1960s and would be transformed during the 1980s into the Washington advocacy organization that it is today.

In 1982, billionaire and right-wing messianic leader Sun Myung Moon started the Washington Times as an antidote to the "liberal" Washington Post. The paper, which promoted competition in the free market over all other human virtues, would be subsidized by the "Moonies" to a tune of $1.7 billion during the next 20 years. In 2000, United Press International, a venerable but declining newswire, was bought up by Moon's media conglomerate, World News Communications.

With generous financing from that same group of conservative foundations, the Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Ted Olsen­who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush's solicitor general. The Federalist Society continues to have a major impact on our legal community.

In 2005, one of the most influential right-wing funders, the John M. Olin Foundation, actually declared its "mission accomplished" and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after "three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right," the foundation's services were no longer needed. The Times reported that the loss of Olin wasn't terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas "a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today's conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio." And that's not even mentioning Rupert Murdoch's vast, and vastly dishonest, media empire.

The rise of the conservative "noise machine" has been discussed at length in a number of other works, and conservatives dismiss it as a conspiracy theory of sorts. In truth, it's anything but­it's simply a matter of people with ample resources engaging in some savvy politics in an age of highly effective mass communication. There's nothing new about that; what's changed is that the world of advertising and marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, and the Right has played the instrument of modern public relations like a maestro.

Taken as a whole, it's difficult to overstate how profound an impact these ideological armies have had on our economic debates. Writing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Hall and Joseph Capella, two scholars with the Annenberg School of Communication, discussed the findings of a study in which they coded and analyzed the content broadcast across conservative media networks. They found a tendency to "enwrap [their audience] in a world in which facts supportive of Democratic claims are discredited and those consistent with conservative ones championed." The scholars warned, "When one systematically misperceives the positions of those of a supposedly different ideology, one may decide to oppose legislation or vote against a candidate with whom, on some issues of importance, one actually agrees."

A larger issue is that the corporate Right's messaging doesn't remain confined to the conservative media. The end of the Cold War brought about a sense of economic triumphalism, which infected the conventional wisdom that ultimately shapes the news stories we read­U.S.-style capitalism had slain the socialist beast, proving to many that in the words of Tom Paine, "government is best when it governs least."

A wave of mergers also concentrated our media in the hands of a few highly influential corporations. In 2009, there was a rare (public) example of one such corporation nakedly exerting editorial control over the decisions of one of its news "assets." During a meeting between the top management of General Electric, which owned NBC-Universal with its various news networks, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, GE executives agreed to force MSNBC's firebrand host Keith Olbermann to cease fire in his long-standing feud with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, "The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn't even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC's journalism."

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp.

Five months previously, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had been criticized for touting GE's stock on his show, "Morning Joe," without disclosing that the company owned the network that employed him. "I never invest in the stock market because I think­I've always thought­that it's just­it's a crap shoot," he said. "[But] GE goes down to five, six, or seven, and I'm thinking, 'My god. I'm gonna invest for the first time, and I'm gonna send my kids to college through this.'"

A week after that, Scarborough invited Nancy Snyderman, a regular medical correspondent for NBC's networks, onto the show to discuss the health care reform bill then moving through Congress. Snyderman, who was presented to the audience as an impartial medical expert, had lost the ABC News job she'd previously held for 17 years due to a conflict of interest. The Nashville Examiner reported that "she was briefly suspended for being paid to promote J & J's product Tylenol. She later spent four years with Johnson & Johnson as Vice President of Consumer Education."

In another ABC segment, Snyderman weighed in on congressional hearings about autism without disclosing that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary was the target of litigation alleging that one of its vaccines may help cause the condition. It was a "blatant conflict of interest," in the words of National Autism Association vice president Ann Brasher.

Snyderman is hardly unique. A months-long investigation in 2010 by the Nation's Sebastian Jones revealed what he called a far-reaching "media-lobbying complex"­dozens of corporate hired guns who appear on network broadcasts without disclosing their ties to the firms they work for. Jones wrote of "the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news," citing such appearances as former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, who went on MSNBC­which conservatives insist is the liberal antidote to Fox News­to urge the Obama administration to launch an ambitious energy program.

The first step [toward a green economy], Ridge explained, was to "create nuclear power plants." Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an "innovation setter" that would "create jobs, create exports."
As Ridge counseled the administration to "put that package together," he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren't told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Jones found that during just the previous three years, "at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials­people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests"­had appeared on the major news channels. "Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens­and in some cases hundreds­of appearances," he wrote.

There's a final piece of this puzzle that's less insidious than what Jones unearthed but probably has a bigger impact on our discourse: the standard-issue "he-said/she-said" reporting that's so instinctive to neutral, "unbiased" journalists. Reporters are expected to get "both sides" of every story, even if one of those sides is making factually dishonest arguments. And there are an untold number of consultants, corporate flacks, lobbyists, and right-wing think-tankers who are always good for a quick quote for a reporter working on deadline.

The economic perception that emerges from all of this simply doesn't depict the economy in which most Americans live and work. Before the crash of 2008, most Americans saw news of a relatively robust economy, with solid growth and rising stock prices. But their own incomes had essentially stagnated for a generation. I've long thought that the disconnect may help explain why Americans suffer from depression at higher rates than do the citizens of most other advanced countries­if you think the economy's solid, everyone else is prospering, and yet you still just can't get ahead, isn't it natural to conclude it must be the result of some fundamental flaw in yourself?

Maybe you do have flaws­sure, you do­but it's important to understand how the economy helps shape one's fortunes. In The 15 Biggest Lies, we'll look at some of the Right's most cherished rhetoric and try to burn off some of the fog that shrouds our economic discourse.
-------------------------------
Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com, and host ofPolitics and Reality Radio. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

ANS -- How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us Into the Economic Mess of the Century

Here's an article about what's going on in the world and America's economy and why -- and you don't have to know much of anything about economics to understand this broad overview.  read it. 
find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-right-wing-billionaires-and-business-propaganda-got-us-economic-mess-century  
--Kim



ECONOMY

How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us Into the Economic Mess of the Century

The corporate Right obscured how they've rigged the "free market" so they always come out on top.
By Joshua Holland / AlterNet
March 17, 2015
Print
5 COMMENTS

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Joshua Holland's book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy (And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America).

*****

The Great Recession that began in 2008 wiped out $13 trillion in Americans' household wealth ­in home values and stocks and bonds­stoking the kind of anger we've seen from pissed off progressives and from the Tea Partiers who dominated the news in the summer of 2009.

But although a lot of people threw around some angry rhetoric­and even invoked the specter of armed revolution­the reality is that when the economy nosedived, we basically took it. We didn't riot; we took the bailouts, tolerated our stagnant wages, and accepted that Washington wasn't about to give struggling families any real relief.

Yet the meltdown was global in nature, and it's worth noting that citizens of other wealthy countries weren't so complacent. As the Telegraph, a British tabloid, reported, "A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads toward 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia." Another British paper, the Guardian, reported scenes of "Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers" in France. French officials went so far as to delay the release of unemployment data, "apparently for fear of inflaming the protests."

You might wonder why Americans are so docile compared to others in the face of such a brutal economic onslaught by a small and entitled elite. Any number of theories have been offered to explain the apparent disconnect. Thomas Frank argued eloquently in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? that wedge social issues­"God, guns and gays"­that the American Right nurtures with such care, obscure the fundamental differences between rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Class consciousness, common to other liberal democracies, has been trumped by social anxieties, according to Frank.

I would offer two additional explanations. First, the 90 percent of Americans who haven't seen a raise in 35 years compensated for their stagnant incomes and kept on consuming, buying televisions and going out to dinner. How did they do it? First, by bringing women into the workforce in huge numbers, transforming the "typical" single-breadwinner family into a two-earner household. Between 1955 and 2002, the percentage of married women who had jobs outside the home almost doubled.  Workers' salaries stayed pretty much the same, but the average family now had two paychecks instead of one.

After that, we started to finance our lifestyles through debt­mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded, and the government started to run big budget deficits, year in and year out. In the period after World War II, while wages were still rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away 7 to 12 percent of the nation's income in savings annually (the data only go back as far as 1959). But in the 1980s, that began to decline­the savings rate fell from around 10 percent in the 1960s and the 1970s to about 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at less than 1 percent (it's rebounded somewhat since the crash­to 3.3 percent at the beginning of 2010).

The second reason Americans seem complacent in the face of this tectonic shift in their economic fortunes is more controversial: the "New Conservative Movement" built a highly influential message machine that's helped obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself.

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let's return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that's more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that­a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there's a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn't reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We've all grown accustomed to conservatives' conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call "intellectual infrastructure" ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

In 1973, brewer Joseph Coors kicked in $250,000 for seed money to start the now highly influential Heritage Foundation (with the help of the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos foundations). In 1977, Charles Koch, an oil billionaire, started the libertarian CATO Institute. Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy right-wing philanthropist who would later fund the shady "Arkansas Project" that almost brought down Bill Clinton's presidency, bought the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1970. The American Enterprise Institute, which was founded as the American Enterprise Association in the 1930s and remained relatively obscure through the 1960s, was transformed into an ideological powerhouse when it added a research faculty in 1972. The Hoover Institution, founded by Herbert himself in 1928, saw a huge increase in funding in the 1960s and would be transformed during the 1980s into the Washington advocacy organization that it is today.

In 1982, billionaire and right-wing messianic leader Sun Myung Moon started the Washington Times as an antidote to the "liberal" Washington Post. The paper, which promoted competition in the free market over all other human virtues, would be subsidized by the "Moonies" to a tune of $1.7 billion during the next 20 years. In 2000, United Press International, a venerable but declining newswire, was bought up by Moon's media conglomerate, World News Communications.

With generous financing from that same group of conservative foundations, the Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and Ted Olsen­who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush's solicitor general. The Federalist Society continues to have a major impact on our legal community.

In 2005, one of the most influential right-wing funders, the John M. Olin Foundation, actually declared its "mission accomplished" and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after "three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right," the foundation's services were no longer needed. The Times reported that the loss of Olin wasn't terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas "a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today's conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio." And that's not even mentioning Rupert Murdoch's vast, and vastly dishonest, media empire.

The rise of the conservative "noise machine" has been discussed at length in a number of other works, and conservatives dismiss it as a conspiracy theory of sorts. In truth, it's anything but­it's simply a matter of people with ample resources engaging in some savvy politics in an age of highly effective mass communication. There's nothing new about that; what's changed is that the world of advertising and marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, and the Right has played the instrument of modern public relations like a maestro.

Taken as a whole, it's difficult to overstate how profound an impact these ideological armies have had on our economic debates. Writing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Hall and Joseph Capella, two scholars with the Annenberg School of Communication, discussed the findings of a study in which they coded and analyzed the content broadcast across conservative media networks. They found a tendency to "enwrap [their audience] in a world in which facts supportive of Democratic claims are discredited and those consistent with conservative ones championed." The scholars warned, "When one systematically misperceives the positions of those of a supposedly different ideology, one may decide to oppose legislation or vote against a candidate with whom, on some issues of importance, one actually agrees."

A larger issue is that the corporate Right's messaging doesn't remain confined to the conservative media. The end of the Cold War brought about a sense of economic triumphalism, which infected the conventional wisdom that ultimately shapes the news stories we read­U.S.-style capitalism had slain the socialist beast, proving to many that in the words of Tom Paine, "government is best when it governs least."

A wave of mergers also concentrated our media in the hands of a few highly influential corporations. In 2009, there was a rare (public) example of one such corporation nakedly exerting editorial control over the decisions of one of its news "assets." During a meeting between the top management of General Electric, which owned NBC-Universal with its various news networks, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, GE executives agreed to force MSNBC's firebrand host Keith Olbermann to cease fire in his long-standing feud with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, "The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn't even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC's journalism."

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp.

Five months previously, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had been criticized for touting GE's stock on his show, "Morning Joe," without disclosing that the company owned the network that employed him. "I never invest in the stock market because I think­I've always thought­that it's just­it's a crap shoot," he said. "[But] GE goes down to five, six, or seven, and I'm thinking, 'My god. I'm gonna invest for the first time, and I'm gonna send my kids to college through this.'"

A week after that, Scarborough invited Nancy Snyderman, a regular medical correspondent for NBC's networks, onto the show to discuss the health care reform bill then moving through Congress. Snyderman, who was presented to the audience as an impartial medical expert, had lost the ABC News job she'd previously held for 17 years due to a conflict of interest. The Nashville Examiner reported that "she was briefly suspended for being paid to promote J & J's product Tylenol. She later spent four years with Johnson & Johnson as Vice President of Consumer Education."

In another ABC segment, Snyderman weighed in on congressional hearings about autism without disclosing that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary was the target of litigation alleging that one of its vaccines may help cause the condition. It was a "blatant conflict of interest," in the words of National Autism Association vice president Ann Brasher.

Snyderman is hardly unique. A months-long investigation in 2010 by the Nation's Sebastian Jones revealed what he called a far-reaching "media-lobbying complex"­dozens of corporate hired guns who appear on network broadcasts without disclosing their ties to the firms they work for. Jones wrote of "the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news," citing such appearances as former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, who went on MSNBC­which conservatives insist is the liberal antidote to Fox News­to urge the Obama administration to launch an ambitious energy program.

The first step [toward a green economy], Ridge explained, was to "create nuclear power plants." Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an "innovation setter" that would "create jobs, create exports."

As Ridge counseled the administration to "put that package together," he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren't told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Jones found that during just the previous three years, "at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials­people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests"­had appeared on the major news channels. "Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens­and in some cases hundreds­of appearances," he wrote.

There's a final piece of this puzzle that's less insidious than what Jones unearthed but probably has a bigger impact on our discourse: the standard-issue "he-said/she-said" reporting that's so instinctive to neutral, "unbiased" journalists. Reporters are expected to get "both sides" of every story, even if one of those sides is making factually dishonest arguments. And there are an untold number of consultants, corporate flacks, lobbyists, and right-wing think-tankers who are always good for a quick quote for a reporter working on deadline.

The economic perception that emerges from all of this simply doesn't depict the economy in which most Americans live and work. Before the crash of 2008, most Americans saw news of a relatively robust economy, with solid growth and rising stock prices. But their own incomes had essentially stagnated for a generation. I've long thought that the disconnect may help explain why Americans suffer from depression at higher rates than do the citizens of most other advanced countries­if you think the economy's solid, everyone else is prospering, and yet you still just can't get ahead, isn't it natural to conclude it must be the result of some fundamental flaw in yourself?

Maybe you do have flaws­sure, you do­but it's important to understand how the economy helps shape one's fortunes. In The 15 Biggest Lies, we'll look at some of the Right's most cherished rhetoric and try to burn off some of the fog that shrouds our economic discourse.
-------------------------------
Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com, and host ofPolitics and Reality Radio. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Fwd: Re: ANS -- As Solar Power Spreads, Diverse Users Fight Utility Attempts To Penalize It

our formatter has formatted this article, so if you want to print it, it's in a nice clear form.
--K


Attached, formatted item

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Kim Cooper <kimc@astound.net> wrote:
Here is good news: apparently, in many areas, the local utility companies have been getting their way in making renewable energy harder and/or more expensive for people to get because the utility company would lose money on you if you have solar panels.  Yes, that means that the profit of the utility companies is more important than saving our planet from destruction.  The good news is that people are starting to fight back!
Find it here:    http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1097367_as-solar-power-spreads-diverse-users-fight-utility-attempts-to-penalize-it   
--Kim



As Solar Power Spreads, Diverse Users Fight Utility Attempts To Penalize It



By Stephen Edelstein Stephen Edelstein
1 Comment83 viewsMar 21, 2015

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Photovoltaic solar power field at Volkswagen plant in Chattanoo  

Photovoltaic solar power field at Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee

You'd be surprised how much a rooftop solar panel can make utility-company executives sweat.

Home solar installations are on the rise in the U.S., and that has electric utilities worried.

Now they have a new worry: A remarkably varied group of advocates and interest groups is fighting efforts by utility lobbyists to restrict, penalize, or boost the consumer cost of solar electricity.

DON'T MISS: Residential Solar Competitive With Electricity In 25 States Next Year: NRG CEO (Jun 2014)

Utilities have long operated on a traditional, century-old business model: They generate electricity at huge central power plants, and sell it to homes and businesses, distributed via a one-way electric grid.

Distributed solar panels disrupt that model, cutting utilities' revenue from customers getting power from the sun's rays--yet still saddling them with the costs of maintaining expensive infrastructure as a backup.

And like most established industries facing new competition, utilities aren't taking this perceived threat lying down.

Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York  

Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York

Utilities are waging a state-by-state campaign that started in legislatures and is now moving [] to public utility commissions, according to industry tactics laid out by The Washington Post.

Documents from the Edison Electric Institute trade group show that as far back as 2012, the industry was planning to limit or suppress solar power.

The first phase of the campaign involved pushing anti-solar bills through state legislatures.

ALSO SEE: Renewable Energy Won't Cause Electric Utility 'Death Spiral': Study

Most of these bills involved outlawing or increasing the cost of net metering--which allows homeowners to gain credit [] for the electricity their solar arrays feed back into the grid, effectively forcing utilities to "buy" that power.

Legislation pertaining to net metering has been introduced in nearly two dozen states since 2013.

In some instances, the bills were virtual copies of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)--a lobbying group associated with the Koch Brothers.

Two BNSF locomotives hauling coal trains meet near Wichita Fall  

Two BNSF locomotives hauling coal trains meet near Wichita Falls, Texas

However, this effort has largely failed--in some cases spectacularly.

Most of the bills considered so far have been rejected and vetoed. The drafters apparently expected widespread Republican support for these bills--but were disappointed.

It turned out that legislators pretty much across the board weren't all that keen on the government regulating how they got their electricity.

MORE: Will Solar Panels Destroy Electric Utilities' Business Model? Yes, They Say

As attempts to get legislation passed proved less than successful [] , lobbyists began to court public-utility commissions instead.

These state-level commissions set the rates and fees utilities can charge customers, and are typically made up of political appointees--insulating them from public opinion compared to legislators who must campaign for reelection.

Last month, an Arizona utility was given approval to institute a monthly surcharge of about $50 for net metering. Utility commissions in Wisconsin and New Mexico are considering similar measures.

BMW DesignworksUSA solar carport  

BMW DesignworksUSA solar carport

But whether those measures pass or fail, the solar industry will likely continue to grow. The price [] of photovoltaic cells has fallen 60 percent since 2010, bringing them into the reach of more consumers.

And while some state governments support anti-solar measures, others subsidize solar installations as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Ironically, even the utilities stand to benefit somewhat from the current solar boom.

More solar-generating capacity helps balance utility grids during times of high demand, taking some strain off the existing infrastructure.

As utilities fight to protect their bottom lines, though, that may well not provide much consolation.

_______________________________________________

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ANS -- As Solar Power Spreads, Diverse Users Fight Utility Attempts To Penalize It

Here is good news:  apparently, in many areas, the local utility companies have been getting their way in making renewable energy harder and/or more expensive for people to get because the utility company would lose money on you if you have solar panels.  Yes, that means that the profit of the utility companies is more important than saving our planet from destruction.  The good news is that people are starting to fight back!
Find it here:    http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1097367_as-solar-power-spreads-diverse-users-fight-utility-attempts-to-penalize-it   
--Kim


As Solar Power Spreads, Diverse Users Fight Utility Attempts To Penalize It

By Stephen Edelstein Stephen Edelstein
1 Comment83 viewsMar 21, 2015


Photovoltaic solar power field at Volkswagen plant in Chattanoo

Photovoltaic solar power field at Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee

You'd be surprised how much a rooftop solar panel can make utility-company executives sweat.

Home solar installations are on the rise in the U.S., and that has electric utilities worried.

Now they have a new worry: A remarkably varied group of advocates and interest groups is fighting efforts by utility lobbyists to restrict, penalize, or boost the consumer cost of solar electricity.

DON'T MISS: Residential Solar Competitive With Electricity In 25 States Next Year: NRG CEO (Jun 2014)

Utilities have long operated on a traditional, century-old business model: They generate electricity at huge central power plants, and sell it to homes and businesses, distributed via a one-way electric grid.

Distributed solar panels disrupt that model, cutting utilities' revenue from customers getting power from the sun's rays--yet still saddling them with the costs of maintaining expensive infrastructure as a backup.

And like most established industries facing new competition, utilities aren't taking this perceived threat lying down.

Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York

Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York

Utilities are waging a state-by-state campaign that started in legislatures and is now moving [] to public utility commissions, according to industry tactics laid out by The Washington Post.

Documents from the Edison Electric Institute trade group show that as far back as 2012, the industry was planning to limit or suppress solar power.

The first phase of the campaign involved pushing anti-solar bills through state legislatures.

ALSO SEE: Renewable Energy Won't Cause Electric Utility 'Death Spiral': Study

Most of these bills involved outlawing or increasing the cost of net metering--which allows homeowners to gain credit [] for the electricity their solar arrays feed back into the grid, effectively forcing utilities to "buy" that power.

Legislation pertaining to net metering has been introduced in nearly two dozen states since 2013.

In some instances, the bills were virtual copies of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)--a lobbying group associated with the Koch Brothers.

Two BNSF locomotives hauling coal trains meet near Wichita Fall

Two BNSF locomotives hauling coal trains meet near Wichita Falls, Texas

However, this effort has largely failed--in some cases spectacularly.

Most of the bills considered so far have been rejected and vetoed. The drafters apparently expected widespread Republican support for these bills--but were disappointed.

It turned out that legislators pretty much across the board weren't all that keen on the government regulating how they got their electricity.

MORE: Will Solar Panels Destroy Electric Utilities' Business Model? Yes, They Say

As attempts to get legislation passed proved less than successful [] , lobbyists began to court public-utility commissions instead.

These state-level commissions set the rates and fees utilities can charge customers, and are typically made up of political appointees--insulating them from public opinion compared to legislators who must campaign for reelection.

Last month, an Arizona utility was given approval to institute a monthly surcharge of about $50 for net metering. Utility commissions in Wisconsin and New Mexico are considering similar measures.

BMW DesignworksUSA solar carport

BMW DesignworksUSA solar carport

But whether those measures pass or fail, the solar industry will likely continue to grow. The price [] of photovoltaic cells has fallen 60 percent since 2010, bringing them into the reach of more consumers.

And while some state governments support anti-solar measures, others subsidize solar installations as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Ironically, even the utilities stand to benefit somewhat from the current solar boom.

More solar-generating capacity helps balance utility grids during times of high demand, taking some strain off the existing infrastructure.

As utilities fight to protect their bottom lines, though, that may well not provide much consolation.

_______________________________________________

Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

ANS -- Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money

Here's a short article by Robert Reich on the permanent loss of jobs due to automation and what it might do to the economy.  The discussions after are pretty interesting too.  He doesn't really say it, but someone we need to uncouple work from income. 
Find it here:   http://www.alternet.org/robert-reich-our-horrifying-future-very-few-people-will-have-work-or-make-money
 
--Kim




Robert Reich: In Our Horrifying Future, Very Few People Will Have Work or Make Money

Think you're safe because you're a professional? Think again.
By Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog
March 17, 2015
Print
453 COMMENTS
[]

It's now possible to sell a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any, workers to produce or distribute it.

At its prime in 1988, Kodak, the iconic American photography company, had 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

The same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world's newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers.

The ratio of producers to customers continues to plummet. When Facebook purchased "WhatsApp" (the messaging app) for $19 billion last year, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million customers.

A friend, operating from his home in Tucson, recently invented a machine that can find particles of certain elements in the air.

He's already sold hundreds of these machines over the Internet to customers all over the world. He's manufacturing them in his garage with a 3D printer.

So far, his entire business depends on just one person ­ himself.

New technologies aren't just labor-replacing. They're also knowledge-replacing.

The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another.

If you think being a "professional" makes your job safe, think again.

The two sectors of the economy harboring the most professionals ­ health care and education – are under increasing pressure to cut costs. And expert machines are poised to take over.

We're on the verge of a wave of mobile health apps for measuring everything from your cholesterol to your blood pressure, along with diagnostic software that tells you what it means and what to do about it.

In coming years, software apps will be doing many of the things physicians, nurses, and technicians now do (think ultrasound, CT scans, and electrocardiograms).

Meanwhile, the jobs of many teachers and university professors will disappear, replaced by online courses and interactive online textbooks.

Where will this end?

Imagine a small box – let's call it an "iEverything" – capable of producing everything you could possibly desire, a modern day Aladdin's lamp.

You simply tell it what you want, and – presto – the object of your desire arrives at your feet.

The iEverything also does whatever you want. It gives you a massage, fetches you your slippers, does your laundry and folds and irons it.

The iEverything will be the best machine ever invented.

The only problem is no one will be able to buy it. That's because no one will have any means of earning money, since the iEverything will do it all.

This is obviously fanciful, but when more and more can be done by fewer and fewer people, the profits go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and owner-investors.

One of the young founders of WhatsApp, CEO Jan Koum, had a 45 percent equity stake in the company when Facebook purchased it, which yielded him $6.8 billion.

Cofounder Brian Acton got $3 billion for his 20 percent stake.

Each of the early employees reportedly had a 1 percent stake, which presumably netted them $160 million each.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left providing the only things technology can't provide – person-to-person attention, human touch, and care. But these sorts of person-to-person jobs pay very little.

That means most of us will have less and less money to buy the dazzling array of products and services spawned by blockbuster technologies – because those same technologies will be supplanting our jobs and driving down our pay.

We need a new economic model.

The economic model that dominated most of the twentieth century was mass production by the many, for mass consumption by the many.

Workers were consumers; consumers were workers. As paychecks rose, people had more money to buy all the things they and others produced ­ like Kodak cameras. That resulted in more jobs and even higher pay.

That virtuous cycle is now falling apart. A future of almost unlimited production by a handful, for consumption by whoever can afford it, is a recipe for economic and social collapse.

Our underlying problem won't be the number of jobs. It will be – it already is ­ the allocation of income and wealth.

What to do?

"Redistribution" has become a bad word.

But the economy toward which we're hurtling ­ in which more and more is generated by fewer and fewer people who reap almost all the rewards, leaving the rest of us without enough purchasing power – can't function.

It may be that a redistribution of income and wealth from the rich owners of breakthrough technologies to the rest of us becomes the only means of making the future economy work.

 -----------------------------------------------------------

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

ANS -- YES, WE CAN PROSPER WITHOUT GROWTH: 10 POLICY PROPOSALS FOR THE NEW LEFT

We need to consider not growing.  Here's how.  Well, actually, it's designed for Europe, where they have a bit more sense....
find it here: http://thischangeseverything.org/yes-we-can-prosper-without-growth-10-policy-proposals-for-the-new-left/ 
--Kim



YES, WE CAN PROSPER WITHOUT GROWTH: 10 POLICY PROPOSALS FOR THE NEW LEFT

January 23, 2015 by This Changes Everything

This post was written by Giorgos Kallis, who teaches political ecology and ecological economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and recently co-edited the book "Degrowth. A vocabulary for a new era." It originally appeared at The Press Project on January 7.

In our recent book "Degrowth. A vocabulary for a new era" we argue that economic growth is not only becoming more and more difficult in advanced economies, but that it is also socially and ecologically unsustainable. The global climate, the welfare state, or social bonds that have lasted for ages, are all sacrificed in the name of appeasing the god of growth.

Like terminally ill patients, whole populations are asked to suffer without end, just so that their economies score a few extra decimals in the GDP scale, to sustain the profits of the 1%.

In theory, growth is needed to pay off debts, create new jobs, or increase the incomes of the poor. In practice, we have had decades of growth, yet we are still indebted, with our youth unemployed and poverty as high as ever. We were indebted to grow and now we are forced to grow to pay off debts.

Degrowth is a call to decolonize the social imaginary from the ideology of a one-way future consisting only of growth. Degrowth is not the same thing as recession. It is the hypothesis that we can achieve prosperity without economic growth.

In other words: that we can have meaningful work without the need for ever-lasting growth; sustain a functional welfare state without the economy getting bigger every single year; and increase equality and eliminate poverty, without having to accumulate more and more money each year.

Degrowth challenges not only the outcomes, but the very spirit of capitalism. Capitalism knows no limits, it only knows how to expand, creating while destroying. Capitalism cannot and does not know how to settle. Capitalism can sell everything; but it can't sell "less."

Degrowth offers a new narrative for a radical left that wants to go beyond capitalism, without reproducing the authoritarian and productivist experiences of real existing socialism (or what some may call "state capitalism").

A new Left, new in terms of ideas, but also in terms of the young age of its members, is rising in Europe, from Spain and Catalonia, to Greece, Slovenia or Croatia. Will that Left be also green and propose an alternative cooperative model for the economy inspired by the ideas of degrowth? Or will this new Left, like the new Left of Latin America, driven by the demands of global capitalism, reproduce the expansionary logic of capitalism, only substituting multi-national corporations with national ones, distributing somewhat better the crumbs to the populace?

Many people who are sympathetic to the ideas and critique expressed in our booktell us that even though the critique of degrowth sounds reasonable, its proposals are vague and anyways they could never be put into practice. It seems easier to imagine the end of the world, or even the end of capitalism, than to imagine the end of growth.

Even the most radical political parties do not dare to utter the D word, or at least question the desirability of growth. To break this spell of growth, we at Research & Degrowth in Barcelona decided to codify some of the policy proposals that are coming out of the theory of degrowth, policies that are discussed in more detail in our recent book.

In what follows we present 10 proposals that we wrote for the context of Spain and Catalunya, and which we submitted to progressive political parties such as Podemos, the United Left, the Catalan Republican Left, CUP or Equo. The context to which these proposals refer to is specific; but with certain amendments and adaptations they are also applicable elsewhere and relevant for radical Left and Green political parties all over Europe.

1. Citizen debt audit. An economy cannot be forced to grow to resolve accumulated debts that have contributed to fictitious growth in the past. It is essential not only to restructure but also to eliminate part of the debt with a people's debt audit, part of a new, really democratic culture. Such elimination shouldn't be realised at the expense of savers and those with modest pensions whether in Spain or elsewhere. The debt of those that have considerable income and assets should not be pardoned. Those who lent for speculation should take the losses. Once the debt is reduced, caps on carbon and resources (see 9) will guarantee that this will not be used as an opportunity for more growth and consumption.

2. Work-sharing. Reduce the working week to at least 32 hours and develop programmes that support firms and organisations that want to facilitate job-sharing.  This should be orchestrated such that the loss of salary from working less only affects the 10% highest income bracket. Complemented by environmental limits and the tax reform proposed below (see 4), it will be more difficult for this liberation of time to be used for material consumption.

3. Basic and maximum income. Establish a minimum income for all of Spain's residents of between 400 and 600 Euros per month, paid without any requirement or stipulation. A recent study suggests this is feasible for Spain, without a major overhaul of the tax system. Design this policy in conjunction with other tax and work reforms so that they increase the income of the poorer 50% of the population while decreasing that of the top 10%, to finance the change. The maximum income for any person­from work as well as from capital­shouldn't be more than 30 times the basic income (12,000­18,000 Euros monthly).

4. Green tax reform. Implement an accounting system to transform, over time, the tax system, from one based principally on work to one based on the use of energy and resources. Taxation on the lowest incomes could be reduced and compensated for with a carbon tax. Establish a 90% tax rate on the highest incomes (such rates were common in the USA in the 1950s). High income and capital taxes will halt positional consumption and eliminate the incentives for excessive earnings, which feed financial speculation. Tackle capital wealth through inheritance tax and high taxes on property that is not meant for use, for example on the second or third houses of individuals or on large estates.

5. Stop subsidizing and investing on activities that are highly polluting,moving the liberated public funds towards clean production. Reduce to zero the public investment and subsidy for private transport infrastructure (such as new roads and airport expansion), military technology, fossil fuels or mining projects. Use the funds saved to invest in the improvement of public rural and urban space­such as squares, traffic free pedestrian streets­and to subsidise public transport and cycle hire schemes.  Support the development of small scale decentralised renewable energy under local and democratic control, instead of concentrated and extensive macro-structures under the control of private business.

6. Support the alternative, solidarity society. Support, with subsidies, tax exemptions and legislation, the not-for-profit co-operative economic sector that are flourishing in Spain and include alternative food networks, cooperatives and networks for basic health care, co-operatives covering shared housing, credit, teaching, and artists and other workers. Facilitate the de-commercialisation of spaces and activities of care and creativity, by helping mutual support groups, shared childcare and social centres.

7. Optimise the use of buildings. Stop the construction of new houses, rehabilitating the existing housing stock and facilitating the full occupation of houses. In Spain those objectives could be met through very high taxes on abandoned, empty and second houses, prioritising the social use of SAREB housing (those falling under the post-crash banking restructuring provisions following the Spanish real estate crisis), and if this is insufficient, then proceed with social expropriation of empty housing from private investors.

8. Reduce advertising.  Establish very restrictive criteria for allowing advertising in public spaces, following the example of the city of Grenoble. Prioritise the provision of information and reduce greatly any commercial use. Establish committees to control the quantity and quality of advertising permitted in the mass media and tax advertising in accordance with objectives.

9. Establish environmental limits. Establish absolute and diminishing caps on the total of CO2 that Spain can emit and the total quality of material resources that it uses, including emissions and materials embedded in imported products, often from the global South. These caps would be in CO2, materials, water footprint or the surface area under cultivation. Similar limits could be established for other environmental pressures such as the extraction of water, the total built-up area and the number of licenses for tourist enterprises in saturated zones.

10. Abolish the use of GDP as indicator of economic progress. If GDP is a misleading indicator, we should stop using it and look for other indicators of prosperity. Monetary and fiscal national accounts statistics can be collected and used but economic policy shouldn't be expressed in terms of GDP objectives. A debate needs to be started about the nature of well-being, focusing on what to measure rather than how to measure it.

These proposals are complementary and have to be implemented in concert. For example, setting environmental limits might reduce growth and create unemployment, but work-sharing with a basic income will decouple the creation of jobs and social security from economic growth.

The reallocation of investments from dirty to clean activities and the reform of the taxation system will make sure that a greener economy will emerge, while stopping to count the economy in GDP terms and using prosperity indicators ensures that this transition will be counted as a success and not as a failure.

Finally, the changes in taxation and the controls in advertizing, will relax positional competition and reduce the sense of frustration that comes with lack of growth. Investing on the commons and shared infrastructures will increase prosperity, without growth.

We do not expect parties of the Left to make "degrowth" their banner. We understand the difficulties of confronting, suddenly, an entrenched common sense. But we do expect radical left parties to take steps in the right direction, and to pursue good policies, such as the ones we propose, independent of their effect on growth. We do expect genuine Left parties to avoid making the relaunch of economic growth their objective. And we do expect them to be ready, and have ideas in place, on what they will do, if the economy refuses to grow. Is this a reasonable expectation in the current political conjecture of Southern Europe for example? Yes and no.

The draft economic policy of Podemos released in November, has many elements that fit with the above agenda. The document does not set growth as its strategic goal. It omits any reference to GDP. It proposes to reduce working hours to 35, it sets a minimum guaranteed income for the unemployed, it calls for a forgiveness of part of household and public debt, and it promotes a shift of investments towards caring, education and the green economy, posing the satisfaction of basic needs through an "ecologically sustainable consumption" as its primary objective.

The policy could go further by shifting taxes from labour to resources, establishing environmental limits, controlling advertising, generalizing the basic income, and reforming the welfare state by thinking ways to universalize the solidarity economy that is thriving in Spain, providing viable and low cost solutions for health care or education.

In Greece in contrast, the huge overhanging debt, and the need to escape the socially disastrous policy of austerity and structural adjustment imposed by the Troika, makes it much harder to ignore growth.

Syriza confronts austerity rightly with a proposal to forgive part of Greece's public debt. Unfortunately though, the objective of such debt cancellation is seen as the relaunching of growth, with Syriza adopting Joseph Stiglitz's proposal for a "growth-clause," whereby the remaining part of the debt will be growth financed.

Syriza proposes a European New Deal and espouses public investments that will spur growth in Greece, but unlike Podemos, it does not talk of a "green" New Deal, or about a shift from conventional to clean industries or from resource intensive sectors to caring and education.

Within the current conjecture of powers in Europe, the dictatorship of the markets and the fixation of Germany with austerity, even the Stiglitzian proposal of Syriza comes to pass as "radical" and stands slims chances of being realized, save for dramatic socio-political events in Greece and a political upheaval in the EU.

Assuming that Syriza were to implement its strategy one day, the question is what would it do if, even after a restructuring of debts, the professed growth was not to come.

Would it recoil into a left version of austerity as the "socialists" of Hollande did in France when faced with the same problem?

Would it pursue even more intensely the current extractivist model of development, exploiting the environments of Greece for resources, exports and tourism, even though this would be against the wishes of its political base that is at the forefront of current struggles against extractivist projects?

Or would it stop and listen to its youth, which is involved in the thriving solidarity economy of Greece, trying to decipher and think how to universalize these pre-figuring local experiments into something new for the national economy as a whole? Not an easy feat, but a radical left was never supposed to follow the easy path.

ANS -- Are We Becoming a Theocracy? 4 Fundamentalist Ideologies That Threaten America

"Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression, but at the same time, institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness that recognizes the very need for such reform and the need to reinvent the conditions and practices that would make it possible."     This article is about various kinds of fundmentalism.



Find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/visions/are-we-becoming-theocracy-4-fundamentalist-ideologies-threaten-america?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark
--Kim


  VISIONS 
TruthOut.org / By Henry A. Giroux
comments_image   8 COMMENTS


Are We Becoming a Theocracy? 4 Fundamentalist Ideologies That Threaten America

Extremists shape American politics to pursue legislative policies that favor the rich and punish the poor.
8 COMMENTS 8 COMMENTS
 
 

December 2, 2014
 

Americans seem confident in the mythical notion that the United States is a free nation dedicated to reproducing the principles of equality, justice and democracy. What has been ignored in this delusional view is the growing rise of an expanded national security state since 2001 and an attack on individual rights that suggests that the United States has more in common with authoritarian regimes like China and Iran "than anyone may like to admit." I want to address this seemingly untenable notion that the United States has become a breeding ground for authoritarianism by focusing on four fundamentalisms: market fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, educational fundamentalism and military fundamentalism. This is far from a exhaustive list, but it does raise serious questions about how the claim to democracy in the United States has been severely damaged, if not made impossible.

The broader contours of the attack on democratic freedoms have become obvious in recent years. While the Bush administration engaged in torture, shamelessly violated civil liberties and put a host of Christian extremists in high-ranking governmental positions, the Obama administration has not only continued many of these policies, but has further institutionalized them. As Glenn Greenwald has reminded us, Obama has continued the Bush-Cheney terrorism and civil liberties policies, further undermining constitutional rights by promoting indefinite detention, weakening the rights of habeas corpus for prisoners in Afghanistan, extending government power through the state secrets privilege, asserting the right to target American citizens for assassination and waging war on whistle blowers. More specifically, there are the ongoing revelations about the Obama administration's decision under the National Defense Authorization Act to allow American citizens to be held indefinitely without charge or trial; the government's increased role in using special operations forces and drones in targeted assassinations; the emergence and use of sophisticated surveillance technologies to spy on protesters; the invocation of the state secrecy practices; the suspension of civil liberties that allow various government agencies to spy on Americans without first obtaining warrants; and the stories about widespread abuse and torture by the US military in Afghanistan, not to mention the popular support for torture among the American public. It gets worse. As the war on terror degenerated in a war on democracy, a host of legal illegalities have been established that put the rule of law if not the very principle of Western jurisprudence into a chokehold. How such assaults on the rule of law, justice and democracy could take place without massive resistance represents one of the most reprehensible moments in American history. Most Americans caught in the grip of simply trying to survive or paralyzed in a relentless culture of fear ignored the assaults on democracy unleashed by a burgeoning national security state. The assaults loom large and are evident in the passage of the Use of Military Force Act, the passage of the Patriot Act, the 2002 Homeland Security Act, the Military Commission Act of 2006 and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Jim Garrison rightly raises the question about whether these acts inspired by 9/11 and the war on terror are worth sacrificing the Republic. He writes:

The question screaming at us through [these bills] is whether the war on terror is a better model around which to shape our destiny than our constitutional liberties. It compels the question of whether we remain an ongoing experiment in democracy, pioneering new frontiers in the name of liberty and justice for all, or have we become a national security state, having financially corrupted and militarized our democracy to such an extent that we define ourselves, as Sparta did, only through the exigencies of war?

The rise of the national security state is no longer an abstraction and can also be seen in the collapse of the traditional distinction between the military and the police, as weapons move freely from the military to local police forces and contribute to the rise of pervasive police abuse against students, African-Americans and immigrants. We also have to include in this list a growing culture of manufactured indifference and cruelty, intensified through a commercially driven spectacle of violence that saturates every element of American society. The latter intensified daily by a language of hate aimed indiscriminately by the right-wing media, many conservative politicians and an army of anti-public pundits against those who suffer from a number of misfortunes including unemployment, inadequate health care, poverty and homelessness. Think of Rush Limbaugh's cruel and hateful attack on Sandra Fluke, insisting that she was a prostitute because she believed that contraception was a women's right and should be covered by insurance companies as part of her health coverage. Or for that matter, think about the ongoing attempts on the part of Republican politicians to cut food stamp programs that benefit over 45 million people. Another would be the call to eliminate child labor laws. Jonathan Schell highlights how this culture of cruelty manifests itself in "a steadily growing faith in force as the solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad." The governing-through-crime model that now imposes violence on school children all across the country is a particularly egregious example. How else to explain that in 2010 "the police gave close to 300,000 'Class C misdemeanor' tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time"? Behavior as trivial as a dress violation or being late for class now translates into a criminal act and is symptomatic of what attorney Kady Simpkins insists is a growing trend in which "we have taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal." All of these violations point to the ongoing and growing fundamentalisms and "rule of exceptions" in the American polity that bear witness to the growing authoritarianism in American life.

Those governing the United States no longer have a moral compass or a democratic vision, nor do they have a hold on the social values that would engage modes of governance beneficial to the broader public. Governance is now in the hands of corporate power and the United States increasingly exhibits all the characteristics of a failed state. As many notable and courageous critics ranging from Sheldon Wolin to Chris Hedges have pointed out, American politics is being shaped by extremists who have shredded civil liberties, lied to the public to legitimate sending young American troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, alienated most of the international community with a blatant exercise of arrogant power and investment in a permanent warfare state, tarnished the highest offices of government with unsavory corporate alliances, used political power to unabashedly pursue legislative policies that favor the rich and punish the poor and perhaps irreparably damaged any remaining public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. They have waged a covert war against poor young people and people of color who are being either warehoused in substandard schools or incarcerated at alarming rates. Academic freedom is increasingly under attack by extremists such as Rick Santorum; homophobia and racism have become the poster ideologies of the Republican Party; war and warriors have become the most endearing models of national greatness; and a full-fledged assault on women's reproductive rights is being championed by the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls and a not insignificant number of Republican governors. While people of color, the poor, youth, the middle class, the elderly, LGBT communities and women are being attacked, the Republican Party is supporting a campaign to collapse the boundaries between the church and state, and even liberal critics such as Frank Rich believe that the United States is on the verge of becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. Let me develop this further by examining four of the most serious fundamentalisms that now constitute the new authoritarianism in the United States.

Market Fundamentalism

A number of powerful anti-democratic tendencies now threaten American democracy and at least four of these are guaranteed to entail grave social and economic consequences. The first is a market fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns, but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness, and a Hobbesian "war of all against all" replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. Free-market fundamentalists now wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract, the welfare state, any notion of the common good and those public spheres not yet defined by commercial interests. Within neoliberal ideology, the market becomes the template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital and commodities.

As market fundamentalism ensures that the logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low-intensity warfare at home chips away at democratic freedoms, while high-intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks and chemical warfare. The cost abroad is massive human suffering and death. At home, as Paul Krugman points out, "The hijacking of public policy by private interests" parallels "the downward spiral in governance." With the rise of market fundamentalism, economics is accorded more respect than politics and the citizen is reduced to being only a consumer - the buying and selling of goods is all that seems to matter. Even children are now targeted as a constituency from which to make money, reduced to commodities, sexualized in endless advertisements and shamelessly treated as a market for huge profits. Market fundamentalism not only makes time a burden for those without health insurance, child care, a decent job and adequate social services, but it also commercializes and privatizes public space, undermining both the idea of citizenship and those very spaces (schools, media etc.) needed to produce a formative culture that offers vigorous and engaged opportunities for dialogue, debate, reasoned exchange and discriminating judgments. Under such circumstances, hope is foreclosed and it becomes difficult either to imagine a life beyond capitalism or to believe in a politics that takes democracy seriously.

When the market becomes the template for all social relations, the obligations of citizenship are reduced merely to consumption, while production is valued only insofar as it contributes to obscene levels of inequality. Not only the government but all the commanding institutions of society are now placed in the hands of powerful corporate interests, as market fundamentalism works hard to eliminate government regulation of big business and celebrates a ruthless competitive individualism. This type of strangulating control renders politics corrupt and cynical. Robert Kuttner gets it right when he observes:

One of our major parties has turned nihilist, giddily toying with default on the nation's debt, revelling in the dark pleasures of fiscal Walpurginsnacht. Government itself is the devil.... Whether the tart is the Environment Protection Agency, the Dodd-Frank law or the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are out to destroy government's ability to govern ... the administration trapped in the radical right's surreal logic plays by Tea Party rules rather than changing the game ... the right's reckless assault on our public institutions is not just an attack on government. It is a war on America.

In the land of the isolated individual, everything is privatized and public issues collapse into individual concerns so there is no way of linking private woes to social problems - the result is a dog-eat-dog world. Moreover, when all things formerly linked to the public good are so aggressively individualized and commercialized, it leaves few places in which a critical language and democratic values can be developed to defend institutions as vital public spheres.

Religious Fundamentalism

The second fundamentalism is seen in a religious fervor embraced by a Republican Party that not only serves up creationism instead of science, but substitutes unthinking faith for critical reason and intolerance for a concern with and openness toward others. This is a deeply disturbing trend in which the line between the state and religion is being erased as radical Christians and evangelicals embrace and impose a moralism on Americans that is largely bigoted, patriarchal, uncritical and insensitive to real social problems such as poverty, racism, the crisis in health care and the increasing impoverishment of America's children. Instead of addressing these problems, a flock of dangerous and powerful religious fanatics, who have enormous political clout, are waging a campaign to ban same-sex marriages, undermine scientific knowledge, eliminate important research initiatives such as those involving embryonic stem cells, deny the human destruction of the ecological system, overturn Roe v. Wade and ban contraceptives for women. This Taliban-like moralism now boldly translates into everyday cultural practices and political policies as right-wing evangelicals live out their messianic view of the world. For instance, in the last decade, conservative pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions for religious reasons. Mixing medicine, politics and religion means that some women are being denied birth control pills or any other product designed to prevent conception; sex education in some cases has been limited to "abstinence only" programs inspired by faith-based institutions; and scientific research challenging these approaches has disappeared from government web sites. But the much-exalted religious fundamentalism touted by fanatics such as Santorum and many of his Tea Party followers does more than promote a disdain for critical thought and reinforce retrograde forms of homophobia and patriarchy. It also inspires a wave of criticism and censorship against all but the most sanitized facets of popular culture. Remember the moral outrage of the religious right over the allegedly homoerotic representations attributed to the animated cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. There was also the conservative Texas lawmaker who jumped onto the moral bandwagon by introducing a bill that would put an end to "sexually suggestive" performances by cheerleaders at sports events and other extracurricular competitions.

Educational Fundamentalism

The third, related anti-democratic dogma is a virulent form of anti-intellectualism visible in the relentless attempt on the part of the Obama administration and his Republican Party allies to destroy critical education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a vibrant democracy. The attack on all levels of education is evident in the attempts to corporatize education, standardize curricula, privatize public schooling and use the language of business as a model for governance. It is equally evident in the ongoing effort to weaken the autonomy of higher education, undercut the power of faculty and turn full-time academic jobs into contractual labor. Public schools are increasingly reduced to training grounds and modeled after prisons - with an emphasis on criminalizing student behavior and prioritizing security over critical learning. Across the board, educators are now viewed largely as deskilled technicians, depoliticized professionals, paramilitary forces, hawkers for corporate goods or money and grant chasers.

At the same time as democracy is removed from the purpose and meaning of schooling, those larger educational forces in the culture are handed over to a small group of corporate interests. The dominant media engage in a form of public pedagogy that appears to legitimate dominant power rather than hold it accountable to any ethical or political standard. Operating in tandem with market fundamentalism, the dominant media deteriorate into a combination of commercialism, propaganda, crude entertainment and an obsession with celebrity culture. Giant media conglomerates such as Fox News have largely become advertising appendages for dominant political and corporate interests. Under the sway of such interests, the media neither operate in the interests of the public good nor provide the pedagogical conditions necessary for producing critical citizens or defending a vibrant democracy. Instead, as Robert McChesney and John Nichols have pointed out, concentrated media depoliticize the culture of politics, commercially carpet bomb citizens and denigrate public life. Such media restrict the range of views to which people have access and, as a result, do a disservice to democracy by stripping it of the possibility for debate, critical exchange and civic engagement. Rather than perform an essential public service, they become the primary pedagogical tool for promoting a culture of consent and conformity in which citizens are misinformed and public discourse is debased. As the critical power of education within various public spheres is reduced to the official discourse of compliance, conformity and reverence, it becomes more difficult for the American public to engage in critical debates, translate private considerations into public concerns and recognize the distortions and lies that underlie much of current government policy. Really, how else is one to explain the popularity of certified liars such as Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, the entire Fox network and Rush Limbaugh?

Military Fundamentalism

The fourth anti-democratic dogma that is shaping American life and one of the most disturbing, is the ongoing militarization of public life. Americans are not only obsessed with military power, "it has become central to our national identity." What other explanation can there be for the fact that the United States has over 725 official military bases outside the country and 969 at home? Or that it spends more on "defense" than all the rest of the world put together? As Tony Judt states emphatically, "this country is obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, 'preemptive' war, 'preventive' war, 'surgical' war, 'prophylactic' war, 'permanent' war." War is no longer a state of exception, but a permanent driving force in American domestic and foreign policy. Cornel West points out that such aggressive militarism is fashioned out of an ideology that supports a foreign policy based on "the cowboy mythology of the American frontier fantasy," while also producing domestic policy that expands "police power, augments the prison-industrial complex and legitimates unchecked male power (and violence) at home and in the workplace. It views crime as a monstrous enemy to crush (targeting poor people) rather than as an ugly behavior to change (by addressing the conditions that often encourage such behavior)."

The influence of militaristic values, social relations and ideology now permeates American culture. For example, major universities aggressively court the military establishment for Defense Department grants and, in doing so, become less open to either academic subjects or programs that encourage rigorous debate, dialogue and critical thinking. In fact, as higher education is pressured by both the Obama administration and its jingoistic supporters to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex, universities increasingly deepen their connections to the national security state in ways that are boldly celebrated. As David Price has brilliantly illustrated, the university is emerging as a central pillar of the national security state. Unfortunately, public schools are faring no better. Public schools not only have more military recruiters creeping their halls, they also have more military personnel teaching in the classrooms. Schools now adopt the logic of "tough love" by implementing zero-tolerance policies that effectively model urban public schools after prisons, just as students' rights increasingly diminish under the onslaught of a military-style discipline. Students in many schools, especially those in poor urban areas, are routinely searched, frisked, subjected to involuntary drug tests, maced and carted off to jail. The not-so-hidden curriculum here is that kids can't be trusted; their actions need to be regulated pre-emptively; and their rights are not worth protecting.

Children and schools are not the only victims of a growing militarization of American society. The civil rights of people of color and immigrants, especially Arabs and Muslims, are being violated, often resulting in either imprisonment and deportment or government harassment. Similarly, black and brown youth and adults are being incarcerated at record levels as prison construction outstrips the construction of schools, hospitals, and other life-preserving institutions. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out in "Multitude," war along with savage market forces have become the organizing principles of society and the foundation for politics and other social relations. The consequences of their power as modes of public pedagogy shaping all aspects of social life is a growing authoritarianism that encourages profit-hungry monopolies; the ideology of faith-based certainty; and the undermining of any vestige of critical education, dissent and dialogue. Abstracted from the ideal of public commitment, the new authoritarianism represents political and economic practices and a form of militarism that loosens any connections among substantive democracy, critical agency and critical education.

Education becomes severely narrowed and trivialized in the media, or is converted into training and character reform in the schools. Within higher education, democracy appears as an excess, if not a pathology, as right-wing ideologues and corporate wannabe administrators increasingly police what faculty say, teach and do in their courses. And it is going to get worse.

Conclusion

In opposition to the rising tide of authoritarianism, there is a need for a vast social movement capable of challenging the basic premises of an ever-expanding, systematic attack on democracy. The elements of authoritarianism must be made visible not simply as concepts, but as practices. The Occupy movement and others arising in its wake need to build a network of new institutions that can offer a different language, history and set of values, knowledge and ideas. There is a need for free schools, universities, public spheres, and other spaces where learning can be connected to social change and understanding translated into the building of social movements. As I have written many times, young people, parents, community workers, educators, artists, and others must make a case for linking learning to social change. They must critically engage with and construct anew those diverse sites where critical pedagogy takes place. Educators need to develop a new discourse whose aim is to foster a democratic politics and pedagogy that embody the legacy and principles of social justice, equality, freedom and rights associated with the democratic concerns of history, space, plurality, power, discourse, identities, morality and the future. They must make clear that every sphere of social life is open to political contestation and comprises a crucial site of political, social and cultural struggle in the attempt to forge the knowledge, identifications, affective investments and social relations capable of constituting political subjects and social agents who will energize and spread the call for a global radical democracy.

Under such circumstances, pedagogy must be embraced as a moral and political practice, one that is both directive and the outgrowth of struggles designed to resist the increasing depoliticization of political culture that is one hallmark of contemporary American life. Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped; needs are constructed; and the capacity for self-reflection and social change is nurtured and produced. Education across a variety of spheres has assumed an unparalleled significance in shaping the language, values and ideologies that legitimate the structures and organizations supporting the imperatives of global capitalism. Rather than being simply a technique or methodology, education has become a crucial site for the production and struggle over those pedagogical and political conditions that offer up the possibilities for people to believe they can develop critical agency - a form of agency that will enable them individually and collectively to intervene effectively in the processes through which the material relations of power shape the meaning and practices of their everyday lives.

Within the current historical moment, struggles over power take on a symbolic and discursive as well as material and institutional form. The struggle over education, as most people will acknowledge, involves the struggle over meaning and identity; but it also involves struggling over how meaning, knowledge and values are produced, legitimated and operationalized within economic and structural relations of power. Education is not at odds with politics; it is an important and crucial element in any definition of the political and offers not only the theoretical tools for a systemic critique of authoritarianism, but also a language of possibility for creating actual movements for democratic social change. At stake here is combining an interest in symbolic forms and processes conducive to democratization with broader social contexts and the institutional formations of power itself. The key point here is to understand and engage educational and pedagogical practices from the point of view of how they are bound up with larger relations of power. Educators, students and parents need to be clearer about how power works through and in texts, representations and discourses, while at the same time recognizing that power cannot be limited to the study of representation and discourse.

Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression, but at the same time, institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness that recognizes the very need for such reform and the need to reinvent the conditions and practices that would make it possible. In addition, it is crucial to raise questions about the relationship between pedagogy and civic culture. What would it take for individuals and social groups to believe they have a responsibility to address the realities of class, race and gender oppression, and other specific forms of domination? For too long, those on the left have ignored that the issue of politics as a strategy is inextricably connected to the issue of political education and entangled with power, ideologies, values, the acquisition of agency and visions of the future. Fortunately, power is never completely on the side of domination, religious fanaticism or political corruption. Nor is it entirely in the hands of those who view democracy as an excess or burden. Increasingly, more and more individuals and groups at home and around the globe - including students, workers, feminists, educators, writers, environmentalists, senior citizens, artists, and a host of other individuals and movements - are organizing to challenge the dangerous slide on the part of the United States into the morass of an authoritarianism that threatens not just the promise, but the very idea of democracy in the 21st century.

Editor's Note:For a list of sources, click here.