Greed: BP’s Mess, and Wall Street’s

A 6/12/10 MoveOn request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/
http://www.fuel2000.net


Greed: BP’s Mess, and Wall Street’s NYT 6/10/10
Just because you can do something, does that mean you should? It’s a question that might have saved us a lot of pain in recent months if both Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum had asked it of themselves during the last decade.
Sure, Goldman, and other Wall Street firms, could — and did — create “synthetic C.D.O.s” to allow consenting investors, including Goldman itself, to gamble on the risk in the U.S. housing market. Sure, Goldman and others could — and did — package up mortgages that should never have been issued into mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors around the world who, in turn, abdicated their responsibility to investigate the soundness of the investment because some rating agency — paid by the underwriters — had slapped a AAA-rating on them. That technology existed, and Goldman and others just availed themselves of it, right? Besides, they were simply supplying the demands of the marketplace, right?
The Gulf of Mexico spill, like the financial implosion, was largely the product of people taking risks and knowing they wouldn’t be held accountable if things went wrong.
Few people on Wall Street — let alone on Main Street, or regulators in Washington — had any idea what a “synthetic C.D.O.” was or what a “mortgage-backed security” was, or what they were designed to do, or the risks they were injecting into the global financial system. One thing bankers and traders — and their high-powered bosses — knew for sure was that they could make billions of dollars for their firms manufacturing and selling these toxic securities to investors around the world, and pocket millions of dollars in annual bonuses for doing it. And that’s what mattered most, right? Everything seemed fine, until one day it wasn’t — and fear overwhelmed us, credit markets froze, unemployment ratcheted up to 10 percent, a deep recession took hold and the American taxpayer got left holding the bag to the tune of around $12 trillion. We’re still digging out.
A similar story, as we now know, with similarly devastating consequences, occurred 51 days ago a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. BP — and other oil companies — simply took advantage of the prevailing technology to drill for oil at unheard-of depths of seawater. The risks inherent in such a dangerous enterprise seemed minimal, right? And BP was simply meeting customer demand for oil, right? And oil companies were raking in the profits doing so — last year, BP made $16.7 billion; ExxonMobil made $19.3 billion (Goldman made $13.4 billion). And that’s what mattered most, right? But thanks to BP’s extraordinary level of incompetence — and an apparent failure to anticipate or plan for a well blowout — the American people now have been handed not only the senseless deaths of 11 men working on the BP rig but also the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history. It is both heartbreaking and sickening.
What these two disasters — one financial, the other environmental — prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the right incentives no longer exist to get corporate executives to do what they should want to do, and what they must do, to prevent such calamities from happening. The “corporation,” as a legal entity, is very good at attracting capital, providing jobs, maintaining a focus on profitability, creating wealth for the people who work there (especially at the top). It is also very good at shielding executives and boards of directors from liability for their poor own decision-making.
What these two crises reveal is that some corporations and their leaders aren’t very good at making decisions that take full account of the risks they and their companies are taking. It is a truism that human beings do what they are rewarded to do. But the corporate structure these days rewards bad behavior. The problem is that the corporate veil protects the decision makers from the consequences of their decisions and, accordingly, they are encouraged to take asymmetrical risks — huge paydays for them if everything works out; huge consequences for us if they don’t. As Senator Christopher Dodd correctly said in April 2008, during the first Senate hearing about the unfolding financial crisis, “We’ve socialized risk and we’ve privatized reward.”
Unfortunately, the financial reform legislation that Senator Dodd and his colleagues are working so hard on to make law does nothing to change that dynamic. Nowhere in the approximately 1,500 pages of the proposed bill is there anything about making Wall Street executives financially and legally liable for their decisions, as they once were when Wall Street was a series of private partnerships and a partner’s entire net worth was on the line every day. Talk about accountability! But that ethic was lost 40 years ago when Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette went public and the rest of Wall Street followed soon thereafter.
As a result, our financial crises come fast and furious these days, since Wall Street bankers and traders get rewarded for selling, and generating revenue, not for worrying about what they create. The time has come for actions to have consequences. You can be sure that if Jimmy Cayne, the former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns, or Dick Fuld, the former C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, had their entire net-worth on the line every day instead of being able to gamble with the house’s money, they would have been much more focused on the risks their firms were taking.
Americans are angry, and rightly so. One measure of how far in the public’s estimation Goldman has fallen off its once lofty perch came from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 1,000 adults last month. Goldman’s positive approval rating stood at just 4 percent, below that of BP, at 11 percent, and that of Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer experiencing acute quality problems, at 31 percent. Goldman’s negative ratings clocked in at 50 percent, fairly dreadful for a firm that was No. 8 on Fortune’s 2010 list of the world’s most admired companies, up seven spots from 2009. (Toyota was number seven on the list.)
Although there is no equivalent (yet) of the “spill-cam” in front 200 West Street — the site of Goldman’s sparkling $2.1 billion headquarters building across from Ground Zero — perhaps there should be, because it sure seems that what Goldman and other Wall Street firms are manufacturing every day has proved every bit as toxic as what’s spewing from a pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. High-def, please.

Our Gigantic Delusion

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net

Our Gigantic Delusion
Can We Overcome It In Time?
by Doug Page / September 21st, 2009
We live in a culture wide, all embracing fantasy world. It has become our total “reality.” It is our Conventional Wisdom. Paul Ehrlich called this intellectual fog “wonderland.” In 1973 Jonah Raskin called it “mythology.” In 1978, Columbia Professor Edward Said wrote his famous book Orientalism in which he surveyed Western academic literature and novels about our attitudes toward Asia, Arabs, Palestinians, East Indians, and Moslems. He found that even novelists assumed that Westerners were more moral, advanced, and enlightened than Asians and that it was our duty to bring our civilization to them. Orientalism boiled down to racism: Our Caucasian race, our Western way of life, our civilization, our economy is good and clean, and theirs is backward, antiquated, dirty, ignorant. and bad. John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology and Richard York, Associate professor of Sociology, at the University of Oregon, and Brett Clark, Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University, in a Monthly Review article, “Capitalism in Wonderland,” show that all of our mainstream economists, policy makers, media owners, editors, journalists, and politicians conform to the dictates of this falsified view of reality. President Obama, Lawrence Summers and all his other advisors, and most members of Congress are captives of this false view of reality.
Even when presented with facts that challenge this gigantic delusion, being frightened, hypnotized, addicted, and brainwashed, we reject them. The irony is that the delusion is so grandiose, that one like me who challenges it, runs the risk of seeming to be a grandiose crazy individual.
Our reigning economic falsehood is that our market economy whose principal goal is short term private profit, is the best that humans can create, is the best for everybody, and is in every respect unchallengeable. Moreover, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. Thus, we cannot have and cannot even consider
Serious measures to deal with the needs of our damaged planet home.
Socialism in any form.
Extensive public hiring and public works.
Caring for ourselves and for each other using the powers of our government.
Directly giving people who want to work, employment to meet our vast unmet needs.
Mondragon type cooperative businesses.
The immorality of a system based on selfish, short term, private greed and absence of caring.
Medicare for everybody or a VA-type public Hospital and doctor available for everybody.
Any health care system that does not provide some private persons with a generous private profit making opportunity from our accidents and illnesses .
Solutions to the ever increasing disparity between the rich and the poor.
Our President and his economic advisors are imprisoned by this reigning market falsehood. It embodies the further falsehoods that our market economy is basically stable, contains no systemic defects, contains no laws of motion or dynamics or anti-social tendencies, and that its minor aberrations can be managed by unlimited expenditures of our tax dollars or by borrowing. The fact that systemic defects caused our “capitalism to hit the fan”1 in 1980 are simply ignored. Thus our President and our government by exhaustive efforts to restore bank lending, seek to create a new credit bubble to replace the housing bubble that crashed. Their stated rationale is that the banks will lend, businesses and individuals will borrow, and that ultimately new jobs will be created. They seek also to maintain and restore the many forms of collateralized debt obligations free of any new regulation. They ignore the basic truth that our economy can be re-started only by directly creating jobs providing enough earned income so that citizen employees can afford to purchase the products of their labor. Moreover, our governmental leaders urge that we must restore “growth” of our existing economy, with its inevitable growth of our emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, of pollution, and our depletion of the planet’s finite resources of oil, soil, and fresh water. As a consequence:
* We are ignoring a basic rule of arithmetic that even “reasonable” growth of 3% per year leads to doubling within an unexpectedly short time. (To get the doubling time simply divide the number 70 by the percentage rate of growth. Thus 70 divided by 3 gives us a doubling time of 35 years. A 4% growth rate would have a doubling time of 17.5 years. A 6% growth rate would give a doubling time of about 12 years. Such doubling continues over and over again so long as the growth rate continues.) Do we really want to double our carbon emissions and consequent global warming? Do we really want to double the consumption of oil, soil and fresh water? Do we really want to double the population of the planet? Is not any talk of growth idiotic? We need a sustainable, stable economy with zero growth.
* We are frightened and uneasy. We are acting irrationally in street marches and in public hearings. We do have to fear fear itself. We have no FDR who promises to meet our needs. We have a presiding eloquent Black Herbert Hoover and not a Black FDR. There are no plans on the shelf for any plausible solutions, and no leaders or academicians promoting them.
* We, of the political left, right and center, with good reason, are worried about how we and our children will pay for all of this vast expenditure of public tax dollars. We worry whether there will be the disastrous inflation experienced by Argentina a few years ago, deflation even worse than the Great Depression of our grandfathers, or, for us, both at the same time.
Then there are the many falsehoods that accompany the extension of this reigning falsehood, our “good” market economy abroad to foreign countries, an extension that we used to call Imperialism:
* Does anybody really believe that our own sons and daughters in the military, and Afghanistan and Pakistan civilian men women and children are being killed or wounded every day as a part of our effort to help them or to bring them Democracy?
* Does anybody really believe that the Honduran military Generals trained in our School for the Americas, financed by loans and grants from our government, using a plane that we financed, landing on the way out at a US military base in Nicaragua, acted without U.S. consent in deposing democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya?
* Does anybody really believe that we are getting out of Iraq when we replace every soldier withdrawn with a hired Blackwater mercenary soldier, and when we are building 4 large permanent military bases in Iraq, and the most lavish US Embassy building in Asia?
* Do we really need 800 military installations in 45 foreign countries staffed with 240,000 military personnel?
Then there is the deepest secret of all, so well hidden in our gigantic delusion, that almost nobody is aware of it. It is the secret Ponzi-like scheme of our private bankers that produces an almost unimaginable annual private profit for them at our expense. This secret private money creating scheme involves the following characteristics:
1. Congress in 1913 delegated the power to create our money supply to the private bankers that constitute the Federal Reserve system. Congress does not use its power to coin our money. Private bankers create 95% of our money supply simply out of thin air. The privately owned “Federal” Reserve Bank simply writes a check out of thin air and issues the money to a private bank. The private bank then loans this money to a private or governmental borrower who promises to repay with interest. The promise to repay becomes an “asset” of the lending bank that it then uses to make many other loans under what is called “fractional reserve banking.” It is thus a fact that 95% or more of our money is based on debt. All existing money thus equals the total of all public and private debt.
2. Our government instead of using its Constitutional power to issue money directly to meet governmental needs (as Lincoln did to finance the Northern side of the Civil War) borrows money to meet its needs from private bankers and pays private bankers interest on what it borrows. Repayment is promised from our tax dollars.
3. Over time, the annual profits for the owners of private banks have compounded enormously. We cannot know how much because the private bankers secured a federal law making it unlawful to audit the activities of the Federal Reserve Banks. One can estimate the annual profit by simply multiplying a probable average interest rate times the total money supply since all money is debt. Is it reasonable to assume that the rate of return is at least 3 %? The total money supply was recently estimated to be $50 Trillion. 3% x $50 Trillion gives private bankers an annual gross profit of $1.5 Trillion per year. This profit compounded over the decades produces an unimaginable stash of total wealth for the owners of the private banks.
4. The private banks use this immense secret stash of wealth to control our government and to override our votes on every issue that is important to banks. Thus it is accurate to say that we have a government of, by and for private bankers. It is also accurate to say that every aspect of the reigning gigantic delusion about our capitalism, including the Imperialism of defending and promoting capitalism abroad, partially set forth above, serves the interests and the profits of private bankers.
5. These private bankers, having the authority to create money out of thin air have created too much money in the recent past and caused inflation, and are now creating too little money and thus are causing our current depression.
In the 1990s, Professor Jared Diamond wrote his book Collapse where he studied four civilizations that had perished in the past and two that survived. The two that survived, managed to overcome their prevailing falsehoods, their Conventional Wisdoms. The four fallen civilizations could not and did not. The question for all of us is: Do we have what it takes to overcome our gigantic delusion? Or will our democratic civilization fall into a new dark age where the only law is the Law of the Jungle?

Contemplate the "gigantic delusion" as you travel down Freedom's Highway

These Persistent, Cosmetic Pipedreams

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net

These Persistent, Cosmetic Pipedreams

You Still Believe America's So Special?
Harry Fuller: The Lies We Tell, and The People Who Believe Them

(CBS) Harry Fuller spent decades in TV news in the San Francisco Bay Area, including stints as General Manager of KPIX-TV (CBS) and News Direcor at TechTV when it was founded in 1998. In 2001 he become Executive Producer for CNBC Europe. He later was the Executive Editor for CNET News.com.

I just saw a stage performance of "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof." The scene where Big Daddy smells out mendacity is rich with metaphor for this time in our America. Because, everywhere, it seems, there is the stench of mendacity. A back-of-the-envelope listing might include the likes of Enron, Iraq's WMD, Tiger Woods John Edwards, Hurricane Katrina, Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers' accounting methods, death panels, and, of course, pending Armageddon. It's not that we present-day Americans are more dishonest or devious than other cultures or previous generations. Scandals, crooks, thievery, falsehood are part of the deal with humans. What makes our mendacity so smelly? There are lies that we Americans constantly tell ourselves and sadly believe. Worse still, we act on those lies as if they were truth. Some of Our Lies We're the Greatest Nation on Earth Huh? By what measure? Longevity? Then we're 38th, behind two other American territories. Wealth? We're in hock, borrowing billions every month to keep our party going. Railroad infrastructure? This nation practically invented long-distance railroads but now has zero high-speed trains. Our cell phone system lags behind many nations. One area where we're doing splendidly is incarceration. We boast one-fourth of all the world's prisoners, despite comprising only 5% of the global population. Our military can level any target. But our experience in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan has proved that military might doesn't necessarily insure a welcome reception from the local population. We can't even count on Israel, a close ally, doing what we want. Sure, we can kill anybody we choose (except Bin Laden), but we can't always make people behave as we wish. This leads to the second lie. Everybody wants to be American, or destroy us Here's the long-standing myth of American exceptionalism. We find ourselves too wonderful to behold. Some of us claim that we're God's chosen people. Let's wake up and take a clearer look. Switzerland has an older democracy. Denmark's been a stable nation for a millennium while France has more vacation and offers its citizens better medical care. Most nations, even Russia, rank higher in living sustainably. In many parts of the world the U.S. is totally irrelevant to hundreds of millions of people. They live without Wal-Mart or Starbucks. (And I'm sure they'd find another service if Google disappeared tomorrow.) Sure, some would like to see our military and borrowing power destroyed. But to most humans we're only a source of movies and other software. We have the greatest system on earth De-regulation of corporations is based on this lie. So is money-rich lobbying. No system is infallible. "Greatest system" excuses government incompetence, political dishonesty, corporate mendacity and bonus-mongering. See what similar self-anointing has done to the Catholic Church? It's doing the same thing to American government, corporations, and our other institutions where self-preservation is paramount. Some politicians claimed during the recent political battle that the U.S. has the world's best medical "system." There's no objective measurement supporting that. We pay more for less than any other post-industrial nation. 38th in longevity. No group with great power or enormous wealth will always act in the interest of others, whether shareholders, voters or patients. Greed's real. It's pathological optimism to expect any system to naturally protect the many from the few at the top. Eternal vigilance, remember? We Americans are God's chosen people How many times in history has nation, king, empire, shaman, or tribe claimed to be at one with their chosen deity? And where did it get them? When some fellow human begins to describe God's will, beware. Sniff for mendacity. Must we persist on a fallacious and foolhardy self-image based on the above and corollary lies? From the Iraq invasion to adjustable rate mortgages, we have repeatedly acted on our lies and self-delusion. Now there's much that needs doing. Right now we're getting a heavy dose of reality therapy here in America. What's unclear is how many of us will face reality rather than cling to these persistent, cosmetic pipedreams? By Harry FullerSpecial to CBSNews.com

Freedom Of The Press

Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10access.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1276167771-0oR1m9aO5PGy/Cq8WIqmAQ

In Decaying Societies, Politics Become Theater

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net

In Decaying Societies, Politics Become Theater
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout by Chris Hedges

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HED20090324&articleId=12880

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
"All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again," he wrote. "This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms."
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.
I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.
"The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared," Giroux, who wrote "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex," told me. "Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere."
Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.
Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.
The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view-all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations-all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like "Survivor") and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.
"This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong," Adorno wrote. "The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism."
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
"The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity-whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts-are always mediated by educational forces," Giroux said. "Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place."
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.
"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
Global Research Articles by Chris Hedges