It is impolite and bad manners to talk about “class” or “class politics” in American society. It is almost forbidden to mention the homeless. These topics do not make friends and influence people. Yet, the evidence shows that over the last 30 years, the rich have been getting richer, and the poor have become relatively poorer. To paraphrase Bill Moyers succinct explanation on one of his recent programs: “Capital has enhanced its power over working Americans.”
So let me be impolite and put forward the following proposition – privileged and affluent Americans of the dominant class have been doing rather well for themselves over the last three decades. As a self-interested class, they have deliberately built structures and pursued neoliberal (market fundamentalism) globalization policies and structural “reforms” (privatization of public services) that have produced a worsening mal-distribution of wealth and power in American society and throughout the globe. These growing mal-distributions of wealth invariably cause social instability, conflict, and lead to increased violence and human strife.
What’s worse, it is increasingly obvious that these policies intentionally excluded large portions of humanity from a life of material comfort and dignity. Instead they imposed a large measure of injustice, senseless degradation, oppression, and unnecessary material suffering on untold numbers of human beings. Naomi Klein has documented the deliberate nature of these neo-liberal policies and much of the human suffering they have engendered in her excellent book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM.
While Americans get prepared to go to the polls and vote for the next President, many may not be aware that they live in an increasingly unequal society. There is little discussion of this in the newspapers or on network news. Yet, the reality is undeniable. Over the last thirty years, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States. Not surprisingly, so has the size of its prison population.
A new study, entitled The Measure of America, (http://www.measureofamerica.org/.) provides data demonstrating the worsening social inequality of the United States. Oxfam charity and several foundations commissioned the study. Published by Columbia University Press, the report documents the declining performance of American society relative to other advanced industrialized countries, and stresses the mounting social inequality within the US.
Here are a few social indicators gleaned from the report.
(1)There has been concentration of wealth at the top – with the top 1 percent of U.S. households now possessing a full third of America’s wealth. Along side of this tremendous concentration and accumulation of wealth, the US has the distinction of being number one among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty. Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.
(2)The U.S. ranks number 24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy - yet spends more on health care than any other nation. Worse, the U.S. ranks forty-second in “global life expectancy.”
(3) The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people - but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners. Currently, 2.1 million people are in prison in America, and around 3,400 are on death row. How can this be in the land of the free? Are our social relations producing that many more criminals than other societies, or are we imprisoning too many people unnecessarily? Are we enacting policies such as the three strikes initiative and stiffer sentencing guidelines that keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time?
(4) In spite of our massive multi-leveled educational system, fourteen (14%) percent of the population - some 30 million Americans - lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.
(5) In 98 countries, new mothers are granted 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. Yet, the U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.
In his recent (2007) book entitled CATEGORICALLY UNEQUAL (Russell Sage Foundation), sociologist Douglas Massey notes that the gains of the New Deal and Fair Deals have essentially been wiped out since the 1970s. Noting that “the United States is vastly more unequal than it was thirty years ago,” Massey offers the following statistics to demonstrate his point:
“Whereas the share of income earned by the top ten percent grew by 31% between 1973 and 2000, the share going the top 5% rose by 45 %, and the share going to the top 1% nearly doubled.”
Massey argues that race-based, class based, and gender based structural mechanisms of stratification are still very active and have combined to make the US “the most unequal society in the developed world.”
Under the rubric of neoliberal globalization, Massey argues that both of the dominant political parties have been complicit in enacting policies that have increased social inequality and disenfranchised larger and larger numbers of Americans. Some of these policies such as regressive tax cuts for the rich, reduced social welfare spending, deregulation of private industry, privatization of public functions, have combined with an increase in arbitrary and corrupt practices among American corporations. Enron was just the tip of the iceberg.
Big Brother Has Grown Stronger, Americans Less Free
Not only are more Americans spending their time behind bars, but as a whole Americans now have less freedom of speech and action than they have traditionally been accustomed to.
The overall trend since 9/11 is clear - Big Brother is growing and individual privacy is diminishing. There has been a concerted political assault on our civil liberties that reaches well beyond protecting us from terrorists. The documented surveillance of Quakers and peace activists in the name of the “war on terror” is just one example of such overreach.
Big Brother can now listen in on your phone conversations with no accountability. He can and does torture people in your name. The laws governing wiretapping and surveillance have been loosened, and the new FISA bill gave Big Brother too much latitude while at the same time protecting the telecoms from invasion of privacy lawsuits. The attitude of Congress : “we just have to place our trust in Big Brother!”
Be aware! Big Brother can more easily access your financial and phone records and your email. In THE END OF AMERICA, Naomi Wolf argues that Americans tend to take their civil liberties and freedoms for granted, expecting that they will always remain viable. She cries out eloquently that “the nation’s freedoms are being dismantled,” and shows us how the safeguards against abuse are disappearing. Tom Paine must be turning over in his grave. And polls show that most (80 %) of Americans are uneasy with the way things are going. They should be. Now we’ll see if they can get away from their television sets and do something about it. The sleep is deep.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Botox Nation: Applying The Cosmetic Fix
by Richard Nadeau
While Botox is derived from a bacteria that carries a low risk of botulism, many Americans spend millions every year injecting it to reduce wrinkles around the eyes with the hope that it will make them look younger and hide their years. In fact, the cosmetic fix permeates every nook and cranny of American society and is propped up by a multi-million dollar industry. Tummy tucks, facelifts, breast implants, liposuction, hair implants, and penis enlargements are readily available to change our appearance and make us feel better about ourselves.
We are indeed a Botox Nation, and every day we celebrate the big lie and the big fix. The cosmetic fix is applied everywhere –to our politics, our wars, our environment, our news. We are incapable of seeing who we are, what we do.
We cannot see our own violence and its impact on the rest of the world. We are a nation that needs to lie about our war in Iraq. The war is now in the process of being “Botoxed” –the wrinkles are being removed and a smooth brow now shows. The environmental crisis has also been Botoxed - all we need to do is drill for more oil; buy up Iraqi oil contracts, and we can drive our big trucks and SUVs as carelessly as before. In politics, it is the same –Presidential candidates are symbolically Botoxed and polished to remove obvious wrinkles and contradictions. Reality must not be allowed to intrude. Let’s face it, the Bush Presidency has been a Botox Presidency par excellence –everything we were told and sold actually served to hide reality from our eyes.
And what do the wrinkles represent? On an individual level they represent the realities we don’t want to see, the wear and tear of living and aging that eventually leaves us with a furrowed brow. But we can’t face aging so we botox the reality as if we can fool mother nature and postpone the inevitable. People do this for practical reasons(jobs, love), but now we have a whole industry telling them they should, that they must, do this. And why not? After all, every other aspect of reality in America has already gotten the cosmetic fix.
Just take a look at our Botox Congress. They are incapable of impeaching the President because they themselves can’t face reality - that they sent over 4000 American youths and over a million Iraqis to their unnecessary deaths. They prefer the “culture of make believe” which says that there was something honorable in our mission in Iraq, that our boys are fighting to “defend America.” So what does Congress do when the Botox has worn off and the realities of war become visible? They vote over and over again to refund the war, and apply more verbal cosmetics and nostrums to make it look better than it really is! The mass media didn’t want us to hear about the real ongoing violence so they completely blacked out the 2008 Winter Soldier testimonies last March. The picture of the war and its every day brutality that the soldiers testified about would have interrupted the ongoing cosmetic fix, shown the wrinkles, and further weakened support for the war.
The network news is the biggest supplier of symbolic Botox to our make believe world. Most of them, including the so called “liberal” New York Times, lied us into this 6 year Iraq war. They told us it was about WMDs, told us that Iraq had a role in 9-11, told us that Iraq was an immediate threat to the United States, even though the country had been militarily devastated in the First Gulf War. We were told that if we didn’t launch a pre-emptive war and attack first, we would be seeing mushroom clouds outside our bedroom windows. Of course, we were told that our own motives were exemplary. We now know that we actually fought the war to liberate the Iraqi people and sow the seeds of democracy throughout the Middle East. Only in a Botox world could this preposterous lie be given even a smidgeon of credibility.
Few of the media or politicians have really accepted responsibility. They may soon be lying us into another war against Iran, or Venezuela, or some other chosen enemy of the Botox oil hungry empire. Since the Iraq war and occupation, the media have been systematically applying the cosmetic fix to the war – the military slaughter in Falluja, Haditha, the realities of the “surge”, were deliberately hidden from our perceptions. I guess such depictions would have been just too real for us to see.
Remember the attempt by the Bush administration at the beginning of the war to prevent us from seeing pictures of caskets filled with dead Americans? That’s what I mean when I say this war has been “Botoxed.” Its been made to look a lot better than it is.
The war is in reality a crime against humanity, an unnecessary war of aggression, according to the standard set down at Nuremburg. But we cannot be allowed to see or grasp this reality, can we? So Congress keeps on funding the war. And why not? In the Botox nation no one’s responsible because no one has been or will be made accountable! Everything in America finally gets the cosmetic fix!
While Botox is derived from a bacteria that carries a low risk of botulism, many Americans spend millions every year injecting it to reduce wrinkles around the eyes with the hope that it will make them look younger and hide their years. In fact, the cosmetic fix permeates every nook and cranny of American society and is propped up by a multi-million dollar industry. Tummy tucks, facelifts, breast implants, liposuction, hair implants, and penis enlargements are readily available to change our appearance and make us feel better about ourselves.
We are indeed a Botox Nation, and every day we celebrate the big lie and the big fix. The cosmetic fix is applied everywhere –to our politics, our wars, our environment, our news. We are incapable of seeing who we are, what we do.
We cannot see our own violence and its impact on the rest of the world. We are a nation that needs to lie about our war in Iraq. The war is now in the process of being “Botoxed” –the wrinkles are being removed and a smooth brow now shows. The environmental crisis has also been Botoxed - all we need to do is drill for more oil; buy up Iraqi oil contracts, and we can drive our big trucks and SUVs as carelessly as before. In politics, it is the same –Presidential candidates are symbolically Botoxed and polished to remove obvious wrinkles and contradictions. Reality must not be allowed to intrude. Let’s face it, the Bush Presidency has been a Botox Presidency par excellence –everything we were told and sold actually served to hide reality from our eyes.
And what do the wrinkles represent? On an individual level they represent the realities we don’t want to see, the wear and tear of living and aging that eventually leaves us with a furrowed brow. But we can’t face aging so we botox the reality as if we can fool mother nature and postpone the inevitable. People do this for practical reasons(jobs, love), but now we have a whole industry telling them they should, that they must, do this. And why not? After all, every other aspect of reality in America has already gotten the cosmetic fix.
Just take a look at our Botox Congress. They are incapable of impeaching the President because they themselves can’t face reality - that they sent over 4000 American youths and over a million Iraqis to their unnecessary deaths. They prefer the “culture of make believe” which says that there was something honorable in our mission in Iraq, that our boys are fighting to “defend America.” So what does Congress do when the Botox has worn off and the realities of war become visible? They vote over and over again to refund the war, and apply more verbal cosmetics and nostrums to make it look better than it really is! The mass media didn’t want us to hear about the real ongoing violence so they completely blacked out the 2008 Winter Soldier testimonies last March. The picture of the war and its every day brutality that the soldiers testified about would have interrupted the ongoing cosmetic fix, shown the wrinkles, and further weakened support for the war.
The network news is the biggest supplier of symbolic Botox to our make believe world. Most of them, including the so called “liberal” New York Times, lied us into this 6 year Iraq war. They told us it was about WMDs, told us that Iraq had a role in 9-11, told us that Iraq was an immediate threat to the United States, even though the country had been militarily devastated in the First Gulf War. We were told that if we didn’t launch a pre-emptive war and attack first, we would be seeing mushroom clouds outside our bedroom windows. Of course, we were told that our own motives were exemplary. We now know that we actually fought the war to liberate the Iraqi people and sow the seeds of democracy throughout the Middle East. Only in a Botox world could this preposterous lie be given even a smidgeon of credibility.
Few of the media or politicians have really accepted responsibility. They may soon be lying us into another war against Iran, or Venezuela, or some other chosen enemy of the Botox oil hungry empire. Since the Iraq war and occupation, the media have been systematically applying the cosmetic fix to the war – the military slaughter in Falluja, Haditha, the realities of the “surge”, were deliberately hidden from our perceptions. I guess such depictions would have been just too real for us to see.
Remember the attempt by the Bush administration at the beginning of the war to prevent us from seeing pictures of caskets filled with dead Americans? That’s what I mean when I say this war has been “Botoxed.” Its been made to look a lot better than it is.
The war is in reality a crime against humanity, an unnecessary war of aggression, according to the standard set down at Nuremburg. But we cannot be allowed to see or grasp this reality, can we? So Congress keeps on funding the war. And why not? In the Botox nation no one’s responsible because no one has been or will be made accountable! Everything in America finally gets the cosmetic fix!
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