Every stage of human civilization is accompanied by, and also influenced by, a consciousness. When civilization changes slowly, the existing consciousness is likely to be in substantial accord with underlying material realities. Today large segments of the American people still have a consciousness which was appropriate to the nineteenth-century society of small towns, face-to-face relationships, and individual economic enterprise. Another large segment of the people has a consciousness formed by organized technological and corporate society, but far removed from the realities of human needs.
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution Is Trying To Make America Livable
Was anyone surprised by the super failure?
The “Super Committee” wasn’t so super after all. What was heralded as a fail-safe process turned out to be an abject failure?
Congress will eventually cobble together a temporary solution for our debt-driven economy. But the only way to rid ourselves of our dysfunctional congress is to get rid of those politicians who envision Congress as a lucrative self-aggrandizing career for themselves.
We need Constitutional Amendments requiring term limits for both houses of Congress, same as we did for the position of president after some feared Franklin Roosevelt would be our president for life (which happened when he died in office).
People we elect to the Senate and House also need to be limited to the same government health insurance (Medicare) and retirement (Social Security) programs they authorize for the public. And they must be prohibited from exempting themselves from laws and regulations they legislate for the public.
“Compromise is not where the incentives are in the political process right now,” said former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. “Members,” he added, “are judged by what their primary electorate thinks of them.”
In other words, the battle cry in Washington, D.C., appears to be: Grab the money and don’t do anything to displease your radical base!
Think about that next time you’re planning to vote for an incumbent.
Bob Elliott, Iowa City Press-Citizen
CONSCIOUSNESS
Charles A. Reich
Charles A. Reich and Barack H. Obama have much in common including the law and a view of changing the American Consciousness. Reich wrote that American history, as it is usually taught, makes today’s reality of failure and crisis a mystery and a paradox. After two hundred years of brilliant, unmatched progress, how can it be possible that we are beset by vast problems and desperate impoverishment?
After watching the steady improvements of all our institution, the development and preservation of our Constitution and the limitless expansion of individual opportunity, why do our institutions, or personal lives, the whole character of America suddenly seem changed beyond recognition? And if Americans had always been the most independent and self-reliant people, the most jealous of their liberties, how have they permitted themselves to be reduced to the impotant “little man” of today, dominated by public and private power?
If history is told this way, it is no wonder so many people are led to blame “communists” or minority groups, youth, foreign influences, or radicals, for all that has gone wrong. Our history seems to preclude any other explanation; only some malign outside influence could have poisoned the nation’s growth; anger and bitterness are understandable. But if these explanations cannot be credited, then something must be wrong with our history. Something must have been omitted, ignored, or falsified. (34)
RIGHT-WING POLITICAL FALSIFICATION
Sam Lane samuel-lane@uiowa.ed reports in The Daily Iowan Monday, December 12, 2011, that one foreign-policy expert said Iowa caucus candidate Newt Gingrich’s statement that Palestinians are “an invented people” is “inflammatory.” Yet he stands by it.
“Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes,” Gingrich said, defending himself during the debate at Drake University. “Are we in a situation where, every day, rockets are fired into Israel while the United States, the current administration, tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process?”
Judith Kipper, the director of Middle East Programs for the Institute of World Affairs, decried the statement. “I think the particular statement was extremely unfortunate,” she said. “Though candidates are fighting to win a race domestically, they have to be careful and sensitive about what is going to inflame the conflict. That statement was definitely inflammatory.”
Mitt Romney called the comments a mistake and said such statements make matters more difficult for Israel [and] “We’re going to tell the truth, but we’re going to tell the truth, but we’re not going to throw incendiary words into a place that is a boiling pot when our friends, the Israelis, would probably say, ‘What in the world are you doing?’” Romney said.
Gingrich responded by saying he’s not making life more difficult for Israel, nor is he trying to speak for the country.
Ron Paul, who has frequently called for limiting U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, said Gingrich’s statement is historically correct, but is an example of the reason the country gets “involved in so many messes.”
Other Invented Peoples At Home and Abroad ~ White People
Nell Irvin Painter is professor of history emerita at Princeton University.
Author Examines 'The History Of White People'
March 15, 2010
Conversations about race often focus on what it means to be black, and throughout American history, laws have struggled with the rights of people of mixed race. But in her new book, The History of White People, historian Nell Irvin Painter explores the concept of whiteness — and explains how many ethnic groups now regarded as white, from Irish, Jews, Italians were once excluded from mainstream American society. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124700316
In an interview with Thomas Rogers for Salon.com Monday, Mar 22, 2010 7:20 PM 14:54:34 CST “The History of White People”: What it means to be white : How bad science and American culture shaped a racial identity -- and why America can't stop obsessing over it; Pointer makes several pertinent points on how whiteness was invented both in Europe and the United State.
Why write a history of whiteness?
We’ve spent so much time in this country on various racial issues. It’s our national sport, in a way, and it’s always as if there is only one side: nonwhite. But this is one of those binaries where you need both sides to make sense of it.
I want to point out that this book is not about white nationalism. It’s not about how bad white people are. It’s about how we have thought about people now considered white. I used to encounter reservations about the project, and people would ask, “Why are you doing this as a black person?” People hear it’s a book called “The History of White People” and that it’s by a black author, and make assumptions.
We’ve all seen the word “Caucasian,” usually when we’re filling out forms, but most of us have no idea where it came from. What is a Caucasian, exactly?
It comes from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who applied it to a large swatch of humanity on the 11th of April, 1795, with the publications of the third edition of his dissertation, in Latin, about the varieties of mankind. He used the word “Caucasian” because he wanted to underscore the beauty of white-skinned people. He thought they were the most beautiful. He located these people in Europe, east into Russia, south into India and southwest into North Africa. The Caucasus is a border area between Europe and Asia and it’s an area freighted with mythological baggage — Jason and the Argonauts, Mount Ararat.
The Human Genome Project found that there’s no genetic basis for racial difference. Is this the end of race?
This is nothing new. As long as there’s been a discussion about race, there’s been a disagreement about how many there were and how to make the distinction — shade, color, height, where the hole in your skull is for your spine to go in, shape of the hand. There have been all these different criteria and nobody ever agreed. Even somebody like Blumenbach called them varieties. Varieties shade imperceptibly into one another. Different experts differed on how many varieties there are. Some people said two — beautiful and ugly. Blumenbach said six.
But just as there’s been the discovery that race is a concept with no scientific meaning, there’s also been a cultural movement to rerace knowledge. When the genome was completed in 2000, the headlines were, “Race is meaningless,” “We’re all the same,” and then three to four years later there came, “I am a race-profiling doctor.” There was heart medicine marketed to black people. What’s really interesting about finding race in the genome in terms of diseases is that diseases that have been discovered so far with a strong genomic cause are among white people, not black people.
Why do Americans have this persistent desire to create racial difference out of nothing?
Our culture was founded in 1789 right about the same moment that Blumenbach was inventing Caucasians — this moment of racialization. Some people say race is in our national DNA so that we just can’t get away from it. I don’t know if we ever will.
As you write in the book, there were four great expansions of what America considers whiteness. What were they?
The first three are expansions of whiteness, because the assumption was that to be American you first had to be white. The first occurred in the Jacksonian era, in the first half of the 19th century, when citizenship criteria were changed from wealth to race. That’s when adult males of any income were allowed to vote, as long as they were considered white. Things changed in the 20th century, when different groups came in as immigrants and people of Irish background were incorporated into the notion of American whiteness. The third great enlargement took place in the mid-20th century, starting with the New Deal in the 1930s and WWII. Politics and the mobilization of Americans to fight the Great Depression and to fight the Second World War opened up American-ness to people who had been considered alien races and their children and grandchildren.http://www.salon.com/2010/03/23/history_of_white_people_nell_irvin_painter/
The Friends of Israel are a Pain in the Ass to the Israelis & To Those Who Want Peace & Freedom In The Holy Lands
Avraham Burg in The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes (2008) writes that some of “Israel’s friends” need to leave the state of Israel alone to solve its own problems. He writes that for many years, three pillars supported the Jewish American structure from the outside: the memory of the Shoah (Holocaust), the founding of the State of Israel, and the struggle of the “Silent Jewry,” the Soviet Jews who were imprisoned behind the iron curtain. As the years passed, two of these elements had weakened, but the Shoah, element remained intact. The third is gone now: Jews from the former Soviet Union are completely free—thanks to American Jewry rather than to Israeli governments. Despite the artificial claims of fundraising campaigns, most of the Jewish people no longer need salvation. We have actually never been in better condition.
As for the second element, Israel’s centrality is eroded due to the constant embarrassments that it produces, which lowered its status in the eyes of many. Bitter identity struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, centered around the “Who is a Jew” controversy, and the lasting attempts of the Orthodox and ultra-orthodox to narrowly define a “Jew,” did not bring hearts closer. The rise of the ultra-Orthodox to political power in Israel and the virtual ban on non-Orthodox streams of Judaism is how an unappreciative Israel reciprocated the warm embrace of American Jews. (40)
Noam Chomsky in dialog with Gilbert Achcar converse in Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) about Israeli and Jewish identity. Chomsky cites that Israel did not want the Falasha (the Black Ethiopian Jews) in the worst way, and for a long time they just refused to allow them in. But there were some Jewish groups in the United States that were both Zionist and civil libertarian, and they started a big campaign, with a lot of publicity on the issue. And Israel really began to look bad. When people didn’t know about it, people didn’t care, but when it got to be known that Israel was blocking Black Jews—this was after the Civil Rights movement—this was too ugly for them, so Israel had no choice but to take them in. But most of them are in development towns. (183)
Chomsky posits that the Russian Jews are a separate component; I think there are about a million of them now; and with very few exceptions, they’re extremely hawkish and very much opposed to any of the social democratic polices [of Israel]. Most of them are pretty well placed to move themselves into the professions [unlike the “Oriental Jews”, Moroccan Jews or Mizrahim who are discriminated against by the Ashkenazi or European elite]; most of them, particularly the ones who came from Russia itself and not Georgia are fairly well educated. And they’re extremely militant and hawkish.
Actually a lot of them aren’t Jews. The Rabbinate, which is very corrupt, is willing to accept them as Jews—mostly because they’re blond and blue-eyed, figuratively speaking. They don’t look like Arabs; they look more like Northern Europeans. So that helps stem the Levantization. The typical model of the Sabra, an Israeli Jew born in Israel, is supposed to be red-haired and strong, rather like a movie hero in the West. The Russian so-called Jews help with that. I think some of the estimates were that maybe half did not fit the strict criteria for being Jewish. In any event, they’re a very hawkish element, and they’re politically very significant. (186)
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT WHO IS A JEW
Ezra and Nehemiah on Who Is A Jew
The Book of Ezra is a book of the Hebrew Bible. Originally combined with the Book of Nehemiah in a single book of Ezra-Nehemiah, the two became separated in the early centuries of the Christian era.[1] Its subject is the Return to Zion following the close of the Babylonian captivity, and it is divided into two parts, the first telling the story of the first return of exiles in the first year of Cyrus the Great (538 BCE) and the completion and dedication of the new Temple in Jerusalem in the sixth year of Darius (515 BCE), the second telling of the subsequent mission of Ezra to Jerusalem and his struggle to purify the Jews from the sin of marriage with non-Jews. Together with the Book of Nehemiah, it represents the final chapter in the historical narrative of the Hebrew bible.[2]
Ezra is written to fit a schematic pattern in which the God of Israel inspires a king of Persia to commission a leader from the Jewish community to carry out a mission; three successive leaders carry out three such missions, the first rebuilding the Temple, the second purifying the Jewish community, and the third sealing of the holy city itself behind a wall. (This last mission, that of Nehemiah is not part of the Book of Ezra.) The theological program of the book explains the many problems its chronological structure presents.[3] It probably appeared in its earliest version around 400 BCE, and continued to be revised and edited for several centuries after before being accepted as scriptural around the time of Christ.[4]
Ezra-Nehemiah
The oldest texts of the Bible treat Ezra-plus-Nehemiah as a single book. (Nehemiah 3:32, footnote)[9] Later the Jews divided this scroll and called it First and Second Ezra. Modern Hebrew Bibles call the two books Ezra and Nehemiah, as do other modern Bible translations. A few parts of the Book of Ezra (4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12:12-26) were written Aramaic, and the majority in Hebrew, Ezra himself being skilled in both languages.[10][11][12]Ezra-Nehemiah was first divided into two separate works by the early Christian scholar Origen, in the 3rd century, and the separation became entrenched in Christian Bibles in the Western European tradition when this was followed by Jerome in his Latin translation.[1] It was not until the Middle Ages that the two became separated in Jewish Bibles.[13]
Ezra 10:9-11
9 Within the three days, all the men of Judah and Benjamin had gathered in Jerusalem. And on the twentieth day of the ninth month, all the people were sitting in the square before the house of God, greatly distressed by the occasion and because of the rain. 10 Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have been unfaithful; you have married foreign women, adding to Israel’s guilt. 11 Now honor[a] the LORD, the God of your ancestors, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives.”
LOFTY INTELLECTUALISM & HISTORICISM
Charles A. Reich writes that the great selling point of America is “freedom.” America is a “free” country; it is part of the “free world,” in contrast to the communist world. But what is really meant by this freedom? Imperceptibly, it has come to mean consumer freedom. Consumer freedom is freedom to travel, ski, buy a house, eat frozen Chinese food, live like a member of the “now generation”; freedom to buy anything and go anywhere. For work, on the other hand, there is no longer any concept of freedom at all. Most of the repression of self—the meritocracy, loyalty, character files, employment regulations—occurs in connection with work; the worker does not live in a “free country.” But can consumer freedom be turned off at the office door? (175)
Reich writes that money and status offer satisfactions that are primarily relative; one must be relatively well off compared to others. But American society is increasingly organized in terms of hierarchy. This means, to the average worker, an end to the American dream of equality and democracy. On the job, there is a rigid caste system, and for the older man, the chances of rising seem dim. Yet a position in the hierarchy becomes more and more not merely a measure of one kind of ability but a measure of the whole man. America still has a pitiless view of the loser.
When a whole society is hierarchical and the shape of the hierarchy is a pyramid, only a few can enjoy the satisfaction of being in superior positions [such as those who sit in Congress]. If everyone is to find satisfaction in his actual position, he must have a good deal of faith in the fairness justness of his lot. Of course, one’s position in the social order never was the result of justice, but the more rigid the hierarchy, the more visible the injustice. Our hierarchy is now almost as formal as that of the Middle Ages, but now we do not have God to justify it, and we have the subversive voice of television constantly telling everyone to “move up a notch.”
A hierarchy in a land that bills itself as a land of equality and opportunity is an inherently unstable structure. Add that many of the decisions determining status are seemingly unfair and unrelated to merit, that the criteria for appointment and promotion tend to be artificial or absurd, that those who judge merit are themselves open to increasing question, and that there is a manifestly unequal starting point for most people in society. The consequence is that one’s status, far from being something to keep one at work, becomes a source of intense dissatisfaction with one’s work. (176-7)
23/07/2011
Media :
Availability:
Available to listen.
Last broadcast on Sun, 24 Jul 2011, 15:05 on BBC World Service (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
Dominic Barton, managing director of one of the world's largest management consultancy firms, makes the case that short term thinking is public enemy number one.
In the world of big companies, managers have to report increased profits every quarter; if they miss their targets, investors agitate to have them removed.
How can the interests of all stake holders, the public, the environment, as well as business itself, be satisfied under these pressures?
Also, leading American civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander on oppressing African Americans through the war on drugs, and best selling thriller writer David Baldacci on the overwhelming urgency of now.
Illustration by Emily Kasriel: short term thinking imprisoning capitalism and justice.
Dominic Barton
Can Western capitalism be reformed so that both CEOs and shareholders think years rather than just months ahead? And what can they learn from Asian economies, such as China and South Korea?
Michelle Alexander
More than 7 million Americans are in prison, on probation or parole. Is it an accident that so many of them are African American? Or is it just a new strategy for black oppression?
David Baldacci
The world of surveillance and security is a natural milieu for thriller writers but how do you make it come alive on the page? And how do you balance the excitement of writing about mortal danger and split-second decisions with the need to explain the context of the story?
SIXTY SECOND IDEA TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Writer David Baldacci wants to make it mandatory for parents to read with, not simply to, their kids every day for the same amount of time that they or their family spend on the computer or watching TV. To read is to think, he says, and if we were all able to read, think and form our own, independent opinions right from the start, 90% of the bad things in life would go away.
In Next Week’s Programme:
In next week’s programme: what keeps dictators in power and the best way to topple them; with professor of politics Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, historian of Iran Ali Ansari, and Richard Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology and researcher in social inequalities.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lz2q6
The long view
Media :
Availability:
Available to listen.
Last broadcast today, 08:32 on BBC World Service.
Synopsis
Europe's leaders have met this week for the umpteenth time this year to try to draw a line under the debt crisis in the eurozone.
Wrong debt crisis say environmentalists. They believe the "ecological debt crisis" is the real disaster waiting to happen: the fact that we are all consuming more resources and producing more waste than the biosphere can cope with.
The best example of this crisis is climate change, and for the last two weeks officials have been meeting at the UN Climate conference in Durban, South Africa in search of a solution.
It is a measure of the difficulty of the negotiations that even coming to an agreement just to have more discussions is reckoned to be a success.
So why can't the world's politicians tackle a problem that many scientists say is the biggest threat facing humanity, or for that matter the debt crisis in the eurozone?
It's because we're so bad at long term planning Dan Arielly , a behavioural economist a Duke University in America, tells Justin Rowlatt.
Water sharing between nations is another good example of the difficulties of taking the long view.
One of the key consequences of climate change - according to the International Panel on Climate Change - will be changes to the water cycle. And that's likely to make conflicts over supplies of water between countries more common.
Justin Rowlatt interviews David Zetland, a senior water economist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who has studied the potential for water conflict.
The clear message is that, when making decisions about the long term, it is always best to take the long view. That's certainly what economist Don Croton believes.
In 2007, when he was 82, Don says he first realised the scale of the coming economic crisis. For him it had frightening echos of his childhood experiences in the 1930s. So he began the long process of writing his memoirs.
Don hoped that there might be lessons for contemporary policy makers in his eyewitness testimony. He wanted to describe the effects of poverty, the way long-term unemployment errodes the soul and the destructive effects of the loss of hope. He tells Business Daily his story.
UN climate talks 'approaching decision time'
"We're reaching the point at which a number of delegations have got to decide whether they want to get a treaty with real environmental integrity or not"
Inside Europe
In-depth guide to the European Union with the latest news, features, views and analysis
Read more on the BBC News website
SIGN OF THE TIMES
Report: Troops' Cremated Remains Went To Landfill
December 8, 2011
An investigation by the Washington Post shows that remains of 274 service members were cremated and disposed of in a landfill by personnel at Dover Air Force Base. Steve Inskeep talks to the Post's Craig Whitlock, one of the reporters who uncovered the story. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/08/143333592/troops-cremated-remains-reportedly-went-to-landfill
Reich posits that one of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties. The Condition of the Bill of Rights cannot accurately be measured by Supreme Court decisions; the real situation depends upon surveillance and arrest procedures, attitudes of public and private employers, the scope of free discussion on television and in the press [as well as online], and other factors embedded deeply in the day-to-day working society.
BBC WORLD NEWS
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16184196
-
US & Canada / NEW 4 hours ago… was US Republican congressman Paul Ryan,. Time magazine names The Protester as its Person of the Year, in recognition of the role played by activists…
At this level, there has been a steady increase in surveillance, wiretapping, spying, police actions that are “political” in nature; there has been a gradual acceptance of loyalty-security criteria for more and more jobs. There has been a steady monopolization of media and of communication. The Bill of Rights is less and less of a shield between the citizen and the State. (264-5)
ONE NATION NO LONGER INDIVISIBLE
Reich writes that the trend is toward our becoming two nations. The two nations will be separated from each other by mutual fear, by differences in consciousness [wealth] and culture so deep that even communication will be impossible. California [as well as the other 49] seems to be two nations already—a nation of the old [rich] and a nation of [poor] young. The young feel that the government might as well represent a foreign country, they are so detached from it. (265)
Why not two nations here in America—the nation of the peace marchers and the nation of the headlights [of the 1% to blinding 99%]?
ON POINT RADIO
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/12/14/jorge-castaneda?autostart=true
Mexico’s Jorge Castaneda says the U.S. risks destroying its middle class and becoming more like Latin America has been.
Former Foreign Secretary of Mexico Jorge Castaneda talks with reporters after an appearance before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Washington Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005. (AP)
Jorge Casteneda, high-placed son of Mexico, has a warning for the United States. A warning born of long, bitter experience in Latin America. And this is it: do not, warns Casteneda, let your middle class die. The American middle class, he says, has been the envy of Latin America.
Latin America had rich and poor and a canyon between, and all the problems that flow from inequality. The United States had a proud middle class that brought cohesion and optimism. Don’t let it go, he says.
This hour, On Point: former foreign minister of Mexico Jorge Casteneda, and his call to save the American middle class.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Jorge Castaneda, a professor of politics and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University, who served as foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003.
Jacob Hacker, professor of Political Science at Yale University and co-author of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”
From Tom’s Reading List
The New York Times “IN a Bertelsmann Foundation study on social justice released this fall, the United States came in dead last among the rich countries, with only Greece, Chile, Mexico and Turkey faring worse. Whether in poverty prevention, child poverty, income inequality or health ratings, the United States ranked below countries like Spain and South Korea, not to mention Japan, Germany or France.”
CNN “Where Free Soilers and slaveholders had once done violent battle, where Teddy Roosevelt called for a “New Nationalism,” Barack Obama presented this challenge: “(W)hat’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.”"
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