David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, and more recently The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, implores us to replace dominator-control stories with new stories -- affirming life values of cooperation, community and interdependence.
8/20/2007
The Great Turning
8/18/2007
What is Globalization?
Noam Chomsky paraphrases a definition by Gerald K. Heleiner, a Canadian development economist who simply put it as.....
The poor complain,
they always do,
but that's just idle chatter.
Our system brings rewards to all,
at least to all who matter.
THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO GLOBALIZATION DOESN'T HELP
WHAT CAN YOU DO? BUY FAIR TRADE...LEARN MORE HERE
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8/16/2007
Europe's Dreaded Affliction
I could not believe when I read this article in the Washington Times (ARTICLE BELOW). This nut case (as well as those like him) are now scrambling desperately to rally the people away from changes to capitalism and the free market by tapping into their "Christian religious beliefs" to justify their "God-given rights" to economic freedom and claiming that the Muslims are threatening that freedom! I mean is there no end to this Crusade? We don't need to add religion to the mix..the greed factor is big enough.
See the guy has the audacity to argue that Europe is failing, (not true) because the European Union makes sure that ALL of their citizens have access to health care regardless of financial status, that all can get an education. And apparently to the author educated, healthy people who have these basic human dignities guaranteed to them are LAZY and a big failure.
If they are so unsuccessful compared to the USA system then please tell me why the USA has a higher infant mortality rate than most other Westernized countries, or why we don't live as long as people of other nations, or why 40% of the families in the USA are living at the poverty line. If our system is so wonderful here why is it that our people are dying earlier, dying soon after birth, and nearly half of our country is living in poverty? God's got nothing to do with it. That is like saying to the 40% poor that "God will provide" but apparently he doesn't like you. At least the EU steps in and takes care of their people's basic needs and they are not even nearly as rich as the USA. We should be ashamed in this country to have statistics like above. We should be ashamed to put a higher value on economics than human life and well being. And the author should be embarrassed to have even considered making this a problem that has anything to do with God with the intent of trying to frighten innocent people into further loss of economic security who are doing all they can just to get by already.
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Published August 1, 2007
By Paul Belien
Liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton, envy Western Europe for its welfare state. They tell U.S. voters that a European-style welfare state is needed to help the poor. In reality the motives of liberal politicians are not altruistic, but egotistical. Welfare makes people dependent on the state. It is not a coincidence that liberalism and secularism are almost synonyms. Liberals want to replace God by the state.
The difference between Americans and Europeans is the state-dependency of the latter. Contemporary Europe is in crisis. Its welfare systems are running out of money. Its moral and legal order is breaking down, while the influence of radical Islam is growing. Its nation-states are being undermined by the European Union. Most Europeans look on passively. After three generations of welfare dependency, they have lost the ability to take their fate into their own hands.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, North America was colonized by freedom-loving people. They had left Europe because they wanted to live according to their own conscience instead of submitting to the centralist absolutist rulers of the new age that was sweeping across Europe from the 16th century onward. Their traditions were rooted in the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was centered on the individual. God had called man to be free from sin, but in order to be free from sin he had to be virtuous, and in order for virtue to have any value it had to be voluntary, implying that the virtuous man had to be free in every aspect of his life, including his economic activities.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
a.k.a. THE ESSENCE OF DEMOCRACY - MARGINALIZING THE GENERAL PUBLIC & REDUCING THEM TO APATHY TO MAINTAIN ELITIST CONTROL
Manufactured consent is borrowed from a book written by Walter Lipmann in 1921 who described this concept as a revolution in the practice of democracy. What it amounts to is a technique of control. And he said this was useful and necessary and useful because the common interests of all the people elude them and so they (the elitists) have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class – notice that that is the opposite of the standard view of democracy. A version of this is expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his book called “moral man and immoral society” who incidentally was very influential on contemporary policymakers. He said rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man he follows not reason, but faith and this naïve faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over simplifications which are provided by the “mythmaker” to keep the “ordinary” person on course. It is not the case as the naïve might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather as this whole line of thinkers observe, it is the essence of democracy.
The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state it doesn’t much matter what people think because you’ve got a bludgeon over their head and so you can control what they do, but when the state loses the bludgeon, when u can’t control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem “it might make people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule” and therefore you have to control what people think and so the standard way to do this, is what in more honest days was called propaganda, manufacture of consent, the creation of necessary illusion – various ways of either marginalizing the general public reducing them to apathy of some fashion.
This view is widely held and deeply rooted in our own civilization….
It goes back to the Origin of modern democracy which goes back to the 17th c. English revolution where there was a struggle b/n parliament representing the gentry and the merchants and the Royalists representing other elite groups and they were fighting it out. At the same time there were many popular movements that were questioning everything; the relation b/n master and servant, the right of authority all together, there was a lot of radical publishing and this disturbed the elites on both sides of the civil war. So as one historian pointed out at the time in 1660 –he criticized the radical democrats, the ones that were calling for what we would call democracy, because “they have made the people so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.”
Now underlining these doctrines which were very widely held, there is a certain conception of democracy, it is a GAME for elites, and it’s not for the ignorant masses that have to be marginalized, diverted and controlled, of course for their own good. The same principles were upheld in the American colonies, the dictum of the founding fathers of democracy that “the people who ‘owned’ the country ought to govern it” – quoting John Jay.
In modern times, for elites this “contrary view about the intellectual life of the media and so on is in fact now the standard one.
~~~Excerpt transcribed from Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”
See blogpost below for further information and resources or click here to go directly
"Manufactured Consent" Pt. 2
WHAT IS MANUFACTURED CONSENT?
Presenting an analysis its authors call the "propaganda model", the book argues that since mass media news outlets are now run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other corporations. According to the book, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized.
The great thing about Noam Chomsky is that he doesn't believe in "Conspiracy Theories" because the truth is right in front of you and as I say..that is harsh enough. He is also a well respected linguist and professor at MIT and has changed the way that we use language.
Learn more about Noam Chomsky here
FOR A BRIEF OVERVIEW of MANUFACTURING CONSENT READ HERE
WATCH THE VIDEO FREE - 3 hrs. long, but well worth it
TO GET THE BOOK go to Amazon.com - Manufacturing Consent
EDUCATE YOURSELF - REMEMBER THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE TO BRING CHANGES - YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE !!! - YOU ARE POWERFUL !!!
8/09/2007
FUNNY IRAQ NEWS...
...in case you need a good laugh amidst the tragedy. Enjoy!!
Press the Play Button in the middle to start the video
8/08/2007
Sunday Bloody Sunday "by Bush"
Some inventive soul took the time to find times that Dubya used the words to U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Press the Play Button in the Middle to watch the video
Sunday Bloody Sunday by Bush
Uploaded by toonbug
Fascism Is Fun
Press Play Button Symbol to Start Video
8/06/2007
Rape is Normal
I thought this guy made some good points and it was worth sharing with you.
Men's pleasure, women's pain: A dangerous sexual ethic is woven into cultural fabric
Robert JensenSchool of JournalismUniversity of TexasAustin, TX 78712
work: (512) 471-1990fax: (512) 471-7979rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
copyright Robert Jensen 2002
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, September 1, 2002, pp. D-1, 3
by Robert Jensen
It is not surprising that we want to separate ourselves from those who commit hideous crimes, to believe that the abominable things some people do are the result of something evil inside of them.
But most of us also struggle with a gnawing feeling that however pathological those brutal criminals are, they are of us -- part of our world, shaped by our culture.
Such is the case of Richard Marc Evonitz, a “sexually sadistic psychopath,” in the words of one expert, who abducted, raped and killed girls in Virginia and elsewhere. What are the characteristics of a sexually sadistic psychopath? According to a former FBI profiler who has studied serial killers: “A psychopath has no ability to feel remorse for their crimes. They tend to justify what they do as being OK for them. They have no appreciation for the humanity of their victims. They treat them like objects, not human beings.”
Such a person is, without question, cruel and inhuman. But aspects of that description fit not only sexually sadistic psychopaths; slightly modified, it also describes much “normal” sex in our culture.
Look at mass-marketed pornography, with estimated sales of $10 billion a year in the United States, consumed primarily by men: It routinely depicts women as sexual objects whose sole function is to sexually satisfy men and whose own welfare is irrelevant as long as men are satisfied.
Consider the $52-billion-a-year worldwide prostitution business: Though illegal in the United States (except Nevada), that industry is grounded in the presumed right of men to gain sexual satisfaction with no concern for the physical and emotional costs to women and children.
Or, simply listen to what heterosexual women so often say about their male sexual partners: He only seems interested in his own pleasure; he isn’t emotionally engaged with me as a person; he treats me like an object.
To point all this out is not to argue that all men are brutish animals or sexually sadistic psychopaths. Instead, these observations alert us to how sexual predators are not mere aberrations in an otherwise healthy sexual culture.
In the contemporary United States, men generally are trained in a variety of ways to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as naturally dominant and women as naturally passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold. Sex becomes sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate.
Again, the argument is not that all men believe this or act this way, but that such ideas are prevalent in the culture, transmitted from adult men to boys through direct instruction and modeling, by peer pressure among boys, and in mass media. They were the lessons I learned growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, and if anything such messages are more common and intense today.
The predictable result of this state of affairs is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence and violence-by-sex is so common that it should be considered normal. Not normal in the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.
None of these observations excuse or justify sexual abuse. Although some have argued that men are naturally sexually aggressive, feminists have long held that such behaviors are learned, which is why we need to focus not only on the individual pathologies of those who cross the legal line and abuse, rape and kill, but on the entire culture.
Those who find this analysis outrageous should consider the results of a study of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. Researchers found that 47 percent of the men who had raped said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of men who reported an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not raped. That suggests a culture in which many men cannot see forced sex as rape, and many have no moral qualms about engaging in such sexual activity on a regular basis.
The language men use to describe sex, especially when they are outside the company of women, is revealing. In locker rooms one rarely hears men asking about the quality of their emotional and intimate experiences. Instead, the questions are: “Did you get any last night?” “Did you score?” “Did you f--- her?” Men’s discussions about sex often use the language of power -- control, domination, the taking of pleasure.
When I was a teenager, I remember boys joking that an effective sexual strategy would be to drive a date to a remote area, turn off the car engine, and say, “OK, f--- or fight.” I would not be surprised to hear that boys are still regaling each other with that “joke.”
So, yes, violent sexual predators are monsters, but not monsters from another planet. What we learn from their cases depends on how willing we are to look not only into the face of men such as Evonitz, but also to look into the mirror, honestly, and examine the ways we are not only different but, to some degree, the same.
Such self-reflection, individually and collectively, does not lead to the conclusion that all men are sexual predators or that nothing can be done about it. Instead, it should lead us to think about how to resist and change the system in which we live. This feminist critique is crucial not only to the liberation of women but for the humanity of men, which is so often deformed by patriarchy.
Solutions lie not in the conservatives’ call for returning to some illusory “golden age” of sexual morality, a system also built on the subordination of women. The task is to incorporate the insights of feminism into a new sexual ethic that does not impose traditional, restrictive sexual norms on people but helps creates a world based on equality not dominance, in which men’s pleasure does not require women’s subordination.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -Robert Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality . He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
BACK TO FREE-LANCE ARTICLESBACK TO ROBERT W. JENSEN'S HOME PAGE
Men Can Stop Rape
from: I'm Not a Feminist, But
A lot has been said about how to prevent rape. Women should learn self-defense. Women should lock themselves in their houses after dark. Women shouldn't have long hair and women shouldn't wear short skirts. Women shouldn't leave drinks unattended. Hell, they shouldn't dare to get drunk at all. Instead of that bullshit, how about:
If a woman is drunk, don't rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don't rape her.
If a woman is drugged and unconscious, don't rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don't rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don't rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you're still hung up on, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don't rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don't rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don't rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don't rape her.
If a woman is but a child, don't rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don't rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don't rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don't rape her.
If your friend thinks it's okay to rape someone, tell him it's not, and that he's not your friend.
If your "friend" tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there's an unconscious woman upstairs and it's your turn, don't rape her, call the police and tell the guy he's a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it's not okay to rape someone.
Don't tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don't imply that she could have avoided it if she'd only done/not done x.
Don't imply that it's in any way her fault.
Don't let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he "got some" with the drunk girl.
Don't perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions.
You can, too, help yourself.
If you agree, re-post it. It's that important.
-Author unknown.
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