The Public's Calling

Um, Take a Message

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It's 1984

Has Been For Years

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 ~ Lost in all the breathless coverage of the NSA eavesdropping brouhaha is that it isn't news.

While a small number of us worry about that our civil liberties are being steadily eroded, most of the American public actually trusts their government to snoop secretly into every communication they fancy. We traded liberty for security long ago, so what's the current fuss really all about?

Two Countries

Hotspots of Hate

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 ~ We're two countries alright, just not divided the way you might think:

The map shows the use of hateful epithets used in tweets, aggregated by county.

Um, so just exactly where is "middle America"?

A lot of related maps to look at and more detail here. Especially interesting (or sobering) to zoom in on where you live, or other places of interest, both to see the localized hotspots, and which hate words predominate. (Here in Washington State, the hate in Aberdeen is visible from space. What's up with that?)

Thirsty? You're Going to Pay

Greed Ascendant

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 ~ If water is not a human right, then what is?



(h/t Keithpp's blog)

Divestiture

Money Talks

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 ~ Protest and divestment work.

Seattle is the first US city to announce formal divestiture of investments in the fossil fuel industry. Mayor Mike McGinn made the announcement yesterday, making good on a promise made November 7 during 350.org's Do The Math tour. Said McGinn:

Climate change is one of the most important challenges we currently face as a city and as a society. I believe that Seattle ought to discourage these companies from extracting that fossil fuel, and divesting the pension fund from these companies is one way we can do that.

The Purpose of Art

To Provoke

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 ~ The manufactured and fictitious crisis of the so-called fiscal cliff has provoked a lot of people. Time to provoke a broader audience about the real crisis, and to replace the bogus framing of the problem.

We're not broke—we're being looted.

More from Artstrike, including this evocative poem:

Proverbs 22:16
by Elizabeth Conall

what do they care
if we can’t pay
the bills run up
to keep us alive?
to save our kids?
why bother with
expensive care
we don’t deserve?
plenty more
where we came from

Plenty more serfs out there. Read the whole thing.

Neoliberalism and Plutocracy

They're the Same Thing

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 ~ The always stimulating George Monbiot's recent blog post examines the need to fight plutocracy in order to address climate change.

Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.

Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich. Neoliberalism appears to be little more than a justification for plutocracy.

World Food Day

The Challenge of Feeding the World

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 ~ October 16 is World Food Day, established to raise global awareness of wide-spread hunger all over the world. Many organizations are today calling attention to this most basic human right—to have enough to eat.

The Institute of Food Technologists, for example, is highlighting the importance of industrial innovation in providing solutions to global hunger:

Just as society has evolved over time, our food system has also evolved over centuries into a global system of immense size and complexity. The commitment of food science and technology professionals to advancing the science of food, ensuring a safe and abundant food supply, and contributing to healthier people everywhere is integral to that evolution. Food scientists and technologists are versatile, interdisciplinary, and collaborative practitioners in a profession at the crossroads of scientific and technological developments.

The innovative scientists and researchers at Phytelligence are part of that global solution that will provide more food, of better quality, faster, to more people.

The Incredibly Shrinking Middle Class

Watch Them Disappear!

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 ~ From the Pew Research Center:

When you consider how the ranks of the poor are swelling, their per-capita income looks even worse. Our country is having an identity crisis—is this who we want to be?

Free Speech

Free in What Sense?

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 ~ There are just under 3 months until the November elections. Many are spending freely, but what are you hearing? Mostly a lot of hooey:

An analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center conducted for the Center for Responsive Politics found that from December 1, 2011 through June 1, 2012, 85% of the dollars spent on presidential ads by four top-spending third-party groups known as 501(c)(4)s were spent on ads containing at least one claim ruled deceptive by fact-checkers at FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, the Fact Checker at the Washington Post or the Associated Press.

These "top" 4 groups are the American Energy Alliance, Americans for Prosperity, the American Future Fund and Crossroads GPS. All are closely aligned with the most reactionary faction of the GOP and all are hostile to renewable energy. Despite persistent efforts to equate corporate and union spending, the numbers show clearly the dominance of corporate speech on our political debate. Big money is free to buy megaphones, but we are not free to learn who's doing the buying.

Election 2012

Look What's Going Down

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 ~ What is happening with our democracy?

As usual, our politicians are, with feigned righteousness and affected indignation, perseverating on a trivial problem while allowing a real problem to grow into a crisis. This is asymmetrical warfare, and conventional democracy is being routed.

Voting Fraud

Don't Congress With Texas

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 ~ Many states have recently passed laws making it much harder for people to register and vote, ostensibly because of concerns about "voter fraud."

The real fraud, however, is using this bogus concern to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters. These laws will do little or nothing to correct a negligible problem, but instead create a much larger and more serious one.

Social Change

Time to Aim Higher than CSR

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 ~ My one-time high school classmate, Paul Klein, is now a sometime blogger for Forbes, where he pens thoughtful pieces arising from his work advising corporations on CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility. Today he published a piece on "the business value of social change."

It's a worthwhile read, and raises an intriguing point that incessant blather about CSR conveniently skirts: can CSR alone make a real difference when it remains subservient to the core corporate purpose of maximizing profit?

OWS—IX

It's the Inequality, Stupid

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 ~ After more than 30 years of growing and glaring inequality, it has become impossible to pretend that the gap can be entirely explained by hard work. In fact, it is the middle class that has worked hard and tripled their productivity even as their real wages have declined. The result of that increased productivity has been a reduction in the number of workers needed to produce the same goods and services, and relentless pressure on employment, while the financial rewards have gone to the top tier.

The system that allocates vast riches to the very top as the rest struggle is not meritorious so much as meretricious.

Question for Authority

"Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?"

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 ~ Although Roman poet Juvenal wrote this in a different context, the idiomatic translation, "who will watch the watchers?" is now commonly applied to those in authority, especially the state.

It's an apt question for our times.

How did we go from this...

... to this?

Our civil rights, indeed our very democracy, are under threat.

Oil and State

The Twain Have More Than Met

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 ~ They're entwined:

Follow the money.

World Autism Awareness Day

An Epidemic

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 ~ Because I have a daughter with autism, I am aware of this every day. Over the years, too, I have also met many others, their families and the many professionals working to solve the puzzle which is autism.

Autism is widespread:

One in 88 U.S. children has an autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability that more children will be diagnosed with this year than with childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes or pediatric AIDS combined, according to the United Nations.

What is nonetheless amazing to me, however, is how many other people I have learned about who also have autism, well beyond those that have shared with my daughter classrooms, therapists, sports teams or other groups. The sister of a high school classmate. The daughter of a tennis partner of my wife's. The uncle of a financial planner. That autism has touched the lives of others I know is frequently something learned only by accident, in passing.

How many others in my day-to-day circles have family members or close friends with autism? Doubtless many more than I know.

The same is probably true of you too.

Autism has become all-too-common, despite being only poorly understood by too many people. It is time we all became more aware, and did more about it.

Learn more.

Milking

A Grim Future

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 ~ As the old saw puts it, who will buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Naked Capitalism:

[As] the chart below underscores, the US changed in the early 1980s from a model where rising worker wages were seen as the driver to ...growth and hence a focus of policy, to one where rising consumer debt levels and asset appreciation were used to substitute for stagnant incomes.

There are some disturbing parallels to the rise in the value of slaves prior to the Civil War, and the insight into capitalist thinking is disquieting in light of current events:

World Water Day

Billions Staying Thirsty

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 ~ World Water Day has been observed on March 22 since 1993. It's purpose is to draw attention to the importance of water to sustain life, and the critical need to maintain clean fresh water supplies.

Climate change threatens our fresh water supply by melting glaciers that provide summer water, by raising ocean levels that render fresh water saline, and by severe weather that disrupts the hydrological cycle, changing the historical availability of water.

Meanwhile, private interests seek to control access to water for profit, even as 10,000 children die every day from preventable water-borne diseases or lack of clean water. Access to water is a human right.

Read more about water.

Who Speaks for the Muppets?

On Small Government

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 ~ David Rothkopf, ex-Clinton Administration official and Seattle WTO attendee in a Grist interview:

I love it when Ron Paul says, “If we get rid of government, freedom will sweep right in.” That’s just not what happens. What happens is that a bunch of elephants stampede in because they’re in a position to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, if you get government out of the way, the people who need government, they don’t have it.

There’s this myth that government doesn’t belong in the marketplace. If that were true, there would be no canals, no railroads, no highways, no internet. The government was a critical partner in many of the biggest innovations in U.S. history.

But if you buy into that for 20 or 30 years, and you say, “smaller government, smaller government programs,” who gets squeezed by that? It’s the cities. And the problem is that, as that happens, it accelerates. Kids drop out of school. Neighborhoods decay. Businesses leave. The tax base goes down. Cops get fired. Teachers get fired. It’s a cycle of pain.

The small government types don't like the comparison, but the question begs an answer: how does what they propose differ from Somalia?