Susan Jacoby : The Age of American Unreason

http://www.susanjacoby.com/

New In An Updated Paperback Edition From Vintage Books

This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history—a New York Times bestseller in 2008—paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. The author examines the challenges posed by the current anti-rational landscape--personified by the rise of the Tea Party--for the administration of Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to restore reason and science in public policy-making. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.

Finally, the author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.

The Age of Consent:

A Manifesto For A New World Order
By George Monbiot

Having made a hugely significant contribution to the increasingly irrefutable‚ if alarming‚ diagnosis of the ills of early 21st−century consumerist culture and its free−market myths‚ George Monbiot now sets out to offer something more constructive‚ a set of proposals − political‚ democratic‚ economic‚ environmental − that might effect the cultural change that many in the West (not to mention those on the outside of the West looking in) now want but scarcely know how to make happen.

The Age of Consent is provocative‚ brave‚ even utopian. But‚ with most of the 20th century′s Big Ideas dead in the gutter‚ it′s time for a book that can be a touchstone for real debate about the political and economic presumptions and prejudices on which our society has rested since World War Two.

George Monbiot‚ 40‚ has been persona non grata in seven countries‚ had a life sentence in absentia given to him by an Indonesian court‚ has been shot at‚ beaten up by military police‚ shipwrecked and stung into a coma during seven years of investigative journeys across Africa‚ Asia and the Americas. He was even pronounced clinically dead of cerebral malaria in Kenya‚ only to rise again‚ return to Britain′s comparative safety‚ and turn himself into the country′s most articulate‚ most enterprising and most effective non−conformist political commentator.

George Monbiot

The Triumph of Ignorance

Why morons succeed in US politics.

By George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian 28th October 2008

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?(1)

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said “there you go again”(2). His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD(3).

But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as Social Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary(4).

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.
But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. “In the South”, Jacoby writes, “what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order.”(5)

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time(6).

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln’s career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment it is a recipe for confusion.
Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly rage against the “liberal elites” destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

AlterNet.Org

Living Planet Report

Details Dangers Of Living Beyond The Environment's Means

New WWF Analysis Warns of "Ecological Credit Crunch" and Offers Solutions For Avoiding A "Natural Resources Meltdown" As U.S. Scores Among Nations With Largest Ecological Footprint

WASHINGTON DC,
October 28, 2008

As global financial markets learn difficult lessons on the consequences of unregulated spending, a new report issued by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns of the danger to future prosperity if the reckless over-consumption of the Earth’s natural capital is left unchecked.

WWF’s Living Planet Report 2008, produced with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network (GFN), shows more than three quarters of the world’s people now living in nations that are ecological debtors, where national consumption has outstripped their country’s biological capacity. Presently, human demands on the world's natural capital measure nearly a third more than earth can sustain. In addition, global natural wealth and diversity continue to decline, and more and more countries are slipping into a state of permanent or seasonal water stress.

The findings of the Living Planet Report 2008 reinforce WWF-US’s “Greenprint” agenda, a policy road map for the next U.S. administration, which was provided in mid-October to Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill) and their U.S. presidential campaign staffs. Commenting on the “Greenprint” at its release, Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF-US noted “Global consumption of natural resources far exceeds the Earth’s regenerative capacity. We are borrowing from our natural capital at an entirely unsustainable rate. And, as is evidenced from the current economic crisis, unsustainable borrowing is not without profound consequences. To raise the stakes even further, there can be no bailout if the Earth’s systems collapse.”

“The world is currently struggling with the consequences of over-valuing its financial assets, but a more fundamental crisis looms ahead – an ecological credit crunch caused by under-valuing the environmental assets that are the basis of all life and prosperity,” said WWF International Director-General James Leape, in the foreword to the new report. “Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of the world,” Leape said.

According to the Living Planet Report 2008, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Kuwait have the largest national ecological footprints per person. On the other end of the scale are countries such as Haiti and the Congo, with a low ecological footprint per person, but facing a future of degrading biocapacity from deforestation and increased demands from a rising population and export pressures.

The Living Planet Report, published by WWF every two years since 1998, has become widely accepted as an accurate analysis of the earth's ability to remain a “living planet”. In 2008, it adds for the first time, new measures of global, national and individual water footprints to existing measures of the Ecological Footprint of human demand on natural resources and the Living Planet Index, a measure of the state of nature.

The Living Planet Index, compiled by ZSL, shows a nearly 30 per cent decline since 1970 in nearly 5000 measured populations of 1,686 species. These dramatic losses in our natural wealth are being driven by deforestation and land conversion in the tropics and the impact of dams, diversions and climate change on freshwater species. Pollution, over-fishing and destructive fishing in marine and coastal environments are also taking a considerable toll.

The Living Planet Report 2008 includes a new water footprint measurement which illustrates the significance of water traded in the form of commodities; for example, the production of a cotton T-shirt requires 765 gallons of water. On average, each person consumes 327,177 gallons (about half an Olympic swimming pool) of water a year, but this varies from 654,354 gallons per person a year (USA) to 163,325 gallons per capita annually (Yemen). Approximately 50 countries are currently facing moderate or severe water stress and the number of people suffering from year-round or seasonal water shortages is expected to increase as a result of climate change, the report finds.

For the single most important challenge – climate change – the report shows that a range of efficiency, renewable and low emissions “wedges” could meet projected energy demands to 2050 with reductions in carbon emissions of 60 to 80 percent. Bringing an ecosystems approach into consumption, development and trade considerations would go a long way to protecting the world's vital living resources.

“These Living Planet measures serve as clear and robust signposts to what needs to be done,” said WWF-International’s Leape. “If humanity has the will, it has the way to live within the means of the planet, but we must recognize that the ecological credit crunch will require even bolder action that that now being mustered for the financial crisis.”
World Wildlife Fund

A Terrible and Silent Crisis:

The Destruction of the American Working Class

North American society prides itself on being classless. Almost no one in North America calls him/herself lower-class or upper-class, and people who describe themselves as 'middle-class' (a class which really no longer exists in North America) do so hesitantly. Few even describe themselves as 'working-class', since that seems to imply it's a place one resides for life (which is the case, but to acknowledge this fact would put the lie to the myth of social mobility). Despite the Great American (and Canadian) Dream (anyone can be President or Billionaire if they work long and hard at it), your chances of moving up even one quintile in the economic and social order are negligible, and dependent more on luck than intelligence, endeavour or education.

My friend Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty.

This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one's class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.

More than anything, Deer Hunting is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day's work -- the end of the "dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure".

I'd given away three copies of Joe's book before I'd ready anything beyond the brilliant introduction -- I just knew the people I gave them to needed to read the book more than I did. If you've read Lakoff, and kind of understand the huge divide between conservative and liberal worldviews, you have to read Bageant, so you really understand the chasm between the worldviews of the uneducated and educated. When you read Joe's astonishing stories, all of a sudden what George Lakoff says makes sense. And, just as astonishingly, so does Bush's 2004 win, and the terrifying prospect that Republican arch-conservatives could be poised to establish a dynasty in the US that will accelerate the Cheney-Bush regime's project for endless war, bankrupting and dismantling government, and ending the separation of church and state, and which will last until that country's final, ghastly unraveling occurs (I'm betting that will happen later this century).

I picked up my fourth copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus in Australia, which includes a little orientation for Australians not familiar with current US culture. This orientation was probably unnecessary for two reasons: Educated Australians (and Canadians and Europeans) probably know as much about current US culture as their American counterparts. And uneducated people from these countries, I strongly suspect, think much like their US counterparts (though less fanatically) -- Joe's description of uneducated Americans sent shudders up my spine, as I recognized in their stories and attitudes those of many uneducated Canadians I thought I knew, or didn't care to know (and now understand much better).

There is so much wisdom in this book, and it is so important to read to achieve an understanding of the current predicament of the US (and hence of the world), that I would not presume to précis it here. If you read only one book this year, please make it Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Some of the key lessons for me:

• "Universal access to a decent education would lift the lives of millions over time...Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations". After reading Joe's stories I have new respect for those who have taught themselves what they needed to learn to be informed, independent citizens, and an appreciation for how those without education are oppressed to an almost unimaginable degree.
• At least 60% of Americans are "working class", i.e. they do not have power over their work -- when they work, how much they get paid or whether they'll be "cut loose from their job [or self-employed labour dependent on big corporations] at the first shiver of Wall Street".
• The critical aspects of the "terrible and silent crisis" destroying working-class Americans are: (a) the working class' own passivity, antipathy to intellect, and belligerence towards the outside world, (b) an economic, corporatist system that benefits from keeping them uneducated, fearful and debt-ridden (and hence holders of low-wage, nonunion, disposable, part-time, noninsured jobs), (c) a health-care system that is especially dysfunctional in working-class areas and whose few quality services are unaffordable to the working class, (d) their dreadful, fat-laden diet (which is all that they can afford) and the toll it takes on their health, and (e) religious and political leaders who prey on their ignorance and exploit their fears.
• Almost as bad as the corporatists at exploiting the working class are the rich, uneducated entrepreneurial class who live in their neighbourhoods -- realtors, lawyers, brokers, gas retailers, "downtown pickle vendors" and other "middlemen who stand on the necks of the working poor". This "mob of Kiwanis and Rotarians" who dominate local politics help get tax breaks and regulation exemptions for big corporations, in return for financial favours.
• As I read this book I realized that my book on Natural Enterprise, which was in part designed to help the chronically underemployed to find meaningful work, will be totally inaccessible to the working class -- they don't have the literacy or basis of understanding of how an economy works to even begin to understand its processes and messages. I can appreciate how working-class people, and their friends (like Joe) perceive "entrepreneurs" to be just the low-level agents of the corporatists, not a means for their liberation from wage slavery.
• "Getting a lousy education, then spending a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial free market economy does not make for optimism or open-mindedness, both hallmarks of liberalism. It makes for a kind of bleak coarseness and inner degradation that allows working people to accept the American empire's wars without a blink." Joe tells how scourges like Tyson Foods and Rubbermade belittle, abuse, threaten and browbeat their workers into obedience, and acceptance of their lot in life. As a result, "the intellectual lives of most working-class Americans consist of things that sound as if they might or should be true" (e.g. that we should all "support our troops"), and what is engendered as a result is a "tide of national meanness".
• Rich Republicans still meet the working-class and small business class on their own turf, at community activities important to these people. Progressives don't even visit, so no other voice is ever heard in the 'red' communities, and as a result "the left understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people...letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit".
• As a consequence of this numbing existence, "it is [a huge myth] that small towns are thrown into deep mourning when one of their young is killed in Iraq...There is growing dissatisfaction with the war, but it is because we are not winning, not because of the dead."
• The mortgage and banking industries exploit workers' dreams of home ownership, supported by the corporatists who need continued growth and rising home prices to finance ever-increasing consumer spending, in the fragile house of cards which is now beginning to implode in the US. Gullible poor workers who buy mobile homes on rented property are essentially "buying large rapidly-depreciating vehicles and paying for space to park them", the absolute antithesis of real home ownership, and a recipe for bankruptcy. But as long as workers are taught that "they are not worthy of a traditional house or decent treatment in the labor market or a living wage", this is the best they can hope for and aspire to.
• Probably the most eye-opening chapter for me was the one where he explains Americans' zeal for gun ownership and fierce opposition to gun control (a view Joe himself shares). He provides credible data to support gun owners' claims that (at least in a country as violent as the US) the mere possession of a gun deters more crime than gun ownership precipits. Progressives should look at the facts and realize that their passion for gun control is alienating them, and the parties they support, from 70 million gun owners for whom the issue is a pivotal one at the ballot box.
• At the same time, Joe is concerned about the propensity of many Americans (which he later ascribes in part to their belligerent Scots-Irish heritage) to carry their enthusiasm for guns to a degree that makes them "devotees to lethality". He worries about its explosive potential: "What happens when this country hits Peak Oil demand and the electrical grid starts browning down and even little things become desperately difficult or unaffordable? What happens if the wrong kind of president declares the wrong kind of national emergency? What will be the first reflex of those hundreds of thousands of devotees to lethality?" Joe is concerned that this belligerence and passion for religious fundamentalism is behind the passion for wars in the Mid-East and Asia and even a passion for a nuclear war. He analyzes the low-level perpetrators of Abu Ghraib like Lynddie England and finds their behaviour completely consistent with the pent-up anger, ignorance and willingness to follow orders that those of Scots-Irish ancestry, or influenced by that culture, exhibit around the world and especially in workng-class US communities.
• Joe describes the leaders of the fundamentalist churches in the US as poorly educated breakaways from the lower ranks of other churches. Their lack of "fancy learnin'" is unrecognized by their equally uneducated followers. Fundamentalists now make up a quarter of the electorate, a segment that has recently and cynically been politicized by corporatists, and is overwhelmingly white, with a high-school education or less, and working-class. A growing minority of evangelicals are believers in replacing secular government and laws with Christian ones, and support what can only be called Holy Wars against non-Christian nations, to accelerate the prophecy of the second coming and the Reign of Christ. A majority believe in the Rapture, which means they could care less about the future of their nation or the environment.
• Unlike public schools, and unlike health care and other civic organizations, fundamentalist congregations are still functioning, growing and open to all. And Christian education and Christian home-schooling are filling the void of a crumbling public education system, and helping to develop the cadres of right-wing believers in the future. They have already achieved astonishing penetration of the upper echelons of the Bush administration and many political establishments and educational institutions and NGOs. The product of this brainwashing by uneducated religious leaders is an electorate "with eyes, that is to say the camera to shoot what is all around them, but no intellectual software to edit or make sense of it all.", victims of "an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis" that Joe predicts will outlast any brief respite in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
• Joe points out the astonishing popularity of the most grotesque "entertainments" -- videos circulating on and off the Internet showing the grisly deaths of both Americans and Iraqis in the Bush War -- the ultimate reality shows. The former are used to whip up fury, indignation and xenophobia, and the latter are a spectacle of religious eye-for-an-eye retribution, applauded by Mel Gibson-style viewers as vengeance in God's name. Joe is not surprised at this, or at the probability that many more Abu Ghraib type atrocities are occurring worldwide in US secret prisons, directed by the CIA and perpetrated by working class, uneducated, Scots-Irish troops many with streaks of religious zealotry. And he was not surprised at the monstrous animal cruelty at the Pilgrims Pride plant (workers reveling in stomping chickens to death), where Lynddie England used to work until she quit because management didn't care about the atrocities that went on there. You come from violent stock, and get put down violently all your life, you tend to perpetuate the pattern. Violence, in the streets, in the workplace, in entertainment, and in theatres of war, defines the working class life experience. The rest of us would just rather not see it or acknowledge it.
• There is a complicated and ironic explanation why huge not-for-profit (but very profitable) hospitals centralized in affluent communities are starving out smaller, local hospitals in poorer areas, to the point that health-care facilities in poorer communities are mostly now just places exhausted working class Americans are "discarded when they can no longer work". Joe explains the perverse way many of these institutions are forced to operate, often treating long-term patients for illnesses they don't have and worsening their condition. These facilities are now the largest cause of bankruptcies in the US, even though 2/3 of these bankrupts have health insurance (thanks to high premiums and deductibles and uncovered costs), and half of uninsured Americans owe money to health-care institutions.
• Joe presents some alarming data on the health care and social security crisis looming especially for older women in the US. Two thirds of Social Security recipients are women, and 90% of them receive no other income, putting most of them below the poverty line at a time the Bushies are trying to cut, bankrupt and/or abolish the system entirely. Half of Americans depend entirely on the government for help when they get old. "Social security is the most important ongoing domestic story in America", Joe asserts bluntly, explaining that it is destroying the social fabric of working class families as many face the dread of regularly visiting elder family members in horrific institutions, elders who paid much into the system and now plead desperately and hopelessly for escape from these terrible places, escape that never comes.

The bottom line of this vicious cycle is that half of Americans are functionally illiterate, and poor education, poor health care, poor nutrition, corporatist oppression and exploitation are creating a time bomb that, in the short run, vents itself in anger against pontificating liberals they never see and don't understand, and in the long run could explode into bloody and nationwide violence. These people, living right in our midst but whom we never reach out to, simply don't have the wherewithal to improve their own lot -- "they are too uneducated, too conditioned to the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen."

Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition -- for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a 'menu' of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles. "Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive." None of us can, any longer, "make up his or her identity from scratch." The upper-middle and affluent suburban "catering classes", those who support the corporatist centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it.

We are all, Joe argues, prisoners of this corporatist political and economic system, caught, more or less, in its web. "America's much-ballyhood liberty is largely fictional. Three million of us are [in prisons or on parole]...The rest of us are captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund." What's worse, "You never know you are in prison until you try the door". And America's working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that they can't even see the door.

America, he says, cannot hope to stop messing up the rest of the world until it solves its own mess. "When social conscience extends no farther than ourselves, our friends, our families then Darfur and secret American prisons abroad are not [perceived to be] a problem".

This book is about the horrific mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the most part, forced down anyone's throats). And our cultures already exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe Bageant.

So no matter where in the world you live, please buy several copies of Deer Hunting With Jesus and give them to people who do not understand why George Bush won the US election of 2004. This is important, and Joe has done all the hard work and research for us, in a courageous, personal and awesome portrait of the true nature of the most powerful country on the planet. We need everyone to hear this story, to understand what has been going on under our noses all along, that we never got quite close enough to see.

The Tyranny of Oil:

“The World’s Most Powerful Industry—What We Must Do to Stop It”

By Antonia Juhasz from HarperCollins Publishers

Antonia Juhasz is a leading oil industry, international trade, and finance policy expert and the author of The Bush Agenda. A fellow with Oil Change International and the Institute for Policy Studies, she has served as an aide to two members of Congress and holds a Master's Degree in public policy from Georgetown University. Juhasz is an award-winning writer and media commentator; her work has been featured in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Petroleum Review Magazine, and Alternet.org. She has appeared on Kudlow & Company, National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show and Marketplace, Washington Journal, Hannity & Colmes, and Democracy Now!, among many other shows. She lives in San Francisco, California.

Climate Deal

May Be Too Late To Save Coral Reefs, Scientists Warn

by David Adam

Published on Monday, October 27, 2008 by The Guardian/UK

A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs, according to a US study that suggests major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are making seawater so acidic that reefs including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia could begin to break up within a few decades, research by the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California suggests. Even ambitious targets to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, as championed by Britain and Europe to stave off dangerous climate change, still place more than 90% of coral reefs in jeopardy.

Oceanographers Long Cao and Ken Caldeira looked at how carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea as human emissions increase. About a third of carbon pollution is soaked up in this way, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. Experts say human activity over the last two centuries has produced enough acid to lower the average pH of global ocean surface waters by about 0.1 units.

Such acidification spells problems for coral reefs, which rely on calcium minerals called aragonite to build and maintain their exoskeletons.

"We can't say for sure that [the reefs] will disappear but ... the likelihood they will be able to persist is pretty small," said Caldeira.

The new study was prompted by questions by a US congressional committee on how possible carbon stabilisation targets would affect coral loss.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to more than 380ppm now. Campaigners and politicians in Europe and the UK say a new global climate deal, which is expected to be agreed next year, must aim to limit CO2 to 450ppm, though scientists say that is unlikely and the world is heading for 550ppm or even 650ppm.

The research suggests that stabilising world carbon levels at 450ppm would still dump so much carbon dioxide in the oceans that only 8% of coral reefs would be surrounded by water with enough aragonite to maintain their structure. Some 7% of the ocean below 60 degrees south will see a shortage of aragonite, while parts of the high latitude ocean could see a pH drop of 0.2 units.

At 550ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, no coral reef would have access to enough of the mineral. Even stabilising CO2 at current levels would still leave some 60% of coral bathed in seawater with low aragonite levels.

The increased amounts of carbon dioxide going into the ocean will also affect other marine life, such as shellfish, that need the calcium mineral to build carbonate shells.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say the risk posed by carbon pollution to coral and marine life could justify a carbon stabilisation goal "lower than what might be chosen based on climate considerations alone".

The UK's Royal Society is preparing to issue a warning to policymakers on the issue, together with dozens of other international science academies.

Caldeira said the affected reefs would not disappear straight away, but that the change in water chemistry would leave them vulnerable to attack, bleaching or disease.

He said: "We're losing the Arctic ice, it looks like we're going to lose the coral reefs and we could lose much of the rainforest. I find it disconcerting that these ecosystems that have been around on Earth for a long, long time are no longer able to survive."

© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited

CommonDreams.org

The Predator State

How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr., Chair in Government / Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale. He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and then served on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group at the LBJ School, is a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute, and is chair of Economists for Peace and Security, a global professional association.

Description
The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago. Tax cuts and small government, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, and free trade are the core elements of this dogma, a dogma so successful that even many liberals accept it. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it altogether. That is why principled conservatives -- the Reagan true believers -- long ago abandoned Bush.

Enter James K. Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a "corporate republic," bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands. In plain English, the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message.

Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to "make markets work"? Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening in this country?

The real economy is not a free-market economy. It is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The real problems and challenges -- inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis, and the future of the dollar -- are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning, with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets.

A timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.

Find out more: Read an excerpt

Banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

Thomas Jefferson, US President; 1743 - 1826

Global Research

Death of the American Empire
- by Tanya Cariina Hsu - 2008-10-23
"Banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies" (Thomas Jefferson)

Financial Meltdown: The Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History
- by Ellen Brown - 2008-10-17
All the king’s men cannot put the private banking system together again: it is a Ponzi scheme that has reached its mathematical limits.

Who is Behind the Financial Meltdown?
- by Michel Chossudovsky - 2008-10-11
The financial market is heavily manipulated. Triggering market collapse can be a very profitable undertaking.

Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power
- by F. William Engdahl - 2008-10-09
Europe's Response to a Financial Crisis "Made in the USA"

Unscrupulous Manipulation of the US Financial Architecture:

The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush

Global Research, October 25, 2008

A Dismal Legacy. Part II

by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

"Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed Works."Gordon Gekko, corporate raider (played by Michael Douglas) in the movie Wall St.

“President [George W.] Bush will be remembered as the most fiscally irresponsible president in our nation’s history.” Sen. Kent Conrad, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee

[The government's decision to buy shares in the nation's leading banks] “is not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.”President George W. Bush, October 14, 2008

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights. ...We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused." Jimmy Carter, former American president

“After [this] war [against Iraq] has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.”Sen. Robert Byrd, (D-W.Va), March 19, 2003

Economically, the Bush-Cheney administration is leaving behind a big financial and economic mess. In fact, this is an administration that has brought misery upon America by its misguided economic policies that have built a mountain of shaky debt and rendered dysfunctional large segments of the American banking industry and large sectors of the U.S. economy, through inappropriate deregulation to enrich greedy special interest characters, wheeler-dealers, corporate con men, professional short-sellers and other scam artists and swindlers. In so doing, it has empowered rich parasitic speculators and turned the financial sector into a giant casino, thus risking the health of the entire economy.

Indeed, and to complete the picture, the Bush-Cheney administration has emptied the public treasury, debased the U.S. currency and fueled deflation, inflation and, in the end, produced stagflation and what can turn out to be a very serious recession.

This is understandable. Over the last eight years, the Bush-Cheney administration has adopted a laissez-faire policy based on a let-them-eat-cake ideology. It has pushed for economic deregulation throughout the government, beginning with the de-fanging of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has pursued an aggressive policy of deregulation of the large global investment banks, which were basically left to self-regulate themselves and allowed to build up the largest mountain of flimsy backed debt instruments and risky financial derivative products ever seen in history. It did the same thing for other regulatory agencies such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, worker safety and transportation agencies.

It is thus no accident that the Bush-Cheney administration has presided over one of the worst financial collapses and credit crises in U.S. history, by packing regulatory agencies with cronies whose mission it was to let rapacious speculators and market manipulators go wild. The result has been the creation of a casino-like speculative economy that is now crashing down before our very eyes.

Under Bush-Cheney, financial markets became manipulated by unscrupulous bankers and by rapacious hedge funds, as public regulation was reduced to a minimum. Millions of Americans lost their homes through foreclosure and many more saw their working and pension incomes eroded and destroyed by inflation and plant closings. And as what could be a protracted recession proceeds, many more will lose their jobs in the coming months, while some older employees may have to postpone their retirement because of the disappearance of their pension money.

In a parody of President Abraham Lincoln, we can say this has been an administration that deserved to be dubbed "a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy." Some would not hesitate to say, also in parody, that it has been "a government of Goldman Sachs, by Goldman Sachs and for Goldman Sachs," considering the ubiquitous political and economic role which that firm has played within the Bush-Cheney administration. President Bush's own Chief of Staff, Mr. Joshua Bolten, comes from Goldman Sachs. And these days, everybody pretends not see the real and potential conflicts of interests of other public servants who are now on the giving public side of things, at the U.S. Treasury, and who are going to be on the receiving private side of public money, in a scant few months. It is the same thing with a lot of what the U.S. Treasury does. —Even the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Mark Carney, is a former employee of Goldman Sachs!

In a related matter, for historical purposes, it will be remembered that, in the fall of 2008, the Bush-Cheney administration sponsored a huge rescue-plus-bailout of the largest speculative Wall Street investment banks (which the Bush SEC had deregulated on March 28, 2004) and of a host of other banking and insurance institutions which had engaged in alchemy or synthetic finance and made risky investments. To that effect, it is ready to place at risk close to $2.0 trillion of public money and let the public debt explode, with few conditions attached to protect the public interest. In fact, the Bush administration stood ready to advance hundreds of billions of dollars and only requested non-voting preferred shares in the troubled banks and insurance companies that it rescued from bankruptcy. As a consequence, contrary to what the Roosevelt administration did in the 1930s, the U.S. government has no direct say about the way the troubled financial institutions are managed and run, and thus, if the bail-out were to be successful, most of the benefits would go to bank owners and their executives; but, if things continue to deteriorate, taxpayers will be the ones left holding the bag.

Some have said this is an example of corporate socialism for the rich. In fact, this has nothing to do with socialism per se, but everything to do with legal and unapologetical extortionism on a high level. For all these reasons, if the ongoing recession and financial crisis were to turn into a full-fledged economic depression, as it could possibly do, and as it did in 1873-1880 and 1929-1939, it would have to be dubbed by historians "the Bush-Cheney Grand Economic Depression" of 2008-20(?).

George W. Bush will also be remembered for having financed his whimsical and ill-conceived three-trillion-dollar war of aggression against Iraq on credit, thus worsening the U.S. financial situation in the world, perhaps irrevocably. He is leaving behind him a financial mess like no one has seen since the great depressions following 1873 and 1929.

In all fairness, it must be said that some Democrats in Congress, the so-called Bush Democrats who usually vote with Republicans on foreign policy issues, have also been supporters of the Iraq War from the beginning and have invariably voted for the hundreds of billions of dollars required to finance it.

The Bush-Cheney administration has presided over economic dislocations and greed-fed financial bubbles, and it has been an agent of poverty and of financial and economic crises. This is an administration that will be sadly remembered for its huge tax cuts for the super rich, for its huge fiscal deficits bequeathed to future generations and for its huge and costly bailouts for speculators and high flyers, and very little for families and ordinary citizens.

As a consequence, on the whole, Americans are today poorer than when this duo took power eight years ago, while the gap between the very rich and the average American has never been wider. It has been a regime that has borrowed and borrowed, debased the currency, waged unnecessary wars and doled out defense contracts in the most reckless possible way, with a minimum of oversight and accountability.

• International Mess: An Irresponsible Attempt to rekindle the Cold War

Internationally, Bush and Cheney not only started a war against Iraq, a country that had never attacked the United States, but they also did their utmost to recklessly restart the Cold War with Russia. They did that by unilaterally abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, by transforming NATO into an offensive military alliance and by installing anti-missile sites, manned by American soldiers, in former Warsaw Pact countries, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, and in former Soviet republics, right next to Russia's borders.

The Bush-Cheney administration designed a policy of encircling Russia by arming pro-U.S. European client states. That is why they have directly provoked Russia by incorporating six former Warsaw Pact nations and three former soviet republics in the now offensive and U.S.-controlled military alliance that is NATO. They went as far as to openly support and arm aggression-prone governments in some former Soviet republics, especially in Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin. All this reflects a pro-active and aggressive military stance against Russia designed to provoke Russia and restart the Cold War, thus dangerously increasing the chances of a nuclear world war.

Let us recall that when Khrushchev's Soviet Union tried to install missiles in Cuba in 1962, it nearly started a world war. Now, half a century later, with Bush-Cheney, the brinkmanship is on the other side. They have acted irresponsibly in provoking Russia, as if they did not mind restarting a cold war with that country. Russian exasperation was well expressed by then Russian President Vladimir Putin when, in 2007, he said that “The United States [under Bush and Cheney] has overstepped its national borders in every way, and as a result, no one feels safe. . . . such a policy stimulates an arms race.”

• Disrespect of Military Advice

George W. Bush will be remembered as the man who brought within the walls of the White House not only corruption and incompetence in nearly every field of activity—as well as a lack of moral fortitude in approving torture—but also a quasi dictatorial gangster mentality in dealing with Congress, with the military, with other governments and with political opponents in general. For instance, Bush fired more generals and admirals than any other head of state since Adolf Hitler in Germany, some seventy years ago. Among others, Bush fired or forced into early retirement Gen. Eric K. Shinseki; Gen. John Abizaid; Gen. George Casey; and Adm. William J. Fallon, then top U.S. commander in the Middle East.

• A Propaganda-prone Administration

But perhaps one of the greatest indictments of the Bush-Cheney administration is the way it has used crude covert propaganda techniques worthy of a totalitarian regime. Indeed, it has launched a sophisticated propaganda campaign to manipulate information and public opinion that has had the effect of undermining democracy and the freedom of information. For one, it has subverted the major American TV and radio networks by provided them with false independent "analysts".

Second, it has paid journalists to push surreptitiously for government programs. Third, it has intervened within news organizations, using the power of government to have journalists and producers fired when they didn't toe the government line. Fourth, the Bush administration has embarked upon the business of censoring movies. And that is only the tip of the iceberg, considering how pervasive the Bush-Cheney administration's direct and indirect control of the media has been. Never has American journalism and U.S. corporate media been so corrupt and complicit, and this is because the United States has never had such a corrupt administration, i.e. the 2001-2009 Bush-Cheney administration.

• Conclusion

To conclude, it should be obvious by now to anybody who has eyes to see that the Texan politician named George W. Bush, son of former President George H. Bush, was unqualified for high office. He has amply and tragically demonstrated it. This is a politician who presided over an administration that has acted as a wrecking crew, destroying most of everything it has touched. [For more analysis on that, see my book "The New American Empire".]

In its countless failures, the Bush-Cheney administration has been an unhealthy mixture, rarely seen in a democracy, of immorality, lawlessness and incompetence. —It won't be missed by most people, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at: mailto:rodrigue.tremblay@%20yahoo.com.

He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire'.

Visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.

Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/

Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

Rodrigue Tremblay is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research Articles by Rodrigue Tremblay

The Political Mind by George Lakoff

“The premise that the Enlightenment saw us as perfectly rational is flawed”

Owen Flanagan Review
28 May 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition

IN The Political Mind, George Lakoff, an eminent cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, sets out to provide a mind science primer for progressive US politicians. His hope is that, come November, they might defeat the conservatives who, if Lakoff is to be believed, already stealthfully deploy the latest wisdom from cognitive science.

According to Lakoff, the 18th-century Enlightenment painted a portrait of humans as thinkers: rational, logical and attentive to facts. Progressive politicians buy into this, and thus offer facts and logical arguments to sell their policies to the public.

But humans are not rational, at least not fully so. We are affective-epistemic kludges- Rube Goldberg devices that negotiate reality with all kinds of imperfect, unconscious and emotion-laden tricks for getting by and getting ahead. According to the cognitive science cognoscenti, we don't just reason, we reason with passion. We don't think, we combine thought with emotion - let's call it "fthinking". Karl Rove and his cronies, Lakoff believes, have long understood this. Francis Bacon said, "Knowledge is power." There is a name for those who use knowledge to gain power. In America they are called Republicans.

Politics, says Lakoff, is not about changing minds through arguments and evidence. It is about configuring and reconfiguring neural pathways. Repetitive, comforting, emotionally attractive and morally appealing narratives, metaphors, mottos and mantras are most likely to gain neural traction. Politicians who control brains win elections.

Republicans, Lakoff says, understand how "brains and minds work". If voters are fthinkers and not thinkers, you need to appeal to their emotions. One way to do so is to hitch a ride on a narrative that is already neurally well honed. Some narratives - for example, "rags to riches" - are affective neural superhighways for Americans.

Apparently, Americans also get that warm fuzzy feeling when they hear a "redemption narrative". According to Lakoff, Bush and his handlers understood this. Bush, recall, "had been an alcoholic, had a DUI violation, avoided service in Vietnam, had a shadow experience in his Air National Guard unit, failed repeatedly in business". Bush's team brilliantly deployed cog-sci know-how and glommed onto the appealing redemptive narrative possibilities in this prima facie sorry set of facts - or so Lakoff says. The fact that Rove and company did everything possible to suppress and/or spin these stories about alcoholism, cocaine use and business incompetence doesn't bother Lakoff in the slightest.

Democrats, on the other hand, just don't get how people fthink. Really? What about "The Great Society", "The Peace Corps" and "Teach for America"- all progressive constructs that ably employ frames and metaphors?

There are serious issues here, almost all of which Lakoff leaves under-discussed. Most important is the idea that we ought to wonder and worry about how we use language to frame policy. Should taxation be framed as theft of the fruits of my labour, or as membership dues to a club I want to be part of? Cognitive science has discovered that different ways of framing such issues have a big effect on the way people think and vote.

The same goes for the ways we talk about war. Is the war in Iraq a war over oil or is it a costly piece of testeronic juvenilia, the hissy fit of an uncurious moral dullard and his evil sidekick over 9/11 and Daddy's unfinished business in the first Gulf War? Republicans are smart enough not to dwell on these credible ways of describing the war. They know they can galvanise people with the repetition of phrases like "the war on terror" and then get away with whatever they wish.

Was it really a prescient team of advisers with advanced cognitive scientific sophistication who fthought up that metaphor? Lakoff seems to think so. After all, Republicans are the ones who understand "how brains and minds work". They apparently know that the constant repetition of phrases like "war on terror" strengthens neural connections. After hearing those words again and again, ordinary people literally get stuck thinking that way. It's noise to neurons.

For Lakoff, the root of all our problems is - as usual - our parents. He believes that we automatically use a "nation as a family" metaphor, which can be broken down into two competing models: the strict father family and the nurturing parents family. Conservatives, he says, idolise "daddy" and believe that "morality is obedience to an authority- assumed to be a legitimate authority who is inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, and has both the right and duty to use force to command obedience and fight evil". One effect of this is that our leaders don't have to win public approval because the public, particularly conservatives, fthink of the president as father with final say over all matters.

Progressives, apparently, see the world through the nurturing parents model, with its "ethics of care", moved by "a single moral value: empathy, together with responsibility and strength to act on the empathy". This ought to make progressives Fthinkers with a capital F, so it is surprising that they allegedly use thinking rather than fthinking to win votes. Maybe they are not actually motivated by the single moral value of empathy. Old ideas of equal worth and dignity still do much of the work for an empathic politic, a politic that strives for the common good without all the touchy-feely stuff.

Part of Lakoff's agenda is to help Democrats set up progressive think tanks - actually, fthink tanks - that use the latest scientific research to carry out "cognitive policies" and "framing campaigns". "Conservatives conduct such cognitive policy making every day of every year," he writes. "It is explicit, well organized, and well funded. Its aim is to change brains in a conservative direction. And it has been working." On the other hand, "progressives rarely conduct cognitive policy making". Lakoff's own fthink tank, the Rockridge Institute, has closed, according to the latest check of its website.

The moral of the story is that successful politicians know how to use words to get people to vote against their own interests and values. Apparently this fact has just been discovered - by Lakoff. When Plato wrote about sophists who strengthen arguments by appealing to emotion he must have been talking about parking disputes at the agora because the relevant discoveries about emotion's role in reasoning and rhetoric, and language's ability to shape thought, wouldn't be made for another 2400 years, at Berkeley.

There is a lesson here, but it is not about politics. It's about the intellectual integrity of scientists, specifically mind-scientists, who wish to apply what they know across borders. Cognitive scientific ways of speaking help us understand things more deeply only if they reveal something new, or give thicker and richer texture to an understanding we already have. Lakoff's premise- that the Enlightenment portrayed us as perfectly rational- is flawed. What about Hume, who famously argued that we are fthinkers (remember "reason is a slave to passion"?), or Adam Smith, Rousseau and Voltaire, all of whom thought profoundly about the role of sentiment? It was Smith, in fact, who first distinguished empathy from sympathy.

Lakoff ends the book with this: "we are far more fascinating creatures than Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, J. S. Mill, and Rawls for instance- thought we were". Like most of the linguistic objects in this cacophony, this, as best I can tell, is just noise from neurons.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.

Focus on America - Delve into the science and technology questions facing the USA in our special report.

Owen Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina

NEUROBIOLOGY OF ADDICTION

Publisher: Elsevier's web site
By George Koob,

Molecular and Integrative Neurosciences Department , The Scripps Institute, La Jolla, California, USAMichel Le Moal, Physiopathologie du Comportement Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale Universite Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2 Bordeaux, France

Description Neurobiology of Addiction is conceived as a current survey and synthesis of the most important findings in our understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms of addiction over the past 50 years. The book includes a scholarly introduction, thorough descriptions of animal models of addiction, and separate chapters on the neurobiological mechanisms of addiction for psychostimulants, opioids, alcohol, nicotine and cannabinoids. Key information is provided about the history, sources, and pharmacokinetics and psychopathology of addiction of each drug class, as well as the behavioral and neurobiological mechanism of action for each drug class at the molecular, cellular and neurocircuitry level of analysis. A chapter on neuroimaging and drug addiction provides a synthesis of exciting new data from neuroimaging in human addicts – a unique perspective unavailable from animal studies. The final chapters explore theories of addiction at the neurobiological and neuroadaptational level both from a historical and integrative perspective. The book incorporates diverse finding with an emphasis on integration and synthesis rather than discrepancies or differences in the literature.

The Really Hard Problem

Meaning in a Material World
By Owen J. Flanagan

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

If consciousness is the "hard problem" in mind science—explaining how the amazing private world of consciousness emerges from neuronal activity—then the "really hard problem," writes Owen Flanagan in this provocative book is explaining how meaning is possible in the material world. How can we make sense of the magic and mystery of life naturalistically, without an appeal to the supernatural? How do we say truthful and enchanting things about being human if we accept the fact that we are finite material beings living in a material world, or, in Flanagan's description, short-lived pieces of organized cells and tissue? Flanagan's answer is both naturalistic and enchanting. We all wish to live in a meaningful way, to live a life that really matters, to flourish, to achieve eudaimonia—to be a "happy spirit." Flanagan calls his "empirical-normative" inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing eudaimonics. Eudaimonics, systematic philosophical investigation that is continuous with science, is the naturalist's response to those who say that science has robbed the world of the meaning that fantastical, wishful stories once provided.

Flanagan draws on philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology, as well as on transformative mindfulness and self-cultivation practices that come from such nontheistic spiritual traditions as Buddhism, Confucianism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, in his quest. He gathers from these disciplines knowledge that will help us understand the nature, causes, and constituents of well-being and advance human flourishing. Eudaimonics can help us find out how to make a difference, how to contribute to the accumulation of good effects—how to live a meaningful life.

About the Author
Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of Consciousness Reconsidered (MIT Press), The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them, and other books.
Home - The MIT Press

AN ENVIRONMENTALIST LOOKS

AT THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN
By Nancy Myers

There is something about what is happening now to global financial systems that brings out the gaper in me. You know, slowing down to look at the wreck. I am reading everything I can about crashing financial institutions, the arcane instruments they invented to bring about their own ruin, and the corrupt, wrongheaded, or oblivious politicians who looked the other way. Who is to blame? How did it happen? What is the story that most of us missed until it became all too evident?

Unfortunately, this is not just about investment banks and hedge funds; it is about all of us. The cliché is that "we" are Main Street and "they" are Wall Street. Actually, many of us are inadvertently or by some degree of choice living on both Main Street and Wall Street. My husband and I, for example, are in the ranks of the first victims of this train wreck: imminent and current retirees. We are, in fact, on the derailed train. We bought our tickets some time ago with our portfolio. How else do you prepare for retirement these days? Not only investment but speculation is all but required. We are both victims and participants.

As an environmentalist, I have been musing on the opportunities this financial crisis might present for our ideas. Many, like me, believe that this is a teachable moment and we are already pushing forward our agendas. Green jobs, the steady-state economy, responsible investment, comprehensive reregulation, and valuing natural capital are all being put forward as answers, or lessons, or ultimate solutions once we get past the current crisis. To read some of these recommendations go to SEHN's True Cost Clearinghouse and scroll down to the articles on "financial meltdown" and "financial bailout."

As for SEHN's agenda, as Guardian (UK) columnist George Monbiot wrote in a recent essay, "Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?" We at SEHN have more to say about economics, including challenges to the prevalent practices of discounting and cost-benefit analysis. More about that in coming months.

Nevertheless, for all our forward-looking and ethical plans, many of us are to a great extent participants in--and prisoners of--the economic systems that are now falling down around our ears. As individuals and as fund-supported NGOs, our investments are in trouble. The trouble is not all our fault and certainly has not been under our control. But that does not excuse us from examining it with clear and unbiased eyes. And then we must decide how we are going to turn the system around, so that our investments--where we put our wealth and what it does in and to the world--lead to wellbeing rather than destruction.

Our first task, however, is to understand what is happening and why. And therefore I hope you read the two excerpts below from an extraordinary, timely draft report just issued by a UK think tank called The Corner House. And then I urge you to read the entire, well-written report, which tells what we've been missing--the whole story behind the current mess. I've included just enough from the introduction to whet your appetite to read the report, and enough from the conclusion to tell you why this is so relevant to our work.

We've seen the story happening, from mergers and takeovers, to Enron, to the privatization of infrastructure like waterworks and the Indiana Toll Road, which runs two miles past my house, and now the biggest financial crisis since 1929. We've seen the story in pieces and haven't recognized it, perhaps because people who tell it--especially politicians and the media--are afraid to admit they really don't understand parts of it. If you read through the 60+ pages of A (Crumbling) Wall of Money: Financial Bricolage, Derivatives and Power you will understand more about the current crisis than either presidential candidate has let on so far, which is a bit scary.

Besides the two excerpts from this work in progress, consider this gem from page 60:

"Greed and fear are not given as the drivers for market behaviour as they have been --unless markets are organised to allow them to become so: solidarity and prudence are equally possible moral underpinnings."

And therein lies hope. With the mechanisms and consequences of greed and fear now visible all around us, we can roll up our sleeves and rebuild our society--and perhaps even secure our personal futures--on different values. Solidarity and prudence (there's the precautionary principle) are good starting points. That would mean investing in future generations, wouldn't it? Now there's a legacy to be proud of.
(Download the full text, fully referenced, here)

Science & Environmental Health Network
Precaucionary Principle SEHN

The Enemy Within

2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World

John Demos - Author

A cultural history of witch-hunting, from the Romans through McCarthy

The term “witch-hunt” is used today to describe everything from political scandals to school board shake-ups. But its origins are far from trivial. Long before the Salem witch trials, women and men were rounded up by neighbors, accused of committing horrific crimes using supernatural powers, scrutinized by priests and juries, and promptly executed. The belief in witchcraft--and the deep fear of evil it instilled in communities--led to a cycle of accusation, anger, and purging that has occurred repeatedly in the West for centuries.

Award-winning historian John Demos puts this cultural paranoia in context. He takes readers from the early Christians persecuted in Rome through the Salem witch trials, McCarthy’s hunt for communists, and the hysteria around child sex-abuse cases and satanic cults in the 1980s.

An original and fascinating look at the cultural, societal, and psychological practice of witch-hunts, The Enemy Within illuminates the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of “evil,” no matter what the cost.

Skeptic: Lectures WordPress: Caltech Lectures

Samuel Knight Professor of History

The Battle Plan

The following is the introduction to Naomi Wolf's new book,
Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

The summer before last, I traveled across the country talking about threats to our liberty. I spoke and listened to groups of Americans from all walks of life. They told me new and always harsher stories of state coercion.

What I had called a "fascist shift" in the United States, projections I had warned about as worst-case scenarios, was now surpassing my imagination: in 2008, thousands of terrified, shackled illegal immigrants were rounded up in the mass arrests which always characterize a closing society; news emerged that the 9/11 report had been based on evidence derived from the testimonies of prisoners who had been tortured -- and the tapes that documented their torture were missing -- leading the commissioners of the report publicly to disavow their own findings; the Associated Press reported that the torture of prisoners in U.S.-held facilities had not been the work of "a few bad apples" but had been directed out of the White House; the TSA "watch list," which had contained 45,000 names when I wrote my last book, ballooned to 755,000 names and 20,000 were being added every month; Scott McClellan confirmed that the drive to war in Iraq had been based on administration lies; HR 1955, legislation that would criminalize certain kinds of political thought and speech, passed the House and made it to the Senate; Blackwater, a violent paramilitary force not answerable to the people, established presences in Illinois and North Carolina and sought to get into border patrol activity in San Diego.

The White House has established, no matter who leads the nation in the future, U.S. government spying on the emails and phone calls of Americans -- a permanent violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The last step of the ten steps to a closed society is the subversion of the rule of law. That is happening now. What critics have called a "paper coup" has already taken place.

Yes, the situation is dire. But history shows that when an army of citizens, supported by even a vestige of civil society, believes in liberty -- in the psychological space that is "America" -- no power on earth can ultimately suppress them.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies." Understood in this light, "America" -- the state of freedom that is under attack -- is first of all a place in the mind. That is what we must regain now to fight back.
Read More
The Huffington Post

“Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11”

By Ann Fagan Ginger, Editor

What Is The Real Score In The "War On Terrorism"?

An Introduction and adjunct to the MCLI book "Challenging U.S. Human Rights Violations Since 9/11," to be published by Prometheus Books in April 2005. The book will contain 184 reports, which are listed in the Table of Contents, with the sources, for readers to think about, and perhaps use, in their work on the November 2004 election.

As a result of the actions by the U.S. Government after 9/11, what is the reality in the "war against terrorism" three years later? On July 13, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a report: "The information-sharing and coordination made possible by section 218 [of the PATRIOT Act] assisted the prosecution in San Diego of several persons involved in an al Qaeda drugs-for-weapons plot, which culminated in several guilty pleas. They admitted that they conspired to receive, as partial payment for heroin and hashish, four "Stinger" anti-aircraft missiles that they then intended to sell to the Taliban, an organization they knew at the time to be affiliated with al Qaeda." (Attorney General John Ashcroft, "Report from the Field: The USA PATRIOT Act at Work," U.S. Department of Justice, July 13, 2004)

Ashcroft did not mention that the conspiracy was actually with U.S. undercover agents who offered them the weapons.

This report from a Government official charged with finding the terrorists leaves a series of questions:

• How many alleged perpetrators of the acts of 9/11 have been charged and convicted of that crime?
• Have the reasons behind these terrorist actions been clearly spelled out?
• How many millions of people in the U.S. innocent of crimes were detained, lost their jobs, or had their lives disrupted?
• Did the loss of one hundred eighty thousand union jobs through the Homeland Security Department Act actually "ensure airport security"? Was security heightened as a result of repeated efforts to break militant labor unions and destroy the right to organize?
• When the Department of Defense demanded, and got, massive increases in the military budget, including funding for new types of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, did this increase homeland security?
• Did it increase homeland security when the DOD denied discharges to Service members who discovered they were conscientious objectors to war after joining the Service in order to get an education and "to be all you can be"?
• Is the country more secure because the Government has made major cuts in the budget for education, health and human services, medical care, battered women's shelters, federal courts, and for rehabilitation of parolees and first offenders?
• Is the United States more secure because 83,000 people were required to register with the Immigration Office once and 13,000 of these people were deported or face deportation?
• When thousands of foreign scholars and students had their academic work interrupted, or put to an end, although they were not even charged with any wrongdoing, did that help the war against terrorism?
• Did it help that the U.S. did not honor many of its treaty commitments to other nations?
• Did people in the U.S. feel more secure when, in December, 2003, the DOD announced that contracts for reconstructing Iraq after the massive damage by U.S. and UK bombing would be made only with corporations in nations that supported the U.S. war in Iraq? Did everyone agree to thus eliminating all contracts to corporations in China, France and Germany, among others?