a robot, i am not » united states

the two sides of Barack Obama

jritch — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 02:22:49 +0000

Much goes unsaid about momentum. So much so that two supposedly polar opposite politicians can take the helm of the Global Empire and still get stuck supporting the same decision infrastructure. There’s only one way this ship is headed, and it isn’t towards anything positive. John Pilger sums up my feelings about the current United States President quite well and the corporatocracy that is politics in modern America.

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Post tags: corporatocracy, politics, united states, video

evidence for America as a psychological ses pool?

jritch — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:12:43 +0000

Morris Berman’s latest post on his Dark Ages America blog summarizes all the prime information on why the United States is such a lonely place to live. My own experience is that the US is a psychological ses pool, perhaps this is a phrase that Berman himself used at one point or that I adopted from somewhere else. But the evidence remains. The entire post is a must read and touches on much broader subject matter but I’ll re-post the key points here:

In his book How Cities Work, Alex Marshall argues that we could have chosen the community solution over the individual one time and again in every area of American life, but that we almost never did that. The result, he says, is that “we live in one of the loneliest societies on earth.” Indeed, between 1985 and 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no one in whom they could really confide tripled. The U.S. Census for 2000 revealed that 25% of American households consisted of only one person; the figure for New York City was nearly 50%. No other society is as isolated as ours. There is a debt here, in other words, in terms of “shadow” material–material that is now knocking at our door. In his recent book, Come Home, America, William Greider writes that the cost of this tradeoff has been a great loss, such as “the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present.” He goes on:

“The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle curiosity, of learning to craft things by one’s own hand, and the satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation….If we could somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major political grievance of our time.”

And, I would add, a major social and psychological debt. Indeed, it goes way beyond this: the data of ignorance and violence for the United States, for example, are astounding. Nearly 25% of all the prisoners in the world are incarcerated in American prisons, and 24% of the adult population says it is OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals. Two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants are purchased by Americans, and in 2008 164 million prescriptions were written for these drugs. Nearly 60% of the population is sitting around waiting for the “Rapture” and the Second Coming; 45% believe that extra-terrestrials have visited the planet during the past year. Twenty percent think the sun revolves around the earth, and another 9% say they have no idea as to which revolves around which. Eighty-seven percent cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map. The United States ranks thirty-seventh among developed or developing nations in quality of health care. Etc., etc. As New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it just a few months ago, if we wish to talk about American exceptionalism, we should take note of the fact that the number of our prison inmates is exceptional, the quality of our health care is exceptionally bad, the degree of our social inequality is exceptionally acute, and public education has gone into exceptional decline.

The arena of U.S. foreign policy is also a classic study of spiritual debt, of oppressing, torturing, and massacring other peoples until they finally couldn’t take it anymore. What else was 9/11 about, really? Not hard to figure out, if you study the record of our political and military interference in the Middle East. The media suppressed any real coverage of Obama’s disavowed pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, back in 2008, but in fact the man was no fool: “When you terrorize other people,” he declared, “eventually they are going to terrorize you.” This is not rocket science; it’s just Newton’s Third Law of Motion—action and reaction. New York Times reporter Steven Kinzer said much the same thing in his book All the Shah’s Men when he asserted that there is a direct line from what the CIA did to Iran in 1953–overthrowing a democratically elected government and replacing it with a torture regime–to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Even Henry Kissinger understands this, having pointed out, a year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that “hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.” I could write a book about it, but inasmuch as I already have, let me pass over the subject of U.S. foreign policy and refer you to the work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, in particular his book The Broken Covenant. Looking around at what constitutes daily life in America–and this in the seventies, when it was significantly better than it is today–Bellah suggested that there was something karmic about it all: “our material success,” he wrote, “is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.” In the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush predicted that the nation “would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness.” The crash of 2008; the subsequent, actual unemployment rate of nearly 20%; the payout, by Wall Street firms, of $18 billion in bonuses in the wake of that crash; the ranks of the former middle class lining up at food banks and soup kitchens—all of this suggests that that day has arrived.

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Post tags: psyche, psychology, united states

much more than we know happening on the Gulf Coast

jritch — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:18:32 +0000

Documentary filmmaker James Fox recently tried to get some footage of the oil slick as it impacts the Gulf Coast beaches and found some interesting stories from the locals. James reports that people there are scared, being arrested and that there are evacuation vehicles on-site preparing for mass forced migrations. Of course, those migrations will be necessary if there are plumes of hydrogen sulfide washing ashore.

Listen to the interview and judge for yourself.

What we do know is that BP is hiring mercenaries to secure the coast of Louisiana. Wired has more info on the situation,

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Post tags: oil, peak oil, united states

a GOOD global oil consumption infographic

jritch — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:59:52 +0000

The infographic below does a good job at showing the scale of our predicament by comparing oil consumption in the US with the rest of the world. The United States consumes 19.5 million barrels per day. No amount of solar, wind or algae can replace that amount of energy. The only path to the future is using much much less.

[view the full image via Good]

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Post tags: consumption, peak oil, united states

living through a superpower’s collapse

jritch — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:34:23 +0000

Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov (2008, New Society)

If there’s one thing about the inevitable decline of the United States that gives me some bit of deeper comfort, its that people like Dmitry Orlov have been writing about it for a long time. His article, Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century was first released in 2005 and clearly Orlov had been thinking about superpower collapse for quite a while before then. Orlov strikes me as an unlikely yet inevitable product of our modern world, a lucky person cursed to find himself at the improbable intersection of circumstances where growing up in the Soviet Union (SU) allows him the context to truly observe the predicament faced by the United States (US). Dmitry’s background in the SU allowed him understand and interact with his homeland as it collapsed in a far more valuable way than any casual tourists would have been able to. His experience allows him to recognize and provide a deeper context on the similar process currently underway in the US.

Reinventing Collapse is the modern day Democracy in America, as valuable as de Tocqueville’s thoughts on life in America for our modern time, and what a different America this is. While de Tocqueville described an underorganized loosely affiliated and dynamic nation, Orlov describes a system barely able to sustain itself encapsulated by a populace bent on a particular definition of the American Dream mythos. A mythos that is out of touch with the fact that rapidly depleting cheap energy made car ownership, suburban life and basically everything we think of as “American”.

I was disappointed that Orlov does not offer specific suggestions for people who are “reinventing collapse” in Reinventing Collapse, especially since his 2005 essay, Thriving in the Age of Collapse was full of brilliant hypothetical scenarios which could serve as a jumping-off point for those acknowledging the United States as they knew it was rapidly approaching its dissolution. What is presented in Reinventing Collapse turns out to be some of the most accurate cultural commentary I’ve read on modern America. And I know it is accurate because it stung a little, while making me laugh. Broad generalizations made of the American peoples and psyche might be offensive to some but its hard to argue with their general accuracy. While Soviet schools had far fewer resources, they resulted in kids that knew much more general information and had better conceptual understand rather than a focus on exams. In my own schooling experience, even at my university, every student was filled with angst when a professor wouldn’t outline specifically what to study. When I had Russian professors, students complained that exams didn’t follow homework problems, testing concepts instead. Orlov concludes this is because schools in the US aren’t about learning, they are about institutionalization. Merely biding the time while kids enter the institution of prison, a corporation, the government or the workforce.

This book methodically makes the case that the SU was prepared for successful collapse far more than the US. And on this point, I have to agree with Dmitry. Most everyone in the US is deeply dependent on having a regular income. It would take a 9/11-sized event every month to compete with the national homicide rate. Our can-do spirit and career oriented mindset will be particularly vulnerable to extreme pain in the transition to a post-growth economy, where-as Russians thought that being someone who “works hard and plays hard” was a bit of a fool. Our pattern of migration uproots people from communities, although it makes us more open to strangers than the Russians. The private housing system and its surrounding sprawl make squatting and a nomadic lifestyle the likely viable options in the future. The conditioning of expecting a monetary exchange to obtain needs will be difficult to transition from but the good news is that a favor and barter economy will be more efficient than consumerism, we’ll get products and services customized to our personal needs.

Reading Orlov is like sitting down with a Russian to have a conversation about what life was like in the the collapsing Soviet Union. I’ve yet to find a more vivid and comprehensive description of what to expect when living through the decline of a superpower. Even if you aren’t sold on the idea that the US is going down, at the least, you’ll find the presented insights on the USSR entertaining and interesting.

Dmitry gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation last year on Collapse Best Practices , it was highly entertaining and summarizes most of the key points in the book. Thanks to @rjboyle for reminding me of the talk and suggesting that I should link to it in this post.

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Post tags: collapse, economic crisis, united states

how the world works(ed) in 10 minutes or less

jritch — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:00:44 +0000

The movie Network is full of amazing scenes. This is just one of them. “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT and AT&T, Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of today.

This video describes the mindset which has brought about the financial complexity which is unraveling at this very moment. Fortunately, I think this video also describes the world we are moving beyond and leaving behind.

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Post tags: corporatocracy, united states, videos

corporate media control has been happening for a long time

jritch — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:39:32 +0000

If you thought media monopolies were a recent thing, think again.

Congressman Oscar Callaway’s report to the US Congress in 1917 on JP Morgan’s plan for the media:

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached. The policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month, an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”

Just more evidence why truly independent media is the most important thing we can have. However, it is something we haven’t had for a long time.

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Post tags: history, journalism, media, propaganda, united states

worst campaign video ever?

jritch — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:44:07 +0000

Dan Fanelli advertises his stance on racial profiling as a solution to terrorism and in doing so represents everything that’s wrong with politics in the US,

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Post tags: politics, terrorism, united states, videos

we aren’t number one

jritch — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:57:48 +0000

Not sure why I’ve been so down on the US lately. Maybe because I feel like all the explicit and unspoken narratives that define the American mythos are completely out of touch with reality. One of those myths is that of the United States being #1 and “the best country in the world”. I think this is an obvious falsehood to many people from developed nations that visit the US however for most of the people that live under the Stars and Stripes, especially those who have never been to one of the many better countries, this is an assumption that’s nearly universally disseminated.

If I could sum up the United States: it is a nation of extremes. It does have some of the world’s best minds, talent and technology. It has some of the worst infrastructure, cities and wealth disparity, especially for developed nations.

Are we truly materialists if all the material junk we’ve got is so poorly manufactured and designed for obsolescence? The state of poverty and social cohesion should be an embarrassment to many but the fact that it isn’t is an additional disappointment.

Here’s one graphic which I found particularly telling,

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Post tags: infographic, united states

playground economics

jritch — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 03:07:44 +0000

it really is so much cuter when kids actualize multilateral trade agreements to fulfill IMF policy

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Post tags: economics, foreign policy, united states, videos