Herb Ruhs: If you’re so stupid, why aren’t you rich?

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From Herb Ruhs
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

Being the silly sort of fool that I am and blessed with masses of free time, I have spent countless hours over the last few years reading many thousands of pages of dense economic texts, listening to an endless series of podcasts and speeches on economic issues, perused innumerable blog posts and comments and diligently followed the words of numerous financial experts. My activities might seem a shade less foolish if I actually had any money of my own, beyond a diminishing monthly social security “entitlement,” but my labors have led me to the understanding that those who have money are the least likely to understand economic reality.

Growing up in an educationally disadvantaged social setting while exercising a little intellectual curiosity meant that I was always being assaulted by insults like, “If you are so smart why aren’t you rich?” I wondered about that too, still do. Half a century later I now understand that, contrary to the intuitive sense, the question we should be asking is, “If you are so stupid, why aren’t you rich?”

Money is a fascinating topic regardless of the frame used to look at it. Straight up economics is so complex and convoluted as to be the purest vein of bull feces ever devised. The anthropologists, with their cross cultural, archeological and historical perspectives tend to be the most informative about money (David Graber, Debt the First Five Thousand Years). The sociologists mostly seem confused on issues of value and economic behavior.

Herb Ruhs: The whole concept of debt under the assault of propaganda has gotten just silly…

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From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

I was surprised recently by seeing a notice at the top of my monthly statement from the Fort Brag Credit Union that they would not be accepting deposits over $5000 since no one was borrowing. Strange. A business that is discouraging business, but, as Michael Hudson points out in the accompanying article, in our upside-down economic world nothing makes sense. A relentless concentration of wealth accompanied by an overall decrease in wealth seems to be the culprit. History shows that this sort of cycle, which is sometimes referred to as “financialization,” is a routine end for hegemonic powers.

From the point of view of the topmost wealth aggrandizers it is just the beneficence of the system that allows general impoverishment to fuel oligarchy. Being rich means being right, and being richer means being more right. Bless his heart, GWB nailed it when he addressed a select audience as “my constituency, the haves and the have mores.” That really sums it up. The mechanics of the looting can be interesting in its own right and I routinely consult only three sources for enlightenment, Max Wolff, Michael Hudson and Max Keiser (RT Network).

Herb Ruhs: Extinction is an equal opportunity solution…

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From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

When the mobsters discovered that they could buy both the politicians and public opinion on a global basis, the way was opened for an astronomically sized securities swindle that is producing such incredible loot that the con can not be stopped by anyone… not by the participants, not by the victims and certainly not by the suborned governments. It is a juggernaut. A machine gone wild. It will continue to burn until there is essentially no trust and general violence, such as we are witnessing in Africa over the coltan trade, is the rule everywhere on the globe. Such action by international cooperation, as may have been crucial in saving us from climate catastrophe, will not happen.

Though the confidence artist devised the specific economic crimes, we need to face the fact that our destruction needs to be laid at our own doors.  Never before have so many fallen for a monster long con.  We have been had due to our incredible credulity, hence the incredible scale of the problems in the world’s economic and social systems that are producing the accumulating doomsday effects that informed persons become aware of on a nearly daily basis. To paraphrase Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s comments on the survivors of a nuclear war, the tremendous irony of the day is that the informed have come to envy the uninformed.

Herb Ruhs: Crime — The Substance of American Life…

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From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

For the last fifty years, based on actual personal experience in Viet Nam during the war and a young life in the sub basement of American society where I had plenty of contact with criminal minds, supplemented by a medical career caring for incarcerated youth (kids tell their doctor everything) and my work as a court qualified child abuse expert, I have been telling folks that we life in a fully criminalized society. Understandably I was discounted as some sort of kook, but I was really a Cassandra. Along the way I have compared notes with countless well meaning and honest folks who observed accurately what I was seeing but couldn’t bring themselves to connect the dots and believe in the tsunami of criminality that has now, finally, become apparent to almost everyone, but is still not understood in its entirety by the vast majority who cling to the comfortable fiction of law and order and individual rights.

Growing up as a homeless and abandoned child in the US and being related by blood to a variety of criminals, left me with a perspective on crime that I only encounter in folks with similar backgrounds, many of them incarcerated. One of the fringe benefits of being an American seems to be being entitled to ignore reality and choose any false reality that appeals. As acute observers of the current scene

Herb Ruhs comments on Religious and Corporate Cults…

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From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

[Herb comments on: Slamming the door on Jehovah Witnesses, et al....]

My sincere condolences for any and all people who suffer under illegitimate authority, be it religious, governmental, academic or any of the rest of the many sources for opportunity for sociopathic ambitious. When I was in private practice many physicians in Southern California banned Witnesses from their practices. My wife and I did not. OTOH, we would have a little talk with these families at the first visit to be sure they understood that if a conflict occurred with the church, around blood transfusion typically, then the matter would be promptly turned over to the courts to decide what to do. Witness families we dealt with were fine with this and we never, fortunately, had problems. You could never tell who was a Witness by seeing them in the waiting room, they were indistinguishable from the rest of our practice, and treated that way.

I am a closet totalitarian I guess. When I see organizations doing criminal and unconscionable things I want them stopped. That implies that

Herb Ruhs comments on Fukishima…

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From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville

Writers should consider that accurate information about what happened at Fukushima is impossible to obtain. The official versions are too full of holes to take seriously. This has become a property of essentially all “official explanations” about everything dangerous. There is some comfort that modern “perception management” (the euphemism for professional lying) with sophisticated science based methods, means that the truth is out there in the opposite direction. The inverse of revealed truth is most likely to be the real truth. Oh what a mess we have made!

In the meantime there are a lot of strange things to explain about what happened at Fukushima and what caused it. This was clearly not a Three Mile Island type failure. No explanation I have heard from normal channels explains how there was so much destruction, so much destruction that we are told it is impossible to investigate! Transparent lies abound. So we are left again to surmise an extensive cover up.

We all watched the tidal wave drown the town on endless youtube videos. What photos are available show an entirely different level of destruction at the plant than closer to the sea in town. The tsunami was more like a sudden flood than a wall of destructive water.

Herb Ruhs comments on George Carlin and Religion…

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From HERB RUHS
Boonville

Of course I love George, miss him terribly as one of the very few bright lights in my sky, but, again, taking what George says superficially can lead to all the wrong sorts of conclusions. What George is talking about is a sort of religion, what I call juvenile religion. It is dominant in our time because, under the influence of large scale hierarchical societies, most grown ups remain psychologically immature throughout their lives and therefore cleave to immature religious practice and belief. There really are very few situations in our society where an actual, fully formed adult person with fully developed mental capacities for critical thinking and personal insight, can openly function as adults. Organizations expel these people early in their careers. They also replace those exercising control over others, the natural place for the fully formed adult, with sociopathic individuals who are incapable of spiritual development, but are preeminent competitors.

The infantile level of spirituality sees the parent and other grown-ups in the circle of dependency as Gods. Then, amazingly early in life, small children realize their mistake and abandon the flawed and unreliable grownups as God figures and substitute an imaginary super-parent as God. It helps the mind of a small child to believe that there is a source of supreme power that is interested in their survival. Modern societies depend on the bulk of people being fixated at this level of development. More dangerous yet are those people who become fixated at the early adolescent stage where God is replaced by the urge to impregnate and get impregnated. This is the stage where Mammon becomes a focus. It is not so much that the person fixated at this early stage as the fact that nothing gets the girls like flashing signs of wealth and power. These people are very useful to the system of coercive hierarchy because, unlike those at earlier stages of developmental arrest (watch Arrested Development for graphic depictions) they can be very easily and usefully manipulated by trivial rewards of sex, drugs and money. These are the middle level managers of the system of oppression. This stage of development is intensely egocentric and therefore vulnerable to trickery and deceit through flattery and false promises. Now ordinarily there would be a level of chronologically appropriate adult people to watch over and protect those whose development is not yet complete. Hierarchical coercive societies, however, shun these appropriately developed folks and systematically prevent them from assuming their biological role. Consequently people who find themselves in this situation are frequently

Herb Ruhs Responds to Orlov…

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From HERB RUHS
Boonville

My condolences to everyone, especially those that read Orlov. Reality is not a pretty picture. In this period of human history it is natural that folks look for a diagnosis for our terminal disease. The mind demands to know WHY everything is so horrible. As a teacher in medical school and residency programs the greatest challenge was to ween people away from superficial thinking, thinking that confuses symptoms with causes. Any sufficiently dramatic symptom can lure the untrained mind into accepting it as a cause. Another confusing aspect of diagnosis is that many actual causes are not subject to treatment and ethical care is limited to treating symptoms to reduce suffering so symptomatic relief, no matter how brief, is demanded and definitive care rejected as too difficult. Continually suppressing symptoms and ignoring underlying disease is a dangerous path. This is our collective fate. We have become wedded to a survival system that is trending toward causing our extinction. Virtually everything we have been taught in our war-like culture, learned to observed as true and right, is actually wrong. Disaster is not so much a matter of scale as attitude.

If you imagine a fully developed, both physically and mentally, adult human, you are imagining the sort of person that made an early success of our species.  I am currently reading

Herb Ruhs Comments…

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From HERB RUHS
Boonville

Re: Fundamentalism and the Internet are Killing Religion

Granted, most of religion here in the US is just a massive nest of long cons roping in the marks. But so is every other institution society. Competitive and cutthroat is good, docile and agreeable bad (except for the subjugated ones where it is expected). This is the inevitable pattern of dominator culture (see intro to Riane Eisler’s Chalice and the Blade for accurate definition).

The basic frame of dominator culture is that life is a form of combat, in a variety of spheres, for the sake of conquest, subjugation, dispossession and exploitation. These are the ends that justify all the means, like formal religion and the centralized state. The dominator culture frame of reference is so fundamental to our thinking that its values, the tricks it uses to put us continually against each other, and every other smothering aspect of it, that it is invisible to us as we operate within it, like water is invisible to fish.

Fortunately, and unfortunately, societies governed by dominator culture are driven to expand, and in the process, they destroy themselves only to be replaced by another dominator culture society. This process has absorbed or obliterated every cultural frame. The relentless conquest and absorption has resulted now in a near homogeneous global society bent on self destruction for the sake of momentary gain. The future, if there is one for H. sapien, is going to be one where the survivors of the global collapse manage

Herb Ruhs: Comments on Stress posting…

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From HERB RUHS
Boonville

[Herb comments on the recent post Stress: Portrait of a Killer. Upcoming film from Transition Ukiah Valley Film Series this Fall, Urban Roots, addresses Herb's solutions...-DS]

The sick irony (as in sick joke) is that prolonged stress, like alcohol, disables one’s judgement leaving one even more susceptible to stress producing environments and behaviors. In the extreme, the individual, even the group or family or society itself, becomes addicted to stress because intermittent stress relief via drugs or other delusions is highly reinforcing. Another sick irony is that this stress driven culture has evolved a scientific establishment that can show us, in detail, how we are killing ourselves, our families, our societies and eventually, our entire species. I am muchly entertained. If you can’t appreciate cosmic humor and intense irony (two faces of the same phenomenon) all your suffering is going to waste. This is how this became the most interesting of times. Anthropology is especially useful in stroking the strings of irony. Over the last few millennia the stress addicted cultures have largely exterminated all gentle cultures they have come across, but isolated bits and pieces — like magically preserved items salvaged from a house fire — do exist, even here in the US. The ones I have come across are universally poor areas where people living largely at a subsistence level help each other. These places also uniformly lack resources that can be turned into global commodities.

Our thinking is perversely confined to individualistic considerations, which is driving all this. It is as if we have become socially blind and are stumbling around in the dark getting hurt and hurting others. Even worse is the suppression of that small part of the society that actually does have a social perspective. The Wobblies’ well known motto of a hundred years ago, An Injury To One Is An Injury To All, was driven into incomprehension by the public mind as scientific propaganda replaced actual reality with a toxic mimic of ever more carefully constructed webs of lies. This is what Winston’s friend in 1984 meant when he described the deliberate wounding of the public mind so as to make independent thought, critical judgement, and the direct apprehension of reality impossible for the vast majority and suppressible in Room 101 with scientific emotional torture. If divide and conquer is the basic strategy of oppression, then the logical extreme is that is each individual is divided from each other, thereby erasing the reality of society itself as Margret Thatcher asserted while claiming that there is no such thing as society. But more importantly, each individual is divided in herself, at perpetual war with her own intrinsic drives to connect. The slave master seeks a helpless slave. The message becomes, “Poison yourself. It’s good for you.”

Of course following these trains of thought and observation can be harmful to one’s mental health

Herb Ruhs: My response to ‘Marx For Bobos?’…

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From HERB RUHS
Boonville

[Herb responds to yesterday's article... -DS]

Less is more?

The rule of conquest, the basic operating system of this world for the last five thousand years or so, states that more is the result of taking from others. It is the rule of radical individualism promoted by sociopathic thinking, which, in turn, is promoted by actual sociopaths, who’s brains are wired without a conscience, who prosper and take control of the machinery of competition the better to prey on the weak who actually have our brains wired to allow for a conscience. For those for whom this is a new idea, please read The Sociopath Next Door.

No sustainable culture can successfully tolerate the elevation of these mental defectives to positions of power. The remarkable thing of our time is that the destruction and collapse routinely caused by the assumption of power by this segment of the population is now affecting the entire world rather than isolated cultures. Rome reduced much of the world under its control to a state of collapse, socially and environmentally. But this is true of all expansionist cultures which are all ruled by sociopathic individuals who transfer their diseased attitudes to the general culture and precipitate collapse. Only bottom up, complex and evolving systems of governance, sans ruthless competition, have any track record of sustainability. Marx and the early anarchists understood this fact of nature but remained under the spell of a fundamentally sociopathic world view.

How the Rich Screwed the Rest of Us

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From RICHARD D. WOLFF
Truthout

[This article deserves to be dinner table conversation.  What we are experiencing in the US, consistent with the historical behavior of empires, is a very successful organized criminal scam by a few to swindle the rest of us, dispossess us of any thing worth stealing (the mortgage fraud alone has impoverished millions) and so reduce us to basic survival concerns that we are even more easily disposed than in the past.  That is the whole US political narrative, and any attempt to divert peoples attention from this grand criminal enterprise is an effort, conscious or unconscious, to further enable the theft.  The US was a very rich country and there is still blood to be drained.  It begins to look, in these dark days, that the crime wave will continue until the country is bled white and dies a humiliating death. ~Herb Ruhs, Boonville]

How the rich screwed the rest of us: The astonishing story of the last few decades is a massive redistribution of wealth, as the rich have shifted the tax burden.

Over the last half-century, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. The three convenient and accurate Wikipedia graphs below show the details. The first graph compares the official tax rates

Herb Ruhs: Derrick Jensen and The Happy Doomer

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From HERB RUHS
Anderson Valley

I don’t know why I end up defending Derrick Jensen (Beyond Hope). He is pretty good at that himself.

What I observe is that folks who read Jensen enthusiastically uniformly fail to understand him and that those who react badly to him are understanding him at a level they are compelled to deny in their conscious thoughts. The things that we don’t like about ourselves annoy us most in others. I think of Jensen as like a real life Ender from Card’s novel Ender’s Game. Like Ender he is unavoidably flooded with reality while all around him are sleep walkers. Being awake while participating in “civilized life” can be excruciating and causes sufferers to flee to monasteries and hermitages, but some brave souls like Jensen choose to stay involved and end up calling themselves activist. No greater gift than from those who confront insanity directly.

Herb Ruhs: We have met the enemy and it is not us, it is our military

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From HERB RUHS
Anderson Valley

I am sure I have offended some with my writings by focusing on the reality and techniques of psychological warfare as if I was an expert.  I am not.  I have had a chance to look at some classified psychological warfare manuals of the US Army forty years ago.  That hardly makes me an expert, but why does that impeach what I have to say?  The emotional response of most people is denial when I insist that virtually everything bad we are experiencing in the US comes right out of psychological warfare doctrine and that, from my view, we are an occupied country under stealth military rule where democracy is a sham.  I can understand negative responses to that kind of statement.  If I hadn’t experienced psychological warfare first hand during my work as a civilian in Viet Nam from ’66 to ’70, I would likely have as much trouble understanding and believing what I have to say about the military’s psychological warfare program against the US population as any one else.  But alas, once one has seen the face of this devil, it can not be forgotten or discounted.

Therefore I was delighted this morning to find access to a document from Turkey that outlines their military’s failed psychological warfare plans against the Turkish people. You can view it here.  As you read the document

Herb Ruhs: Looting The Country

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From HERB RUHS
Anderson Valley

“…ensuring that government of the banks, by the banks, for the banks shall not perish from the Earth.” – from: In Money-Changers We Trust by Robert Scheer

This otherwise great article by Scheer is still pussy footing around the fact of a blatant, and not too concealed, financial conspiracy to loot the country and reinvest overseas by the wealthy of this country led by the banking industry.  The article does come close enough in its analysis and list of perpetrators for folks without blinders to see the general plan and conduct of the greatest looting in history.  US corporations are adding jobs faster than ever, only just not in the US. Looted money seeks a home to invest in and it is not here. I wonder if, a little down the road, it won’t be in the banks interest to just cut the umbilical and collapse the US dollar and do business in other currencies.

For the time being the only thing preventing a total financial abandonment of the nation that is the need for the Military to recruit soldiers in the US. With the current high unemployment of military aged individuals in the US that problem is temporarily solved. However, with its rampant contracting the US military is coming to depend on US recruitment less.  Lots of ruthless mercenaries looking for work out there, and the support services, always a large proportion of any force as compared to combat units, are already filled by non-US citizens.  So, if you count effectiveness in the way that was done throughout history to include support units, the US Army is ALREADY not a majority native US force.

Historically, when empires reach this point where foreign mercenaries outnumber citizens – in the case of Rome the “barbarian” legions, British the sepoys, Hessians, Gurkas, etc. –  the empire is overextended and doomed. The book Sorrows of Empire

Herb Ruhs: Time Running Out

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From HERB RUHS
Anderson Valley

Sixty five years ago, when I was born, the United States was seen as the white knight saving the world from expansionist tyrannies that believed in economic expansion by means of aggressive war and torture as instruments of state policy.  Now I must confront the exquisite irony, sixty five years later, that the United States supports aggressive war, the greatest of all crimes according to the Nuremberg Trials that saw the execution for this crime of some of the highest placed leadership of the Nazi regime, AND torture as legitimate policies of the state.  My parents and many of my relatives fought, some died, to rid the world of aggressive war and torture and it turns out that they fought and died for nothing.  An even greater irony is that the elder population by and large, in their moral confusion — which is the product of high tech propaganda — the survivors of that very same war to free the world of these things, now tend to support what they fought and died to stop.

Compassion dictates that we seek to alleviate suffering when we can, but where does compassion have a foot hold here? I guess it is a character weakness of mine, but I have a hard time being compassionate toward mass murderers and torturers and the clueless hypocrites that support them. I would like to be compassionate toward my country, fallen so far in the moral universe, but to what use?  Is there any evidence that this tide of depravity in the US can be turned? Doesn’t seem so, but I would love to be wrong about this.

On the other hand, I now have the opportunity to commiserate with those liberal and progressive elements of Weimar Germany that watched helplessly as their country turned into a mass insane asylum.  It is with great sadness that I am encouraging my children, and anyone for that matter who will listen, to emigrate NOW while

Herb Ruhs: Our Imperfections and Vulnerabilities Make Our Mutual Dependency Strong

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From HERB RUHS
Mendocino

I have been working on the growing insight that our imperfections are what makes our social groupings strong. Real humans feel best when deeply embedded (did the Army ruin that word?) in a dense network of mutual dependency. That only really works if evolution has equipped us with vulnerabilities that lead us to depend on others. No vulnerability, no society.

Try to imagine a society built of only Robinson Crusoes, fully self-reliant, hyper-libertarian types with no need for anyone else. Actually, we tend to have a form of that here in Mendoland, and it is why our society is weak and we find ourselves continually at the mercy of human predators, the lizzards in human skin to whom we give power over ourselves.

We are meant to find those individuals and groups that compliment our weaknesses, make us more whole. Instead we are taught to look for people as much like ourselves as possible and try very hard to never feel in debt to anyone, except possibly our parents. It is a terrible way to live. As a result we get all kinds of people who end up bad at what they try to do because they are continually trying to model themselves on “successful” people in order to gain acceptance. They end up trying to do things that they are least equipped by nature to accomplish. We have become a nation of conformist failures because we denigrate our uniqueness and treat our varying disabilities as shameful rather than the raw material of the social links we are meant to make in order for our social group to be stronger than the sum of its parts.

The current authoritarian conformist dominant view is like watching people trying to work a picture puzzle where all the pieces are alike and none fit together properly. Dr. Brown, “Connection, Shame, and Vulnerability” video, explains this concept beautifully in twenty minutes. Time well spent.
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Herb Ruhs: Beware the hospital

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From HERB RUHS, MD

As a physician I can hardly avoid facing the facts about health care, but I can understand why people would want to.  I get a lot of nervous laughter from folks when I assert that health care itself has become the third leading cause of death in the US behind cancer and heart disease.  But this assertion is chillingly true (http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm). Better I guess that people characterize me as a mere crackpot than feel the terror that is lurking behind their illusions.

People are also surprised to hear that it is the health care system itself that is causing shortened US life spans and bad infant survival rates.  In fact it is a credit to our highly effective propaganda system that so many refuse to believe that personal choices, “life style choices” as the propaganda sources like to put it, have essentially nothing to do with our nations plummeting health statistics. Few I speak to are prepared to go even further and identify the ROOT source of our discontents as our insanely increasing economic inequality, as has been shown in the recent book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger By Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett. What can I say? This is the desired result of our massively funded thought control system euphemistically call our mass media. Never have so many been so confused about what is going on.  We are witnessing (though by design most are unaware of it) a triumph of epic proportions in the long march of social engeering.

Consequently I was pleased to come across this report on the Medicare facet of the disaster that is American health care, “AHRQ: Rate of Adverse Events in Medicare Cases ‘Disturbing’” (http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/HEP-259160/AHRQ-Rate-of-Adverse-Events-in-Medicare-Cases-Disturbing#%23). The report has details of what sorts of things actually go wrong in hospitals and why. Folks who look through this with open eyes will come to the conclusion that our hospitals have become down right dangerous places to be sick in. Open minds will realize that it is not just Medicare that is spreading death and mayhem. It is the entire system from our decrepit public health system and the corrupt Federal agencies administering it, to the doctors office down the street. It is all bad for very logical reasons that are all political in nature. We are administering ourselves to death.

Only in a nearly perfectly propagandized society could such things go on without rage in the streets.  The propagandist must be so proud of themselves.
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Herb Ruhs: When will we stop the lyin’ and the denyn’

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From HERB RUHS
Mendocino

When will we stop the lyin’ and the denyn’ and face the fact that, in every way, in every time, and in every place, the monster that is SOCIAL CLASS is the source of virtually all of our societal afflictions. Eden is just beyond the door where we leave class behind as a means of ordering society. Rank is the rankest of the rank things that escaped, unnoticed in denial, from Pandora’s box.

In a recent book (on order for me at Laughing Books in Boonville) called Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Spencer Wells, described as “renowned geneticist and anthropologist” takes the position (at least according to the review at Google Books) that our current existential crisis began with the advent of farming and the abandonment of the hunter gatherer life style. With all due respect, if the review was accurate, (I love Wells’ work) I think he is wrong.  From my study I suspect that most of us would be quite happy as early Neolithic farmers on the periphery of the “great civilizations” where the sociopaths had already gotten a foothold and instituted mono-cropping of grains with coerced labor.

My understanding is that our decline began with the invention of class.  Our torment since that time has been the inevitable consequences of class. Class war, a concept that, for me, includes all aspects of class violence, economic, spiritual and educational, is our primary reality.  Those who advocate for peace yet ignore class as the engine of war are pursuing a illusion.

Much of what is taught in our universities about prehistory is bull. Most of what people think they know about our origins is conditioned by the rightist political views of powerful folks in the Academy. Fact is that our species had the brass ring in our hands at the end of a ten thousand year run of good weather following the last ice ages. We began our descent with the establishment of hierarchical institutions like religion,

Herb Ruhs: Tyranny

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From HERB RUHS
Mendocino

Tyranny: “cruel and oppressive government or rule.”

It is comforting for me to read Hedges’, in his article “How Democracy Dies: Lessons from a Master,”calling the current political situation one of outright tyranny.  For at least twenty five years now I have been doing the same as “tyranny” is the only term in English that generalizes sufficiently to describe the political situation in the US as I have viewed it developing.  Highly centralized command and control structures in civil society, the giant banks and corporations in our case, are the soul of tyranny. As Hedges points out eloquently, the success of such rule is dependent on people not clearly understanding its true nature until it is way too late.

On the positive side, tyranny is also a society wide learning opportunity.  Apparently it is difficult  to learn that you can never trust ambitious people – ever –  since they can not trust themselves to moderate their compulsive drive to control others.  Our Achilles heel is that we identify with our oppressors and predators vicariously.  Something small and dark in all of us wants to be free of fear by achieving dominance over other, weaker, people.

Worship of this grasping nature is not so much evil as it is primitive.  Small autonomous groups can work to sublimate and limit this “will to power” by encouraging identification with the group as the true agent of ambition. Large scale groups, societies, corporations, the military, organized

The paradox of middle-class aspiration

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From THE GUARDIAN
Thanks to Herb Ruhs

[This Guardian article is as cogent an assessment of economic paradox in the US as I have found. The paradox of middle-class aspiration:Is it the enduring myth of the American dream that persuades so many to support tax cuts they will never earn enough to enjoy? -HR]

Is it the enduring myth of the American dream that persuades so many to support tax cuts they will never earn enough to enjoy?

The generally accepted explanation of why many Americans, even those that are poor, are opposed to raising taxes for the rich is the enduring belief in upward social mobility or that they may one day be rich themselves. We still believe America is the land of opportunity. You can be born in the ghetto and rise to super stardom. A welfare recipient from a broken home may become president. But the truth is, for the vast majority of people, these dreams are out of reach and, in fact, the US actually has the lowest social mobility of any industrialised nation.

Is it the enduring myth of the American dream that persuades so many to support tax cuts they will never earn enough to enjoy?

One thing we can thank the Great Recession for is that it has finally drawn attention to the growing inequality in American society. Any study or report you care to look at leads to the same sorry conclusion: the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class are disappearing. These trends have accelerated since 2000, but they have been in place for decades; yet, a large percentage of people who are suffering as a result of the inequality seem to favour, or at least tolerate, the policies that perpetuate it.