Breaking the News

Note to the reader: The Professor is returning next post, so the All Housewife All the Time Show is coming to an end. I know you'll be devastated. (wink)


Professor J,

After spending all these months reading and discussing Hedges work along comes HBO on Sunday night and makes many of the same points in the monologue that fires The Newsroom's opening salvo. Since I know you've been a little busy and probably missed it, here's the clip:  

 

While browsing around other blogs and articles about this speech I found that those on the left were typically cheering and those on the right were calling it a speech about hating America, calling Sorkin an America hater, capitalism hater, and scoffing at the idea of the news being influenced by corporations, ratings, and shareholders. Seriously? Conservative bloggers use such terms as "Hollywierdos, refer to Jane Fonda (whose character hasn't been introduced yet) as a "commie," and accuse anyone with a different view of being delusional. Perhaps Sorkin  does intend to use the new series as HBO funded left wing propaganda, but to say that NONE of the things said or portrayed are accurate is delusional in its own right.


Just exactly where Sorkin got the statistics used by Daniels in the speech is a matter of some controversy. Where statistics come from and how they are skewed is always important information and a fair comparison can be made more difficult by a lack of a universal standard for some things. I didn't have time to fact check those statistics as of the time of this post so for the sake of argument let's just say they are mostly true. For an example let's use infant mortality which, according to the speech has us coming in at 178. According to the CIA World Factbook we're at 174. Statistics for this vary widely due to the fact that in the U.S. we try to save even the smallest, most premature baby who in many countries would be written off at birth. And whose numbers and rankings are we looking at? The CDC, WHO? UN? They are different.

Accuracy (in a television drama) aside, are conservatives really going to take issue with the idea of the decline of journalistic standards?

Much of the dialogue in the first episode centers around worries about how the corporate owners will react, and the lack of a search for truth in modern journalism. I couldn't help thinking that if Hedges was watching he must have been cheering (though he doesn't seem like the cheering type). 

You can read the Housewife's review of The Newsroom here.

I find it interesting that so many people equate pointing out deficiencies and failures with hate. I didn't think it was hate. I thought it was articulate disappointment. I thought it was mourning the loss of something. If a marriage doesn't work out you can mourn the loss of what was once good about it without despising the institution.The left/right argument he interrupts to give this little tirade is interesting in its uninterestingness. We've heard it all before. We've heard it so much we don't hear it anymore. It has become so much background noise in the national dialogue (the one we aren't having) that we are in such desperate need of. It's the he says/she says of American politics that keeps people from getting to the truth about what is really going on and makes it next to (or maybe really) impossible to see the truth. That is assuming that people care about something other than whose fault the last big screw up was and if it was "our" guy how we can spin it to make the other side look bad. What might really be good for the country rarely seems to be a consideration. 


How do you get people to want the truth? More than they want to be right. More than they want to be popular. More than they want to be comfortable. How do you do that?


Will "I was fighting the good fight."

Charlie: "How's it going so far?"

Will "Progress is slow, but I'm in it for the long haul."

This housewife wants to know--what's not to love about that?

The Dark Side

 Professor J,

Throughout this book Hedges lays out some hard truth. Isn't it interesting how often those words go together? 

I don't know what to do with the information Hedges relays on pages 179-180 except to quote it nearly in its entirety: 

Sen. Frank Church, as Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government's massive and  highly secretive National Security Agency. He was alarmed at the ability of the state to intrude into private lives. He wrote when he finished his investigation:

'The capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology...I don't want to see this country ever go across this bridge. I know the capability that there is to make tyranny total in America,and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return...'

At the time Senator Church made this statement, the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.

The military can be ordered by the president into any neighborhood, any town or suburb, capture a citizen and hold him or her in prison without charge. The executive branch can do this under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11 (oh the things we trade away for a false sense of security) that gives the president the power to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone involved in planning, aiding, or carrying out terror attacks. And if the president can declare American citizens living inside the United States to be enemy combatants and order them stripped of constitutional rights, which he effectively can under this authorization, what does this mean for us?..." (179)

The bad news continues on the next page:

"The specter of social unrest was raised a the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in November 2008, in a monograph by Nathan Freier titled Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development. The military must be prepared, Freier warned, for a 'violent, strategic, dislocation inside the United States' that could be provoked by 'unforeseen economic collapse,' purposeful domestic resistance, pervasive public health emergencies, or loss of functioning political and legal order." (180)

One has to wonder just what "violent, strategic, dislocation" might mean...

I'm currently reading the biography, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. It's a compelling work. Every decision we see him make, every truth sought, and every conviction held tightly is viewed with the end in mind. The tragic, violent end. Less than two hundred pages in and it is clear already that the driving force of his life was a search for intellectual and spiritual truth.

"...he was never what one might term today a cultural warrior, nor could he be labeled conservative or liberal...Anyone on the side of truth wherever it led, was a compatriot to be lauded."

I have a feeling we are going to need many, many people like that in the days to come.

This Is Your Brain On Fear

Professor J,

Credit: R. Kanai et al., Current Biology, 21 (26 April 2011)

Just when I'd promised the readers a skipping ahead plan for these posts, I'm taking a detour instead. One cannot be surprised. Maybe I can pull myself together in time for your return. But I had a few more thoughts about a recent interesting study in the news.

You can find the links to the articles mentioned at the bottom of this post.

A university recently did a survey, the results of which showed that people who watch Fox News exclusively are less informed that their fellow citizens and in the most attention grabbing statistic of all, were less informed than those who reported that they watched no news at all. Pretty shocking. Is the reporting and information dissemination on that network worse than any others? Worse than MSNBC is hard to imagine. And if you flip back and forth between news channels hoping to get something resembling fairness and balance, or even just plain old facts, you will notice that they are often covering the same stories, interviewing the same people, and in some cases if you listen carefully they are using the exact same words and phrases. That one always creeps me out.

So is Fox just the most abysmal news organization or is something else at work? The word "exclusively" for instance? The results of the survey may have more to do with WHO is watching than WHAT they are gathering from the information they receive. What kind of person is willing to get all their information from ONE source? And specifically from a source that arose out of a distrust of other networks. Someone of that mindset may avoid hearing other opinions and be more fearful of people with different views than others. Actually, according to a study at the University College London, conservatives tend to have a larger amygdalas than their liberal friends.

(Amygdala. Yes, yes, I know. Stick with me.)

Since the  amygdala is the area of the brain related to survival and it is where we register and process emotions such as fear, anger, pleasure and arousal I can't help but wonder if it is why lots of conservatives seem so angry. It may also explain why so many of those "family values" candidates have such a rough time staving off sex scandals.

What does all this mean? It's fun to sit around and speculate about how being open to new experiences leads us toward liberal thinking and fear leads us to red state consensuses. But it's less fun to imagine what some high stakes results of being wrong on one hand or the other might mean. Can we trust our own judgement? Imagine living in Germany in the thirties and watching Hitler rise to power. Were the fear mongers issuing frantic warnings just paying attention to the primitive parts of their brains? Were those willing to quickly adapt to new ways of thinking, facilitators who swept evil along? In the end history proved that there was much to be afraid of. Indeed few were afraid enough. Or was it the reverse? Were those backing Hitler the ones fearful of what might happen to Germany without radical change?  And what part of the brain is it exactly that can accept no more horrific rumors and opts out of reality with the excuse that one is just following orders? Were the demonstrators in Tienanmen Square freedom lovers who were open to new experiences and the fear mongers the defenders of the establishment and human rights violators? The "liberal" view in that case, led those brave protesters to fall on the right side of history, if on the wrong side of cell doors in many cases. 

The danger isn't necessarily in the fact that individual minds are pre-wired one way or the other. The danger is that people close them both to rational fears and new experiences. The Founding Fathers, supremely educated, well read, deep thinkers by today's standards (okay, freaking geniuses, by today's standards) embraced both kinds of thinking. It is perfectly reasonable to be afraid of tyranny and totalitarianism. But the courage to create a well thought out form of government, to give the world an ideal of liberty, to embark on the grand adventure of changing the world  and to drop a massive cornerstone of history into place required an open mind and the embrace of the new and unknown. They were prepared for the task at hand because they were above all else, rational, reasoned hopeful thinkers. A society can never have too many of those.

They did not assume evil intent on the part of those with a different ideology. As a matter of fact, they trusted each other to the point of pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They made this pledge though there were fierce differences of opinion on how to bring about a working government and sustain individual liberties far into the future, against the odds.

There is no more brave OLD world. Still, we must press on.

File under: Things to think about.

http://www.westenstrategies.com/pdf/newsweek%20-%20The%20Roots%20of%20Fear%20-%20Dec%2024%202007.pdf
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982211002892
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation 
http://theweek.com/article/index/228375/why-you-vote-the-way-you-do
http://www.inquisitr.com/241677/study-fox-news-viewers-less-informed-than-those-who-watch-no-news-at-all/

Village People

Note to our famously intrepid readers: Our good professor is out of pocket again so I'm going to get plenty of opportunities to skip ahead as far as I want. He may return to find us discussing another book entirely. ;)

Professor J, 

Here's what I was trying to think of during dinner: (Okay, so it isn't all that profound ;))
 
What happens in disaster/survival situations is that contrary to what is depicted by Hollywood, people actually behave quite altruistically, and much of the saving is done by those close by, such as neighbors, and not from the those outside, such as first responders, which may be slow in arriving. While you will always have the few who are only out for themselves and are willing to cheat or squander resources, studies show that the majority of people in worst case scenario situations are willing to work together and sacrifice to help each other.

One (of many) problem(s) I have with much of the conspiracy/survival mentality is that they sell (literally, as there is nearly always a product or endorsement of a product involved) the idea of survival for individuals and families. They are selling fear and paranoia instead of a real communal solution which would involve various skill sets in a local community. They are selling the illusion of a solution, one that is not sustainable. Who are these people who are going to sit on stockpiles of food and fend off hungry neighbors? What's the result of that behavior going to be when their personal supply of food runs out? It's interesting that much of this thinking is becoming popular among some Christians...Compare that image to one of a community of gardeners, carpenters, people who keep chickens or bees, the tinkerer who can fix nearly anything, the nurse, ham radio enthusiast, seamstress, teacher, owner of a large library, and talented cook.

You don't even have to ask who you'd rather live next to if the whole thing falls apart. Who would you rather live next to on an ordinary day?  There's a saying I like: "If you stay ready, you ain't gotta get ready." The result of strong, friendly, neighborhoods with diverse skills would be not just the ability to meet physical needs, but an underlying web of emotional support that will be essential. I suspect when necessary an amazing amount of resourcefulness would rise to the surface. Nearly no one panics in the way Hollywood depicts in disaster films, and even media reports during real crises tend to focus on bad behavior like looting, which isn't nearly as much of a problem as it looks to be when all the news crews are outside the one store where it is happening. The lead story is rarely the majority of people who are behaving well, if not admirably.

I'll meander back around to Hedges next time. Aren't you glad I couldn't remember my point? :)

Pulling the Strings

Professor J, 

 "What if our semi-sedated society is incapable of changing itself in time WITHOUT experiencing a mega-unravelling?" 

  Important question.


We almost saw in 2008 the beginning of the potential unraveling you think may be necessary. You could be right about that. At the time, when most Americas were completely unaware of the precariousness of the situation, it would have been mentally and emotionally devastating. The danger of letting the ship sink so we can build a better ship (to paraphrase Glenn Beck at the time) was that a majority of people were (and still are) psychologically unprepared for the series of events that would follow. Our lives are ones of such ease that being stuck in rush hour traffic is something many can't cope with. The realization that entire systems could collapse is at least something that people are aware of now, however vaguely. That idea had probably occurred to few before. 

Entertaining thoughts about that is a healthy first step. Thinking how a worst case scenario might be handled is empowering. Unfortunately I think you may be right about it having to come to that. As you pointed out at the end of your post people will put up with quite a lot, overlook red flags, and willingly ignore warning signs to retain some semblance of an ordered and comfortable life, the life they once knew, up to and including, boarding a cattle car.

Side note: To harken back to an earlier point in the book, I wonder how many optimistic/positive thinking Jews thought that each new injustice would be the last one and that they could adapt? Those fleeing while they had time were most certainly observant realists with little hope for improvement in the situation. 

Modern life seems to carry with it something akin to the fog of war. The fog of routine, or accumulation, the fog of distraction. It keeps us from seeing clearly, and in an age of instant communication, from putting information together in a way that gives us a clear overall view of the battle at hand.  So yes, while we would hope that people could be educated into unplugging their own matrix connections, it is highly unlikely.


One result of the trend of people wanting to learn HOW to do things that I've harped on before (which we could categorize as education) is that the level of self reliance in a community goes up. Those skills learned out of a for a hobby or interest in some trendy activity may be invaluable during a "mega-unraveling." This kind of education won't lead directly to change but is likely to make surviving the matrix unplugging more likely and tolerable. It is complete dependence on the corporate matrix that will keep people fearful enough to continue to be complicit in their own imprisonment. When every single thing we need/use is provided by a corporation it creates powerlessness and dependence.

Worst Case Scenario Girl was especially struck by everything Hedges quotes and says on p. 179 and much of it goes along with my previous comments and yours. I'm not going to skip ahead to that just yet however.

On page 175 Hedges attacks the press and other groups as courtiers, whose role he says is to "parrot official propaganda."

"The rise of courtiers extends beyond the press. Elected officials govern under the pretense that they serve the public, while, with a few exceptions, actually working on behalf of corporations. In 2008, a Congress with a majority of Democrats  passed the FISA bill, which provides immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance over the previous six years. Such a bill endangers the work of journalists, human rights workers, crusading lawyers, and whistle-blowers who attempt to expose abuses the government seeks to hide."

"We trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us in the name of journalism. We trust courtiers in our political parties who promise to fight for our interests and then pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and abuse. We confuse how we are made to feel about courtiers with real information, facts, and knowledge. This is the danger of a culture awash in pseudo-events." (176)

Throughout the last chapter Hedges seems to echo your question about whether there is a path we could take at this point that could avert an all out crisis and bring things back under control short of something akin to anarchy. The author doesn't appear to hold out much hope for such a solution. Massive amounts of unvarnished truth would be necessary.

If we could get the media to give us the truth, I wonder if they wouldn't deliver it doing a Jack Nicholson impersonation. Could we, as a nation, handle it?

We probably won't get a chance to find out the answer to that one...

In Our Name

Madame:

I think that will be the name of a future book, and I thank you for it, especially for relating Dan Rather’s comments to that effect.

When one travels abroad, it often becomes apparent how much the U.S. is detested for a number of things.  The good accusers make a distinction between Americans and their government, as in they like Americans generally, but despise what our government and its connected corporations do.   What they do IN OUR NAME, which in turn often gives we the individual people a bad name.

When “reporters” merely parrot official propaganda or the ideological drivel of one or more of the parties, they are doing the opposite of serving us the people, and they are certainly no check on power.  And forget about keeping us “informed.”

Good first thread!  Personal responsibility is a necessary first step.  A question is how much they can do that if they are knowingly (and probably unknowingly) plugged in and subservient to the Matrix that has been fashioned.

I believe we also need to first be more determined than the elites, and then only when a critical mass is established that way can change come, when the outnumbered elites and their vehicles—parties, corporations, media, etc.—are bent to the people’s will.  But what is the people’s will is a problem.  We cannot seem to stay focused, let alone with effective consensus, on much of anything.  And how to educate people to be more than drive-by citizens (low-information voters) is a big challenge.  A bigger one is how to get emotionally influenced citizens to listen to voices of reason instead of those emotional triggers that are used to manipulate them.

You hit the pinpoint nail on the pinpoint head about getting the denizens of this hyper-individualistic society to recognize and act on the common good.  It flashes momentarily in times of momentous crisis, but is usually mismanaged even then.

Since we are cascading with our interlocking and inter-affecting problems, if we are to have any chance of reversing and solving that volatile and complex mixture, perhaps we should not try to unravel carefully.  What if our semi-sedated society is incapable of changing itself in time WITHOUT experiencing a mega-unravelling?  A bit anarchic to say that, I know, but I do sometimes wonder if we have become a land where the irrational/emotional, the apathetic, and the lotus eaters (diversionists) are too big a majority to turn around.  Hmm.  I don’t know.  Something for me to consider further.   I would LIKE your call for education to be the answer, yet in an endless tsunami of dense information and misinformation, how that would be effected is problematic.  As the elites and corporations have demonstrated, the more ready route is to emotionally manipulate and divert, not to educate.  You and I want the struggle to occur in the arena of ideas, but that has in too many cases been bypassed.

The corporations and those who run them or own them have most of the cards in this American hand.  “These corporations have no loyalty to the country or workers. Our impoverishment feeds their profits.  And profits, for corporations, are all that count.  The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good, or the impact of the corporation’s activities on the environment.  Corporation by-laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make the largest profits possible for shareholders.  A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefit, that protects workers’ rights, that invests its profits to limit pollution, that gives consumers better deals, can actually be sued by shareholders.” (162-163)

Corporations weaken our bodies, our minds, our energies by their food, drink, drugs, and diversions, making us docile, obedient, listless serfs who think we are free.

They create a climate of disconnected exploitation, where the true owners and stewards of the social good (us) do not feel or react when that good is destroyed.   “The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” one enlightened CEO says. (Hedges, 163)

Corporations have psychopathic traits of deceit and callous unconcern for others, and yet we the people grant or acquiesce to their powers.  Hedges wrote the following BEFORE Citizens United went into effect: “Under the American legal system, corporations have the same legal rights as individuals.  They make contributions to candidates.  They fund 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation and defang regulatory agencies.  They saturate the Internet, airwaves, newspapers, and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. A few media giants control nearly everything we read, see, and hear.”  They have huge legal teams to fend off lawsuits that make it through their paid for legislators and “regulators.” (163-164)  Albert Einstein in 1949 predicted this oligarchy would happen that would make a lie of capitalist-democracy; indeed, it had already begun in his time (see Hedges’ quote of him on 164).

And yet we refuse to see, or if we see, refuse to believe, or if we believe, refuse to confront reality.  The net effect is that we do little to nothing. 

And to think this is the same people that derided the Jews for “marching so docilely into the detention camps.”

This Just In

Professor  J,

How very superlative! With masculine endings even! ;) I should probably have opened with Professorius Supremus.

Yes, of course you are correct in pointing out that availability of healthy food is often a problem in certain areas, particularly in the inner city. And we see nutrition, exercise, and an interest in healthy living move more and more to the forefront as education and incomes rise. HBO recently aired a great documentary on the subject. The Weight of the Nation is worth watching in its entirety but part 4: Challenges is closely related to the point you were making in your last post. Other forces are at play as well. A recent study showed a connection between babies born by C-section and obesity.  While lots of things are pulling at us (and the HBO doc does an excellent job of exploring them) I still can't let parents off the personal responsibility hook when we see so much of the problem in areas where families are not stranded amid bad choices.

Did you see that Mayor Bloomberg is tackling the sugar addiction in New York? His proposal would ban extra large versions of sugary drinks. We'll see how that goes.

Hedges explains further what has happened to the press on p. 170 after quoting an exchange between John Stewart and Jim Cramer (host of Mad Money on CNBC):

" Cramer, like most television and many print reporters, gives an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same time they pretend they have vetted and investigated the claims made by those in power. They play the role of television journalists. It is a dirty quid pro quo. The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down, reporters--real reporters--are cast into the wilderness and denied access."

In Dan Rather's book which I quoted last time, he lays out the close connection between the corporatization of the news, the need to secure licenses and permissions from the government, and the move away from digging for the truth.  He spends a good deal of time reiterating the fact that uncovering the truth is the point  of journalism no matter how unpleasant the results may be. And he relates some stories he's covered where the results were unpleasant not only for the country but for him personally. At one point he refers to real journalism as a "public service."

"What mattered was getting to the truth, or as close to the truth as humanly possible. The public's right to know--our right to know--what was being done in our name, in our country's name, was paramount."

More paramount than getting invited to scintillating cocktail parties and gaining access to power players and celebrities? Not anymore according to one of Rather's cohorts.  Last month on Meet the Press we saw Tom Brokaw take issue with the White House Correspondents Dinner:

“Look, I think George Clooney is a great guy. I’d like to meet Charlize Theron,” he said. “But I don’t think the big press event in Washington should be that kind of glittering event where the whole talk is about Cristal champagne, taking over the Italian Embassy, who had the best party, who got to meet the most people. That’s another separation between what we’re supposed to be doing and what the people expect us to be doing, and I think that the Washington press corps has to look at that.”

The event “separates the press from the people that they’re supposed to serve, symbolically,” he said. “It is time to rethink it.”

Back to Hedges:

"The most egregious lie is the pretense that  these people function as reporters, that they actually report on our behalf. It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt. Many media workers, especially those  based in Washington, work shamelessly for our elites. In the weeks before the occupation of Iraq, media workers were too busy posturing as red-blooded American patriots to report. They rarely challenged the steady assault by the Bush White House against our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. The role of courtiers is to parrot official propaganda." (175)

Oh, I have to go first in the thread unraveling? Okay. I'll make a tiny start anyway...Answers, real answers are not going to come from the top down. They are going to come from the bottom up. Hedges makes this point for me in the book. But we aren't going to get any real solutions in any kind of collective way until we own responsibility for ourselves. Self education, awareness, and tenacity are going to be necessary to free us from our mental slavery and old thinking. We cannot expect someone else to rescue us from our individual prisons of old thought, mindless action...paralyzing inaction. Change must start with us being the people we'd hope to be.

A community is  a collection of individuals, so is a nation. If the old adage that "all politics are local" holds true then it may also hold true that all change is personal. We have a unique national mentality that is well suited for blazing trails in the wilderness and imagining and inventing. It is, however, a bit of  a liability when it comes to get people to see that they are connected in both large and small ways.  The impact of individual decisions and actions on our communities, local and national, are rarely thought of. Education about that might be a first step.

Oh, I had no doubt you still had much to say! ;)

Vapors

Madamest Maximus Supremus:

Forgive my poor Latin. :)

The questions your discussion group asked are exactly the ones we need to ask ourselves—in many months and perhaps years of forging consensus.  Twice now we have attempted—understandably feeling an urgency because it is eating the country—to move forward without first airing all and achieving effective consensus (full consensus is probably not realistic).  And twice the effort has been sabotaged or diluted, diverted, or corrupted (although the 2700 page law does contain some beneficial and needed things that improve on the present situation, it also contains more than a fair amount of, shall we say, excessive benefit for major players in the sickness industry; our readers can decide for themselves whether that means the law is fatally flawed compared to the present situation.  Of course, maybe the Supremes will decide part or all of it for them).

Yes, some food/healthcare/education issues of children lay largely at the doorstep of ignorant, uncaring, obstinate, or selfish parents.  Yet sometimes those parents have limited and/or poor options.  Poverty and/or long hours at poor paying jobs are cycle-repetitive and daunting enough, but then sometimes parents do not even have access to good and healthy foods (it is more common in some areas to live near multiple terrible fast food places than it is to be near even a basic grocery store, let alone one with healthier foods).  And even when good foods can be found, they may not be affordable.  And where the magical combo of availability and affordability exists, the parent(s) has to find the preparation time while coordinating multiple schedules—a product of not only our overscheduled and frantic society, but also the fact that the society is a hyper-individualistic one, meaning that the nuclear family is largely on its own continually to do everything from child care to transportation to basic daily/weekly tasks the family requires to function.

Yet you are correct that we have transformed the country far too much into one centered on cars, fast food, and sedentary entertainment.  You don’t solve a whole lot if you swim upstream against that.  And if much of our food is either nutritionally near-bankrupt, or actually even makes us less intelligent and/or less able to reason, we are slaves, serfs, or cattle in far more ways than we might realize.

No one has ever advanced a convincing argument to me about why Congressional members are NOT required to be part of whatever laws, systems, etc. they pass.  There’s another Constitutional amendment sorely needed, but that would be one of the trickiest of all to get.

You (and Hedges) have brought up many good points about corporations.  We so desperately need a radically different set of rules and relationships about them, so that, if they go on existing in something like their present forms, they serve the society instead of us serving them.

The myths we put forward to exalt ourselves and divert us from our true internal adversaries trumpet an America that in many respects no longer exists—and yet, we in our illusory culture—either do not recognize or do not acknowledge, or if we do, we blame each other rather than the puppeteers.

Which loose thread to pull first and how much do we want to unravel?  I have no hesitancies in tossing answers into the ring, but am more interested in hearing Madame’s ideas first! :)

Addressing your second post (my Mem Day post put me behind, as you know), I do indeed hear those Don Henley lyrics. :)

The press/media is vaporizing as a check on power or a source for the people to keep their creatures—governments and corporations—under control and doing their bidding, rather than the other way around.  We in political science like to blather about the separation of powers—between the executive, legislative, and judicial at the national level, and further subdivided between the national and state and local governments (the transformation of all that is a can of worms discussion for perhaps another time).  Yet, as you say, we give short shrift to the Framer’s additional check—a vigorous and probing press.  With corporations and plutocrats increasingly controlling in some fashion all three national branches and much of the state and local governments, the steady evaporation of investigative media is yet another undermine to the foundations of the republic.

Hedges brings up one example of what not having a free and investigative press/media does (or does not) when discussing how much of what we spend on “health-care” really goes to administrative “costs” that hide the reams of money that corporations make: “(T)he reality of the health-care system is never discussed because corporations, which fund the main political parties, do not want it discussed.” (157)

An info-tainment media isn’t going to give us what we so very much need: “(I)n a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters.  NAFTA was great if you were a corporation.  It was a disaster if you were a worker.” (158)

While I have some disagreement with some of Hedges’ assertions about welfare reform, I do not doubt that society reached for a solution without thinking it through (we are infamous for doing that, repeatedly).  We swelled the already burgeoning prisons, for this and other reasons: “We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.  The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.” (158)  We blithely accept such a statistic, instead of looking at ourselves about how sick a society we must be, and also, who is profiting from all those people behind bars (there is a good book by Cornell West and Tavis Smiley that touches on this heavily)?

Democrats were no strangers to gutting financial regulation and speeding up the Wall Street casino, and many of those are in charge or in positions of influence today.  This, Hedges shows, demonstrates how we in reality have a corporate-state with 2 factions.   Yet we embrace illusion, thinking we will somehow make it when legions fall down the economic ladder around us, becoming in complete denial that you can’t have your American dream, as Robert N. Bellah says, if you live in a society that isn’t worth living in.

“The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by the corporate titans.  It is being paid on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing towns, and in depressed rural enclaves.  The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated  sets of statistics….or on the absurd utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals.  It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.” (158-159)  Swelling legions, Hedges says, that are impoverishing whole classes of people, but without us wanting to believe it, and with many having nowhere to go and nothing to realistic hope for.  There is always money—our taxpayer money or borrowed money—to bail out the criminals who run (ruin) things the way they want to make their obscene extortionist profits, but there is little to nothing "available" to help the man and woman of Main Street.

Worry not Madame.  30 pages of the book left, and I have much to comment on!  Shocked, I know! :)