Psyche, Science, and Society

James Carroll: Labor’s Failure

For Labor Day, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll writes of:

Labor’s Failure

by James Carroll

LABOR DAY can seem like a holiday that belongs to another era. That is not because the trade union movement is no longer relevant, nor does the impulse to honor work and workers ever lose its importance. But the word “labor” once defined an entire culture, with its “names, battle slogans, and costumes,” in Karl Marx’s phrase. Where did it go? The labor movement had its symbols, from politically charged clothing to badges to the holidays in May and September; its structures, from picket lines to unions to worker-owned insurance companies; its rhetoric, from the manifestos of agitators to the leaflets of organizers to the songs of Woody Guthrie; its ethic, defined as solidarity.

Millions continue to hold membership in unions, which continue to protect the rights of workers, but the triumph of the labor movement consisted in its becoming a feature of a social landscape that is taken for granted. It was nifty when workers’ apparel - blue jeans - and equipment - pick-up trucks - became items of upper class fashion, but the shallow victory implied a substantial defeat. Labor stopped being a force for political change, much less for social justice. What happened?

The 19th-century dream of a workers’ vanguard leading to a better world was both betrayed and realized, and in each case, labor was undercut. The betrayal occurred when tyrants, in advancing the cause of “the people,” actually advanced themselves. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” turned out to be mere dictatorship. Yet the discrediting of the vision of Karl Marx by the 20th-century communisms that claimed him does not vitiate the original vision. Echoing what Mahatma Gandhi once said of Christianity, Marxism has yet to be really tried.

The realization of the workers’ dream occurred, across the same decades of the 20th century, when regulated capitalism made its adjustments, and a vast population of working people was able to lay solid claim to the middle class. But affluence had an inherently co-opting effect, as was powerfully displayed during the American civil rights movement, when the labor virtue of solidarity was trumped by racism, and union members mostly found themselves on the wrong side of history. The curious phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” saw workers recruited into a reactionary political movement that undercuts their own interests.

Meanwhile, the human significance of work was undergoing a massive cultural mutation, as traditional industry gave way to high technology, skill to mechanization, manufacturing to information, and economic nationalism to globalization. Marx worried about the control of the means of production, but what is control when the factory is replaced by the keyboard as the center of invention? For 200 years, “capital” was decisive, but then along came “intellectual capital.” Goodbye borders. Goodbye regulation. Welcome to the free market, a free-for-all that destroys freedom. The very conditions of transcendent inequality that gave rise to the labor movement in the first place are now being rapidly re-created on a global scale, with unions reduced to the role of sputtering kibitzers.

In the United States, the most revealing failure of the labor movement to live up to its foundational ideal involves labor’s role as a pillar of the military-industrial complex. The engine of the American economy is defense spending. For two generations, but especially since the end of the Cold War, the nation has cannibalized itself by investing its best minds and most of its treasure in a profoundly counterproductive military establishment.

Usually this is blamed on the so-called “iron triangle” of corporations, Congress, and the Pentagon, which keep trillions of dollars circulating through the unbroken loop. But the labor movement has long been an essential part of this corrupt system, with union lobbyists playing their crucial role in keeping the lucrative defense contracts coming.

What would have happened at the end of the Cold War, when the expected “peace dividend” might have rescued education or rebuilt the nation’s infrastructure, if union leaders, backed by the grass-roots labor movement, had demanded an end to the Pentagon boondoggle? The conversion of a military-based economy, serving no real purpose beyond its own enrichment, to an economy of authentic productivity would have transformed foreign policy in the nick of time (no war in Iraq), and provided resources for homefront infrastructure (no failed dikes in New Orleans, or collapsed bridges in Minneapolis).

It did not happen, for a lot of reasons - one of which is the hollowed out commitment of a movement that should have known better. What this nation needs is a revitalized reason to celebrate Labor Day.

Add comment September 3rd, 2007

In Iraq, poor women forced into prostitution

A long time ago, I first wrote of the specter of prostitution in Iraq. Evidence is now emerging that, like many countries in conflict, many poor women are being forced into prostitution, either by economic means or by force. Aljazeera sadly reports on the rise of prostitution:

In Iraq, sex is traded for survival
By Afif Sarhan in Baghdad

When Rana Jalil, 38, lost her husband in an explosion in Baghdad last year, she could never have imagined becoming a prostitute in order to feed her children.

A mother of four, Jalil sought out employment, but job opportunities for women had decreased since the US invasion.

She begged shop owners, office workers and companies to hire her but was treated with what she calls chauvinistic discrimination.

Within weeks of her husband’s death, a doctor diagnosed her children with malnutrition.

Fighting tears, she recalled the desperation which led her to the oldest profession: “In the beginning these were the worst days in my life. My husband was the first man I met and slept with, but I didn’t have another option … my children were starving.”

She left the house in a daze, she recalled, and walked to the nearest market to find someone who would pay her for sex.

She said: “I’m a nice-looking woman and it wasn’t difficult to find a client. When we got to the bed I tried to run away … I just couldn’t do it, but he hit and raped me. When he paid me afterwards, it was finished for me.

“When I came home with some food I had bought from that money and saw my children screaming of happiness, I discovered that honour is insignificant compared to the hunger of my children.”

Iraqi widows desperate

Prior to the US invasion, Iraqi widows, particularly those who lost husbands during the Iran-Iraq war, were provided with compensation and free education for their children. In some cases, they were provided with free homes.

However, no such safety nets currently exist and widows have few resources at their disposal.

According to the non-governmental organisation Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), 15 per cent of Iraqi women widowed by the war have been desperately searching for temporary marriages or prostitution, either for financial support or protection in the midst of sectarian war.

Nuha Salim, the spokesperson for OWFI, told Al Jazeera: “Widows are one of our priorities but their situation is worsening and we are feeling ineffective to cope with this significant problem. Hundreds of women are searching for an easy way to support their loved ones as employers refuse to hire them for fear of extremists’ reprisals.”

She said the NGO has documented the disappearance of some 4000 women, 20 per cent of whom are under 18, since the March 2003 invasion.

OWFI believes most of the missing women were kidnapped and sold into prostitution outside Iraq.

Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the ministry of women’s affairs says that there are at least 350,000 in Baghdad alone, with more than eight million throughout the country.

Bitter trade

As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters.

Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to “shop” for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children.

He told Al Jazeera: “I’m sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones.”

Abu Ahmed had been initially approached by Shada, the alias of a woman living in Baghdad, who sought young women for Iraqi gangs running prostitution rackets in neighbouring Arab countries.

She told Al Jazeera that her role was to convince young women from impoverished families that a better life awaited them beyond the country’s borders.

She said: “Families don’t want them and we are helping the girls to survive. We offer them food and housing and about $10 a day if they have had at least two clients.”

“Our priority is virgin girls; they can be sold at very expensive prices to Arab millionaires.”

Shada said she sleeps in a different house every few nights as armed groups have marked her for trial and assassination.

Escape from Jordan

OWFI’s Salim says cases like Lina’s have become very common as poverty is increasing in Iraq and desperate families sometimes sell their daughters for less than $500 to traffickers.

But increasingly, young Iraqi women arrive in neighbouring capitals to find that prostitution carries a heavy and dangerous price.

Suha Muhammad, 17, was sold to an Iraqi gang by her mother, herself a prostitute, after her father was killed.

When she arrived in Jordan, she was gang-raped by four men who told her they were teaching her the tricks of the trade.

She told Al Jazeera she had been sold to a gang that caters to VIPs in Syria and was often shuttled to Amman, the Jordanian capital, for high-profile clients.

After six months, she escaped: “I ran away and an Iraqi family helped me by driving me to the immigration department where they helped me get a passport to return to Iraq.

“My aunt is now taking care of me in Baghdad. She never imagined that my mother could sell me, but unfortunately women in Iraq are not important and respected.”

Traffic

Mayada Zuhair, a spokesperson for the Baghdad-based Women’s Rights Association (WRA), said Iraqi and Arab NGOs are trying to monitor the trafficking of young women from the war-ravaged country to neighbouring destinations.

She told Al Jazeera: “We are trying to find out the fate of many widows and teenager girls who were trafficked. Unfortunately it is not an easy process and without international support, funding, and resources, we fear more young Iraqi women will be taken abroad to work in the sex trade.”

In the meantime, however, prostitution remains the only option for Nirmeen Lattif, a 27-year-old widow who lost her husband in an attack on Shia pilgrims south of Baghdad.

When she turned to her husband’s relatives for financial support, they could not afford to help her.

She says she tries not to think of the gravity of what she does or the dishonour it carries in conservative Muslim society.

“I think of my children, only my children; without money we starve in the streets.”

3 comments August 15th, 2007

Lead poinsoning and crime rates: The case for public health as public safety

This is a topic about which I have no special competence. But, like other social researchers and citizens, I have been puzzled by the dropping crime rate. Many theories have been proposed, but none has seemed to really explain the phenomenon. Now the Washington Post brings news of a little-know theory with, evidently, strong empirical support: crime rate reflects the lead poisoning rate 20 years earlier:

Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity
Data May Undermine Giuliani’s Claims

By Shankar Vedantam
Sunday, July 8, 2007

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

“I began with the city that was the crime capital of America,” Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent.”

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.”

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say that lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

Giuliani’s presidential campaign declined to address Nevin’s contention that the mayor merely was at the right place at the right time. But William Bratton, who served as Giuliani’s police commissioner and who initiated many of the policing techniques credited with reducing the crime rate, dismissed Nevin’s theory as absurd. Bratton and Giuliani instituted harsh measures against quality-of-life offenses, based on the “broken windows” theory of addressing minor offenses to head off more serious crimes.

Many other theories have emerged to try to explain the crime decline. In the 2005 book “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner said the legalization of abortion in 1973 had eliminated “unwanted babies” who would have become violent criminals. Other experts credited lengthy prison terms for violent offenders, or demographic changes, socioeconomic factors, and the fall of drug epidemics. New theories have emerged as crime rates have inched up in recent years.

Most of the theories have been long on intuition and short on evidence. Nevin says his data not only explain the decline in crime in the 1990s, but the rise in crime in the 1980s and other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, indicate that lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

Because the countries phased out lead at different points, they provide a rigorous test: In each instance, the violent crime rate tracks lead poisoning levels two decades earlier.

“It is startling how much mileage has been given to the theory that abortion in the early 1970s was responsible for the decline in crime” in the 1990s, Nevin said. “But they legalized abortion in Britain, and the violent crime in Britain soared in the 1990s. The difference is our gasoline lead levels peaked in the early ’70s and started falling in the late ’70s, and fell very sharply through the early 1980s and was virtually eliminated by 1986 or ‘87.

“In Britain and most of Europe, they did not have meaningful constraints [on leaded gasoline] until the mid-1980s and even early 1990s,” he said. “This is the reason you are seeing the crime rate soar in Mexico and Latin America, but [it] has fallen in the United States.”

Lead levels plummeted in New York in the early 1970s, driven by federal policies to eliminate lead from gasoline and local policies to reduce lead emissions from municipal incinerators. Between 1970 and 1974, the number of New York children heavily poisoned by lead fell by more than 80 percent, according to data from the New York City Department of Health.

Lead levels in New York have continued to fall. One analysis in the late 1990s found that children in New York had lower lead exposure than children in many other big U.S. cities, possibly because of a 1960 policy to replace old windows. That policy, meant to reduce deaths from falls, had an unforeseen benefit — old windows are a source of lead poisoning, said Dave Jacobs of the National Center for Healthy Housing, an advocacy group that is publicizing Nevin’s work. Nevin’s research was not funded by the group.

The later drop in violent crime was dramatic. In 1990, 31 New Yorkers out of every 100,000 were murdered. In 2004, the rate was 7 per 100,000 — lower than in most big cities. The lead theory also may explain why crime fell broadly across the United States in the 1990s, not just in New York.

The centerpiece of Nevin’s research is an analysis of crime rates and lead poisoning levels across a century. The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

“Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do,” said Needleman, one of the country’s foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin’s theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, “If I do this, I will go to jail.”

Nevin’s work has been published mainly in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research. Within the field of neurotoxicology, Nevin’s findings are unsurprising, said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Environmental Research.

“There is a strong literature on lead and sociopathic behavior among adolescents and young adults with a previous history of lead exposure,” she said.

Two new studies by criminologists Richard Rosenfeld and Steven F. Messner have looked at Giuliani’s policing policies. They found that the mayor’s zero-tolerance approach to crime was responsible for 10 percent, maybe 20 percent, at most, of the decline in violent crime in New York City.

Nevin acknowledges that crime rates are rising in some parts of the United States after years of decline, but he points out that crime is falling in other places and is still low overall by historical measures. Also, the biggest reductions in lead poisoning took place by the mid-1980s, which may explain why reductions in crime might have tapered off by 2005. Lastly, he argues that older, recidivist offenders — who were exposed to lead as toddlers three or four decades ago — are increasingly accounting for much of the violent crime.

Nevin’s finding may even account for phenomena he did not set out to address. His theory addresses why rates of violent crime among black adolescents from inner-city neighborhoods have declined faster than the overall crime rate — lead amelioration programs had the biggest impact on the urban poor. Children in inner-city neighborhoods were the ones most likely to be poisoned by lead, because they were more likely to live in substandard housing that had lead paint and because public housing projects were often situated near highways.

Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

Nevin’s finding implies a double tragedy for America’s inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.

Add comment July 9th, 2007

Pink: Dear Mr. President

I know I’ve posted this before, but someone sent it to me today and I can ever get enough of it:

1 comment June 2nd, 2007

Howard Zinn: ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’

Inveresk Street Ingrate has reproduced an old article by Howard Zinn on what he found valuable in the life and work of Karl Marx, appropriately titled ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’ Well worth reading.

Here’s the explanation of the title:

remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”

From his conclusion:

He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

In addition to the important concepts of Marx mentioned by Zinn, I would add  that of commodity fetishism. The idea that human relationships get transformed into things that are given a price and bought and sold on the open market has greater resonance today, when thre is virtually nothing that isn’t for sale. Beauty? Buy it here! Love? This way?

And my own profession of psychotherapy has transformed intimacy into a commodity, available to those who can afford it. In typical capitalist fashion, now that therapeutic intimacy is a commodity, its providers are having their wages squeezed lower and lower. Marx, presciently predicted the proletarianization of all. In our time we are seeing this prediction being realized as “professionals,”  doctors, lawyers, therapists, etc., are increasing turned into employees, “wage slaves”, loosing control of their professional destinies and doing the bidding of others.

Add comment April 20th, 2007

Swap refugees. Keep families apart. Flout international law

Now that both the United States and Australia are ruled by those professing “family values,” the rulers of these two  countries have found yet another way to advance the cause. They’ve reached agreement to swap refugees between the two countries to keep families apart, making emigration less desireable:

An agreement between the United States and Australia to swap refugees held in offshore detention centres breaks international law, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

The exchange would involve genuine refugees held by Australia on the remote Pacific island of Nauru and those held by the United States at its naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Human Rights Watch reports that, surprise, the agreement flouts international law:

“The only conceivable reason for this ‘refugee swap’ is to deter future asylum seekers from trying to reach the United States or Australia by boat,” said Frelick [of HRW].

“Yet international refugee protection principles hold that detention and similar measures should never be used solely as a deterrent to other would-be refugees.”

Speaking in moderate language:

  Several opposition politicians and rights groups in Australia have described the agreement as “bizarre.”

Add comment April 19th, 2007

Self-help or disdain for others?

Johann Hari of the Independent has an excellent piece on the sadness, and viciousness, behind our obsession with self-help. He brings out the disgusting reactionary ideology behind much of the self-help movement. We psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not above this ideology either:

The Selfishness of The Self-Help Industry
The Cult of Positive Thinking Blames All The People Who Falter or Fail in Life For Their Own Misfortune

by Johann Hari

I am thinking of writing a book called The Power of Negative Thinking. Subtitle: Let’s Hear It For Hate. Yes, let’s hear it for pure, undiluted loathing, for negativity, for black-eyed bile.

I say this because I have just pored through the “book” that has thwacked Harry Potter into second place and sent The Da Vinci Code spinning back into its Vatican vault. The Secret - written by Australian reality TV producer Rhonda Byrne - has sold six million DVDs and books since it first sprouted a few months ago, even earning the recommendation of St Oprah of the Screaming Studios.

In its slim 198 pages, it crystallises a sit-up-and-smile-right culture that is, in fact, making us all more miserable.

The Secret boasts that it can change your life. On every page. At least three times. Byrne brags that she has uncovered the One True Law that guarantees success. “I began tracing the Secret back through history,” she writes. “I couldn’t believe all the people who knew this. They were the greatest people in history: Plato, Shakespeare, Newton…” and on and on.

So what is this not-very secret Secret? It is the most extreme strain of positive thinking yet preached. In a desperate attempt to give it a scientific sheen, Byrne calls it “The Law of Attraction”.

You are, she says, like a giant transponder, sending signals out into the universe. “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency.” If you send out negative thoughts, you will attract negative things into your life. If you send out positive thoughts, positive things will come. “It is exactly like placing an order in a catalogue,” she says. Exactly.

If you want a mansion, you need to really, really picture a mansion, believe in it - and it will be yours. Ask, believe, receive. “The Universe will start to rearrange itself to make it happen for you… If you see it in your mind, you’re going to hold it in your hand.”

If you plough enough positive thinking into something, it will “always” happen. As one “case study” in the book puts it, “I would visualise a parking space exactly where I wanted it, and 95 per cent of the time it would be there for me and I would just pull right in.” Another “case study” is of a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who shunned medical treatment, pictured herself without breast cancer really, really hard - and the cancer vanished.

By taking the cult of positive thinking, which stretches back to Norman Vincent Peale’s famous book in the 1950s, to this barking extreme, The Secret reveals what was wrong with the idea all along: it instinctively blames all the people who falter or fail in life for their own misfortune.

Look at the pressure always put on people diagnosed with cancer, who are entitled to be wailingly, howlingly depressed, to “stay positive”. The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote recently: “I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly when I was being treated for breast cancer”, and, she believes, it only places “an additional burden on the sick and aggrieved”.

The Secret takes this further, saying: “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an unbalanced perspective, or we’re not being loving and grateful.” Ah, Aids - a sign of ingratitude. Cancer - a sign you don’t love.

The Secret takes this to its sick logical conclusion. Did the 9/11 victims “attract” Mohammed Atta? Did the Jews “attract” Auschwitz? Yes: “If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, those thoughts can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Bob Proctor, one of the “gurus” who features heavily in the book, was asked on the TV show Nightline whether the children of Darfur - currently being hunted down and murdered for being black - had been thinking negative thoughts that “manifested” in the Janjaweed. He replied, “I think the country probably has.”

The Secret isn’t only a piece of charlatanry; it’s a social barometer that reveals something sad about our psyches after 30 years of spiralling inequality and the collapse of political hope.

The rise of self-help exactly coincides with the decline of faith in collective political solutions. You won’t find an answer out there, through getting involved with the society you live in, it says. “I made a decision I would not watch the news or read newspapers any more, because it did not make me feel good,” Byrne declares. She urges her readers to shun their friends if they become sick, because “you are inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness”.

You shouldn’t even look at fat people because that lets “fat thoughts” into your mind. (If you already looked at my byline picture - too late, fatso.)

If it seems like a leap from The Secret to the ballot box, you just have to turn to the book’s explicitly political pronouncements. “Why do you think that 1 per cent of the population earns around 96 per cent of the money that’s being earned?” it asks.

Massive tax cuts, markets rigged in the favour of the rich, the rise of a right-wing ideology? No, “the rich think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds.” And as for the poor, “the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them in their thoughts.”

The American self-help industry, inevitably drifting across the Atlantic, has always been a reactionary response to economic stresses beyond the control of citizens sitting at home alone. Since the 1950s, whenever there has been a sense of economic anxiety - and for most poor and middle-class Americans, the Bush years have been a time of declining relative incomes even as the super-rich soar off into the stratosphere - this industry has been there with a simple message: the problem is within you.

One of the reasons Bush has got away with so much is that so many Americans have internalised the cruel myths of the self-help industry. I can’t think of a sadder symbol of the Bush years than the news that the One God, One Thought Church is screening The Secret DVD to their housing counselling programme “to show people who feel hopeless that they can own a home”. Don’t create political pressure for cheap houses for Katrina refugees; just tell them to visualise it very, very hard.

This is the real secret - that the book is a pure expression of Bushism: a slop of rancid aspiration-speak masking selfishness, social collapse and religiose myth-making.

In place of this siren vision of self-help, let’s help each other. In place of obsessively changing yourself, let’s change the world. And in place of blithe, blind optimism, yes - let’s hate.

j.hari@ independent.co.uk

Add comment April 12th, 2007

Palast: Bush’s New US Attorney a Criminal?

Greg Palast reports that Bush has appointed a seasoned criminal, who denied 70,000 voters their right to vote in 2004, to one of those plump now-open, US attorney slots:

Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn’t mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.

However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails — potential evidence of a crime — to email addresses ending with the domain name “@GeorgeWBush.com” he sent them to “@GeorgeWBush.ORG.” A website run by prankster John Wooden who owns “GeorgeWBush.org.” When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.

And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called, “Caging” lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.

he Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, “Do not forward.” Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city’s State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.

If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as “suspect” and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these ‘cages’ captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.

Read: Bush’s New US Attorney a Criminal?

Add comment March 8th, 2007

Hedges on Nader

Chris Hedges, one of today’s moral beacons, contemplates supporting Ralph Nader, should he make another run for the Presidency:

These corporations, and their enraged and manipulated followers in the Christian right, tens of millions of them, if left unchecked will propel us into despotism. The corporate state has rigged our system, hollowed out our political process and steadily stripped citizens of constitutional rights, federal and state protection and assistance. This may be the twilight of American democracy. And it is better to stand up and fight, even in vain, than not to fight at all.

Add comment February 26th, 2007

Krugman on health reform viciousness

Paul Krugman takes on the Decider’s disgusting health insurance “reform” plan, which taxes workers with good insurance to fund the well-off who choose not to have insurance. Not mentioned in Krugman’s critique is that tax breaks do not help poor people very much, not only because their tax rate is low anyway, but also because they don’t have the cash to put out all year in hopes of a refund the next spring.

Gold-Plated Indifference

by Paul Krugman

President Bush’s Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Mr. Bush’s proposal won’t go anywhere. But it’s still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should “treat health insurance more like home ownership.” He went on to say that “the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance.”

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it’s like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn’t like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It’s a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don’t need an “incentive” to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can’t afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Of those uninsured who aren’t low-income, many can’t get coverage because of pre-existing conditions — everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won’t solve their problem.

The only people the Bush plan might move out of the ranks of the uninsured are the people we’re least concerned about — affluent, healthy Americans who choose voluntarily not to be insured. At most, the Bush plan might induce some of those people to buy insurance, while in the process — whaddya know — giving many other high-income individuals yet another tax break.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase — not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, “unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need.”

Again, wow. No economic analysis I’m aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul’s premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have “gold plated” health coverage please raise their hands?

According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the wealthy; we’re talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans.

What’s driving all this is the theory, popular in conservative circles but utterly at odds with the evidence, that the big problem with U.S. health care is that people have too much insurance — that there would be large cost savings if people were forced to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket.

The administration also believes, for some reason, that people should be pushed out of employment-based health insurance — admittedly a deeply flawed system — into the individual insurance market, which is a disaster on all fronts. Insurance companies try to avoid selling policies to people who are likely to use them, so a large fraction of premiums in the individual market goes not to paying medical bills but to bureaucracies dedicated to weeding out “high risk” applicants — and keeping them uninsured.

I’m somewhat skeptical about health care plans, like that proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that propose covering gaps in the health insurance market with a series of patches, such as requiring that insurers offer policies to everyone at the same rate. But at least the authors of these plans are trying to help those most in need, and recognize that the market needs fixing.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems.

What’s really striking about Mr. Bush’s remarks, however, is the tone. The stuff about providing “incentives” to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as “gold plated,” is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush’s speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they’re not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Universal Health Coverage Attracts New Support. Of course, this support is for a corporate-dominated private insurance system that creates a new entitlement program for the nations greediest insurance companies while doing little to reduce the costs of healthcare.

Add comment January 22nd, 2007