Television.
Definitely a bad word in some circles- it can take the rap for all that is wrong with the world. At other times, it seems like the sole raft in a dying and awkward conversation among the newly acquainted.
The average American watches about three hours of television a day. Hmm, numbers, with work, sleep, eating, socializing, it is quite the accomplishment.
How many hours of commercials is that a year? According to research, the average child sees 20,000 30-second TV commercials in a year, by age 65 the estimate is two million. The evidence that are heads are filled by the narrowly focused wisdom of commercials is pervasive: Children too young to read identify brands!
All this advertising costs (A LOT of) money. Money that could be spent on other social goods. But, that’s not the point I want to make.
There are plenty of us who get all quirky-faced when thinking about TV, myself included. It’s not that I hate TV-TV is an amazing technological advancement. It’s just in the hands of profit-driven monguls and I want it to be in the hands of the people, where it belongs (Ecotopia Emerging).
As it is, TV is a detriment. Recent research has shown that increased TV watching is associated with unhappiness. According to the CPHS, 36.6 percent of American youth spend at least four hours a day in front of their television sets. At that rate, at an age of 72 years, that’s twelve years spent in front of the tube. 12 YEARS!
Is this the world we want to be in?
“Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500”
When television is code for commercials and repeat plot lines, I think not.
A woman who threw flour at Kim Kardashian: Arrested immediately. The man who killed Trayvon Martin: Still free.
(Source: abcnews.go.com, via think-progress)
A Nod to the Intelligentsia
If you want to locate the social group that has the responsibility (or luxury, depending on your angle) of forwarding this gross period in time, a period of time that Immanuel Wallerstein calls “global chaos,” you might turn to one of the greatest and most infamous thinkers on the topic.
Marx understood that class lives within our selves. Class is written on our bodies, compromises our actions and most importantly, imbues our thoughts. There is a subjective element of class. Importantly, Marx also realized that the objective class conditions are inherently unstable.
Olin Wright, Marx’s unofficial understudy, disqualified from the title only by time, predicts that the intelligentsia will lead the wave of the next social formation.
Where can we go to get the thoughts of the intelligentsia? We can go to the progressives.
Education and progressive values trend together. Progressive values often state that a more equitable distribution of wealth and ideas is needed, along with practices that protect the earth and its resources from being severely ravaged. These values must become the metaphorical axe shoved into the wheels of civil destruction, halting its momentum and changing the course of future civil activity. So, hold steady. Hunker down. We, the progressives, the intelligentsia, are the ®evolution.
My fellow progressives and counter-revolutionists (read: the status quo), the seeds of destruction have sprouted, and they are growing, strongly powered by a rare blend of institutionalized greed and cognitively dissonant moral practice.
This downward spiral of a system is aware of its weak links. Because the intelligentsia increases along with education levels, education is a threat. The confusion, despair and despondency of the intelligentsia emit from this fact. We are weakened, but we are also attuned to an impending shift, and we are the ones who have the clarity, motivation and empathy to produce the undercurrent of a social reformation.
To evolve is to roll forth. To revolve is to turn around. Our natural progression, our evolution, can lead us out of this mess—a transformation, much like an emerging butterfly, if we don’t give up or bow out.
Capital Gains, Part Two
Besides bringing in the assertion that taxing capital gains is double-taxing income and so is unethical (or immoral), another typical argument regarding capital gains runs something like this op-ed letter recently published in the Columbus, Indiana Republic:
A lot of the recent criticism has been directed at the long-term capital gains tax, which presently stands at 15 percent. For a lot of well-to-do Americans who invest their wealth, their effective tax rate is around that number.
It is important to note, that the 15 percent tax is for long-term investments, which must be held for over a year.
These are not people trading thousands of shares of stock per day; investments held under a year are taxed as ordinary income, which for those making over $380,000 is 35 percent. Instead, these are people not simply sitting on their money, but are rather putting their money to work for themselves and for whom they invest in.
When a millionaire, or a thousandaire for that matter, invests their after-tax money in a bond or stock for the long term, that money is directly reinvested back into the economy, helping create new offices, factories, equipment and, in short, jobs. These jobs will lead to stronger growth and, in turn, stronger tax revenues for the government.
Raising the long-term capital gains rate, as has been suggested, discourages investment in America.
What, exactly, is the evidence for how investment creates jobs? Put another way, what corporation would hire someone on a one-time influx of money? More likely, this company (company A) is trying to finance a new office, or a new piece of equipment. Or, such investment has other uses, like trying to leverage the purchase of some other corporation.
If I’m company B, manufacturing or selling the new office or machine company A is investing in — great, I can now pay another person or raise a salary or two if other business is good. I can subcontract some folks to deliver the machine and give another worker or two some overtime to install it fully.
Meanwhile, back at company A, what happens if the thing I’m offering stock for is an improvement in the assembly line or an upgraded software package that allows me to let go of a few employees to increase profits (which is mandated by the stockholders of their boards, by the way)? Do these unemployed match the number of jobs created by my investment?
Point being: no one really knows the connection between jobs and investment. There are simply too many variables to isolate. So to rest on the assumption that my investment creates “new offices, factories, equipment and, in short, jobs,” much less “stronger growth and, in turn, stronger tax revenues for the government,” sounds like an argument, but it isn’t. It’s a series of statements claiming associations that are better, at this point, relegated to ungainly speculation.
COMING UP: OCCUPY OUR FOOD SUPPLY FEBRUARY 27th, 2012
It’s been several hundred years since the alleged “Let them eat cake” line. Since then, the relationship between us, the masses, and food has just gotten weird.
It’s time for us to collectively flex our GMO’d muscles. From Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring to Sandra Steingraber’s 2010 Living Downstream we know that the chemicals we use for our food and water supply are harmful to humans and destroy nature. We’ve prozac and atrazine in our water supply. Food reconditioning is legal and practiced in our public schools.
Occupying our food is about owning our health. It’s about all of us individually working towards a food-friendly food system. Food needs to be more than “safe” and calorie-rich. Food is a prime defense against illness, depression and injury. Food is medicine and should be widely available to us, sans toxins.
This movement is also about worldwide class warfare and the corporate conglomerate empire forcing decisions upon us. It is the poorest in the world who will are dying daily due to lack of healthy food and water. It is the poorest in America who are disproportionately suffering from Type II Diabetes and who live in food deserts. It is the poorest who are least likely to have a voice in politics and least likely to have political power. It is the wealthiest who receive government subsidies to deliver these products to us.
We need to hone our collective sustenance consciousness. For occupy our food supply day micro-actions, check out the brief online animation of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, boycott Cargill and ConAgra products, sign petitions, watch documentaries (The Price of Sugar, Flow, King Corn, Food, Inc, The Future of Food (free online)), read book’s (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation) on the topic. Contact those in power. We have the resources. If we occupy our time, minds, and wallets we can free our food supply.
“Anti-Depressants are Counter-Revolutionary”
Let’s be honest. Habitual drug and alcohol abuse are counter-revolutionary. Teenage reactionary sentiments need not be encouraged past high school. Game day, Burning Man, the weekend beer fest turn serious despair into ineffectual actions stinking of resentment. The more out of touch someone is with the structure that conditions their lived experiences because they’re too fucked-up or coming down, the better that system stays intact to assert its oppressive power and grow in strength.
Perhaps the greatest drug threatening economic, political, and social change is anti-depressants. Caused by a system that continues to perfect the process of alienation as pure being, depression will spread among a population as smoothly as capitalism turns every relation into an economic exchange. Our water, air, health, even DNA can be turned to into a profit, which will persist until the source is exhausted.
People are beyond that point. They’ve utterly wasted themselves with the simple task of surviving under such a meaningless value system. Waking up sober shouldn’t be as painful as a hangover. Anti-depressants mend a person back to health as surely as a boat made of milk cartons will survive a voyage on the sea. It may keep one afloat for awhile, but wait for disturbances beyond our control. No drug can protect one from the constant forces that insist we live in ways so out of touch with what it means to be human. Only when we can live well can begin drinking well.
Doonesbury’s shooting straight. Go see them.
The “Trespass Bill”
HR 347, The Federal Restricted Buildings and Ground Improvement Act of 2011, passed the House of Representatives with a 388-to-3 vote. What’s bigger than a landslide? The entire continent of North America rolling over the top of Hawaii might be a closer analogy for the bill’s margin of victory.
One has to wonder about a law that garners that much support from our political elites, especially when it has to do with more easily prosecuting public dissent.
The bill further solidifies a law that makes citizen assembly and peaceful protest against any person protected by secret service a federal crime. It is a revision of a law that has already been in place for a few decades, but it has been revised to make arrest and prosecution of citizens easier. The fact that many of these laws already exist does not make them excusable. In an article for the International Business Times, Ashley Portero writes,
The original statute says a person must have entered one of the regulated zones “knowingly and willfully” for the action to qualify as a crime — HR 347 strikes out “willfully.” As a result, the law essentially now renders it a crime to remain in a restricted area even if the perpetrator does not realize he or she is breaking the law by being there.
“The change means it’s easier to prosecute under ‘knowingly,’ which is an issue because someone could knowingly enter a restricted but not necessarily realize they are committing a crime,” explained Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
The new legislation lowers the bar for prosecutors since a conviction would only require proof that a person “knowingly entered” a restricted area, without concern to whether the defendant realized his or her actions was unlawful.
Since the President of the United States is not the only person protected by secret service these days (many of the Republican Presidential hopefuls either already have secret service protection or are seeking it), citizens will be hard-pressed to disagree with any opinions spouted by our “protected” brethren.
The bill was placed on President Obama’s desk and signed into law on March 9th. Hooray for speedy legislation!
Drones: Real Killing Made to Seem Virtual
Drones. Even the liberal spectacle that is Bill Maher thinks that drones are cool. He likes the idea that we can send an unmanned killing machine into enemy territories to destroy bad people without having to risk the lives of U.S. military. Maher puts it this way:
Since 2005, I think, the number of drone missions has gone up by something like 1200 percent, and for good reason. You know, we can do it a lot cheaper. It’s cheaper, we can get closer to the target and therefore kill less civilians. They can stay up longer. I’m sold. I’m going down to the dealership tomorrow. I’m hoping they have a hybrid.
The potential risks of drones do not enter into the conversation. For example, others, including current and future enemies of the U.S., may also get their hands on drone technology. Moreover, killing people across the world from a virtual cockpit and making war seem more like a video game than a reality should incite moral and ethical concerns.
Our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare attitudes prepare us for the inhumanity of murder and distance us from the reality of killing so effectively that few people question the use of drone technology in public discourse. In the meantime, the drone campaign in Pakistan alone (a country with whom we are not officially at war) has killed dozens of civilians, including women and children, who were either attempting to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.
And, just in case anyone makes the mistake of thinking of this as a Republican vs. Democrat issue, we must be reminded that the number of drone strikes have actually escalated significantly under the Obama Administration.
What this indicates is nothing new, but it is no less disturbing for all its lack of originality: drone strikes that murdering civilians are sanctioned by both parties in the U.S. government and accepted as an inevitable reality by the general public. With so few people speaking out against it, the practice of remote controlled annihilation continues unabated, leaving a trail of death in its wake.
