As we wait for the results of the Wisconsin recall election, a refresher course on what the struggle over the future direction of the United States is really about might be in order. Fortunately (or depressingly) the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality has put together a new package of easy-to-digest “educational materials on trends in inequality” that pound the message home. The gist: the United States is becoming more unequal every which way you can imagine.
Between 2009 and 2011, the press release for the project notes, “media mentions of the phrase ‘income inequality’ increased by over 250 percent.” But changing trends in income distribution are only one part of the vast distortions rippling through American society. The slides now available for perusal at http://www.inequality.com are divided into 14 categories: debt, education, employment, family, gender, health, immigration, income, mobility, politics, poverty, race, violent crime, and wealth.
The most obvious insight gleanable from the charts is that class background matters. If you are poor, you are more likely to be in debt and have health problems, and less likely to get a quality education or have your priorities reflected in politics. Of course, that’s always been true, not just in the U.S., but everywhere.
United States of inequality – Inequality – Salon.com
5 JunA Practical or Coalition Strategy for “Truth and Traditions” Party as Paleocon Greens
5 JunBy Charlie Keil
There is NO split in the Republican Party unless there is a real T for Truth Party that old-fashioned, paleo-conservatives can vote for happily with confidence and in good conserving conscience. By Traditions, plural, we mean the diversity of eco-moralities that once upon a time (pick your pre-industrial era) kept all of us in some kind of balance with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” If there is no real TnT Party most of those Ron Paul teaparty voters stay trapped inside the Republican Party at election time. You can guess who will win big in 2012, a divided but ‘big tent’ Republican Party. Same party that elected colorful women to governorships in New Mexico and North Carolina. Continue reading
Our new era of anxiety – Neuroscience – Salon.com
4 JunThe article reports high levels of anxiety in the contemporary world. Would more dancing, singing, and grooving help cut that down?
While evolution programmed anxious emotions to arise in threatening and uncertain situations, culture helps define what particular objects and situations people consider to be dangerous, what cues activate their fear responses, and what sorts of things they worry about as well as the degree of intensity or duration with which one should respond. For example, while witchcraft is a common source of anxiousness in many African societies, it is unlikely to be a source of fear in modern Western cultures. Witch fear is seen as reasonable in the former but not the latter. Fears of being buried alive dominated nineteenth century consciousness in the United Kingdom and United States but would be extremely rare at present; conversely, food allergies, a rare source of anxiousness in the past, are a dominant source of worry in the contemporary United States.
We Live in a Market State
3 JunIn 2002 Philip Bobbitt published The Shield of Achilles, his response to Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of an era of world peace based on the triumph of capitalism over Soviet communism. In a brilliant review of this book published the following year in New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan summarized Bobbitt’s predictions for the future of the capitalist society to come:
“An entirely new political form [of state], the market-state has arisen to supplant [the nation-state]. . . . the market-state ceases to base its legitimacy on improving the welfare of its people.
Instead, this new form of polity simply offers to maximize opportunities—‘to make the world available’ to those with the skills or luck to take advantage of it. ‘Largely indifferent to the norms of justice, or for that matter any particular set of moral values, so long as law does not act as an impediment to economic competition,’ the market-state is defined by three paradoxes. Government becomes more centralized but, yet weaker; citizens increasingly become spectators; welfare is retrenched, but security and surveillance systems expand. Bobbitt etches the consequences imperturbably. The grip of finance on electoral politics may become so tight as to erase the stigma of corruption. Waves of privatization will continue to roll over the state, eventually dissolving large parts of it into a looser, shifting ensemble of subcontracted and clandestine operations . . . .
Public education will implode as parents seek to augment the human capital of their children with early investments in private school. Inequality and crime could grow to Brazilian proportions. Civil liberties will have to be reconceived to accommodate far-reaching anti-terrorist dragnets. Some of the fictions of citizenship will gradually give way to more realistic weighted voting systems. Representative government itself will become increasingly nominal as media plebiscites openly assume the function f securing the assent of atomized multitudes. National security spin-doctoring will become so pervasive as to engender a new epistemology of managed opinion.”
Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 54-55
By Hayden White, via ARCADE: Literature, the Humanities, and the World.
Truth and Traditions 