Politics

The media obsession with details of politics in America breeds an apathy, born of overkill. Politics have overshadowed government. The manipulations for power have become a spectator sport on the level of professional wrestling. Meanwhile, the quality of American government on all levels deteriorates. Look at your roads, your buses, your subway trains for an illustration.

The yowling Tea Party contingent bring more dysfunction to this environment. Playing with covert racism and homophobia, these closet Republican Rightists seek to immobilize any progressive legislation in a time of national crisis. Their motivation, shrilly misrepresented as patriotism, is obviously manufactured by corporate financing.

Progressives of all types are disillusioned by the Obama administration's sadomasochistic love affair with Wall Street. Summers, Frank and Geithner serenade Obama with sonnets of Wall Street's inherent love of democracy and freedom, as the money men continue to pick the pockets of the American people.

There comes a time in any organization's life when it begins to exist for itself, not for those who have formed it or pay for it in money or labor. This seems glaringly true of the U.S. administration, Congress and Supreme Court. Our government is foundering in a sea of political self-interest. And the people are suffering for it.

Perhaps it is good for the citizens to disengage from this government, as it now operates. Perhaps this is a time for a Jeffersonian revolution. This Fall's election will definitely be a harbinger of what form such a revolution will take in America.

Generosity

The celebrity culture in America has fostered an unrealistic concept of what it means to be a generous, compassionate person in society. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are lauded as models of humanitarian philanthropy. Howard Hughes designed the model that billionaires follow. The medical Howard Hughes Foundation, appropriately founded by the psychosomatic, germ-phobic eccentric, was Howard's solution to avoiding paying personal income taxes. By placing his millions in a tax-exempt non-profit, Howard paid negligible personal taxes while he was alive.

If every citizen paid his/her taxes fairly and equitably, government could be transformed into a prospering organ for improving the quality of life for all citizens. If tax breaks for corporations and businesses were eliminated universally, the people would benefit. Corporate lawyers have developed slick machinery to rip off the public treasury over and over again with very little given back to the public and profits given to wealthy shareholders, who have lawyers to help them to avoid paying taxes.

Bringing generosity into the individual life is a matter of scale and common sense. Generosity isn't money or gifts. Generosity is a process of openness, fairness and spontaneous cooperation. Look around you right now. There is someone in your life who can benefit from your time or effort in some small way today. If you do this survey of your own life every day, you will find plenty to do to improve the quality of life in your own sphere of influence. You can change someone's life right now with a phone call or some generous action.

Our society is troubled. The economic times are difficult in part due to the selfishness and carelessness of people in the world of finance who thought of nobody but themselves. Our media has indulged the worst of us by focusing on violence and dysfunction in order to satisfy our curiosity and voyeurism. Negativity and alienation have blossomed. Staring at iPhones in public is the norm.

I try to acknowledge what I can do every day to improve the quality of my own life and the lives which touch mine. My capabilities require a small scale of generosity. I am not wealthy. I have some physical limitations. I accept these limits and move on with what I can do, without getting hung up on what I would ideally like to do or should do from a comparative perspective.

By planning carefully and using my time responsibly and efficiently, I am able to do something proactive and constructive most days. It doesn't leave much time for watching TV or staring at the computer monitor's buffet of distractions. I don't own an iPhone. It would take time away from my reading books, observing real life around me or helping a friend. My scale of generosity is humble indeed, but I take comfort in knowing that there are millions of people trying to do good in a similar way. My guess is that we are keeping the planet moving along in a positive direction just as effectively as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Corporations

I communicate on this blog via a broadband cable connection, purchased from a national cable provider, which also provides me with telephone and television services. I recently discovered that my "on demand" television feature was inoperative. I got an error message, similar to the error messages we all dread on computer monitors.

I had gotten the same error message when the cable system was activated by two separate technicians about a month ago. The second technician, who came to replace faulty equipment left by the first, had assured me it was all fine. When I pointed out that the external cables on the outside of the building were hanging out of a broken plastic box like black spaghetti, he shrugged and said, "I don't have a ladder."

This time, I called the 800 number. A rather brusque woman, identifying herself as Dawn in a New Jersey accent, humored me, told me to recycle the box by unplugging the cable from it and then wait 25 minutes. I found, of course, I would have done just as well to spread a circle of garlic on the living room floor and do a rain dance in it. Next, a thickly Spanish-accented man, who insisted on calling me "Mr. Paul" over and over again, said he was going to electronically send me a very special (magic?) signal which only he possessed. He guaranteed his signal would get through. Perhaps this line works for him in his local singles bar. It did nothing for my cable box.

The third call put me in touch with Joe, an average-sounding young man with a warm personality. He took me through yet another rebooting experience which did not leave my cable box glowing any more effectively. But, he did set me up with a real service technician, who is due later today. Hopefully, this technician will remember to bring a ladder to look at the knotted spaghetti cables on the side of the building.

Welcome to the Corporate Soviet of America. If you have seen and understood the film "Brazil", you will understand my point. As bureaucracy grows, it begins to exist for its own benefit. Its original function or purpose becomes secondary to its own survival and prosperity. This is disastrous for the consumers of service industries. Ask anyone who goes to a huge medical center with a serious illness. The insertion of layer after layer of barriers between the consumer and someone who provides an actual, on-site service is an attempt to decrease the payrolls of higher-paid technicians in favor of lower-paid hand-holders, whose job it is to keep the consumer at arm's length.

Meanwhile, at the top, the executives and shareholders are pulling out the resulting profits at the expense of poor customer service, lower wages for customer-service tele-workers and higher workloads for fewer on-ground technical personnel. Deregulation under Reaganite politicians has made this situation worse.

It is common knowledge that increasing the access of a population to internet bandwidth increases education, productivity and participation in the workings of a society. But, is this what corporations by their very nature want? Why would corporations, which sell mediocre services at a premium, unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food and cheaply made consumer goods based on an oil economy, want to provide the consuming public with the tools of their enlightenment and liberation from the very junk they are peddling?

When you next hear Libertarians and Tea-Party devotees screaming against Government, you will be hearing the shrill voice of corporate-funded or corporate-inspired stupidity. Think about whether you really want to spend your future calling 800 numbers while the quality of your life slowly slips away.

Depression

As I sit here on a cold, gray New England morning in the supposedly "merry" month of May, I think about several recent encounters I have had with depression. My own fleeting depression was recent. It was reactive, easy to pin down the source. Selling a house, floods in March, other complications. The upside was that I lost that nagging three pounds I am always wanting to shed at the belt line. Well, the causes of the depression have resolved. Things are moving along. My mood has bounced up and so have the three pounds on my belt line. I am a veteran of dealing with depression. I know its cycles all too well.

Others are less fortunate. Their depression is entrenched. Genetic biochemistry, deprived childhood, trauma...all of these can contribute to a primary, inner-sourced, depression, with which many people must struggle on a daily basis. The advent of anti-depressant drugs and their mass marketing by pharmaceutical corporations for huge profit has masked much of this depression in society. Frankly, these drugs are so over-prescribed now, that it is hard to know who is depressed and who isn't. The percentage of people with primary depression is rather low, but anti-depressants are handed out like candy by irresponsible doctors, spurred on by drug salesmen.

The great tragedy in this is that anti-depressant drugs all have serious side effects and limited efficacy. They were originally designed to work in concert with professional psychotherapy. The insurance companies took care of that. They basically gutted the payment mechanisms for cognitive and behavioral psychotherapy in favor of paying for the quick-fix drugs. So, in response, the medical profession transitioned away from therapy and into psychopharmacology, almost exclusively. After all, doctors in the U.S. seldom pass up a method for becoming richer. The slack has been absorbed by psychologists and social workers, whose work is poorly covered by most health insurance.

Frankly, Americans are over-medicated and under-treated. All the social networking sites in the world will not cure depression. In fact, I will speculate that their virtual nature and ease of access only increase real-time social isolation. The drugs eventually lose their effects and require changes and dose adjustments, all accompanied by physical, toxic side effects. The side effects then cause a whole new barrage of anxiety and depression. Yes, this is a serious, wide-spread American problem.

The health insurance companies are crying poverty. How is this possible? The hospitals are crying poverty. How is this possible? The pharmaceutical companies are bemoaning losses on drug research. How is this possible? It isn't. It is all bullshit. And, I think we are beginning to see the turn-around.

The good news is that some depressed people are turning their own depression around by getting in touch with their anger. The bed news is that this anger can be extremely volatile and unpredictable. I offer the recent riots in Thailand as an example of this volatility. In the U.S., our history of race riots has been suppressed, but I assure you they were quite real and not really that long ago.

Yes, I am suggesting that corporate America has profited from under-treating depression in the population in the hopes, perhaps, that it would ensure their political power and profits. Keeping people medicated and isolated from therapy groups or therapists is an effective way to temporarily squash dissent. After all, the group therapy movement, along with various self-actualization movements, in the 1960s could be credited with waking Americans from the materialist malaise of the 1950s. This fueled, at least in part, the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

The poor, who have not had access to anti-depressant drugs or therapy, have fallen behind even further in this aggressively materialistic period of the 1990s and early 2000s. Obesity rates have soared as they have eaten their way to some level of comfort. Corporate America has gladly sold them cheap foods filled with corn, soy and chemical additives. Obesity is a good way to keep people immobilized, mentally dulled and powerless.

If this exploitation of the American people for profits is not intentional, then why does corporate food manufacturing spend millions of dollars every year in Congress to prevent regulations which will end this decimation of American health? Why does the pharmaceutical industry do likewise? And, why would a health insurance industry, crying poverty, want to stay in business when the government proposed single-payer health care, which would end their misery?

Preliminary election results in recent primaries across the nation herald a change. Unfortunately, as I have said, the anger that arises out of depression without proper cognitive treatment is volatile and unpredictable. It often manifests itself in ways that are counterproductive for everyone. Ultimately all the people pay the price for the greed and corruption of the few who hold wealth and power.

One of the first interventions made in cognitive therapy for people with depression is the assertion that the depression will not last forever. As Americans awake from the depression of the last decade, in which they have been lulled to sleep by hollow materialism and propagandized nationalism, they will inevitably experience anger and frustration with their government and themselves. Hopefully, they will look to leaders who, like responsible healers, will advocate truly democratic change which is in the interest of the whole American family.

Thieves

Wake up America!

Bail Out = Corporate Welfare = Your Future Bankrupted.

Sports

The top photograph to the right was recently taken in front of the Science Museum in Boston. The museum is hosting a corporately funded exhibit on Olympic sports history. The photo below it replicates a Nazi propaganda poster which was used at the time of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which were presided over by Adolph Hitler and are considered the beginning of the current commercial Olympic movement. This represents the same genre of propaganda used to equate teamwork with family with social responsibility.

The sad truth which history conveys is that genetic-family-centered, sports-centered societies are less socially responsive to social needs. In fact, these societies, like ancient Rome and ancient Sparta, were war-centered and brutal to those in their societies who did not measure up to the warrior classes. These societies, like the current American society, were fractionalized by gangs, political factions and family feuds.

As a taller-than-average boy with a father who was compulsively driven to conform to conservative heterosexual values, I was cajoled and then bullied into participating in basketball games. I had no aptitude or interest. The result was a widened permanent rift between my father, my older sports-minded brother and myself. I was verbally demeaned and humiliated within my family and in public for the remaining years of my childhood and adolescence in my working-class environment. While ineptitude at sports was the overt reason for ridicule, the subtext was my suspected homosexual nature.

This was valuable training for my personal evolution. I saw through the mindless popular myths about sports and masculinity and aptitude. I was able to work out that the men who were most driven to conform and comply with these myths are the same men who support war, child abuse, the abuse of women and the suppression of their own homosexual feelings. I can only assume, from my experience, that the women who are similarly driven are similarly motivated by rage and fear.

I firmly believe that organized sports as they exist are part of the problem, not part of the solution. I believe they are impressed on youth to produce compliant citizens who will join armies and fight real or virtual wars for the corporate powers. The merging of nationalism or global capitalism with organized team sports is glaringly obvious everywhere. I am sure my simple assertion of this opinion could throw indoctrinated team sports fans in to blind rage. This would simply prove my point, in my opinion.

The men responsible for creating democracy in modern times, men like Adams and Jefferson, did not play team sports. They did not learn the politics and philosophy of liberation on a football field or basketball court. Far from it. They read books, studied history and promoted cooperation of the many against the gangsterism of the few.

A world at peace would indeed have plenty of teamwork to do to correct the negligence and environmental corruption caused by corporate power. The time, money and energy spent on corporately sponsored team sports may eventually be put to better use. This would indeed be an evolutionary step for mankind.

We

We the people have allowed our planet to become our sewer. We the people have allowed corporations and corrupt politicians to tell us that evil is good. We the people have killed and plundered in the Middle East, in Viet Nam, in Cambodia, in El Salvador. We the people foster the misconception that killing under the pretext of war is honorable, when we bow our heads to the military. We the people allow gang violence to exist in impoverished slums by allowing the politicians whom we pay to not do their jobs. We the people allow vandals to deface and destroy public accommodations and private property by not holding the parents of these vandals and negligent police responsible. We the people encourage overpopulation, poverty and stupidity by supporting the folly of reproductive rights without reproductive responsibility. We the people are the cause. We the people are the only solution through practice and right action.

G-8

Last week, the puppets of the world's greediest people, the so-called "world leaders", met in Germany, where they fawned on each other with embraces and applause, while thousands of committed, brave and mindful protesters were kept miles away by the fascist troops of the global corporatocracy (the government constituted by the concerted influence of corporations on world governments). This summit was not reported in this light by any of the several radio, television and mainstream Internet outlets I frequent. I feel I need to add my view here in this obscure space, because the number of those who are awake to the evils of fascist and oligarchic domination of the population of the world seems to be shrinking. How has the age of information brought us to this place? How has the age of information allowed for this surrender of the masses to economic and psychological enslavement? Perhaps this is simply evidence that knowledge itself does not bring mindfulness unless incorporated into practice. The practice of living in the light of truth, honesty with oneself and others in all things, does not allow for submission to the powers who are now trampling on human rights, the environment and the core values of civic responsibility to the people of the world, not the elite. As can be seen clearly in those whose forebears have submitted to slavery, the road back from enslavement is much longer than the road to submission.

Fear

Television, radio and print outlets in America are intentionally peddling fear for profit. Fearful people are easier to control. Fearful people do not parade openly in demonstrations against a corrupt, corporate-controlled government. Fearful people gladly hand over exorbitant taxes to pay for armies and police forces. Fearful people are more likely to act defensively and irrationally under stress. This fear mongering is intentional and corrupting. It can turn a peaceful and tolerant society into a Fascist police state. Perhaps this is the agenda of the corporations which control the governments of the developed world.

Corporations

Gangs, clans and militias are the smaller versions of corporations. The behavior of the poor and disenfranchised reflects the behavior of the rich and powerful who dominate and exploit them. The world, as dominated by atavistic war-based competition between heterosexual males, is bound to be violent, despite illusions of so-called capitalist democracy. Until the people of the world unite against the greedy and aggressive, as they have done historically nation by nation, there will be no real peace or general human evolution.

Halloween

The current elevation of Halloween to a commercial and community holiday is symptomatic of many elements of modern American culture. Neighborhoods are littered with plastic and paper products, branded with orange and black themes of pumpkins, skeletons, scarecrows, vampires, etc.. Walking around my own neighborhood convinces me that the owners of the decorated homes have absolutely no idea what this ritual is really about. However, I am convinced that Walmart rules in their households, which contain impressionable children under the age of eighteen. The lack of mirth in the American culture is reflected in this penchant for gloom, fright and death. The patent disregard for the general appearance of the neighborhood, the environment, is also glaringly obvious in these displays of disposable materials. Halloween has eclipsed Thanksgiving, it seems. The latter holiday, in its traditional American form, was a time for community functions for the needy, high school sports events, and a history-minded reflection on the controversial origins of this nation at the expense of its native inhabitants. Thanksgiving now is a long weekend for travel, since American families are no longer community-based. Halloween is a community holiday to the limited extent that Americans celebrate community in these times. America is balkanized. Ethnic communities have once again superseded the community at large. In the absence of the nationalist fervor of war fever, like that of 2001, what is the American community? What is the American identity?

Stocks

The stock markets are evolved monsters, originating in market squares of primitive villages. They are the playground of the wealthy, greedy, aggressive and materialistic. In recent times, they have been touted to the general public as beneficent and necessary features of 'freedom' in the capitalist catechism. This is part of the scheme, of course. The scheme of the rich to get richer at the expense of the gullible. Socialism is the only check against runaway capitalism. Socialism, basically embodied in the sharing of capital and resources through government administration of tax revenues, has been responsible for the general improvement in health, education and quality of life for the masses of the industrial societies. Stock markets are to social welfare, as casinos are to hospitals. In other words, apples and oranges. While freedom does entail the unimpeded existence of stock markets, it does not exclude socialism. And, the source of the wealth required for social improvements in a society is basically irrelevant. However, the recent attempt of government to fuse the concept of stock market trading with social welfare is perverse and dangerous. That is the road to fascism. In my own practice, I try to align my need for economic freedom with my social responsibilities to the general society. I do not begrudge my tax payments, unless I see those revenues being stolen or squandered by unscrupulous politicians. It takes the vigilance and right action of all citizens in a society to maintain and promote the welfare of everyone in it.

Commerce

Isn't it interesting that the religious movement which invented socialism is now the tool of rabid capitalists in America? Commerce once entailed the trading of goods and skills between equals. It was a truly democratic, perhaps even anarchic, occupation which supported whole civilizations throughout human history. Capitalism kills commerce in this egalitarian form. It pushes corporations to monopoly and the control of goods and prices, determined by greed, not supply and demand. My practice does not exclude commerce. Treating people fairly in transactions involving goods and money is part of practice. Trade as communication, dialogue and human cooperation facilitates human evolution and the common wealth.