An interview with Richard Wolff

“What do you call a system that takes the richest country in the world and renders half its population poor or low income?”

This question and others addressed by Richard Wolff.

Here’s something you probably never hear about from the US news media and you’ve never heard from a US politcians: Worker co-ops.

One of the most prosperous regions of Italy – and the world for that matter – Emiglio Romagna has 40% of its employed in worker coops.

This includes the cities of Bologna, Parma

It’s the home of companies like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and Ducati.

The GDP per capita in around $40,000 US a year, roughly equivalent with the US.

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“Delusion is always a mistake”

Journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.

Her books:

Non-fiction

The Uptake, Storage, and Intracellular Hydrolysis of Carbohydrates by Macrophages (with Zanvil A. Cohn) (1969)
Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (with John Ehrenreich) (1969)
The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (with John Ehrenreich and Health PAC) (1971)
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (with Deirdre English) (1972)
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (with Deirdre English) (1973)
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (with Deirdre English) (1978)
Women in the Global Factory (1983)
Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs) (1986)
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983)
The Mean Season (with Fred L. Block, Richard A. Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven) (1987)
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989)
The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990)
The Snarling Citizen: Essays (1995)
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America (2001)
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (ed., with Arlie Hochschild) (2003)
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005)
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007)
This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (2008)
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009). In the United Kingdom this book is called Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World 9 January 2010 Guardian/UK

Four years later…

With this technology, each home would be able to produce all the electricity it needs not only to run the household, but also to power a car.

So where is it and why isn’t this news?

And what’s happened since?

In 2010, he signed with something called the Tata Group of India to commercialize his research. Then in 2012 Harvard hired him away from MIT.

Here he is entertaining undergraduates at Harvard in September 2012. I liked it better when he was talking about the science and how it would be applied.

Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness is a technical term that refers to the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly, failing to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help itself by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. Organisms which have been ineffective and less sensitive in determining the consequences of their behavior are defined as having acquired learned helplessness.

Experiment Summary

In the learned helplessness experiment an animal is repeatedly hurt by an adverse stimulus which it cannot escape.

Eventually the animal will stop trying to avoid the pain and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation.

Finally, when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness prevents any action. The only coping mechanism the animal uses is to be stoical and put up with the discomfort, not expending energy getting worked up about the adverse stimulus.

Health implications

Regardless of origin, people who see uncontrollable events reliably suffer disruption of emotions, aggressions, physiology, and problem-solving tasks. These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.

Physical health

Learned helplessness can contribute to poor health when people neglect diet, exercise, and medical treatment, falsely believing they have no power to change. The more people perceive events as uncontrollable and unpredictable, the more stress they experience, and the less hope they feel about making changes in their lives.

Young adults and middle-aged parents with a pessimistic explanatory style are often more likely to suffer from depression. People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to be poor at problem-solving and cognitive restructuring, and also tend to demonstrate poor job satisfaction and interpersonal relationships in the workplace. Those with a pessimistic explanatory style also tend to have weakened immune systems, and not only have increased vulnerability to minor ailments (e.g., cold, fever) and major illness (e.g., heart attack, cancers), but also have a less effective recovery from health problems.

Psychological health

Learned helplessness can also be a motivational problem. Individuals who have failed at tasks in the past conclude erroneously that they are incapable of improving their performance. This might set children behind in academic subjects and dampen their social skills.

Children with learned helplessness typically fail academic subjects, and are less intrinsically motivated than others. They may use learned helplessness as an excuse or a shield to provide self-justification for school failure[citation needed]. Additionally, describing someone as having learned to be helpless can serve as a reason to avoid blaming him or her for the inconveniences experienced[citation needed]. In turn, the student will give up trying to gain respect or advancement through academic performance.

Social impact

Child abuse by neglect can be a manifestation of learned helplessness: when parents believe they are incapable of stopping an infant’s crying, they may simply give up trying to do anything for the child.

Another example of learned helplessness in social settings involves loneliness and shyness. Those who are extremely shy, passive, anxious and depressed may learn helplessness to offer stable explanations for unpleasant social experiences. However, Gotlib and Beatty (1985) found that people who cite helplessness in social settings may be viewed poorly by others, resulting in a situation that reinforces the problematic thinking. A third example is aging, with the elderly learning to be helpless and concluding that they have no control over losing their friends and family members, losing their jobs and incomes, getting old, weak and so on.

Social problems resulting from learned helplessness seem unavoidable; however, the effect goes away with the passage of time. Nonetheless, learned helplessness can be minimized by “immunization” and potentially reversed by therapy. People can be immunized against the perception that events are uncontrollable by increasing their awareness of previous positive experiences. Therapy can instruct people in the fact of contingency and bolster people’s self esteem.

The Truth about New Orleans – 2005

FEMA had a plane in the air that knew there were multiple levee breaches in New Orleans, but the information was not relayed to Louisiana emergency officials on the ground for twelve hours.

New Orleans firemen who rode out the 2005 storm in an office tower saw the breaches from their vantage point as they were occurring and were warned not to testify to what they they saw and when they saw it when they appeared before a Congressional investigative committee a few years later.

What was going on?

My best guess is that the Administration (Bush II) needed time to get its story straight. More specifically, the US Army Corps of Engineers whose incompetence and fraud was the reason for the levee failures, need time to muddy the waters with stories like:

* “Katrina did it” (Wrong: the city flooded many hours after Katrina passed);
* “New Orleans is below sea level” (Parts are and many parts aren’t, just like New York City, London and Amsterdam);
* And this one which the Corps broadcast to blog discussion boards across the Internet while posing as “average citizens”: New Orleaneans are no good and not worth worrying about. Besides, they’re stupid and reckless to live where they live.

The Corps spent millions of tax payer dollars on overt PR and utilized a long standing, well developed network of local “opinion leaders” who tried to shout down and ridicule anyone who questioned The Official Story.

With these kinds of resources, it’s almost impossible not to win the first battle with a massive sneak attack, but public knowledge and opinion is not a battle, it’s a war – a long war – and as the Japanese Imperial Forces learned a few short years after Pearl Harbor, “winning” one battle conclusively on Day One does not mean winning the war.

Through a relentless, grassroots campaign, Levees.org (with help from Brasscheck), has trained careless journalists to stop calling the 2005 New Orleans disaster “Katrina” and call it was it is: the Federal Levee Failures.

It’s placed permanent, unremovable historical markers at several breach sites telling present – and future – generations the real story.

Now, as you can see with this video, it’s collaborated with several New Orleans institutions, including UNO, the University of New Orleans, to convert its self-guided historical bike tour into a free app that plays on smartphones. It lets interested people see and hear what happened to New Orleans in 2005 and why.

Congratulations to our friends in New Orleans. This is kind of push back is a model for the nation. (I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.)

Does history matter? You bet it does. Just ask the expert on Big Brother and how to fight him: “Who controls the past controls the future.” – George Orwell.

For more info and to lend your support to this project, visit our good friends at Levees.org

Recommended read…

The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

by Etienne de la Boetie

A review and primer
Mises.org

States are more vulnerable than people think. They can collapse in an instant -when consent is withdrawn.

This is the thesis of this thrilling book. Murray Rothbard writes a classic introduction to one of the great political essays in the history of ideas.

In times when dictators the world over are falling from pressure from their own people, this book, written nearly 500 years ago, is truly the prophetic tract of our times.

Étienne de La Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Périgord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family, and became a dear friend of Michel de Montaigne. But he ought to be remembered for this astonishingly important essay, one of the greatest in the history of political thought. It will shake the way you think of the state. His thesis and argument amount to the best answer to Machiavelli ever penned as well as one of the seminal essays in defense of liberty.

La Boétie’s task is to investigate the nature of the state and its strange status as a tiny minority of the population that adheres to different rules from everyone else and claims the authority to rule everyone else, maintaining a monopoly on law. It strikes him as obviously implausible that such an institution has any staying power. It can be overthrown in an instant if people withdraw their consent.

He then investigates the mystery as to why people do not withdraw, given what is obvious to him that everyone would be better off without the state. This sends him on a speculative journey to investigate the power of propaganda, fear, and ideology in causing people to acquiesce in their own subjection. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. Habit and tradition. Perhaps. Perhaps it is ideological illusion and intellectual confusion.

La Boétie goes on to make a case as to why people ought to withdraw their consent immediately. He urges all people to rise up and cast off tyranny simply by refusing to concede that the state is in charge.

The tyrant has “nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?”

Then these inspiring words: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

In all these areas, the author has anticipated Jefferson and Arendt, Gandhi and Spooner, and those who overthrew Soviet tyranny. The essay has profound relevance for understanding history and all our times.

As Rothbard writes in his spectacular introduction, “La Boetie’s Discourse has a vital importance for the modern reader—an importance that goes beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political philosophy, or, for the libertarian, of reading the first libertarian political philosopher in the Western world. For La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which all libertarians—indeed, all opponents of despotism—find particularly difficult: the problem of strategy. Facing the devastating and seemingly overwhelming power of the modern State, how can a free and very different world be brought about? How in the world can we get from here to there, from a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? Precisely because of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boétie offers vital insights into this eternal problem.”

Read the essay for free or buy a copy here

Monsanto goes ‘Big Brother’

Monsanto gets a golden goose for chickenfeed

By ALAN GUEBERT
Columbia Daily Tribune

Every week for 19 years, this 170-square-foot, two-dog, one-person office has declared its complete devotion to numbers.

For example, just last week we found it completely fascinating that in just three days this month, 100 U.S. senators offered 302 amendments to an Ag Committee-approved 2012 farm bill that already ran more than 1,000 pages.

In comparison, the 3-by-5-inch booklet on my desk that contains the entire U.S. Constitution runs 38 pages.

More recently, two numbers — $210 million and $40 million — have bounced around this sunlit office.

The first is the price Monsanto paid for Precision Planting, a Tremont, Ill., maker of after-market planting and harvesting equipment that it explains will “help farmers plant, harvest and analyze data from each field to improve yield and productivity.”

(…)According to the May 23 news release that announced the deal, Precision’s “new FieldView technology … offers an application designed to monitor all critical aspects of planter performance and crop data analysis.”

That means Monsanto bought the hardware and software it believes will accurately deliver “the optimum genetics to each square foot of soil.”

It also means that at any point in the growing and harvest seasons, Monsanto likely will know the dates, times, acreages, soil types, weather, seeding rates, yield, moisture content — in short, just about every hard number connected to any field — that uses its Precision technology anywhere in the world.

Continue reading here

Related article…

Stop, Frisk, Record

By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
New York Times

APP: Stop and Frisk Watch

PLATFORM: Android

PRICE: Free

Last fall, Jason Van Anden, a computer developer from Brooklyn, made an app called I’m Getting Arrested for Occupy Wall Street protesters. Now, he has designed an app for people who see other people who may be about to get arrested.

The Stop and Frisk Watch app, which Mr. Van Anden designed for the New York Civil Liberties Union, is intended to be used by community groups documenting stop-and-frisk actions by the New York Police Department. It is being distributed free for Android devices only; an iPhone version is expected this summer.

Continue reading here