Why do people often vote against their own interests?
From BBC NEWS
The Republicans’ shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.
Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.
Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.
What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.
Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough. (more…)
‘Shadow Elite’: Did The Supreme Court Just Trash Democracy and the Free Market?
From Huffington Post
By Janine R. Wedel
In a much-debated 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court voted to strike down regulations that stretch well back into the last century (as well as a portion of the 2002 McCain-Feingold act) prohibiting corporations from using their general treasuries, without monetary limits, to finance ads that explicitly call for the victory or defeat of a candidate.
The vote, the balance of which was tipped by the court’s conservative majority, has been touted by some as a victory for principles of freedom. Far from it. The decision is poised to aid and abet the further intertwining of state and private power–the quintessence not of a “free market” but of a communist state. And the decision offers the shadow elite even more opportunities, sans government oversight or public input, to skew public policies to their own agendas. Through direct campaign contributions they are now more empowered than ever to use their corporate affiliations for greater leverage elsewhere. (more…)
‘Shadow Elite’: Do You Know Whose Agenda You’re Being Sold?
From Huffington Post
By Janine R. Wedel
In the community of fewer than 2,000 in which I grew up, the proverbial six degrees of separation melt away. You can’t help but play multiple roles in a small town: A teenager babysits for her next-door neighbor’s kids whose father is also her schoolteacher and a colleague of her father’s and whose mother is also her Sunday school teacher. Is there potential for nepotism and corruption? Yes. But at the same time, everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it’s difficult to hide agendas. In a small community, agendas, roles, relationships, and sponsors are pretty clear. (more…)
For The Shadow Elite Failure Often Guarantees Future Rewards
From Huffington Post
By Janine R. Wedel
Far from the old pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps model of acknowledging failure and starting anew, the shadow elite do not admit failure at all. More important, past failure may guarantee their future success. When most of us fail, consequences are not widespread. When the shadow elite fail, it affects all of us because their power is pervasive and they are largely beyond accountability. For confirmation one need only look as far as two of the country’s top economic helmsmen, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. (more…)
Is the Government In Charge, Or Is It The Shadow Elite?
From Huffington Post
By Janine R. Wedel
Arriving at my home airport after the holidays, I noticed that the zipper on the side of my bulging luggage had broken, and boxes of decorated cookies had fallen out. I enlisted the help of an employee who promised to check whether baggage handlers had found stray belongings on the conveyor belt. It would take her some time, but she vowed to call later that evening. There would be no way to reach her (only a maddening 800 number). Yet I felt sure she’d contact me, whatever the outcome. (more…)
Real Communities are Self-Organizing
John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy. (more…)
The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization
JARED DIAMOND / Harper’s Magazine Jun03
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography and of environmental health sciences at UCLA. His book Guns,
Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize.
[More by Jared Diamond]
One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth, and power.
Recent archaeological discoveries have revealed similar courses of collapse in such otherwise dissimilar ancient societies as the Maya in the Yucatán, the Anasazi in the American Southwest, the Cahokia mound builders outside St. Louis, the Greenland Norse, the statue builders of Easter Island, ancient Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. These civilizations, and many others, succumbed to various combinations of environmental degradation and climate change, aggression from enemies taking advantage of their resulting weakness, and declining trade with neighbors who faced their own environmental problems. Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact—approaching the limit at which impact outstrips resources—we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.
The 11th Hour
The full movie for free to watch online. I think this movie is really great. It’s main focus is on the environmental destruction being done by humans, and it’s conclusion isn’t just we need to get solar panels and windmills and recycle and all that bullshit but that we need to change our consumption patterns and our relationship to the planet. Now it does conclude with wanting to keep the civilization project going but with a new “green” version of it but it does talk a lot of our messed up relationship with the places we live in and it does bring up peak oil and really peak everything it has Richard Heinberg in it. And I think it is definitely worth your time to watch it.
