quote:

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain free. (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

quote:

The adult entertainment industry is undoubtedly driven by its devoted fans,� said

quote:

I will use another meaning of �corporatism� to highlight another aspect of corporatism other than the merger of corporations and State�that is, its �repressive� quality.

quote:

Clearly we can learn to be other than what we are genetically best suited to be, we obviously have, gradually all of us in the past ten thousand years, but that doesn't mean we have to like it -- I don't care what Skinner and his pre and post Behaviorist cronies say! But that doesn't really matter so much because all Smith was really doing was justifying what already had to be agreed upon in some way for the evolving hierarchies already in place, in order to satisfy his economic theory.

Thus with that "market man at heart" theory we are reduced once again to Behaviorist concepts of human nature as being designed by systems of reward and punishment behavior control, since it is assumed that everyone at base selfishly competes in the marketplace for personal rewards. Everything beyond that just falls into place as it logically must according to theory. Beliefs that anyone could actually care for another human being are also justified in terms of the theory of selfishness.

quote:

I think you a preacher, Man.

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The differences between those more prosaic types of commodification of the human mind and body ... and its use and abuse in pornography and related businesses ... is really a matter of degree.

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I don't know how to think about it, except for the concept of control and choice

quote:

Reducing a subject to an object is stealing, or denying their freedom and choices--that is the scandal and hideous crime against Humanity

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COMMODIFICATION

quote:

Only a respect for the law makes it possible for free men to dwell together in peace and progress.... Law is the adhesive force in the cement of society, creating order out of chaos and coherence in place of anarchy.

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No one was better than Adorno at dissecting the psychic and emotional brutality of capitalism�s regimes of commodification and the increasing pressure it exerts on individuals to define themselves through consumption. (Adorno as Antidote).

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This, he argued, led to the compulsion to shut off one�s capacity for empathy, whether with working people whose labor produces commodities (how could we shop at Wal-Mart otherwise?) or those whose homes, lives and futures are being sacrificed in the name of a market-friendly abstraction called �Iraqi freedom.�

quote:

Adorno referred to this �shut off� compulsion in refreshingly severe terms, calling it �the mechanism of psychic mutilation upon which present conditions depend for their survival.� As Lee suggests, he surely would have had much to say about our contemporary equivalent of proto-Nazi �body culture,� in which such perverse phenomena as full-body cosmetic �extreme makeovers� have moved from creepy evidence of psychopathology to prime-time entertainment.

quote:

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
By Alan Deutschman
Fast Company
http://biz.yahoo.com/special/psycho05_4.html

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.


On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.

"These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said.

"They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.

Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

It's Hare's latest contribution to the public awareness of "corporate psychopathy." He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film's premise that corporations are "sociopathic" (a synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.

But wait, you say: Don't bona fide psychopaths become serial killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted, that's still an unusually good place to look for the conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible 40. A score of around 20 qualifies as "moderately psychopathic." Only 1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is "highly psychopathic," the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below that is "sliding into sainthood."

On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there's plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you're likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as "moderately psychopathic"; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. "I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange," Hare told Fast Company.

"There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You'll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one's position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something."

There's evidence that the business climate has become even more hospitable to psychopaths in recent years. In pioneering long-term studies of psychopaths in the workplace, Babiak focused on a half-dozen unnamed companies: One was a fast-growing high-tech firm, and the others were large multinationals undergoing dramatic organizational changes -- severe downsizing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures. That's just the sort of corporate tumult that has increasingly characterized the U.S. business landscape in the last couple of decades. And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. "The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it," Babiak claims. "Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior."

And you can make a compelling case that the New Economy, with its rule-breaking and roller-coaster results, is just dandy for folks with psychopathic traits too. A slow-moving old-economy corporation would be too boring for a psychopath, who needs constant stimulation. Its rigid structures and processes and predictable ways might stymie his unethical scheming. But a charge-ahead New Economy maverick -- an Enron, for instance -- would seem the ideal place for this kind of operator.

But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply "the Hare") to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or "factors." Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others" category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints "chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle," the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

This view is supported by research by psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, who interviewed and gave personality tests to 39 high-level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminals and psychiatric patients. The executives were even more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere, and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy. Board and Fritzon concluded that the businesspeople they studied might be called "successful psychopaths." In contrast, the criminals -- the "unsuccessful psychopaths" -- were more impulsive and physically aggressive.

The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many corporate power brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. Remorseless? Soon after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western, a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the company's Manhattan skyscraper. "Those were my enemies," Davis said. "I got rid of them." Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to pay for Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump.

In the most recent wave of scandals, Enron's Fastow displayed many of the corporate psychopath's traits. He pressured his bosses for a promotion to CFO even though he had a shaky grasp of the position's basic responsibilities, such as accounting and treasury operations. Suffering delusions of grandeur after just a little time on the job, Fastow ordered Enron's PR people to lobby CFO magazine to make him its CFO of the Year. But Fastow's master manipulation was a scheme to loot Enron. He set up separate partnerships, secretly run by himself, to engage in deals with Enron. The deals quickly made tens of millions of dollars for Fastow -- and prettified Enron's financials in the short run by taking unwanted assets off its books. But they left Enron with time bombs that would ultimately cause the company's total implosion -- and lose shareholders billions. When Enron's scandals were exposed, Fastow pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay back nearly $24 million and serve 10 years in prison.

"Chainsaw" Al Dunlap might score impressively on the corporate Psychopathy Checklist too. What do you say about a guy who didn't attend his own parents' funerals? He allegedly threatened his first wife with guns and knives. She charged that he left her with no food and no access to their money while he was away for days. His divorce was granted on grounds of "extreme cruelty." That's the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam. Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report. Dunlap needed the protection because so many people despised him. His plant closings kept up his reputation for ruthlessness but made no sense economically, and Sunbeam's financial gains were really the result of Dunlap's alleged book cooking. When he was finally exposed and booted, Dunlap had the nerve to demand severance pay and insist that the board reprice his stock options. Talk about failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

While knaves such as Fastow and Dunlap make the headlines, most horror stories of workplace psychopathy remain the stuff of frightened whispers. Insiders in the New York media business say the publisher of one of the nation's most famous magazines broke the nose of one of his female sales reps in the 1990s. But he was considered so valuable to the organization that the incident didn't impede his career.

Most criminals -- whether psychopathic or not -- are shaped by poverty and often childhood abuse as well. In contrast, corporate psychopaths typically grew up in stable, loving families that were middle class or affluent. But because they're pathological liars, they tell romanticized tales of rising from tough, impoverished backgrounds. Dunlap pretended that he grew up as the son of a laid-off dockworker; in truth, his father worked steadily and raised his family in suburban comfort. The corporate psychopaths whom Babiak studied all went to college, and a couple even had PhDs. Their ruthless pursuit of self-interest was more easily accomplished in the white-collar realm, which their backgrounds had groomed them for, rather than the criminal one, which comes with much lousier odds.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.

Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. "People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don't have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it," says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). "It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us -- and so evil. Good people don't want to believe it."

Of course, cynics might say that it can be an advantage to lack a conscience. That's probably why major investors installed Dunlap as the CEO of Sunbeam: He had no qualms about decimating the workforce to impress Wall Street. One reason outside executives get brought into troubled companies is that they lack the emotional stake in either the enterprise or its people. It's easier for them to act callously and remorselessly, which is exactly what their backers want. The obvious danger of the new B-Scan test for psychopathic tendencies is that companies will hire or promote people with high scores rather than screen them out. Even Babiak, the test's codeveloper, says that while "a high score is a red flag, sometimes middle scores are okay. Perhaps you don't want the most honest and upfront salesman."

Indeed, not every aberrant boss is necessarily a corporate psychopath. There's another personality that's often found in the executive suite: the narcissist. While many psychologists would call narcissism a disorder, this trait can be quite beneficial for top bosses, and it's certainly less pathological than psychopathy. Maccoby's book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Perils of Visionary Leadership (Broadway Books, 2003) portrays the narcissistic CEO as a grandiose egotist who is on a mission to help humanity in the abstract even though he's often insensitive to the real people around him. Maccoby counts Apple's Steve Jobs, General Electric's Jack Welch, Intel's Andy Grove, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher as "productive narcissists," or PNs. Narcissists are visionaries who attract hordes of followers, which can make them excel as innovators, but they're poor listeners and they can be awfully touchy about criticism. "These people don't have much empathy," Maccoby says. "When Bill Gates tells someone, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' or Steve Jobs calls someone a bozo, they're not concerned about people's feelings. They see other people as a means toward their ends. But they do have a sense of changing the world -- in their eyes, improving the world. They build their own view of what the world should be and get others recruited to their vision. Psychopaths, in contrast, are only interested in self."

Maccoby concedes that productive narcissists can become "drunk with power" and turn destructive. The trick, he thinks, is to pair a productive narcissist with a "productive obsessive," or conscientious, control-minded manager. Think of Grove when he was matched with chief operating officer Craig Barrett, Gates with president Steve Ballmer, Kelleher with COO Colleen Barrett, and Oracle's Larry Ellison with COO Ray Lane and CFO Jeff Henley. In his remarkably successful second tour of duty at Apple, Jobs has been balanced by steady, competent behind-the-scenes players such as Timothy Cook, his executive vice president for sales and operations.

But our culture's embrace of narcissism as the hallmark of admired business leaders is dangerous, Babiak maintains, since "individuals who are really psychopaths are often mistaken for narcissists and chosen by the organization for leadership positions." How does he distinguish the difference between the two types? "In the case of a narcissist, everything is me, me, me," Babiak explains. "With a psychopath, it's 'Is it thrilling, is it a game I can win, and does it hurt others?' My belief is a psychopath enjoys hurting others."

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it's extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego -- something he promotes rather than plunders. "The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self," Babiak says. "A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game." That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap -- guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever -- indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. "An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy," Babiak says. "But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company's existence. They're loyal to the company." So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a "culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change."

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The "antibullying" movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard's Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. "If we continue to go this way in our Western culture," she says, "evolutionarily speaking, it doesn't end well."

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we'll get more Enrons -- and deserve them.

Alan Deutschman is a Fast Company senior writer based in San Francisco.

Ten American business Psychopaths:
http://images.fastcompany.com/slideshows/bosses/intro.html

quote:

Chronciles of Dissent
p.341-344.
David Barsamian:Polls show that people strongly supported these controlson the media. It doesn't take a genius to know that there's a palpable public hostility toward the media. How do you account for that?

Chomsky:The kind of hostility that you have in this country is interesting. There's hostility toward the media, toward Congress, toward just about every institution except one, namely the corporate system. No hostility toward that. That tells you exactly who runs the country. It's perfectly OK to criticize the media, Congressmen, the courts, and
the cops. You can say the President's a clown. You can do anything except criticize the actual center of power. You're not even allowed to know that it exists. It's invisible.

It was very striking in the Orwellian terminology that was designed in the 1980s how special interests are talked about, which we've discussed in a previous interview. Just to recap, the Democrats are always being
accused of being a party of special interests, meaning labor, women, youth, the elderly, everybody. But if you check back you find one striking omission from special interests: never anything about corporate power, business power. That's not a special interest. That doesn't exist.

The omission seems true of scholarship, too. Some years ago, in the 1970s, there was a very rare academic study of corporations and foreign policy. The person wrote an article, a standard mainstream political scientist, in one of those journals. He started by reviewing standard
works looking at this question. He took the two hundred leading works in international affairs and foreign policy to see what they had to say about corporations and foreign policy. He discovered, to his amazement because he was pretty naive, that they avoided the topic. He said 95 percent of the studies never mentioned corporations and foreign policy. Five percent gave it passing mention. There was plenty of talk about women, clergy and foreign policy, but somehow nobody ever talked about corporations and
foreign policy. He went on to speculate as to this strange oversight. He concludes that if scholars start looking at corporations and foreign policy they'll probably find that there's some influence there.

That shows the discipline of the scholarly profession. You want to make sure that you never study what's important. It would be much too dangerous. The field of diplomatic history, which is an interesting field, spends an awful lot of time on personalities. I've been in debates about this with radical historians who strongly disagree with what I'm saying here. But in my view the concern about the personal decisions and the personalities of the leadership is about as interesting as discussion of the
personalities of the Chairman of the Board of General Motors. Undoubtedly it has some hundredth order effect on the decision being made, but the overwhelming effects are institutional, having to do with the institutional
structure in which he's working. Whether George Bush believes what he's saying, or did Ronald Reagan remember this, who was the particular advisor who said this, what did he have for breakfast that morning�yes, these are all hundredth order questions, about as interesting as the personalities of these people, which are not very gripping. But
they tell you very little about policy. However, that's the way the academic professions have to work, all the way over to the radical critics for the most part, not entirely, but very far over.

You get it in the general public. If Massachusetts has a serious economic crisis, who do people hate? Take a look at this morning's Boston Globe. It talks about the popularity of the governor after his cutback of services. Why?Because he's attacking the people who everyone hates most, namely state employees and the poor. That's who everybody hates. Are they the cause of economic problems? Or is there some other factor involved in what
happens in the New England economy besides the poor and state employees? Of course, people hate the media, too. You're allowed to hate them. In fact, you're allowed to hate everyone except the people who don't exist, namely the ones who in fact run the show, the ones who have concentrated decision making power, who make investment decisions, who set the framework within which the government operates, who own the media, control them and set the conditions under which they work. Those
institutions you're not allowed to hate, or even know of their existence.

In fact, part of the propaganda system promotes the idea corporations are comprised of people just like us. There's "us" on the one hand, going from the corporate executive to the honest sober worker to the housewife and
so on. That's all us. And then there's "them," the state employees, the poor, the Congress and all these bad guys who are trying to make life tough for us. That's the picture. It is not painted that way by accident. There has been an enormous effort made, probably a billion dollars a year
spent on advertising, public relations in the broadest sense, to try to create these images on movies, sitcoms, outright propaganda, scholarship, all framed in these terms, and pretty consciously. People in the public relations
industry know what they're doing, and they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't carry this out.

quote:

Restaurant Shift Turns Into Nightmare
ABC News,
November 10, 2005
Source

An Extra Shift at McDonald's Becomes a Terrifying Interrogation
Nov. 10, 2005 � - Louise Ogborn was always willing to take on extra shifts at McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky. Ogborn's mother had health problems and had recently lost her job, so the 18-year-old did whatever she could to help make ends meet.

On April 9, 2004, Ogborn offered to work through the restaurant's evening rush, trying to be helpful and make a few extra dollars.

"I was just going to eat and then clock back in and help until somebody else came along that could help," she said.

But Ogborn couldn't have known that her noble gesture would turn into a terrifying ordeal that she says will haunt her for the rest of her life.

A Startling Accusation

Ogborn was called into assistant manager Donna Summers' cramped office and told that Summers was on the telephone with a police officer.

"She said, 'Here she is. This is the girl you described,'" said Ogborn. "She told me to shut the door."

Summers told Ogborn that the officer on the phone had their store manager on the other line and that he had described her and accused her of stealing a purse from a customer.

"I was like, 'Donna, I've never done anything wrong,'" Ogborn said. "I could never steal -- I could never do anything like that. I don't have it in me."

But inside the back office, which had now become an "interrogation room," Ogborn's protests fell on deaf ears.

"She said, 'Well, they said it was a little girl that looked like you in a McDonald's uniform, so it had to be you.'"

It was Ogborn's word against the accusation of a man claiming to be a cop, and she was given a choice: submit to a search or be escorted to the police station.

Listening to 'the Voice'

Ogborn was told to empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone, which she did. Then the caller demanded that Summers have Ogborn remove her clothes -- even her underwear -- leaving her with just a small, dirty apron to cover her naked body.

Summers says she never second-guessed what she was being asked to do, as she firmly believed the person she was talking to was a police officer. Ogborn says she trusted her manager to do what was right.

Because it was a busy Friday night, Summers had to leave the office to check on the restaurant. The man on the phone demanded that another employee be left to watch Ogborn until the police arrived and Summers chose 27-year-old Jason Bradley.

"He [Bradley] takes the phone and they're telling him to have me do certain things and drop the apron," she said. "He wouldn't have any part of it."

Bradley walked out in disgust, leaving Summers with no one to watch Ogborn. Then the caller made an odd request, asking Summers to call her fianc� to have him watch the girl.

Summers says she did as she was told.

"I honestly thought he was a police officer and what I was doing was the right thing," said Summers. "I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing."

Surveillance video shows Ogborn broke down in tears.

Two Hours of Torment

Within fifteen minutes, Summers' fianc�, Walter Nix, entered the office where Ogborn tugged at the small apron that barely covered her top and exposed her legs up to her buttocks.

Again, Summers says she didn't question the caller and completely trusted her fianc� to be left alone with the girl.

Ogborn says she wanted to run, but that it would have been too humiliating to run through the restaurant naked.

Nix, a 43-year-old exterminator, began following the caller's commands, ordering Ogborn to drop her apron, bend over and stand on a chair.

Then -- as ridiculous as it sounds -- he told her to do jumping jacks to shake loose anything she might be hiding. Ogborn says that was just the beginning of two more hours of torment.

The demands became more and more bizarre. When Ogborn says that when she failed to address Nix as "sir," the caller tells him to hit her violently on the buttocks over and over. At one point on the video, Ogborn was "spanked" for almost 10 full minutes.

"He told me I was asking too many questions, so he was told to hit me," she said. "I just said, 'Please don't do this.'"

By the end, red welts could be seen on the woman's body.

During it all, Summers periodically came back to the office, and each time, Nix threw the apron at Ogborn, telling her to stay quiet.

"I begged her every time she came in the room," Ogborn said. "'Get me out of here. Please get me out of here."

Ogborn says she even asked the assistant manager to call the police, but each time, she says, Summers told her, "No, we're still waiting for the cop."

Summers denies Ogborn ever asked her to call the police or that the girl pleaded with her.

Ogborn says that after more than three hours of dehumanizing treatment, Nix -- again on the instructions of the caller -- forced Ogborn to perform a sexual act.

The caller then told Nix to hand the phone back to Summers and instructed her to bring in someone else.

This time, she had Thomas Simms, a 58-year-old maintenance man who worked at the restaurant, get on the phone with the caller, but Simms refused to comply with the caller's strange demands.

"Tom told me, 'This man is asking � for her to drop her apron so I can see her without the apron,' " she recalled. "And I said, 'Do what?!' "

Summers frantically called her manager, Lisa Siddons, who the caller claimed had been on the other line all along. But when Siddons answered her phone, she said she'd been sleeping.

It was then that Summers realized, she'd been had.

Police Arrive

When Mount Washington Police Detective Buddy Stump arrived at the restaurant, he had Nix arrested and began the process of trying to figure out who the caller was.

"The first thing I thought about was � this has got to be somebody on a pay phone," he said. "Maybe over [at] Winn Dixie and they're getting their jollies off at watching all the action and the police roll in."

But thanks to an Internet search by his chief of police, Stump discovered that calls like this have been going on for more than 10 years. Ogborn, it turns out, was only the latest in a long line of victims.

After a McDonald's employee used the "*69" feature to get a telephone number for the caller, Stump learned the call had been made from a supermarket pay phone -- in Panama City, Fla.

Stump discovered that the call was made with an AT&T calling card and, upon learning that the biggest seller of those cards in Panama City is Wal-Mart, he contacted local police for help.

A Decade of Calls

It turned out that the Panama City Police Department had received several calls about investigations in multiple states for similar incidents. By early 2004, there had been more than 70 cases of hoax phone calls to fast food restaurants, dating as far back as 1994.

At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., a caller convinced a 55-year-old janitor to do a cavity search of a 19-year-old cashier, while in Fargo, N.D., a manager at a local Burger King strip-searched a 17-year-old female employee.

In Phoenix, a caller had a Taco Bell manager pick out a customer and then strip-search her. And police in Massachusetts had been looking for a man who called three Wendy's restaurants near Boston in a single day.

Stump was put in touch with Vic Flaherty, a detective in West Bridgewater, Mass., investigating the Wendy's calls.

Flaherty told Stump he had traced the card's purchase to the exact time the caller bought it, but as luck would have it, the security cameras were pointed toward the front doors -- not the registers -- and didn't capture the sale.

The Big Break

The detectives caught a break when they discovered the calling card used in the Kentucky incident was purchased at a different Wal-Mart than the one in the Massachusetts case. This time, the cameras in the store were trained on the cash registers.

"We can see the card go across the scanner -- we see everything," said Flaherty. "But now we see an individual. We don't know who that is."

When detectives go back to the first surveillance tape to try and match up the face, they find the same man and notice something else -- he's wearing a uniform.

The uniform is that of CCA -- Corrections Corporation of America -- a private prison company that runs a jail in Panama City. The warden identified the man in the video as one of his prison guards -- 38-year-old David Stewart.

According to police, a search of Stewart's trailer revealed guns, police paraphernalia and training manuals. Police also discovered that Stewart had attended a local police academy and even volunteered as a deputy with a small police department in western Florida.

"It's like a sigh of relief," Flaherty said. "It's been a long time, now you actually have a name to a face."

The Calls Stop

David Stewart was extradited to Kentucky and charged with solicitation of sodomy and impersonating a police officer and has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces up to 16 years in prison.

Clinical psychologist Jeff Gardere says the caller's actions were likely a way to feed a God-like complex by manipulating his victims emotionally, physically and sexually. He calls it "virtual voyeurism."

Gardere goes on to say that it was no accident that caller was targeting fast food restaurants.

"Everything is by the book," he explained. "This is how you serve it. This is exactly how you do it. You follow the book -- you're OK. I believe he picked fast food restaurants because he knew, once you got them away from that book, once it was something outside the manual or the procedures, they would be lost."

Since Stewart's arrest in the summer of 2004, there have been no more reported incidents of hoax calls to fast food restaurants.

"This tells me we got our man," said Stump.

Nix has pleaded not guilty to charges of sodomy and sexual assault.

Donna Summers was fired after the incident and has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge. She broke off her engagement to Nix after viewing the surveillance tapes.

Meanwhile, Ogborn is suing McDonald's and Summers for false imprisonment.

In a statement, McDonald's said, "We take this matter very seriously and through our training try very hard to warn employees about such schemes."

McDonald's training manual does include a section which cautions employees that "no legitimate law enforcement agency would ever ask you to conduct such a search."

But none of the employees "Primetime" spoke with at the Mount Washington, Ky., McDonald's say they ever recall seeing the warning.

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For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else's intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it.

Life when one can't hide from the eyes of others - that is hell. Those who have lived in totalitarian countries know it, but that system only brings out, like a magnifying glass, the tendencies of all modern society. The devastation of nature; the decline of thinking and of art; bureaucratization, depersonalization; lack of respect before personal life. Without secrecy, nothing is possible - not love, not friendship.
~Czech novelist Milan Kundera

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All Eyes On You
How Spy Chips Are Quietly Reshaping Privacy
By Martin H. Bosworth
December 15, 2005 ConsumerAffairs.com


You may not realize it, but that pack of disposable razors you just bought can enable you to be tracked wherever you go. Same with that discount card you used to buy the razors in the first place.

Somewhere, a computer is collating and tabulating all of your information from the moment you step into the store, and using it to generate a "profile" of you for unknown purposes.

Not only that, but one day in the near future, you could have a little microchip implanted in your body. Like something out of "Blade Runner" or "The Matrix," you could be electronically "tagged" and identified in order to build a record of your medical information, accessible anywhere in the world -- and for other purposes you may not know about.

Sound like cyberpunk at its most clich�? Far from it. Radio frequency identifiers (RFID) -- more commonly known as "spy chips" -- are a reality in everything from retail business to medical records.

And that's just the beginning. In the words of Alex Eckelberry, president of Florida-based Sunbelt Software, "The problem with RFID�[is that] we are headed toward a state where privacy will be a thing of the past."

Brave New World
RFID works on a deceptively simple principle. An object is implanted or "tagged" with a small computer chip. The chip is monitored wirelessly by a "reader" that identifies its unique signature, and whatever information is on the chip is automatically stored in a linked database.

What makes this different from classic "bar codes" is that the data storage capacity for RFID enables each and every tagged item to have its own unique identifier, whereas the bar code system has one code for an entire class of item.

Business was quick to jump on the concept of millions of products that could be individually identified and tracked. Wal-Mart has led the way in using RFID tagging, investing $250 million in RFID technology and requiring their distributors to mark high-end items such as consumer electronics with RFID tags.

Walgreens recently partnered with marketer Goliath Solutions to track promotional displays in its 5,000 stores nationwide using RFID tags. The tags will be used to track how long displays are made available in stores, group displays by regional interest, and so on.

"With the GOLIATH system, we'll have unprecedented insight into marketing data collected daily from every store," said Robert Kral, Walgreens vice president of purchasing in a press statement.

RFID tags are used in the EZ Pass toll-charge system popular throughout the Northeast. EZ Pass users prepay a certain amount and install a transponder in their car.

When passing through tolls that use the EZ Pass system, a reader in the toll booth identifies the transponder and automatically deducts the amount of the toll from the driver's account.

The government is also getting in on the RFID action. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is testing the use of RFID-tagged cards for visitors to and from the United States. Border guards would "read" the cards each time a visitor to the U.S. crossed the divide.

The Defense Department has issued several big-ticket contracts to RFID suppliers in order to tag their shipments of food, clothes, and weapons around the world.

Investment in RFID is booming. A study by the Gartner research group found that worldwide spending on the technology was $504 million in 2005, with total spending expected to increase to $3 billion by 2010.

"Businesses are beginning to discover business value in places where they cannot use bar coding, which will be the force that moves RFID forward," Gartner's vice-president of research, Jeff Woods, said.

The Body Electric
The most controversial aspect of RFID technology usage is the concept of installing RFID tags in living beings, humans and animals alike. A rabies scare in the Bordeaux region of France in September 2004 motivated the Digital Angel Corporation to distribute 50,000 of its RFID tags to implant in pets in the region.

A year later, Digital Angel supplied 2,000 chips and 28 readers to identify pets displaced by Hurricane Katrina, both to read chips that had already been implanted in pets, and to create a database of information about the animals in order to identify them.

Digital Angel is a subsidiary of Applied Digital, Inc., a company that specializes in "information and security solutions." Another Applied Digital subsidiary, VeriChip, has championed the usage of implanting RFID tags in humans for medical database tracking.

VeriChip's "VeriMed" tracking solution would enable doctors to identify medical patients who may be unable to provide proof of who they are or who can't communicate effectively. The patient would have an RFID chip implanted on their body, which the physician could then track with a handheld reader.

The patient's medical information would be stored, according to VeriChip, "[in] a designated secure healthcare information database, allowing [the physician] to immediately take the safest course of action."

VeriChip has currently deployed the VeriMed system in 68 medical facilities, including 65 hospitals.

Applied Digital is taking advantage of recent publicity about RFID to file an initial public offering for VeriChip, scheduled to close in late 2006.

According to the press release announcing the IPO, "Offering proceeds will also be used for enhancing the growing sales of the infant protection systems, wander prevention systems and asset tracking systems both in the United States and internationally."

VeriChip got a huge publicity boost from the support of former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) chairman Tommy Thompson. Thompson serves on the board of directors of VeriChip, and publicly exhorted the virtues of using RFID for medical information tracking.

In an interview with CBS MarketWatch, Thompson compared the technology's growing usage to that of the iPod.

"Today everybody knows what an iPod is," said Thompson, "and the same thing as with a chip in your arm that is placed there instantaneously, and is going to be able to help you secure your medical records which will be able to allow you to�be able to get immediate care."

Thompson also said that he himself would be willing to get "chipped" in order to demonstrate how quick and easy the procedure is. However, when asked about it on December 5th, VeriChip spokesman John Procter said that Thompson had yet to undergo the procedure.

According to Procter, The procedure is "very quick and painless," but Thompson has to fit it into his schedule. In an interview with ConsumerAffairs.Com, Procter said that "it will be handled in an appropriate fashion."

Procter emphasized that all uses of the chip are "completely voluntary." "We will not have [the chip] imposed on people who don't want it." The best uses for the chip would be for patients who may be mentally ill or have prior conditions that require constant care, he said.

Legal guardians of patients who may be unable to communicate their desires may have the authority to "chip" someone without their permission. The data would be stored in a "secured, password-protected, firewalled database" maintained by Applied Digital, except in cases where hospitals maintained their own databases.

Although Procter stressed that the database would meet conditions required by the Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which governs the collection and protection of medical records, he could not verify if the administrators would themselves be HIPAA-certified.

"Total Surveillance"
No one has done more to bring the issues surrounding RFID technology to the public than Katherine Albrecht.

Albrecht is the founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), which regularly reports on the potential abuses of loyalty cards and discount card memberships in retail stores, and has become a tireless foe of spy chips.

Albrecht and her chief partner, Liz McIntyre, have repeatedly exposed the surreptitious usage of RFID in everyday life.

Albrecht recently told Mother Jones magazine, "The problem with RFID has to do with the fact that the RFID tags can be so easily hidden into products -- things people buy and carry -- and the reader devices can be so easily hidden into aspects of the environment. This makes it extremely easy for someone who wants to observe and watch people in these surreptitious ways to do so."

CASPIAN's efforts have led to such findings as the insertion of tiny RFID tags into Gillette razorblade packages and the usage of spy chips in discount cards for the METRO "future store" in Rhineberg, Germany.

Albrecht and McIntyre recently published "Spy Chips: How Major Corporations and Governments Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID," which details their investigations of RFID usage and its implications.

In an interview with ConsumerAffairs.Com, McIntyre was skeptical that the total amount of spending on RFID was $504 million. "That's pretty low," based on their findings, she said.

McIntyre said that Walgreens and Goliath could use their new RFID system "not just to track displays, but customers as well." She noted that Goliath has emphasized the ability to hide the RFID readers in light fixtures and other unobtrusive areas, "so customers couldn't see them."

McIntyre obtained patent and trademark information filed by Goliath regarding the usage of their RFID tracking information.

According to the patent filing, tracking store displays with RFID tags would "monitor and report exposure of particular shoppers to marketing materials that are being monitored by the system. The system will therefore allow companies to monitor and remedy compliance problems during an advertising program, which will improve overall compliance and increase the effectiveness of the advertising program. It will also allow fee-based marketing programs that are conditional upon certain retail conditions being present at a particular time to be executed with more precision, reliability, and verifiability.

"Furthermore," says the filing, "it will allow the flow of specific shopper traffic within a store to be monitored and analyzed. In addition, the system will allow subsequent marketing programs, such as coupons or direct mail, to be tailored to or made conditional on shopper interests, shopping patterns, or prior exposure to marketing materials."

Who Watches The Watchmen?
A concern expressed by opponents of RFID chips is that identity thieves and criminals may be able to use their own readers to "tag" the data in a chip. McIntyre believes that while that is a concern, the major issue should be with businesses and government agencies who have the capability to collect this information and who are already doing so without the public's consent.

"The Pentagon has been in talks with VeriChip" over using these technologies, said McIntyre. "We're looking at�a government-held database of medical information records on every American."

Alex Eckelberry thinks that the usage of RFID for surveillance presages an erosion of individual privacy, and individual liberty with it.

"One of the founding tenants of our society is the belief that freedoms and privacy are interconnected. We have fundamental freedoms that are vital for our nation to continue to succeed, and we have seen a slow whittling down of these freedoms that pose a real danger to our future. Freedom and privacy are critical to a healthy society."

In the landmark Harvard Law Review article, "The Right to Privacy," Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis laid out the case for privacy being an essential right.

"Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right 'to be let alone,'" Brandeis wrote.

Though he was speaking of "instantaneous newspaper photographs" and an increasingly invasive press, he could just as easily have been speaking of spy chips when he said, "The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury."

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RFID tags are used in the EZ Pass toll-charge system popular throughout the Northeast. EZ Pass users prepay a certain amount and install a transponder in their car.

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Monroe soon made friends with a co-worker, but within a few weeks the Customer Service Managers, or CSMs, separated them, making sure they worked in different sections of the store and eventually on different shifts. Wal-Mart discourages associates from forming friendships with the people around them, apparently because it both fears such fraternization will result in lost productivity and because there is a greater chance such bonds will facilitate unionization. If Monroe made even the smallest computation error, she had to call a CSM to fix it while customers waited impatiently. "Customers scream at you and there's nothing you can do," she said. Monroe was told not to joke around with her fellow workers or to make political comments, even on her breaks. Monroe came to particularly dread the "opening ceremony," otherwise known as the Wal-Mart cheer: "You guys treat me like crap, you won't let me switch shifts, you won't let me dress like myself, won't let me act like myself, and now you want me to be, like, 'Yay, Wal-Mart'?" Monroe quit on the spot after 11 months when her boss refused to allow her time off to attend her brother's wedding in Chicago.

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1984, Chapter 11, George Orwell

As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hidlng-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by instalments'. She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips.

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1984, Chapter 13, George Orwell

During the Two Minutes Hate she [Julia] always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein...In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda....She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing.

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1984,Chapter 23,George Orwell
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.

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More Young Adults Taking ADHD Drugs
ADHD Drugs Jumps 19% in Young Adults in 2005, Report Shows By Miranda Hitti
WebMD Medical News

Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
on Tuesday, March 21, 2006

March 21, 2006 -- The use of prescription drugs to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rose again in 2005, mainly among young adults.

So says Medco Health Solutions, which manages prescription drug benefit programs. Medco checked prescription data for 2.5 million patients nationwide.

For young adults (aged 20-44), ADHD prescriptions rose nearly 19% in 2005 and about 139% from 2000 to 2005, according to Medco.

For kids and teens (aged 0 to 19), growth in ADHD medication use was less than half of 1% in 2005. That number is a stark change from years of much higher growth -- 9% to 16% per year from 2000 to 2004.

'Growing Trend' for Adults

In a news release, Medco's chief medical officer, Robert Epstein, MD, MS, commented on the findings.

"This new research indicates that we're seeing a growing trend in the use of ADHD medications among adults," Epstein says. "In 2005, the numbers continued upward from 2004, as they have every year since the beginning of this decade."

The FDA has studied and continues to analyze safety issues related to ADHD drugs.

"While there is a growing acceptance that ADHD is not just a childhood disease and can impair adults as well as children, the possible cardiovascular issues associated with ADHD drugs should be weighed very seriously when prescribing these drugs for adults since they're at greater risk of heart disease and stroke than children," Epstein says.

Gender Gap Shrinking

While ADHD prescriptions were more common for males than females in every age group, the gender gap was much narrower for young adults and is shrinking for kids, according to Medco.

"While boys still far outnumber girls taking ADHD drugs, girls are increasingly being diagnosed and treated for the condition," Epstein says. "ADHD in girls can be less noticeable than in boys and in the past was often overlooked. However, that appears to be changing."

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The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the régime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom—that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.

Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modern dictatorships don’t, in fact, leave the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Café Royal would soon have found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how little worth-while writing of any kind—even such things as diaries, for instance—has been produced in secret under the dictators.
As I Please
by George Orwell
Tribune, 1944, April 28.

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"Privacy is the disease"
by Armando
The Kos
Sat Apr 15, 2006

Dan Solove writes about a New Republic article by William J. Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, who apparently specializes in Christian law theory (who knew Harvard had a professor for that? Damned liberals!). Stuntz apparently has expressed some reasonable opinions in the past. But not this time. Stuntz attacks the right to privacy for individuals and the demand for transparency from the government:

Today, the danger that American democracy faces is not that rulers will know too much about those they rule, nor that too many decisions will be made without public scrutiny. Another danger looms larger: that effective, active government--government that innovates, that protects people who need protecting, that acts aggressively when action is needed--is dying. Privacy and transparency are the diseases. We need to find a vaccine, and soon.

Say what? I guess he might be one of those who thinks 'everything changed after 9/11.' Yep. He is:

The harder it is to tap our phones, the more government officials will seek out alternative means of getting information: greater use of informants and spies, or perhaps more Jose Padilla-style military detentions with long-term interrogation about which no court ever hears, or possibly some CIA "black ops," with suspected terrorists grabbed from their homes and handed over to the intelligence services of countries with fewer qualms about abusive questioning. In an age of terrorism, privacy rules are not simply unaffordable. They are perverse.

Wow! Just, wow! Here's the kicker, Stuntz argues that not only do we have too much of a right to privacy, the government has to tell us too much about what it is doing. Solove writes:

[Stuntz] argues that transparency makes it harder for government officials to do something, and doing something is better than doing nothing: "For most officials most of the time, the key choice is not between doing right and doing wrong, but between doing something and doing nothing. Doing nothing is usually easier--less likely to generate bad headlines or critical blog posts."

What an amazing thing for Stuntz write to argue. '"Doing something is better than doing nothing."' It will not surprise you that Stuntz is a strong supporter of the Iraq Debacle. I wonder what George Will thinks of that "'doing something is better than doing nothing"' principle?

Solove gives this argument more consideration than I think it deserves, but you should read his post on it and judge for yourself.

For me though, Stuntz's closing is all I needed to read:

"We have too much privacy, and those who govern us have too little."

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales could not agree more. We all know how right they have been.

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(the structural objects) are finally developing identities beyond and beside any of the character traits we might assign to those who function within them. It sometimes occurs to me that the 'state' may have only served as a template for their construction; a design which has now quite outstripped the imagination of those who conceived and named them. We may analyze and rightly appreciate their great threat to any claim we might make to a soulful existence.

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We are thrown back to abhoring the psychopathy and violent repression of those who utilize the corporate apparatus for their ambitions, but cannot address the actual state of the corporate ambition on its own turf - as an entity in a world it is creating for itself and entities like itself. What models are we to use? Such analysis always returns to our being thrown back upon an analysis of own fears and desires without knowing much about the world of this creature we believe to be of own invention. Has it, instead, evolved in some way we cannot comprehend; and to purposes which have little to do with us, other than we serve to carry out its ambitions with little more status than say, the cells that live and die within us do for our bodies? How would we even carry out such an analysis?

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Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
Nineteen Eighty Four, Chapter 7, George Orwell.

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In classical Greek philosophy, Reason is the cognitive faculty to distinguish what is true and what is false insofar as truth (and falsehood) is primarily a condition of Being, of Reality — and only on this ground a property of propositions. True discourse, logic, reveals and expresses that which really is as distinguished from that which appears to be (real), And by virtue of this equation between Truth and (real) Being, Truth is a value, for Being is better than Non-Being. The latter is not simply Nothing; it is a potentiality of and a threat to Being — destruction. The struggle for truth is a struggle against destruction, for the “salvation” (sozein) of Being (an effort which appears itself to be destructive if it assails an established reality as “untrue”: Socrates against the Athenian city-state). Inasmuch as the struggle for truth “saves” reality from destruction, truth commits and engages human existence. It is the essentially human project. If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology….

To be sure, this is still the dictum of the philosopher; it is he who analyses the human situation. He subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment — namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organization of society nor the transformation of nature. They were ineffective, unreal.
ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN. STUDIES IN THE IDEOLOGY OF ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY (1964)

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I don't know if anyone else has postulated the notion that the 'corporate structure' may also be a natural projection of some kind of "organic evolutionary process?" (in quotes, and with some reservation).

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- Some of your descriptions remind me of Foucault's "Panopticon" - the ultimate surveillance design of a prison with a central tower and an encircling set of cells, each with an open view of the prisoner inside; takes very few in the central tower to know everything that goes on in each cell.

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- I reserve that their is 'life beyond privacy'; that is, privacy is requisite only in punitive cultures; that is, only as long as what one is, what one does, presents the subject as the accused and the inquiry as preludium to punishment, is the notion of privacy useful. In a non-punitive culture, where engagement, celebration and curiosity are the norm, privacy becomes useless; what does one need to protect? In that sense, perhaps privacy needs to be reconsidered as an intermediate state, rather than a final condition?

- Perhaps the same might be said of the division between 'work' and 'play'? An entirely artifical construct useful only to manipulate labor with promises of 'relief' on the one hand and 'tension' on the other. A recreation of the orgasmic sequence harnessed to the machinery workplace.

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Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job
By LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT
nytimes.com
Published: July 31, 2006


FOUR YEARS WITHOUT WORK - Christopher Priga, 54, has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. He supports himself by borrowing against his home in Los Angeles.

ROCK FALLS, Ill. — Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.

So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.

“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family’s savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife’s income helps them scrape by. “If things really get tight,” Mr. Beggerow said, “I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that.”

Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Most of these missing men are, like Mr. Beggerow, former blue-collar workers with no more than a high school education. But their ranks are growing at all education and income levels. Refugees of failed Internet businesses have spent years out of work during their 30’s, while former managers in their late 40’s are trying to stretch severance packages and savings all the way to retirement.

Accumulated savings can make dropping out more affordable at the upper end than it is for Mr. Beggerow, but the dynamic is often the same — the loss of a career and of a sense that one’s work is valued.

“These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former job,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So they stop trying.”

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

“To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” said Christopher Priga, who is 54 and has not had steady work since he lost a job with a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox in 2002. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits,” he explained. “I’ve been down the road where I did all the things I was supposed to do, and the end result of that is nil.”

Instead, Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising value of his Los Angeles home. Other men fall back on wives or family members.

But the fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.

No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990. About 25 percent of the missing men are collecting this insurance.

The ailments that qualify them are usually real, like back pain, heart trouble or mental illness. But in some cases, the illnesses are not so serious that they would prevent people from working if a well-paying job with benefits were an option.

The disability program, in turn, is an obstacle to working again. Taking a job holds the risk of demonstrating that one can earn a living and is thus no longer entitled to the monthly payments. But staying out of work has consequences. Skills deteriorate, along with the desire for a paying job and the habits that it requires.

“The longer you stay on disability benefits,” said Martin H. Gerry, deputy commissioner for disability and income security at the Social Security Administration, “the longer you’re out of the work force, the less likely you are to go back to work.”

As a rule, out-of-work men are less educated than the population as a whole. Their numbers have grown sharply among black men and men who live in hard-hit industrial areas like Michigan, West Virginia and upstate New York, as well as those who live in rural states like Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The missing men are also more likely to live alone. Nearly 60 percent are divorced, separated, widowed or never married, up from 50 percent a decade earlier, the Census Bureau reports. Sometimes women who are working throw out men who are not, says Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. In any case, without a household to support, there is less pressure to work, and for men who fall behind on support payments, an incentive exists to work off the books — hiding employment — so that wages cannot be garnisheed.

“What happens to a lot of guys who become unmoored from family life, they become unmoored from everything,” Ms. Edin said. “They are just living without attachments and by the time they are 40 or 50 years old, the things that kept these men from falling away — family and community life — are gone.”

Even as more men are dropping out of the work force, more women are entering it. This change has occurred partly because employment has shrunk in industries where men predominated, like manufacturing, while fields where women are far more common, like teaching, health care and retailing, have grown. Today, about 73 percent of women between 30 and 54 have a job, compared with 45 percent in the mid-1960’s, according to an analysis of Census data by researchers at Queens College. Many women without jobs are raising children at home, while men who are out of a job tend to be doing neither family work nor paid work.

Women are also making inroads in fields where they were once excluded — as lawyers and doctors, for example, and on Wall Street. Men still make significantly more money than women, but as women become more educated than men, even more men may end up out of the work force.

At the low end of the spectrum, men emerging from prison with felony records are not easily absorbed into steady employment. Hundreds of thousands of young men were jailed in the 1980’s and 1990’s, in a surge of convictions for drug-related crimes. As prisoners, they were not counted in the employment data; as ex-prisoners they are. They are now being freed in their 30’s and 40’s and are struggling to be hired. Roughly two million men in this group have prison records, according to a calculation by Richard Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, labor economists at Harvard and the Urban Institute, respectively.Many of these men do not find work because of their records.

Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing from the nation’s best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country’s well-being than it once was.

Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at almost any point in the last half-century, which raises the question of how they will get by as they age. They may be forced back to work after years of absence, they may fall into poverty, or they may be rescued by the government. This same trend is evident in other industrialized countries. In the European Union, 14 percent of men between 25 and 54 were not working last year, up from 7 percent in 1975, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Over the same period in Japan, the proportion of such men rose to 8 percent from 4 percent.

In these countries, too, decently paying blue-collar jobs are disappearing, and as they do men who held them fall back on government benefits for income. But the growth of subsidies through federal and state programs like disability insurance has happened largely without notice in this country while it is a major topic of political debate in Europe.

“We have a de facto welfare system as Europe does,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the University of Notre Dame. “But we are not proud of it, as they are.”

Reading, Sleeping, Scraping By

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years.

He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a characteristic of men without work. As the months pass, they average almost nine-and-a-half hours a night, about 80 minutes more than working men, according to an analysis of time-use surveys by Harley Frazis and Jay Stewart, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Very few of the books Mr. Beggerow reads are novels, and certainly not the escapist Westerns that he himself writes (two in the last five years), his hope being that someday he will interest a publisher and earn some money. His own catholic tastes range over history — currently the Bolshevik revolution and a biography of Charlemagne — as well as music and the origins of Christianity.

He often has strong views about what he has just read, which he expresses in reviews that he posts on Amazon.com: 124 so far, he said.

Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, “Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire” by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first took lessons.

His new life began in the spring of 2001 with the closing of Northwestern Wire and Steel in Sterling, Ill., where he had worked since 1971. During the last three of those 30 years, Mr. Beggerow found himself assigned to work he really liked: as a union representative on union-management teams that assessed every aspect of the plant’s operations.

What made him valuable was his dexterity as a writer. No one could put together committee reports as articulately as he did, and he found himself on nearly every team. His salary rose to $50,000. During those years, he taught himself more math, too, to help in the analyses of the issues that the teams tackled: productivity, safety, plant layout and the like.

“I actually loved that job,” he said. “I even looked forward to going to work. The more teams they had, the more they found out what I could do and the more I found out what I could do.”

Mr. Beggerow would take another job in a heartbeat, he says, if it were like the work he did in those last three years at Northwestern. The closest he has gotten has been as an instructor at a community college, teaching plant maintenance and other useful factory skills. His students were from nearby manufacturing companies, which subsidized the courses, including his pay of $45 an hour. But factory operations in the area are shrinking, and Mr. Beggerow has not had a teaching stint since November.

Like Mr. Beggerow, the great majority of the missing men are out of the work force for months or years at a time rather than drifting in and out of jobs. There appears to have been no rise since the 1960’s in the percentage of men out of work for short periods, according to research by Chinhui Juhn, a University of Houston professor, and other economists.

Mr. Beggerow will not take a lesser job, he says, because of his bitter memories of earlier years at Northwestern Wire, particularly the 1980’s, when the industry was in turmoil. A powerful man, over 6 feet and 200 pounds, he worked then as a warehouseman.

What got to him was not the work. It was the frequent furloughs, the uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and 50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return, the schedules that forced him to work every holiday except Christmas, and then, as rising seniority finally gave him some protection, a six-month strike in 1983 followed by a wage cut. His pay shrank to $13 an hour from $17, a loss he did not fully recover until those last three years.

“I was always thinking if there was some way I could get out of this, do something else,” Mr. Beggerow said. “What made me so upset was the insecurity of it all and the humiliation. I don’t want to take a job that would put me through that again.”

Shortly after Northwestern closed, Mr. Beggerow married. It was his third marriage, and also Cathleen’s third. He has one adult child by the first wife; Cathleen has no children. For six months they lived on his $12,000 from a shrunken pension and her $28,000 as a factory worker — until severe injuries in an auto accident five months after their wedding forced her out of that job. She eventually qualified for $12,000 a year in disability insurance.

Their two incomes are not enough to cover expenses, which bothers Mrs. Beggerow, although not enough to badger her husband to take a job, any job. She respects him too much for that, she says.

Instead, she finds ways to make money herself, in activities she enjoys. She is taking in work as a seamstress, baking pastries for parties and selling merchandise for others on eBay, collecting a fee. Still, she says, she hopes to land a part-time clerical job. “The comfort of a paycheck every week would take a load off my mind,” she said.

While she is tolerant of her husband’s reluctance to work, respecting his current pursuits, she is not above looking for a job he would consider suitable. “I look at the employment ads every day,’’ she said, “and every so often I find one that I think might be right up his alley.”

Less Concern About the Future

Recently there was an opening for an editor-writer at a small travel magazine published in a nearby town. “I applied,” Mr. Beggerow said, “but the publisher did not seem to want someone my age.”

Meanwhile the Beggerows’ savings are shrinking. This year, for the first time, they have drawn down so much from their 401(k)’s they have been forced to pay early-withdrawal penalties. But Mr. Beggerow resists being stampeded.

“The future is always a concern, but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it,” he said, waving aside, in his new and precarious life, the preparations for retirement and old age that were a feature of his 30 years as a steelworker.

“When you are in the mode of having money coming in,” he explained, “naturally you think about planning and saving. And then when you don’t have the money coming in, you think less about the future, at least money-wise. It is still a concern, but not a concern that keeps me up at night, not in this life that I am now leading.”

Men like Mr. Beggerow, neither working nor looking for a job, also have become more common in the popular culture, making the phenomenon more acceptable. On the television show “Seinfeld,” Cosmo Kramer, who did not work, and George Costanza, who regularly lost jobs, were beloved figures. Personal-finance magazines whose circulations have grown rapidly over the last 25 years also encourage not working — by telling readers how to afford retirement at 50 and by painting not working as the good life, which it apparently is for a small number of wealthy men. About 8 percent of non-working men between 30 and 54 lived in households that had more than $100,000 of income in 2004.

“Men don’t feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once did,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Nor do men have the incentive they once had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to them.”

Mr. Priga, the former Xerox engineer who lives in Los Angeles, has been wandering in this latter Diaspora. He is a tall, thin man with a perpetually dour expression. His dress — old jeans and a faded khaki shirt — seemed out of place in the upscale Beverly Hills restaurant where he was interviewed for this article. But his education and skill were not out of place.

Mr. Priga is an electrical engineer skilled in computer technology, and much involved, as he tells the story, in writing early versions of Internet and e-mail software for banks and other companies. A divorce in 1996 left him with custody of his three children. One of them had behavioral problems and to care for the boy he dropped out of steady work for a while, mortgaging his house to raise money and designing Web sites as a freelancer.

He re-entered the work force in 2000, joining Xerox at just over $100,000 a year as a systems designer for a new project, which did not last. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, Xerox downsized and Mr. Priga was let go in January 2003.

From Prison to Joblessness

“I’ve been through a lot of layoffs over the years, and there is a certain procedure you follow,” he said. “You contact the headhunters. You go looking for other work. You do all of that, and this time around it didn’t work.”

So he went back to designing Web sites as a freelancer, postponing the purchase of health insurance. No work has come his way since March, and even if people had hired him to design Web sites for them, Mr. Priga would not consider that real employment.

His father is his standard. At Mr. Priga’s age, 54, “my father was with Rockwell International designing the fiber optic backbone for U.S. Navy ships,” he said. “He got a regular paycheck. He had retirement benefits, medical benefits, all of that. I’m at that age and I don’t see that as even possible. I’ve kind of written off the idea completely. I’m more like a casual laborer.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics determines who is working through a monthly survey of 65,000 representative households. People are asked if they did any work for pay in the week before the survey, including self-employment. For Mr. Beggerow and Mr. Priga, the answer has been no.

The same goes for Rodney Bly, a 41-year-old Philadelphia man struggling with a prison record, although he has had income — from off-the-books work that he refuses to think of as employment.

Mr. Bly, a lanky, neatly dressed six-footer, was in and out of jail, mostly on drug convictions, from 1996 until 2003, but has been clean since then, he said in an interview last month. He has even been a leader of an Alcoholics Anonymous-style group of former addicts who meet regularly and do their best to stay off drugs and out of jail.

Mr. Bly has been living in a recovery shelter for addicts and shows up occasionally for meals at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen and health clinic in a poor North Philadelphia neighborhood that tries to help ex-convicts get work and keep it.

He has worked pretty regularly, distributing flyers. But that brings him only $270 a week, most of which goes to the shelter for rent, utilities and food. More to the point, the work is off the books, which makes Mr. Bly invisible in the national statistics as a member of the work force.

Still, he has a girlfriend, reports Karen Pushaw, a staff member at St. Francis, “and that grounds him, keeps him looking for legitimate work.”

Ms. Pushaw tries to help. At her encouragement, he applied for 25 jobs this spring but received no offers, not even an interview. The obstacle is two felony convictions, one for car theft, the other for three instances of drug possession.

“Because of the two felonies, I can’t get a job as a security guard or a sales person or a short-order cook,” Mr. Bly said. “I can be a pot washer or a dish washer, but I can’t get a job that pays more than $8 an hour, not a legitimate one. I’m excluded.”


Amanda Cox contributed reporting for this article from New York.

quote:

Office Space: Creating boundaries in accordance to the panoptic vision
Reagan's Anthropology of the Body

“The principle of ‘enclosure’ is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery. This machinery works space in a much more flexible and detailed way. It does this first of all on the principle of elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive, or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation.”

--- Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, p.143


"This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined, and distributed… all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.”

--- Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish, p.197

Image 1

The first image depicts an empty office. The photograph is in black and white to highlight the sterile and orderly appearance of the space. The large area of the office is partitioned to create cubicles, a personal, confined, separate space for every individual. The second image is an advertisement, depicting a diagram of a “pod.” The pod is a specialized work area, designed to divide an area in order to accommodate the most workers in the smallest amount of space, in order to ensure maximum efficiency. These partitioning devices, which appear in countless offices around the world, are tools used to enforce the panoptic order to the working space, and to enhance the productivity and efficiency of the worker as an individual by separating him. This reduces opportunities for idle conversation and other such wastes of potentially productive time, and forces focus on work by facing the worker away from the greater space, and into his personal space: towards the computer and desk. The partitions are high enough to prevent viewing or communicating with other workers while seated at the desk, but low enough to allow for observation and documentation of each individuals activities and productivity. This modern embrace of the panoptic ideal serves as a form of effective and unproblematic discipline of the worker as an individual and serves as a modern version of the assembly line; rather than tightening screws, while standing at the conveyer belt, each worker is separated to function in isolation in front of the artificial, static glow of the computer monitor, ensuring maximum production and participation of the individual as a cog in the corporate machine.

quote:

Generation empty
Marin psychologist Madeline Levine says that driving our kids to succeed is a journey over an emotional cliff.
BY JILL KRAMER
Pacificsun.com
August 25, 2006

Tomorrow’s movers and shakers are emotionally wounded, says psychologist Madeline Levine. An increasing number of well-heeled, driven, high-achieving adolescents are growing up without conscience or community. These are the kids who will be filling classrooms at Harvard and Princeton and who will later be our politicians, policy makers, doctors and lawyers—and that’s a problem for all of us.

Levine’s new book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, exposes the ugly side of these smart, stylish teens and their affluent families. They look perfect and appear to have everything; but one in every three is deeply troubled. They’re anxious and depressed, they’re abusing hard drugs, they’re lying and cheating, they’re suicidal, self-destructive, desperate and angry.

The conventional wisdom has always been that children raised in affluence are protected from the psychological traumas of lower socioeconomic groups. To highlight the differences, Dr. Suniya Luthar of Columbia University—whose research forms the scientific underpinning of Levine’s book—compared the emotional well-being of children in poverty with that of affluent kids. She was surprised to find that the affluent children were more troubled.

Levine has seen both sides of this equation. Her roots are in working-class Queens, New York, and her first career was in inner-city schools that were more like war zones than teaching establishments. But for the last 25 years, she has been treating the privileged children of Marin County in her private psychology practice. She’s also raised three sons here. Married to a successful surgeon, she lives in a sprawling wood-shingled home in one of the toniest areas of this highly affluent county. When I arrive at her front door, I’m welcomed inside by her Latina maid.

Levine joins me in her front room where light pours in through long, narrow windows placed high above us near the cathedral ceiling. She still has a trace of a New York accent and an earthy, unassuming manner. She’s wearing jeans with a pin-striped navy blouse, shirttails out, a pair of reading glasses on top of her head. Her eyes are close-set, her smile dazzling. As we talk, her youngest son, age 15, passes through on his way to the kitchen, barefoot, with a friend in tow.

• • • •

It seems that your book has struck a nerve.
I have to tell you, this whole thing has been just extraordinary. The book just came out last month. I’ve been to New York. I have to go back. I have to go to Chicago and L.A. The London Times just bought the serial rights. I don’t know who’s more surprised, the publisher or me. Perhaps so many kids are running into trouble, and the book just happened to be timed with everybody feeling impacted in some way. I have the feeling that, if it had been three years ago, it wouldn’t have gotten this response.

One of the main reasons you say kids are unraveling is the pressure to achieve. Parents believe that their kids have to get in to the best schools so they can land the best jobs at the highest salaries. Are they wrong?
Kids from prestigious schools make marginally more money, on average, than kids who didn’t go to prestigious schools. It really becomes delusional to think that these are the things that make for a better quality of life for children. Does it allow your kid to say at a cocktail party, “I went to Princeton”? Yes. But for kids to constantly be pressured has very negative effects on healthy child development. The reality is that there is zero correlation between the school you went to and happiness. If you want your kids to be happy, that has nothing to do with the school.

Tell me about the population of kids that you’re writing about. Who are they, and what are the problems they’re having?
This book looks at kids with a family income of $120,000 to $160,000, which in some communities is not even considered affluent. Depression among teenagers in communities like this is three times the general rate of depression for teens. And [the rate of] anxiety disorders is three times the general rate. And substance abuse is substantially higher, and cutting is substantially higher. And 30 to 40 percent of kids are showing “troubling psychological symptoms.”

That statistic really gets me. That’s astonishingly high.
Well, you have 22 percent of girls meeting criteria for clinical depression. I’m not talking about kids who are just “unhappy”—they’re depressed! There’s a big difference. You would expect 8 percent to be depressed, and we’re getting 22 percent instead.

You say in the book that parents often are unaware of this. But if a kid is a self-mutilator, or as it’s called a “cutter,” for example, there’s physical evidence. You mention in the book a girl who carved the word “empty” into her arm. You’d think a parent would notice something like that.
Up until the last seven or eight years, these kids were easy to identify. They looked depressed, they were bedraggled, they were withdrawn, they were angry. Their parents were beside themselves when they hauled them into therapy. Over the last few years, I think it is increasingly difficult to recognize that these are kids who are in trouble. They come in, [the girls are] made up, they drive up in a good car, they have very good social skills—“Hi, Dr. Levine, it’s a pleasure to meet you”—they look you right in the eye. So at first blush, it’s kind of like, “what are you doing here?” And that’s why that cutter story, for me, was the “aha!” story. Because she was wearing this very expensive T-shirt, Prada or something, and underneath she’s carved “empty” into her arm. So, on the surface, she looks terrific. But she’s bleeding underneath. And that became a metaphor for me, for the kids that I was seeing. The surfaces of everything in these communities look good. The houses look good, the women are well-groomed, the lawns are done. But the substance of things has become really impaired. And these kids still are maintaining their grades. The old saw about depression was “watch for a drop in your kid’s grades.” Now I’m seeing kids addicted to cocaine and they’re number one in their class. They party all night, they use cocaine and they stay up and study. So now, when parents call me up, they say, “I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with my kid, but would you just take a look at her?” This was unheard of 15 years ago.

So what tips off the parent when a kid seems to be doing okay?
I think parents intuitively have a really good sense about their children.

If they’re paying attention.
I think parents are paying attention, but we all live in this “culture of affluence,” where stuff matters more than connection, competition matters more than cooperation, and individuality matters more than reciprocity. There was an incident of cheating on the SAT at one of the schools here where the scores of hundreds of kids were thrown out. And the school really didn’t do anything. And many of the kids who cheated went on to some of the best schools. Their judgment was completely clouded by the need to be competitive. They’re willing to cheat, knowing there’s a risk that scores for everybody else in that room will be tossed out. So what are you paying attention to? How they look? How competitive they are? Or that they don’t clean up their dishes and they don’t treat their parents with respect?

And the kids probably have the same values as their parents, so the parents wouldn’t see this as a warning sign.
That’s right. That’s really the book that needs to be written, but there’s no research yet. The woman [Dr. Suniya Luthar] who has done most of the research on affluent kids is from Columbia University and she’s now turning her attention to the mothers. And I am certain, after living in this community for 20 years, that you will find the same elevated rates of depression and substance abuse among the moms that you’re finding among the kids. She’s looked at kids around the country and keeps coming up with very consistent findings on these exaggerated rates of emotional problems.

You tell a story in the book of your own “worst parenting moment.”
It really was. It was just awful of me. I’m right in the middle of writing this book, telling parents to “see the child in front of you,” and there I am, screaming at my son about a grade! And this is the most sweet-tempered child imaginable. So I really had to think about what happened. And I think what it was, for me, who lost a parent early, and my family was on assistance—I come from a very working-class-to-lower-class background—I found language skills were my way out. Language skills got me through school and got me my scholarships and all that. So here I was, screaming at my kid about his English grade slipping. Well, that’s my thing. That’s my history. He didn’t lose a father. He didn’t have to work in order to be able to go to school. But every time our own story becomes so powerful that we can’t see the kid in front of us, I think that’s when we’re not very good at parenting. So he doesn’t have strong verbal skills, but that’s not a problem for him because he’s a visual-spatial kid. He taught himself CAD drawing!

Well, parents of any socio-economic level will tend to project their own histories onto their kids.
Sure. But affluent parents are so anxious about their kids being able to maintain their lifestyle. Will my kids live like this [looking around at her architecturally grand sitting room]? My whole house [where I grew up] could have fit in this entrance here. Will my kids live in a house like this? I don’t know. Probably not. Does it matter? Now, at age 57, I know it doesn’t matter. When I was younger, I probably thought it mattered a heck of a lot more.

What happens 10 years from now to the 30 to 40 percent of kids from these families that are troubled? Do they grow out of it?
Nobody knows. Is this a new phenomenon? It hasn’t been studied yet. But the way this research came about was that Dr. Luthar is one of the country’s foremost experts in poverty. So as she’s looking at kids in poverty she decides to compare them with affluent kids, thinking it’s going to highlight the problems of the kids in poverty. And she found in her first study and her second study and her third study that the affluent kids looked worse!

Worse in what areas?
Depression. Anxiety disorders. Substance abuse. Psychosomatic disorders. They feel less connected to their parents than kids in poverty.

That really surprised me. You’re comparing affluent kids to kids who are being raised by single mothers who are working two jobs and are never home.
When my dad died and my mom was working two jobs, I felt like we were in it together. I was incredibly connected to her. And like I mention in the book, one of my patients once said to me, “My mom is everywhere and nowhere.” Being around is not the same as being connected. Being connected is a whole other level of emotional availability. It has nothing to do with how many games you attend. Another thing that the research shows is that affluent boys endorse delinquent behavior at the same rate as boys in poverty—meaning that they’re just as likely to say, “I’m going to drink and drive, there are no rules for me, it’s okay to steal from my local 7-11.” Now the kid in poverty may be more likely to act on that, but I think this is what we’re seeing as entitlement. These kids feel like they don’t have to play by the rules. They endorse anti-social values.

It sounds like they’re angry.
Absolutely. I think it does. I think these kids are astoundingly angry. And I think it’s because the very people who are supposed to love them the most are the ones who make their love conditional on performance. There’s a woman I’m seeing in my practice whose husband is going to leave her unless she makes a certain amount of money at her job. This is a woman who makes an enormous salary. Very, very successful. And her husband says, “if you don’t keep making that $800,000, I’m outta here.”

My God!
But it’s not that different from the kids I see who say, “I can’t go home because I got a C. My mom’s going to have a heart attack.” There’s this tremendous over-reaction. And these parents mean well. I think that a lot of this comes from anxiety. I used to work with younger children as a school consultant, and I once held this one kid back from kindergarten when he was in pre-school. He was just young, he needed a year more to cook, there was nothing wrong with him. And the father came in screaming at me—how the hell did I expect his son to get into Harvard medical school if I was holding him back in pre-school? Now, it’s easy to say this guy is just a jerk. But on another level, he’s just scared to death about his child’s future and he thinks I’m screwing it up.

What are you seeing in the family backgrounds of the parents of these kids? Any patterns?
A lot of them didn’t have good models of parenting because of the high divorce rate. A lot of them were on their own as kids. And I’m finding a lot of sexual abuse among the moms.

They were sexually abused as kids?
Yeah. Now, remember, I’m a psychologist, so I see people who have had troubles. But I’m guessing there is a higher level of trauma and loss in the backgrounds of these women—and some combination of narcissism and masochism. So, on the one hand they take incredibly good care of themselves and on the other hand, they subject themselves to unbelievable levels of control by their husbands. I see women who have to report to their husbands every item they have bought, right down to their tampons. These are very capable, competent women, but something is going on where they let themselves be treated poorly by their husbands, and by their children. I hope that when there’s more research done, we’ll have a better sense of what it is. I think that moms need a compassionate voice. I think they tend to be treated as spoiled and self-centered, and a lot of what we hear when we’re pitching this book is, these women should be on their knees with gratitude for how easy they have it. And it just isn’t true.

Well, I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to feel sorry for these women. But I think that we’re all going to be affected by the kind of adults these kids grow up to be.
Yes, these are the people who are going to take care of you and me. It’s out of these kids that the lawyers and the doctors and the policy-makers and the CEOs are more likely to come, because their parents have money and connections. So it’s really a bigger social issue. I’m hoping that the doctor who takes care of me in 15 years isn’t the kid who cheated and felt that was perfectly fine. I want somebody who’s compassionate, who cares about people. And I think that the kids who push their way to the top have issues of conscience that are of concern to me. They believe that it’s every man for himself and in order for you to win, somebody else has to lose.

I think we’ve already seen a lot of this in scandals like Enron.
That’s exactly right. And that’s why you can’t say this is brand new. It may have been around for the last 200 years and it was just undocumented. Maybe it was there all along and that’s why we have Enron and President Bush! I know kids who have lied, cheated, stolen, been picked up for all kinds of misdemeanors and even felonies and still get admitted to some of the best schools in this country.

Tell me about your background. Where did you grow up?
In Queens. It was a working-class neighborhood, doors open. You couldn’t buy your way out of trouble so you needed your neighbor to help you out if you were sick or you needed a cup of sugar or whatever. My mom was a housewife and my father was a cop. A Jewish cop.

There aren’t a lot of those! When you were a kid, what did you imagine you would be doing when you grew up? Did you think you would have a career?
The notion of being a doctor or a Ph.D. didn’t even cross my mind until I was well into my 20s. People in my family were truck drivers, most of the women didn’t work. But I was always smart in school, so I thought that meant I was going to be a teacher or a social worker—both of which I was. And one day my supervisor at Mount Sinai Hospital—I was working in the Department of Psychiatry—she called me and said, “I want you to go back to school and get a Ph.D.” But I was a terrible teacher.

Really!
I worked in the South Bronx. They’ve made movies about this place—Fort Apache, with Paul Newman.

What grade did you teach?
For several years I taught junior high school and I also taught high school. And I was just awful. But what I liked was going home with the kids and meeting their families. I was really good at talking with the parents and the kids.

Why weren’t you good at teaching?
There was no teaching going on in those schools. Our school was so violent that, rather than call for an ambulance every day, the city just gave us our own ambulance. Every day somebody was injured, badly. What I ended up doing was I’d make friends with a couple of the boys who were left back so many times they were 22 years old and still in high school, and I’d promise to pass them if they made sure I got from my car to the school safely. I used to have kids having sex in the coat closet. I’d be taking knives away from kids. It was horrible.

Where did you go to school?
My husband had a fellowship in California so we came out here and I ended up going to California School of Professional Psychology for my Ph.D. So I’ve been to Columbia and I’ve been to the California School of Professional Psychology and I’ve been to the State University of New York at Buffalo and probably the best education I got was at University of Buffalo. Better than Columbia. I was an English major and I used to hang out with Leonard Cohen there. Robert Haas, who became the poet laureate of the United States, taught several of my classes. Allen Ginsberg was there and Leslie Fiedler—it was a very exciting time. So I really don’t have strong feelings about where my kids go to school because it really doesn’t matter. Now, if I said to one of my parents, “you know I think Santa Cruz is just as good as Stanford,” they’d be outraged. But it depends on what you’re interested in. What’s the best school for my child? It depends on the kind of person he is. Even my agent, who I adore, he had one young child and his wife was pregnant with the other and he says to me, “Now I know I’m not supposed to ask this, but we’re trying to decide between two schools—one is very rigid and academic and the other is kind of a hippie school—what do you think would be better for my two kids?” The kid’s not born yet! [laughs] And he’s the smartest guy I know!

It’s amazing that this kind of thinking is so ingrained and so widespread.
I actually believe that, if you can convince parents that this is harmful—if you can speak compassionately enough, with enough understanding of the anxiety that they face and stand in their shoes—I think you can get people to change their point of view. You know, we picketed Safeway when we thought Alar on apples was bad for our kids. When you can galvanize moms that their kids are really at risk, I think you have a good shot at having people re-think their priorities. But, for the most part, I think we’ve been schooled to think that our kids are at risk if we don’t act this way.

Mothers who would like to participate in the latest research conducted by Dr. Suniya Luthar can log on to www.momsofteenssurvey.com.

quote:

J G Ballard: The comforts of madness
J G Ballard's new novel is set in a mall. The master of the urban dystopia tells Marianne Brace why consumerism is a new fascism, and why it fascinates him.

Independent.co.uk
15 September 2006

J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children's encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. "Selling is like wooing a girl," says Ballard. Ballard "believed in" The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, "'Go and read The Eight Volumes.' That was her name for them," he chuckles. "It was the nearest thing to television."

Ballard's new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.

"Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in," says Ballard, who doesn't do shopping himself. "You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on."

We are sitting in the author's modest semi in Shepperton, where manufacturers have failed to "have on" Ballard. Apart from the television there's no evidence of consumer unendurables here. He doesn't even own a computer. "My three children were brought up in this house and it hasn't changed at all. Nothing has been moved for 30 years," he says.

But while things remain the same chez Ballard, the world outside has reinvented itself. Now, the landscape of greater London "lacks all the classic features of what used to be urban - the town hall, church, vicarage, public library. All these are largely gone." This fascinates Ballard. "Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?"

Ballard's drowned cities, parched landscapes and concrete jungles have come to seem remarkably prophetic. Whether conjuring primeval swamps or deluxe tower blocks with regressing residents, Ballard recognises our appetite for psychic and physical disintegration and warns about what may lie ahead. If his plots sometimes creak and his characters come from stock (architects, doctors, psychiatrists), his cool prose includes almost narcotically beautiful images while bursting with unsettling ideas.

Two things have particularly fed his imagination. Shanghai - "a terrifically exhilarating place, a media city before its time" - was where Ballard was brought up. "It has been the main engine of my fiction. I've tried to change the world to be like Shanghai of the 1930s." His anatomical and physiological studies, meanwhile, provided "a vast anthology of images and metaphors".

Ballard's work slots somewhere between Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs. His early protagonists find their own internal hearts of darkness in worlds mapped by ecological disaster, or seek new frontiers among gargantuan lizards and crystallised forests. Those frontiers become psychological in more experimental works like The Atrocity Exhibition. In the 50 years he has been writing, the dream-like apocalyptic locations have ceded to man-made enclosures where characters embrace transgressive acts just to find out whether they are still alive.

Ballard has the rare distinction of appearing as an adjective ("Ballardian") in the Collins English Dictionary. Does he - as it states - deal in dystopias? Ballard cannot resist a characteristic inversion: "I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I'm safe. What I hate," Ballard leans closer to the tape-recorder with a smile, "is what I call heritage London. This is a new hate of mine. Heritage London is not just Bloomsbury, Whitehall, the Tower of London. It's really middle-class London - Hampstead, Notting Hill, wherever you find these areas held together by a dinner-party culture."

Although admitting to being "very nostalgic" for his childhood, Ballard scorns the sentimental English love for the past. "We still believe that England is a land of gothic quadrangles and village greens, all that John Major rubbish about warm beer and spinsters cycling to evensong. Give us a break," he roars with laughter. "Living out here by the M25 I know this is the real England. This is the England that voted for Tony Blair, for cheap fights to the Seychelles and a more efficient NHS. Millions of people live out here and aren't interested in gothic quadrangles, for heaven's sake."

But how does an affection for airport hinterlands fit with his loathing of shopping malls like the Bentall Centre in nearby Kingston? "Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much?" Ballard muses, "because it's so... cretinous." He has watched the customers there. "They seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains." Consumerism has become part of the air we breathe. "That's why it's a potentially fertile basis for some major psychological shift."

Ballard wanted to write a quartet about what he calls "the new pathology of everyday life." Kingdom Come, like the three novels before it, is a murder mystery where the narrator investigates an unexplained death. "All four novels are about criminalising everyday life," Ballard explains. Crime energises the exclusive Spanish resort in Cocaine Nights, while criminal recreation reanimates the zombified executives in Super-Cannes's business park. Chelsea Marina's middle-class discovers the power of meaningless crime in Millennium People. For the mall-adjusted in Kingdom Come, the crime is fascism.

The narrators become implicit in the crimes, willingly seduced by a morally equivocal character. Ballard says, "The ideas offered by Dr Maxted I endorse, by and large." In Kingdom Come the psychiatrist Maxted observes that: "Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness." As an advertising man, the narrator, Richard, sees the possibilities. Determined to discover who killed his father, he helps to groom a cult leader from "the hospitality rooms of afternoon TV".

"Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?" asks Ballard. In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts. "Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism," he argues. "It's a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter... The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation."

Kingdom Come has the familiar Ballard mix of absurdity, resonance and teasing humour. Among his favourite books he counts Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Brave New World, Catch-22 - all self-contained worlds with their own bizarre logic. "Realism doesn't really suit the novel anymore. It simply cannot compete with the cinema, television or the TV commercial in creating a naturalistic image of the world. The novel is at its best when it creates its own world from scratch."

According to Ballard, however,"Life is filled with surrealist moments, if we only saw them... Human beings," he adds, "are the only members of the animal kingdom whose normal state of mind is pretty close to madness." As a boy, he witnessed much violence. He became distrustful of conventional reality. "I realised that what we think of as conventional reality - this quiet suburban street, for instance - is just a stage set that can be swept away." Ballard considers himself a libertarian. "I'm all for free sex, alcohol and would liberalise the drug laws if some way could be found to protect adolescents." As a writer, however, he says, "I do tend to moralise. I regret it. It turns you into a kind of salesman. I'm selling this season's hot new line: Psychopathology!" Ballard chuckles. "I do come on a bit hard sometimes through these ideas of mine. I sort of repeat myself, but I'm driving the message home."

Biography: J G Ballard

J G Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. His internment during the war inspired his most famous novel, Empire of the Sun (filmed by Steven Spielberg). Returning to England in 1946, he spent two years reading medicine at Cambridge University. Keen to write, he took various jobs from Covent Garden porter to trainee RAF pilot in Canada. He began by writing science fiction short stories and in 1962 published his first major work, The Drowned World. Many novels have followed including The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High Rise, Cocaine Nights and the award-winning Super-Cannes. His wife died in 1964 leaving him with three young children. He lives in Shepperton. Kingdom Come is published by Fourth Estate.

J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children's encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. "Selling is like wooing a girl," says Ballard. Ballard "believed in" The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, "'Go and read The Eight Volumes.' That was her name for them," he chuckles. "It was the nearest thing to television."

Ballard's new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.

"Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in," says Ballard, who doesn't do shopping himself. "You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on."

We are sitting in the author's modest semi in Shepperton, where manufacturers have failed to "have on" Ballard. Apart from the television there's no evidence of consumer unendurables here. He doesn't even own a computer. "My three children were brought up in this house and it hasn't changed at all. Nothing has been moved for 30 years," he says.

But while things remain the same chez Ballard, the world outside has reinvented itself. Now, the landscape of greater London "lacks all the classic features of what used to be urban - the town hall, church, vicarage, public library. All these are largely gone." This fascinates Ballard. "Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?"

Ballard's drowned cities, parched landscapes and concrete jungles have come to seem remarkably prophetic. Whether conjuring primeval swamps or deluxe tower blocks with regressing residents, Ballard recognises our appetite for psychic and physical disintegration and warns about what may lie ahead. If his plots sometimes creak and his characters come from stock (architects, doctors, psychiatrists), his cool prose includes almost narcotically beautiful images while bursting with unsettling ideas.

Two things have particularly fed his imagination. Shanghai - "a terrifically exhilarating place, a media city before its time" - was where Ballard was brought up. "It has been the main engine of my fiction. I've tried to change the world to be like Shanghai of the 1930s." His anatomical and physiological studies, meanwhile, provided "a vast anthology of images and metaphors".

Ballard's work slots somewhere between Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs. His early protagonists find their own internal hearts of darkness in worlds mapped by ecological disaster, or seek new frontiers among gargantuan lizards and crystallised forests. Those frontiers become psychological in more experimental works like The Atrocity Exhibition. In the 50 years he has been writing, the dream-like apocalyptic locations have ceded to man-made enclosures where characters embrace transgressive acts just to find out whether they are still alive.

Ballard has the rare distinction of appearing as an adjective ("Ballardian") in the Collins English Dictionary. Does he - as it states - deal in dystopias? Ballard cannot resist a characteristic inversion: "I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I'm safe. What I hate," Ballard leans closer to the tape-recorder with a smile, "is what I call heritage London. This is a new hate of mine. Heritage London is not just Bloomsbury, Whitehall, the Tower of London. It's really middle-class London - Hampstead, Notting Hill, wherever you find these areas held together by a dinner-party culture."

Although admitting to being "very nostalgic" for his childhood, Ballard scorns the sentimental English love for the past. "We still believe that England is a land of gothic quadrangles and village greens, all that John Major rubbish about warm beer and spinsters cycling to evensong. Give us a break," he roars with laughter. "Living out here by the M25 I know this is the real England. This is the England that voted for Tony Blair, for cheap fights to the Seychelles and a more efficient NHS. Millions of people live out here and aren't interested in gothic quadrangles, for heaven's sake."

But how does an affection for airport hinterlands fit with his loathing of shopping malls like the Bentall Centre in nearby Kingston? "Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much?" Ballard muses, "because it's so... cretinous." He has watched the customers there. "They seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains." Consumerism has become part of the air we breathe. "That's why it's a potentially fertile basis for some major psychological shift."

Ballard wanted to write a quartet about what he calls "the new pathology of everyday life." Kingdom Come, like the three novels before it, is a murder mystery where the narrator investigates an unexplained death. "All four novels are about criminalising everyday life," Ballard explains. Crime energises the exclusive Spanish resort in Cocaine Nights, while criminal recreation reanimates the zombified executives in Super-Cannes's business park. Chelsea Marina's middle-class discovers the power of meaningless crime in Millennium People. For the mall-adjusted in Kingdom Come, the crime is fascism.

The narrators become implicit in the crimes, willingly seduced by a morally equivocal character. Ballard says, "The ideas offered by Dr Maxted I endorse, by and large." In Kingdom Come the psychiatrist Maxted observes that: "Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness." As an advertising man, the narrator, Richard, sees the possibilities. Determined to discover who killed his father, he helps to groom a cult leader from "the hospitality rooms of afternoon TV".

"Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?" asks Ballard. In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts. "Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism," he argues. "It's a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter... The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation."

Kingdom Come has the familiar Ballard mix of absurdity, resonance and teasing humour. Among his favourite books he counts Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Brave New World, Catch-22 - all self-contained worlds with their own bizarre logic. "Realism doesn't really suit the novel anymore. It simply cannot compete with the cinema, television or the TV commercial in creating a naturalistic image of the world. The novel is at its best when it creates its own world from scratch."

According to Ballard, however,"Life is filled with surrealist moments, if we only saw them... Human beings," he adds, "are the only members of the animal kingdom whose normal state of mind is pretty close to madness." As a boy, he witnessed much violence. He became distrustful of conventional reality. "I realised that what we think of as conventional reality - this quiet suburban street, for instance - is just a stage set that can be swept away." Ballard considers himself a libertarian. "I'm all for free sex, alcohol and would liberalise the drug laws if some way could be found to protect adolescents." As a writer, however, he says, "I do tend to moralise. I regret it. It turns you into a kind of salesman. I'm selling this season's hot new line: Psychopathology!" Ballard chuckles. "I do come on a bit hard sometimes through these ideas of mine. I sort of repeat myself, but I'm driving the message home."

Biography: J G Ballard

J G Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. His internment during the war inspired his most famous novel, Empire of the Sun (filmed by Steven Spielberg). Returning to England in 1946, he spent two years reading medicine at Cambridge University. Keen to write, he took various jobs from Covent Garden porter to trainee RAF pilot in Canada. He began by writing science fiction short stories and in 1962 published his first major work, The Drowned World. Many novels have followed including The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High Rise, Cocaine Nights and the award-winning Super-Cannes. His wife died in 1964 leaving him with three young children. He lives in Shepperton. Kingdom Come is published by Fourth Estate.

quote:

Contemplations from the Cheap Beer Zone

Joe Bageant
July 4, 2006s

Two kingpins of the sweating class deconstruct popular culture, Jon Stewart as opiate of the liberal masses and the Lake Tohopekaliga Bassmaster five-fish Classic.

"Now you take Dick Cheney, a goddamned drunk if ever I saw one. How else would a man confuse a little bitty quail with a Texas judge? But Cheney better be careful, cause you go to pouring booze over a pacemaker, you’re asking for trouble, I don't care how much you paid for the pacemaker or the booze."
-- Virgil Jenkins, retired bulldozer operator.

By JOE BAGEANT

Beer450_1You could say my friend Virgil Jenkins is an erudite and insightful student of American culture. You could say he has honed his understanding of America through decades of serious reading and contemplation. But it would be a damned lie. Mostly, Virgil does just what I do, drink and talk and watch television. Still, the dirt-eating truth of the situation is this: He's got more common sense and insight than 99% of the people who run this country. We seem to have gotten different results from the same regimen.

Virgil lives alone in a slum rental eight blocks from me, ensconced in a two-room apartment with his TV and a stash of dried beans, Kraft instant mac and cheese, and his monthly case of Keystone Light Beer (when you live on a $720 a month Social Security check and pay $500 a month rent, even Budweiser is upscale stuff.) Virgil doesn't have a phone and doesn't own a car. He never complains, though. He says, "I've had it worse." And he has. They tell me Virgil carries a generous scattering of North Korean shrapnel up one entire side of his right leg and ass. With any luck, I'll never see it firsthand. In his prime, Virgil was a heavy equipment operator. "Hell, there ain't much dirt in this county what's been tore up that I didn't help tear it up." Apparently he hasn't been out to see the explosion of $400,000 **** boxes and shopping centers circling Winchester these days. Which is understandable because since his wife Myrna died in 1990 he doesn't leave the old neighborhood.

At any rate, when your drinking is limited to Keystone Light, your door is always open to guys like me showing up with a bottle of good whiskey. The only way to improve on such a situation is to get out some plastic cups and turn on the ESPN CITGO Bassmaster Championship and talk politics and women during the slow spots in the show. So here we are on our third cup and watching the Lake Tohopekaliga Central Florida Tournament -- the one where Scott Martin caught that winning 16-pound, 3-ouncer on a five-fish limit.

What I like about Virgil is that, despite watching television half his waking hours, he seems to have escaped the effects of red state media here in Virginia, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network ("If I wanna know what God thinks, I'll ask him myself.") Or the Fox Network's Iraq War drums ("You gotta wonder where the coffins and the cripples are. Sumthin fishy there.") Or the effects of advertising ("If I could afford it I'd buy a case of that Cialis stuff and smuggle a boner downtown on Friday nights. And if it last over four hours that's just fine with me.") OK, so he hasn't completely escaped media's shaping effects. As for the rest of us, with the exception of those getting up at 4 a.m. for vespers in monasteries, most Americans under 70 live lives almost entirely shaped by media. The past two generations of Americans derive their functioning cultural knowledge and self-identity from media, though they will swear it ain't so, and indeed do not believe it themselves, so permeated is their existence. We reduce all things to personality, consumer products, celebrity and entertainment.

Especially politics. For example, liberal TV watchers see Jon Stewart of The Daily Show as being political or about politics in some way. Of course it is about entertainment. Period. It's a comedic entertainment, created for profit by a global corporation and designed to fit the tastes and self-images of people who identify themselves as politically progressive. Stewart is a hip identity symbol for white middle class liberals. Which comes down to being, as Virgil terms it, "a smartass." Yet Stewart is a fundamental political input for millions, even though his show has about as much to do with an informative, actionable reality as Sponge Bob or ABC News (which delivered to my email this morning the following story: Castrated California Child Molester Wants His Freedom.) If you are a Stewart watcher who thinks you do not unquestioningly take him as a primary source of information, remember this: The Daily Show is being piped directly into your brain stem -- as any neuropsychologist or cognitive scientist can tell you, you don't have a choice in the matter.

The media is not politics, of course -- though it is politics' most important tool -- anymore than pop culture is culture. Pop culture is simply popular diversion for a nation that can afford to manufacture, distribute and consume such expensive illusions for the pure sake of diversion. Be that as it may, after three generations of immersion in such media, particularly television, we find that Vladimir Kosma Zworykin's ionoscope now shapes a national consciousness that is almost wholly derived from its output (input to our consciousness.) One that takes its aesthetic and cultural cues from digitized illusions based upon previous illusions carbon copied from previous illusions -- media, movies, television, popular music -- Mary Pickford morphs flickering across time and ether, reincarnated as Marylyn Monroe, Mary Tyler Moore, Anne Southern, Barbara Eden, then again as Jennifer Anniston. To my mind, they could have stopped with Barbara Eden.

Nevertheless, popular/consumer culture, stuff like McDonald's cups, Batman and "Consumer Apparel Philosophy" is a big deal, important and majorly legit, we are all supposed to agree, because they have been studying such pop culture in universities for 35 years now. In the big consumer prizefight for the consciousness of America, Heidegger vs. Hilfiger coming to you live from the Virgin Records store in Times Square, guess who gets knocked out in the first round?

Likewise we read the New York Times best seller lists if it were actually important, despite that we cannot name a single book other than the Bible and the Koran which changed contemporary America in any meaningful lasting way. In the real America books are over with, at least as important vehicles for change and evolution of consciousness and the republic. They have been for a long time. Movies too, for the most part. We listen to and read movie criticism, then talk about movies as if they were important or necessary. They change nothing, be they Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, a major bullshit media ruckus to stir the money pot, or Al Gore's Inconvenient Truths, which will win a pile of the industry's self-congratulating awards, then melt like candy cotton in American consciousness by next year. And this is a movie delivering the most important piece of information on the planet, albeit more watered down than a 50-cent shot in a skid row bar. But when if comes to change, it didn't even change Al Gore. Anyone ever ask Gore why he doesn't give up his car, or his air conditioner, especially after making Inconvenient Truths?

Don't get me wrong. Just like you, I would vote for Al Gore in a friggin heartbeat. Especially given that neither Dennis Kucinich nor Hugo Chavez will never make the ticket. Deluded as Al is that "national policy" can ever do more than possibly slow down the corporate takeover of civilization and seizure of world resources now in progress, I would vote for the new fuzzier, more lovable Al Gore Americans are not allowed to vote on national policy, heaven forbid! Otherwise a helluva lot of us would vote for a policy that matches up Louisville Slugger Prostock baseball bats with selected Republican kneecaps. But instead, we vote for personalities and fraudulent media issues such as gun control (both sides are hawking media baloney on that one) and threats such the legal union of Brian and Geoff destroying good Christian marriage -- this, despite that the Bible crowd set seems quite capable of doing it for themselves -- their divorce rate is no lower than we onanist librul fetus killers. And when it comes to halting the American suckdown of the planet's paltry remaining resources, only global revolution or an environmental collapse can get American faces out of the Cheetos bag, much less rock the ExxonMobil Wal-Mart Starbucks Microsoft Citigroup McDonald's Time Inc. Monsanto bastards out of the saddle they own and occupy regardless of who is in the White House. Using media to fight these guys is like threatening a rapist with a water pistol. Hell, they own the water pistol too. Media is just too pervasive, cheap and malleable to have any real effect on Americans, other than distraction and escape, and of course to stampede them in the general direction of the mall, the sports arena and the next battlefield. We will doubtlessly continue to swim around like trained guppies in the soup of pop culture as politics and well managed news, though. None of us has the neurological equipment to function without the life sustaining glitter and muck, much less see outside the fishbowl or express a unique personal identity. That atrophied long ago. It might be a good idea to return to the Amphibian Age and start over again. But then the ecosystem seems to be doing that for us.

I'm "about MacIntosh" (but mostly I about done for)

The other day at a local fern bar I heard a 30ish gal tell a young fellow dressed in black -- who obviously "had his nose open" for her, as we Paleolithic rednecks say -- "I'm about Macintosh and Avril Lavigne." "Me too," he answered (a bit too enthusiastically to nail any trim, I thought). Then the courtship ritual proceeded down some pop cultural path I could not follow, involving "Trip-Hop" and a movie called Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend, which I would pay good US green folding money to see, just so I could be "about" something with such a dynamite title. I guess we're all "about" stuff these days. Even at 59, I'm about (still) Otis Reading, The Beatles, and John Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg and Dinah Washington, with a little David Allen Coe thrown in. Which proves I'm unhip and my "about" has done crapped out. But there is no escaping the truth. Despite all the American individualism blowhole stuff, we are stamped by the particular popular culture of our times. Shaped by whatever cultural images or products happen to be most profitable for media to project into our minds at the moment. I once had a Beatle haircut (just awful.) Later, because it was supposed to be hip and literary, I stumbled around inside the pages of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 -- mostly looking for a way out. Today I find myself ditching my PC and shopping for a Mac. Soon I'll join the Mac cult, which I suppose will make me "about Mac." None of us gets out of this consumer identity thing alive.

We have all assembled our identities from the prepackaged and highly processed consumer media spectacle that now constitutes the American experience, mixed and matched personality ensembles from synthetic experiences and products, all of it purchased at the same globally franchised company store, all of it within the context of our own particular tribe of consumer cultism and commodity fetishes. It's vapid, it's absurd. But it's all we've had to work with from the birth, consumer culture derivatives of consumer culture derivatives. It's a long way back to the Greek classics or even de Toqueville from the Da Vinci Code and Oprah. And an even longer way back to pre air conditioned life and black and white TV, if you know what I mean. Our estrangement from such things as an entire afternoon of quiet reflection or even the most common discomforts or simpler amusements has not been chronological. Thanks to technology, it has been quantum and exponential, developing in all directions simultaneously. Bondage though it is, nobody wants out. Not really. It's like sex. It feels good as along as you don't do too much thinking about it. In fact, few of us can conceive of an "outside." And the miniscule number of people who can imagine there being something beyond "society of the spectacle" find it a fearsome thing. They worry about possibly living without HBO while half the world wipes their asses with their fingers.

Ah, but it's a wondrous age we are told. An age of miraculous scientific advances, even as a theocratic state emerges to refute Darwin. It's an age of medical miracles, even as millions die of long ago conquered diseases -- an age of DNA engineered dogs and tomatoes and electronic brain candy and every imaginable sort of digital dildo right there on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Circuit City. My god amighty, child! We have Celebrity Poker, Viagra, edible thongs, iPods and a man in the White House chosen by god and who eats pizza two nights a week just like the rest of us. Now if that is not plentitude and democracy, what the hell is? What a generation we are! A "Generation of Swine," Hunter Thompson called us and I tend to agree. Virgil however, being a more charitable man, says: "Waaal, I wouldn't say swine. A hog roots hard all day. It's more like people has become gerbils. Shit, most people these days never done a lick of real work in their lives. You can tell by looking at 'em." The the bourbon is taking hold.

Virgil distrusts people who don't do observable, real work for a living. I'm with Virgil on that one. At the same time I don't trust people who do work, but do the bidding of the empire without ever questioning it. All those self-deluding little shits who merrily keep American capitalism's gears oiled, administrated, the caterers who keep the spreadsheets updated and the ram the Empire's party line down the world's gullet day in and day out. Those who keep the empire running and deadly from within their stark cubicles and posh offices -- lawyers, most college professors, tax accountants, stock brokers, magazine/newspaper/book editors, journalists, marketers and all those other white collar whiners Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote about in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. After all, these middle class people did acquiesce to, contribute to, and help build the very system that ****ed them. So long as they were drawing a paycheck, they never asked questions. So long as they were comfortable enough that they could hold the hardest working class in unspoken contempt -- meaning the plumber butt, truck driving, Jiffy Lubing, waitressing, chicken packing class, they considered the view around them perfectly acceptable.

That's nothing new. We born to the sweating classes expect some people to hold us in utter contempt, people like Martha Stewart, Rush Linbaugh, Deepak Chopra and Bud Selig. And of course George Bush and Dick Cheney are gifted naturals at it. They hold the entire human race in contempt. I do too some days. But it's not the mean assed kind of disdain that would make me want to sick a raging unmuzzled German shepherd on a naked Iraqi. But what do I know? As one Army former dog handler infamously put put it last month: "I'm as compassionate as the next guy, but there is quite a rush in seeing a a grown man piss himself."

There certainly seems to be enough meanness to go around these days. The unfeeling, punitive resentful kind that makes ordinary working folks want to bomb Iran, and a surprising number want to bomb France, according to one survey, and the professional and semi-professional classes, both liberal and conservative, piss in the laps of the working folks who install their marble cabinet tops and rotate their tires. (Not that the proles mind; the lottery is gonna make 'em rich anyway. Right?) It's hard to deny that Americans are mean both to one another and the world. Yet, it doesn't feel mean to us at all, further proving the point. Personally, I think humiliation is involved in this somewhere. People can suffer all sorts of hard knocks, but they never forget humiliation. Most likely it is the inner humiliation of meaningless work and the pointlessness of consumer state existence that generate such lack of compassion. Not that compassion is likely to cross your mind when your engagement with other humans consists of discussion of mortgage rates around the water cooler and your notions of intimate human truths come from the Butt**** Mountian movie, or when your prepackaged idea of the higher mysteries is the Da Vinci Code. I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me it was the deepest book they ever read. "Really makes you think," said my neighbor up the street, a leading Democrat and business owner here in Winchester, Virginia.

Pour me a carrot juice and turn on The Man Show

Meanwhile, we drink organic juices in plastic containers, and buy hybrid cars with terribly polluting batteries if we can afford to. We are self-righteously concerned over the current administration's foibles, conveniently ignoring that such grotesque folly translates into the blood of entire families splashed up the walls of Iraqi homes at the point of the very same American weaponry that helps drive the economy, that puts the cabernet on our tables or the movie tickets in our pockets. They are one and the same, hopelessly interdependent, because the Empire is as holistic as everything else on the planet. But once our folly has been commercially packaged as comedy fare, jokes about such things as the Green Zone make us feel better and Jon Stewart rich. His success is appropriately measured in Emmys, not change. And yes, I watch Jon Stewart. Moreover for the same reasons Virgil says all of us watch television:

"People don't want to think about complicated stuff. They wanna see big titties and a shoot-out with hoodlums in New York. They wanna see some little guy win a million bucks."

He's probably right. Maybe it's true Americans -- and not just ill-bred Americans like me and Virgil either -- wouldn't watch smart, honest television if it were available. I'd watch The Man Show every weekend if the wife would let me. But it's also true that intelligent people will watch stupid television. I tell myself I am in that group, though my wife Barb just gives me that hopeless look of hers when I say it. Even Virgil calls The Man Show "the dumbest damned piece of crap I ever seen."

Crap or no crap, corporate state media, not reason and rationality, governs all things American now, especially elections. Obviously rationality had nothing to do with the way heartland America voted in the most recent ones. They voted based upon a media projection of America tailored to their demographics. Just like the allegedly more progressive ones watching The Daily Show. The only difference is the channels. One group is watching Stewart or MacNeil Lehrer and the other is watching NASCAR, or My Name is Earl. Hmmmm ... well, let's be truthful, middle class liberals like Earl too. It helps reinforce classist stereotypes and feelings of superiority. It's also funny as hell.

In any case, while hipper people are chatting about how funny The Stephen Colbert Report was last night, and while Virgil is watching Master Bathroom Makeover on the Home and Garden Channel (Don't ask me what makes that man tick), network "news" pukes up its necrotic finale backstage, behind pretty well-coiffed mummies like Leslie Stahl or Katie Couric, who, we are told, is "a serious, tough-minded journalist who projects extreme levels of gravitas through those high-beam eyes of hers" as she delivers lines like: "Church bells rang out over Nicole Kidman's hometown Sunday to announce her marriage to country music star Keith Urban in a lavish but intimate ceremony attended by relatives, close friends and a smattering of Hollywood stars." Good night and good luck. The ghost of Ida Tarbell weeps; Ed Murrow and Upton Sinclair go off on a rip-roaring drunk together, tipping over trash cans in the void.

Meanwhile, my Unitarian preacher friend Chutney rightfully laments that, "American Idol has become news and genocide and unwarranted spying on US citizens science isn't that big a deal." Chut my dearest, there's no mystery here. Americans as a people and a nation simply do not give a gnat's ass about genocide. Especially if practiced upon wretched dusky peoples squatting amid their own feces and drinking from puddles. We can dance around it all we want, but action gets the traction. Talk takes a walk. And our inaction bellows at the world, no matter how many Internet chat friends share our own personal shame and indignation.
Fortunately, or perhaps not so fortunately, since the truth is seldom pleasant, less pretentious people like Virgil say aloud what others will not: "The world is runnin out of about everything. Too many mouths and assholes. Something's gotta give somewhere. Probably the best thing is to let all them mud people die off or kill one another. They ain't got no kind of life anyway. I feel sorry for the bastards, but that's just the way things is." Pragmatic Yankee thinking at its best.

More educated folks than Virgil have concluded the same -- that human life is unsustainable at the present level and that it would take a die-off of 70-90% of humanity for us to become sustainable again, not to mention another 10 million years for the earth to restore itself. I've heard this from renowned experts, and also that human pandemics may well be the earth's way of healing itself. None of them would ever say it publicly. Would you? The only one who did so was crucified by the press, the liberal community, politicians and his own university. I'll spare him additional hate mail by witholding his name, though many readers are already aware of the shit storm his lecture stirred up a few months ago. Some subjects are absolutely taboo, even in the lofty objective world of science. One just does not say such things aloud. But Virgil can say any damned thing he wants to, and does.

One of the less controversial but nonetheless true things Virgil says is that the current war in Iraq "was a piece of shit from the word go, but there ain't no stopping people once they start scratching gravel and crowing at one another." Sayeth the Keystone Bard,

"I was in one war and I can tell you it is a damned nasty thing, deed it is. But people gonna fight wars, it's in their blood. Man has got a war gland somewhere inside him, I think. It's always sumthin' or other. In the old days it was for gold an territoree, and slaves and scalps. Now it's for oil. Personally though, I'd rather have oil than a scalp any day.

"Ain't no stopping war, and it don't matter who you vote for. I voted for Truman and he damned near got my ass shot off. I voted for Kennedy and he just couldn't stay off fightin the pajamas in Veetnam, and damned near got us A-bombed over Cuba. I voted for Boosh and look what he's done. Got us pinned down by that bunch of striped assed heathens in Irak. It's always the same."

So why do we even bother with the pretense of a two-party system? Virgil, pouring himself another short one into a blue plastic cup: "Well, it gives the Republicans a chance to get elected from time to time. Otherwise nobody would vote for 'em these days, and they damned well know it. But people gets tired of the likes of Bill Clinton and his side action, and Al Gore and John Kerry and their snottiness, so they vote for a Republican because mostly the Democrats has become slick little shit-asses." According to Virgil, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were the only Democrats in the last half century who weren't.) "Then a few years later all our asses is in a sling after the Republicans has robbed the little feller and give it all to the rich. So they go back to the Democrats to get some welfare or unemployment or some kind of relief like they got from Roosevelt and Johnson. The little man has got to have some relief time to time. Back and forth. Back and forth." When it comes to political analysis, Virgil keeps it simple and on the mark.

"OK, so what do you think people really want?"

"You really want to know what I think? I think we should just elect a goddamned king and be done with it. That's what people want. Somebody to tell 'em exactly when to shit, where to shit and what color. A nice king who will take care of everything, protect 'em so's they can just watch television and bet on the basketball games. That's what they really want. Politics is just too ****in' hard for most people."

We shall see.

Bottoms up.

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Hewlett-Packard spying scandal sheds new light on US corporate “ethics”
By Patrick Martin
wsws.org
2 October 2006

The chairman and a half dozen other top officials have resigned or been fired at Hewlett-Packard, the biggest US personal computer and printer manufacturer, amid a scandal over illegal corporate spying that has unfolded over the past month.

The spying campaign, launched by H-P board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn in response to leaks to the press of internal corporate discussions, included surreptitiously obtaining the phone records of H-P board members and employees, surveillance of board members and journalists, and the emailing of spyware to journalists in an effort to learn the identity of their sources within the company.

Private telephone records on hundreds of cell and home telephones were obtained by a method called “pretexting,” in which investigators made repeated calls to telephone companies, pretending to be the individuals targeted, until they were able to convince a phone company employee to release the information.

California state authorities have begun an investigation into the spying program to determine whether criminal charges may be warranted. On Thursday, more than a dozen current and former H-P officials and employees appeared before a congressional subcommittee. Ten of them invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. H-P General Counsel Ann Baskins resigned her position only hours before the session and refused to testify.

Dunn, who resigned September 22, was the principal witness at the hearing and defended her conduct in the anti-leak campaign. She claimed to be unaware of the methods used by private investigators who obtained records on hundreds of phone numbers belonging to company directors, employees, their families and journalists.

Striking a posture of clueless naiveté that would seem to belie her position as a top executive at Barclay Global Services, a leading financial services firm, Dunn claimed that she thought anyone could obtain private telephone records on anyone else by simply calling the telephone service provider and asking for them.

The private investigators were hired through a series of “cutouts” intended to allow the top corporate officials to plead ignorance of what was being done at their instigation. Dunn routed her instructions through Kevin Hunsaker, a senior attorney at H-P, who headed the secret spying campaign in his capacity as the company’s chief ethics officer.

Hunsaker relayed Dunn’s orders to Anthony Gentilucci, head of H-P’s global investigations unit, located in Boston, who assigned the job to Ronald DeLia of Security Outsourcing Solutions, a Boston firm specializing in such investigations for big companies.

DeLia further outsourced the dirty work to Action Research Group of Melbourne, Florida, which specializes in data brokering, which in turn hired subcontractors in Florida, Georgia, Colorado and Nebraska, who conducted the actual surveillance and obtained telephone records from Verizon and other telecommunications firms.

The spying campaign was touched off by a series of leaks from within the Hewlett-Packard board of directors, providing details of internal disputes over corporate strategy. H-P, the biggest company in Silicon Valley, has been in considerable difficulty since its controversial acquisition of a leading manufacturer of personal computers, Compaq. CEO Carly Fiorina was forced out in 2005. She was succeeded as CEO by Mark Hurd, former CEO of NCR, and as chairwoman of the board by Dunn.

The first stage of the internal leak investigation ended inconclusively in 2005, but the probe was revived in January 2006 after articles appeared on the Internet publication CNET and in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal providing details of corporate strategy and possible acquisitions that Dunn was convinced could only have come from board sources.

Dunn’s anti-leak investigation came to light only because her targets on the board of directors were themselves high-level corporate figures: George A. Keyworth II, longtime director of research at Los Alamos and chief science adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and Thomas J. Perkins, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist who resigned from the H-P board last May in protest over the spying and in August made public the reasons for his departure.

The investigation included physical surveillance of Keyworth, his wife and two other directors and the acquisition of their telephone records, which were checked for phone calls to the journalists who were writing about the company. While press accounts differ as to the exact number, private information was obtained on as many as 300 separate telephone accounts, including cell phones, home phones and office phones for H-P directors, nine journalists, and several H-P employees, as well as their spouses and even children.

One internal company report described surveillance of Keyworth while he was giving a lecture at the University of Colorado, and at his home in Piedmont, California as well as at a second home in New Mexico. There was an attempt to get his laptop after it was stolen from him during a trip to Italy.

Other H-P internal reports discussed a proposal to plant spies in the guise of clerical or cleaning workers in the San Francisco offices of CNET and the Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps the most elaborate plan was a sting operation involving the creation of a dummy employee, codenamed “Jacob,” who was to become a source for CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto, the journalist under the most intense surveillance. “Jacob” was to become an email tipster to CNET, and actually supplied Kawamoto with some valid inside information to establish his credibility.

Then the phony informant was to be used for a blatantly illegal purpose: he was to send Kawamoto an email with attached spyware that would install itself on the journalist’s computer and track every subsequent keystroke, thus giving H-P investigators a full view of everything she did.

The sting operation was approved not only by Dunn, but also by H-P CEO Mark Hurd, who has otherwise managed to escape being directly linked to the project. Hurd testified before the September 28 congressional hearing and admitted his role in approving the sting, which he said was legal.

Hurd could hardly have denied responsibility, since the House subcommittee was supplied with internal H-P documents including a PowerPoint presentation about the sting, delivered by Hunsaker to Dunn, and an email from Dunn to Hunsaker and Baskins, in which she said, referring to the information to be leaked to Kawamoto, “I spoke with Mark and he is on board with the plan.” Another email from Hunsaker to Dunn said, referring to the sting, “FYI, I spoke to Mark a few minutes ago and he is fine with both the concept and the content.”

The atmosphere inside the upper echelons of H-P is summed up in an email exchange between Hunsaker and Gentilucci, in which Hunsaker asked how the company’s subcontractors were going about obtaining private phone records. Gentilucci wrote that pretexting “is on the edge, but above board. We use pretext interviews on a number of investigations to extract information and/or make covert purchases of stolen property, in a sense, all undercover operations.” Hunsaker’s response consisted of four words: “I shouldn’t have asked.”

Hewlett-Packard used both its technological and financial resources in the spy campaign. The company installed a special monitoring system to capture messages sent by company employees using AOL Instant Messaging, spying even on its own public relations employees—those hired specifically for the job of maintaining contact with the press.

The company spent well over a quarter-million dollars for the leak investigation between January and April of this year, for expenses ranging from physical surveillance (including an entry for “trash re-con of all areas”), background investigations of board members, their relatives, the targeted reporters, and numerous H-P employees.

None of the top executives who oversaw this massive invasion of privacy is likely to suffer much more than public embarrassment. General Counsel Baskins leaves the company with stock options valued at $4.6 million as well as full retirement benefits. Chairman Dunn goes back to her lucrative post at Barclay’s. And CEO Hurd is still a Wall Street darling, since H-P’s stock has rocketed from the low $20s to nearly $37 a share in his two-year tenure.

If Dunn had confined her investigation to the journalists and H-P employees, and not stepped on the toes of a billionaire (Perkins), and a man with extensive industry and political connections (Keyworth), it is unlikely that the spying would ever have become public. Corporate spying on employees is generally legal in the United States, where workers give up virtually all their democratic rights as a condition of employment.

According to a recent survey by the American Management Association, reported by the Los Angeles Times, more than three quarters of all companies, 76 percent, monitor employee use of the web, and more than half store and review email messages and computer workstation files. More than half of surveyed companies also track phone numbers called and the duration of those calls, and half conduct video surveillance of their workforce. Another study found that 92 percent of all corporations conduct some form of secret spying on their employees.

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Enslaved to a Debt Prison
funnymoneyreport.com
Posted: 2006-12-23
By: Lee Rogers

What really bothers me about our current economic system is how technology has been used to efficiently turn this country into a debt prison powered by computer databases that track purchases and credit worthiness. Through the use of our debt based fiat currency, most wealth exists as binary digits on a computer hard drive. It is nothing more than an illusion as binary digits on a computer hard drive have no real value. This illusion has allowed banks and credit card companies to build databases that contain information on where you shop and how much you spend. It has turned the average American into an economic slave.

In the 1970’s credit cards were primarily reserved for the wealthy. In addition, obtaining mortgage loans were difficult unless you had the ability to put down a huge down payment. Fast forward to the 21st century and we see first year students at colleges and universities get bombarded with credit card offers. We see banks giving away home loans using all sorts of creative financing packages. There are a couple of key reasons why I believe these things have changed so quickly.

The first reason is because the system needs people to become a slave to the fiat debt prison as early in life as possible. The U.S. educational system leads students to believe that unless they get a college education that they won’t be able to succeed. This is of course a lie, but it is a good way to get people into debt at a very early age. The higher educational system in this country is ripping people off with tuition and housing fees just for the privilege of earning an undergraduate degree. Most students end up majoring in something that is of little to no value in the marketplace. In fact most of the undergraduate degree programs fail to provide students with any desirable job skill. The grade point average system actually discourages students from pursuing challenging degree programs with difficult courses. A class in sports management is given the same weight as a class in chemistry which is simply not a fair comparison. The chemistry class is obviously more difficult but someone earning an A in the sports management class is considered to have a higher GPA as opposed to someone earning a B in the chemistry class. This is one of the reasons why we see the science and engineering programs in this country filled with students from India and China. It is a common practice that schools base scholarships contingent upon a student maintaining a certain GPA. Additionally there are many parents in this country who expect good grades from their kids even if it discourages them from taking more difficult classes. As a result, the science and engineering programs which would give students truly desirable job skills are simply not being pursued by those born in this country. These distortions leave many graduates swimming in debt with a degree that has little value.

Already in debt with student loans, many graduates are burdened with finding a job that will enable them to find a place to live and pay for the basic necessities of life. On top of that, they have to deal with the Internal Revenue Service stealing their money through the communist inspired income tax system. They also have to deal with the Federal Reserve which devalues the purchasing power of the little money that they are able to save. This forces them to take on additional credit card debt and loans in order to maintain a decent standard of living. This brings me back to the main point. The whole system is designed to put people into debt at an early age. By bombarding students with credit card offers and making student loans readily available it puts them into debt right away. Credit card companies know that the average student will not be able to make a sufficient income while they pursue their degree so they become a perfect target. The more people who are in debt, the more people there are that are forced to provide labor to the debt prison.

The second reason why we have seen an explosion in credit issuance is because when people use credit and debit cards it enables institutions to track what people do. Almost everything can be purchased with a credit card today. Credit cards are the main method of choice used to purchase items on the Internet. Credit cards can even be used to purchase fast food, gasoline and almost anything else you can think of. Even just a decade ago, you couldn’t use a credit card to buy food from McDonalds. Now, it is common practice for someone to use their credit card to buy fast food and all sorts of items. We are quickly turning into a cashless society which gives more power and control to the private banking and credit card companies. It doesn’t sit well with me that all of my cash withdrawals, deposits and credit card transactions are stored on a computer database. It is a total invasion of privacy. Unfortunately in today’s society it is very difficult to maintain a good standard of living and function without a bank account and a credit card. Invasion of privacy is essentially imposed upon you in order to operate with any sort of efficiency.

This is not the way our economic system should be. Transactions should be private business between the buyer and the seller. Technology is enabling banks and credit card companies to create a cashless society that can be used to track what people buy and sell. People have voluntarily entered into this system because credit cards have been sold as an easier way to buy things on a line of credit. You also need to establish a line of credit in order to obtain loans for cars and homes. The only catch with this is that by using these debt instruments you give up the anonymity of any transactions you conduct.

As technology advances, privacy will be eroded even further. Even cash transactions may no longer be truly private. The European Central Bank (ECB) announced several years ago that they would be putting RFID tracking chips in Euro bank notes by 2005. RFID chips are small computer chips that emit a radio frequency enabling the bank notes to be tracked wherever they go. It is almost 2007 and it is safe to believe that all of the new Euro bank notes have the RFID chip embedded in them. It would not surprise me if the same plan is or has already been implemented by the Federal Reserve in new Federal Reserve Notes.

Implantable RFID chips for humans have already been developed and approved for use by the FDA. RFID chips are already being used on animals. It is not hard to see a future where these chips are implanted in people and you will need to use them in order to buy or sell in modern society.

This brings me to gold and silver. As our financial privacy continues to erode with all of these technological tracking mechanisms put into place, gold and silver can be used to escape from the system. Unlike binary digits stored in a database, gold and silver are real tangible items that store value and protect privacy. If the cashless tracking grid really starts ramping up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an underground black market form where bartering tangible items like gold, silver, guns, food and water becomes a common practice. It would be a way for people to work around a society where debt enslavement is common and financial privacy is becoming a thing of the past.

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Hang the Professors, Save the Eunuchs for Later:A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard.
By JOE BAGEANT
April 14 / 15, 2007

It is time to close America's universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. American universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.

-- Fred Reed, American expatriate writer and "equal-opportunity irritant."

If there is one bright spot in the bleak absurdity of slogging along in our new totalist American state, it is that ordinary working Americans are undisciplined as hell. We are genuine moral and intellectual slobs whose consciousness is pretty much glued onto an armature of noise, sports, sex, sugar and saturated fats. Oh, we nod toward the government bullhorns of ideology, even throw beer cans and cheer when told we are winning some war or Olympic sports event. But when it comes right down to it, we could generally give a rat's ass about government institutions and are congenitally more skeptical of government than most nations, especially nations that get things like good teeth and free higher education for their tax dollars.

Surely, there are governmental facts of life no working American can escape, like the IRS, but no ordinary person is dumb enough to actually trust political parties, banks, the courts or the news media. Born with the organizational instincts and global awareness of a box turtle, we take the most torpid political path -- we call it all bullshit, pay lip service, vote occasionally, then forget about our government altogether until April 15th of the next year.

As inhabitants (you couldn't really call what we practice citizenship) of a nation that is essentially one big workhouse/shopping compound, American life is simultaneously both easy for us and rather dangerous to the rest of the world. For instance, when the corporate state's CBS-ABC-CBS-FOX-NBC-XYZ television bullhorns told us some warthog named Saddam Hussein blew up the World Trade Center and probably fixed the NFL ratings too, Tony the electrician said, "Well, OK then. Sure, go ahead and bomb the ****er." Then he flicked to the Home and Garden Channel, where the guy in the plaid shirt is explaining how to get a skylight installed without leaking. Thanks to American industrial molecular science, there's yet another new sticky stuff miracle from Dupont, a tube of which costs about as much as the entire friggin roof. After the obligatory Dupont public relations sponsored tour of the plant where the goo is cooked up, plaid shirt guy gives "application instructions," meaning he tells you how to squirt it out of the tube. And somewhere along the line, between the plant tour and watching the goo dry, Tony gave "informed consent" to the war in Iraq without even knowing it, or for that matter, giving a shit.

This sort of life has its advantages, such as never having to analyze the institutions that manage us -- not that we'd know how even if we cared to. That's what television is for. Right? Given our short attention spans, compliments of the business state's 100-channel national nerve system (three minutes into the show and the blonde hasn't taken her bra off or killed anybody yet, CLICK!) diversion fills the void of understanding as a nation of clueless mooks knocks around the new American emptiness, wandering the mall food courts, and maybe half-heartedly looking for a pair of size XXXL 50-inch waist long wicking NBA shorts (they actually make'em), but generally is just bored.

But hold yer drawers there, hoss, because we nevertheless do possess a seed of existential angst, however tiny, this despite the liberal intellectual managing class' and leftist profs' claims to the contrary. And that makes us potentially unmanageable politically speaking, potentially dangerous even (it's the length of the fuse that is deceiving.) We may be being lead around by our stomachs and our dicks with our eyes taped shut, but we're not total ideological slaves yet. Because even the worst ideology requires at least a modicum of thought, and as a people with no authentic intellectual culture, we haven't enough collective intellect or education these days to pull it off.

Meanwhile, when it come to pulling off, that small American class in charge of all things intellectual are doing just that, jerking off a whole nation. Admittedly, it's an unenviable job, but there are people selfless enough to do it. These poor intellectual bastards constitute the most servile class in America -- the Empire's house niggers. It is their job to maintain the semblance of ideological control over the pizza gobbling herd (America eats 126 acres of pizza a day!) for the Corporate States of America, which entertains no breach of official ideology, that collection of clichés and things that sound as if they ought to be true, according to our mercantile mythology and conditioning. So it is the American intellectual's gig to weave some philosophical and ideological basket of American Truth out of mercantile folklore and smoke in such a way as to appear to hold water when viewed at great distance by the squinting millions out there in the burboclaves, office campuses, construction sites and fried chicken joints. If the result were not so abysmally eye glazing, tedious and predictable, it would be an act of pure alchemy, truly spinning gold from chaff, turning mud bricks into bullion. Like we said, somebody's gotta do it, but the question remains as to why anyone would choose to. Answer: It beats working.

"Blessed are the thinking classes, for theirs is the kingdom of tenure."

-- Jesus to the Boston University Philosophy Department

Though they never admit it, and especially to each other, these professors, book editors, intellectual critics, and social and economic "theorists" are very class conscious, privileged and understand that they occupy their desk chairs at the pleasure of The Corporation. You don't have to stand back very far to see they have been the spin masters of the business class from the outset, and have either held America together, or kept the **** job going from the beginning, depending upon the class from which you are viewing American history.

Of course they are only human. Like any group of people with a class advantage, they prefer to keep on drinking cognac and pissing it out upstream from the rest of the Pepsi swilling herd destined for bladder cancer. So this class sticks together, despite its prissy intellectual disputes in journals and critical publications. They produce "criticism" for the for the New York Times Book Review, or The National Review, etc., which, though it may even be lively at times, and often full of that vacuous wit that garden variety liberals so love because it revolves around a few threadbare names and dead ideas they learned during their college days or masters degree indoctrination.

But the thinking classes' main job is to serve as intellectual hit men for the ruling elites, the business class, which doesn't come all that hard for them, having been all stamped out of the same dough on the Corporate system's university conveyor belt. Most are utterly convinced they are original and thinking for themselves, which in the university scheme of things means absorbing vast amounts of text, fermenting it in some sort of a second stomach and regurgitating it as a concentrated cud, supposedly unique because they alone coughed it up. The few who understand that this in no way resembles original thought usually keep mum, and keep their jobs in publishing or academia. Or flee screaming in despair once they figure out what is going on.

Then too, there is a huge number for whom America's university system is a sheltered workshop; people who simply could not survive in the real working world, which, miserable as it may be, nevertheless demands a modicum of practicality and some scant ability to socialize. I once dated a university professor with a doctorate in linguistics who, honest to god, let her Irish wolfhound shit all over the house and completely destroy every piece of furniture in her place until she was forced to sleep in the attic crawlspace in a sleeping bag, and actually did not understand why nobody ever accepted her dinner party invitations. She was not, by the way, brilliant or eccentric. Just completely helpless and out of it in her own little corner of academic goo-goo-land. Yet out there on the plains of Washington State University hers was a reasonably respected intellect.

Now you can skin the cat (or that goddamned wolfhound) any way you choose, but if you want to be a really respected intellectual, you must serve business and power. You must serve the only apparatus capable of allowing you exposure enough to make a lunge at respect, which after all, merely amounts to being allowed to create something scientifically useful to the Empire's goals, or in other cases, achieve that weird localized hothouse plant celebrity as an intellectual one finds on every campus. Either way, you'll never make as much money as say, Ann Coulter, who is infinitely more useful to the Empire and the business class that runs it than any intellectual can ever hope to be.


Pistol whipped with the "business end" of a good education

The United States has the most obsessive business class in the world. This would be no big deal if it did not direct the minds of the nation's population thorough its public relations indoctrination industry. This is a matter of life and death for the financial pickle vendors, sub-prime mortgage shysters and CitiBank, Morgan Stanley and other high financiers who have come to actually own this country. There is only one threat to their empire of debt: people acting in the interests of ordinary society -- which in the rest of the world is known as socialism. Consequently, we have no socialist politicians and no socialist journalists in our entire press and media, which is simply unimaginable in most civilized places like Europe. It is important that the working class thinks it has the self-determination they learned about in high school civics classes designed in the universities, that they feel any kind of individual power at all, which basically comes down the tepid power of consumer choice, which makes them malleable, and intolerant of any voice that suggests otherwise. But if even one iota of class awareness were allowed to flourish here, well, much of the American business class and the entire Yale University faculty would be hiding out in Argentina.

Without class interests and class awareness there can be no genuine politics or political parties. So, to the everlasting relief of the business classes, and with thanks to our university system's poli-sci, history and social science departments, we have neither. Despite all the media's political white noise, we have a depoliticized society. It may be that the Internet is changing things. It surely is the most refreshing opportunity to come along maybe in all of modern American history, and it does put heat on some political campaigns. No arguing that it influences certain influencers in society, to the degree that anything besides advertising influences anybody in the consumer republic. Problem is though, how do you create critical political mass in a depoliticized society? Most people don't vote and when it comes to actual participation in politics, opportunity is zilch. If you are not from the relatively privileged political and business segments, what the hell access is there for the individual to participate, except in one of the two business based and supported parties offered? Even at the local level. Anyone who has tried to affect one of these parties locally knows you either play entirely by the party line or stand isolated, over in the corner of the Holiday Inn meeting room with your paper plate of stale salami and Triscuits and keep your mouth shut and let the Rotary Club's big dogs bark. "Save the class dissidence bullshit for your next Al-Qaeda cell meeting, buddy!"

It is 1958 and I am twelve years old, living on the edge of niggertown in Winchester, Virginia and hiding out in the Handley Public Library from the redneck bully kids. I am reading a somewhat pompous but erudite biography of a Harvard dean and wondering how such a mythical magical being could possibly exist in the same country and on the same planet as me. A place where my dad came home from the gas station every night, skin penetrated by and forever smelling of motor oil and cigarettes. Yet this man in this book, this Harvard dean who apparently ate fish eggs called caviar (I looked it up in the dictionary,) was a bulwark against something called McCarthyism, hated some people called communists and was friends with a fellow named John Kennedy. His name was McGeorge Bundy, which meant absolutely nothing to me, neither at the time, nor even later when he became one of the Kennedy administration's gurus who launched the Bay of Pigs and the cranked up Vietnam War. Still, reading about him beat the hell out of being bloodied by the red-faced inbred yokels who plagued the 10-block walk home from school. That same year I read Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," a copy of which was given me by am older kid, a fellow habitué of the decaying old Southern library, the queer son of the local insurance agent. It changed my life forever:

"America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?"

Learning is a fickle thing. You never know which parts of it will turn out to be important and you don't really need any credential or even much literacy to begin the journey. After reading Howl I was pretty sure I was a class dissident, even though the word was not even in use yet. Before a word is born, there is a mumbling in the heart that cries for a name.

All these years later I find great comfort in that there are any number of genuine class dissidents and original thinkers still nested within the university system, nursing happy-hour pitchers, writing poetry, formulating perfectly rational antidotes to our national delusions, even though they serve now as mere manikin proof of the great academy's tolerance for diverse ideas. They have been rendered eunuchs, but at least they are dissident eunuchs with health insurance. But I have always enjoyed living in or visiting major university communities. Just last week I had one of the most meaningful evenings in ages with the dissident crowd at the University of Pennsylvania in Philly. Thankfully, such dissidents prefer to congregate there instead of, say, Bob Jones Cult College or wearing the secret Mormon underwear of Brigham Young University. It felt like old times. It felt free. Sort of. Still though, there was a nagging feeling that these people were an endangered species. And also that they were actually philosophers and bards and artists, noble pursuits once esteemed by universities and the intellectual class, but somehow now fall under the category of dissents -- which in America is code for terrorist sympathizing malcontents.

From the viewpoint of university administrators, my puny philosophy department, and even the entire humanities division, looks rather like some vestigial organ The business school is the heart, the natural sciences are the brain, and we, who read Plato and Descartes, Homer and Montaigne, are the appendix, just waiting to be excised once and for all.

-- Justin E. H. Smith, Concordia University philosophy professor.

Meanwhile, until appendectomy happens, there are the nation's intellectual hall monitors to deal with. Most of America's intellectual class, like any privileged one that expects to maintain privilege, the intellectual class must be self-policing. So real dissidents and original thinkers are ignored and we watch B. F. Skinner's extinction behavior practice put into action. Smile and ignore the dissident to death professionally. Sometimes though, in spite of the best pest eradication efforts in the garden of academe, there sprouts a weed so completely antithetical to the great lie that he or she cannot be ignored. And if the offending party is particularly unlucky, he or she may be discovered by one of the political hacks sponsored to "elected office" by the Corporation, usually a Republican congressman looking for threats from within this very republic of eagles under god. Then all hell breaks loose. First the dissident is publicly discredited and demonized by an organized media lie campaign. After that, an appointed academic committee somehow discovers that his or her credentials, even after 25 years in the university system, are fraudulent and that there are some serious questions about his or her sexual appetites, not to mention his or her whereabouts on September 11.

I once thought I understood the ways in which America removes those who would point to the essential global criminality by which all Americans draw their ration of bread. But as I watched this process be conducted on my friend Ward Churchill, I realized how the extraction of these people from society has become an exquisitely brutal form of public surgery, certainly chilling on the face of it, but even more horrifying for the entertainment value it provided for the cheap seats in the Coliseum. I've known Church for over 30 years and though I've never completely agreed with what I considered his somewhat violent take on things, I agree with him now. Not simply because the system took out another of my dissenting friends, but because for the first time I could see how the dismemberment of a thinking citizen's identity and life is conducted, tissue by tissue, through carefully sharpened lies and fraudulent moral and intellectual charges. In his starkest truth telling about the genocide perpetrated upon indigenous peoples, and in his now infamous description of the Empire's "little Eichmanns" occupying the World Trade Center towers, Church came too close to the truth about the kind of psychic violence that underpins The American Way, the unacknowledged kind that is executed by America's most servile class, the bureaucratic, managerial and intellectual classes that maintain a system which could never survive the light of truth or anything resembling real justice.

It is because of guys like Church that the American intellectual establishment must conduct the self-policing of their own class. So a carefully nurtured and sustained system of intellectual critics finds faults, finds problems in the basic thesis or critical thinking or premise of any writer or thinker whose observations do not match the national hallucination being sold by the system's elites (to whom they must cater without appearing to cater.) Even the supposed intellectual left does this. In fact, probably does it best of all through its staunch assertions of the evils of free market capitalism, even though free market capitalism does not even exist and has never been practiced (more on that later). Most born into the establishment's intellectual class are born blind, rather like kangaroos or possums inside safe dark middle or upper middle class marsupial pouches where they experience nothing except what feels good as defined by the moist darkness of their nurture. And when they emerge they feel entitled to be where they are and honestly cannot see the system itself, never giving it a thought until they go off to college and, between spring breaks and beer parties, learn to experience and define reality through texts.

Those who do see the system for what it is are either worn down by the sheer mass of our institutions, or construct elaborate mental architecture to bridge over and avoid the truth. While their efforts are often applauded taken up by fellow intellectuals -- post modernism has been the latest of these, and like all such constructions, contains a maybe one or two fly-shit sized specks of truth -- they are utterly lost in the national machinery of fabrication. Text is not reality. Hell, reality isn't even reality in this country.

It is not too hard to grasp why unlettered but intuitive -- and not a little bit vengeful -- Chinese peasants in their revolution killed, humiliated and imprisoned the intellectuals. If Mao got one thing right it was that those intellectuals who pretend to ignore the existence of class, or refuse to live at the level of the most common class, are actually class exploiters, and entertain the pretense at their own eventual peril. No amount of text, no amount of ideology or pretense can ultimately protect us from reality, something which Americans are about to learn the hardest way possible.

When it comes to the state sanctioned American intellectual establishment's support of charade and pretense, the biggest fraud of all has been the notion of capitalism and free markets. There never was a free market, and, as Howard Zinn has so often demonstrated, every single industrialized nation was built on protectionism from the beginning. Even a cursory study of economic history shows that not a single developed nation in the world has ever followed the rules of free market capitalism. Not one. Early America built its textile industry on protectionism from the British. A hundred years later our steel industry came about the same way.

That is not to say the rules of free market capitalism are never observed. The rules of free market economics are for ramming down the throats of Third World or otherwise uncooperative peoples. Especially those tracking crude oil through the marketplace on the soles of their sandals. Yet there is scarcely a college or university, or business or school of that mumbo jumbo ritual called "economics" in this nation that does not teach "free market history" and free market "solutions" to such problems as the devastating eco collapse in progress, or that millions of babies shit themselves to death from dysentery or die for lack of a plain old drink of clean water.

Watching doomsday on HBO

Free market capitalism may have been a fraud from the git-go, but at least there was once a version which accepted the notion that any market needed customers. Once upon a time business in the industrialized world needed its citizen laborers as customers, as consumers, which implied they be paid at least enough to buy the products of the businesses and corporations that beat their asses into submission along America's assembly lines and hog slaughtering plants. That was called American opportunity and prosperity and it looked pretty damned good to millions of war ravaged Urpeen furiners trying to decide whether to eat a wharf rat or the neighbor's cat for dinner. As for the Third World, they could eat dirt and do native dances for what few tourists existed then (otherwise called the rich), but mainly they should stay out of the way of "our" natural resources in their countries.

At any rate, when the citizen labor force, by their sheer numbers, held most of the dough in their calloused mitts, there was no avoiding them by the business classes. But now that so much of not just this nation's, but the world's wealth, has become concentrated in the hands of so few, that is no longer a problem for the rich. People are cheaper than ever and getting more plentiful by the minute. So work'em to death, kill'em, eat'em if you want to. Who the **** cares? The international rich, the managers and controllers of the new financial globalism and the world's resources and the planet's labor forces, whether they be Asian "Confucian capitalists," masters of Colombian Narco state fortunes or Chinese Tongs, New York or London brokerage and media barons, or Russian oligarchs, hold increasing and previously unimaginable concentrated wealth. They look to be a replacement for the mass market, indeed even a better one with fewer mass distribution problems, higher grade demand and at top prices.

Until then however, the real dough is still in the energy game, the big suckdown of hydrocarbons, that plus convincing Americans to burn up their own seed corn. Academics, economists and scientists offer "free market solutions," such as ethyl alcohol from corn -- which most readers here know requires more petroleum to grow than energy it produces, and will deprive the rest of the world of much needed food -- just so Americans may continue motoring the suburban savannah lands, grazing on Subway Cold Cut Combos and Outback's Kookaburra Chicken Wings.

But even when the last Toyota Prius is forever moldering in the globally warmed deserts of Minneapolis, we proles will not be totally unprofitable creatures. Yesterday I read a gem of an economic paper asserting that in the emerging information, amusement, service, and "experience and attention economy," it is vital that "private business capture ownership and control of the public's knowledge and its attending rent streams." Apparently it's not bad enough that we become a third rate gulag of impoverished nitwits. They are going to charge us for the privilege.

Oh, dammit to hell anyway. Like a lady in Philly told me last week, "Joe, you're always so grim about these things." She's right. It's not the end of the world. Just the opening act. There is still quite a bit of this ugly little drama to be played out. But I can say one thing with certainty: This may be, as the economic intellectuals assert, the new American "attention economy," but I sure as hell ain't gonna to pay to watch.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, from Random House Crown about working class America, scheduled for spring 2007 release. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found at: http://www.joebageant.com. Feel free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com.

Copyright 2007 by Joe Bageant

quote:

Hang the Professors, Save the Eunuchs for Later:A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard.
By JOE BAGEANT

While your prophet rides a mule, mine rides a rocket ship. Shall we race?
JOIN YET? IT'S YOUR WAR - REPUBLICANS - GoArmy.com
Common Dreams
Center For American Progress
F.A.I.R. Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting
Skeptics Annotated Bible
Landover Baptist Church

quote:

This article appears to unfairly attack intellectuals at universities.

quote:

What Kind of a System Does This to Its Youth? Criminalizing the Classroom.
By LINDA FLORES
June 19, 2007

"They're treating us like criminals, like we're animals."

-- Student at Curtis High School, Staten Island, New York City

"Sometimes the classroom feels like a jail cell."

-- Jane Min, Flushing High School, Queens, New York City

Imagine if schools were places where youth were treated like the precious people they are--where their creativity, their curiosity, and their critical thinking were valued and encouraged. Imagine if, in school and out of school, the youth were challenged and unleashed and they were called upon to discuss and debate everything from Shakespeare to religion, from the state of the planet to how society--including their own schools--should be run. Imagine if the rebellious spirit and questioning of the youth were not only not squashed and corralled--imagine if it were valued as a crucial part of revolutionizing society.

But in this society, we can only imagine this. And for way too many youth, the experience is exactly the opposite. Schools are ringed with fences and metal detectors. Instead of the sounds of debate and lively discussion over string theory or globalization, the hallways ring with echoes of cops, Glocks at their hips, screaming to the youth to "Get the **** back in line!"

When youth come to school, instead of knowing they are coming to a safe place where they will learn and be learned from, they live with fear: will they be frisked and humiliated in front of everyone for no real reason? Will they be arrested if they wander out of the metal detector line? Will they make it home at the end of the day, or will they be taken to jail for swearing or getting into a fight?

An important report, "Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools," was released by the New York Civil Liberties Union in March 2007 . It covers the experience of youth in New York City, but it provides an all-too-rare glimpse at the experience of youth all over this country, particularly Black and Latino youth--the harassment, degradation, brutalization, and criminalization that they are forced to endure when they come to school. The report is drawn from interviews with parents, teachers, school administrators and staff, and, importantly, surveys from 1,000 youth in New York City schools.

In New York City, the public schools have been policed by the NYPD since 1998. In the 2005-2006 school year, there were a total of 4,625 cops (200 of them armed) patrolling the schools as so-called "School Safety Agents (SSAs)." The NYCLU report points out that if the NYPD's School Safety Division were its own police force, it would be the 10th largest in the country--larger than the entire police force in Washington, D.C., Detroit, or Boston.


Cops Like School Prison Guards

Under the school "safety" program, any junior high and high school in the New York public school system is subject to "roving metal detectors." What this has meant is cops coming into schools unannounced, setting up a military-style task force. In an approach very similar to what U.S. soldiers do in Iraq, the cops swarm in, take over the school's cafeteria or gym, and turn the school into a police zone, snaked with lines of students waiting to pass through the metal detectors.

Students are forced to wait for hours in line as their bags are searched and their cell phones (prohibited in the school district) or cameras (not prohibited) are confiscated. And 21 percent of the city's junior high and high schools now have metal detectors permanently installed. At Wadleigh Secondary School in Manhattan, one student who found a "roving" metal detector at his school called his mother to come pick up his phone before it was confiscated--and was then arrested when he tried to explain why he wasn't waiting in line.

These cops in the schools act like, and basically function as, prison guards: barking orders, pushing and shoving students, deciding arbitrarily what is and is not allowed on any given day. Students' bags are searched, and everything from house keys to spare change is confiscated. The cops decide what they will and won't let students bring in to schools. For example, some students who had permission to carry cell phones had them taken. Some students had their iPods confiscated and never returned. And at an aviation magnet high school, students had their engineering supplies taken for supposedly being "weapons."

Cops have confiscated students' food and then eaten it. Students are routinely yelled at and cursed at, and have reported being physically shoved through the metal detectors or shoved against the wall to be frisked regardless of whether they set off the metal detectors. At one school, the cops taunted one student who was wearing a nice coat, accusing him of stealing it. When one cop found a blank CD in a student's backpack he said, "Is that rap? That's probably why you're being searched." In one eight-month period more than 17,000 items were taken from students in the "roving" metal detector program--70 percent of them were cell phones, and 29 percent were iPods and similar items. Not one gun was found.

The NYCLU report detailed numerous instances where the cops actively terrorized and brutalized students. At one school, cops chased students who tried to avoid the checkpoints, screaming, "Round them up!" At Samuel Tilden High School in Brooklyn, a 17-year-old student named Biko Edwards was walking toward his chemistry class when a vice principal stopped him. When Biko protested not being allowed to go to class, the vice principal called in a cop. The report describes what happened next:

"Officer Rivera then grabbed Biko and slammed him against a brick door divider, lacerating Biko's face and causing him to bleed. Officer Rivera then sprayed Mace at Biko's eyes and face, causing Biko's eyes to burn. Rather than treat the student, Officer Rivera then called for back-up on his radio, and proceeded to handcuff Biko [He]was taken to a hospital where he spent approximately two hours being treated for his wounds, and spending most of his time in the hospital handcuffed to a chair He faces five criminal charges."

And what happens to young women in these schools--are they places where young women are treated as human beings with value and intelligence, and not as a collection of body parts? Are the schools themselves a place where young women and men are encouraged to debate the oppression of women, and called upon to solve it? No--the schools are places where women are harassed and groped by the armed enforcers of the state themselves. One student reported that "the police like to put their hands on kids without reason." And 27 percent of students surveyed reported that officers touched or treated them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. Young women whose underwire bras set off the metal detectors reported they were forced to lift up their shirts, supposedly to prove they weren't carrying any weapons, or to unzip or unbuckle their pants supposedly to prove they weren't concealing cell phones. Young women have been searched by male officers, and the report says, "students and teachers alike complain that male SSAs subject girls to inappropriate behavior, including flirting and sexual attention." At one high school, cops were heard making remarks about a young woman's body. At another school, a gay student was humiliated every day as male cops would flip coins to see who had to search him.


Teachers Also Targeted

And what about those teachers who really are trying to make a difference? Who care about the students and despite low pay, cutbacks, deteriorating buildings, and increasingly fascistic rules, and who are really trying to connect with students and give them an education? Who do not like the way schools are being turned into prisons?

The ACLU report exposes how teachers who dare to defend their students are attacked and brutalized, sending a crystal clear message to the youth: "No one is going to defend you. Look what happens to anyone that does." Take one story recounted in the report:

"On March 8, 2005, at least seven NYPD officers arrived at the New School for Arts and Sciences after teachers called 911 to ask for medical assistance for a student who had been involved in a fight.

"Several teachers had successfully stopped the fight and controlled the situation before the police responded, and Cara Wolfson-Kronen, a social studies teacher, informed the 911 operator that the fight had been defused. Despite this, one of the officers demanded that the teachers identify the students who had been involved in the fight and said that they would be handcuffed.

"Quinn Kronen, an English teacher, pointed out that those students were now peacefully sitting in the classroom. Officer Bowen responded by yelling: 'You ****ing teachers need to get your shit together. These kids are running crazy. You need to get rid of them.' When Mr. Kronen objected to such language, Sergeant Walter told Mr. Kronen that he had 'better shut the **** up' or she would arrest him. When Ms. Wolfson-Kronen objected, Sergeant Walter said: 'that is it; cuff the bitch.' Officers arrested Ms. Wolfson-Kronen, paraded her out of school in handcuffs and forced her to stand outside in sub-freezing temperature without a jacket. They also arrested Mr. Kronen.

"The teachers were detained at the 41st Precinct for approximately two hours before being released. The charges against them -- disorderly conduct -- were dismissed at their initial court hearing, because their alleged wrongdoing did not constitute unlawful activity.

"On March 22, 2005, Mr. Kronen and Ms. Wolfson-Kronen received an anonymous letter signed by 'The Brotherhood.' The letter threatened them with physical harm for 'messing up with our fellow officers' continuing: 'If I were you I'd be planning my getting out of New York fast.'"

In October 2006, Adhim Deveaux, a math teacher at the Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship, ran outside after hearing that one of his students was being assaulted by a cop. After seeing the student being slammed onto a car, Deveaux went up to the cop, hoping he could calm the situation down; he said, "He's my student, I'm his teacher. He's just a kid." In response the cop hit and shoved Deveaux and then another cop grabbed Deveaux from behind, slammed him onto the sidewalk and handcuffed him. Deveaux was taken to the precinct and charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and obstructing governmental administration.

This teacher was trying to defuse a situation before it got worse: in any society where the police or other kinds of authorities were really about serving the people, they would welcome this and try to work with and rely on the teacher--and they would listen when the teacher pleaded, "He's just a kid." But these cops arrested the teacher, because enforcing repressive prison-like conditions in the schools is what they are about--not trying to solve problems among the students and teachers.


Criminalization of the Youth

The NYCLU report details numerous times where students were attacked and/or arrested for petty and ridiculous offenses like swearing, being late for school or refusing to turn over their cell phones. Their web site mentions a case of a 13-year-old girl who was handcuffed and taken into custody in May for drawing on her desk in school, charged with graffiti. These are youth who are doing nothing wrong--and they are being pulled into the criminal system and treated like criminals themselves.

And this kind of criminalization of the youth is not limited to New York City. Bob Herbert, a writer for the New York Times, has written a number of columns about outrageous instances of police brutality against youth, including a 6-year-old Black girl in Florida who was handcuffed and driven to jail because she threw a tantrum in kindergarten, and a 7-year-old Black boy in Baltimore handcuffed for riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. Herbert points to the racist discrimination involved in such cases. For instance a 14-year-old Black girl in Texas was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2006 for shoving a hall monitor (she was recently released) while a white girl in the same town convicted of arson was sentenced only to probation.

Commenting on how students are "belittled, shouted at, cursed at, instrusively searched and improperly touched by cops," Bob Herbert points out: "This poisonous police behavior is an extension into the schools of the humiliating treatment cops have long been doling out to youngsters--especially those who are black or Latino--on the city's streets." ("Poisonous Police Behavior," June 2, 2007)

What kind of message is this sending to the youth? Schools should be places where the youth are encouraged to test and try out limits, where they are encouraged to make mistakes, where the most important thing is making sure their minds are really challenged and unleashed. But not in this society. When a young woman is handcuffed for drawing on a desk, or a 6-year-old is handcuffed for throwing a tantrum, this is a reflection of how this society views youth. And the message to the youth themselves here is unmistakable: This is not your world. Your lives don't matter. The only future this system has for you is a shit job or prison. And when the cops arrest these youth, these illegitimate and bogus arrests are used to "prove" that the youth really are criminals, and to isolate these youth further from the rest of society.

It is not simply that these cops are racist, brute thugs who hate and fear the youth they are charged with controlling--although that is unmistakable after reading things like this report. The outrageous and brutal use of the police in the schools and more generally against the youth reflects the role of the police in enforcing exploitative and oppressive relations in society, including national oppression. These police are not in the schools (or anywhere else) to "serve and protect" the people. They are there to serve and protect the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation that many of these youth face with the highest unemployment and worst housing, education, and health care.

The report states that "during the 2004-2005 school year, 82 percent of children attending high schools with permanent metal detectors were Black and Latino, a minority enrollment rate eleven percentage points higher than in schools citywide. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, the largest high school with permanent metal detectors in the city, there are 4,511 students and not one school librarian."

What kind of system is it, where youth are forced to go to overcrowded, under-funded schools that look more like prisons than places of learning and growth? What kind of system treats the energy, the creativity, the rebelliousness of youth, as something to be snuffed out, rather than cherished and unleashed? What kind of system has enforcers who harass youth for not going to school--and then harass and even arrest them, for petty bullshit, when they do?

Those who peddle the lie about America being the "land of opportunity where any kid can become president," who prattle on about the "value of education" and "no child left behind"--while saying and doing nothing about the prison-like conditions in schools--have no right to speak about "individual responsibility" and how the youth need to take make "better choices."

To quote Pink's song "Dear Mr. President":

"How can you say
No child is left behind?
We're not dumb, and we're not blind
They're all sitting in your cells
While you pave the road to hell"

Linda Flores writes for Revolution. She can be reached at: comolaflores@yahoo.com

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Linking Alienation and Dissociation
By Dr. SUSAN ROSENTHAL, M.D.
July 21 / 22, 2007

Alienation and dissociation reinforce each other to create a cycle of social powerlessness. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, a worker ponders this dilemma.

"The more a person is on the receiving end of orders, the more the person's got to think he or she is really somewhere else in order to keep up self-respect. And yet it's at work that you're supposed to 'make something' of yourself, so if you're not really there, how are you going to make something of yourself?"

Capitalism alienates the majority from control over the decision-making process, putting most people "on the receiving end of orders." Dissociation is a psychological defense against feeling powerless; the worker goes "somewhere else" to preserve self-respect. However, dissociation keeps the worker in his alienated condition, "so if you're not really there, how are you going to make something of yourself?"

Alienation and dissociation re-enforce each other in countless ways. Workers who must function like cogs in the social machine have dissociated relationships with the other cogs. There is no direct and conscious sharing of the creative, productive process. Instead of relating to each other as fellow producers, directly exchanging what they want and need, workers relate to each other as dissociated consumers, you pay my boss for what I made and I pay your boss for what you made.

Consequently, despite living, working, commuting, and shopping together, most people feel estranged from one another. We talk about what we can't control (sports, the weather) to avoid discussing what we aren't allowed to control (our work, the world).

Capitalism alienates humanity from the environment by dissociating the past and the future from the present. Only the sale is important. Every year, tons of industrial chemicals, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals enter the market as commodities with no consideration for what happens after they are sold. Once used, these products are thrown away, washed away and excreted from human and animal bodies, entering rivers, streams and lakes, returning to us in the form of contaminated food and water.

Alienation and dissociation reach their pinnacle in war. When people feel helpless to stop the madness, they must dissociate from the brutality or go mad themselves.

People who feel powerless have been compared to some laboratory animals who resign themselves to unavoidable electrical shocks. Even after their cage doors are opened, they do not escape. This phenomenon is called "learned helplessness," where the familiar, no matter how terrible, seems preferable to the unknown, no matter how promising.

People without hope do feel powerlessness. However, animals have limited ways to extract themselves from harmful situations, unlike human beings who are creative and resourceful problem-solvers. And while individuals have a limited ability to solve problems, there is virtually no limit to the problems that people can solve together.

To maintain their stranglehold over society, the people-in-power use divide-and-rule strategies that keep the majority feeling isolated, fearful, and powerless. Nevertheless, the criminal behavior of the ruling class compels ordinary people to organize in self-defense.

Cooperation counters the downward cycle of alienation and dissociation. Cooperation elicits feelings of strength and hope, so people work harder to find solutions, thereby increasing their chances of success. Cooperation and hope re-enforce each other to increase social power.

Whether we feel hopeless or hopeful, powerless or powerful depends on whether we work alone or together. Alone, we can't protect ourselves from environmental pollution, corrupt corporations, oppressive institutions and war-mongering governments. As an organized force, we have the power to change the world.

Dr. Susan Rosenthal has been practicing medicine for more than 30 years and has written many articles on the relationship between health and human relationships. She is also the author of Striking Flint: Genora (Johnson) Dollinger Remembers the 1936-1937 General Motors Sit-Down Strike (1996) and Market Madness and Mental Illness: The Crisis in Mental Health Care (1999) and Power and Powerlessness. She is a member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981. She can be reached through her web site www.powerandpowerlessness.com or by email at: author@powerandpowerlessness.com

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While the professors as individuals are pushing in their own intellectual way, the institution has other objectives. In a sense, they've been corpratized as most of us are.

I think what has happened over the last 30 years, like all aspects of our culture, the fat cats are now controlling the messages in our state schools. The religious right has pushed so hard for the last 30 years, and it's become so conservative, the message coming out of universities has also become more conservative. Essentially, the right is now shutting down our experience and as we all know, in a fascist culture, the intellectuals are the first to go.
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Challenging Corporate Power: California Community Says Companies Are Not People; Bans Campaign Donations
By Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, YES! Magazine. September 5, 2007.

Humboldt County, California, became the latest, and largest, jurisdiction to abolish the disastrous legal doctrine known as “corporate personhood.”


In 2006, Humboldt County, California, became the latest, and largest, jurisdiction to abolish the legal doctrine known as "corporate personhood."

Measure T was successful because our all-volunteer campaign came together to pass a law that bans non-local corporations from participating in Humboldt elections. The referendum, which passed with 55 percent of the vote, also asserts that corporations cannot claim the First Amendment right to free speech.

By enacting Measure T, Humboldt County has committed an act of "municipal civil disobedience," intentionally challenging "settled law." But voters also recognize that Measure T is an act of common sense. We polled our community and found that 78 percent believe corruption is more likely if corporations participate in politics.

The Measure T campaign was led by women and young people, with critical support from elders and feminist men. This diverse leadership created a culture of cooperation and collaboration that permeated the campaign, and made it as much about community as about a win on election day. For example, the law itself was written using a consensus process, the advice of volunteers was valued just as highly as input from experts and consultants, and we organized numerous parties and social events to help spread the word.

The local Democratic and Green Parties formally endorsed the effort, and leaders of both worked arm-in-arm during the campaign. They were joined by organized labor and every peace, justice, and environmental protection group in the community. Humboldt County modeled a campaign carried out with respectful unity.

This effort did not spring up out of thin air. It was the result of years of old-fashioned community organizing by Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County that included workshops and educational programs explaining how corporations have acquired more rights under the law than people have.

We designed the campaign with "big picture" goals in mind from the beginning. We knew we wanted to claim for our campaign the best and most noble ideals of American history--especially self-governance and protecting people's rights against abusive power. We realize that the founding of this country is deeply flawed, but we used the national creation story to put Measure T on the side of truth and justice.

To that end, our PAC was named the Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights, and our website was VoteLocalControl.org. Our primary outreach tool was a tea bag that reminded voters of the proud history of the Boston Tea Party as an act of rebellion against the most powerful corporation of the day, and called for a modern-day T(ea) Party of our own.

Like the populists of the 19th-century agrarian movement, we believe that genuine change cannot be imposed from the top down. It must proceed from the ground up, and the battles must be waged in local communities.

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US lawmakers take Yahoo to task
Yahoo rebuked for passing user information leading to journalist's imprisonment in China

Thursday November 8th, 2007

Shi Tao was jailed for 10 years in 2004, after distributing an email from the Chinese authorities - ordering journalists not to report any protests over the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Yahoo isn't the only villain

The Internet giant is just one of many tech firms propping up China's totalitarian ways. By Peter Navarro

Which company has committed the greater evil? Yahoo Inc. helped send a reporter to prison by revealing his identity to the Chinese government. Cisco Systems Inc. helps send thousands of Chinese dissidents to prison by selling sophisticated Internet surveillance technology to China.

If bad press is to be the judge, the "stool pigeon" Yahoo is clearly the bigger villain. In 2004, after the Chinese government ordered the country's media not to report on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo e-mail account to forward a government memo to a pro-democracy group. When China's Internet police -- a force of 30,000 -- uncovered this, it pressured Yahoo to reveal Shi's identity. Yahoo caved quicker than you can say Vichy France, and Shi is doing 10 years in a Chinese slammer for one click of his subversive mouse.

For ratting out Shi, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang has been dragged before Congress, called a "moral pygmy" and forced to issue an apology. In contrast, Cisco and Chief Executive John Chambers have received little public scrutiny for providing China's cadres of Comrade Orwells with the Internet surveillance technology they need to cleanse the Net of impure democratic thoughts. Los Angeles Times November 8, 2007