Glen Greenwald: Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who Created the Conditions That Led to His Rise

This is an EXCEPTIONAL review. Bless Glen Greenwald for his continued excellence in investigative journalism, consistent integrity and courage, and his profound commitment to truth and providing us with the larger pictures we most need to know. - Molly

“There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of the film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many of the parts I found most compelling. But that’s precisely why Moore’s film is so worth your time.” - Glenn Greenwald

 By Glenn Greenwald

“FAHRENHEIT 11/9,” the title of Michael Moore’s new film that opens today in theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly profitable Bush-era “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but also a reference to the date of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a secondary figure in Moore’s film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the climate in which someone like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.

For that reason alone, Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies.

Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular, source of political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect, if not design, it distracts the population’s attention away from the actual architects of their plight.

This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic myth – at once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016’s “Fahrenheit 11/9,” the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with “flaws,” was nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy democracy, one which, by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed immigrants, embraced diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought to defend human rights against assaults by the world’s tyrants, was governed by the sturdy rule of law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected fundamentally decent even if ideologically misguided men to the White House, and gradually expanded rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for the world’s neediest.

But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our idyllic land, vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump’s assumption of power that the nation’s noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a far darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to “Who We Are”: a profoundly “un-American” tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, racism, elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive cruelty toward the most vulnerable and marginalized.

This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists, and thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once. Most importantly, it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling class, now recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols of America’s pre-11/9 Goodness.

The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and protection of those responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower prosecutions, the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak, Sisi, and Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street at everyone else’s expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites responsible for all those crimes – it’s all blissfully washed away as we unite to commemorate the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands a piece of candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero and Trump-opponent-in-words John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of us re-tweet the latest bromide of Americana from the leaders of America’s most insidious security state, spy and police agencies.

Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/michael-moores-fahrenheit-119-aims-not-at-trump-but-at-those-who-created-the-conditions-that-led-to-his-rise/ 

Pádraig Ó Tuama: Let Us Pray

Thank you to my dear friend and soulful sister, Bess Piñon, who shared this beautiful quote in our women's circle last night. Blessed be. ❤ Molly

So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.

 ― Pádraig Ó Tuama,

Irish Poet and Theologian 

For the full interview, please go here:

https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-marilyn-nelson-choosing-words-that-deepen-the-argument-of-being-alive-sep2018/ 

Trump’s Psychotic Puerto Rico Tweets Erase Human Beings From Existence for Political Gain

Well articulated and spot on. ― Molly

 He's unfit for office, and everyone knows it.

By JACK HOLMES

The President of the United States is not fit to hold the office. Every day the Republican majorities in Congress and his infotainment apparatchiks at Fox News prop him up is another day of disgrace for the nation. The president does not care what happens to most anyone, a function of what is one of the clearest cases of malignant narcissism—bordering on what's been called "radical solipsism"—ever seen in a public official. But he particularly does not care what happens to black and brown people, whom he thinks are, at best, hangers-on to the American experience and should just be happy they're allowed to stay.

Never has this been more readily, gobsmackingly apparent than in his handling of Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico, which is an American territory where Americans live. In the initial aftermath, Trump dragged his feet on going to the island. He explained the response was difficult because the island was surrounded by "big water." When he arrived, having spent previous days fighting with the mayor of San Juan on the Internet, he announced that Maria was not "a real catastrophe" and told people to "have a good time." He "joked" that the island—at least 90 percent of which was without power at the time, and where food and clean water were in short supply—was ruining his administration's budget. Then he started jump shooting paper towels into a crowd of hurricane survivors.

Recently, it was confirmed that nearly 3,000 human beings—or, if it matters more to you, American human beings—died as a result of the storm and, it increasingly appears, the government's poor response to it. Here is how Donald Trump, American president, handled the news that significantly more people died in Maria than in Hurricane Katrina:

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

.....This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

Imagine you lost a family member in a natural disaster and the President of the United States not only displayed his typically blunt indifference, but also suggested their death was faked as part of a hoax by his political opponents. Imagine he lied while doing it, making up conspiracies about how the deaths were counted. (The figures have been certified by both the Puerto Rican government and independent researchers.) Imagine he tried to erase you and your family for his own political gain.

Please continue this article here: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23115418/president-trump-puerto-rico-3000-deaths-tweets/

David Korten: When Profit Drives Us, Community Suffers

An excellent piece by author and visionary David Korten. ― Molly

 

 We evolved to be connected to nature and to one another, but our exploitative global economy is severing those relations.

 

By David Korten

 

As I was reading the current series of YES! articles on the mental health crisis, I received an email from Darcia Narvaez, professor of psychology at University of Notre Dame. She was sending me articles being prepared for an anthology she is co-editing with the working title Sustainable Vision. The articles present lessons from indigenous culture that underscore why community is the solution to so much of what currently ails humanity.

Both these collections underscore why so much of what currently ails us can be traced to the ongoing global process of commodification, monetization, corporatization, and the increasing trend of machines, robots and artificial intelligence replacing people in jobs ranging from manufacturing to customer service. All this is separating us from one another and from nature so that billionaires can grow their fortunes. The consequences—including environmental, social, and political collapse—are dramatic, devastating, and unnecessary.

Narvaez observes that for roughly 99 percent of the time that has elapsed since the appearance of the first humans, we lived as hunter-gatherer tribes with deep and direct connections to one another and nature. Together, tribal members foraged for nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Together, they stalked, killed, and dressed their game. Together, they prepared their food in communal kitchens.

Relationships with one another and nature were direct, strong, lifelong, and grounded in intimate knowledge of one another and the plants and animals they lived among. Tools were simple, self-made, and shared.

Our human brains evolved in this context to facilitate living in co-productive relationship with one another and the Earth. The distinctive developmental needs of the brain as a child matures into adolescence and adulthood can only be fully understood in this context.

As human beings, we begin life with bodies and brains only partially formed and in a state of total dependence on our parents. No mother can completely provide for her own needs and those of an infant by herself. That’s why, it’s said, it takes a village to raise a child.

The human child’s path to physical and mental maturity is long, can be treacherous, and requires proper nutrition and exercise. A hunter-gatherer newborn was breast-fed for its first 2-5 years. This provided nutrition and constant reassurance of its mother’s love and care. The maturing child led an active outdoor life. He or she experienced constant engagement and enduring relationships with playmates of many ages, the support of an ever-present tribal family spanning multiple generations, and the accessible wisdom of honored elders. This is what the maturing human mind and body evolved to expect and which it continues to require.

In our modern setting, we pride ourselves on our liberation from the need to forage for our food, make our own clothes, and build our own shelter. This can work well for those with adequate income to buy what they need or want. No amount of money, however, can buy the love and caring we need to meet our emotional needs.

Statistics on global trends suggest we are creating a world where it is ever harder to meet those needs. More people are living in single-personhouseholds. Since the 1960s, the percentage of households with only one person has more than doubled in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States.

In the United States, 28 percent of households are now single-person. Between 1960 and 2016, the number of children in the United States living in single-parent households increased from 22 percent to 31percent of the population. Often the single parent is a mom struggling to make ends meet with one or more low-wage jobs that may require long commutes, offer little security, and separate her from her children during most of her waking hours.

Too exhausted to prepare home-cooked meals, we depend on nutritionally deficient, chemically laced packaged meals. Online retailers provide for our material needs with no need to venture out of our single-person residence or even for any human contact. To fend off our isolation-produced depression, we become addicted to drugs and alcohol.

The mental health consequences are devastating. U.S. suicides have increased 25 percent since 2000 and experts predict that 50 percent of the current U.S. population will experience a mental health disorder at some point in their lives.

Please continue this article here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/when-profit-drives-us-community-suffers-20180918

Paul Verhaeghe: Neoliberalism Has Brought Out the Worst In Us

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits 

has changed our ethics and our personalities

By Paul Verhaeghe

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic

George Monbiot: Neoliberalism – The Ideology At the Root of All Our Problems

I have shared this vital piece by George Monbiot before and believe it important to share again and again. So important to see the waters in which we swim and to work together toward deeply needed radical change where life rather than profits and greed are valued. Another world is possible. ― Molly

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

By George Monbiot

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papersoffer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

Please continue this article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot