Playlist for Show: Long Waves

The decline in participation in voting leads to an abdication of the one tool of influence that individuals have in their government via the legislature. Statistics from the US Census bureau reported that topping the list of reasons for not voting is a lack of interest (13%) or a dislike of the candidates or issues (13%). More than a quarter of registered nonvoters in 2008 didn’t vote because they weren’t interested or didn’t like their choices. Many reported illness or disability (15%), especially among older registered nonvoters. Others were too busy, or had conflicting schedules (17%). That’s about a third of the registered nonvoters.

Yet many states continue to take actions denying voters access to the polls. Thus, people controlling the string of power still believe that voting is important.

Relying extensively on the work of John Ralston Saul, the show unpacks the consequences of non participation in voting.

There are 3 positions people may occupy in relation to their governments: citizens, subjects, slaves. I have never seen such a headlong retreat from citizenship into slavery conducted with such unconscious willingness and glad participation.

Norquist: Shrink government to the size that it can be drowned in the bathtub. The idea here is that if government is removed, we will be finally free to enjoy the fruits of our own labors. But nature hates a vacuum, and is one structure of power is removed, another will surely take its place. We will not return to the Garden of Eden and absolute freedoms is government is removed or dismantled. The garden we shall inherit will not be ruled by god but by a corporate state. Not government of, buy and for the people, but a government run of, by and for the corporate entities who will take their place.
Corporations are people but they are not human. They do not die. They have no body to incarcerate, and they have no morals other than to maximize shareholder profits, though these are sometimes sacrificed to some extent for the managers’ profits. ENRON, CITICORP, etc.
Corporations pursue their own ends as this is modeled as individual freedom for the garden variety human person, and so feeds the false notion of individualism as a personal matter with no obligation to the social. We seek our own ends and desires without a concern for how our means to our ends might hurt, cheat, or deprive others of their ends and desires. Saul writes “The promise, real or illusionary, of personal self-fulfillment seems to leave no room for the individual as a responsible and conscious citizen.”
This unconsciousness of people arises in part from the lack of a language of the public, a problem noted by John Dewey in 1925 in his work, the public and its problems. Dewey’s view of the problem was similar: Our babel is not of tongues but of the lack of shared signs and symbols without which a public is impossible. It’ s not that there is no public, there are too many publics. They can’t organize themselves.
It is important to note that the words and pronouncements advertisements and pr releases of corporations and government are largely without meaning. They do not communicate. They are not language and these techniques of social persuasion cannot be used by us.

Where, then is our public? Where is the shared language of free people reflecting on their lives in the context of a shared social world?
Saul suggests, rather, that we have manufactured utopias (60) presented to us through the non-communication of corporate language, the manipulative language of advertising, and the coercive and deceptive language of politics.
This was captured well by Kendra Eash in her poem, this is a generic advertisement, later turned into a video. Youtube.
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Likewise, the utterances of politics are addressed not to rational, reflective persons with a sense of history and a grasp of the complexities of the world. They are not designed to be considered, examined, analyzed. As statements of pure ideology, they are meant to possess the mind and the heart. They are meant to be swallowed whole without chewing. And politicians speak not of issues but of the interests of those who have paid for them.
Saul quotes Mussolini: “The crowd doesn’t have to know. It must believe. If only we can given them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become a reality. “
And in the words and images and films, we are taught to believe the lies that sustain power, the lies that construct enemies out of other people, the lies that individual freedom, corporate or human, is the only good.
Because this is our ethos, our leaders turn against education and thought. This too is transmitted to the masses through various ideological devices so that many of those most directly concerned with individual freedom and personal liberty attack the teaching of controversy in schools, attack books that challenge beliefs as satanic, or they simply withdraw from public education completely and homeschool. It was no accident that the “Christian Right” so-called, set its sites on school boards as a first step to advancing this ideology. Power thrives where people are marginally literate, have no historical knowledge worth the name, and have never learned to critically engage an idea that seems alien or threatening to them.
Thus in higher education as well, we turn away from funding liberal arts, the knowledge and training necessary and fitting for a free person, and focus on STEM and computers and technical training. Above all, we want to get jobs out of the educational system. The logic of this is revealed in the truth that most persons cannot attend college in the US without substantial debt, a burden that cannot be expunged by any legal process and which will consume a large percentage of their income for a decade or more after graduation, if in fact, they are lucky enough to find a job.
The follow on effect from this system, which benefits the banks and lenders, as well as the contemporary educational industry, damages the consumer economy, the housing industry, and other financial aspects of the country, for they cannot buy who have no money.
Yet the greater damage is done to the public itself, to democracy, which is then little more than the choice of which burger to buy.
The trap is that we have bought the idea and the false dream sold by corporatism, of the idyllic small town. PAT BUCHANNAN
Yet the rhetoric is of return to small town values, of tribal or even family values with no obligation to the social whole.
Hence the war on immigrants, on LGBT, on difference.
In this way the corporation are freed as is global capital. Our individual liberties become theirs.
This is sold. Disingenuous packages w/ not proof that they actually work. Holy mantra of all presidents in recent times to speak of free markets and free speech as connected, to say free speech arises out of free markets. Reagan, HW, Clinton, Bush, Obama. It is the declaration of faith in this ruinous ideology required of all US leaders.
Saul points out that The end of all this is a modern garden of eden, innocent, simple, unconscious.
Garden is uniformity, naiveté, absence of critical thought, philospophy, analysis and finally an abdication of responsibility for anything but one’s self.
The corporate and technocratic speech acts and ideology present themselves as the inexorable and universal truth incarnate. The free market, the equilibrium of human desires in society, and the production of plenty for all.
This is reflected in its technocratic form in government in various forms of censorship and control (formal and informal) and in surveillance.
NSA center in UTAH, global spectrum dominance, TIA,
Stupid idea: turning citizens into spies (Ashcroft) and See something, say something.
People critique this. There are rallys, and articles, and speeches, but as Saul notes, language must relate in some practical way to the structures of power or it is just so much babble. The protests are babble. Let them protest so long as they pay their taxes.
We already see the corporations moving into the vacuum of power left by citizens deserting their duties.
Everybody knows the deal is rotten, old black joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.
Corporations have enormous influence on government, and even if it our fault, we fail to see that and fall into a growing sense of powerlessness.
Lobbying:
Boeing Co. is one of the most influential companies in airline manufacturing and has continually shown its influence in lobbying Congress … Between January and September, Boeing spent a total of $12 million lobbying according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. Additionally, Boeing has its own political action committee, which donated more than $2.2 million to federal candidates during the 2010 election cycle. Of that sum, 53 percent went to Democrats. …Through September, Boeing’s PAC has donated $748,000 to federal politicians
Access is vital in lobbying. If you can’t get in your door, you can’t make your case. Here we had a hostile senator, whose staff was hostile, and we had to get in. So that’s the lobbyist safe-cracker method: throw fundraisers, raise money, and become a big donor.
—Lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2011[45]

Meanwhile the corporations grow and profit and take over increasingly larger segment of the government. There is no shortage of money for education. The crisis of education is properly a crisis of priorities. Profits for corporations or for people, for schools, universities, for infrastructure, for public health. The money is there but the will to ensure that a proportion which would only be decent cannot be apportioned to the commonwealth, the common good. No more taxes becomes the rallying cry of the corporations and is inculcated in an uncritical populace as the defense of their petty holdings. So the public does not act through their one power of the legislature to bring about this act of self-defense and self-preservation. The propaganda is too persuasive, and the rhetoric is too pervasive.

 

 

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