podesta-emails
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Well worth the seven minutes read
Good morning,
Here is a beginning critique of the corporatization of society and its
consequences. As the author emphasizes, this is not just about polluted
water in Flint, Michigan, but about the role of corporations and how they
influence government. Without religious values, no perspective exists for
discerning right from wrong. If this tendency continues to expand, we will
lose our social compass and further decline into expediency and efficiency
without the values that give meaning to life beyond profit and gain. This
is not just an American issue, as it increasingly is a worldwide condition.
Author Chris Hedges sees this but can't quite bring himself to define the
solution which he describes as "moral values." Yes, he is on the right
track, but he doesn't define this because of his failure to articulate how
religion is the essential glue that holds society together.
This should help us recall President George Washington's final guidance to
America which I am appending below from his 1796 farewell address:
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,
religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man
claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great
pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and
citizens. ... Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property,
for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the
oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And
let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained
without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined
education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid
us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious
principle."
fred
Published on
Monday, February 08, 2016
by TruthDig
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/flints_crisis_is_about_more_than_water_20160207>
Flint’s Crisis Is About More Than Water
by
Chris Hedges <http://www.commondreams.org/author/chris-hedges>
What is in the mind of someone who knowingly poisons children and impairs
their lives? Why did the politicians, regulators and bureaucrats who knew the
water in Flint, Mich.,
<http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2016/02/months_mount_on_flint_water_cr.html>
was toxic lie about the danger for months? What does it say about a society
that is ruled by, and refuses to punish, those who willfully destroy the
lives of children?
The crisis in Flint is far more ominous than lead-contaminated water. It is
symptomatic of the collapse of our democracy. Corporate power is not held
accountable for its crimes. Everything is up for sale, including children.
Our regulatory agencies—including the federal Environmental Protection
Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Michigan’s
Department of Environmental Quality—have been defunded, emasculated and
handed over to corporate-friendly stooges. Our corrupt courts are part of a
mirage of justice. The role of these government agencies and courts, and of
the legislatures, is to sanction abuse rather than halt it.
The primacy of profit throughout the society takes precedence over life
itself, including the life of the most vulnerable. This corporate system of
power knows no limits. It has no internal restraints. It will sacrifice all
of us, including our children, on the altar of corporate greed. In a
functioning judicial system, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint’s former
emergency manager, Darnell Earley, along with all the regulatory officials
who lied as a city was being sickened, would be in jail facing trial
<http://michaelmoore.com/ArrestGovSnyder/>.
Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Gitta Sereny in “Into
That Darkness,” Omer Bartov in “Murder in Our Midst,” Alexander
Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago,” Primo Levi in “The Drowned and the
Saved” and Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear” argue that the modern
instrument of evil is the technocrat, the man or woman whose sole concern
is technological and financial efficiency, whose primary measurement of
success is self-advancement, even if it means piling up corpses or
destroying the lives of children.
“Monsters exist,” Levi noted, “but they are too few in number to be truly
dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.” These technocrats have no
real ideology, other than the ideology that is in vogue. They want to get
ahead, to rise in the structures of power. They know how to make the
collective, or the bureaucracy, work on behalf of power. Nothing else is of
importance. “The new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired
builders, faithful devout disciples,” Vasily Grossman, in his book “Forever
Flowing, wrote of Stalin’s Soviet Union. “The new state did not even
require servants—just clerks.”
We churn out millions of these technocrats or clerks in elite universities
and business schools. They are trained to serve the system. They do not
question its assumptions and structures any more than Nazi bureaucrats
questioned the assumptions and structures of the “Final Solution.”
<https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=the+%E2%80%9CFinal+Solution.%E2%80%9D+>
They manage the huge financial houses and banks such as Goldman Sachs. They
profit from endless war. They orchestrate the fraud on Wall Street. They
destroy the ecosystem on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. They are
elected to office. They are empty shells of human beings who stripped of
their power and wealth are banal and pathetic. They are not sadists. They
do not delight in cruelty. They are cogs in the machinery of corporate
power.
These technocrats are numb to the most basic of human emotions and devoid
of empathy beyond their own tiny inner circle. Michigan state officials,
for example, provided bottled water to their employees in Flint for nearly
a year while city residents drank the contaminated water, and authorities
spent $440,000 to pipe clean water to the local GM plant after factory
officials complained <http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/30/michael-moore-flint/>
that the Flint water was corroding their car parts. That mediocre human
beings make such systems function is what makes them dangerous.
The long refusal to make public the poisoning of the children of Flint, who
face the prospect of stunted growth, neurological, speech and hearing
impairment, reproductive problems and kidney damage, mirrors the
slow-motion poisoning and exploitation of the planet by other corporate
technocrats. These are not people we want to entrust with our future.
Theodor Adorno warned in his essay “Education After Auschwitz” that if we
did not create an educational system that taught us to think morally and
trained us how to make moral choices, another Auschwitz would appear on the
horizon. Schools must teach more than vocational skills; they must teach
values. They must, as Adorno wrote, teach citizens about “the societal play
of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.” And they
must do this “without fear of offending any authorities.”
We live in an age that has eradicated social and cultural consciousness and
left us in a rootless, ahistorical, emotionally driven void. Whole
populations in our poorest communities are poisoned
<http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-exide-cleanup-20150817-story.html>
or, in countries such as Iraq, murdered en masse. But we have no context
for measuring human actions and human evil. We find our collective identity
in childish nationalist cant and patriotic propaganda that bombards the
airwaves, not in the cold reality of our callousness and ruthlessness. We
do not know who we are.
“People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make
themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves as
self-determined beings,”Adorno writes about the technocrat. “With this
comes the willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass.”
“The manipulative character—as anyone can confirm in the sources available
about those Nazi leaders—is distinguished by a rage for organization, by
the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain
lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism,” Adorno goes on to say in his
1966 essay. “At any cost he wants to conduct supposed, even if delusional,
*Realpolitik.* He does not for one second think or wish that the world were
any different than it is, he is obsessed by the desire of doing things [*Dinge
zut un*], indifferent to the content of such action. He makes a cult of
action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the
advertising image of the active person. If my observations do not deceive
me and if several sociological investigations permit generalization, then
this type has become much more prevalent today than one would think.”
Humanity as an idea, as the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has pointed out,
is itself mortal. It can be extinguished along with millions of human
beings. “Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory,” Finkielkraut
reminds us. “It is the companion that dogs our every step.”
“Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well
be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost,
it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral
existence,” writes Omer Bartov in “Mirrors of Destruction.” “This may be
one reason, along with the realization that mass murder has continued
unabated since 1945, that such men as [Tadeusz] Borowski, [Jean] Améry,
Paul Celan, and [Primo] Levi finally decided to put an end to their own
lives.”
We have turned our universities into temples dedicated to corporate
vocational training. Most graduates of Princeton or Harvard have no more
ability to question the operating systems of the corporate state than an
inner-city boy or girl who is taught basic functional literacy only so he
or she can stock shelves or sell fast food. We all have our place in the
great machine of corporate self-immolation. We all are drones. The
technical skills vary from intricate and complex to rudimentary. But the
commonality is that we lack the capacity to measure our actions against the
ideas, outrages and injustices of the past. We have ceased to be moral
beings. The devil in Goethe’s “Faust” grasps that the element most
essential to the perpetration of evil is the obliteration of memory.
*Now it is over. What meaning can one see?* * It is as if it had not come
to be.* * And yet it circulates as if it were.* * I should prefer—Eternal
Emptiness.*
We do not possess the intellectual skills—and this is by design—that permit
us to question power, to see ourselves as part of a long human continuum.
We have forgotten, or never been taught, that each individual must be seen
as an ultimate end if we are to retain any human decency and hope. Once we
depersonalize others, once we forget who we are and where we came from, we
make evil possible. “Act so that humanity, both in your own person and that
of others, be used as an end in itself, and never as a mere means,”
Immanuel Kant wrote. If we cannot think morally, if we live devoid of
empathy, if our advancement comes at the expense of the other, if we lose
touch with the wisdom of the past, we cannot rebel. And if we do not rebel
we will sustain a system that will ultimately slay us.
© 2015 TruthDig
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