Economic Aspects of "Love"

[Hammer of Los]

..

It is difficult to impossible to keep your children protected from the baleful effects of our societies' confusion, ignorance, and its elevation of selfishness, vanity and materialism.

It is up to the parents to provide the necessary counterbalance. Self assurance, the fluidity of roles, the necessity of selfless service, the importance of equality and the imperative of discovering the meaning of their lives.

BALANCE is the KEY.

Well, one of them.

I have a whole bunch of them jangling around in my pockets.

..

[American Dream]

..

It is difficult to impossible to keep your children protected from the baleful effects of our societies' confusion, ignorance, and its elevation of selfishness, vanity and materialism.

It is up to the parents to provide the necessary counterbalance. Self assurance, the fluidity of roles, the necessity of selfless service, the importance of equality and the imperative of discovering the meaning of their lives.

BALANCE is the KEY.

Well, one of them.

I have a whole bunch of them jangling around in my pockets.

..

Here's a couple of books that relate to this topic:

My Mother Wears Combat Boots -- kick-ass punk-parenting book




[The best pre-natal advice I ever got was, "Pick one book, any book, and only one book." They all get you there, but they take different, and often mutually exclusive paths. I cheated -- I read several -- and of the lot, the best was My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us by Jessica Mills (horn player in several punk bands such as Less Than Jake, and columnist for MAXIMUMROCKNROLL). Mills, a touring punk musician, silversmith, anarchist and pacifist, wrote the book based on her experiences as a punk parent, trying to raise a baby without "gender-coding," punishment, or authoritarianism, in a world that is hardly cooperative to such goals.

Mills is a great writer -- of all the baby-books I've read, only COMBAT BOOTS deserves the adjective "compelling" -- and while I don't agree with 100 percent (or even 85 percent!) of her parenting ideas, I found them provocative, well-informed, and, above all, humane. Mills has high ideals, but she freely acknowledges that her parenting often falls short of her objectives -- her kid ends up watching Disney cartoons, pitching tantrums, and wanting to wear frilly pink dresses. It's this human fallibility that really makes the book -- Mills's insistence that we're all human and parents can, will and should make mistakes. Mills's book is as much about how to cope with your own challenges as it is about coping with your kids'.

I was especially taken by Mills's descriptions of her boyfriend's struggles to co-parent without either smothering or allowing the easy gendered roles to take over. There's a great guest-written chapter about punk-fathering, and a really heartwarming interview with the bright-as-anything 15-years-old daughter of a couple of punk parents who pioneered taking kids to shows, protests, and on tour.

COMBAT BOOTS goes from prenatal to four, and it's just the thing for your different friends who are already being buried under heaps of What to Expect When You're Expecting or worse, Nestle- or P&G-published "parenting magazines" that are just thinly disguised pitches to get you to buy a ton of crap you and your kid don't need.

My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us

"Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood features bestselling writers, punk-rock stars, artists, political thinkers, and regular guys tackling all the topics conventional fathering guides won't touch: the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience; the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers; our fraught relationships with Star Wars and Star Trek; the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers; the emotions of sperm donation; and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Contributors include Steve Almond, Jeff Chang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cory Doctorow, Ian MacKaye, Raj Patel, and many other dads from all walks of life."

[American Dream]

NSFW

Ideal Women

France, 2009, 2 min 36
Dir. Elena Rossini

An experimental short commissioned by Arte Web & the Louvre Museum for their “4 Semaines” project. Ideal Women juxtaposes the beauty ideals of classical art and those of contemporary mass media.

[American Dream]

http://www.science20.com/news_releases/ ... ween_girls

The Profit Motive Behind The Sexualization Of 'Tween Girls

Apr 27 2008


At Abercrombie & Fitch, little girls were sold thong underwear tagged with the phrases "eye candy" and "wink wink." In Britain, preschoolers could learn to strip with their very own Peekaboo Pole-Dancing Kits, complete with kiddie garter belts and play money. And 'tween readers of the magazine Seventeen discovered "405 ways to look hot" like Paris Hilton.

This kind of sexualization of 'tween girls - defined as those between the ages of 8 and 12 - in pop culture and advertising is a growing problem fueled by marketers' efforts to create cradle-to-grave consumers, a University of Iowa journalism professor argues in her new book.

"A lot of very sexual products are being marketed to very young kids," said Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect. "I'm criticizing the unhealthy and damaging representations of girls' sexuality, and how the media present girls' sexuality in a way that's tied to their profit motives. The body ideals presented in the media are virtually impossible to attain, but girls don't always realize that, and they'll buy an awful lot of products to try to achieve those bodies. There's endless consumerism built around that."

Durham advocates healthy and progressive concepts of girls' sexuality, but criticizes the media for its sexual representations. Studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation and other research organizations show that sexual content aimed at children has increased steadily since the 1990s, Durham said. Times were prosperous, Britney Spears emerged as the sexy schoolgirl on MTV, and 'tweens had plenty of disposable income -- a perfect alignment for marketers trying to expand into a new demographic. By 2007, 8- to 12 year-olds' consumer spending was $170 billion worldwide, according to the market research firm Euromonitor.

The book, published this month by Overlook Press, is the culmination of 13 years of research by Durham, an associate professor in the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Durham immersed herself in magazines, movies, TV shows, catalogs and Web sites aimed at young girls, from Cosmo Girl to "Hannah Montana." She went to junior high schools to talk with girls about how the messages affected them.

In the book, Durham identifies five myths of sexuality and provides advice and resources for caring adults who want to discuss the issue with young girls.

The myths are:

-- If you've got it, flaunt it. Bare a "Barbie body" as often as you can. But don't celebrate or enjoy any other body type. "It's really excluding a lot of girls from enjoying and recognizing pleasure in their own bodies," Durham said.

-- Anatomy of a sex goddess. "Media reinforce a ridiculous ideal of being both extremely thin and voluptuous -- a body not found in nature," Durham said. "You have to go through borderline starvation and plastic surgery to get it."

-- Pretty babies. Representations of sexual girls are getting younger and younger. Many of the images presented as the most sexually desirable are images of girls as young as 11 or 12. "It's problematic in many ways: It encourages sexualization of girls too young to make good decisions about sex. It legitimizes the idea that young girls should be looked at as sexual partners. And, presenting pre-pubescent bodies as the sexual ideal pressures grown women to achieve the body of a child who hasn't even matured yet," Durham said.

-- Sexual violence is hot. Media aimed at children -- like PG-13 "slasher" movies -- convey the message that violence is sexy or that sex should be violent.

-- Girls don't choose boys; boys choose girls -- and only hot girls. Women and girls are supposed to focus on pleasing men. But little emphasis is placed on women taking pleasure in their own sexuality or bodies, or on guys striving to please gals, Durham said. "It's a very one-way construction of sex."

"The book definitely isn't anti-sex," Durham said. "It starts with the recognition that girls are sexual -- everybody's sexual -- but that girls deserve good information that will help them make good decisions. We have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, and a study by the Centers for Disease Control just reported that 1 in 4 teen girls in the U.S. has an STD. Clearly we're not giving them the kind of information they need to take care of themselves sexually and transition to adulthood in safe ways."

Durham encourages parents, teachers and counselors to jump-start conversations about sexualization of young girls in the media. Ask girls to look through a teen magazine and discuss the messages. How seriously do they take them? Do they understand the profit motives, or how images can be doctored to perfection?

Other tips include: complimenting girls on more than just their appearance to emphasize that they are multidimensional; encouraging activism for causes like ending sex trafficking; and assisting girls in creating their own media -- Web sites, blogs or 'zines -- that are less focused on sex and appearance.

"There's this hesitance to talk about these issues, especially before kids reach adolescence," Durham said. "But often, when parents finally do bring it up, it's too late. Kids have already had their sexual understanding shaped by media. We need to be having a lot of open discussions about the sexualization of childhood and what constitutes healthy sexuality. I don't think we should neglect our responsibility as adults and leave them to navigate this terrain on their own."

[American Dream]

Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine

[American Dream]

Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you'll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.

The point isn't that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.

The result is a spectacular kind of bubble-and-bust.

Excerpted from:A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100, by Venkatesh Rao.

[American Dream]

http://www.geneticsandsociety.rsvp1.com ... &mgf=1

Life, Monetized

Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself — And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, by Harriet A. Washington

by Osagie K. Obasagie, The American Prospect
November 17th, 2011


In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a New York Times bestseller about a poor black woman in the late stages of cancer in 1950s Baltimore whose doctor removed cervical tissue from her without her knowledge. By remaining viable outside of Lacks’s body, the cells became “immortal” and thus quite valuable; scientists using them have been able to pursue research that would have been unimaginable beforehand, leading to achievements such as the polio vaccine and advances against cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Skloot’s book captivated readers by revealing the story of exploitation behind the development of what have become known as “HeLa cells.” Similar episodes of scientific advancement on the backs of vulnerable subjects have been exposed before, from J. Marion Sims’s gruesome mid-19th-century experiments on black slaves that laid the groundwork for the modern field of gynecology to recently uncovered evidence that in the 1940s, U.S. researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan patients, prisoners, and soldiers with syphilis to test new medications. Yet it still can be hard to believe that any scientist could be involved in such ethically vacuous behavior as taking and distributing unsuspecting patients’ tissues without consent, acknowledgment, or compensation.

If there is a shortcoming in Skloot’s book, it’s that the singular focus on the HeLa cells’ history gives the impression that such biomedical opportunism is a relic of a bygone era. The latest book by science journalist Harriet A. Washington, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a reminder to think carefully about such intuitions.

Washington’s central thesis is that in the 1980s, Congress and the courts laid the foundation for a “medical-industrial complex,” which, Washington argues, benefits research industries at the expense of both consumers and human research subjects. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to partner with private companies by selling and licensing the intellectual-property rights of research findings supported by federal funds. Around the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that living organisms altered or isolated by researchers are patentable.

These developments brought together the university and corporation in a manner that transformed research culture as well as its aims. Washington notes that scientists in the pre-Bayh-Dole era were surely motivated by ambitions outside of healing individuals (fame, professional recognition), but commercial success and financial rewards were not as commonly sought.

Jonas Salk, for example, was in many ways the model of pursuing science in the public interest. After developing the polio vaccine in the 1950s, Salk turned down the chance to profit from its commercialization. When journalist Edward R. Murrow asked who owned the patent, Salk famously replied, “The American people, I guess. Could you patent the sun?” Washington’s book exposes the shifting social and legal dynamics that now make Salk’s sentiment seem remarkably quaint.

Much of Deadly Monopolies explores contentious issues in modern biomedical research that have been aggravated by the field’s commercial emphasis. For example, patients’ ownership of and control over their own human tissues throughout the research endeavor have not improved as much as one might think, with law and research norms deferring substantially to scientists and research entities.

Indeed, if what happened to Henrietta Lacks occurred today, it would be largely unremarkable; researchers routinely use patient specimens in a manner not wholly unlike the development of HeLa cell lines.

Improvements have occurred on the front end in terms of removing personal identifying information from biological samples and including boilerplate informed-consent documents (whose growing length and complexity raise significant questions about whether such consent is meaningful). But the overall dynamic of patients’ diminished rights regarding the use of their own body tissues continues largely undisturbed. Washington reminds us of the story of John Moore, whose tissues were surreptitiously taken by his doctor during a splenectomy, along with other biological materials in subsequent follow-up visits, and developed into a profitable cell line. In 1990, the California Supreme Court declared that Moore had no property interest in this line, despite noting the physician’s failure to obtain consent and intentionally deceiving Moore about his financial stake in these biological materials.

Washington demonstrates how such issues are part of a broader labyrinth of policies and practices that benefit private interests at the public’s expense. For example, she critiques the pharmaceutical industry’s claim that the cost to develop a new drug exceeds $800 million—a figure used to justify drugs’ high cost—where other evidence disputing the creative accounting used to come to this astonishing number suggests that the real cost may range between $71 million and $150 million. Then there is the burgeoning practice of outsourcing clinical trials to cheaper sites across the globe to test new drugs, whereby “the dearth of health care in much of the developing world leaves its people vulnerable to experimental exploitation and abuse.” Washington also discusses biocolonialism: “Researchers and pharmaceutical companies have designs on the diverse biological riches of poor countries because much of the biodiversity of the West has vanished,” she writes, giving rise to Western companies asserting intellectual-property claims over medicines used by indigenous communities for hundreds of years.

Deadly Monopolies also addresses growing efforts to patent human genes. Roughly 20 percent of the human genome has been patented, a situation that according to Washington can impede scientific innovation and clinical care by granting proprietary interest to parties who can dictate how certain diseases are researched and diagnosed. Washington briefly points to the experiences of Genae Girard. After being diagnosed with breast cancer and receiving test results showing that she has a genetic predisposition for ovarian cancer, Girard sought a second test to help her decide whether she should preemptively remove her ovaries. She was not able to obtain a second independent genetic test because Myriad Genetics, a company based in Utah, had patented the relevant genes, preventing others from offering this service.

What can all of these diverse issues possibly have in common? Washington links them to “the corporate takeover of life itself.” Though she is not the first to raise many of these concerns, Washington offers an overarching framework that enables readers to see connections that are often obscured. The book’s brilliance lies in the compassionately told narratives of individuals whose lives have been affected by the increasing corporate control of scientific research. Rather than simply writing another book about biomedical wrongdoing, Washington with her journalistic approach provides a more humane account of the problems tied to the for-profit nature of today’s research industry. In doing this, Washington accomplishes what has thus far escaped previous authors. She makes the case for a broader political consciousness of science and technology.

This leads to her primary recommendation: repealing the Bayh-Dole Act. If achieved, this proposal could well bring reform that would address many of the concerns expressed in the book. Yet it does raise one question. To what extent was the passage of Bayh-Dole a consequence of an already changing research culture rather than its cause? As Washington describes in her previous book, Medical Apartheid, which documents the long history of medical experimentation on African Americans, abuse and exploitation in medicine predate Bayh-Dole by several decades. The monetary incentives created by Congress may add a unique dimension to this problem, but they are not the only cause.

So, perhaps reform exists in additional remedies beyond those Deadly Monopolies recommends. This is precisely the conversation an important book starts in order to challenge readers to see the world differently so that they connect the disparate dots. Deadly Monopolies is an extraordinary achievement in this and many other regards.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

ENDANGERED SPECIES: LONDON

London, U.K., 12 minutes
Dir. Elena Rossini

Video highlights from the body image conference Endangered Species London.

[American Dream]

Here is more from the same conference:

[American Dream]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/ ... rostitutes

Why men use prostitutes

The reasons why many men pay for sex are revealed in the interviews that make up a major new piece of research

Read the research project's report on men who buy sex (pdf)

Julie Bindel
The Guardian, Thursday 14 January 2010


Seven hundred men were interviewed for the project, which aimed to find out why men buy sex.


'I don't get anything out of sex with prostitutes except for a bad feeling," says Ben. An apparently average, thirtysomething, middle-class man, Ben had taken an extended lunchbreak from his job in advertising to talk about his experiences of buying sex. Shy and slightly nervous, he told me, "I am hoping that talking about it might help me work out why I do it."

I, too, was hoping to understand his motives better. Ben was one of 700 men interviewed for a major international research project seeking to uncover the reality about men who buy sex. The project spanned six countries, and of the 103 customers we spoke to in London – where I was one of the researchers – most were surprisingly keen to discuss their experiences.

The men didn't fall into obvious stereotypes. They were aged between 18 and 70 years old; they were white, black, Asian, eastern European; most were employed and many were educated beyond school level. In the main they were presentable, polite, with average-to-good social skills. Many were husbands and boyfriends; just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.

Research published in 2005 found that the numbers of men who pay for sex had doubled in a decade. The authors attributed this rise to "a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact", yet many of our interviewees told us that they felt intense guilt and shame about paying for sex. "I'm not satisfied in my mind" was how one described his feelings after paying for sex. Another told me that he felt "disappointed – what a waste of money", "lonely still" and "guilty about my relationship with my wife". In fact, many of the men were a mass of contradictions. Despite finding their experiences "unfulfilling, empty, terrible", they continued to visit prostitutes.

I interviewed 12 of the men, and found it a fascinating experience. One told me about his experience of childhood cruelty and neglect and linked this to his inability to form close relationships with anyone, particularly women. Alex admitted sex with ­prostitutes made him feel empty, but he had no idea how to get to know women "through the usual routes". When I asked him about his feelings towards the women he buys he said that on the one hand, he wants prostitutes to get to know and like him and, on the other, he is "not under delusions" that the encounters are anything like a real relationship.

"I want my ideal prostitute not to behave like one," he said, "to role-play to be a pretend girlfriend, a casual date, not business-like or mechanical. To a third person it looks like we're in love."

I felt compassion for Alex. No one had shown him how to form a bond with another human being and he was searching for something that commercial sex was never going to provide.

But another of the interviewees left me feeling concerned. Darren was young, good-looking and bright; I asked him how often he thought the women he paid enjoyed the sex. "I don't want them to get any pleasure," he told me. "I am paying for it and it is her job to give me pleasure. If she enjoys it I would feel cheated." I asked if he felt prostitutes were different to other women. "The fact that they're prepared to do that job where others won't, even when they're skint, means there's some capability inside them that permits them to do it and not be disgusted," he said. He seemed full of a festering, potentially explosive misogyny.

When asked what would end prostitution, one interviewee laughed and said, "Kill all the girls." Paul told me that it would take "all the men to be locked up". But most of them told the researchers that they would be easily deterred if the current laws were implemented. Fines, public exposure, employers being informed, being issued with an Asbo or the risk of a criminal record would stop most of the men from continuing to pay for sex. Discovering the women were trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced would appear not to be so effective. Almost half said they believed that most women in prostitution are victims of pimps ("the pimp does the psychological raping of the woman," explained one). But they still continued to visit them.

An upcoming new law will make it illegal for men to pay for sex with a trafficked or pimped woman – and a punter's ignorance of a woman's circumstances will be no defence. Critics have suggested that this is unfair, that a man can't possibly know whether a woman is being exploited. Our interviews challenged this notion. The men knew, to some extent, about abuse and coercion in prostitution – they weren't operating under the convenient illusion that women enter the trade because they love sex. More than half admitted that they either knew or believed that a majority of women in prostitution were lured, tricked or trafficked.

More than one third said they thought the prostitutes they visited had been trafficked to London from another country, and a small number said they suspected that they had encountered a trafficking victim based on the woman's inability to speak the local language or on how young or vulnerable they appeared. "I could tell she was new to the country," said one man. "To be new in a country and be a prostitute – it can't be a choice . . . She looked troubled."

Another said that he had "seen women with bruises, cuts and eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are". One man suspected that an African woman he had met was trafficked because "she was frightened and nervous. She told me she had been tricked. I had sex with her and she seemed fine with the sex. She asked me to help her, but I said there was little I could do. She might have been lying to me."

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would "need" to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, "Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead." Another put it like this: "A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape." I concluded from this that it's not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it's sometimes men themselves.

Half of the interviewees had bought sex outside of the UK, mostly in Amsterdam, and visiting an area where prostitution is legal or openly advertised had given them a renewed dedication to buying sex when they returned to the UK. Almost half said that they first paid for sex when they were below the age of 21. "Dad took me and my older brother," said David. "He paid. Maybe he wanted to make sure we weren't gay. We went to a brothel. Dad didn't do it, and I don't think he told my mum."

Another man paid for sex during a stag trip to Thailand with eight of his friends. He was disappointed. "It was a Russian girl, it wasn't the escort experience. She didn't want to talk, just lay on the bed and wanted to do the [sex] act only."

Many men seemed to want a real relationship with a woman and were disappointed when this didn't develop: "It's just a sex act, no emotion. Be prepared to accept this or don't go at all. It's not a wife or girlfriend." Others were clear that they paid for sex in order to be able to totally control the encounter, including Bob, who said, "Look, men pay for women because he can have whatever and whoever he wants. Lots of men go to prostitutes so they can do things to them that real women would not put up with."

Although some of the men said they thought the women they bought enjoyed the sex, many others admitted that they thought the women would be feeling "disgusted", "miserable", "dirty" and "scared". Ahmed said he thought the woman might feel "relief that I'm not going to kill her".

Only 6% of the men we spoke to had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. "Deterrents would only work if enforced," said one. "Any negative would make you reconsider. The law's not enforced now, but if any negative thing happened as a consequence it would deter me." Perhaps the new law will make Albert think twice about paying for sex. He told me, "If I'd get in trouble for doing it, I wouldn't do it. In this country, the police are fine with men visiting prostitutes."

Read the research project's report here (pdf)

[American Dream]

Give me neither poverty nor riches,
grant me only my share of bread to eat,
for fear that surrounded by plenty, I should fall away
and say, "Yahweh - who is Yahweh?"
or else in destitution, take to stealing
and profane the name of my God.

-Proverbs 30:8-9



O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

-Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968),
"Paul's Letter to American Christians" 1956



Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of you life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.

-Thich Nhat Hanh



Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.

- Erich Fromm (1900–1980), The Art of Loving, 1957



The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken. We don’t manufacture much. We just burn up ever scarcer petroleum in the ever-expanding suburbs built with mortgage money lent to people who haven’t a clue.

-Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus, 2007



McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don't drive them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles, and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of videology that works through sound bites and film clips.

-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995



The illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement . . . alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes. We have renounced the act of being and plunged ourself into process for its own sake.

-Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967



Under private property ...Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.

-Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Human Requirements and Division of Labour, 1844



Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales. Long-lunch traditions obstruct the development of fast-food franchises and successful fast-food franchises inevitably undermine Mediterranean home-at-noon-for-dinner rituals—whether intentionally or not hardly matters. Highly developed public transportation systems lessen the opportunity for automobile sales and depress steel, rubber, and petroleum production. Agricultural lifestyles (rise at daylight, work all day, to bed at dusk) are inhospitable to television watching. People uninterested in sports buy fewer athletic shoes. Health campaigns hurt tobacco sales. The moral logic of austerity contradicts the economic logic of consumption. Can responsible corporate managers then afford to be anything other than immoral advocates of sybaritism?

-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995



We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.

-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002



The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.

-Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Frederick Engels (1820-1895),
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848



The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

- Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Banalities II,” no. 8,
Internationale Situationiste Paris, Jan 1963



Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

-Cree Indian prophecy




The measure of those excesses [demand for material things] is seen in the forests and in the natural parts of the Earth. And the people who live there, as we do, are the ones who live with the consequence of supplying the raw material for those excesses.

-Guujaaw, leader of the Haida Nation,
quoted by DeNeen L. Brown in
"In Canadian Court, a Native Nation Claims Offshore Rights,"
Washington Post, 26 Mar 2002




The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law.

-Winona LaDuke, speech on "Social Justice & Racism," UC Boulder 28 Sep 1993




In the last seven years, a borderless youth culture has emerged. The uniform is Levi's. The drink is Coke. And they are all hard-wired to the same pop media. Outside the United States this phenomena is seen not only as a product of globalization, but as a new form of American colonization. The world is beginning to look like an American strip mall, complete with KFC, Pizza Hut, and the Golden Arches…The destination of McWorld's economic engineering is a global shopping mall where our identity, our common humanity, and even our spirituality are derived from our consumerism… We are not simply dealing with the issues of consumerism that we contended with in the '70s and '80s. In the 21st century, global marketers have taken an entirely new focus that is much more seductive than anything we have seen before.

-Tom Sine, "Branded for Life," Sojourners Sep/Oct 2000




We Americans think we are pretty good! We want to build a house, we cut down some trees. We want to build a fire, we dig a little coal. But when we run out of all these things, then we will find out just how good we really are.

-Will Rogers (1879-1935),
quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greeenhouse Trap, 1990 *



Tis a gift to be simple
'Tis a gift to be free
'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
It will be in the valley of love and delight

When the true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shall not be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Til by turning, turning we come round right

-Shaker hymn

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/21/ ... niversity/

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Commodifying Education

The Corporatization of the American University

by STEVEN HIGGS


Peter Seybold traces the pernicious influence corporatization has had on the American campus back almost a decade before the Reagan Revolution of 1980, to a memo written by Richmond, Va., attorney Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in late summer 1971.

Powell, who would be nominated for Supreme Court justice by President Richard Nixon just two months later, said American business had to take the offensive to counter the social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s, said Seybold, a sociology professor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). Among the institutions Powell said the business world had to recapture was the American campus.

“Part of this was a cultural and political attack on the university,” Seybold said.

Powell’s clarion call for the eradication of the American Left on campus and throughout society is credited with “inspiring the founding of many conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute,” according to the PBS website on the Supreme Court that republishes the memo.

Titled “Attack of American Free Enterprise System,” the memo listed the university first on Powell’s list of attack sources. “The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians,” he wrote.

In addition to the right-wing think tanks, the memo has inspired to action the former New Left radical David Horowitz, among an army of others. The one-time editor of Ramparts magazine “now is nicely funded by the right wing to do all these things like eradicating the Left from the academy,” Seybold said.

***

Seybold is the former director of the Indiana University division of labor studies, which, by the time he left in 2001, had been decimated by the Right’s campus offensive. Fifteen years after joining what is now the IU Labor Studies Program, the Bloomington resident left and has served since as an associate professor at IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis.

Since joining academia in 1978, Seybold has focused on “political sociology, inequality, sociology of work and the labor movement” and explored the impact money has on higher education since he did a study of the Ford Foundation early in his career.

“In 1984 I was asked to give a talk at a university in Pennsylvania, and I titled the talk ‘Toward a Corporate Service Station,’” the New Jersey native said. “That was sort of the beginnings of my interest in this subject, because even then I saw the influence of money was changing the culture of the university.”

In recent years, Seybold has been increasingly interested in how universities mimic the corporate world and how they are adopting the corporate model for how they run themselves.

“I’m especially concerned about what this means for the culture of the university and just generally the degradation of the environment that faculty, staff, students and administrators work in because of the onslaught of the corporate model,” he said.

***

Quality of scholarship, for example, does not have nearly the importance on hiring in the corporate university that it has historically, Seybold said. “Now most departments, when they hire new professors, they look at how many grants they bring in and their potential to bring in even bigger grants in the future. When I started out in academe, grantsmanship was not a significant factor in hiring decisions.”

The results, he said, are professors who teach as little as possible, who use grants to buy themselves out of teaching and concentrate their research on ideas that potentially can be turned into products.

“I describe this as the commodification of the university,” he said. “And I would say this has effects on all aspects of the culture of the university.”

Among those aspects are the way students are treated, the number of adjuncts used as “basically part-time labor to replace full-time faculty,” the now-franchised bookstores and food service, and the outsourcing of work like campus maintenance, Seybold said.

“You can follow this logic through all the parts of the university and see the way it is being implemented,” he said.

For example, certain subject areas and departments that are worthwhile and should be supported are unable to make money, he said.

“It is fundamentally changing the culture of the university,” he said.

***

The logic extends to what should be the most significant part of the university experience – the classroom – where the corporate model incentivizes bigger classrooms, online education and a movement away from face-to-face teaching, Seybold said.

“Corporations readily provide materials to be incorporated in courses,” he said.

The corporate model also negatively impacts students’ lives, Seybold said. Many have instructors who don’t have offices where they can discuss their work in private. And due to the high costs of education, they take more classes and frequently work multiple jobs, degrading their campus and classroom experiences.

At urban campuses like IUPUI, where up to 75 percent or more of students work, the rising cost of tuition and campus life has spawned a phenomenon called stopping out. “They go to school for a year, leave for a year and try and make some money, and then they come back and take six credits, and they keep working,” he said.

Consequently, students show increasing interest in parts of university study that are directly connected to business, Seybold said. And the debt they accumulate for college also shapes their career options.

“Six months after they get out they have to start paying back that $50,000 or $60,000 loan bill,” he said. “So they aren’t as open to say AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps or working for the labor movement or a community group because they need to make money.”

Another example is the rise of service learning, where students get credit for working in the communities they study in, Seybold said.

“I think it’s service learning basically in support of the status quo,” he said. “We’re not training people to be community organizers or labor organizers. We’re not training people to help ameliorate some of the problems that have been caused by moving toward a more free-market economy, unfettered capitalism.”

If he had to identify one signpost as the tipping point in the corporatization of the American university, Seybold said it would be the decline in public funding of universities.

“Once you do this, once you renege on the commitment of a public university through public tax money, then you set forth this whole marketization and corporatization,” he said.

This means that corporations can in effect almost buy certain programs and that the logic of business will be transferred to the university, he said, so it becomes all about head counts and departments making money.

Indiana University institutionalized corporate logic early on in with responsibility-centered budgeting, which sought to make each school and even departments separate business units that have to support themselves by taxing other departments for their services and things like that, Seybold said.

“Once you buy into this logic, it’s hard to stop,” he said.

***

In the broader social sense, the Right’s attack on university culture reflects the elites’ concerns about the counterculture and the movements of the ’60s and efforts to repudiate them, Seybold said.

“That includes rewriting the ’60s and convincing generations after that that a lot of our problems stem from the ’60s,” he said, “and that the ’60s were not as good as people who lived through it said they were.”

So Seybold and others who hold onto the liberal ideals of university purpose and culture – “Because it is a public university, we should be serving our students” – are looked at basically as dinosaurs, holding onto realities that have been transformed.

Coming from the labor movement and as a sociologist interested in the organization of work, Seybold sees the corporate campus as an attack on the craft of being a professor.

“I consider being a professor a craft occupation,” he said. “And I see my craft being attacked.”

***

Over the past five years or so, Seybold said, he has seen growing awareness across the campus about the influence corporations have on campus life.

“I think there are examples,” he said, citing a successful organizing effort this year by food-service workers at IUPUI as one. “There’s been more activism on the part of organizations like the AAUP (American Association of University Professors). I think there is heightened awareness among graduate students now that their job prospects are very uncertain in this corporate university.”

But the upshot is today’s universities train rather than educate, Seybold said, and the repercussions negatively impact all aspects of university life.

“I describe it as a degradation of the culture of the university,” he said. “It affects students, the staff, the faculty and the administration when the institution increasingly serves as a handmaiden to corporations.”

[American Dream]

Body image activist Sharon Haywood (co-editor of Adios Barbie) talks about the beauty myth in Argentina.

For more information about this presentation, read: www.theillusionists.org/?p=1508

[American Dream]