Money, Money, Money

Maher is right on. All of the major issues in this country can be linked to capitalism and greed. Health Care, jails, war–these things should not, under any circumstance, be run for-profit.

When I worked at a medical clinic, it made me uncomfortable to be talking about vaccines and health in terms of bottom line and profit. It just seemed morally wrong to me. There must be a way to give good health care without the worry of money. There is a good way–many other countries use this way! I am sad to say, but I don’t know if we will ever step out of our individualist, capitalist, greedy ways.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

By Bill Maher

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are.

Naomie Klein on Rachel Maddow

I love Naomi Klein. I saw her speak about her book, “The Shock Doctrine,” in New Orleans. Now here she is speaking about the bailouts:

Bill Maher interviews Elizabeth Warren

Milton Friedman’s economic theories, which have been ruling for the past forty years, are falling apart before our eyes. This model is one of extreme capitalism, upheld as scientific theory. However, the fact is money is not scientific, and the way that money affects people cannot be viewed as such. If we want to progress as a society and survive this turbulent time, we must let go of Friedman’s outdated model and establish one which takes into account the people.
Below is a great video clip from Real Time with Bill Maher. He interviews Elizabeth Warren about the bailouts and the future of our country.

Connection in the Flat World

I find it interesting that in this new era of technology, some argue that we seem to be far more “disconnected” then ever before. Texting has replaced phone calls, the computer screen has replaced faces of real life people. But perhaps this assumption is incorrect. Friedman points out that in the flat world, we are more interconnected to more people than ever before. We have to be to survive in the global marketplace:

“Think about the whole mind-set of bin Ladenism. It is to ‘purge’ Saudi Arabia of all foreigners and foreign influences. That is exactly the opposite of glocalizing and collaborating. Tribal culture and thinking still dominate in many Arab countries, and the tribal mind-set is also anathema to collaboration. What is the motto of the tribalist? ‘Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider.’ And what is the motto of the globalists, those who build collaborative supply chains? “Me and my brother and my cousin, three friends from childhood, four people in Australia, two in Beijing, six in Bangalore, three from Germany, and four people we’ve met only over the Internet all make up a single global supply chain.’ In the flat world, the division of labor is steadily becoming more and more complex, with a lot more people interacting with a lot of other people they don’t know and may never meet. If you want to have a modern complex division of labor, you have to be able to put more trust in strangers.

In the Arab-Muslim world, argues David Landes, certain cultural attitudes have in many ways become a barrier to development, particularly the tendency to still treat women as a source of danger or pollution to be cut off from the public space and denied entry into economic activities. When a culture believes that, it loses a large portion of potential productivity of the society. A system that privileges the men from birth on, Landes also argues, simply because they are male, and gives them power over their sisters and other female members of society, is bad for the men. It builds in them a sense of entitlement that discourages what it takes to improve, to advance, and to achieve. This sort of discrimination, he notes, is not something limited to the Arab Middle East, of course. Indeed, strains of it are found in different degrees all around the world, even in so-called advanced industrial societies.”

It seems that in the flat world, we need to be even more embracing and open to gender and ethnicity than ever before.

Beggar Robot

Food, Inc.

Swine Flu?

I am watching Janet Napolitano on CNN news, and on the bottom of the screen it reads:

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY DECLARED

20 swine flu cases in the U.S.

You have got to be kidding me. “Public Health Emergency?!?!”

1260 people die a day from heart attacks!!

115 people die a day from car accidents!!

45 people are murdered every day!!

….and twenty cases of a curable flu is considered a public health emergency?!?

This is exactly why I don’t watch television anymore. Our government and media are RIDICULOUS.

The Future of Education in the Flat World

I have been reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century and it has got me thinking a lot about the future of education.

The main thesis of Friedman’s book is that times have changed, are changing, and will continue to change drastically. We are living in a “flat” world where technology and communication has dramatically changed the way we live our lives. We live in a world where we can outsource work to India to save our company money, which consequences in a percentage of lower-end jobs being cut from the work field. Friedman argues that in this flat world, to be employable we must become “untouchables.” He explains:

“The way I like to think about this for our society as a whole is that every person should figure out how to make himself or herself into an untouchable. That’s right. When the world goes flat, the caste system gets turned upside down. In India untouchables may be the lowest social class, but in a flat world everyone should want to be an untouchable. Untouchables, in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced.“

Friedman places these “untouchables” into four categories: special (Such as famous Hollywood stars or big namers like Bill Gates); specialized (This includes knowledge workers-lawyers, brain-surgeons, software engineers); anchored (Jobs which must be done in a specific place-waitresses, nurses, electricians); and lastly, really adaptable (Employees who constantly are learning and improving upon their skills to become more of an expert and less mediocre). In this new flat world, mediocrity is the kiss of death.

Now that so many of the lower paid and low-skilled jobs have vanished in America due to outsourcing, the bar has been significantly raised for Americans seeking work. Friedman argues that in this new flat world, higher education is not an option anymore. A college degree is needed now because jobs require a much higher level of skill than they did before we entered the twenty-first century. He suggests that all citizens should be offered at least two years of a college education in order to level the playing field. If we do not make college available to all (like we once did with mandating the high school years of education), then only the privileged and wealthy will get the education needed for the well-paying jobs of the future. If the level of education needed to become employed has been upped, so must the mandatory schooling of the American people.

Friedman has made me think about education in a very different light. I once thought that not all people were “college people,” and not all people should go to college. This was based on my experience with many college freshmen who seemed to be at university because it delayed their adulthood for another four years, or because their parents made them, or because it was expected of them. Now I see that college must be the end goal for all high school students. If these students want to compete in the global economy and someday land a good job and live a comfortable life, they have no choice but to go to college. But this leads us to a terrible conundrum-how do the underprivileged and poor make it to this step? And how do we make those who do make it to college see how important their higher education is for their future?

Getting a college degree is already becoming a norm in our society, and maybe this is not such a bad thing. We are living longer, and our careers are lasting longer than ever before. Higher education leads to longer and happier lives, and is a direct deterrent to crime (and in a country where 1 in 10 US citizens are imprisoned, perhaps more education is really what we need). But we need support-from our government-to make it possible for all to attend college. And professors and teachers need to work to illuminate the importance of their subject matter. Why is what you are teaching important in the 21^st century? Are you teaching your students the skills they will need to survive in the global economy and in the flat world?

And this leads me to the subject of technology and the use of it. Technology must not be the enemy inside the classroom. Technology is the future, it is the now, and it will make today’s students able to compete for jobs and survive in the uncertain job field of the future.

The Third Generation

“There is something about post-World War II America that reminds me of the classic wealthy family that by the third generation starts to squander its wealth. The members of the first generation are nose-to-the-grindstone innovators; the second generation holds it all together; then their kids come along and get fat, dumb, lazy and slowly squander it all. I know that is both overly harsh and a gross generalization, but there is, nevertheless, some truth in it. American society started to coast in the 1990s, when our third postwar generation came of age. The dot-com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work. All it took was an MBA and a quick IPO, or one NBA contract, and you were set for life. But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and Eastern Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it. Lucky for us, we were the only economy standing after World War II, and we had no serious competition for forty years. That gave us a huge head of steam but also a huge sense of entitlement and complacency–not to mention a certain tendency in recent years to extol consumption over hard work, investment, and long-term thinking. When we got hit with 9/11, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice, to address some of its pressing fiscal, energy, science, and education shortfalls–all the things that we had let slide. But our president did not summon us to sacrifice. He summoned us to go shopping.”

– Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

The Century of the Self

“The twentieth century was one of breathless, spectacular, relentless innovation. But we can forget about the horseless carriage, the radio, the polio vaccine, the wireless telephone and the PlayStation. The true triumph of the century was the invention of a whole new way of being–a new imperative of the self.

So, go ahead and express yourself. Be true to yourself. Enjoy yourself. Treat yourself. Find yourself. Spoil yourself. Distinguish yourself. Love yourself. Get some self-esteem. Some self-worth. A positive self-image. Achieve self-awareness. And self-sufficiency. Do some self-improvement. Self-actualization. Self-help.

Get out there, into the big glittering universe of the self. Measure it out in Me time and MySpace. Welcome to individuality. Population: You.”

– Adbusters: 79

The great sickness of our time is the solidification of the ego. We are a nation of self-perceived self-contained individuals. We are wrapped up in cardboard boxes, an army of Barbie dolls and GI Joes, marching single file while fearfully stealing glances at one another through the cellophane windshield.

Does a helping hand absent of financial gain or notoriety exist? Our nation’s ideology has always been along the lines of self-reliance-the new city on the hill, built by the hands of hardworking autonomous people. Like Stephen Colbert has said, to overcome adversity one must pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Not working? Then get longer bootstraps!

As globalism has become all pervasive, Americans are relying less on themselves more and more. We have traded in our blue collar factory jobs for comfortable air-conditioned service jobs, of which would not exist if countries like China and Mexico were not producing products and food for us. This myth of independence and “the self” is cracking, and when it falls to ruins all will be lost. When the bottom falls out, how will a nation who has forgotten the fundamentals of life-love, kindness, compassion, community-be able to rebuild?

This culture is self consuming; like the oroborus, we are consuming our own tails.