By Ben Protess, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on August 4, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.
Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo. Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years -- equality, democracy, and social rights.
Proponents of neoliberalism are indifferent to this history and dismiss the notion that "another world is possible" that could alleviate grinding misery and poverty around the world. But in opposition to the contemporary individualistic system of capitalism, evidence of a new global movement dedicated to social justice and human rights has sprung from the ashes of the past. Just in the past decade, we have witnessed the expansion of worker insurgencies, peasant and indigenous uprisings, ecological protests, and democracy movements.
Historians frequently view revolutions as extraordinary and unanticipated interruptions of state social regulation of everyday life.
This isn't the case.
In my work as editor of a new encyclopedia of revolution and protest, I've reviewed 500 years' worth of revolutionary actions. And the surprising pattern I've found is the regularity of volatile and explosive conflicts, commonly revealed as waves of protest from within civil society to confront persistent inequality and oppression. While historians cannot forecast the time and place of revolutions, the past has a sustained, if disjointed, record of popular resistance to injustice.
History shows that revolutions must have political movement and a socially compelling goal, with strategic and charismatic leadership that inspires majorities to challenge a perception of fundamental injustice and inequality. A necessary feature is the development of a political ideology rooted in a narrative that legitimates mass collective action, which is indispensable to forcing dominant groups to address social grievances -- or to overturning those dominant groups altogether.
Unresponsive rulers risk possible overthrow of their governments. For example, the vision and struggle of a multiracial South Africa was a guiding principle that put an end to the entrenched white-dominated apartheid system.
A second essential element is what Italian philosopher Antonio Negri calls constituent power, the expression of the popular will for democracy -- a common theme in nearly all revolutions -- through what he calls the multitude.
Mr. Negri counterpoises the concepts of constituent power and constituted power to demonstrate the oppositional forces in society. Thus, following the American Revolution, the ruling elite created a second Constitution establishing a national government with fewer democratic safeguards.
In response to challenges from popular movements, modern states have concentrated power in constitutions and centralized authority structures to suppress mass demands for democracy and equality. Few democratic revolutionary movements have gained popular power as new states almost always consolidate control, often resorting to repression of the masses that initially brought them to power. Still, virtually all revolutions during the past 500 years have created enduring consequences that, in evolving form, remain forces for justice to this day.
Revolutionary movements must recognize the durability and overwhelming inertia of state power. They must acknowledge that they are highly unlikely to seize power from unjust regimes, even when their objectives have moral force and are deeply popular among the masses. And yet, history is full of exceptions to this rule, so we must conclude that while revolutionary transformation is improbable, it is always a possibility.
At a lecture to Young Socialists in Zurich just one month before the February 1917 Revolution, Vladimir Lenin said: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution." Less than a year later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained power over the Soviet state with the initial support of workers, peasants, and most of the military.
In the last century, the opponents of the failed bureaucratic statism in the Soviet sphere and free-market capitalism in the West have struggled to find a discourse of resistance. While democratic opponents defeated Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, opponents of free-market capitalism have yet to gain traction, in part due to the general consensus among global rulers in defense of neoliberalism. As such, revolutionary movements have had to redefine themselves outside territorial borders as powerful tools of the global collective to petition for human rights and social justice for all.
People are inherently cautious and take extraordinary action only when they have little to lose and something to gain. The current economic crisis has pushed more people into poverty and despair than at any time since the early 20th century, to the point where alternatives to the current system can be considered.
Today, throughout the world, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, and students are galvanized into movements that are challenging state power rooted in global norms of neoliberalism. New movements have gained greater traction with the legitimacy and strength of a global collective behind them, rather than as isolated protests. The oppressed are framing new narratives of liberation to contest power on a state and international level: whether peasants in Latin America or India struggling for land reform; indigenous peoples mobilizing resistance for official recognition of their rights; or workers and students throughout the world waging unauthorized strikes and sit-ins, and taking to the streets in support of democracy and equality.
© 2009 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141720/
Friday, August 7, 2009
Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings
By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), a book about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:
"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.
"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."
My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.
I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.
For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.
The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.
For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.
Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.
DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"
"I am the Son of God."
"Grab a cross on the way out."
On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...
Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.
The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.
With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.
At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.
Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."
And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.
High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.
"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.
During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.
Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America!
For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.
You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.
Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...
Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.
Rent a Life, Inc.
(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.
Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.
Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.
Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.
The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"
Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.
The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.
The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.
Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).
Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"
Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?
How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?
"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."
I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.
Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.
After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.
Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.
Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."
Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.
Joe Bageant is author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), a book about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/
14 Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed
By David Dvorkin, Dvorkin.com
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
The great ebb and flow of the marketplace has recently forced me to try to convince myself of the benefits of being unemployed.
Some of those benefits are obvious, and I could have anticipated them even before a supervisor tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to talk to me about something. ("Do you have a minute?" he asked. What would have happened if I'd said no, that I was too busy?)
Not Having to Wake up to the Alarm Clock
That's an obvious one. There was a character in the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip of many years ago who retired but would still get up at the crack of dawn and go down to the mill every morning just so he could thumb his nose at the place as the get-to-work whistle blew. That was an amusing strip, and I saved it for years. But I wouldn't want to take the bus downtown every weekday just to emulate that cartoon character, even if my old workplace had a whistle and even if I had retired voluntarily. So I've turned off the alarm.
(Oh, you ask, but what if you oversleep and waste away the hours you should be spending looking for another job? That hasn't been a problem. The constant sense of dread wakes me up in plenty of time – usually well before the crack of dawn.)
Getting Rid of Telemarketers and Door-to-Door Salesmen
Back in the glorious paycheck days, I used to think about telling them I'd just lost my job. Actually, sometimes I really did tell them that, because I'm a cowardly kinda guy and it's easier to fib than to be firm. Now I don't have to fib. When I tell them I'm unemployed, they hang up or back away quickly, terrified of infection by the job-loss virus. And they seem to have crossed me off those secret lists they hand around. It's true that some of one's friends back away with the same look of fear in their eyes, but I'm sure that's unconscious.
I'm hoping to get taken off the snail-mail solicitation lists, too. From time to time, for example, I get invited to contribute to the Republican National Committee. Yeah, sure. Try me again after I've developed Alzheimer's. Throwing solicitations of that sort away was always easy. But it was hard and induced considerable guilt to throw away unanswered solicitations from organizations I support philosophically. Sometimes you're just strapped for cash, you know? Even with a regular paycheck coming in. I'd feel terrible guilt as I tore up the good-guy solicitations and dropped them in the trash, and I'd tell myself that at least if I lost my job, I'd have an acceptable excuse and wouldn't feel guilty. And I was right! Actually, I still feel guilty, but I tell myself that I'll resume making contributions to those worthy outfits as soon as I have a regular paycheck again.
When.
If.
But here are some benefits of being unemployed that I did not anticipate.
Spousal Closeness
My wife and I were close before, but we've been drawn even closer by a sense of common striving and the extra time we're spending together. A lot of that extra time is spent worrying together, fretting together, hyperventilating together – but together!
Long-Range Planning
I used to obsess over long-range planning. Not that I did any long-range planning; I just obsessed over not doing it. And I used to spend too much time mulling over – even obsessing over – the past. Or at least obsessing over the fact that I was mulling over it so much. You should live in the present, I would tell myself. Now I'm doing just that. The present is intensely with me. I'm obsessing over it.
Scamsters
They've always been around, and they're an amoral, revolting bunch. I'm no kid, I'm no naif, I know all of that.
Nonetheless, I've been surprised at just what low reptiles some of them are. There are companies that post fake job ads so that, brimming with hope and desperation, you'll send them your resume. Then they call you, ask you to come to their office for an interview. Of course you go, dressed in your best interview clothes. The office is sumptuous. The people are well dressed. The pitch is slick. Give us lots of money, and we'll show you how to find the high-paying hidden jobs, the ones that are never advertised, the positions only we know about.
If you do fall for that pitch, you'll only spend money you can't afford to spend, you'll almost certainly never get a job through them, and they, the piles of excrement in human shape, are the only ones who will benefit. How do you think they can afford those offices?
These people are rotten enough to be members of George W. Bush's cabinet. Encountering them has taught me something about the depths of human nature. I guess that qualifies as a benefit of being unemployed.
My Beard
It's still growing!
Well, of course it is, you say. Let me explain that, on an emotional, irrational level, I still feel relieved every morning when I realize that I still need to shave.
It's still growing! Despite the way I frequently feel, I haven't really been unmanned.
Clutter
Our house was so cluttered!
We had dangerously outdated canned foods in kitchen cabinets. It just sat there taking up space and making the house look smaller, the way clutter does. Now we're coming up with inventive ways of combining stuff that we would once never have thought combinable. Why, back then we might even have thrown it out. (Eventually.)
We've rediscovered old hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and bars of soap that we stashed away and forgot about long ago. (Golly, where did those come from?) Now we're using those up instead of actually paying for bars of soap or bottles of shampoo.
And how about all those CDs that we never have liked and always wondered what possessed us to buy, let alone to keep? Well, that's what the used-CD store is for! (Oops. They've gone out of business.)
We have clothes we know we'll never wear again and should have gotten rid of long ago. How fortunate that we didn't! Why, you can get money for that stuff at a thrift store! A tiny amount that we might once have thought not worth bothering with, but our standards have changed. Round 'em up, move 'em out, Rawhide!
Now we're gaining space in the cabinets and in the closets and in the bookcases and even in the refrigerator. Some day, that space could come in handy. Some day, when we can afford to buy things again.
We actually have two refrigerators in our kitchen, a big one and a small one. (The reasons are historical and trivial.) Now we've reached the point where we could easily get by with just the big one. Soon, we'll be able to manage with just the small one. When we reach that point, perhaps we'll sell the big one, assuming anyone would be so foolish as to buy it. (It wasn't a great refrigerator even when it was new.) That will give us extra space in the kitchen, but more to the point, it will make it easier to move to smaller quarters, if it comes to that. Such as under a highway viaduct. Do they have power outlets there? I suppose not. It's not something I used to think about all that often.
The kitchen cabinets are built in, so we'll have to leave those behind.
Snobbery
We have been cured of the sin of snobbery.
It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. Oh, sure, sometimes we'd buy the house brands out of some sort of general moral conviction that we ought to save money. And then we'd gradually drift back to the name brands because . . . well, we just did. But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! And the house-brand cans stack better! And the labels are spiffier! Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.
Power. Shower.
Are you a fan of the television show Smallville? We sure are.
Although there are a few details about the show that keep bothering me.
How do the desperately cash-strapped Kents keep that farm running? They have no employees. 'Course not. Can't afford 'em. Wouldn't need 'em, either, if Clark did all the work with his superspeed and superstrength instead of spending his time mooning after Lana Lang and otherwise engaging in superteen superangst. Pa Kent's no use. He spends his time vaguely and ineffectually tinkering with odd bits of farm equipment. That's why Ma Kent had to get help from her nasty father and go to work for the remarkably evil and devious Lionel Luthor. I also wonder if I really did once glimpse snow-capped peaks in the background in, er, Kansas.
But I digress.
What really bothers me about the Kents is that despite their constant worrying about money, and even though their house seems to be nicely designed to let in lots of sunlight (in Kansas . . . ), nonetheless during the middle of the day they seem to keep every single electric light in the place turned on!
(I also wonder if perhaps this is a terrible cultural side-effect of that evil socialistic institution, the Rural Electrification Administration, but I'm digressing again.)
People don't need that much light. Especially not people who are worried about money.
We decided to start taking our showers in the dark. Cool showers, of course. Fortunately, it's still late summer when I'm writing this, so the cool water feels nice and there's sunlight coming in through the bathroom window. Are you paying attention, Kents?
Oh, and say, speaking of it being summer, we're learning that we don't really need the air conditioning quite as desperately as we used to think we did. This winter, we'll try to make the same discovery about heat.
Popcorn
Speaking of things you don't need, what about that tub of buttered popcorn at the movies? Or the movie itself? The movie will be out on DVD soon enough – and maybe when that time comes you'll still be able to afford to buy a DVD and you'll still own a DVD player. And a TV set. And a living room. And if you don't still own all of those things, you certainly won't be wasting time thinking about missing that dumb movie. On the negative side, should you eventually find yourself without a living room or a kitchen, the idea of that popcorn – of its smell, of its taste, of its essential fillingness – will start to affect you powerfully. Even without butter.
Weight, Losing
We both talked for years about trying to lose some weight. As you will have guessed from the preceding paragraph, we're finally doing it. If I hadn't lost my job, we'd still both be doing nothing more than talking about it. I might soon be able to get into those older Dockers and jeans covered with dust in the closet. Not all clutter is bad.
Weight, Lifting
And exercising more. That's something else I always knew I should do. Time, time, there was never enough time! But now at last there is enough time. I really do intend to start exercising lots and lots just as soon as my stomach acid settles down again.
Triumph of the Will
It's really all a matter of will power, isn't it? Thanks to being unemployed, I've developed more will power. I've become very good at maintaining my self-control and even smiling when people ask me if I'm taking advantage of all this time off by relaxing and enjoying myself and getting a lot of writing done. Well, yeah, I do keep tinkering with my resume. (Go read it! Click here!)
FEH
I never really expected that being unemployed would give me a deeper understanding of our wonderful capitalist— I'm sorry, I mean Free Enterprise Hurrah! system. Or the FEH, as its friends call it.
For example, I have a much clearer understanding of what a true living wage is, what's really necessary for two people to survive on. The amount is certainly less than I used to think it was. I may even learn to adjust my estimate downward even more in the future. Of course, I'm talking about surviving on, not living happily on.
That's what you might call the practical, personal-finances aspect of the FEH. There's also the theoretical side. I had that all wrong, as well.
I actually thought – and this is really silly when you consider that I've been working in the FEH for nigh on to a thousand years and so should know better – that companies feel the same sense of obligation and duty toward their employees that they insist their employees should feel toward them. If you contribute to your company's success and help it to advance its interests and financial health, often making sacrifices of your own time to do so, then your company will reciprocate by making sacrifices in bad times to take care of you by not depriving you of your paycheck and benefits. That's the way I thought it worked.
Where in the world did I get that idea? Now I finally understand – and I'm so much the better man and citizen for the understanding – that the true, indeed the only, obligation any company's top management has is to its Board of Directors and major shareholders. And of course to the continued employment of its top managers. My appreciation for the wonderfulness of the FEH can only be deepened by this knowledge, even if I am now forced to gaze upon that wonderfulness from a cold and comfortless place outside the warmth and safety of its shelter.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of being unemployed is this. I now feel absolutely free to despise George W. Bush. Oh, of course I despised him before I lost my job. But now I know I'm not alone.
Read more David's work at Dvorkin.com.
© 2009 Dvorkin.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
Posted on August 1, 2009, Printed on August 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
The great ebb and flow of the marketplace has recently forced me to try to convince myself of the benefits of being unemployed.
Some of those benefits are obvious, and I could have anticipated them even before a supervisor tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to talk to me about something. ("Do you have a minute?" he asked. What would have happened if I'd said no, that I was too busy?)
Not Having to Wake up to the Alarm Clock
That's an obvious one. There was a character in the Snuffy Smith cartoon strip of many years ago who retired but would still get up at the crack of dawn and go down to the mill every morning just so he could thumb his nose at the place as the get-to-work whistle blew. That was an amusing strip, and I saved it for years. But I wouldn't want to take the bus downtown every weekday just to emulate that cartoon character, even if my old workplace had a whistle and even if I had retired voluntarily. So I've turned off the alarm.
(Oh, you ask, but what if you oversleep and waste away the hours you should be spending looking for another job? That hasn't been a problem. The constant sense of dread wakes me up in plenty of time – usually well before the crack of dawn.)
Getting Rid of Telemarketers and Door-to-Door Salesmen
Back in the glorious paycheck days, I used to think about telling them I'd just lost my job. Actually, sometimes I really did tell them that, because I'm a cowardly kinda guy and it's easier to fib than to be firm. Now I don't have to fib. When I tell them I'm unemployed, they hang up or back away quickly, terrified of infection by the job-loss virus. And they seem to have crossed me off those secret lists they hand around. It's true that some of one's friends back away with the same look of fear in their eyes, but I'm sure that's unconscious.
I'm hoping to get taken off the snail-mail solicitation lists, too. From time to time, for example, I get invited to contribute to the Republican National Committee. Yeah, sure. Try me again after I've developed Alzheimer's. Throwing solicitations of that sort away was always easy. But it was hard and induced considerable guilt to throw away unanswered solicitations from organizations I support philosophically. Sometimes you're just strapped for cash, you know? Even with a regular paycheck coming in. I'd feel terrible guilt as I tore up the good-guy solicitations and dropped them in the trash, and I'd tell myself that at least if I lost my job, I'd have an acceptable excuse and wouldn't feel guilty. And I was right! Actually, I still feel guilty, but I tell myself that I'll resume making contributions to those worthy outfits as soon as I have a regular paycheck again.
When.
If.
But here are some benefits of being unemployed that I did not anticipate.
Spousal Closeness
My wife and I were close before, but we've been drawn even closer by a sense of common striving and the extra time we're spending together. A lot of that extra time is spent worrying together, fretting together, hyperventilating together – but together!
Long-Range Planning
I used to obsess over long-range planning. Not that I did any long-range planning; I just obsessed over not doing it. And I used to spend too much time mulling over – even obsessing over – the past. Or at least obsessing over the fact that I was mulling over it so much. You should live in the present, I would tell myself. Now I'm doing just that. The present is intensely with me. I'm obsessing over it.
Scamsters
They've always been around, and they're an amoral, revolting bunch. I'm no kid, I'm no naif, I know all of that.
Nonetheless, I've been surprised at just what low reptiles some of them are. There are companies that post fake job ads so that, brimming with hope and desperation, you'll send them your resume. Then they call you, ask you to come to their office for an interview. Of course you go, dressed in your best interview clothes. The office is sumptuous. The people are well dressed. The pitch is slick. Give us lots of money, and we'll show you how to find the high-paying hidden jobs, the ones that are never advertised, the positions only we know about.
If you do fall for that pitch, you'll only spend money you can't afford to spend, you'll almost certainly never get a job through them, and they, the piles of excrement in human shape, are the only ones who will benefit. How do you think they can afford those offices?
These people are rotten enough to be members of George W. Bush's cabinet. Encountering them has taught me something about the depths of human nature. I guess that qualifies as a benefit of being unemployed.
My Beard
It's still growing!
Well, of course it is, you say. Let me explain that, on an emotional, irrational level, I still feel relieved every morning when I realize that I still need to shave.
It's still growing! Despite the way I frequently feel, I haven't really been unmanned.
Clutter
Our house was so cluttered!
We had dangerously outdated canned foods in kitchen cabinets. It just sat there taking up space and making the house look smaller, the way clutter does. Now we're coming up with inventive ways of combining stuff that we would once never have thought combinable. Why, back then we might even have thrown it out. (Eventually.)
We've rediscovered old hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and bars of soap that we stashed away and forgot about long ago. (Golly, where did those come from?) Now we're using those up instead of actually paying for bars of soap or bottles of shampoo.
And how about all those CDs that we never have liked and always wondered what possessed us to buy, let alone to keep? Well, that's what the used-CD store is for! (Oops. They've gone out of business.)
We have clothes we know we'll never wear again and should have gotten rid of long ago. How fortunate that we didn't! Why, you can get money for that stuff at a thrift store! A tiny amount that we might once have thought not worth bothering with, but our standards have changed. Round 'em up, move 'em out, Rawhide!
Now we're gaining space in the cabinets and in the closets and in the bookcases and even in the refrigerator. Some day, that space could come in handy. Some day, when we can afford to buy things again.
We actually have two refrigerators in our kitchen, a big one and a small one. (The reasons are historical and trivial.) Now we've reached the point where we could easily get by with just the big one. Soon, we'll be able to manage with just the small one. When we reach that point, perhaps we'll sell the big one, assuming anyone would be so foolish as to buy it. (It wasn't a great refrigerator even when it was new.) That will give us extra space in the kitchen, but more to the point, it will make it easier to move to smaller quarters, if it comes to that. Such as under a highway viaduct. Do they have power outlets there? I suppose not. It's not something I used to think about all that often.
The kitchen cabinets are built in, so we'll have to leave those behind.
Snobbery
We have been cured of the sin of snobbery.
It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. Oh, sure, sometimes we'd buy the house brands out of some sort of general moral conviction that we ought to save money. And then we'd gradually drift back to the name brands because . . . well, we just did. But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! And the house-brand cans stack better! And the labels are spiffier! Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.
Power. Shower.
Are you a fan of the television show Smallville? We sure are.
Although there are a few details about the show that keep bothering me.
How do the desperately cash-strapped Kents keep that farm running? They have no employees. 'Course not. Can't afford 'em. Wouldn't need 'em, either, if Clark did all the work with his superspeed and superstrength instead of spending his time mooning after Lana Lang and otherwise engaging in superteen superangst. Pa Kent's no use. He spends his time vaguely and ineffectually tinkering with odd bits of farm equipment. That's why Ma Kent had to get help from her nasty father and go to work for the remarkably evil and devious Lionel Luthor. I also wonder if I really did once glimpse snow-capped peaks in the background in, er, Kansas.
But I digress.
What really bothers me about the Kents is that despite their constant worrying about money, and even though their house seems to be nicely designed to let in lots of sunlight (in Kansas . . . ), nonetheless during the middle of the day they seem to keep every single electric light in the place turned on!
(I also wonder if perhaps this is a terrible cultural side-effect of that evil socialistic institution, the Rural Electrification Administration, but I'm digressing again.)
People don't need that much light. Especially not people who are worried about money.
We decided to start taking our showers in the dark. Cool showers, of course. Fortunately, it's still late summer when I'm writing this, so the cool water feels nice and there's sunlight coming in through the bathroom window. Are you paying attention, Kents?
Oh, and say, speaking of it being summer, we're learning that we don't really need the air conditioning quite as desperately as we used to think we did. This winter, we'll try to make the same discovery about heat.
Popcorn
Speaking of things you don't need, what about that tub of buttered popcorn at the movies? Or the movie itself? The movie will be out on DVD soon enough – and maybe when that time comes you'll still be able to afford to buy a DVD and you'll still own a DVD player. And a TV set. And a living room. And if you don't still own all of those things, you certainly won't be wasting time thinking about missing that dumb movie. On the negative side, should you eventually find yourself without a living room or a kitchen, the idea of that popcorn – of its smell, of its taste, of its essential fillingness – will start to affect you powerfully. Even without butter.
Weight, Losing
We both talked for years about trying to lose some weight. As you will have guessed from the preceding paragraph, we're finally doing it. If I hadn't lost my job, we'd still both be doing nothing more than talking about it. I might soon be able to get into those older Dockers and jeans covered with dust in the closet. Not all clutter is bad.
Weight, Lifting
And exercising more. That's something else I always knew I should do. Time, time, there was never enough time! But now at last there is enough time. I really do intend to start exercising lots and lots just as soon as my stomach acid settles down again.
Triumph of the Will
It's really all a matter of will power, isn't it? Thanks to being unemployed, I've developed more will power. I've become very good at maintaining my self-control and even smiling when people ask me if I'm taking advantage of all this time off by relaxing and enjoying myself and getting a lot of writing done. Well, yeah, I do keep tinkering with my resume. (Go read it! Click here!)
FEH
I never really expected that being unemployed would give me a deeper understanding of our wonderful capitalist— I'm sorry, I mean Free Enterprise Hurrah! system. Or the FEH, as its friends call it.
For example, I have a much clearer understanding of what a true living wage is, what's really necessary for two people to survive on. The amount is certainly less than I used to think it was. I may even learn to adjust my estimate downward even more in the future. Of course, I'm talking about surviving on, not living happily on.
That's what you might call the practical, personal-finances aspect of the FEH. There's also the theoretical side. I had that all wrong, as well.
I actually thought – and this is really silly when you consider that I've been working in the FEH for nigh on to a thousand years and so should know better – that companies feel the same sense of obligation and duty toward their employees that they insist their employees should feel toward them. If you contribute to your company's success and help it to advance its interests and financial health, often making sacrifices of your own time to do so, then your company will reciprocate by making sacrifices in bad times to take care of you by not depriving you of your paycheck and benefits. That's the way I thought it worked.
Where in the world did I get that idea? Now I finally understand – and I'm so much the better man and citizen for the understanding – that the true, indeed the only, obligation any company's top management has is to its Board of Directors and major shareholders. And of course to the continued employment of its top managers. My appreciation for the wonderfulness of the FEH can only be deepened by this knowledge, even if I am now forced to gaze upon that wonderfulness from a cold and comfortless place outside the warmth and safety of its shelter.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of being unemployed is this. I now feel absolutely free to despise George W. Bush. Oh, of course I despised him before I lost my job. But now I know I'm not alone.
Read more David's work at Dvorkin.com.
© 2009 Dvorkin.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141703/
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