Don't Buy It

Months back I happened to watch this Ted Talk which discusses (among other things) the relationship between income and happiness. It was a major eye opener for me. I found it very liberating to recognize that much of what I perceived as a want/need was something that in the end really didn't affect my happiness. I've become convinced that a much simpler existence would actually provide no less life satisfaction, and probably would produce more.

So I just wanted to share a couple of related resources on this topic. I thought the below 9 minute commentary entitled "You Don't Need to Buy This" was very worthwhile.



There's an article by the speaker that's worth reading here.

I recently watched a movie, available streaming on Netflix that's called "Happy." It explores the relationship between perceived causes of happiness and actual causes.

In Light of the Attacks in Libya

The right wing is giddy to be able to talk about the attacks in Libya. It's a great opportunity for them. The last thing they want is for people to discuss what OUR government is doing. They want to distract us from that question and have us instead focus on the atrocities of others that we can't control.

A young conservative questioner tried the same tactic with Noam Chomsky. Listen to see how it went for him.

Growth Is The Problem

The problem I have with so called liberal economists like Paul Krugman is not that he's wrong about his prescriptions for what would solve our economic problems. Yeah, austerity in the US should be expected to reduce economic growth, cause a lot of suffering, and increase unemployment, just as it has in Europe. He's not wrong that preparation for an alien invasion would boost our economy even if it was later discovered that the invasion threat was a hoax. He's not wrong to suggest that the new I-Phone 5 could boost our economy by causing people to discard perfectly good phones.

Where he's wrong is that he doesn't recognize that his solutions allow us to continue down this unsustainable path. Capitalism needs ever expanding consumption. Krugman knows that the problem is lack of demand. So when consumers already have all the products they would ever need you have to contrive wants so that people will continue to consume more. Break windows. Throw away phones. Prepare for a war against a non-existent threat. Dig some ditches and re-fill them. This is what Capitalism requires.

What Americans don't recognize is that they are already fantastically rich. I found a really well written piece describing our riches, particularly relative to even the wealthiest people of the past, right here. If you are reading this blog post you are probably among the richest people in the world today. In fact you are way richer than most people that have ever lived. How is it that we don't live like we are rich? Instead we work and work for decades filling our homes with junk that we don't want and don't use? How many of us can actually fit 2 cars in our 2 car garages? I can with a lot of effort if I pile boxes full of crap high and to the side. At the moment I can't get 2 cars in, because I have too much stuff that I don't use in there.

Chris Hedges has a good piece on this topic here. Also a good interview on Democracy Now here. We are committing suicide by growing our economy when it is not really necessary for our happiness. It's only necessary because our system is Capitalist. It will not go on forever. It will either end with a massive economic collapse and unimaginable suffering or we will change the system drastically on our own terms.

Chomsky on "Support Our Troops"

Should Liberals Prefer a Romney Victory

An interesting debate on Democracy Now on this question here.

Take the issue of austerity. Yeah, Republicans want a savage austerity package that should be expected to collapse our economy like was done in Europe. But could they do that effectively like Obama can if he chooses to? Obama himself picked the heads of his Deficit Commission which is proposing a harmful austerity package.

In health care we need single payer. The deficit would be gone. 40-50 million people get some respectable options. It's win-win. Well sort of. It's not a win for profit seeking owners that will no longer make millions doing nothing. So they oppose it. The right wing Heritage Foundation crafted a plan that placates the masses but keeps the owners in the profit stream. Obama had a chance at bringing single payer, but instead he gave corporations their profitable solution, and the result will be continued high prices. It's not terribly surprising that Romney is now expressing support for some portions of Obama Care. It's a right wing plan.

Then of course you have all this war expansion and surveillance state expansion. All of this has come about virtually without opposition from the left. The argument is that while Romney is evil Obama is the more effective evil. It's a strong argument. I can respect that good people may come down on either side of this debate. This is a very hard question.

Clinton-More Facts in 48 Minutes than RNC Offered in 4 Days

I keep hearing that Clinton gave a pretty good speech. Jon Stewart makes fun of the length, but is impressed that it did contain something that just isn't offered by Republicans: content.

Fox News vs CNN

If you want to bash Fox News more power to you, but I think it's important to recognize that you don't want to do this in a way that obscures the fact that CNN is very similar.

I view it much like the Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are in the tank for the rich and they are proud of it. They blatantly reject democracy, lie, etc. OK, we know where they stand. Democrats sort of pretend to be different, but when push comes to shove there's not much difference.

Here's a story about CNN's pushy behavior directed against their own journalists in service to the brutal torturing government in Bahrain. Sure, Fox News has directed their journalists to lie in service to wealth. CNN wants their reporters to include lies in stories as well in service to this brutal military dictatorship that enjoys strong support in Washington. If you want to go crazy demonizing official enemies, like Iran and Syria, there's no problem. Demonizing friends of the state is a bridge too far.

Another thing to remember is that propaganda is not usually put forward in such a blatant form. Like the higher ups pressuring reporters to include lies in their stories. The filtering produces the propaganda without a cabal of powerful people pulling strings. One example is contained in some of the videos I show here where Michael Moore is interviewed about his movie Sicko. It starts with CNN's Sanjay Gupta just getting the facts blatantly wrong as he tries to discredit the movie prior to the interview. He got obvious things wrong, like the amount of money Moore claimed Cuba spent per person on health care. Nobody directed him to get it wrong. It was incompetence in service to CNN's corporate backers.

You have the vast majority of Americans that agree with Michael Moore on health care and you have the corporate sector representing the interests of wealth that opposes. CNN gets it all wrong in service to wealth. Interestingly as we learn in this video where former insurance company executive Wendell Potter apologizes to Michael Moore for the role he played discrediting Sicko, one of the people Gupta relied on was a paid insurance company stooge that was working to discredit the film and this of course was not revealed to the CNN audience. So maybe it was a combination of incompetence in service to wealth and organized disinformation in service to wealth.

Credit to Keith Olbermann for exposing a lot of this. But then he was suspended from MSNBC and now he's gone.