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James Goodman

Monoculture - 0 views

  • Years back, in CS Lewis’ essay ‘On The Reading of Old Books,’ I encountered a suggestion that has stuck with me ever since. Lewis posited that each generation of humanity takes certain things for granted: assumptions that go unexamined and unquestioned because they are commonly held by all. It was Lewis’ opinion that reading books written by prior generations would help us to see around these generational blind spots.
  • In her new book, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, FS Michaels suggests that just such a blind spot has, over the course of generations, come to dominate the narrative and values that our society lives by. From education and the arts to how we eat, think, and play, Michaels asserts that we have been steeped in a single point of view, the economic, where value is reduced to what can be sold and worth is determined by financial expediency. Michael’s writing is clear and sharp as she brings the impact of this pervasive global philosophy down to the personal level, showing how it affects our lives in the everyday.
  • In a time of seemingly constant budget cuts and belt-tightening, this book is a valuable tool in provoking thought and discussion about how we as a society value the arts, education, and health.
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    In her new book, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, FS Michaels suggests that just such a blind spot has, over the course of generations, come to dominate the narrative and values that our society lives by. From education and the arts to how we eat, think, and play, Michaels asserts that we have been steeped in a single point of view, the economic, where value is reduced to what can be sold and worth is determined by financial expediency. Michael's writing is clear and sharp as she brings the impact of this pervasive global philosophy down to the personal level, showing how it affects our lives in the everyday.
James Goodman

The "Mental Illness" Paradigm: An "Illness" That is out of Control - Mad In America - 0 views

  • The “mental illness” paradigm—an insidious cancer:  I find it interesting to turn the “medical model” language of “mental illness” back onto itself and consider this entire “mental illness” paradigm as acting like an insidious cancer (the difference in my use of the term “cancer” here being that I’m readily acknowledging that this is just a metaphor). Cancer is essentially what occurs when a cell of an organism “forgets” its role as a member of a larger whole and turns against the organism, becoming consumed only with its own reproduction. Using this metaphor, we can say the “mental illness” paradigm fosters this turning one part of a whole against itself. We see this taking place interpersonally between members of our society as we develop ever increasing fear of those labelled “mentally ill,” and we see this taking place intrapersonally as we develop ever increasing fear and suspicion of our own “unusual” or “extreme” subjective experiences. We see signs of this cancer spreading throughout nearly every branch of contemporary Western society—our schools and education systems, our media, our government policies, our way of trying to make sense of ourselves and others’ experiences and behavior, and of course our health care systems. We also notice that this type of cancer thrives particularly well on a diet of greed, fear and ignorance—greed (enormous financial incentive to many in the pharmaceutical and mental health industries), fear (especially our fear of uncertainty, preferring an understanding that is clear although flawed to having to make some peace with mystery and the unknown), and ignorance (just think of the daily bombardment by massive amounts of misinformation coming at us from almost every angle).
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    "The "mental illness" paradigm-an insidious cancer: I find it interesting to turn the "medical model" language of "mental illness" back onto itself and consider this entire "mental illness" paradigm as acting like an insidious cancer (the difference in my use of the term "cancer" here being that I'm readily acknowledging that this is just a metaphor). Cancer is essentially what occurs when a cell of an organism "forgets" its role as a member of a larger whole and turns against the organism, becoming consumed only with its own reproduction. Using this metaphor, we can say the "mental illness" paradigm fosters this turning one part of a whole against itself. We see this taking place interpersonally between members of our society as we develop ever increasing fear of those labelled "mentally ill," and we see this taking place intrapersonally as we develop ever increasing fear and suspicion of our own "unusual" or "extreme" subjective experiences. We see signs of this cancer spreading throughout nearly every branch of contemporary Western society-our schools and education systems, our media, our government policies, our way of trying to make sense of ourselves and others' experiences and behavior, and of course our health care systems."
James Goodman

Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? - Zach McDade - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

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    Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Zach McDade May 23, 2013 9 Comments Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Shutterstock inShare3 Share Print Share on emailEmail Urban Institute MORE FROM THE URBAN INSTITUTE: The "Disconnected Youth" Paradigm Stemming the Tide of Federal Prison Growth The Continued Decline of North Korea Is a Case for Inclusive Politics A fascinating recent article in The New Republic reviewed a body of new science documenting the pernicious physiological effects of loneliness. Researchers have shown that loneliness-more formally, the want of intimacy-exacerbates a host of ailments, including Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer. The share of Americans who report "not feeling close to people" at any given time is 30 percent and growing, and deemed by some a social health crisis. Should public policy researchers and practitioners care about something as intangible and inaccessible as loneliness? I'll give you three reasons why I think we should. First, some background… Feeling lonely actually sends misleading hormonal signals that physically change the molecular structure of the brain. According to the article, this "wrenches a whole slew" of bodily systems out of whack, causing loneliness to be seen by some as a risk factor for death as great as smoking. Who tends to be affected by loneliness, according to this research? Women more than men, blacks more than whites, the less-educated, the unemployed, the retired, anyone different. In other words, many of the same people affected by today's long-term unemployment and wealth disparities, persistent poverty, and isolation. If loneliness exacerbates these ills, it will further diminish people's ability to engage in economically and socially valuable and productive activities, which in turn could exacerbate loneliness. Three reasons why loneliness should be a p
James Goodman

The Untouchable Economy: Why Americans Are Turning Against 'Stuff' - Michael Mandel - T... - 0 views

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    Millennials are shifting from tangibles (cars and homes) to intangibles (education and access to data), but they are not alone. In today's data-driven economy, the business sector is moving along the same tangible-to-intangible path as the Millennials, perhaps at an even faster pace. Business spending on nonresidential structures, other than mining-related, is roughly 30% below the 2007 pre-recession highs, while investment in software is up almost 20% over the same period.
James Goodman

Harold Meyerson: The party that truly believes in redistribution - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    Indeed, the United States has experienced an upward redistribution so profound that it affects far more than incomes. Whole sectors of the economy and regions of the country have been decimated by these economic changes. The descent in all manner of social indexes is most apparent among poorly educated whites. Conservative commentator Charles Murray has documented in his new book the decline in marriage rates and family stability within the white working class. And now, as the New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise has reported, that decline includes longevity as well. While other Americans' life expectancy has advanced, the life expectancy of whites without high school diplomas has declined since 1990 - by three years among men and five years among women. The market is not just redistributing income in the United States, then. It is redistributing life.
James Goodman

Unfit To Report - 0 views

  • quite possibly the scummiest — Planet Money/This American Life propaganda piece for the financial industry, disguised as highbrow progressive journalism.
  • The piece was called "Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America" and it essentially argued — using wildly flawed research and straight-up lies — that our Social Security program is burdened by a glut of freeloader disability queens, faking their disabilities in order to live high on the Social Security disability insurance hog. Why would NPR run such a flawed, biased story? The answer takes us right to the heart of Wall Street’s plans to privatize government benefits, which Wall Street bond holders want to slash for their own profits. This battle pits powerful Wall Street interests and their media and political lackeys on the one side, versus an overwhelming majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats both — on the other. In the middle stands a radio piece from a trusted source, NPR/This American Life/Planet Money, telling its progressive, educated audience that there is in fact a problem with Social Security, and that problem is a bunch of human parasites faking disability to suckle from the Social Security teat. It’s the sort of rancid old 1930s anti-New Deal propaganda that the American Liberty League or NAM or the Chamber of Commerce used to puke out on a regular basis. But this is 2013, meaning this time around, the battleground is on the putative left, pitting the Democratic Party leaders including Obama against the people who voted for him, and who have nowhere else to turn. On the Democratic Party’s side: their funders on Wall Street, and their neoliberal propagandists in pundit-land and in universities. The key isn’t winning over right-wing conservatives, but rather affluent progressives — i.e., Planet Money's and NPR’s audience. If they can flip that demographic, Social Security is privatized toast.
  • The good thing is that the piece was such obvious crap, so intellectually flawed and propaganda-soaked, that Ira Glass and the This American Life/Planet Money/NPR people were forced to respond to their critics. The downside is that the critics were far too respectful, basing their criticism on factual flaws rather than on the corruption that made the flawed reporting not just possible, but inevitable.
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  • As we reported last year at our SHAME Project and in my piece for the NSFWCORP, Planet Money has a serious conflict-of-interest problem when it reports on anything involving the banking sector. Planet Money’s sole sponsor, as of late last year, is Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), one of the world’s most toxic subprime lenders. Ally/GMAC preyed on Americans on the upside, then plundered taxpayers for over $17 billion in TARP bailout funds when their fraud schemes came crashing down. As we showed, the disturbing overlap between GMAC’s lobbying efforts against bank regulation bills, and Planet Money programs attacking that legislation and its promoters, means that Planet Money has essentially doubled as a sophisticated PR vessel targeting a key audience unaware of the Planet Money/NPR financial arrangement with the banking industry.
  • When you know that Planet Money’s sole sponsor is a predatory lender, this hit-piece on Social Security "disability queens" makes an appalling sort of sense. Social Security is actually a fully funded and well-managed program. That’s precisely why Wall Street has been trying to grab it for years. When furious NPR viewers objected to seeing their donations funding anti-Social Security propaganda, Ira Glass felt compelled to issue this statement standing by the reporting: "We know of no factual errors. We stand by the story." Yet, as a Wired reporter pointed out, Planet Money did alter the online version of the show after listeners raised a fuss. NPR finally admitted that the text had been altered, lamely explaining that "sentences were changed for clarity after publication."
  • Among the products that Lincoln Financial Group sells is, you guessed it, disability insurance. So unless it’s a complete coincidence that Lincoln Financial’s ads keep popping up as the Planet Money sponsor for the show about disability queens, it looks like once again, Planet Money, This American Life and NPR have the same "failure to communicate their conflict-of-interest and media corruption" problem that we wrote about last summer. They’ve done nothing to address the corruption in their editorial process. No one is holding Planet Money, This American Life or NPR accountable for clear conflict-of-interest.
  • But perhaps NPR doesn’t give a shit. In their corporate sponsors page, NPR openly boasts that paying NPR to read your company’s name has a "halo effect" —that is, having a harmless squeaky progressive-sounding NPR voice reading out your company’s name essentially helps to whitewash the corporate sponsor’s brand reputation. That can really come in handy if you’re one of the banks that pocketed billions in taxpayer money and now you’re lobbying to cut Social Security benefits
  • So, as the financial lobby and the DC political class close in for the kill on your Social Security, you should be aware that Planet Money, This American Life and NPR are key players on the left flank of the bankers’ propaganda war. If you’re one of their listeners or donors, you’re a target. Welcome to what passes for the "liberal" media.
James Goodman

Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
  • Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.
  • The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.
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  • As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.
  • The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.
  • King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”
  • King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.
James Goodman

Inertia, Not Progress Defines the Decade After 9/11 : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.The attacks were supposed to have signalled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. Bush talked about ridding the world of evil, columnists wrote of “World War Three,” and almost all Americans felt that, in their private lives and in the national life, nothing would ever be the same. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.
  • The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country. By the time of the Japanese surrender, the Great Depression was over and America had been transformed. This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th. On the interstate south of Mount Airy, there’s a recruiting billboard with the famous image of marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the slogan “For Our Nation. For Us All.” In recent years, “For Us All” has been a fantasy. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.
  • “We are at war against terror.” Those were fateful words. Defining the enemy by its tactic was a strange conceptual diversion that immediately made the focus too narrow (what about the ideology behind the terror?) and too broad (were we at war with all terrorists and their supporters everywhere?). The President could have said, “We are at war against Al Qaeda,” but he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his rhetoric, in an attempt to overpower any ambiguities. Freedom was at war with fear, he told the country, and he would not rest until the final victory. In short, the new world of 2001 looked very much like the bygone worlds of 1861 and 1941. The President took inspiration from a painting, in the White House Treaty Room, depicting Lincoln on board a steamship with Generals Grant and Sherman: it reminded Bush of Lincoln’s “clarity of purpose.” The size of the undertaking seemed to give Bush a new comfort. His entire sense of the job came to depend on being a war President.
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  • What were the American people to do in this vast new war? In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001—the speech that gave his most eloquent account of the meaning of September 11th—the President told Americans to live their lives, hug their children, uphold their values, participate in the economy, and pray for the victims. These quiet continuities were supposed to be reassuring, but instead they revealed the unreality that lay beneath his call to arms. Wasn’t there anything else? Should Americans enlist in the armed forces, join the foreign service, pay more taxes, do volunteer work, study foreign languages, travel to Muslim countries? No—just go on using their credit cards. Bush’s Presidency would emulate Woodrow Wilson’s and Warren G. Harding’s simultaneously. Never was the mismatch between the idea of the war and the war itself more apparent. Everything had changed, Bush announced, but not to worry—nothing would change.
  • At the time of the attacks, few educated Americans born after 1950 had any direct experience of war or persecution or cataclysmic failure. After 9/11, this gap in the résumés of intellectuals gave them both a sense of inadequacy—an outbreak of envy for the Greatest Generation—and a compensatory tendency to inflate the drama of the war on terror and their own role in it. This took place at a level of abstraction that is made possible when the fighting is eight thousand miles away. As a result, a number of the country’s best minds mistook the post-September 11th era for a new American golden age.
  • After the attacks, Americans asked, “Why do they hate us?” This turned out to be the wrong line of inquiry. The most pressing questions were about us, not them: our leaders, our institutions, our ability to act as a cohesive nation and make rational decisions, our power to take action abroad in a way that would not be a self-defeating waste. Starting with the intelligence failures that did not foresee the attacks, every major American institution flunked the test of the September 11th decade. The media got the W.M.D.s wrong. The military failed to plan for chaos in postwar Iraq. Congress neglected its oversight duties. The political system produced no statesmen. C.E.O.s and financiers couldn’t see past short-term profits. The Bush Administration had one major success: it succeeded in staving off another terrorist attack in America. It botched almost everything else.
  • After 9/11, life in America changed in a few palpable ways: you needed I.D. to get into an office building, and boarding an airplane became an ordeal. But all the structural trends stayed on course: the stock market, after a setback, maintained its relentless upward climb; inequality soared, as Wall Street fortunes reached unimaginable new heights, while average wages began to decline; just about every remaining textile job in Surry County disappeared; Americans sank deeper into debt and depended more on their houses for wealth; the iMac progressed to the iPad; CBS News continued its descent into irrelevance and Fox News its corrosive rise, while newspapers kept cutting back or closing shop. The political division of America into red and blue hardened into the mutually hostile and unintelligible universes in which we live today. Bush, already viewed as illegitimate by many Democrats, became one of the most hated Presidents in American history; the writer Nicholson Baker even published a novella about the merits of assassinating him. Meanwhile, the Republican Party fell completely under the control of its most extreme elements, and “traitor” became a routine term for its opponents. For all the talk of national unity and a new sense of purpose, the terror attacks did nothing to bring together the country. America after September 11th was like a couch potato who survives a heart attack, vows to start a strict regimen of diet and exercise, and after a few weeks still finds himself camped out in the living room.
  • The Bush Administration collapsed in the late summer of 2005—not in Falluja or Kandahar but in the submerged neighborhoods of New Orleans. The response to Hurricane Katrina gave Americans such a devastating picture of official failure that it suggested something fatally wrong with an entire approach to governing. Iraq, of course, had provided evidence of high-level arrogance, incompetence, and neglect for two years, and Afghanistan for even longer than that, but, because these places were far away and American troops were risking their lives to serve the nation, the public wasn’t ready to withdraw its support. When the footage came out of the Gulf Coast—when, for the second time in four years, a great American city looked like Kabul or Kinshasa—it was Iraq in fast motion, and right around the corner. Government at all levels, but especially in Washington, had failed to plan for the worst outcome, even when the entire country saw it coming. An Administration staffed by cronies neglected to take care of citizens for whom it had the greatest responsibility. Katrina made brutally clear that the White House had substituted passive, self-congratulatory bravado for serious organized effort. Like Iraq, New Orleans represented a failure of individual leaders, but also of national institutions.
  • After Katrina, support for the Iraq war evaporated. Having been asked for very little ever since September 11th, other than to take the Administration’s way on faith, Americans had little trouble reframing their allegiances. This was the price of a foreign policy based on assertion rather than on persuasion. The war on terror had been a kind of confidence game: it depended on a belief in American virtue and ability that had proved unwarranted. With the exception of his advocacy of the surge, in 2007, Bush became an increasingly irrelevant figure, and his foreign policy crawled away from grand projects for “world order.” When Vice-President Cheney called for new wars with Iran and Syria, there were no takers.
  • In the years after Katrina, Americans began to see that the same unstable combination of hoopla and neglect that had characterized the war on terror also characterized the decade’s supposed economic boom. While the media were riveted by the spectacle of celebrity wealth, large areas of the country were—like Surry County—left to rot. The boom had been built on sand: housing speculation, overvalued stocks, reckless deregulation, irresponsible deficits. When the foundation started to crumble with the first wave of mortgage defaults, in 2007, the scale of the destruction became the latest of the decade’s surprises. Hardly anyone foresaw how far the economy would fall; hardly anyone imagined how many people it would take on the way down. Even the economic advisers of the next Administration badly misjudged the crisis. The trillions of dollars spent and, often, misspent on wars and domestic bureaucracies were no longer available to fill the hole left by the implosion of the private economy. Reborn champions of austerity pointed to the deficits in order to make the case that the country couldn’t afford to spend its way back to health. And, like the attacks that were supposed to change everything, the recession—which was given the epithet “Great” and was constantly compared with the Depression of the nineteen-thirties—inspired very little change in economic policy. Without effective leadership, the country blindly reverted to the status quo ante, with the same few people making a lot of money, if a little less than before, and the same people doing badly, if a little worse.
  • This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, élites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.
James Goodman

New Trends in Eating Disorders - Eating Disorders Center - EverydayHealth.com - 0 views

  • Orthorexia: An Obsession With Healthy Food “Orthorexia is an obsession with eating healthy food — to such an extent that the person may restrict their diet very severely and limit their functioning, such as not socializing in situations where there is ‘unhealthy’ food,” says Sheela Raja, PhD, an assistant professor and clinical psychologist in the Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There has been no research into eating disorder statistics to know how widespread orthorexia is, but in general the idea of “good” and “bad” foods is relatively common in people with eating disorders. The advent of so many fad diets hasn’t helped matters either. No carbs, only raw food, macrobiotics — diets with such strict food rules can certainly lead to confusion about what really is healthy and what isn’t, and in turn can contribute to orthorexia. Warning signs can range from negative feelings about “impure” foods to trouble dealing with stress. Avoiding social situations or bringing your own food to restaurants or get-togethers can be another red flag, as can insisting that good health is totally dependent on the quality of the food you eat. It can also be more common in people who have obsessive or black-and-white thinking that a food is either all good or all bad. Orthorexia is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, given that the symptoms overlap significantly with diagnoses of other eating disorders. “No classic treatment plan is available, but I work with people to normalize food and take away magical thinking about the ‘right/perfect’ foods,” says Esther Kane, MSW, a registered clinical counselor in private practice in Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada, and author of It’s Not About the Food: A Woman’s Guide to Making Peace with Food and Our Bodies. Nutritional education and finding other ways to deal with stress and negative moods are important steps. Raja, for example, suggests participating in an activity unrelated to eating, such as going for a walk or taking a bath, when feeling stressed. Focusing on moderation is also key, as is emphasizing the idea that no food should be excluded from the diet.
James Goodman

Net Worth, Self-Worth and How We Look at Money - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Mr. Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance. How does he define them?
  • Those who are in the money avoidance camp share beliefs that make them distance themselves from money. Mr. Klontz said this group may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger. People who fall into the money worship camp would seem to be the opposite, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things that money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others.
  • “They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Mr. Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.” Anxiety about money status occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.) The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future was money vigilance. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Mr. Klontz said. Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents. But what may be surprising is that the study found few links between who held what belief and their family background, race, gender, education level or income.
James Goodman

The real causes of the economic crisis? They're history. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street — arms outstretched in triumph — is racing toward the finish-line tape while millions of American families are struggling to stay on their feet. With victory seemingly in hand, the historical rewrite is in full swing. The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010.
  • Meanwhile, more than 24 million Americans are out of work or can’t find full-time work, and nearly $9 trillion in household wealth has vanished. There seems to be no correlation between who drove the crisis and who is paying the price.The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission detailed the recklessness of the financial industry and the abject failures of policymakers and regulators that brought our economy to its knees in late 2008. The accuracy and facts of the commission’s investigative report have gone unchallenged since its release in January.So, how do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.
  • If  you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. You disregard the reality that two-thirds of the deficit increase is directly attributable to the economic downturn and bipartisan fiscal measures adopted to bolster the economy. Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.
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  • If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. Now, you condemn reform efforts as “the current ‘anything goes’ regulatory ethos” — a phrase that paradoxically recalls your own failed policies at the Federal Reserve. In short, after driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” You revise your opinion on the causes of the crisis to instead focus blame on government housing policies. The source for this newfound wisdom: shopworn data, produced by a consultant to the corporate-funded American Enterprise Institute, which was analyzed and debunked by the FCIC report.
  • If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses that savaged communities across the country and pledge to block the appointment of anyone to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless its authority is weakened. You ignore the evidence of pervasive excess that wrecked our financial markets and attempt to cut funding for the regulators charged with curbing it. Across the board, you refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.Does historical accuracy matter? You bet it does.   Traveling down a road unfettered by facts will take us far from where we need to be: prosecuting financial wrongdoing to deter future malfeasance; vigorously enforcing financial reforms to rein in excessive risk; and rooting out Wall Street’s conflicts of interests, abysmal governance and badly flawed compensation incentives.Worst of all, it will divert us from the urgent task of putting people back to work and creating real wealth for America’s future. Over the past decade, we squandered trillions of dollars on rampant speculation rather than on making investments — in technology, infrastructure, clean energy and education — that increase our productivity and economic strength. The financial sector’s share of corporate profits climbed from 15 percent in 1980 to 33 percent by the early 2000s, while financial-sector debt soared from $3 trillion in 1978 to $36 trillion by 2007. With tens of millions still unemployed, isn’t it time to shift from an economy based on money making money to an economy based on money creating jobs and genuine prosperity?
James Goodman

Brain-Changing Hammocks - The Sweet Pursuit - Utne Reader - 0 views

  • It’s summertime, and hammock season is here. Time to lay back, sway under a shade tree, let the breeze kiss the soles of your bare feet, and drift off. Certainly a hammock can help you relax, but new research suggests it can also alter brain activity to improve sleep. In a study published in the June 2011 issue of Current Biology, neuroscientists at the University of Geneva claim that gentle rocking makes people fall asleep faster and experience deeper sleep by synchronizing brain waves.
  • The researchers enlisted 12 men to take two afternoon naps in a quiet, dark room on a bed that could simulate the gentle rocking motion of a hammock. (Chances are, they didn't have a hard time rounding up volunteers.) For one nap, the bed rocked; for the other, the bed was stationary. Cynthia Graber of Scientific American reports the findings:
  • All the men fell asleep faster when they swayed. And the scientists monitored the men’s brain activity during all the naps. They found that rocking increased the duration of what’s called N2, a non-REM stage that accounts for about half of a good night’s sleep. Rocking also increased deep-sleep-associated brain activity—so-called slow oscillations as well as bursts of action called sleep spindles. Though the conclusions drawn from this naptime study are encouraging, the jury is still out on whether hammocks can alleviate insomnia at night. But, why wait for proven results? Put down the Ambien and try a hammock.
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