Debt, Discipline, and Consumerism

Education is discipline, and debt is consumerism. We learn
to consume and live by our debts.
Photo credit: beware of images

by douglas reeser on March 29, 2013
Maybe you've noticed the picture of Noam Chomsky accompanying a quote from an unidentified source that has been making the rounds on Facebook and a number of websites. I've tried to find where the quote came from, and the best I can tell is that it was from an article in the Ottawa Citizen that no longer has a working link from back in 2011. I've also found links back to the Chomsky Quotes Tumblr, but was unable to find the exact source there either. Regardless of exactly where the quote came from, or even if Chomsky said or wrote it, the message is still compelling, and fits well with the emerging movement to alleviate student debt on a national level.

The meme-ing quote reads:

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people ina system of debt they can't afford the time to think. Tuition Fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy. 

In my mind, the quote is a little all over the place, and could probably use some context (hence my curiosity about where it came from). Still, I think it captures the attention for linking debt, discipline, and mindless consumerism. Again, being unsure about the context of the quote, I hesitate to offer much critique, other than to criticize those who continue to share it without including a source. At least the quote is attributed, but without the source, it retains little of its original value. What remains worth some further comment are those three primary concepts: debt, discipline, and consumerism.

No Housing on Minimum Wage: No Problem for the Rich

It's hit the mainstream - the rich are getting richer, and the poor
are getting poorer. Cartoon courtesy of AM 1600 WWRL.

by douglas reeser on March 21, 2013

Having spent my teenage years in and around the city of Philadelphia, and with my family still there, it's a morning ritual of mine to read through the Philly news on philly.com. This morning in the business section, I couldn't help but notice the stark negativity on display in the headlines. Leading off the section, with a photo and large type was an article titled, Rich get richer, everyone else poorer, which contrasted the record levels hit on the Dow, widely recognized as a leading indicator for the US economy, with a 17-month low on a survey of US consumer confidence. According to the article, economists don't know how to explain the 17-month low and the lingering effects of the Great Recession, however, this statement is contradicted just a few paragraphs later:

Economist, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, crunched the numbers for the two years coming out of the financial meltdown, starting in 2009, and came up with the jaw-dropping finding that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans had captured 121 percent the nation's gains in income. Income for the remaining 99 percent actually declined further over those same two years.

In other words, "we" have moved out of the recession only if we consider "we" to be the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, high unemployment rates are keeping wages suppressed for the rest of us. The other headlines in the business section seemed to support this unpleasant reality: Study: Philly leads nation in 'deep-poverty' residents, Low-wage workers gloomy about future, College educated dishwashers, Survey: Low-wage workers missing out on training. Kind of a depressing series of articles to stumble upon in the morning, although I am trying to see it as a positive development that this issue is being addressed in the mainstream media. 

Health or Debt? It's Really Not a Choice

March 21, 2013
Strike Debt, the organization that grew out of the Occupy Movement and began buying up student debt, has added medical debt to its list of targets. This great animated video explains why in a pretty clear way, and hopefully it continues to inspire solidarity and collective action. It is by helping each other that we will find our way forward through all of this...

Check out the video, and then visit Strike Debt to get involved.

Forced to Work: U.S. Prisons and the New Forced-Labor Camps

~ "Made on the inside to be worn on the outside" ~
"Prison Blues" work jeans made by inmates in
Oregon. Photo from American Ground  

by douglas reeser on January 30, 2013
Sometimes it takes just a slight shift of perspective to reveal the insidiousness of certain practices of the capitalist regime. Over the last 30 years or so, outsourcing of all types of jobs, from service to production, has enabled increased profits at the cost of worker exploitation in places outside of the major regions of consumption. As the continued globalization of the corporate production machine has taken root, so too have fair trade and other worker's-rights movements, that have aimed to fight the exploitation of workers around the globe. These actions are beginning to force corporations to seek new outlets of cheap labor, which has led to a turn back to the center: the ever-growing U.S. prison population.

In the past, prison labor was touted as a means of reforming inmates, and providing them with a skill that would aid in their re-integration with society. Today, prison labor is something much different. It's now a source of incredibly inexpensive, highly controllable labor. Prison labor shows up to work on time, receives no benefits, overtime, or other perks, cannot organize, and is rarely paid even minimum wage. If a prisoner refuses these terms, they are reportedly locked up in solitary. A report from Global Research, a Canada-based globalization research center, has begun to frame this "insourcing" of jobs in way that reveals just how underhanded this development in labor practice is.

First a little prison population background is in order. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2011, there were about 1.6 million total prisoners in state and federal prisons in the US. Of those, 1.4 million are male, and almost 1 million are black or hispanic (about 63% of the total prison population). Prisoners in private prisons represent a relatively small fraction of the total number of total prisoners (about 130,000 in 2010), but the privatization of prisons is one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. All of these prisoners combine to represent around 25% of the world's prisoners, and more than any other country, including China and India, which have 4-5 times the total population of the US.

Consumption Junction: "Forget the Money"

by Lana Lynne on November 30, 2012
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" That ubiquitous childhood refrain echoes throughout many people's lives, evolving with each new chapter of experiences. When we're young, the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. As we get older, for many these choices begin to fit into pre-molded channels, into recognizable and attainable occupations. By the time we're "grown up," what we want to be has been replaced by what we do for money. Our options for alternative lifestyles are few, and unceasing bombardments by consumerist messages tell us what to do with our money, each tailored to our socioeconomic positions. Cultural critics call us automatons of the industrial complex, and as members of "the masses," we fall in lockstep time to a soundtrack of retail therapy.

And yet, the idea of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" or, as Alan Watts puts it, "What if money were no object?" still resonates with us. A short video made by a 20-year-old "self-taught video creator" takes a snippet of Alan Watts speaking about living a meaningful life to narrate a nicely spliced montage of dreamy time-lapse images. Watts asks listeners straightforward, "What makes you itch? What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?" For the rest of the video, he laments people's complacency with "doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living." "Forget the money," he says, "because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time."

On Youtube, the video has gotten more than one million views. On Facebook, one posting of the video was shared over 200,000 times. Is this a whisper from within the masses of complacent consumers, breaking free of the amnesiac lullabies of monetary desire? Or has our ability to answer Watts' question been reduced to a like and a share?

Read more about Recycled Minds' exploration of similar ideas in this article about a world without money, this one about profiteering in academia, and this one on how Occupy is helping people out of debt.

Occupy your Debt

The People's Bailout - a variety show in support
of the 99%. Live online and in NYC on November
15, 2012. 

by douglas reeser on November 12, 2012
In case you haven't heard, Occupy is back in the news and this time it doesn't have to do with protests, sit-ins, or police violence. And to the surprise of many, it seems that the potential for Occupy is actually growing, as the movement is working on at least two fronts, and certainly in terms of public relations, Occupy is scoring some points. The movement has shown the public a different side of itself through its relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in early November. The hurricane resulted in extensive damage throughout much of New York City and New Jersey, so much so that the traditional governmental and non-governmental relief agencies have had difficulty responding to all the needs of those affected.

With so many in need, members of Occupy were able to quickly mobilize a response that other relief organizations were unable to do. According to a piece in the Nation,

"Occupy Sandy, as the effort has been branded, arose quickly in the aftermath of the storm, setting up local community hubs to dispense water, food and aid, and form groups to help communities pump water from their houses and clean up the vast quantities of rubble left in Sandy’s wake. Distribution centers have been set up in numerous locations in New York and New Jersey, and they continue to help those in need... While federal mobilization efforts can often take weeks—sometimes months—to reach citizens, Occupy was one of the only local groups capable of quickly mobilizing to help victims. Organizing volunteers and supplies is no small task, but Occupy Sandy has been able to generate a large amount of aid. On Sunday, Michael Premo, one of the volunteers, estimated the mobilization effort included 2,500 volunteers, 15,000 meals and 120 carloads of supplies sent to recovery sites."

"Nature's Economic Stimulus": The Value of Honeybees

Bee collecting pollen. Photo from pdphoto.org

by lana lynne on January 13, 2012
Nothing says nature like green, and it appears that beekeepers have decided to go straight for the wallet in an ongoing attempt to draw attention to the honeybee plight. On Tuesday, beekeepers and environmentalists came together to lay out the impact of honeybees on the U.S. economy, showing the substantial monetary effect long-range fall out that colony loss can have on the food system.

According to one apiary owner at the conference, the value of his colonies tops $5 million in just 6 months: "$500,000 from California almonds in January, $800,000 from Georgia blueberries in March, $2 million from Pennsylvania apples and cherries in April, $500,000 from Maine blueberries in May, and $1 million from Pennsylvania pumpkins in June." Numbers like these have earned the honeybee status as the most important pollinator in the world.

Study after study points to pesticides as the likely culprit in the decline of honeybees. But as Claire Thompson points out in her Grist article, trying to get Big Agricultural to change its ways in an election year isn't likely. If any reason could convince industrial agriculture to become more sustainable, though, it may be profits.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/10/4177304/beekeepers-are-critical-to-economy.html#storylink=cpy