Robber Barons – Engaging Peace

The “Just Enough” Policy: Behavioral Control of Collective Protest through Minimum Reward, Part 3 of a 3-part series

Posted on April 11, 2016April 9, 2016 by kathiemm

The Paradox of Advances and Losses

by Anthony Marsella, PhD

Virtually everyone, except perhaps the very young and uninformed, is in disbelief at our national situation. Most adults never imagined a world filled with so many challenges to security, health, and wellbeing. Old timers (i.e., over 70 years) ask, “How did it all happen? It’s not just the changes, but the speed of things!” They gaze into their memories, and utter those timeless words: “It seems like only yesterday.”

There are, of course, many positive changes occurring, especially in our social fabric and formation. Long denied civil and human rights are increasing across different population sectors. Advances in medical sciences and practices fill us with awe as countless lives are saved, and longevity increased. The list is endless, and should evoke optimism. But amid the advances are losses that bring a sense of insecurity and fear.

That is the paradox! The mix of advances and challenges leave us filled with ambiguity. We become immobilized as we search for answers or yield to complexity. Conscience calls, but trade-offs are calculated. Citizen activism is rising, fueled by access to information and knowledge previously unknown. Whistle blowers risk pain and punishment, as conscience rises in the face of injustice.

Who or what is the foe? We are told that the process and product of globalization has resulted in increases in health, wealth, and happiness. But is globalization really hegemonic, controlled by a few nations, corporate monopolies, and powerful individuals? Who is it benefitting?

The concentration of power, wealth, and position is, in my opinion, our greatest threat. It seeks a homogenization of social orders, cultures, and fundamental values. In the heady post WWII days, a strong sense of national pride and identity was natural. But! We were warned by Eisenhower of the impending dangers of a “Military-Industrial Complex” and the capacity of this Complex to dominate our nation’s future. Eisenhower, unfortunately, did not tell us the Complex would grow, and become a “military-industrial-congressional-educational-moral-technological-cultural-managed complex,” now resistant to change because of complexity, resiliency, and concentration of wealth, power, and position.

There is a calibrated mental calculus now in use by those with wealth, power, and position. They are firmly entrenched in every institution, and their interests are narrow and self-serving. We argue over the benefits of capitalism and other neo-liberal policies even as neo-cons re-assert their interests. And through all of this, the “Just Enough” principle is played out confusing, immobilizing, frightening a public unaccustomed to the unfolding changes. Is this a planned conspiracy? I do not know! I do know the wealthy, powerful, and positioned know each other, gather, and benefit from their relationships. I know they function in secrecy, while our privacy is removed. They set the vision. Their appointed “acolytes” implement the vision. Conspiracy? “A rose by any other name, is still a rose.”

What we have today is not much different from the gilded-age period when monopolies in banking, steel, oil, and transportation brought together “barons” in Jekyll Island, Georgia. Together, they grasped their mutual interests. Today we have a return in the form of “Big” agriculture, banking, education, energy, finance, medicine, military, pharmacology, transportation, and on and on. The times return!

The words of an old Arab saying come to mind: “The times are father to the child.” We are experiencing a time of “Just Enough!” The question remains to be answered whether “Just Enough” will be understood, questioned, and replaced by “Not Enough?” Resentment is “smoldering”! Citizens recognize the tactics being used. That may be the topic of my next commentary: Behavioral control through oppression. Ahhh, the endless historical story!

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Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

This is the third in a three-part series originally published on https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/06/the-just-enough-policy-behavioral-control-of-collective-protest-through-minimum-reward/

How to Feed the Power Hungry

Posted on January 21, 2016 by kathiemm

Cartoon from the records of the National Child Labor Committee (U.S.). During the Progressive Era many organizations were formed to outlaw the child labor that was a feature of Gilded Age industrial revolution, which included teenage girls working long hours in mills. The cartoon shows a child laborer supporting the world with her labor, including an uncaring robber baron industrialist.
Image is in the public domain.

There are two easy ways to feed the voracious power-wielding groups in this country, those contemporary robber barons who gobble up the sustenance, the lives, the well-being of millions of people and the planet on which they struggle to survive:

1) Succumb to their lies, their distortions, their fear-mongering, their racism, their endless worship of capitalism, and their militarization of everything; how succumb? by voting for them;

and

2) Don’t vote. Stay home. Tell yourself, the world is an unholy mess. Your vote won’t matter. There is no difference between political parties. That’ll get them. Not.

This is a big year. Another Presidential election, Congressional elections, other elections, and if you’re a US citizen 18 or over, you have the right to vote. There may be no right more important than that one. Thousands of people were locked up, beaten, and murdered so that you and your compatriots would have that right.

From small communities to the nation as a whole, countless decisions are decided by votes. Congress votes to preserve or destroy forests, wildlife, the atmosphere.

The President votes by approving or vetoing Congressional votes.

Community level governments decide whether or not to put more money into education, recreation, local social services based on voter behavior.

It’s not too late to make a new year’s resolution and this one won’t involve giving up things you like.

Vote.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Corporate America: Purveyor of Inhuman “Rights”

Posted on June 30, 2014June 30, 2014 by kathiemm

When you hear the word “rights” in the American corporate media, it is usually preceded by “Constitutional” rather than “human.”

The Supreme Court has declared that corporations have the same rights as people. Their first declaration of this principle came as early as 1818 and most recently in 2010 in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.

The Citizens United decision serves the latest cabal of robber barons and further empowers the military industrial complex, which may be credited by the Court as having enough brain to exercise rights but has manifested little in regard to a heart.

Indeed, in exercising their putative Constitutional rights, the profiteers of the military industrial complex have shown an enormous talent for crushing human rights both within the borders of the United States and in other lands wounded by US hegemony.

In one of the latest examples of human rights violations in the US, the City of Detroit has been shutting off water to the poorest residents of the city, unable to pay their water bills.

The shutoffs have been linked to a push towards privatization of the water system. Like the privatization of prison management, this effort is one more giant step forward in the rush to privatization that disproportionately violates the human rights of people of color and poverty in the U.S.

Former President Jimmy Carter is appalled by the U.S. record on human rights violations.

How about you?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Robber barons, redux: Labor Day

Posted on September 2, 2013March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

If you know what a robber baron is, and have noticed them lurking around recently, go to the head of the class.

Cartoon of child labor supporting robber baron. Image in public domain.

As Merriam-Webster reminds us, “robber baron” refers to:

“1: an American capitalist of the latter part of the 19th century who became wealthy through exploitation (as of natural resources, governmental influence, or low wage scales)
2: a business owner or executive who acquires wealth through ethically questionable tactics”

The barons are definitely back, and more powerful than ever. Only we call them Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and the Top 1% now.

Check out some of the revealing documentaries:

As history so often shows us, when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That has been particularly true for people of color and immigrants following the recent great shift in money from the poorer to the richer.

A recent book from Laura Gottesdiener, A dream foreclosed: Black America and the fight for a place to call home, provides many of the horrendous details:

The current unemployment rate for blacks is 13.7%
The median net wealth of black families in 2010 was $4,900, compared to $97,000 for white families—a number that is itself inflated by multimillionaire and billionaire whites
Since 2007, corporate corruption and loan-sharking have led to at least 4.8 million completed foreclosures, disproportionately to black and Latino families.

Gottesdiener also provides some heartening examples of Occupy movement and other community organizers’ work to stop the plunder of poor.

The labor movement learned long ago that individual and community efforts can bring about important change—although preserving those changes demands constant vigilance.

Most members of American labor have to work this Labor Day “holiday,” but we would all do well to remember the value of activism.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology