Competition and Consciousness

From some ideas relating to the post I previously mentioned on OlyBlog:

Competition may have its place. But when competition gets to the point of subduing, subjugating, demeaning—of behaving in ways that are downright cruel (or even just unfriendly,) then what good is that!

Mean-spirited competition, oppressive competition, divides—it opens up corridors for greed and avarice, toward pursuit of conquest.

Competition and Consciousness
When there is competition to get rich, and there is also insufficient consciousness and caring about others' well-being, then we wind up with social situations ripe for the outbreak of violence—violence even to the extreme point of war.

Because the real cause of war is competition over material resources, and the quest for material and economic superiority.

And truth is the first casualty of war.

A Question about Wealth and Privilege, and Oppression and Suffering

Let us ask whether our wealth and privilege depend on oppression and cause suffering.

No Imperialism, No Racism

Racial and economic justice, and the cessation of violent conflict! Abolition of an offensive economic, military-industrial establishment...

The enemy is not personnel. It is not personal. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is fear, xenophobia, racism and other prejudice. The enemy is aggression and violence and hate.

Here are three copies of a video I recently made, my intent was to deal with the problem of an 'us v. them' mentality, privilege and oppression, wealth disparity, socio-economic harmfulness, and I suppose, violence in general.

Videos are below the fold.

Scenes from the Apocolypse (Day 4 at the US Social Forum in Detroit)

My friend just drove through East Detroit. I'm told that it looks like a scene from the Apocolypse. The houses still standing in disrepair, and only a few sparse houses still standing, with giant trees standing like sentinels, and some blocks are entirely razed to the ground every house collapsed. There are giant multi-story factories crumbling, with upper stories caving in...

What a story. What an indictment of our amoral/immoral boom and bust economy. I am thinking about a transition to a life-serving society, rather than one that presumes the possibility of enlightened and altruistic self-interest.

I believe progress is toward service, toward caring, toward a society that ensures the mutual uplift of all people, a society that is non-discriminatory.

I believe that the highest purpose for humanity on Earth is stewardship and care-taking, because I believe that the Earth does not belong to any one of us, nor to all of us collectively—rather it's the other way around, in that we belong to the Earth, and we are part of the Earth.

It's so sad to see the poverty that exists in the midst of so much abundance. So sad to see the racism that goes on to this day.

I had a conversation with a friend earlier about their parents opinion that poor people are to blame for their plight because they're lazy.

I am concerned that this type of thinking is all too prevalent in the mainstream, and is the result of ignorance and a misguided and incomplete understanding of systematic privilege and oppression, and the effects of violence and abuse on individuals and communities.

People suffer mistreatment and it causes impairment. It is incorrect to blame people with impairment for their subsequent disability. People who suffer with impairment ought to be supported and cared for, ought to be nurtured and accepted for their condition—as they are—and not subjected to pity, nor to discouragement based on their condition.

It's about unconditional love. And understanding that all people are good. And while some people behave in ways that aren't good (probably all of us do to some extent in this society (because society is not designed to serve life/our best interests of health and mutual prosperity) it makes sense to strive for understanding and for a world that works for all people, regardless of age, gender, religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, ability, and etc..

"Another world is possible. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing." —Arundhati Roy

The Global Richlist

Check out this site to learn where you sit in regard to global wealth. You might be VERY surprised by HOW RICH YOU ARE in comparison to the rest of humanity. http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Healthcare: NOT Wealthcare!

Healthcare: NOT Wealthcare!

MLK RIP

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors

Wednesday 04 April 2007

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years - his last years - are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling segregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or [the right] to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" - including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

...

link to original

Wealth Distribution

I was really shocked by these numbers. I knew that the ultra-wealthy were disproportionately wealthy, but I was unaware of the severity of the issue:

The Kansas City Star
By Rick Montgomery
...
While the rest of America rolls its eyeballs at such injustice, a spate of new studies and statistics throws a blinding spotlight on just how concentrated the world’s wealth has become. The richest of the rich are getting much richer, and ascending quicker, than are the rather wealthy.

And Average Joe? He appears stuck in the mud.

According to data recently prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households saw an increase in real household income of 2 percent between 1990 and 2004. That’s adjusted for inflation.

Two. Percent. In 14 years.

Now creep up the income ladder to the top 1 percent of households. There, says the center’s Aviva Aron-Dine, real income shot up 57 percent in the same period.

Climb higher. For the top 0.1 percent — where incomes average about $4.5 million a year — the jump was 85 percent. For the top .01 percent, 112 percent.

“The increasing gulf between the rich and super rich is a reflection of the greater chasm throughout society,” says Aron-Dine. “What’s going on is an increasingly skewed assessment of wage and income over the long term.”

Not since the 1920s — the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rollicking Jay Gatsby — has such a small slice of America hoarded so much of the nation’s income, her findings show.

Globally, the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of the personal wealth, says a new study by U.N. researchers.
...

link to original

Here's another interesting source of infomration in re: wealth distribution:

Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
September 2005 (updated December 2006)
...
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 39.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2004).
...

click here to see Table 1 and Figure 1.

Finally, here is a story from the Washington Post describing how the tax burden has shifted since George Bush entered the White House and began his tax cut regime:

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 13, 2004; Page A04

Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.
...

link