Concerning the cameras rolling unedited for 30 minutes, you certainly picked a couple of interesting examples WRT my personal history. I can remember Bull Conner sitting on my grandfather’s front porch back in the 1950′s, and I had some eye-opening experiences in the Ca Mau Peninsula in the late 1960′s, though nothing so harrowing as My Lai, more a matter of environmental devastation (‘moonscaping’, I call it).

What a coincidence, if that’s what it is.

I look forward to getting your book from the library.

Oh, and no more annoyance from Mapp.

As to the littles: About 70 percent of the US population has no meaningful net wealth. That’s little.

Meanwhile, there are about a million households in which property incomes are huge and independent of the labor of the occupants, who “work” only if they feel like making that show or because they want to keep an eye on their possessions. These people own half of everything in the country, and are the primary beneficiaries (see Alfred D. Chandler) of the corporate capitalist system and its rigid logic. These people enjoy access and influence in rough proportion to their commanding share of the wealth, and they also govern a system of “democracy” where possession of both major cash and ideological “seriousness” as judged by the commercial media are necessary prerequisites for any significant candidacy for public office.

Since it isn’t tied to a claim about bodily appearance, defining class is at least as tricky as defining race or gender. My view is that class “membership” (and the corresponding behavioral proclivities) can best be assessed by looking for individuals’ place in three distinct life circumstances: 1) wealth, 2) degree of power over macro-economic and political decisions, and 3) degree of compulsory-ness of work, with wealth ownership being the most fundamental factor. At the top, wealth and power are immense and work is totally optional. In the middle, wealth and power are real but not large enough to make labor optional. The bottom 70 or 80 percent live paycheck-to-paycheck at best, have basically no political power, and must work in order to avoid hard-core poverty. For the excellent reason that nobody represents their interests in the political process, most of the bottoms refrain from voting.

Contrary to mainstream dogma, individuals’ class position does exert a heavy influence on the likelihood of certain attitudes and behaviors, and these conditioned behaviors explain the lion’s share of how this society works. This is a corporate capitalist society. The interests and actions of the business owners exert a huge (and arguably totalitarian) degree of influence on our overall choices and actions.

Anyhow, I am thinking more of what Chomsky has called the ‘comprador class’ or rather the domestic analogue of such a class. I don’t blame the wretched of the earth for the condition of the earth.

But please tell us who comprise the ‘little people’ in the USA and who the Bigs. I ask this in honest perplexity. Is this a comprehensive dichotomy?

Perhaps you could point me to an item in the TCT archive. Thanks.

The polls show that over half the voting population was against Obama’s Afghan escalation. And the voting population is the more conservative half of our total population.

Take a look at Chomsky’s Failed States.

No offense, but I’m getting damned sick of the left blaming the little people for the sins of the Bigs.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/25/change-security-internet-oped-cx_rm_outsourcing08_0529data.html

Maybe it won’t be quite so grim. Labor struggle might raise living standards for today’s low cost workers or their descendants so that wage equalization will settle at a higher level than today’s lowest level.

Today’s world leader in economic power however seems devoted to throwing its weight behind oligarchs wherever its attention lingers, so that labor struggle is often folded into other issues generally associated with “stabilization” (always with its “security” component). This suggests to me at least that labor struggle will be long and bloody and not very successful without a U.S. domestic labor movement renewal and, perhaps more importantly, a renewed and sustained U.S. peace movement.

But peace movements never seem to get much traction or develop the staying power of other institutional forms in the U.S., suggesting that peace’s opposite has instrumental value as a national organizing principle. War abroad is considered an essential element of peace at home. War abroad is popular.

I’m far from being an expert, but it looks to me like much of the last century’s worth of technological development has not only been inspired by the capitalist system, but fine-tuned to sustain its illusions and fulfill its unique needs.

Again, I’m not an economist or a technologist, but what little I know suggests that much of the apparatus of production itself make no sense, and would in fact barely function outside the current capitalist context. What use could any rational system make of these specialized factories, thrown up wherever the labor is cheapest, designed to extract maximum work from a minimally skilled workforce, in what I suspect are less-than-humane conditions? If the system is going to come apart — and it seems determined to — will it even be possible to retool the technology of modern agribusiness to keep people fed?

Just asking.

America, said Paulson, had ‘humiliated itself as a nation.’ Many Americans found this hard to understand: they did not feel humiliated. But, then again, they had not stated their reputations on the free-market philosophy that created this mess. Paulson had; so had Bernanke; so had the financial elites of America, Britain, and many smaller countries.

This is the summation for our times. I chose, out of informed principle and molecular bull-headedness, not to join the corporate or academic cesspools. I will not revert to some paleolithic existence because of the illegalities and devastation other classmates and college-educated folk of these worlds wrought, though nor will I ever escape the consequences of their moronic escapades.
Like Jean, I will live amongst the wreckage, but I am neither the cause, nor the end of it. All thinking people are ready for better ways, but these cannot be willed into being through self-abnegation. That Catholic sense of absolution through specious self-assignation of guilt is a philosophy of lunacy.

i’m too output oriented
like most post modern anaclytics

sorry you deserve constant affirmation