Category Archives: Uncategorized
Understanding The Matrix
What I find most compelling in the Matrix films is the deep connection between the fiction and the world we inhabit. Filmmaker Lana Wachowski has indicated the red pill represented the medication used in the process of gender transition, which is one possible interpretation. Great art often contains several layers of meaning, but alternative perspectives are not all created equal. Trying to hijack these films to use as right-wing propaganda is abhorrent, but let’s not feed oxygen to that dumpster fire. The Matrix could also be identified with the forces of capitalism but people are oppressed in other economic systems too.
When I began, many years ago, to try to dig to the foundations of what is wrong with the world, I learned about things like corruption, regulatory capture and Manufacturing Consent. Then I read a mind-blowing 2014 study by Gilens & Page which demonstrated that the only demographic group in the U.S. who get the policies they vote for are the wealthy. The U.S. is not a republic – not a “representative democracy” – in anything but name. The U.S. is an oligarchy. The few who rule are very rich, but if a majority of rich people tried to steer the country to the left to avoid impending pitchforks, they would likely fail.
The Matrix is real and it is constructed of lies.
The lies begin in early childhood. The tooth fairy myth conditions children to go along with a false narrative, if they know what’s good for them, or the money won’t appear under the pillow. Many adult Christians still pray to God like he’s Santa Claus on steroids.
The really Big Lie foundational to so many others is that average people have the collective power to change the world by voting. There was a brief shining moment between the Summer of Love and the infamous Powell Memo when it seemed possible, and millions clung to that shimmering narrative because it felt good, but it was just a mirage in the desert, an illusion forever beyond our reach. Those who are well off find it easy to believe that “representative democracy” is real because they generally get what they vote for, but they are blind to the hard fact that 90% of us do not.
There are many binary categories used to divide and rule us. Increasing polarization only serves the machines and should be guarded against. There are many Big Lies that need to be recognized as such and transformed into new truths:
“Freedom”
“Democracy”
“The American Dream”
“Work hard and you’ll get ahead”
“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain”
In our world, every vote you cast supports the illusion. Every vote supports The Matrix of Lies. Every vote represents more power and wealth extracted by a handful of greedy multi-billionaires to be used against everyone outside their circle. If you find this statement very uncomfortable, you know what cognitive dissonance feels like. We desperately want this to not be true. I now recognize this discomfort as a weapon wielded against us. Our cognitive dissonance keeps us stuck in The Matrix. Fear of pain keeps us stuck; and fear of the chaos we’ve been told will certainly emerge if we fail to comply.
Many of us would like to nuke the entire political & socioeconomic system and some even think it necessary, but we could rise above The Matrix instead. If you wait until the corporate media gives you permission to do so, you will be forever at the mercy of sentient beings who really don’t care if their insatiable greed and lust for power hurts or kills you and the people you love. Many of us, faced with the dawning of this painful truth, just take the blue pill and I cannot fault them for it. None of us want to acknowledge that we are all unwitting agents of The Matrix or that our compliance supports it and empowers it.
I don’t know how all this will end. I’m not going to fly off and save the world, but I can take one step at a time and try to move in the direction of truth. I like to think this is what happens after the movie ends.
Edit: I wrote this before I learned about #MassFormation, which is perhaps a more accurate description for what is happening than #CognitiveDissonance.
The Big Lie Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy
One of the malevolent subsidiaries of the Big Lie is that “there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” It is true that you can’t just ‘vote’ your way out of an oligarchy, but a variety of alternative tactics will be required to rebuild democracy. Some may march in the street with symbolic pitchforks and be mauled by militarized police, but that spectacle may not be necessary just yet. There are still ways to get the job done without risking tear gas & rubber bullets. Hope is not dead, but this window of opportunity is shrinking fast.
There are several grassroots initiatives undermining the oligarchy/plutocracy and the smartest ones frame our common enemy as “corruption” instead of “capitalism” or “billionaires” because neither the liberals nor conservatives can win this battle without help and trying to restore democratic power only for “my side” is obviously a non-starter. The only way to restore power to all the people from whom it was stolen is to strive for unity in a non-partisan anti-corruption movement.
Expect the plutocrats to fight this every step of the way. Edward Snowden and the subsequent Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the underhanded information warfare tactics already used successfully to divide & rule us. The billionaires’ lackeys will drive wedges into any anti-corruption movement along as many fault lines as possible. Divide & rule has always been the plutocracy’s strongest defence and it is clear how they have weaponized identity politics to this end.
Those of us who have the patience and tact to use “mental ju-jitsu” skills to de-escalate polarized conversations might train others how to do it. We need to get in touch with the fundamental humanity of people who are literally being framed as our enemies. Setting up our fellow citizens to be attacked by others is criminal and the deep state and/or private contractors engaged in psychological and information warfare ought to be held accountable.
Although corruption is often framed as a monster, huge beyond our reach, there are many ways to hack tentacles off this beast. Some suggest overturning Citizens United would require a constitutional convention, but the Koch network have clear intentions to hijack such an event for their own benefit. Grassroots groups all over the country have already used initiatives in state & local races to enact anti-corruption laws. When enough states clean up their own backyards, we’ll hit a tipping point and the American Anti-Corruption Act can be implemented at the federal level.
Once that happens, parties and candidates not beholden to the wealthy will be easier to elect and it when they reach a critical mass in both houses, it will be possible to mend shredded infrastructure and the social safety net. Eventually, deeper forms of corruption can be addressed, like regulatory capture. It’s time for the trust-busting that finally cut the robber barons down to size to make a comeback. Perhaps one day robust independent oversight of the alphabet agencies can be developed to protect civil and privacy rights and bring the military-industrial-complex to heel.
Opinions differ on which of the many crises we face is the worst one but logic keeps leading back to a singular, fundamental truth. Undermining the plutocracy must come first – chronologically – because voters can’t solve any other problems until they have the power to do so. The Big Lie of “democracy” deliberately blinds voters to the fundamental problem that needs to be solved before all others, so let’s hold the corporate media accountable for malpractice and get to work on solving the core problem.
This post is part of a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
The Big Lie Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters
The first two essays in this series laid out the Big Lie of “U.S. democracy” and why it is so hard for the truth about oligarchy/plutocracy to get any traction in the media.
Corporate plutocracy in the U.S.. deprives people of their democratic power, but it does not exist to seek power alone. Incomprehensible volumes of wealth and income have been sucked from the pockets of the poor and working class by the ultra-rich, and this cash vacuum has been turbocharged by the pandemic response.
About a month before the Gilens & Page study was published, billionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer gave a TEDtalk in which he warned his peers:
“I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when.”
The apparent response of the ruling class has been something akin to “Alrighty then, a police state it is!” Whether the uprising Hanauer warned of can be avoided or merely delayed remains to be seen. Anyone who has read history ought to know it’s a bad idea to create a massive demographic of angry people who have literally nothing to lose. The corporate Democrats seem as oblivious as the French aristocracy before their heads began to roll.
One might expect the plutocrats to throw us a bone like Medicare for all out of consideration for their own self interest, if not the suffering poor, but despite the massive financial hardship caused by the pandemic, very little is being done to alleviate the acute suffering of tens of millions of people. With massive ongoing protests in many cities and calls for a General Strike, this callous disregard for human suffering may seem remarkably shortsighted, but the oligarchs see things from a higher perch than the rest of us.
The plutocracy stays on top by the effective use of Divide & Rule tactics. They hide in the shadows while encouraging voters on the left and right to see one another as enemies. They play a Polarization Game of their own design in which they are the only possible victors. None of us can “win” such a game by taking sides. On the contrary the only way the rest of us can beat the plutocrats at their own game is to refuse to be played. We win when we recognize those who vote differently as people and acknowledge our shared humanity.
Instead of getting stoked against the enemies we’re told it’s OK to hate, we all need to burst our Orwellian filter bubbles and develop our awareness of the way propaganda is being used to dehumanize us all. We need to recognize that the horrors we’ve been told will be visited upon us if ‘the other side’ wins are falsehoods that pale in comparison to what dystopian nightmares our lives may become if the current corporate technocracy is not brought under human and humane, democratic control, and soon.
Continued in Part 4
This post is part of a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
The Big Lie Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy
Oligarchy means rule by the few, but Plutocracy, which means rule by the wealthy, may be a more accurate term to describe U.S. governance. However, plutocracy and oligarchy can be used interchangeably not just because the few who rule also happen to be rich, but because of the other feature both systems have in common: the average citizen has no say in public policy, so the ruling class does not have the consent of the governed.
The Big Lie that the U.S. is a “democracy” has been stubbornly persistent for a number of reasons, including cultural saturation and cognitive dissonance, but there’s another factor that may contribute to maintaining the illusion of choice. The Gilens & Page study (2014) that exposed the U.S. Oligarchy notes that the probability of a law passing is about 30% no matter what percentage of average voters approve of it. This figure may have a unique significance with respect the way our brains are wired. Adolescent rats love to wrestle, and Panksepp discovered that if one rat is at least 10% bigger than another, it will trounce the smaller rat every time. However, if the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat won’t play. If the little rat doesn’t play, the big rat can’t have fun.
Of course, correlation is not causation, but perhaps this is the reason the average voter’s influence on public policy flatlines at 30% rather than 25%, or ten. Perhaps the big rats – the oligarchs – let voters win 30% of the time so we’ll continue to cling to the illusion of democracy, even though the little rats only ever win when the big rats let them. Perhaps the only reason voters get even 30% of what they want is to prevent them from building guillotines.
It is also instructive to consider the specific policies which have caused the most severe economic harm to the poor and working class, like NAFTA. In Canada, another pseudo-democracy, nobody has replicated Gilens & Page yet and I don’t think any political science student who wants to do so should expect encouragement from the academic establishment because I am certain the same results would emerge.
A typical Canadian election involves turfing out a party who failed to deliver on their promises. In Canada’s 1988 single-issue federal election, a majority of the electorate voted for parties that promised to reject the North American Free Trade Agreement, but their jobs were sent to Mexico anyway and did not return even after the “false majority” government responsible was kicked to the curb in the next election. Canada’s new Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland called out the Plutocrats in 2013, and was offered a seat at their table for her trouble, so now she’s too busy to say anything more on the topic.
Although the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be trotted out as rare example of the people actually getting who, if not what, they voted for, there is no certainty voters will ever see her platform come to fruition because the vast majority of both houses is beholden to the oligarchy. AOC was never expected to win her primary against an establishment incumbent, and may not have succeeded if the Democratic Party had recognized the threat she posed to their power before it was too late.
In Democratic primaries, candidates can legally be selected in ‘smoke-filled rooms‘ rather than elected. The judge who dismissed the DNC cheating lawsuit in 2017 said that while it was clear the DNC rigged the primary to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination, cheating his supporters out of the millions of dollars they had donated wasn’t illegal. Many of the same signs of cheating discovered in the 2016 Democratic primaries have been repeated in the current race, not that Republicans are above similar shady tactics.
There is abundant evidence, for those who trouble themselves to seek it out, that Noam Chomsky’s assessment of the duopoly was correct:
“In the US, there is basically one party – the Business Party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies, as is most of the population.”
George Carlin illuminated this as well, and we laughed, but now when we read his rants it’s clear he was more than just a comedian and his brilliant work pointed to a hard truth. Instead of trotting out a Carlin quote here, I’ll give the last word to the late Bill Hicks:
I’ll show you politics in America, here it is:
“I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs”
“I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking”
“Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding both puppets.”
Continued in Part 3
This post is part of a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy”
It’s time to stop calling the U.S. a democracy not only because there is insufficient evidence for it but also because failure to challenge the Big Lie perpetuates the core problem it seeks to obscure. There is abundant evidence the U.S. is an oligarchy or, perhaps more accurately, a plutocracy.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels
School teachers who told us about Hitler also taught us that the U.S.A. was a “democracy” and perhaps in 1975 it was still true, but any reporter who continues to refer to the U.S. as a democracy today, without qualifying the term, is committing journalistic malpractice. Sadly, the Big Lie is buried among so many others it tends to go unnoticed.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit democracy index 2020, the U.S. is a “flawed democracy” but it would be more accurate to call it a “pseudo-democracy” or a “former democracy” particularly at the federal level, because there are serious weaknesses in the way this index is measured. The methodology is not transparent, relies largely on “experts’ assessments” and the survey used ignores the crucial question of whether the average voters’ preferences are actually reflected in public policy.
Our own experience tells us that no matter what the majority of us vote for, what we invariably get is what the economic elite want or are willing to allow. In 2014 an academic paper by Gilens & Page confirmed what the average voter already suspected, based on data from 1981 to 2002. In a nutshell:
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
I don’t have concrete evidence upon which to draw conclusions about the health of democracy prior to 1981, but we do know Reagan’s election marked neoliberalism’s shift into high gear. The efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, outlined in the infamous Powell Memo, culminated in what Chris Hedges called a corporate coup d’état turning a once-proud Republic into a covert plutocracy.
Naturally, the corporate media propagates the Big Lie that the U.S. is a democracy or constitutional republic for self-serving reasons. Those who do speak the truth have gone unheeded, although this now appears to be shifting as the consequences of plutocracy become harder to hide. The process of Manufacturing Consent is breaking down because the mainstream media is losing it’s grip on the public mind and social media censorship hasn’t replaced it… yet.
Most mainstream media outlets ignored ‘the Princeton study‘ and its disturbing conclusions. MSNBC did a segment on the findings, and another outlet attacked it, but few even mentioned it before the story disappeared from public view. Critics of Gilens & Page argued over the extent to which the wishes of voters aligned with those of the economic elite without taking into account the extent to which public opinion is shaped by the media. One criticism of the study – I kid you not – is that governance is so darned complicated that we’re better off leaving it to the “experts.” Events since 1980 make it clear we are not ruled by benign philosopher kings, but looters making off with everything that isn’t nailed down.
Setting the truth before the public, though, is not sufficient for them to accept it. Because we took in the Big Lie at an early age, it is harder to dislodge than more recently acquired knowledge. The psychological phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance” makes it very difficult to convince people that U.S. Democracy is, in fact, a lie. Like a red pill covered in barbed spikes, it does not go down easily, not even for me.
The widely held misconception that we can make the world a better place by “voting” blinds voters to the reality that other methods will be needed to overturn oligarchy. If we hope to rebuild representative democracy we must first admit that we’ve lost it. We all need to open our eyes now, even if it hurts, and insist on honesty about oligarchy/plutocracy while there is still hope to overturn it.
Note: Prior to 2020/08/21, this piece was much longer, but it has now been split it into a 4-part series.
The Big Lie Part 1: “Democracy” (The U.S. is not a republic)
Part 2: Duopoly = Oligarchy = Plutocracy (How they get away with it)
Part 3: Plutocrats = Looters (Why we need to fix this)
Part 4: Cancel Plutocracy (How to solve the problem)
Remembering the Dead we Betrayed
Every November I listen to The Green Fields of France, but I rarely sing along because I can’t even listen to it without weeping. I weep because we have broken faith with the unquiet dead who lie under Flanders fields. Not just because we’re still sending our sons and now daughters to die in foreign lands, but because so many have died in vain. We told them they were spreading democracy, but we have failed to protect and preserve democracy here at home.
Every time a Canadian dies in battle, we have a chance to make sure he or she is the last to die in a pointless foreign entanglement to ‘increase shareholder value’ for transnational fossil fuel corporations. However, we cannot accomplish this unless and until we reclaim the power to do so, and electoral reform is the best solution to the erosion of our democracy.
To us they threw the torch from failing hands and we dropped it. Its time to pick it up again and hold it high the next time the government tells us Electoral Reform is not a priority.
Previous Remembrance Day blog post:
“Red Poppy, White Poppy. Different Colours, Same Flower“
Trudeau is Not the Problem
The problem is that you don’t live in a functioning democracy. People criticize Justin Trudeau for all kinds of reasons that are useless distractions from the most serious problem this country faces: the loss of democracy. The fact that Canadians fail to comprehend how badly democracy has been damaged makes it harder to solve the problem. Electoral Reform is the most fundamental issue facing Canadians because we cannot hope to solve any of the other serious problems we face unless and until we reclaim the power to do so.
“First past the post” (FPTP) electoral systems are fundamentally unfair because they can give parties 100% of the power with support from less than 50% of the voters. In addition to unfair elections, Canadians really don’t understand the corrosive effect ‘party discipline’ has on democracy. Party discipline means you don’t have to buy a boatload of MPs if you want to shape legislation. All the billionaire plutocrats need to do is use the access that wealth affords and exert their considerable influence over the handful of people at the top of the party in power who tell our MPs how they must vote. These people are friends, neighbours and colleagues who rub shoulders at social events.
In 2014, Gilens & Page published the Princeton Study which proved the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy. If you replicated that study here, you’d get the same results. If you want a solid example of Canadian politicians ignoring the will of their constituents, look at 1988’s single-issue election where the majority of Canadians voted against NAFTA, but one party got 57% of the seats with only 43% of the vote. If you think only the Tories break promises to their voters, look at the GST.
Noam Chomsky said this about the U.S. political system:
When flawed electoral system gives people more power than they deserve, bad things will happen. Power can make ‘good’ men go bad and bad men much worse. I don’t think most people understand what power does to people. In 1870 there was a debate about a proposed new doctrine in the Catholic Church. Implementing the doctrine of papal infallibility was one of the worst decisions the Catholic Church ever made. In opposition to this travesty, here is what one it’s sharpest critics wrote:
” I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. ” -Lord Acton
This fundamental property of power explains most of what is wrong with the world, from Harvey Weinstein to income inequality to war and genocide. If you think Canadians can relax because we aren’t ruled by Donald Trump (yet) you need to wake up because we’re headed down the same path.
DriveTest Fail Rate Mystery Solved
The wide variations in pass/fail rates at DriveTest centers throughout Ontario aren’t news, but what causes those variations? The worst fail rates are in and around Toronto where one assumes there may be worse traffic, but there’s another significant difference in that land values are much higher. I studied the problem after my son failed his first road test before he even got out of an incredibly small parking space and noticed the problem presented by poor parking lot design. This is a problem which can be fixed and should be remedied, but that won’t happen overnight. Meanwhile, understanding the parking lot problem may help new drivers save the time, trouble and expense of re-booking a failed road test, not to mention preventing damage to vehicles.
The parking spaces nearest the entrance to the Port Union DriveTest location in Scarborough don’t even come close to meeting the basic space requirements laid out in municipal by-laws. Where parking spaces are too shallow and drive aisles too narrow, driving examiners are deliberately asking people to back into parking spaces that are too small to maneuver into safely, even though management has been alerted to this problem by driving instructors who bring their students for testing. The problem would be less pronounced if the spaces were wider to make up for the narrow drive aisle, but they squeezed the maximum number of spaces in by keeping to the minimal width of 2.6 metres.
The city zoning bylaw says that where the parking spots are perpendicular, the drive aisle should be at least six metres wide. The width of the drive aisle at Port Union’s DriveTest facility varies, but along this stretch it narrows from 5.5 m at the wider end to a mere 4.3 m at the its narrowest point. In addition, parking spaces in the same section are only 4.3 m deep, although the bylaw says they should be 5.6 m in length. Shortly after I took the photo below, a transport truck had a heck of a time squeezing past the SUV with the bike rack. Notice where the yellow stripes end. Where drive aisles are too narrow to allow perpendicular parking, spaces should be raked to a 45 degree angle.
If you are taking a road test at Port Union, do not park in the first few spots, or those numbered 17 through 36. Here’s a Google map image with red x’s showing the locations of the parking spots you should avoid because there is insufficient room to get in or out cleanly. If you park there, not only is it harder to park, there is a risk someone else will pull in so close beside you that you cannot get out without scraping paint, which will end your test before it begins. Fortunately, there a number of parking spaces available that have a wide enough drive aisle in front of them.
While many DriveTest facilities suffer from poor parking design, I spotted another variant at Downsview. Try to avoid using the drive aisle nearest the entrance because a lane marking there decreases safety. When traversing a parking lot, the safest place to drive is down the middle of the drive aisle because it increases visibility and also the distance between your vehicle and others’ bumpers. Insisting that drivers keep to the right increases the chance of a fender-bender, and kissing fenders will end your driving test immediately. I don’t know if examiners are faulting people for not staying in those lanes, but feel free to share your experience in the comments.
If you’re going to take your test at another center, scope out the parking area first to determine if there are problem areas to avoid. I took a tape measure to Port Union, but you can get a pretty good idea by holding a ruler to the scale at the lower right of a google map image and doing a little math. (On my monitor 1mm = .25 m, but your mileage may vary) Perhaps the lower fail rate at the East York DriveTest can be attributed to a more spacious parking area. (upper left of the photo below) At some facilities it may be impossible to find any parking spot with adequate space.
The nature of driving tests makes it necessary to have dedicated parking spaces available and these should meet some basic standards just as we should expect a roof to keep out the rain. Parking lots that fail to provide adequate space should be re-designed to meet code or rejected for use by a DriveTest facility. Municipalities may have standards that vary, but the MTO should establish minimum sizes for parking spaces and drive aisles so DriveTest facilities are consistent across the province. The Minister of Transportation is responsible for these facilities, so if your car was damaged as a result of inadequate parking space, feel free to send your concerns to the Honourable Steven Del Duca.
Given the high price of land in Toronto, the Ministry should not assume that commercial landlords provide parking spaces that meet the minimum requirements now specified in municipal by-laws. The current landlord may assume the lot meets code, but the municipality that approved the parking lot may have done so prior to the establishment of minimum space requirements.
Solving the parking problem will improve safety, reduce fail rates and long wait times and ensure new drivers are not subjected to unfair testing. Reducing a DriveTest location’s failure rate “norm” will also make it more attractive to new drivers booking road tests. The MTO should take ownership of this issue and work with Serca Canada (the company that operates the facilities on behalf of the province), their landlords and local building inspectors to redesign problem areas. In the meantime, unfair testing can be avoided by having DriveTest instructors refrain from requiring clients to park in areas without sufficient space where better options are available. This issue may similarly affect drivers in other jurisdictions as well.
If you’ve booked a road test, I hope this information helps you pass the first time. Good luck and happy trails!
Note: I share this research freely for the public good, but if you find my work valuable enough to consider rewarding it with a wee gratuity, here’s a link:
paypal.me/solvealltheproblems
How We’ve Been Played
The penny just dropped for me on how the ruling class get away with maintaining the illusion of democracy. If you’re not familiar with the Princeton Study (Gilens & Page, 2014) , this short video explains how the wishes of billionaires are reflected in public policy, while the wishes of the average voter have “NEAR ZERO” influence on the actions of our elected representatives.
The probability of any particular bill becoming a law is 30%, whether the average voter is opposed to it or supports it. You would think that being ignored 70% of the time would piss people off enough that they would take action, but you’d be wrong. Professor Jordan Peterson explains why in this lecture about how rats play (skip to 3:30). Adolescent rats like to wrestle, and Panksepp discovered that if a rat is at least 10% bigger, it will trounce a smaller rat every time.
If the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat won’t play. If the little rat doesn’t play, the big rat can’t have fun. When I heard that “30%” the light went on over my head. The big rats known as the “economic elite” whose wishes are reflected in public policy let the voters ‘win’ 30% of the time so that the illusion of democracy can be maintained. They give the little people the absolute minimum that they can get away with and still maintain the illusion of “democracy.” Clearly, the ruling class are big rats, and the rest of us have been played.
Before the Flood Needs a Sequel
I just watched Before the Flood on National Geographic, hoping that the filmmakers dug deep enough to get to the root of the problem. Although the film is a strong call to action, I was disappointed that it didn’t follow the story far enough to locate and identify the source of political inaction in America. The sad truth is that corruption is so extensive, and the political institutions so compromised that voting will not fix this problem unless and until anti-corruption ballot initiatives are passed in every state and eventually in Washington to get fossil fuel money out of the political process.
One of the saddest moments of the film was scientists blaming themselves for failing to inform the public, but that failure cannot be laid at their feet. The fourth estate – the news media – has failed spectacularly, an there is little hope for improvement now that corporate ownership is more concentrated than ever. The mainstream media frames issues and shapes public opinion. Algorithms on social media and Google are manipulated to promote the same narrow view of what is possible. Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” exposed the Propaganda Model but having accused the media of complicity, that understanding of power was never allowed to bubble to the surface of public consciousness in America. It is time to wake up and connect the dots between political corruption, corporate malfeasance, and media complicity. We need to lay the blame where it properly belongs. As Utah Phillips said:
The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses.
This is no time for blind optimism, but fear of the future won’t help either. The time has come to get angry at the crimes fossil fuel companies commit, especially in North Dakota. We need to recognize that what is ‘legal‘ and what is ‘right’ may be very different, in a world where corporations have been allowed to write laws that members of congress often don’t even read.
Before the Flood is a great documentary, but like the Paris Accords, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. I strongly recommend that in his next film, DiCaprio focus on the obstructionist fossil fuel corporations, even if they threaten to sue. If we’re too afraid to step on the toes of the oil giants, we cannot hope to stop them from destroying the biosphere. They have too much power and they are not going to give it up voluntarily. The world would be a better place if the biggest multinationals were broken up into smaller units.
The next film I want to see will focus on the current DOJ investigation of the horrifying fact that EXXON KNEW about man-made climate change in 1981 and spent decades hiding the truth and lying about it. A crime of that magnitude should result in prison for perpetrators and the company should be liquidated. Ecocide should be recognized as an International Crime Against Humanity under the Rome Statute and people of all nations should demand that their governments ratify the treaty. We need to fight to take back control of our governments and hold the fossil fuel giants to account. We can all begin by standing with Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline.
Connect ALL the Dots 