Forwarded message from Jacqueline Wasilewski
I just read Henry A. Giroux's article below when you have time. I provides all sorts of discourse for us to use in promoting SDD/ILIS and making it clear why it is important, i.e., making it intelligible to people who have not yet experienced it …
It is a long, dense article … but absolutely outstanding.
Tuesday 20 March 2012
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: “A group of right-wing extremists in the United States would have the American public believe it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of a market society. Comprising this group are the Republican Party extremists, religious fundamentalists such as Rick Santorum and a host of conservative anti-public foundations funded by billionaires such as the Koch brothers, whose pernicious influence fosters the political and cultural conditions for creating vast inequalities and massive human hardships throughout the globe.”
Phi Beta Iota: Selected extract below.
Overlaying the festering corruption is a discourse in which national destiny (coded in biblical scripture) becomes a political theology drawing attention away from the actual structural forces that decide who has access to health insurance, decent jobs, quality schooling and adequate health care. This disappearing act does more than whitewash history, obscure systemic inequalities of power and privatize public issues. It also creates social automatons, isolated individuals who live in gated communities along with their resident intellectuals who excite legions of consumer citizens to engage in a survival-of-the fittest ritual in order to climb heartlessly up the ladder of hyper-capitalism. The gated individual, scholar, artist, media pundit and celebrity – walled off from growing impoverished populations – are also cut loose from any ethical mooring or sense of social responsibility. Such a radical individualism and its shark-like values and practices have become the hallmark of American society. Unfortunately, hyper-capitalism does more than create a market-driven culture in which individuals demonstrate no responsibility for the other and are reduced to zombies worried about their personal safety, on the one hand, and their stock portfolios on the other. It also undermines public values, the centrality of the common good and any political arenas not yet sealed off from an awareness of our collective fate. As democracy succumbs to the instrumental politics of the market economy and the relentless hype of the commercially driven spectacle, it becomes more difficult to preserve those public spheres, dialogues and ideas through which private troubles and social issues can inform each other.
See Also:
Kenneth Bausch at Phi Beta Iota
Stuart Umpleby at Phi Beta Iota
