That's a great post, Wendy.  And with 13 reads, I'm surprised there are no comments. 

Mackey's speech is very good as far as the nature and value of freedom is concerned, and he does seem like a smart and good-intentioned person.  But I do have some of the same reservations about it that you do.  Mainly, it seems clear that he's naive about what's really at the heart of globalism, which he thinks is wonderful.  He apparently doesn't see that international banking owns the corporate world, and that the corporate world owns government (a condition defined by Mussolini as fascism).  He also doesn't seem to see that the method of globalism is to hamstring and even destroy nation states as it rolls on toward a global corporate oligarchy.  Now, although I, too, think government does far too much, if there is one valid role of government, it is to protect people from corporate abuse, theft, and control.  But when government and business are essentially the same entity, "protection" is a bitter joke because it's really betrayal.  Being a successful businessperson dedicated to not only profit but a better life and world for everyone, Mackey projects onto free-market capitalism his own principles and values.  Would that it really had them!

But what he says about freedom and (our) responsibility is right on the mark.  I don't like to call myself anything politically, but, I have to say that what the Libertarians are saying is just about what I'm left with after the conflagration of events that started with 9/11/01 burned away all the rest of my social and political ideas, beliefs, and "reality."   Yes, freedom is the thing that we find ourselves with less of every day.  But is that surprising?  We really are hooked on government "support" and "help."  We love our unemployment compensation, our social security, the idea of single-payer healthcare.  And these entitlements are good and even necessary when money is tight or just not flowing in at all.  But they're handed to us by a government that serves elite financial and corporate masters who have been keeping us as poor as they can manage for a long time.  No wonder we need this "help."  The thief gives us $1 in compensation for the $1000 he stole from us.  (Now, that's sharp business!) 

It's hard to really understand and accept that the more we ask government to do for us, the more it will do to us -- because the more control it will have over us, courtesy of our clueless selves.  Caring and compassion are essential for a humane condition in our society, but it's more and more clear that we can't expect this from a government run by sociopaths.  If we can take down this predatory economic system for one thing (and maybe an economic collapse will do that for us -- just as fever kills off the virus in our bodies), we'd have more wherewithal to take care of the unemployed, the sick, and the destitute in our own communities.  And here I must agree completely with Mackey:  this is our responsibility.  We're nuts to rely on government.  A bumper sticker I saw read, "Government is a disease posing as its own cure." 

-- So there, I've revealed my beyond-Libertarian anarchistic heart.  Maybe this transformation we believe is happening will bring us all to a level of sensitivity and consciousness where government as we know it is simply not needed.  Let's pray for this.

Bob

Hi Wendy and Bob,

Your dialog reminded me of an article I read some time ago called "The gospel of Consumption, and the better future we left behind"  a brief history of how we've come to this junction. 

Not every business leader is a sociopath.  That is certainly hopeful:

"There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”

To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals.

A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a “personal letter” to employees, Brown pointed to the “mental income” of “the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents.” Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to “higher standards in school and civic . . . life” that would benefit the company by allowing it to “draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate.”

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”

Unfortunately, the present paradigm does favor the sociopath, so they carried the day:

"... industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.  There is much more in the article.  It is a good piece of history that informs us of how we've ended up in the present dilema.  BTW, it also fits very well with the previous post you made Wendy, about Mind Control.  It's all about how we've been manipulated to serve the desires of a few.

Let's keep grounding ourselves deeper and deeper in Reality, in the here and now, so that we rip the shackles of "perception management", so others get the resonance and we break out of this damned darkness. 

Mother Earth and Father Spirit want nothing more than to embrace and feel their Sacred Love, and see their children, their creation, play in the garden.

In Love and Light,

Namaste.

Still working my way through the OP article, time has not been on my side this week :(

I don't know how I've never heard of that Kellogg thing, great post!

Gets right to the heart and core of what has happened...  made me think of Edward Bernay's two books, Public Relations and Propaganda....

Love/Light, and Peace beyond reason and rationalization, with no opposite, Chris

Josh, you never heard about Kellog because you were not supposed to... you may get funny ideas.  But they can't help it anymore.  It's leaking through all the cracks of this sinking ship. 

Here's another article, from Sports Illustrated of all places (amazing where enlightement can come from) that illustrates the path we've been on:

Sports Were Essential To The Life Of The Early North American Indian

"There may never have been and may never again be a culture in which sports so obsessed individuals and communities, produced so many sports nuts, both participants and spectators, as that of the American Indian, a fact that, among others, scandalized early white explorers.

When the Baptist minister David Jones arrived in the Shawnee lands in 1772, he was ill and weak from hunger. He admitted grudgingly that he ate well among the Indians, but he was otherwise generally outraged by the Shawnee culture. Among other signs of their savagery he noted that they had no jails, no proper laws nor government. But what seemed to aggravate the Reverend Jones most was the uncivilized frivolity of these people. "It appears as if some kind of drollery was their chief study," he wrote indignantly. "The cares of this life, which are such an enemy to us, seem not to have yet entered their mind." These merry people were forever singing, dancing and playing games.

Time and again early white observers would make the same essential point: It was the infernal, incessant playfulness of these people that made them so weird. Whites looked at North America as a howling wilderness that had to be quickly and drastically improved if its potential wealth was to be developed. Indians saw it as wealth in place, a providentially created storehouse. Food, shelter and clothing did not, of course, fall on the Indians from the sky. They had to work in their fashion to get what they wanted, but generally they did not have to labor in the imperative, unremitting way the whites did. In consequence they had a lot more disposable time on their hands.

A few more advanced white thinkers ( Benjamin Franklin for one) found there were certain admirable aspects to the Indian ways. For example, it was occasionally noted that most Indians lived as only the richest and most powerful whites did, which is to say, in pursuit of their pleasures. However, the mainstream view was that the native Americans were lazy louts whose idleness was an affront to the laws of man and God.

Indians seem to have held equally low opinions about the whites. They found them to be a grim, joyless, heaving and grunting lot with not much more style or gaiety about them than mud turtles. The bottom line was that white societies were organized to produce work and wealth, and Indian ones to provide leisure and freedom—that is, to allow individuals to do whatever they damn well pleased most of the time."  This should bring much joy to your libertarian hearts   :-)      (emphasis added by me)

It's comming back.  Keep breathing Sacred Love.  Pass the word.

Love.

Namaste.

Hi Fairyfarmgirl,

Just click on the title, that's the link.  If it doesn't work for you here is the URL:
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1065598...

BTW, I'd like to see your farm sometime     It sounds great.

C-ya!

Bob

Nice going FairyFarmGirl... you'll get there.  The fruit of your mental farm is already delicious, I'm sure your Earthly farm will do the same.

My daughter and her husband, who are Taoists, want to start a medicinal herb farm in their land in CT.  He is a very good acupuncturist and steeped in the Traditional Chinese Medicine and wants to grow some of the Chinese medicinal herbs.  Maybe there will be some room for cooperation in that area.  I'll check with you when I go back for a visit next Feb.

If I may suggest... don't forget the straw bale construction     Excellent insulation and building material for summer and winter.  It is very needed in the Northeast of the US... and the coming new world.

Namaste

Great thread! I just reposted the SI article on my facebook page as a Happy Thanksgiving message. :) Also, the Kellogg story reminds me of a great book called Affluenza.... Basically all about how sometime during the 20th century, we went the way of choosing more money over more time. It's all about the importance of leisure, etc. Happy Thanksgiving!