An Ugly Week For The Human Race And Other Living Things

Obama's peculiar sin is that he - unlike Reagan or Clinton or the pathetic Bush family goobers - is stuck presiding over the national decline at the moment it has slipped into fourth gear, and at a time after which all those other clowns have more or less exhausted the suite of remotely plausible diversionary tactics.

You could almost feel bad for Barack Nothingburger, having to deliver the exquisitely badly timed State of the Union address to the world this week. He, his signature legislative initiative, and his presidency itself were already toast, but he still had to walk in the room and pretend otherwise.

There could hardly have been a worse week for it. The days preceding his speech just brought one disaster after another for the president.

But, since he has decided to be part of the problem, while masquerading as its solution, who cares? As long as he continues to adhere to that position, I’d just as soon see his presidency wrecked and his name humiliated anyhow. Considering that treason is a capital offense, I’d say the guy is getting off easy anyhow.

However – and this may be a news flash for the White House – there is a whole other world out there. And for we ordinary folk, all 6.8 billion of us, it was also an especially bad week.

That may sound like another example of Obama-style mega-narcissism, to believe that America’s problems are also the world’s, but the truth is they are. We’re still the big ol’ superpower on the block, and we’re still perfectly capable, thank you very much, of lashing out in rage toward others when we feel insecure. I’d refer any disbelievers of that notion to about a million Iraqis who could vouch for its veracity. Except for one small problem. They’re dead now. So just take my word for it.

The Week From Hell started out with the heretofore unimaginable notion that Massachusetts could elect a Republican to the Senate. That he could be taking Ted Kennedy’s seat. And that he could be the final blow putting so-called health care reform in America – Kennedy’s long-sought legislative passion – out of its misery.

Don’t get me wrong. I laughed out loud at the stupidity of Democrats thinking they could continue to win elections by being Democrats. In a way, it’s a damned healthy sign that an angry and frightened public is growing increasingly intolerant of bullshit from its political class nowadays. “Aren’t you the same guys who promised us big old change last year? Yeah, well guess what, now it’s this year, and you haven’t delivered jack. So bye.” That’s actually precisely the way it should be, and among the political parties in America, the Democrats would be my close second favorite choice for getting their heads handed to them on a platter by an angry public no longer willing to settle for taxpayer-funded solutions for corporations and cheap rhetoric for the rest of us. These punks had it coming and the only silver-lining to the disaster they’ve brought down on all of us is seeing them become its latest victims.

Don’t get me wrong about healthcare, either. Everything about that legislation was wrong, and I’m delighted to see it die. It was poorly handled in every imaginable way, by what is without doubt the most inept president at least since Herbert Hoover, and by a Congress full of whores, thieves and congenital liars, and I’m happy that the whole thing exploded in their faces. Damn shame, of course, about all those millions of Americans without adequate health care. But since any assistance this bill might have provided them was going to be scant and inadvertent, anyhow, I refuse to feel bad about its demise.

Democrats know exactly what they need to do if they want to fix healthcare in America. And they also know that even if they can’t get the legislation through the Senate, now that they’ve blown their super-majority, they could at least destroy any member of Congress who would vote against such simple reforms that minimally regulate the worst practices of the insurance industry (since we can assume that Democrats could never pull the trigger for single payer). But they also know that they ARE those members of Congress who would be destroyed. When it comes to the essential question of who they work for, they’re really no different than the Grand Old Pigs.

But Scott Brown’s election was a really bad thing for America and the world, at least in the short term, because when you have a two party system and the Democrats are in power, that means a vote to throw the bums out can only go in one place. The story of American politics over the next five years has already been written. In desperation for solutions, and having already forgotten how much they hated the Bush nightmare, voters will soon be handing the keys to American government back to the Republican Party, which will then promptly fail, even more egregiously than the Democrats, to provide solutions. Neither further tax cuts for the wealthy, nor the slashing of social programs, nor gay-bashing, nor some jive war in some banana republic will cure what ails Americans, and it may no longer even successfully distract them for more than a few minutes.

That’s where things will get very interesting. Unfortunately, that may be ‘interesting’ in the unhappy sense of the ancient Chinese curse. Ask yourself this question: If a rageful and desperate America were to make a sharp ideological turn one way or the other in order to seek solutions to its maladies, which way would it go? To the left, as it did in the 1930s? Or to the right, as certain other countries you may have heard of did during the same decade? I’d say it’s actually an open question, primarily because socialist-hating Americans love their socialist government programs like Medicare and Social Security, and they might even want a lot more of those as the free market system championed by the right assists them in continuing to shed their jobs, houses, security and dignity. Still, if I had to bet, I’d say the other scenario is the more likely.

And that scenario became all the more likely because of the second development of the prior week, the ghastly decision by the Supreme Court to open the floodgates for wholesale corporate purchases of the US and state and local governments. I’ve seen a lot of ugliness in American politics over the course of my lifetime, ranging from Vietnam to Watergate to Iraq and the current Great Recession, but few items can match the decision by the right-wing majority of the Court in Citizens United for its sheer destructive power.

Before turning to the substance of the ruling, it’s important to note how we got it at all. Or, more precisely, how we didn’t get it. None of the litigants in the case were actually arguing these questions or demanding this remedy. This was, instead, the purest case of ‘legislating from the bench’ in perhaps all of American history. The extreme right, which now owns the Supreme Court as well as the rest of American government, simply told the parties in the case that the Court was hijacking the issue and turning it into something the majority wanted to address. The lawyers were instructed to prepare new briefs, in short order, on new issues that the right-wing RATS (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, plus Kennedy) wanted to rule on. And then they did just that. They just went ahead and wrote a new law, like any parliament or Congress would, using this hapless case as a vehicle for what they intended to do along. This, mind you, comes from the same folks who always rail against judicial activism, who rant about respecting precedent, who supposedly hate legislating from the bench, and who have told us that judges should simply ‘call balls and strikes’. Except, of course, when their particular ideology happens to have a majority on the Court, that is.

But, of course, who could blame them for making this decision, even if their methods possessed all the veracity of, say, WMD as a casus belli for invading Iraq, or all the procedural and substantive integrity of Bush V. Gore, brought to you by more or less entirely the same crew who did Citizens United? I mean, after all, can anyone deny that corporations are lacking a policy-making voice in America today? Does anyone not think they are subjected to a gross institutional bias which prevents them from being heard? Does anyone not agree that they are human beings, just like you and me, and should be treated as exactly such by the law? What could be more commonsensical?

Indeed, the only thing more egregious than this decision is the way it was made, and the only thing more egregious than that is the degree of blatant hypocrisy it reveals amongst those who made it.

But that’s not exactly news. What is now new is that more or less all obstacles to complete corporate control of the country have been loosed. It has now become almost impossible to argue anymore that ours is anything but a sham democracy, with sham democratic rituals meant – along with WWE wrestling matches and state-run lotteries – to distract us from the real story. And that story is the use of the American polity for no other purpose than the redistribution of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top.

For thirty years now, the folks Teddy Roosevelt once identified as “the malefactors of great wealth” have been busy destroying the Grand Compact that once governed American labor relations and society, formerly stipulating that the upper class and middle class and even the working class would all do pretty well, comparatively speaking. But that was not enough for the greedy rich. So they hired political hacks like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and they rewrote the terms of the deal. Whether it’s tax policy or trade relations or labor organizing and negotiating rules or government benefits, the new new deal is the same across the board. Way more for the rich, way less for the rest of us.

Of course, people notice. So the first line of defense was to dumb them down enough such that they would at least be slow to notice, and so that they could be sold bogus solutions. Those policies and that rhetoric have been the second line of defense. “It’s the fags and the towelheads and the nigrahs and the feminazis and the wetbacks and the gubmint who’ve made you miserable”, said every regressive from here to the horizon, for decades now. It worked pretty well up until 2006 and 2008, when the folks saying it were in charge and yet still weren’t delivering prosperity, and when the schadenfreude of someone else being kicked in the teeth no longer delivered sufficient comfort to placate the ripped-off masses.

Now comes the third line of defense, when all avenues of democratic change and redress are being closed off. Congress and the White House – both nominally controlled by the party of the people – are no less the tools of the plutocracy than when the GOP was sitting in those seats. Now the Supreme Court has likewise been captured, and we should anticipate many more of the kind of rulings we’ve been seeing, underwriting big state and big corporate power at every turn. Poor Justice John Paul Stevens. What a beautiful anachronism he has become, a vestige of a more humane and more innocent time, back when Democrats were still Democrats, and Republicans still approximated human beings. Now, with the floodgates open, and with more and more judicial positions at the state level being drowned in electoral campaign money, all the doors are being closed, just as planned.

I don’t know what form the fourth line of defense will take, but I’m pretty sure it will involve blood. The events in Iran lately or China’s Tiananmen Square are probably instructive in this regard.

The third item of note in this Week From Hell was the closing of Air America. I’m pretty close to the last person in the world who will miss this attempt at a progressive answer to the wall of horror over there on radio right. The programming of Air America, with a couple of notable exceptions, was dismal beyond belief, ping-ponging between screeching shriekery and apolitical inanity, and rarely resting for even a moment in-between on anything articulate or informative or thoughtful. You know, if I wanted embarrassing political commentary on my radio, I already had Limbaugh and Hannity and Savage and all those other drooling thugs with ganglion cysts where their brains were supposed to be to choose from.

Still, the idea that it’s so hard to inject thoughtful discourse into the national dialogue in any moderately broad-based medium is really depressing, even if in this case it might have been more to do with spectacularly bad management than it was because of spectacularly dumb Americans.

We are in a really bad place now, and it feels as though all the avenues offering even a glimmering of hope and redemption are closing down simultaneously. Progressive commentary is being silenced in the supposed marketplace of ideas, while vitriol-spewing hard-right thugs proliferate like so many Spanish Fly-addled bunny rabbits. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars worth of corporate influence have now been unleashed to further overwhelm the already daunting odds of fair competition in electoral contests, and to fully secure the purchasing of favorable policy for special interests. And this was done by a radical one-vote majority of the Supreme Court, who took it upon themselves to go out and change a hundred years worth of Congressional legislation as well as recent precedents of the very same Court. Just calling balls and strikes? No. More like just balls. These guys went out an bought land, built a stadium, wrote the rules and invented an entirely new game.

Then, of course, there’s the so-called progressive party, now in charge. You know, the one that’s supposed to provide an alternative, in a democratic system, to the party of death, destruction and deceit. Yeah, that one. Except it turns out that the Democrats are no alternative at all. At least when it comes to policy. If, on the other hand, you like your politicians to be embarrassingly weak, inept and ineffectual, then the latter-day Three Stooges – Barack, Harry and Nancy – offer a refreshing break from the linebacker eyes and the freight train punch of the GOP killers.

But, of course, you always wind-up back there anyhow. What the last thirty years make increasingly clear is that the Democrats have simply become a sort of halfway holiday from the worst excesses of the GOP, a kind of spring break from the serious business of wrecking a superpower. When things get really obnoxious under Republican rule, the Dems come in to provide the requisite comedic interlude for a few years. When the economy is good, they may even be invited to actually stay a bit longer, as Bill Clinton was – provided, of course, that he didn’t actually mess with anything that mattered. When money is tight, however, comatose ineptitude as a governing philosophy doesn’t play so well, and the duration of the Democratic intermission gets short.

Such is the meaning of another of the dismal events of the past week, the president’s State of Potemkin speech. What a piece of crap that was. What an abysmal laundry list of platitudes that will be not be remotely remembered by anybody in ten years or even ten days. This White House seems to have now gone full-on Bill Clinton, trotting out silly quarter-measure policy initiatives that even they don’t believe in, begging the rabid right to punk them yet again and again, and studiously avoiding any action or rhetoric that would threaten even half a percent of the take collected every day by the predatory governing interest structure for whom America is not a country so much as a handy aggregation and collection apparatus.

Among other indicators, Obama’s fleeting and half-hearted pep talk on health care – merely the signature issue of his administration, mind you, and the item that consumed almost all the country’s political oxygen over the last year – made clear that he has now decided to walk away from the issue, though the awkwardly-timed SOTU address made it necessary for him to pretend that he’s not. (Remember, just a week or two ago, when they were trying to schedule the address to triumphantly follow his signing of the bill? My, how things have changed, and my, how fast it’s all gone down the toilet.) In this respect he’s gone Clinton as well. Make an awful attempt at health care reform, write really bad legislation, handle the strategy and politics of it stupidly, wreck yourself and your party in the process, then just walk away and leave the dying corpse there, squirming in the dirt.

Does this turn to Clintonism mean Barack is going to start screwing White House interns, too? Perhaps, because his fiscal politics are Clinton-like, as well. Trying to placate the insatiable right, he leaves untouched a growing military budget that so dwarfs those of the entire rest of the planet combined as to inescapably render America the international sociopath among nations, while practically echoing Clinton’s “the era of big government is over” swill with his spending freeze on domestic programs. Hey man, they’re only poor people, aren’t they? It’s only the environment, isn’t it? It’s just education, right? Who cares? Meanwhile, predictably, the right begins to boo and hiss literally right as the words pass across the president’s lips. This is classic Obama: breathtakingly tepid nothingburger supposed solutions to serious political problems that piss off the left because they want him to be going the other way, piss off the middle because they want something that works, and piss off the right because not even troglodytes like John McCain are mentally ill enough to satisfy them anymore.

The sad – and what I think will eventually prove quite ugly – truth is that this administration is simply not up to the requirements of the times. Part of this country’s mythology about itself – and not a terribly inaccurate view, in some ways, either – is that each generation of Americans rises to meet the call of history, the challenges of their respective moments. But for a very long time now, this generation has not, and Barack Obama is just the latest in a sorry string of losers who have sought to deceive, distract or simply coast on inertia, while the long-term prospects for the country crumble under our feet.

Obama’s peculiar sin is that he – unlike Reagan or Clinton or the pathetic Bush family goobers – is stuck presiding over the national decline at the moment it has slipped into fourth gear, and at a time after which all those other clowns have more or less exhausted the suite of remotely plausible diversionary tactics.

But those difficult circumstances could also have been his opportunity instead. Like the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts of the past, he could have risen to the occasion of what history demands here and now. Instead, his is a cowardly presidency, afraid to offend even criminals, stuck in the middle of the road like a deer in the headlights of the eighteen-wheelers barreling down on him, and stupidly believing that if he merely doesn’t move at least he will survive his own inaction, whatever happens to the rest of the country. Obama is purely the wrong actor for his time. At a moment when Americans want action, he continues to avoid acting, thinking he is saving himself, even as all the indicators – from tea parties to losing elections in three states he won a year ago to plummeting job approval ratings – scream out for him to do otherwise.

Right before the Massachusetts contest, Barack sent an email urging me to help out the hapless Coakley campaign. He said, “David, If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election”. And then he went up there and did a rally for his candidate, telling people that “Bankers don’t need another vote in the United States Senate. They’ve got plenty.” And then his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told us that a key theme of 2010 will be asking voters “whether the people they have in Washington are on the side of protecting the big banks, whether they’re on the side of protecting the big oil companies, whether they’re on the side of protecting insurance companies or whether they’re on the people’s side.”

Well, Barack, if you’re reading this, let me first thank you for your note. How kind of you to write. And, yes, as a matter of fact, I was a bit fired up for the last election. But, no, I wouldn’t dream of being fired up for you or your party again this year, and perhaps not ever again any year, as a matter of fact. And you’re a big reason for that, my friend. You see – how shall I put this? – bankers don’t need another vote in the White House. They’ve got plenty. And since you’ve decided to ask folks in 2010 which side the people they have in Washington are on, my answer is that they are overwhelmingly on the side of protecting the big banks, on the side of protecting the big oil companies, and on the side of protecting insurance companies.

Oh, and perhaps you haven’t noticed, but you and your party won the last two elections. The ‘people we have in Washington’ right now are not they, but rather you.

And you’re wrecking the country and the world.

And so it was, this Week From Hell, in which the avenues of national redemption closed more completely and more emphatically. There will be no genuine party of the people on our ballots, there to choose in elections. There will be no alternative voice of sanity in the media flinging even toy arrows at the impenetrable wall of national psychosis. There will be no change you can believe in from a president who seems content to be just a slogan in a suit. There will be only more of the same, until the next election, when it will get worse, and then the one after that when it gets worse still. All of which may be but a mere warm-up act for the real fireworks.

Such was the Week From Hell, indeed, except for one final blow.

Howard Zinn left us, shutting down yet another of the few remaining voices of sanity in this deeply unhealthy society. Judging by these events preceding his death, it’s not unreasonable to guess why he went when he did.

You can die from a broken heart, can’t you?

The fine art of haggling

The fine art of haggling

You can negotiate a discount no matter what you buy or where you shop

Donna Montaldo scored a $175 discount when she bought a gas stove from an appliance store in Louisiana. Sally Greenberg wrangled $100 off the price of a flat-screen TV at Best Buy in Washington, D.C. How? By simply asking.

If you thought haggling was limited to car dealerships and mom-and-pop stores, it's time to broaden your horizons. Nationwide department-store chains, exclusive clothiers, and big-box discounters are open to negotiating prices. You just have to know how and when to approach them.


Get over it

For most folks, the biggest obstacle to haggling is the fear of looking foolish, says Montaldo, a bargaining expert at www.about.com, a consumer-advice Web site. "You have to get it in your head that you are a savvy negotiator, not a cheapskate," she says.

Most salespeople won't be surprised when you ask for a price break. Retailers allow and sometimes even encourage their managers to negotiate, though it's rarely a part of written corporate policy. "It's customer service--an opportunity to say yes to the customer," Montaldo says.

Montaldo has negotiated the biggest discounts for herself at clothing, appliance, furniture, and jewelry stores. But she has haggled everywhere and over just about everything. She's been especially successful when she finds a flaw. "When you buy something new, you should expect it to be perfect," she says. "If there's makeup on the collar of a blouse or a scrape on the inside of a table, that's not new, and you should be able to negotiate a discount."


Follow the rules

Here's how Montaldo saved $175 on the gas stove: It was in perfect shape, so she didn't haggle on the $900 sticker price. (She had already researched the model on the Web and knew that it was priced fairly.) Instead, she asked for free delivery, which would have been $75, and $100 off the cost of installation.

Robert Bordone would call Montaldo's deal a classic example of one of the basic rules of negotiation: Propose an outcome that will be attractive to both sides. Bordone is an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Law School and the director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

The key is putting yourself in the other party's shoes, Bordone says. If you make an offer that you wouldn't accept if you were in their place, why would they? But if the offer would satisfy you, chances are that the other side will accept it.

"Always ask" is Greenberg's mantra. When Best Buy didn't have the TV model that she wanted in stock, she asked for a $100 discount on a higher-priced set. The manager agreed to the deal.

Greenberg's typical approach is straight-forward: "First I remind the manager that I'm a good customer and that I spend X amount at his store every month. Then I ask if he can do better on the price," says Greenberg, an attorney who, as it happens, is senior product safety counsel for Consumers Union in Washington, D.C. Consumers Union is the publisher of Consumer Reports and this Web site.

Like Montaldo, Greenberg doesn't pay full retail price for imperfect goods. She's even gotten discounts at Toys "R" Us and Target on items with damaged packaging. But if you don't ask for a discount, she says, you won't get one.

Bringing out your inner haggler

• Be patient and be nice. If you're waiting to talk with the manager, don't glare at your watch or tap on the counter. No one wants to bargain with a grouch.
  
  
• Time your haggling. Late in the month, when salespeople are trying to meet their quotas, can be a good time to bargain for big-ticket items. And evening or early morning hours are usually less busy, so clerks will have time to talk.
  
  
• Know before you go. Research prices and store policies. Bring Web printouts, flyers, and newspaper ads with you.
  
  
• Learn to read the ticket. Price or inventory tags often contain date stamps that tell you how long an item has been in the store, though you may need to ask a friendly salesperson to help you locate and decipher the codes. Retailers are often more willing to cut the price on merchandise that's been on the sales floor a longer time.
  
  
• Avoid an audience. Haggle out of the earshot of other customers. Sales clerks don't want everyone in the store asking for a deal too.
  
  
• Inquire about sales. Salespeople often know when an item will be going on sale. Ask if they will hold something for you until then--or let you have it now at the lower price.
  
  
• Find fixable flaws. Look over items carefully for minor imperfections you know you can live with or easily repair, say, a dent on a washing machine or a missing button on a shirt.
  
  
• Be prepared to walk. Unless those pumps are worth full retail to you, there are other stores with other shoes.

The Art of Haggling: How to Get the Lowest Price on Most Everything You Buy

How to Haggle Your Way to Big Savings

By Pamela Cole Harris, About.com Guide

If you are decorating on a budget, it's important to get items for your design at the best price possible. Whether you are buying at a flea market, garage sale, or discount store, you can negotiate a lower price on most items. Haggling is an art form which, if done skillfully and with the right attitude, will save you hundreds of dollars. Here's how to haggle successfully:

• Attitude is everything! If you try to intimidate, bully or demean the vendor, he/she will most likely dig his/her heels in and demand the full price. If, however, you are polite, charming, and respectful, you will usually come away with a lower price.

• Research before you bargain. It's best to know what the item usually brings and in what condition before you begin to bargain. If the price is already low for the item, you probably will not get the price much lower. But if the price is high, you have lots of negotiating room. But it's up to you to know your prices.


• Fair value. Determine a fair price that you can afford to pay and stick with it. This tip goes hand in hand with the next one, which is:


• Walk away. Don't fall in love with the item. Prepare to walk away if your price isn't met. Don't “ohhhhh” and “aaahhh” all over the item, but politely point out its defects or imperfections. And whatever you do, don't tell your companion in front of the vendor that “you just HAVE to have” that item. He/she is no fool and you just signaled that you will be willing to pay more for the beloved item.


• Pay cash. Take the exact price you want to pay out of your wallet before you begin negotiating. Show the vendor the cash and hold it out to him/her. It is a very strong-willed vendor who is willing to let that money go back into your pocket and not his.

If you follow these basic rules, you can become an expert haggler. Just don't try this technique at stores that don't negotiate prices, such as grocery and fabric stores.

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Top 10 Tips On Learning How to Haggle

How to Get the Lowest Price on Most Everything You Buy

By Donna L Montaldo, About.com Guide

Whether one haggles for a great deal on a new pair of jeans, a dishwasher, the bid on having the house painted or the cost of a child's new braces, entering into price negotiations when buying anything is smart and will often result in getting a lower price.

1. Think Savvy - Not Cheap

There is nothing embarrassing about haggling over the price of anything. Good hagglers know few boundaries when it comes to asking for a better deal. Keeping focused on the end result of all of the money that can be saved, just by asking a few questions, can help anyone break into the art of good haggling.

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2. Be Nice

Not many people are willing to compromise when dealing with a grump. Good hagglers are always upbeat, polite and patient. Success will come with less effort if the person controlling the price likes you.

3. Avoid an Audience

Anyone in the position to decide the price of something is usually aware of the golden rule when dealing with the public - What is good for one is good for all. If other people are around there is always the risk that they too will want to get an extra discount. Haggling quietly and out of earshot of other patrons will allow the person in charge to be more flexible when agreeing to bargain.

4. Do the Research

Good hagglers take the time to research products, services and pricing before they buy. Arming yourself with advertisements, printed Internet pages or notes on pricing and policies offers a visible comparison to show a salesperson. Before entering the store, a car lot, or the dentist office, knowing how much you would have to pay elsewhere gives you the knowledge you need to ask for a better price.

5. Ask About Future Markdowns

Store employees are often given a heads up about what and when things are being marked down. A bold haggler will always ask if something they want is going to be further reduced in the near future. Many times a sales associate will offer to hold the item until the markdown day arrives or just honor the markdown price if it is going to be changed within a day or two.

6. Ask About Coupons

Coupons and bounce-backs (a coupon given for use on a later date) have gained in popularity at almost all major retail stores and outlet centers. Hagglers always ask if there is a coupon available before they buy. Many times cashiers have a few up by the register.

7. Look for Fixable Flaws for Extra Discounts

Shopping the 'imperfect' rack is a great place to find merchandise to haggle for dollars. A dent in an inconspicuous place on an appliance, a small blemish on the wood of a table or buttons missing on a designer blouse shoud equate to big savings to those who haggle price.

The retailer is often so happy someone is interested in buying the damaged goods, that they become flexible in lowering the price to get rid of it. Good hagglers always do a thorough inspection of anything they are interested in buying and if they find a flaw they will always ask for the price to be lowered.

8. Learn to Read the Ticket

Many times the price ticket contains the date or season the item arrived at the store. It is usually coded and may be part of a longer code, but by studying the ticket, it can generally be spotted. If you become friendly with a store employee, you can always ask them to decipher the code for you.

Color codes are also a good indicator to how long something has been around. For example, a winter red may be coded as 53, a spring red as 55, a summer red as 58. A salesperson will be more motivated to knock off extra dollars on an item that has been on the sales floor for two seasons compared to something that has just arrived.

9. Be Prepared to Leave Empty-Handed

A good haggler knows when to walk away empty-handed. Hagglers shop often and rarely out of need. This puts them in the highest level for top negotiating because if the price isn't low enough, they simply walk away.

10. Know the Markdown Policies

Knowing the markdown policies of the store help hagglers save money. Most stores will adjust the price of a previous purchase if the item was marked down within a certain time from when it was bought. This can range from two weeks to a month in most stores. By knowing the store policy, the haggler knows when to return to check the price of something they already bought. If it is lower, they then ask for an adjustment. This brings up one last important point - hagglers never throw away a receipt.

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Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Alice Walker Reflect on the Death of Howard Zinn

Remembering the lifelong dissident and peace activist and historian, who joined many of the struggles for social justice over the past fifty years.

By Amy Goodman

After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past fifty years.

He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women. He was fired for insubordination for standing up for the students. While at Spelman, he served on the executive committee of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After being forced out of Spelman, Zinn became a professor at Boston University.

In 1967 he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. A year later, he and Father Daniel Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam to receive the first three American prisoners of wars released by the North Vietnamese.

When Daniel Ellsberg needed a place to hide the Pentagon Papers before they were leaked to the press, he went to Howard and his late wife Roz.

n 1980, Howard Zinn published his classic work, A People’s History of the United States. The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way we look at history in America. The book was recently made into a television special called The People Speak.

Well, in a moment, we’ll be joined by Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Anthony Arnove. But first, I want to turn to a 2005 interview I did with Howard Zinn, in which he talked about his time as an Air Force bombardier in World War II.

HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm—first use of napalm in the European theater.

And we don’t know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we’re on the right side, they’re on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it’s OK. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn’t hear screams, couldn’t see blood. And this is modern warfare.

In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they’re firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think, reflecting back on that bombing raid and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don’t solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We’re seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.

AMY GOODMAN: After returning from the war, Howard Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill. He then received his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

In the late ’50s, Howard Zinn moved to Atlanta to teach at all-black women’s school Spelman, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. We’re joined now by one of his former students, the author and poet Alice Walker. She’s joining us now from her home in Mexico.

Alice, welcome to Democracy Now! So sad to talk to you on this day after we learned of the death of Howard Zinn.

ALICE WALKER: Thank you very much for inviting me to talk.

AMY GOODMAN: But talk about your former teacher.

ALICE WALKER: Well, my former teacher was one of the funniest people I have ever known, and he was likelier to say the most extraordinary things at the most amazing moments.

For instance, in Atlanta once, we get to this very staid, at that time, white college, all these very staid, upper-class white girls there and their teachers, and Howie got up—I don’t know how they managed to invite him, but anyway, there we were. And this was even before any of the changes in Atlanta. We were still battling to get into restaurants. So Howie gets up, and he goes up to the front of the room, and this large room is full of people, and he starts his talk by saying, “Well, I stand to the left of Mao Zedong.” And it was just—it was such a moment, because the people couldn’t imagine anyone in Atlanta saying something like that, when at that time the Chinese and the Chinese Revolution just meant that, you know, people were on the planet who were just going straight ahead, a folk revolution. So he was saying he was to the left of that. So, it’s just an amazing thing.

I think I felt he would live forever. And I feel such joy that I was lucky enough to know him. And he had such a wonderful impact on my life and on the lives of the students of Spelman and of millions of people. We’ve just been incredibly lucky to have him for all these years, eighty-seven. That’s such a long time. Not long enough. And I’m just so grateful.

AMY GOODMAN: Alice, Howard Zinn was thrown out of Spelman College—right?—as a professor, for insubordination, although recently they gave him an honorary degree, and he addressed the graduating class. Why was he thrown out?

ALICE WALKER: Well, he was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens. He didn’t see why we shouldn’t be able to eat where we wanted to and sleep where we wanted to and be with the people we wanted to be with. And so, he was with us. He didn’t stay back, you know, in his tower there at the school. And so, he was a subversive in that situation.

And, of course, the administration could expel the students for activism. And I left Spelman because I sort of lost my scholarship, but I had stayed. That was one of the ways they controlled us. And they tried to control him, but of course you couldn’t control Howie. And so, they even waited until he had left for the summer vacation to fire him, to fire him. They didn’t fire him face to face. But, yeah, he was, you know, a radical and a subversive on the campus, as far as they were concerned. And our freedom was just not that important to the administration. What they needed was for us not to rock the boat.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Noam Chomsky, who’s still with us on the phone from Boston. Noam, I wanted to ask you about Howard Zinn’s role in the antiwar movement in the ’60s. In 1968, Howard Zinn traveled to North Vietnam with Father Daniel Berrigan to bring home three US prisoners of war. They became two of the first Americans to visit North Vietnam during the war. This is Howard Zinn speaking in 1968 after he returned to the United States.

HOWARD ZINN: Father Berrigan and I, on our way back—this may seem presumptuous on our part, but when—on our way back in from Paris, we sent a wire, I think with our last fifteen bucks, to the White House, saying something like, “We’d like to talk to you, President Johnson. You know, would you please meet with us? We’ve just come back from Hanoi. We’ve just talked with the premier, Pham Van Dong. But we just read in the newspaper that you say the North Vietnamese are not ready to negotiate. What we learned from Pham Van Dong seems to contradict that. We’d like to talk with you about this and about the prisoner release, which we think has been mishandled.” But we have not, so far, seen an answer from LBJ.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Howard Zinn. Noam Chomsky, talk about this period. Talk about the time Howard Zinn went with Father Dan Berrigan to North Vietnam and what it meant.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that was a breakthrough at recognizing the humanity of the official enemy. Of course, the main enemy were the people of South Vietnam, who were practically destroyed. South Vietnam had been devastated by then. And that was important.

But, at least in my view, the most—the more important was his—the book you mentioned before, The Logic of Withdrawal. And there was, by then—so I think this must have been 1967—you know, a substantial antiwar movement, but it was keeping to palliatives, you know, stop doing these terrible things, do less, and so on. Howard really broke through. He was the first person to say—loudly, publicly, very persuasively—that this simply has to stop; we should get out, period, no conditions; we have no right to be there; it’s an act of aggression; pull out.

Actually, he—that was so surprising at the time—it became more commonplace later—that he couldn’t even—there wasn’t even a review of the book. In fact, he asked me if I would review it in Ramparts just so that—which, you know, left-wing journal I was running then—just so somebody—people would see it. So I did that.

But it sank in pretty quickly, and it just changed the way people looked at the war. And in fact, that was one of his fabulous achievements all along. He simply changed people’s perspectives, both by his argument and his courage and his integrity and his willingness to be on the front line all the time and his simplicity and, as Alice Walker said, his humor. This is one case, the war. His People’s History is another case. I mean, it simply changed the conscience of a whole generation.

There had been some studies, you know, of the sort of actions from below, but he raised it to an entirely new plane. In fact, the phrase of his that always rings in my mind is his reverence for and his detailed study of what he called “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lead to those great moments that enter the historical record, a record that you simply can’t begin to understand unless you look at those countless small actions.

And he not only wrote about them eloquently, but he participated in them. And he inspired others to participate in them. And the antiwar movement was one case, civil rights movement before it, Central American wars in the 1980s. In fact, just about any—you know, office worker strikes—just about anything you can—any significant action for peace and justice, Howard was there. People saw him as a leader, but he was really a participant. His remarkable character made him a leader, even if he was just sitting on the—you know, waiting for the police to pull people away like everyone else.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, in 1971—you may remember this; in fact, you may have been there, but Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg were both beaten by police in Boston at a protest against the Vietnam War. One day before the beating, Zinn spoke at a large rally on Boston Common. This is an excerpt from the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

HOWARD ZINN: A lot of people are troubled by civil disobedience. As soon as you talk about committing civil disobedience, they get a little upset. That’s exactly the purpose of civil disobedience: to upset people, to trouble them, to disturb them. We who commit civil disobedience are disturbed, too, and we mean to disturb those who are in charge of the war.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He said at the end of his speech, I remember, he said, “Now let me address the secret police in this crowd.”

HOWARD ZINN: You agents of the FBI who are circulating in the crowd, hey, don’t you see that you’re violating the spirit of democracy by what you’re doing? Don’t you see that you’re behaving like the secret police of a totalitarian state?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, that cost him a bit, I think, the next day when we were sitting in front of the Federal Building, I have a feeling, because, again, the police chose in the end to arrest almost no one. They didn’t want arrests. They didn’t want a trial. They didn’t want the publicity that would be associated with that. They only arrested a couple of ring leaders, and one of those was Howard.

HOWARD ZINN: And so, let the spirit of disobedience spread to the war factories, to the battlefield, to the halls of Congress, to every town and city, until the killing stops, until we can hold up our heads again before the world. And our children deserve a world without war, and we ought to try to give them that.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: And at that point, the batons were raised, and they began clubbing us very heavily. Howard was pulled up, as I say. His shirt was ripped apart. He was taken away. And I saw blood coming down his chest as he left.

AMY GOODMAN: That was an excerpt of the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of Howard Zinn’s autobiography.

Noam, we just have a minute left in this segment, but talk about that activism.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that case is very similar to what Howard described about his bombing attack. I mean, the police were actually sympathetic, the individual policemen. They were coming over to demonstrators, you know, speaking supportively. And in fact, when they were given the order to move forward, they were actually telling people, Howard and others, “Look, please move, because we don’t want to do this.” But then, when the order came, they did it. I don’t know who. But it’s much like he said: when you’re in uniform, under arms, an automaton following orders, you do it.

And as Dan pointed out, they went right after Howard, probably in reaction to his comments the day before. And he was dragged away and beaten.

But he was constantly involved with civil disobedience. I was many times with him, as Dan Ellsberg was and others. And he was just—he was fearless. He was simple. He was straightforward. He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and changed their minds. They changed their minds by their actions and by hearing him. He was a really—both in his life and in his work, he was a remarkable person, just irreplaceable.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you were personal friends with Howard, too. You and Carol, Howard and Roz spent summers near each other on the Cape.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, we were personal friends, close personal friends for many years, over forty years. So it’s, of course, a personal loss. But it’s beyond—even beyond his close friends and family, it’s just a tragic loss to the millions of people—who knows how many endless numbers?—whose lives he touched and changed and helped them become much better people.

The one good thing is that he understood and recognized them, sure, especially in those last remarkable, vibrant years of his life, how much his incredible contributions were welcomed, admired, how much he was loved and admired, and he could look back on a very satisfying life of real unusual achievement.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam Chomsky, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Noam is a linguist, a world-renowned dissident and a close friend of Howard Zinn. And Alice Walker, thanks, as well, for joining us from Mexico, former student and friend of Howard Zinn.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll hear more of Howard in his own words, and we’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove, his co-editor and colleague. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove and Naomi Klein, but on this sad day, the day after the news of Howard Zinn’s death, I want to turn to one of the last interviews we did with him. It was May 2009. He came to New York to promote his latest book.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in the introduction to A Young People’s History of the United States, “Over the years, some people have asked me: ‘Do you think that your history, which is radically different than the usual histories of the United States, is suitable for young people? Won’t it create disillusionment with our country? Is it right to be so critical of the government’s policies? Is it right to take down the traditional heroes of the nation, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt?’”

HOWARD ZINN: Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?

And I think the answer is: we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.

Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain—well, Mark Twain, everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but when we go to school, we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. We aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre in the Philippines. No.

We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her.

And so, there are these alternate heroes in American history. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses. They’re the heroes of the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people who are obscure, who are not known. We have in this Young People’s History, we have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus. And that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat, and she got arrested, and that was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of—we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say, “This is the way to live.”

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Howard Zinn. We’re joined now by Anthony Arnove in New York, by Naomi Klein here at Sundance, where Howard Zinn was last year, premiering The People Speak. He was here with Anthony Arnove, who’s co-author of Voices of a People’s History of the United States with Anthony.

Anthony, we just have a few minutes, but share your reflections on the latest work of Howard Zinn. I know this is a tremendous personal loss for you, as well as for everyone.

ANTHONY ARNOVE: Well, you know, Howard never rested. He had such an energy. And over the last few years, he continued to write, continued to speak, and he brought to life this history that he spoke about in that segment that you just aired. He wanted to bring a new generation of people into contact with the voices of dissent, the voices of protest, that they don’t get in their school textbooks, that we don’t get in our establishment media, and to remind them of the power of their own voice, remind them of the power of dissent, the power of protest. And he wanted to leave a legacy of crystallizing those voices, synthesizing those voices.

And he actively worked to bring together this remarkable documentary, The People Speak, which he narrated. He worked so tirelessly to bring that about. And, you know, I just felt so privileged to have had the opportunity to work with him at all, let alone on this project, and to see that realized.

But, you know, Alice Walker talked about his humor, his sense of joy in life, and that was infectious. He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn—Howard changed their lives—reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, I wanted to bring Naomi Klein back into this discussion. I think it’s very touching we’re here at Sundance, where you were with Howard Zinn last year, as he premiered People Speak. But last night, after Howard died, we saw the New York Times put up the AP, the Associated Press, obit. The Times has something like 1,200 obits already prepared for people. They didn’t have one prepared for Howard Zinn. And this Associated Press obit very quickly went to a quote of Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, who once said, “I know”—he’s talking about Howard Zinn—“I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Naomi Klein, your response?

NAOMI KLEIN: I don’t think that would have bothered Howard Zinn at all. He never was surprised when power protected itself. And he really was a people’s historian, so he didn’t look to the elites for validation.

I’m just so happy that Anthony and the incredible team from People Speak gave Howard this incredible gift at the end of his life. I was at Lincoln Center at the premiere of People Speak and was there when just the mention of Howard’s name led thousands of people to leap to their feet and give him the standing ovation that he deserved. So I don’t think he needed the New York Times. I don’t think he needed the official historians. He was everybody’s favorite teacher, the teacher that changed your life, but he was that for millions and millions of people. And so, you know, that’s what happened. We just lost our favorite teacher.

But the thing about Howard is that the history that he taught was not just about losing the official illusions about nationalism, about the heroic figures. It was about telling people to believe in themselves and their power to change the world. So, like any wonderful teacher, he left all of these lessons behind. And I think we should all just resolve to be a little bit more like Howard today.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s end with Howard Zinn in his own words, from one of his last speeches. He spoke at Boston University just two months ago in November.

HOWARD ZINN: No matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place, it’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably—inevitably—the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.

So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this—all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.

We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. That’s all I want to say. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Howard Zinn. As we wrap up today, Naomi Klein, your final words?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, we are in the midst of a Howard Zinn revival. I mean, this was happening anyway. And it’s so extraordinary for somebody at the end of their life to be having films made about them and played on television, and his books are back on the bestseller list. And it’s because the particular message that Howard relayed his whole life, devoted his whole life to, is so relevant for this moment. I mean, even thinking about it the day after the State of the Union address, Howard’s message was don’t believe in great men; believe in yourself; history comes from the bottom up.

And that—we have forgotten how change happens in this country. We think that you can just vote and that change will happen for us. And Howard was just relentlessly reminding us, no, you make the change that you want. And that message was so relevant for this moment. And I just feel so grateful to Anthony and, once again, the whole team that facilitated this revival, because we need Howard’s voice more than ever right now.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

AlterNet.org

The Big Theories Underwriting Society Are Crashing All Around Us -- Are You Ready for a New World?

The ideas and institutions that define our culture are breaking down -- and that's a good thing, say authors Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman.

Economic meltdown ... environmental crises ... seemingly endless warfare. The world is in critical condition. Bad news? Good news? Or both?

Many of the ideas and institutions that define our culture are breaking down -- and that's a good thing, say Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman. In their new book, Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and a Way to Get There from Here, they write that today's crises are part of a natural process -- clearing out what no longer serves us to make room for a new way of being. Are they cockeyed optimists or do they see things others miss?

Reality is alive, dynamic and interconnected. Science has been saying so for nearly a century, and we experience it every time we walk on a beach or look into another's eyes. Yet most of our cultural, societal, political and economic structures act as if it's not so. We can no longer afford to indulge outdated worldviews. In order to deal with the crises we now face, we've got to act on the new realities and understandings revealed by science.

A cell biologist by training, Bruce Lipton taught at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine, performed pioneering studies at Stanford, and authored The Biology of Belief. Steve Bhaerman has been writing and performing "enlightening" comedy in the character of Swami Beyondananda for over 20 years. He is the author of several books.

Terrence McNally: Bruce, you first, a bit about your path to the work you do today?

Bruce Lipton: When I was very young I looked into a microscope for the first time and saw cells moving around. That vision ultimately led to my becoming a cellular biologist and teaching in medical schools. I was a pretty conventional biologist who thought of the body as a biochemical machine run by genes. I was teaching the genetic control of a molecular body to medical students, but at the same time I was doing research on muscular dystrophy and cloning stem cells starting about 1967.

My research proved so mind-boggling that it led to my leaving the university. I saw that genetically identical cells put into different environments have different fates. I'd start with genetically identical stem cells, change some of the constituents of their environment, and the stem cells would form muscle; change the environment a little bit differently and genetically identical cells would form bone; change it yet again, and another group of genetically identical cells would form fat cells.


I was teaching medical students that genes control life, yet my research said that the genes were actually controlled by the organism's response to the environment.

That work ultimately led to The Biology of Belief, and presaged epi-genetics, one of today's leading areas of research in biomedicine. Epi is a prefix that means above. Epidermis means the layer above the dermis. Epi-genetic control literally means "control above the genes."

How an organism perceives the environment or, in the case of humans, what an organism believes about the environment, actually controls its genetics. If we change our perceptions or beliefs or attitudes about life, we actually change our genetic read-out dynamically. This revolution in science empowers you to recognize that your health is under your control.

TM: Now Steve, your path, which I assume may be even more circuitous than Bruce's?

Steve Bhaerman: I was a very idealistic young teacher in Washington, DC teaching during the late '60s-early '70s. I found some really fabulous ideas about how things could be, but how to put those ideas into practice escaped most people. I remember meeting a world-famous expert on communal living, but nobody could stand to live with him. For the last 30 or 40 years I've been exploring spiritual paths, learning about myself, and seeking ways of making our great ideas congruent with actual reality.

I thought it would be interesting to write a book about healing the body politic, applying a biological or medical metaphor to the wider world. When I read The Biology of Belief and met Bruce, I realized that he was the guy I was meant to do this book with. In Spontaneous Evolution we hope to help people see that many of the beliefs we've been living by are now burned-out stars, yet we keep trying to navigate by them.

TM: Steve, you left out the fact that a big part of your path has been humor.

SB: For the last 20-something years I've been performing and writing as Swami Beyondananda, the cosmic comic. Humor is a great way to allow new ideas to infiltrate, and I've learned a lot cohabiting with the Swami. As soon as I put the turban on [with Indian accent], oh then we've got a whole different set of wisdom coming out.

TM: Bruce, how did you decide to take on this collaboration?

BL: I got so caught up with cellular biology and the biology of belief that I kept putting the biological understanding of civilization on the back burner -- until Steve and I started talking.

Most people get caught up in, "Oh my God, crisis here, crisis there. What are we going to do? The sky is falling!" For the last few years Steve and I have been crafting an understanding that says we're in a transition. Rather than focusing on what's coming apart, we want people to understand that this crisis makes it possible to move to a much higher level of evolution.

TM: Let's pull apart some of the threads that you deal with in the book. You say 1) there are three perennial questions that any belief system needs to address; and 2) that the answers to those questions have changed. What are those three questions?

SB: Why are we here? How did we get here? And now that we're here, how do we make the best of the situation?

TM: And how have those changed?

SB: If you look at recorded history, we began with animism -- simply "I am one with everything." There wasn't much of a distinction between the spiritual world and the material world, and indigenous people were able to navigate these two worlds fairly easily. Had we stayed at that point, we would be little more than human animals in a cosmic petting zoo. But we ventured out to explore.

We then began to see that there are many forces. We recognized the "me" and the "not me," and we began to assign powers to various gods. So we had polytheism. Then came the monotheistic view that there is only one God and one power. The institutionalized version of monotheism through Christianity was very powerful throughout the middle ages.

TM: You single out the institutionalized version of Christianity, not Judaism or Islam?

SB: Christianity is most powerful in terms of its impact on Western society. Christianity's worldview eventually gave birth to scientific materialism as a challenge to the institutionalized version of the infallible church.

The first little chip to fall: Copernicus recognizes that the earth actually revolves around the sun. It takes over 100 years for that belief to be integrated throughout even the thinking world.

As the church loses its infallibility, we see the rise of the current dominant paradigm: scientific materialism, the material world is what matters. Newton, Descartes and the rest say that the universe is a machine.

We are now at the threshold of a new understanding which we call holism, in which what we call "science" and what we call "spirit" are part of the same thing. Yet our institutions are still based on scientific materialism, on beliefs that have actually been disproved by science.

TM: You point out myth perceptions: unexamined pillars that support modern thought. In science, some of these have been proven wrong, but the public hasn't been let in on that yet.

BL: When the general population accepts particular answers to perennial questions from some group or entity, they tend to turn to that same source for other truths about the world. When the Church was running the show, if you wanted to find out about health or what's going on in the future, you turned to the priest or the Church for answers.

TM: Or prior to that, the medicine man.

BL: In animism.


When science took over, we started saying, "You want truth? You don't go to the Church anymore. Now you go to the science people." The flavor of the answers flavors culture and character. When the answers change, civilization changes.

In the current vision of scientific materialism, belief in matter is primary. The Newtonian belief that the universe is a physical machine takes our attention away from the invisible realm. We focus on material acquisition as a representation of how well we're doing in our lives. We take the earth and the environment apart seeking more matter. The more matter you have, the more effective you are in this world. He who dies with the most toys wins.

Over 100 years ago, quantum physics said, "The invisible realm you ignore is actually the primary shaper of the physical realm."

TM: I hear you expressing a kind of duality: "We were paying attention to matter, now we've got to pay attention to the invisible." But holism doesn't pay attention to one or the other, it realizes they are in fact the same.

BL: Exactly. That's the conclusion we come to. If it sounded like we were emphasizing the spiritual over the material, it was only because that's the piece that's missing in today's world: the piece that says "Wait there's more to us than this physical plane."

Look over history. The primary differences between civilizations is whether they emphasize the spiritual or the material. With animism, both were the same thing. We're coming back to that. After taking civilization to the spiritual realm under the Church and then into the material realm under the sciences, science and spirituality are coming back to a midpoint, recognizing that they are both critical.

TM: What is the old belief and what is the new belief?

BL: The old belief: Genes predetermine our fate and control who we are. We didn't select our genes and we can't change them, so our lives are beyond our control. That kind of science says I'm a victim, so I need a rescuer. As victims, we turn over our healthcare to other people. But the new biology reveals that our thoughts and beliefs and how we interact with the environment control our genetics.

TM: Until fairly recently I thought that I was born with a blueprint that would play out for the rest of my life. I think that's a common misconception. You're saying that, though we're born with a particular genetic structure, it's not a blueprint or a done deal. Again, not a simple either/or.

BL: The scientific story we've been living says we have no power. But we say we are all active participants in the unfoldment of our own genetics, our own health, and the health of the world that we live in.

TM: You say that from a position of science, not from a position of belief. We've talked about two of the false beliefs: Newtonian physics, and the belief that genes control our lives. What are others?

BL: The premises of Darwinian evolution: that random mutations got life going and that life is based on a struggle for survival of the fittest. Those are beliefs that influence our culture well beyond the realm of science. As a consequence, we live in a world based on competition and struggle. But we have to ask: Is the world really that way or did our beliefs create that impression?

Now we learn that the entangled community called the biosphere is driven not by competition but by cooperation and community. This means our competing has been anti-evolutionary.

Humans evolved over a million years ago. What's evolving now is not the individual human, but the living superorganism called humanity. We are all cells in the body of one living thing. So we need to come together and recognize our unity.

The cells making up humanity will keep killing each other -- as in an autoimmune disease -- until we realize that we're all part of one organism and cooperation is key. The way we live in our world today mimics some of our biggest health issues: autoimmune diseases like arthritis, Alzheimer's and cancer. The fundamental underlying issue in almost all illnesses today is stress. When stress hormones are released into your body, the same hormones that get you ready for fight and flight, also shut off the immune system.

TM: In the old days, fleeing or confronting a tiger, you didn't need immunity or digestion or much intellectual capacity. You needed speed and force. And so the body turns off certain things and turns on others. In modern society, however, those stressors are often symbolic and constant. What about the notion of random evolution?

BL: "Why are we here?" If you start from random mutations, we're just an accident, a genetic crap-shoot. That belief disconnects us from the biosphere and all the other organisms on the planet. But the fundamental nature of evolution is that every new organism emerges into the biosphere to bring greater harmony and balance to the environment.

TM: You're saying evolution is not about individual organisms, it's about larger and larger ecosystems.

BL: We started this whole cycle of civilizations with animism and we have to return to that kind of awareness. Belief systems that allow us to pollute will go away when we realize we're part of an intricate and delicate network and web of life.

TM: You conclude that the crises and breakdowns we're facing are in some ways a good thing that will allow the rise of new and better systems. That may not be such good news to a lot of people who are hurt in the process.


SB: Survival of the fittest is a dominator belief system. We must move to "thrival of the fittingest" where we disperse resources in such a way that everybody benefits and we build a common wealth.

When we allow every individual to thrive in a local garden, we allow them local energy, local autonomy, local sustainability. All of a sudden, every group makes a contribution, and we spend less time, energy, money and attention protecting ourselves from one another and fixing things that could have been prevented.

Underneath our skins we have a 50-trillion-cell, highly functional community with technology that far outstrips anything that we've invented with our human minds. When we're healthy, this system is so impeccable and harmonious that within us we have full employment, universal health care, no cell left behind. The organs cooperate with one another so that the whole system can thrive. You never hear about the liver invading the pancreas demanding the islets of Langerhands. It just doesn't happen.

We need to begin to imagine how to put these ideas into practice in our lives, our communities and our world. Awareness is the first step. Every phase of evolution involves expanding awareness and expanding connection.

TM: Are you saying that even evolution that appears to us to be simply physical, arises through awareness and connection?

SB: When single cell organisms "decided" they didn't want to be single any more, they combined in community. And the process of combining as a community enhanced the awareness of each cell. Each now had access to the information that was being gathered and used by other cells. Then we had specialization of cells, and some cells would never see the light of day but would get signals about what was happening out in the world.

Each of us is a community of 50 trillion cells working in concert. At this stage in human evolution, we don't need to grow another arm or a bigger brain. We need to grow greater awareness and connection in community.

What are the implications of that? How do we live our lives? How do we relate to other people? Politically we've been divided -- as if the liver said, "I'm not talking to the heart, to hell with him!" Can we begin to recognize that every nationality, every cluster of human cells, is an organ in this one body of humanity?

What would it be like if our systems -- the organization of money or health care or the law -- actually worked in concert with one another rather than in competition? These are important questions to begin to ask as we take the first steps of new awareness, as we lift ourselves outside the matrix of invisible beliefs that we've mistaken for reality.

TM: What would a person want to know or learn or do to begin to participate in this spontaneous evolution?

BL: We have to start recognizing that our belief systems are controlled by our mind, and that most of our mind is not under our control. We have a conscious mind, the creative mind, home to our wishes and desires, and we have a subconscious mind, a habit mind with programs downloaded. We generally believe that we're running our lives with our creative minds. A lot of people say, "We're facing a crisis, let's create answers and solutions." But 95 percent of our life comes from the habit mind, programmed primarily by other people and our culture.

TM: So even with the best of intentions, we miss 95 percent of where the action is.

BL: Absolutely. That's why we struggle so hard to get to where we want to go. We're operating from invisible beliefs about how life works that were programmed into us before we were six.

In the first six years of your life, you see the stresses and struggles your parents go through, and that becomes a behavioral program in your subconscious mind. Then when you're older, you say, "Let's have a life that's wonderful and joyous and happy." But 95 percent of your life is coming from behaviors downloaded from your parents.

Until we become aware of these invisible programs that undermine us, we look like we're victims to the world. If we want peace and love, harmony and health, and we don't get it, we may conclude that the universe is against us. But from the perspective of the new biology, we undermine ourselves with the acquired beliefs of our culture. We have to rewrite those beliefs to re-empower ourselves.

TM: I knew we were facing lots of crises. Now I learn that 95 percent of what I do is out of my control. Where's the good news?

BL: The good news is if we become aware of it, we can do something about it. Being forewarned is being forearmed.

TM: What can I do about the 95 percent that's habitual?

SB: Once we recognize how much of our reality is programmed, we can begin to forgive ourselves and forgive others. We can begin to recognize that one thing we have in common is that we're all programmed. That recognition is a first step outside the matrix of controlled beliefs.

I've been told that a person out there is my enemy. We've both been programmed, but with different programs, therefore we disagree. So the first step is to recognize that we are all programmed.

The reality we have in common is not in our heads, it's in our hearts. Scientific studies have shown that we can walk into a room and begin to entrain with one another.

McNally: We begin to have similar heartbeats?

SB: Like a tuning fork, we begin to harmonize. When you create situations where people can communicate and listen in a respectful way, an interesting thing happens. We begin to focus on what we have in common as humanity. We begin thinking like a species instead of like individuals.

We're in a similar situation to a caterpillar in the process of transforming into a butterfly. Most of the news is about the caterpillar that can't be fixed. Our book is about the emergence of the butterfly. While still a caterpillar, the imaginal cells of a new butterfly begin to communicate with one another, allowing new structure to emerge as the caterpillar collapses.

We face a choice of focus. Do we focus on the Titanic sinking or the party boat doing fine?

TM: The premise of all of this is holism, yet out of habit we end up with dualism. I don't accept that it's a choice between this or that. I'm not going to be satisfied focusing on the party boat and ignoring the hunger and inequity around me.

SB:It will take a new structure for that hunger to be solved. We can't solve it at the level that we've created the problem.

TM: So you're not saying to focus on where the goodies are, you're saying focus on the possibility of evolution and transformation.

SB:We're not saying to ignore the problems in the world. We're simply putting our attention on what we're building instead.

BL: Today we write off whole populations because they don't fit into our economic models. There's hope in our future, because the breakdown is necessary to build a more sustainable foundation. Some people will have terrible problems and others will have great success, yet they're both part of a community.

In your body, no particular cells go hungry. Every cell must be fed for the body to be in harmony. When we begin to treat all humans as cells in one body, and make sure that they all get the basics in life, we create the foundation on which to build an exciting future.

Every cell counts. Every human counts.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles and WBAI99.5FM, New York (streaming at kpfk.org and wbai.org.). Visit terrencemcnally.net for podcasts of all interviews and more. He also advises non-profits and foundations on communications. Visit terrencemcnally.net for podcasts of all interviews and more.