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Monday, December 27, 2010

The psychological, cultural & societal disintegration of America under post-industrial capitalism





December 26, 2010 at 20:44:50

The psychological, cultural & societal disintegration of America under post-industrial capitalism

By Richard Clark (about the author)

opednews.com


This article is based on an interview that Amy Goodman did with Canadian physician and best-selling author, Dr. Gabor Mate', whose books are listed at the end of this article.

Whether it's a shopping addiction or an addiction to opiates, and whether we know it or not, we're all looking for more endorphins for our brains. Endorphins are the brain's feel-good, reward, pleasure, and pain-relief chemicals. Even more amazing, they are the "love chemicals" that connect us to the universe -- to God, or the "oceanic experience" as Freud called it -- and to one another.

The problem for addicts is that this circuitry doesn't function very well. The circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn't function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as do extreme sports, as does workaholism, and so on.

So why do these circuits not work so well in drug addicts? After all, the so-called addictive drugs, in themselves, are not, rather surprisingly, very addictive -- which is to say that most people who try most drugs never become addicted to them. And so, there has to be individual susceptibility involved, to explain those who do get addicted. And these susceptible people are of course the ones with these impaired brain circuits , and that impairment is caused by early life experience adversity, rather than by genetics.

What is meant by "early life experience adversity"?

The human brain, unlike that of any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that's because, from an evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains. And to walk on two legs we must have a narrow pelvis. This means -- large head, narrow pelvis -- that compared to other mammals, we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head is the biggest part of the newborn human body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings don't get that developed for two years. This means that much of our brain development, which in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And so it is that which circuits develop, and which don't, depend very much on environmental input. Thus our developing brains are exposed to the possibility of early life experience adversity.

The problem here is that when children are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don't develop the way they ought to. It's that simple. Unfortunately, however, the medical profession incorrectly puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, has a simple explanation: It lets everybody off the hook.

What is meant by "letting people off the hook?"

If we can pretend that people's behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, and not the social and emotional environment, we don't have to look at child welfare policies, we don't have to look at the kind of support that our society provides to pregnant women, and we don't have to look at the kind of non-support that is, pitifully, extended to families. The reality is that most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age, because of the dire economic situation and associated considerations that have sprung up over the past 30 years, since Reaganomics first began to take its terrible toll. Because of current welfare laws, most mothers are now forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, and cannot see their kids for most of the day. The tragic reality is that under these conditions, kids' brains don't develop the way they need to. Myriad problems result, both for the children and for the society.

However, to the extent that we can pretend that all the resulting damage is caused by genetics, we don't have to look at the social and economic policies at the root of these misfortunes; we don't have to look at the politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, thereby causing them more stress, causing them more pain -- and more predisposition to addiction. Bottom line, we don't have to look at economic inequalities. If it's all genes (which of course it isn't), we're all innocent, and society doesn't then have to take a hard look at its commonplace attitudes and policies. So most of us pretend, as required.

Criminalization versus harm reduction

How should addicts be treated, and how are they treated in the United States and Canada?

If people who become severe addicts (as shown by all the studies) were for the most part severely abused and neglected as children (as they certainly are), then we must realize that the war on drugs is actually being waged against people that were abused from an early age onward, throughout their childhood years. In other words, we're punishing people for having been abused. That's the first point.

Now imagine a situation where we really were trying to figure out how to help addicts and others who are dysfunctional. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who on earth would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and ensures the disease of the addict -- and then foolishly hope, through such a crazy system, to rehabilitate large numbers of them? It can't be done. In other words, the so-called "war on drugs," which, as the new drug czar points out, is really a war on people, actually entrenches addiction deeply. Furthermore, it institutionalizes people in facilities where there's nothing in the way of the care they so desperately need. We call it a "correctional" system, but it doesn't correct anything. In actuality it's a punitive system that makes its victims more dysfunctional than ever. So people suffer more, and when they come out, they're more entrenched in their addictions and dysfunctionality than they were when they went in.

The chemical control of children's behavior

There are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications -- medications that are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it so that adults can control their behavior. So what we have here is a massive social experiment in the chemical control of children's behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics, on our kids. How sweet.


In the last five years, there's been a 43% increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and most of these drugs are going to boys. In other words, what we're seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of this diagnosis and its corresponding drug treatment.

What we're talking about here is nothing less than the destruction of American childhood. How so? According to a recent study published in the U.S., nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria for a mental health disorder. So we're talking about a massive negative impact on our children by something in our culture that's just not being recognized.

So what is it?

The conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids. Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Boston, actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is now the number one public health concern in the United States. Similarly, a recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child development that are optimal for brain development, are no longer present for our kids. She says that the way we raise our children today, in this country, is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being and normalcy.

What's really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are ever less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that most American children are no longer getting the support they need to properly develop.

The essential condition for the physiological development of the brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allow us to mature -- the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers. And that condition, that presence, is becoming ever scarcer in America. With tragic consequences.

But what can you expect in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? -- as compared to, say, in Sweden, where paid leave for either or both parent(s) is 15 months!) The fact is that most American kids no longer have adequate emotional caregivers available to them throughout most of their childhood. What can you expect in a country where nearly 50% of low-income women suffer from postpartum depression and therefore can't possibly be properly attuned to their child?

What we have to understand here is that, contrary to the "free enterprise" myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities, human beings are not private entities. They are not discrete, individual entities. What people actually are, are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another whenever circumstances are conducive to such cooperation. And when such circumstances are not available, and the necessary support is not available for women, that's when women get depressed. And when the fathers -- those who have even bothered to stick around -- are stressed, for lack of sufficient wages, lack of sufficient time off from work, and lack of decent employment opportunities, they're not able to support their woman in that really important, crucial bonding role that's particularly necessary in the beginning of a child's life. The men then get stressed and depressed themselves. Rancor follows, as does spousal abuse and child abuse. Children, and our society, then take the toll. A very heavy toll indeed.

(Note: Compelling new evidence shows conclusively that large income inequalities within societies damage the social fabric and the quality of life for everyone. See the massive accumulation of evidence at this site.)

In summary, the child's brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. And in this country, over the past 30 years, such parents are ever less available to children. For that reason you've got burgeoning rates of autism in this country, which has risen nearly 30-fold in the last 30 years.

Autism

Autism is a whole spectrum of disorders, but the essential quality of it is emotional disconnect. These children are living in a world of their own. They don't respond appropriately to emotional cues. They withdraw. They act out in an aggressive and sometimes unpredictable fashion. There's no clear sense of emotional connection and no sense of peace inside them.

In general, the rates of anxiety amongst children are increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up dramatically. Then too there's the bullying, the precocious sexuality, and the teenage pregnancies. There's now even a program on TV, a so-called "reality show," that focuses on teenage mothers. All indications of a society that has somehow got off on the wrong track and that is spiraling downward.

Post-industrial capitalism and the disintegration of the modern American family

It never used to be that so many children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That simply was not the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. But post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities that are interconnected. They don't work where they live. They don't shop where they live. Often the kids don't go to school where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. Instead, they're spending their childhoods largely separated from the nurturing adults they absolutely need for healthy brain development.

In ADD, as already stated, there's an essential brain chemical, necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. It's called dopamine. Dopamine is an essential life chemical for all mammals. Without it, there's no life. Mice in a laboratory, that have been chemically deprived of dopamine, will starve themselves to death. Why? Because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they're hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there's no motivation or incentive. So, one way to look at ADD is as a massive problem of motivation, because dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications do elevate dopamine levels, and these kids do then become more motivated. They can then focus and pay attention.

However, the profoundly mistaken assumption behind giving these kids medications is that what we're dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and that the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. But if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, you'll see that they are normal when they're with their mothers, and when you separate them from their mothers, their dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

In other words, what we're doing is trying to correct a massive socioeconomic problem, that results in disconnection and the loss of nurturing, by feeding our kids chemicals! Granted that these stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are, in the short run, helped by them. The question is not so much whether these drugs should be used or not; the problem is that 80% of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that's all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it's seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, and not in any way as a problem of emotional environment and development. So our kids keep "acting out" and the total chemical dosage keeps increasing, as does their "acting out."

What does "acting out" mean?

When you hear the phrase "acting out," it usually means that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, and/or rude. Most of us don't have the words and concepts that are necessary to say what's really going on. The phrase "acting out" means that you're referring to behavior which you haven't got the words to properly describe, within the limits of the vocabulary you possess. In a game of charades, you have to "act out" because you're not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your hunger, through behavior, by pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don't have the words that are required.

So yes, a lot of children are "acting out," but it's not just bad behavior. It's also a manifestation of emotional losses and emotional shortages in their lives. And whether it's bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we're dealing with here is childhood-stunted emotional development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or exclusively through medications, we need to somehow find a way to help these kids develop normally.

But many in America are moving in exactly the opposite direction

In 1998, there was a book that the New York Times named the best book of the year and it nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. It was called The Nurture Assumption. In this book, the researcher-author argued that parents don't really make any difference anymore! Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled "Do Parents Matter?" Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have only to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, "Does the mother cat make any difference?" or "Does the mother bear matter?" This author's research showed that children are now being influenced -- in their tastes, in their attitudes, and in their behaviors -- by peers more than by parents. And this poor researcher thereby concluded that this is somehow natural! Her badly mistaken presumption was that what is the behavioral norm in North America . . is actually natural and healthy. In fact, it isn't.

If your spouse or partner came home from work and didn't give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your friends wouldn't say, "You've got a behavioral problem on your hands and you should try tough love." What they'd say is that you've got a relationship problem. Yet when children act in these ways, the vast majority of Americans have been taught to think they have a behavioral problem, and then they try and control or reshape those "bad' behaviors.

In fact, what our children are showing us is that we have a relationship problem with them. They weren't/aren't connected enough with us and were/are too connected to their peer group. That's why they want to spend all their time with their peer group and very little with their parents. And now we've given kids the technology with which to do exactly that. So the terrible downside of the Internet and their cell phones is that now kids are spending way too much time with each other, and way too little with their parents.

Don't kids have to rebel in order to separate from their parents?

No. They eventually have to separate, but they don't have to rebel. In other words, separation is normal, yes. Individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person. But it doesn't mean you must reject and be hostile to the values of adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children become adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony, or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. But American kids are initiated by other kids. And so it is that you have the gang phenomenon, which is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids rebel against adult values. It happens not because they're bad kids, but because they've become disconnected from adults.

Education in the United States -- how does it fit in?

We first have to ask, how do children learn? Learning is an attachment dynamic, among other things. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn also when you're curious. And you learn when you're willing to try something, and if it doesn't work, you try something else.

However, in caring about something and in being curious about something and in recognizing that something doesn't work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. The problem is, children who become completely peer-oriented -- because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk -- have a hard time protecting themselves from all that negativity in the peer world. The harsh reality is that children are not, and cannot be, committed to each others' unconditional loving acceptance. Far from it. Even adults have a hard time providing that. Children simply can't do it. Ever. So those children who rely totally on their peers, and not their parents, become very insecure. And emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They then become hardened, so that they can become "cool.' Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that demonstrated amply in rock videos. It's all about being cool. It's all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Detached. Now, when that happens, curiosity largely disappears. Why? Because curiosity is inherently vulnerable, because when you care about something and you're admitting that you don't know, you are vulnerable. When you're "cool,' you won't try anything, because if you fail, your vulnerability is exposed. And that violates the ethic of "cool.' So, you're not willing to allow the trial and error that is essential to real learning and real education.

As long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to model themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, in America, kids are still learning from the people they're attached to, but now it's other kids they're primarily attached to, not their parents. So now you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids to be their main cue-givers. Therefore teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America, education is seen almost exclusively as a question of academic pedagogy; hence these terrible standardized tests. And the teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most often penalized. For if they don't have good student test scores to show school administrators, they're seen as bad teachers, and then they could be fired. So, to avoid being seen as "bad teachers," they are inclined to kick out any difficult kids, so as to avoid that label and the firing that might then follow.

The difficult kids get kicked out, and teachers are afraid to teach in neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties. The kids are peer-oriented, and are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection on the teachers, which it definitely is not. So, actually, teachers are regularly being slandered and scapegoated these days, for something that is not their fault. And the reason that teachers are being slandered and scapegoated is because of the failure of American society to produce the right environment for proper childhood development!

What this problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. So, we have to somehow recreate those communities and those neighborhoods. The schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. Teachers must be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.

Research into the effects of adverse childhood experiences

There was a number of large-scale studies in the United States, done by brilliant researchers, called the ACE studies, A-C-E, adverse childhood experiences. An adverse childhood experience stems from a child being abused, or from violence in the family, or from a parent being jailed, or from the extreme stress of poverty, or from a rancorous divorce, or from a parent being addicted, alcoholic and so on.

It turns out that if a child has a number of these adverse childhood experiences, his chances of becoming a drug addict later on, or any kind of an addict, go up exponentially. In fact, a male child with six such adverse childhood experiences sustains a 4,600% increase in the risk of becoming an injection-using substance addict, as compared to the chances of a male child with no such experiences. In other words, there is a 46-fold increase in risk.

Interestingly enough, those adverse childhood experiences also exponentially increase the risk of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, and a whole range of other diseases, as well as suicide and early death. In other words, there's a real connection between early childhood adversity and a) how a person lives their lives and b) the later appearance of addiction and diseases, both physical and mental.

* * *

Dr. Gabor Maté is the Vancouver-based physician and bestselling author of four books:

  • When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection;
  • Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It;
  • Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; and his latest,
  • In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.


http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=JCpLDBUAAAC

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always (more...)

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Trauma: How We've Created a Nation Addicted to Shopping, Work, Drugs and Sex

AlterNet.org


WORLD

Post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed the conditions required for healthy childhood development.

AMY GOODMAN: From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It; and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers; his latest is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again.

And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the biology of addiction?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: For sure. You see, if you look at the brain circuits involved in addiction—and that’s true whether it’s a shopping addiction like mine or an addiction to opiates like the heroin addict—we’re looking for endorphins in our brains. Endorphins are the brain’s feel good, reward, pleasure and pain relief chemicals. They also happen to be the love chemicals that connect us to the universe and to one another.

Now, that circuitry in addicts doesn’t function very well, as the circuitry of incentive and motivation, which involves the chemical dopamine, also doesn’t function very well. Stimulant drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, nicotine and caffeine, all elevate dopamine levels in the brain, as does sexual acting out, as does extreme sports, as does workaholism and so on.

Now, the issue is, why do these circuits not work so well in some people, because the drugs in themselves are not surprisingly addictive. And what I mean by that is, is that most people who try most drugs never become addicted to them. And so, there has to be susceptibility there. And the susceptible people are the ones with these impaired brain circuits, and the impairment is caused by early adversity, rather than by genetics.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “early adversity”?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means—large head, narrow pelvis—we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years. That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on environmental input.

When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to. It’s that simple. And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families, so that, you know, most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age on because of economic considerations. And especially in the States, because of the welfare laws, women are forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, often single women, and not see their kids for most of the day. Under those conditions, kids’ brains don’t develop the way they need to.

And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this whole approach of criminalization versus harm reduction, how you think addicts should be treated, and how they are, in the United States and Canada?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the first point to get there is that if people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused. That’s the first point.

The second point is, is that the research clearly shows that the biggest driver of addictive relapse and addictive behavior is actually stress. In North America right now, because of the economic crisis, a lot of people are eating junk food, because junk foods release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. So that stress drives addiction.

Now imagine a situation where we’re trying to figure out how to help addicts. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and ensures the disease of the addict, and hope, through that system, to rehabilitate large numbers? It can’t be done. In other words, the so-called “war on drugs,” which, as the new drug czar points out, is a war on people, actually entrenches addiction deeply. Furthermore, it institutionalizes people in facilities where the care is very—there’s no care. We call it a “correctional” system, but it doesn’t correct anything. It’s a punitive system. So people suffer more, and then they come out, and of course they’re more entrenched in their addiction than they were when they went in.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m curious about your own history, Gabor Maté.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were born in Nazi-occupied Hungary?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, ADD has a lot to do with that. I have attention deficit disorder myself. And again, most people see it as a genetic problem. I don’t. It actually has to do with those factors of brain development, which in my case occurred as a Jewish infant under Nazi occupation in the ghetto of Budapest. And the day after the pediatrician—sorry, the day after the Nazis marched into Budapest in March of 1944, my mother called the pediatrician and says, “Would you please come and see my son, because he’s crying all the time?” And the pediatrician says, “Of course I’ll come. But I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying.”

Now infants don’t know anything about Nazis and genocide or war or Hitler. They’re picking up on the stresses of their parents. And, of course, my mother was an intensely stressed person, her husband being away in forced labor, her parents shortly thereafter being departed and killed in Auschwitz. Under those conditions, I don’t have the kind of conditions that I need for the proper development of my brain circuits. And particularly, how does an infant deal with that much stress? By tuning it out. That’s the only way the brain can deal with it. And when you do that, that becomes programmed into the brain.

And so, if you look at the preponderance of ADD in North America now and the three millions of kids in the States that are on stimulant medication and the half-a-million who are on anti-psychotics, what they’re really exhibiting is the effects of extreme stress, increasing stress in our society, on the parenting environment. Not bad parenting. Extremely stressed parenting, because of social and economic conditions. And that’s why we’re seeing such a preponderance.

So, in my case, that also set up this sense of never being soothed, of never having enough, because I was a starving infant. And that means, all my life, I have this propensity to soothe myself. How do I do that? Well, one way is to work a lot and to gets lots of admiration and lots of respect and people wanting me. If you get the impression early in life that the world doesn’t want you, then you’re going to make yourself wanted and indispensable. And people do that through work. I did it through being a medical doctor. I also have this propensity to soothe myself through shopping, especially when I’m stressed, and I happen to shop for classical compact music. But it goes back to this insatiable need of the infant who is not soothed, and they have to develop, or their brain develop, these self-soothing strategies.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think kids with ADD, with attention deficit disorder, should be treated?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if we recognize that it’s not a disease and it’s not genetic, but it’s a problem of brain development, and knowing the good news, fortunately—and this is also true for addicts—that the brain, the human brain, can develop new circuits even later on in life—and that’s called neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to be molded by new experience later in life—then the question becomes not of how to regulate and control symptoms, but how do you promote development. And that has to do with providing kids with the kind of environment and nurturing that they need so that those circuits can develop later on.

That’s also, by the way, what the addict needs. So instead of a punitive approach, we need to have a much more compassionate, caring approach that would allow these people to develop, because the development is stuck at a very early age.

AMY GOODMAN: You began your talk last night at Columbia, which I went to hear, at the law school, with a quote, and I’d like you to end our conversation with that quote.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Would that be the quote that only in the presence of compassion will people allow themselves—

AMY GOODMAN: Mahfouz.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, oh, no, yeah, Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian writer. He said that "Nothing records the effects of a sad life” so completely as the human body—“so graphically as the human body.” And you see that sad life in the faces and bodies of my patients.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He’s a bestselling author. He’s a physician in Canada.

In that first interview, we touched briefly on his work on attention deficit disorder, the subject of his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It. Well, just about a month ago, we had Dr. Maté back on Democracy Now! to talk more about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the "destruction of the American childhood."

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In the United States right now, there are three million children receiving stimulant medications for ADHD.

AMY GOODMAN: ADHD means?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And there are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications, medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics on kids.

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43—there’s been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we’re seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I’m talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it’s just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we’re talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that’s just not being recognized.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what attention deficit disorder is, what attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, specifically ADD is a compound of three categorical set of symptoms. One has to do with poor impulse control. So, these children have difficulty controlling their impulses. When their brain tells them to do something, from the lower brain centers, there’s nothing up here in the cortex, which is where the executive functions are, which is where the functions are that are supposed to tell us what to do and what not to do, those circuits just don’t work. So there’s poor impulse control. They act out. They behave aggressively. They speak out of turn. They say the wrong thing. Adults with ADD will shop compulsively, or impulsively, I should say, and, again, behave in impulsive fashion. So, poor impulse control.

But again, please notice that the impulse control problem is general amongst kids these days. In other words, it’s not just the kids diagnosed with ADD, but a lot of kids. And there’s a whole lot of new diagnoses now. And children are being diagnosed with all kinds of things. ADD is just one example. There’s a new diagnosis called oppositional defiant disorder, which again has to do with behaviors and poor impulse control, so that impulse control now has become a problem amongst children, in general, not just the specific ones diagnosed with ADD.

The second criteria for ADD is physical hyperactivity. So the part of the brain, again, that’s supposed to regulate physical activity and keep you still just, again, doesn’t work.

And then, finally, in the third criteria is poor attention skills—tuning out; not paying attention; mind being somewhere else; absent-mindedness; not being able to focus; beginning to work on something, five minutes later the mind goes somewhere else. So, kind of a mental restlessness and the lack of being still, lack of being focused, lack of being present. These are the three major criteria of ADD.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to this point that you just raised about the destruction of American childhood. What do you mean by that?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many, many kids. And Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, who’s a professor of psychiatry at Boston—University of Boston, he actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States. A recent study coming out of Notre Dame by a psychologist there has shown that the conditions for child development that hunter-gatherer societies provided for their children, which are the optimal conditions for development, are no longer present for our kids. And she says, actually, that the way we raise our children today in this country is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well-being in a moral sense.

So what’s really going on here now is that the developmental conditions for healthy childhood psychological and brain development are less and less available, so that the issue of ADD is only a small part of the general issue that children are no longer having the support for the way they need to develop.

As I made the point in my book about addiction, as well, the human brain does not develop on its own, does not develop according to a genetic program, depends very much on the environment. And the essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us a connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allows us to mature—the essential condition for those circuits, for their physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned parenting caregivers.

Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don’t have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women, nearly 50 percent of them, suffer from postpartum depression? And when a woman has postpartum depression, she can’t be attuned to the child.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about fathers?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the situation with fathers is, is that increasingly—there was a study recently that showed an increasing number of men are having postpartum depression, as well. And the main role of the father, of course, would be to support the mother. But when people are—emotionally, because the cause of postpartum depression in the mother it is not intrinsic to the mother—not intrinsic to the mother.

What we have to understand here is that human beings are not discrete, individual entities, contrary to the free enterprise myth that people are competitive, individualistic, private entities. What people actually are are social creatures, very much dependent on one another and very much programmed to cooperate with one another when the circumstances are right. When that’s not available, if the support is not available for women, that’s when they get depressed. When the fathers are stressed, they’re not supporting the women in that really important, crucial bonding role in the beginning. In fact, they get stressed and depressed themselves.

The child’s brain development depends on the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available parents. In this country, that’s less and less available. Hence, you’ve got burgeoning rates of autism in this country. It’s going up like 20- or 30-fold in the last 30 or 40 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Say what you mean by autism.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, autism is a whole spectrum of disorders, but the essential quality of it is an emotional disconnect. These children are living in a mind of their own. They don’t respond appropriately to emotional cues. They withdraw. They act out in an aggressive and sometimes just unpredictable fashion. They don’t know how to—there’s no sense—there’s no clear sense of a emotional connection and just peace inside them.

And there’s many, many more kids in this country now, several-fold increase, 20-fold increase in the last 30 years. The rates of anxiety amongst children is increasing. The numbers of kids on antidepressant medications has increased tremendously. The number of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder has gone up. And then not to mention all the behavioral issues, the bullying that I’ve already mentioned, the precocious sexuality, the teenage pregnancies. There’s now a program, a so-called "reality show," that just focuses on teenage mothers.

You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how the drugs, Gabor Maté, affect the development of the brain.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: In ADD, there’s an essential brain chemical, which is necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. That’s called dopamine. And dopamine is simply an essential life chemical. Without it, there’s no life. Mice in a laboratory who have no dopamine will starve themselves to death, because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they’re hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there’s no motivation or incentive. So, partly, one way to look at ADD is a massive problem of motivation, because the dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications elevate dopamine levels, and these kids are now more motivated. They can focus and pay attention.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we’re dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they’re normal when they’re with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we’re doing is we’re correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we’re replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs—the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that’s all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it’s seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

AMY GOODMAN: Gabor Maté, you talk about acting out. What does acting out mean?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a great question. You see, when we hear the phrase "acting out," we usually mean that a kid is behaving badly, that a child is being obstreperous, oppositional, violent, bullying, rude. That’s because we don’t know how to speak English anymore. The phrase "acting out" means you’re portraying behavior that which you haven’t got the words to say in language. In a game of charades, you have to act out, because you’re not allowed to speak. If you landed in a country where nobody spoke your language and you were hungry, you would have to literally demonstrate your anger—sorry, your hunger, through behavior, pointing to your mouth or to your empty belly, because you don’t have the words.

My point is that, yes, a lot of children are acting out, but it’s not bad behavior. It’s a representation of emotional losses and emotional lacks in their lives. And whether it’s, again, bullying or a whole set of other behaviors, what we’re dealing with here is childhood stunted emotional development—in some cases, stunted pain development. And rather than trying to control these behaviors through punishments, or even just exclusively through medications, we need to help these kids develop.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned you suffered from ADD, attention deficit disorder, yourself—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN:—and were drugged for it. Explain your own story.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, I was in my early fifties, and I was working in palliative care at the time. I was coordinator of a palliative care unit at a large Canadian hospital. And a social worker in the unit, who had just been diagnosed as an adult, told me about her story. And as a physician, I was like most physicians who know nothing about ADD. Most physicians really don’t know about the condition. But when she told me her story, I realized that was me. And subsequently, I was diagnosed. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And what was that story? What did you realize was you?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Oh, poor impulse control a lot of my life, impulsive behaviors, disorganization, a tendency to tune out a lot, be absentminded, and physical restlessness. I mean, I had trouble sitting still. All the traits, you know, that I saw in the literature on ADD, I recognized in myself, which was kind of an epiphany, in a sense, because you get to understand—at least you get a sense of why you’re behaving the way you’re behaving.

What never made sense to me right from the beginning, though, is the idea of ADD as a genetic disease. And not even after a couple of my kids were diagnosed with it, I still didn’t buy the idea that it’s genetic, because it isn’t. Again, it has to do with, in my case, very stressed circumstances as an infant, which I talked about on a previous program. In the case of my children, it’s because their father was a workaholic doctor who wasn’t emotionally available to them. And under those circumstances, children are stressed. I mean, if children are stressed when their brains are developing, one way to deal with the stress is to tune out.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about holding on to your kids, why parents need to matter more than peers.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Amy, in 1998, there was a book that was on the New York Times best book of the year and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was called The Nurture Assumption, in which this researcher argued that parents don’t make any difference anymore, because she looked at the—to the extent that Newsweek actually had a cover article that year entitled "Do Parents Matter?" Now, if you want to get the full stupidity of that question, you have to imagine a veterinarian magazine asking, "Does the mother cat make any difference?" or "Does the mother bear matter?" But the research showed that children are being more influenced now, in their tastes, in their attitudes, in their behaviors, by peers than by parents. This poor researcher concluded that this is somehow natural. And what she mistook was that what is the norm in North America, she actually thought that was natural and healthy. In fact, it isn’t.

So, our book, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers, is about showing why it is true that children are being more influenced by other kids in these days than by their parents, but just what an aberration that is, and what a distortion it is of normal human development, because normal human development demands, as normal mammalian development demands, the presence of nurturing parents. You know, even birds—birds don’t develop properly unless the mother and father bird are there. Bears, cats, rats, mice. Although, most of all, human beings, because human beings are the least mature and the most dependent for the longest period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the importance of attachment?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Attachment is the drive to be close to somebody, and attachment is a power force in human relationship—in fact, the most powerful force there is. Even as adults, when attachment relationships that people want to be close to are lost to us or they’re threatened somehow, we get very disoriented, very upset. Now, for children and babies and adolescents, that’s an absolute necessity, because the more immature you are, the more you need your attachments. It’s like a force of gravity that pulls two bodies together. Now, when the attachment goes in the wrong direction, instead of to the adults, but to the peer group, childhood developments can be distorted, development is stopped in its tracks, and parenting and teaching become extremely difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: You co-wrote this book, and you both found, in your experience, Hold on to Your Kids, that your kids were becoming increasingly secretive and unreachable.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, that’s the thing. You see, now, if your spouse or partner, adult spouse or partner, came home from work and didn’t give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your friends wouldn’t say, "You’ve got a behavioral problem. You should try tough love." They’d say you’ve got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, we think we have a behavioral problem, we try and control the behaviors. In fact, what they’re showing us is that—my children showed this, as well—is that I had a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and too connected to the peer group. So that’s why they wanted to spend all their time with their peer group. And now we’ve given kids the technology to do that with. So the terrible downside of the internet is that now kids are spending time with each other—

AMY GOODMAN: Not even in the presence of each other.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly the point, because, you see, that’s an attachment dynamic. One of the basic ways that people attach to each other is to want to be with the people that you want to connect with. So when kids spend time with each other, it’s not a behavior problem; it’s a sign that their relationships have been skewed towards the peer group. And that’s why it’s so difficult to peel them off their computers, because their desperation is to connect with the people that they’re trying to attach to. And that’s no longer us, as the adults, as the parents in their life.

AMY GOODMAN: So how do you change this dynamic?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, first we have to recognize its manifestations. And so, we have to recognize that whenever the child doesn’t look adults in the eye anymore, when the child wants to be always on the Skype or the cell phone or twittering or emailing or MSM messengering, you recognize it when the child becomes oppositional to adults. We tend to think that that’s a normal childhood phenomenon. It’s normal only to a certain degree.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they have to rebel in order to separate later.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: No. They have to separate, but they don’t have to rebel. In other words, separation is a normal human—individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person. But it doesn’t mean you have to reject and be hostile to the values of the adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children would become adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. Now kids are initiated by other kids. And now you have the gang phenomenon, so that the teenage gang phenomenon is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids are now rebelling against adult values. But it’s not because they’re bad kids, but because they’ve become disconnected from adults.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Maté, there’s a whole debate about education in the United States right now. How does this fit in?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, you have to ask, how do children learn? How do children learn? And learning is an attachment dynamic, as well. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn when you’re curious. And you learn when you’re willing to try something, and if it doesn’t work, you try something else.

Now, here’s what happens. Caring about something and being curious about something and recognizing that something doesn’t work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. Children who become peer-oriented—because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself or herself from all that negativity in the peer world? Because children are not committed to each others’ unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They become hardened, so they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Now, when that happens, curiosity goes, because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you’re admitting that you don’t know. You won’t try anything, because if you fail, again, your vulnerability is exposed. So, you’re not willing to have trial and error.

And in terms of who you’re learning from, as long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to be modeling themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, kids are still learning from the people they’re attached to, but now it’s other kids. So you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids now to be their main cue-givers. So teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America again, education is seen as a question of academic pedagogy, hence these terrible standardized tests. And the very teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most penalized.

AMY GOODMAN: Because if they don’t have good test scores, standardized test scores, in their class—

DR. GABOR MATÉ: They’re seen as bad teachers.

AMY GOODMAN:—then they could be fired. They’re seen as bad teachers, which means they’re going to want to kick out any difficult kids.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s exactly it. The difficult kids are kicked out, and teachers will be afraid to go into neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties, the kids are peer-oriented, the kids are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection. So, actually, teachers are being slandered right now. Teachers are being slandered now because of the failure of the American society to produce the right environment for childhood development.

AMY GOODMAN: Because of the destruction of American childhood.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: That’s right. What the problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. We have to recreate that. So, the schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. The teachers should be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.


America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane


AlterNet.org


WORLD

A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media.

As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:

Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred."

The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out

Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story:

American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.

It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.

For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.

Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac

A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.

This appears to be a picture of two mothers collecting food boxes from the charity Feed the Children.

Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

CNN Tries to Outfox Fox With Tea Party Deal

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS


CNN Tries to Outfox Fox With Tea Party Deal


CNN, the once dominant and comparatively respectable cable news network, seems determined to destroy whatever shreds are left of its credibility.

Photo Credit: www.newscorpse.com
CNN, the once dominant and comparatively respectable cable news network, seems determined to destroy whatever shreds are left of its credibility. It announced this morning that it will be partnering with the Tea Party Express for a Republican primary debate in September of 2011.

Generally when a media organization chooses to co-host a primary campaign event it goes with the party apparatus or a non-partisan group like the League of Women Voters. Tea Party Express is hardly non-partisan. TPE is a political action committee that has actively engaged in campaigning on behalf of specific candidates. It supported Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska (all lost). It has also been a vocal proponent of Sarah Palin, who is a speculative candidate for president herself and thus a possible participant in the debate. It has taken positions for or against GOP candidates based on their adherence to Tea Party dogma and helped to defeat GOP incumbents. How can TPE be impartial in a Republican primary debate?

CNN’s statement announcing this partnership quoted Sam Feist, CNN political director and vice president of Washington-based programming, saying that…

“The Tea Party movement is a fascinating, diverse, grassroots force that already has drastically changed the country’s political landscape.”

“Undecided voters turn to CNN to educate themselves during election cycles, so it is a natural fit for CNN to provide a platform for the diverse perspectives within the Republican Party, including those of the Tea Party.”

That statement ought to outrage members of the Tea Party who insist they are not affiliated with any other party. It is a statement that reduces their views to being merely “perspectives within the Republican Party.” While TPE may not object to that characterization, I suspect that many other Tea Partiers would.

What’s more, the predominantly white organization cannot seriously be portrayed as diverse or as a “grassroots force.”It was created by Sal Russo and his Republican PR firm, Russo Marsh, and its brief history is fraught with scandal. Rival Tea Party groups were harshly critical of it for directing nearly half of the money it raised from citizen supporters to Russo’s firm. TPE's former spokesman, Mark Williams, was forced to resign after publishing a racially offensive article on his Web site. That was a particularly embarrassing episode as the Tea Party was battling persistent allegations of racism at the time.

On the day following CNN’s announcement Williams issued a press release praising CNN for its decision to embrace Tea Party Express. In the release he declared himself to have been vindicated and noted that the CNN relationship was evidence that charges of racism against the Tea Party were unfounded.

Williams: “That a respected international, serious news organization like CNN and even the potential presidential candidates recognize that the Tea Party is anything but racist simply thrills me.” [...] I feel completely vindicated, this is an absolute vindication of both the Tea Party and Mark Williams.”

This is precisely what makes CNN’s move so reprehensible. TPE is using this connection to whitewash its dubious reputation. CNN has to know that it is permitting itself to be used for the political benefit of an organization that doesn’t even have the respect of its Tea Party comrades. When Williams resigned last summer, TPE was booted from the National Tea Party Federation and has never been reinstated. So how is it representative of the so-called movement?

The Tea Party’s influence has long been overstated in the media. Poll after poll shows that it is an insignificant segment of the population and that its views are wildly out of touch with the American mainstream and even the Republican Party. But if CNN were still determined to partner with a Tea Party group it should at least endeavor to find one without the repugnant baggage of TPE (an admittedly difficult task).

It is also notable that Tea Party Express has become a fixture on Fox News. Fox provided wall-to-wall coverage of the TPE bus tour with reporter Griff Jenkins riding along. Perhaps Fox would have been an even more natural fit for partnering with TPE than CNN. After all, TPE was created by a Republican PR firm and Fox is the communications arm of the Republican Party. If nothing else this underscores the transparent dishonesty of portraying the Tea Party as anything other than an affiliate of the Republican Party. How else can it justify playing an official role in the GOP primary debate?

But far worse is the damage this does to CNN, an already wounded critter. This is an unprecedented partnership between a news organization and an active political action committee that has already taken sides in the debate. Would CNN ever consider partnering with MoveOn.org for a Democratic debate? I think not. And prior to this news, I would have hoped not. Now I would suggest that MoveOn give CNN a call just to see how fair and balanced it is.

What might have have prompted CNN to make this unholy alliance with a discredited and over-hyped entity? Undoubtedly CNN’s new president Ken Jautz had something to do with it. Jautz, who took the reins at CNN in September, was previously in charge of its sister network HLN. It was there he made history by giving Glenn Beck his first job in television. In hiring Beck he praised the radio shock-jock as being “cordial,” and “non-confrontational.” That should have been a warning sign that Jautz might not be a suitable choice to run a news network. Jautz has always been more interested in ratings than journalism, and the Tea Party deal imparts a disturbing vision of the direction he intends to take CNN.

Earlier this year ABC News tried to hire smear artist Andrew Breitbart as an election analyst. The public outcry (and Breitbart’s own prickly personality) resulted in Breitbart getting thrown to the curb. That should serve as an example that we can have a positive influence on these sort of decisions. Everyone who who cares about ethical media and fair elections should let CNN know this is inappropriate and unprofessional. You can use this form on CNN’s Web site to tell it that it should not be partnering with Tea Party Express or any right-wing wing PAC (or left-wing for that matter). You can also Tweet CNN at http://twitter.com/cnn. Use the hashtag #NoCNNTP.

Mark Howard is an artist and author and the publisher of News Corpse. His political and socially disruptive artwork has been displayed internationally.