If you haven’t noticed yet, EcoSalon has a bit of a crush on Russell Brand. I mean, he’s adorable and all, but it’s his brazen views on politics, commerce, and a fierce commitment to revolution that we find so irresistibly prescient. Take this, a clip from his recent visit to #OccupyWallStreet where he committed to use the sales of his new book “Revolution” to fund nonprofit causes to make this world a better place. Plus, he hugs a cop

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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A collection of sayings from politicians and pundits on the role of corporations in government. 

It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. -Henry Ford

The real truth of the matter is, and you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. -Franklin Roosevelt

Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board to conceal its powers, but the truth is the FED has usurped the government. It controls everything here (in Congress) and controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will… When the FED was passed, the people of the United States did not perceive that a world system was being set up here… A super-state controlled by international bankers, and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure! -Rep. Louis T. McFadden

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. -Abraham Lincoln

The banks can and do create money… And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people. –Reginald McKenna

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. -Kurt Vonnegut

Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens. -Britney Spears (in 2003)

Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. -David Rockefeller

I knew that all corporate leaders get special attention in Washington. But the ones who are the most feared are media corporations. -Ben H. Bagdikian

They think they’re gonna get away with this. These people who stole the pension funds of the American public. Who stole their money, who stole the future of our kids and grand-kids they think… They’re kleptomaniacs and they think they’re gonna get away with it. They have taken our Democracy and formed it into a klep-tocracy. -Michael Moore

What we have today is a laissez faire American version of feudalism; a private government in the form of private corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to govern entire activities within our political economy. -Barry C. Lynn

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets. -Don Monkerud

What we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution was one or another form of state capitalism. It’s been overwhelmed, certainly in the last century, by big conglomerations of capital corporate structures that are all interlinked with one another and form strategic alliances and administer markets and so on. And are tied up with a very powerful state. So it’s some other kind of system – call it whatever you want. -Noam Chomsky

We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years… It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. -David Rockefeller (at the Bilderberg Meeting in 1991)

To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we (will then) be taxed in our meat and our drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they (will) be happy. -Thomas Jefferson

They’re upset about the fact that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of this country and that one party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the other party caters to them as well. -Alan Grayson (on the Occupy Wall Street movement)

I would have to say that who has had the largest effect on the whole planet without us really paying attention across the board and everywhere is the entire banking industry and their disregard for the people that they’re supposed to be working for… So the ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys… They’re not heroes, but they are people that had a really huge effect on the way the world is operating. -Mario Batali

The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world – no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men. -Woodrow Wilson

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.” -Philip Slater

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining super capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control… Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent. -Rep. Larry P. McDonald

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father’s conquered. -Thomas Jefferson

A private corporation, let’s say General Electric, is, in fact, just a pure tyranny… And when those institutions also control the government, the framework for popular decision-making very much narrows. In fact, that’s the purpose of shrinking government. It’s so that the sphere of popular decision-making will narrow and more decisions will fall into the hands of the private tyrannies. -Noam Chomsky

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go… We are living in the end of the sovereign states… In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish… Countless people… will hate the new world order… and will die protesting against it. -H.G. Wells

 -Allen Ginsberg

The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens… must be broken, or it will break us. -Thomas Jefferson

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The post 25 Quotes on Who Really Runs America appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnRead a book. Occupy your mind.

What is the endgame of the American Dream? If our cherished national narrative is indeed one of rags to riches, aspirations to the realization of prosperity, then what lies at the end of the rainbow if not a pot of pure gold? There are other performance metrics, to be sure, but it’s no secret that in the land of the free, we by and large define victory in terms of fame and fortune. Yet as winners’ dreams are realized, and the rich continue to get richer, there is clearly trouble in paradise.

As having vs. having less (and less) has once again fallen into extremely high relief, a small percentage of 99 percent have ”occupied” Wall Street, demanding the wealth be spread, the crimes be prosecuted and “the system” changed. Many in thought and some in deed have put what few eggs they have left in the movement’s basket, or at least in the enough! concept it represents. But American culture on the ground remains what it is. Turn on the television, surf the “news,” even read a bestseller, and ask yourself this: How do the rich occupy us? Why do we stare at them so? What part of our dreams have they already bought and paid for (along with an endless supply of our bows and curtseys and get-out-of-jail-free cards)?

Sociological and psychological data points notwithstanding, you would be hard-pressed to find a source that could offer more insight into the codependence between the 1 percent and the rest of us than the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gaze (or, for some of you, look again) through Fitzgerald’s lens and you’ll see deeply into the twisted folie that remains our collective dream. So much of his work explores how and why we deify and then, stunningly left out of the equation (we protest!), publicly eviscerate our champions and by proxy the system that keeps us (apologies to one in ten of you) on the not-quite-long end of the stick.

As for the how, try this on—it’s not from an OWS pamphlet. It’s from Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published nearly a century ago. He was 23 and it was 1920, the dawn of the Jazz Age:

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food.

Yes. You can say that again.

As for the why, Fitzgerald’s greatest work explores the relationship between the dreamer, the dream and those who occupy the choice seats. His main characters demonstrate what it means to desire and glorify wealth, and, like the poor dog that pursues the speeding car, what one can and cannot do with it on the rare occasion that it’s chased down. Moreover, he explores our illusions about money and prestige from the inside out, exposing how, free from day-to-day struggles, the wealthy can often exemplify the worst of our human selves, as they are set free to enjoy the hubris and vagary that come from not having to earn a living. Our desire as individuals to climb to such sickening “heights” provides the brilliant foil and tragedy in his fiction.

In his masterpiece, the compact and near-perfect The Great Gatsby, we witness a man who takes a stab at the heart of the beast, subjugating and even erasing his “common” reality to obtain the dream. So personally overwhelming is his quest, that its goal arguably becomes interchangeable with the idea of love itself. Of his great desire, Daisy, Jay Gatsby’s declaration followed by narrator Nick Carraway’s observation:

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … High in a white place the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

Fitzgerald’s Nick Diver, tragic hero of the later, some say greater, and definitely more intricate Tender is the Night, is another 99 percenter who dares to stake a claim, this time through the form and family of the damaged and complex Nicole Warren. Sadly, as Nicole’s sister, Baby, notes, “When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.” Does Nick really stand a chance?

What makes these characters—Gatsby, Diver, and Paradise’s Amory Blaine—so powerful is not simply their juxtaposition to wealth. That would be maudlin, at best, or simply trite (see pulp, then and now). Rather, the way in which they embody what we might now finally call the American Tragedy is by their extreme love-hate relationship with it all. Like we do with our “winners” today (be they Trumps, Hiltons or the vilest insider traders), these timeless icons elevate the dream masters, lifting them high to ogle and adore, allowing them their dalliances and their misdeeds. Why? Because they think that they can play, too – that the thrill can somehow be more than vicarious. But of course the game is rigged, and they find themselves left out, their noses pressed against the glass, the dream merely an illusion.

Today, as we rage against the 1 percent, it’s perhaps wise to ask ourselves, how did we get here? Why are there class crimes in progress with the violators and predators getting away Scott free, as it were? What is it about our dreams and heroes that has us insanely circling back here again and again, in a cultural and class dialectic that seems to lack any final synthesis? Perhaps it’s an expatriate like Fitzgerald who in the end can see it best. After all, by spending time outside the church, it’s easier to see how gods are created – and served.

Whether you’re considering a Fitzgerald refresher (no, not a martini) or wanting to pick him up for the first time, here are some quick takes on what are arguably his three finest novels:

This Side of Paradise, 1920

An immediate and mammoth success when it was published, Fitzgerald’s first novel is seen by many as the opening bell of the Jazz Age. The story is of Midwest-born, egotistical and aggressively social Amory Blaine, who travels east to boarding school and then Princeton to assume his rightful place in the world. Upended by superficiality and then the Great War (the storyline of his experience overseas is loudly absent), he struggles to find love and personal authenticity in the face of a warped and overbearing culture. An anthem for the youth of the day, the two-book, three-part story, was ahead of its time in experimental form (part of it is presented as a script) and reads as a highly charged, postmodern pastiche.

The Great Gatsby, 1925

Many have made the case that The Great Gatsby is the finest American novel. Perhaps rightly so. Returning war veteran Nick Carraway tells the story of his time in Long Island’s ritzy West Egg, where he moves in next door to a great mansion and its beautiful, enigmatic and larger-than-life owner – the fabulous Jay Gatsby. A taught and seamless narrative, Nick’s unfolding relationship with the mysterious Gatsby and the latter’s obsession with across-the-bay flapper Daisy Buchanan is pure American legend. Read this short, yet glorious novel in a single sitting. It is fundamental to who we are and quite possibly were destined to be from our first landing on this side of the Atlantic.

Tender is the Night, 1934

Fitzgerald’s last finished novel, Tender is the Night, wades deep into the heart of ethics and compromise as it follows the lives and marriage of Dick and Nicole Diver. Written in part during his wife Zelda’s hospitalization for schizophrenia, many events of this at times intricate and always-nuanced novel are clearly autobiographical. Tormented during its writing for many reasons, not the least of which his alcoholism, Fitzgerald sets up and then examines without mercy what appears to be the perfect couple of the late-1920s – French Riviera-bronzed, party friendly and easily loved by all who surround them. A rollercoaster of pleasure of pain and twisted and changing love roles, the novel is a flourish of language and storytelling, soaked in the psychology of love, wealth and “place.”

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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Top image: Bastián Despreciable Cifuentes♡

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ColumnJane Austen’s tomes on relationships are revisited with 21st century reading glasses.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

These words mark the opening passage of British author Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride & Prejudice. Although the conclusions she draws about love and intimacy are starkly insufficient for contemporary audiences, Austen continues to be fiercely relevant because of her lightning-hot investigative process and sharp social commentary. With a forked tongue pointed directly at the landed English gentry, it’s not so much her what, but rather the derring-do of her how.

For post-modern women, Austen’s world view – with its codified rules and wax seal of matrimony – isn’t so much suspect, but simply quaint. We welcome and also balk at today’s ever changing guard, asking what will become of us in an era defined by what sociologists herald as the End of Masculinity. Boys and girls both are bereft of a compass for navigating the variegated topography of gender, pair bonding, and progeny.

In our era, plurality reigns – rendering outcomes open-ended and unhinged, rather than foregone.

For Jane Austen, the terrain of dating and desire was not simple. Austen, for instance, spurned a suitor once marriage became the relationship’s only inevitability; consequently, she spent the rest of her life alone, but transformed her solitude into a gift – harnessing her time to author Sense & Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma. The socially-sanctioned options at her disposal were few, but she certainly gave the finger.

For many women, it’s the sheer abundance of choices that threatens to paralyze momentum; porous lives with few boundaries have their own attendant shortcomings. The introductory statement to a current-day Pride & Prejudice would require radical revision, not least because the very concept of a “universal truth” is an untenable antiquation. Instead of staking out a man of means in want of a wife, I might re-write the text to read as follows:

“That you are wholly and utterly alone is unavoidable; that everything is causal and that we’re all in this together is also inescapable; the rub, whether it be between boys and girls or whatever relationship between two humans, is to harmonize your ultimately abject triviality with your responsibility to change the world, in ways big and small, on a daily basis.”

Berlin-based Abigail Wick is a New York Times and NPR contributor. From an Ex-Pat…with Love is her weekly EcoSalon column about cultural dislocation, romantic relationships and lifestyle choices – filtered through the lens of an American woman living and working abroad.

Image by Kameron Elisabeth

The post From an Ex-Pat…with Love appeared first on EcoSalon.

How far will the branding of Occupy Wall Street go?

For anyone born after 1965, the current political climate feels like we’re living the pages of a history book. But now, Flower Power is repackaged into 140 characters or less. An iconic image of young protesters flower-bombing police officers is replaced with a soon-to-be iconic image of an 84-year-old activist bombed with pepper spray. For many of us, supporting or opposing the ideals of Occupy Wall Street places us firmly in roles that feel familiar. We’re the hippies, now. The police. The veterans. The armchair activists. We are the American experience.

Except in the 21st century, there’s one big difference. Now, we’re being branded.

It’s ironic, really. Occupy Wall Street is a movement born from frustration with a perceived capitalist’s greed. People are angry, fed up, tired of seeing the inequities of a supposed democratic society washed and diluted into a sea of bad decisions and wasted money. And yet, simply, we are still a society that revolves around consumer demand.

Accordingly, “occupy” has become a buzz word with businesses using it to market themselves and pop culture infusing it into the vernacular. Just, how did we get here?

It started with a casting call on Craigslist. Unemployment rates for the under 25 crowd is at 18 percent, compared to the national average of 9 percent. Hence, young people are pissed. And MTV, the youth network, wanted in. “If you are over the age of 20 and appear to be between the ages of 20-24,” wrote the October 17th, 2011, posting, please send three recent photos and your bio to realworldcasthing@bunimmurray.com.

From this call came “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street,” where we met Bryan and Caitlin, two middle class youths disenchanted with their present and future prospects.

Then there was Jay Z’s line of Occupy Wall Street t-shirts. Last week, the rapper-mogul came under fire for marketing a line of Occupy Wall Street cotton shirts on his Rocawear clothing line – without planning on sharing the profits with the movement. Called a “scrotum” with the “political sensibility of a hood rat,” Jay Z was accused of cashing in on a movement that is protesting cashing in. Ironic, but not too.

The t-shirts inevitably disappeared from the Rocawear website.

Then “Occupy” started showing up in blog stories unconnected with the movement. Gawker called a New York Times report on the “sell-out” California college kid’s trend to “Occupy McMansions.” Twilight enthusiasts occupied “Twilight Street” ahead of the latest movie premiere in Los Angeles. In fact, “Occupy” is officially part of our vernacular, soon to be validated as a buzz word of 2011.

Hell, even the conscious businesses are getting in on it. A recent email blast went out from Solar Mosaic to “occupy” rooftops with solar energy. As the company’s enthusiastic press release writes, “Called Occupy Rooftops, this new wave in the Occupy movement is being spearheaded by solar finance company Solar Mosaic and 20 other companies and organizations to help people kick start a project on a building in their community such as a school, non-profit or place of worship.” For as little as $100, you too can have solar energy occupying your home.

It seems as if we’re drawing on Occupy Wall Street like a leviathan swirling around a fleet of rogue pirate ships captained by dashing, dread-headed swains. (Copyright, The Walt Disney Company.) It’s enough to leave you wondering, just who is occupying who?

But if it changes the way we think, does it matter? We are all consumers. In the end, remembering this may be one of the best ways to effect real change. We can choose not to buy from giant chain stores. We can choose to support American-made local businesses. We can invest and bank responsibly. We can buy ethical house wares and local, organic food. And yes, we can even consciously source our energy.

We are the 99%. Time to occupy our own choices.

The post The Branding of Occupy Wall Street appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThe health of a body politic can only be as strong as the individual relationships that comprise it.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, with pop-up solidarity encampments, sit-ins, and demonstrations sprouting in cities as far flung as New York and Nashville or Atlanta and Los Angeles, is a mounting cultural zeitgeist soon to enter its second month. The noisy convergence of a few-dozen Tea Partiers waving signs and causing a public ruckus always ends up dominating the nightly news, but not even NPR provided so much as a single story during Occupy Wall Street’s first nine days. People interested in following the occupation’s development had to look outside of their country’s borders, where international coverage by Al Jazeera and The Guardian UK had to suffice instead.

Now that it’s getting more coverage, many critics dismiss the protesters’ demands and frustrations as scattered and disorganized, but Occupy Wall Street’s disunity is actually its strength. Without a singular definition, there is more conceptual and theoretical space for a plurality of voices, whether that be a recent college graduate whose ambitions to find a respectable job have been dashed or a working class single mother who can’t afford monthly health insurance payments.

In a country where 24-million citizens, no matter how hard they try, can’t find decent full time employment and where 57-million citizens can’t afford full health care coverage, something has run amok. Systemic inequity and exploitation results in rampant societal sickness, and the current Occupation reflects an unhealthy body-politic. Citizens are clamoring not only for relief from economic malaise, but also calling into question the legitimacy of corporate globalization and the governmental structures that support it.

As a freelance American writer living and working in Berlin, my own participation in this movement is that of the pen. (Although I’m excited this weekend to attend an affinity demonstration here in Germany’s capital, especially because these protests always come with ‘party buses,’ huge platforms on wheels that groan under the weight of mega sound systems blasting electronic music and followed by dancing crowds – fun!)

I’m not a policy wonk, nor am I interested in prescribing antidotes to redress widespread social and financial injustice. Instead, I’m much more interested in what I can do on a micro-scale to directly impact my immediate environment. It is my conviction that the quality of our relationships – how we engage with and support one another – can have profound societal implications. How can people love their neighbors if they’re always pitted in battle against their spouse? How can people exercise sound reason at the voting polls if they can’t even create sane problem solving models with their partner? Our intimate relationships are the building blocks of our culture, and the way that we treat our lovers determines our capacity to develop a world that acknowledges human decency and dignity.

This week’s Sex by Numbers is inspired by the disenfranchised people in my home country who are taking to the streets. I am proud of their emboldened voices. I am proud of the DIY kitchens, free medical care, and solar-generated power systems that make up the encampments. I am proud that people of many stripes are banding together, collectivizing resources, and participating directly in the backbone of a vibrant democracy – dissent. In this vein, I will examine five ways in which we can also foster and nourish love relationships of which we can be equally proud, how we can create romantic partnerships that stimulate our highest selves and model the way we behave in society. A country can only be as strong as its lovers.

Ego Trip

Meaningful communication so often gets lost in the muck of shoddy translation. Our egos are useful survival tools, and peace-and-love calls to stamp them out are not only naive, but also foolish. At the same time, excess ego creates uptight stinginess and increased readiness to be on the defensive. If you operate under the expectation that people are out to hurt you, then there’s a high likelihood that whatever they say – no matter how ultimately trivial – can trigger your too easily hurt feelings.

Imperfectly United

Err on the side of forgiveness for your partner’s petty slights of tongue or sometimes errant behavior. Consider first whether or not their words and actions are, in the grand scheme of things, worth causing a fuss about. Chances are, if you can exercise ongoing compassion for your lover’s own insecurities and imperfections as a communicator than you can save yourselves needless bickering and strife. At the end of the day, you are both flawed beings ever striving to become better versions of you. Sometimes people mess up; get over it.

Do It Yourself

Perception and pro-action mean taking matters into your own hands. If you identify something that needs to be done, do it yourself to show your partner that you’re invested in your shared lives with one another. Sure, it’s always fun to attend to quotidian tasks as a team, but sometimes it’s simply more practical to be efficient and be done with it. Notice his bike tire has gone flat? Take five minutes and fill it with air so that you two are primed for two-wheeling adventure when the mood strikes. Notice that his dirty underwear is piling up in the hamper? Help a brother out and throw it in the wash. Attend to these things with good cheer and without calling attention to them; it serves as a model for the type of thoughtful treatment you hope he also extends to you and weaves into your everyday lives a culture of sharing and equal consideration of interest.

Peaceful Conflict Resolution

I grew up in a family where daily warfare was the norm – what could and should have been minor upsets were instead a source of explosive epithets, irrational and embittered judgement, and exaggeratedly wounded feelings. As an adult, I now have the choice not to inhabit a psychological battlefield in a domestic war without end, and it surprises me how simple it really is to defuse emotional landmines. I’ve had lots and lots of help along the way to achieve this place of relative peace and ease, but at its core is a staunch refusal to invite men into my life who don’t know how to take care of themselves and others. With this requisite check-mark in place, developing a useful, effective template with which to weather a few storms is fundamental.

First Fix You

Be honest about how you feel, but you don’t have to share every damn thought that flits through your head. Instead, focus on the development of your own internal compass so that you can manage your emotions instead of asking your partner to shoulder an undue load. It frees up mental space for both of you to be independent and self-sufficient, so that when you join forces to solve a conflict you can meet one another as free, actualized adults.

Sex By Numbers is an ongoing look into the emotional and sexual lives of the modern day woman. Follow Abigail Wick weekly here for insight and inspiration as she explores the “sex” of women and the terrain they must travel.

Article Images: david_shankbone, WarmSleepy Author Image: Alina Rudya

The post Sex by Numbers: Five Lessons About Relationships From #OccupyWallStreet appeared first on EcoSalon.