The G20 Travesty

The recent economic summit of the G20 nations in Pittsburgh was everything I expected - that is, a glossy stage show in which the chief political representatives of world banking interests offered vague statements praising the so-called economic recovery (for the bankers, that is) while pressing forward on plans to make working people pay for the crimes of international finance, all while peaceful protesters outside faced now-routine police brutality bolstered by the most technologically-advanced methods of crowd dispersal/oppression. Tear gas, pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets and sonic cannons (also known as Long Range Acoustic Devices) were all deployed as the international elite attempted to neutralize any popular criticism of its reactionary policies.

According to the G20, economic recovery will require governments to reduce spending and squeeze workers by lowering their living standard, a solution which does not exactly square with their professed goals of creating jobs and reducing poverty. Perhaps the weakness of their actual economic plans was what prompted leaders of the Western nations to distract the media's attention by engaging in this heartwarming act of political theatre:

In what has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated political provocation, the United States, Britain and France, with the support of Germany, denounced a supposedly secret Iranian nuclear plant, threatened stepped-up economic sanctions and possible military action unless the facility was immediately open to inspection.

In a joint announcement Friday morning at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared together before television cameras to issue the warning. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had left Pittsburgh to return home, issued her own statement of support for the threats against Iran.

Obama declared, “The Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law.” He gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad six days to respond—by the time of an October 1 meeting in Geneva. His approach echoed that of George W. Bush seven years ago in citing an alleged nuclear weapons program as the basis for going to war against Iraq.

Talk about déjà vu all over again. Is the memory of the public really so short that the buildup to war against Iraq in 2003 - supported by the same bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction and the same hypocritical lectures about international law from the world's most powerful rogue state - has already been forgotten as we see the exact same propaganda applied to Iran? That's a rhetorical question, of course; public opinion has almost always been irrelevant when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. But it is depressing to see the foreign policy elite do everything in its power to beat the drums of war, especially at a conference supposedly designed to address the economic crisis. Then again, we shouldn't be surprised; unscrupulous politicians have always used war as a distraction from and "solution" to economic problems.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon characteristically followed the lead of the United States, condemning Iran for its "continued refusal" to listen to resolutions by the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Unless, of course, you consider the fact that the existence of Iran's supposedly top-secret nuclear facilities was actually disclosed to the IAEA by...Iran, in a letter written September 21 that acknowledged the construction of a new pilot-fuel enrichment plant. But whatever.

The relentless demonization of Iran by the wealthy Western elite is merely another indication of how little power the people of those nations actually have over their governments' foreign policies. We should revere the heroes who showed up in Pittsburgh to protest the continued dominance of the neoliberal agenda over a world that ideology has clearly failed, especially given the ever-more repressive measures undertaken by the new American police state. Riot squads entered university dormitories to threaten students with arrest and expulsion, many requests for peaceful demonstrations were unceremoniously denied, and the use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, gas and LRAD against the crowd was justified by the supposed threat from anarchists, though it has been shown in the past that plainclothed police provocateurs often infiltrated anarchist groups in order to justify the brutal crackdown on protesters.

Also noteworthy is the coverage of the G20 protests in the largest mainstream news organizations, which is to say there was barely any, certainly nothing approaching the wall-to-wall coverage of factually-challenged teabaggers at town hall meetings. We mainly saw sanitized coverage and carefully-prepared statements from the G20 leaders themselves, though CNN ran a nice little fluff piece on the riot police point of view.

Of course, no discussion of this G20 would be complete without a quote from the first Community Organizer-In-Chief. For any deluded liberal who still believes Obama has anything in common with them at all, the following howler should provide a much-needed slap in the face:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Barack Obama says the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh was relatively tranquil and protesters should realize that world leaders are trying to shape a global economy that helps poor people.

Obama told reporters Friday that previous world summits drew far more protesters than the several thousand who clashed with police this week in Pittsburgh.

The president said many of the protesters oppose capitalism and free markets in general. He said they are free to express their views but he disagrees with them.

Obama said the G-20 leaders agreed to economic policies that should create world markets that help workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives.

After all, if there's anyone who knows about helping workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives, it's Wall Street's most prominent puppet.

Health Care, American Racism and the Manchurian Candidate

And now, for a long overdue post. I've neglected this blog somewhat since I got a data management job in June working for the Ontario provincial government. It was a great seven weeks, and only reinforced my respect for the public sector. But don't think for a moment that I was so busy with that job that I neglected to follow the news. On the contrary, if anything, the fact that I was following the news so closely contributed to the absence of a new post for a couple of months.

Specifically, I'm speaking about the Obama administration's purported efforts to reform American health care. This is one of those subjects that, as a Canadian basking in the warm glow of a single-payer system, probably shouldn't concern me. But given the subject's dominance of the cable news cycle and the blogosphere, it's been impossible to avoid. And if I'm interested in American politics partially because it's so much more out there than Canadian politics, then this summer has been a stark lesson in both the ironclad grip of corporate lobbyists over the political process south of the border, and the maddening gullibility and stupidity of a large portion of that country's white working class.

Although I wasn't alive in 1967 to experience the Summer of Love, I've now had the misfortune to bear witness to 2009 devolving into the Summer of Hate. When the teabaggers and right-wing extremists first burst onto the national consciousness at the town hall debates, the sheer madness and idiocy of what they were saying stunned me into silence. Never before in my life had I seen so much misdirected anger as when these sad rubes let loose their redfaced rage at the prospect of receiving HEALTH CARE. Bush's wars of aggression, shredding of the Constitution and civil liberties, disregard for looming ecological catastrophe and undeclared class war against poor and working-class Americans all passed them by, but Fox News and hate radio have given them their marching orders: all the accumulated disasters facing the country as a result of eight years of Republican mismanagement (and, more to the point, 30 years of neoliberal economic dogma) have now been placed solely at the feet of one Barack Hussein Obama. Sadly, the town hall rubes are more than racist enough to fully embrace this logic.

Let's not kid ourselves: a good deal of the fears generated among misinformed white working class Americans by the right wing noise machine are based primarily on race. Tim Wise summed up best the reasons for their ludicrous belief that Obama, as total a Wall Street whore as has ever occupied the Oval Office, whose entire health care "plan" is based around salvaging the existing private insurance system, is secretly attempting to impose communism on America:

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing--his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites--which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below--Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.

Of course, Obama has made it much harder for progressives to defend him, given his propensity for spitting in the face of his most loyal supporters. His health care bill is to the health insurance industry what TARP was to Wall Street - a government bailout in which taxpayers subsidize private industry. The great Matt Taibbi explained in his recent Rolling Stone article on health care why the bill that ultimately emerges may actually be worse than no bill at all, since it essentially forces the population to buy a defective product. This is classic Obama - he has always offered pretty words while his actual policies have constituted the grossest kind of corporate welfare.

Nevertheless, the sheer level of venom directed at him by the extreme right is profoundly depressing because it fails to address any substantial, real problems with the bill. Rather, the lies, distortions and exaggerations peddled nonstop by Republican politicians and the right wing hate machine have raised ridiculous fears of "death panels" and pulling the plug on grandma. It's just really, really sad to see people again loudly protesting against their own best interests, because if they should be protesting anything, it's that the Obama plans don't go nearly far enough towards universal health care. But that would require a knowledgable, informed citizenry - impossible in the modern United States given the predominance of corporate disinformation campaigns that pass as "news".

I want to end this somewhat disjointed post by referring to two vastly different books I recently read as part of my ongoing attempt to understand conservative redneck culture, to figure out once and for all why these people consistently vote against their own best interests. The first book is a truly worthwhile read by Winchester, Virginia native Joe Bageant called Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. Bageant is a product of a culture saturated with God and guns, yet through education and 60s-era hippie liberalism managed to emerge a self-proclaimed "godless socialist", earning him mad props from yours truly. His book is a sad indictment of the South in which a toxic combination of religiosity, poor education and an otherwise commendable commitment to "self-reliance" has resulted in a population snugly in the hands of an ingenious Republican public relations machine. Conservatives' success in framing national issues through Southern cultural tropes is truly impressive in its diabolical success, and the only hope for liberals and progressives is to grab the bull by the horns and create new frames by which progressive policies can find a hold in these reactionary strongholds. This will be extraordinarily difficult given the utter corruption (via corporate campaign contributions) of the current Democratic Party.

The second book has value only in that its pages can be burned as a fuel source if necessary. Michael Savage is perhaps the most repugnant talk radio host in America, no easy feat in a field dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I recently perused his book The Savage Nation, and was predictably mortified by its scathing hatred towards Savage's imagined shadowy force of secular, gay-loving, America-hating liberal "Commu-Nazis". Reading this latest version, published in 2002, it was clear that the equation of Obama to Hitler by conservatives is by no means a recent phenomenon. But I gained some insight into the uniquely twisted reasoning of deluded white conservatives towards Obama and his apparently sinister aims. It goes something like this:

Throughout his book, Savage, like many conservative commentators, explicitly equates liberals with socialists, communists, Nazis and terrorists. Despite Obama's excruciatingly middle-of-the-road, mealy-mouthed centrism and fellating of Wall Street and the Washington establishment, right-wing media has successfully mined his record for anything that could conceivably be used to fit him into a convenient "angry black man" stereotype. The widespread coverage of Jeremiah Wright, magnification of Obama's relationship to William Ayers, and subsequent demonizing of Van Jones as a radical communist revolutionary all combined to create a Bizarro world version of Obama specifically designed to stoke fear among backwards conservative voters - a dichotomy best captured in this article by The Onion.

So the longstanding conservative equation of liberals with terrorists, combined with the exotic "otherness" of Obama's personal background (white mother, black Kenyan father) and his suspiciously Muslim-sounding middle name, Hussein, all conspire to create a version of Obama onto which any manner of conservative fears can be projected - socialism, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, you name it. The teabaggers, birthers and deathers all seem to truly believe Obama is some Manchurian candidate who will soon reveal his true nature as a communist/socialist/fascist/Muslim racist. That these ideas often contradict each other is no problem for far-right propagandists and true believers.

The fact that conservatives will demonize Obama no matter what he does makes his willingness to reach out to Republican politicians in a futile effort at "bipartisanship" that much more frustrating. In fact, the Democrats' approach to health care has been so undeniably weak that it's fair game to assume that that was their plan from the beginning. The always-excellent David Michael Green said as much in today's must-read column:

Of course, he's also chosen to put healthcare reform on the table as the signature legislative initiative probably of his entire presidency. That's fine, but watching him in action I sometimes wonder if this clown really and actually wants a second term. I mean, if you had asked me in January, "How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?", I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.

Altogether, it's an astonishingly perfect recipe for getting rolled, so much so that I'm not the first person to have wondered out loud if that was actually the president's intention all along. Look at this freaking fool. Now look at the guy who ran a letter-perfect, disciplined, textbook, insurgent, victorious campaign for the White House. Can they possibly be the same person? And, since they obviously are, is there possibly another explanation for this disaster besides an intentional boot? I dunno. But what I do know is this. Obama's very best-case scenario for healthcare legislation right now represents a ton of lost votes in 2010 and 2012. And the worse that scenario gets, the worse he and his party do. But even a 'success' in the months ahead will produce a tepid bill, a mistrustful public, an inflamed and unanswered radical right, and a mealy-mouthed new government program that doesn't even begin to go online until 2013. A real vote-getter that, eh?

Trust me, if Obama was actually the Islamic Marxist revolutionary racist of Glenn Beck's psychotic delusions, he'd be a lot more effective at actually getting things done.

Blaming the Victim?

Reading Mark Steyn's latest column in the Republican propaganda organ National Review, a few thoughts crossed my mind. The first was fairly standard - that Steyn, a classic right-wing shill with a column in the increasingly unreadable MacLean's, is an idiot. His arguments are always low on facts and heavy on hypocrisy, but that's par for the course when it comes to your average conservative diatribe.

The second thought concerns his whole argument, against government-funded health care. Once you get past the usual fearmongering about a massive "U.S. health bureaucracy", you get one of the more nonsensical statements I've seen lately about the issue:

When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that the current, privatized United States health system costs far more than any of its equivalents in the industrialized world while delivering far less. American health care is completely dominated by insurance companies that make all their profits by denying people coverage. The profit motive is the reason why Americans with health insurance are constantly told they have "pre-existing conditions" not covered by the company. A public health care system would be infinitely superior to a private one for the simple reason that its aim is not to profit at the expense of other peoples' lives; it's aim is to provide health services for the population - taking care of people, helping them when they're sick. As Democratic politicians love to point out (without doing anything about it), health care should be a right, not a privilege. A health care system whose entire motive lies in denying people health care is a sick joke, or at least it should be.

But this brings me to the last thought I had while reading the column, and it addresses a far larger issue. Often, when I talk about American politics with my family, they'll tell me something along the lines of "who cares? That's in America." And in a way, they have a point. I spend hours and hours each day reading about American news, politics, and media. Part of that is because it's just so much more fucked up in general than Canadian politics; it's hard to believe that an entity like the modern Republican party, dominated by wingnuts, Jesus freaks, venture capitalists, torture apologists and chickenhawks, can be one of the two major political parties in what is (for now) the world's lone superpower. It would seem like a perfectly plausible argument for someone to tell me that I shouldn't worry what the right-wing noise machine is saying on any given day. As a Canadian progressive, why the hell should I care what wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest of the Faux News crew have to rant about?

The problem, of course, is that while I don't take these guys seriously - I watch it knowing perfectly well that it's propaganda - many, many people in the United States do. And it's not just rednecks and wealthy conservatives; the mainstream media sees these demogogues as worthy contributers to the national discussion. Arianna Huffington, in her book Right Is Wrong, identified one of the main faults of corporate cable news: they always assume that there are only two sides to every issue, a liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) view, and that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. CNN is the prime culprit here when it comes to television, but it equally applies to establishment rags like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And it's immensely destructive when it comes to an issue where the right/left paradigm does not apply. Take the issue of global warming. Typically, a news segment on the issue might have one person who says global warming is real, and another who says it's a hoax or the science isn't advanced enough for us to know for sure. Since global warming is real, providing such a false balance leaves the viewer disoriented and unsure what the truth really is.

I saw a particularly putrid example of this phenomenon last night on CNN during a discussion about Gitmo detainees. Campbell Brown assured us we would hear from "two very different perspectives", which was fairly spot-on: it featured a face-off between Liz Cheney repeating her father's standard talking points (the detainees were Evil Terrorists, "the worst of the worst", too dangerous to try in American courts for some reason, and repeating the debunked lie that 15% of them had "returned to the battlefield), and Joan Walsh, arguing that Guantanamo only served as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda (sharing the opinions of U.S. military commanders). I have my disagreements with Walsh - she's one of those liberals that sometimes cheers on imperialist war when it's carried out by a Democratic president - but I have to give her props this week, not only for her performance on the side of "truth" on CNN against Liz Cheney, but also for her bravura verbal ass-kicking of Bill O'Reilly on the issue of Dr. Tiller's murder.

Anyway, the problem was that CNN was offering - as Huffington described it - "equal times for lies." You have Liz Cheney lying her ass off, defending torture and extraordinary rendition, Joan Walsh offering a reasonable rebuttal actually based on fact, and then you have Campbell Brown weighing in before the commercial break with a typically CNN sitting-on-the-fence moment: "well, you both have interesting arguments, let's see if afterwards we can come to some kind of agreement." Panels like this make a mockery of the journalistic ideal. Theoretically, a journalist is supposed to sort through facts to arrive at the truth. Brown lets two sides talk - one of which is consciously lying and distorting the truth - and then leaves it to the viewer to decide which side is right, a complete abdication of her supposed responsibility as a journalist.

And this brings us back to the larger issue - the power of the right-wing propaganda machine. As stupid as conservatives are when it comes to actual policy, I'll give them this: they are brilliant when it comes to getting their message out. As George Lakoff summarizes in his book The Political Mind, Republicans have always been masters of framing issues in ways that skew towards their own agenda; hence, Democrats are accused of being "soft on terror" or "weak on national security". And Democrats always buy right into that framing, adopting right-wing policies to prove how "tough" they are and by extension looking all the weaker, as opposed to if they stood up for principle and said they were "strong on liberty" or something like that. In any typical media event, the Right always sets the agenda and the "Left" responds, and in this way, they allow the Right to effectively control the news cycle.

By presenting the lunatic fringe as the Respectable Right (although there's really not much difference these days), the media keeps a seat at the table for the forces of reaction. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this. The conservative movement is insanely well-funded by wealthy patrons. The corporate news media - both its owners and its advertisers - have an interest in presenting the news in a way that does not interfere with their own privileges, and so will always give time to a political movement that stands up for the interests of the American oligarchy. An educated population would be able to see through these lies. But guess what? Most people don't know that much about the news. They form their opinions based on very superficial impressions of what goes on in the world, and in that arena, it's hard to beat the right-wing noise machine.

So the problem is that the disinformation and lies purveyed by Wingnut TV and Hate Radio reach an audience of largely uneducated Americans, which the Right preys upon by exploiting basic fears and prejudices (Immigrants! Gays! Blacks! Evil Muslim Terrorists!), as well as wedge issues like abortion, in order to get them to vote against their own interests. Once in power, the Right leads the forces of imperialism and rapacious capitalism, lowering the standard of living for workers, trashing the environment, and engaging in endless war with a never-ending supply of unfortunate civilians slaughtered by U.S. airstrikes at wedding parties. In short, they're ruining the world for my generation and each one after it.

It's tempting to point the finger at the Wingnut segment of the U.S. population: the dumbass, xenophobic, God-fearing, gay-hating, gun-loving hillbillies who watch Fox News and think that a millionaire blowhard like Bill O'Reilly, a Republican-talking-point robot like Sean Hannity, or a racist, sexist 300-pound Oxycontin addict, with a few failed marriages under his belt, who claims to be the paragon of "moral values", have their best interests at heart. These are the Americans who have barely any concept of the world outside their borders, who have no idea that every country in the developed world besides theirs have some form of universal health care, who think that wanting their country to bomb brown people on the other side of their world somehow makes them "tough"...at some level, you have to blame them for their own stupidity and gullibility. It takes all sorts to make up a society, and you will always have those undereducated buffoons who ascribe to what Matt Taibbi referred to as "the peasant mentality."

However, I still can't let myself adopt the attitude of my brother, who suggested the other day, "who cares about a bunch of hillbillies?" The thing is, those hillbillies are actually an ever-shrinking minority in the U.S., and they support Republican politicians mainly because they lack the education to see how they're being misled. The majority of the American electorate voted for Obama, and even if most of them can't see past his celebrity-facade to see that he is a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (like all recent presidents), we can at the very least accept that they wanted some form of "change". Call me an optimist, but I prefer to believe that most people want very reasonable things from their politicians. The mass media today, meanwhile, serves to spin the policies and distract the populace so that they think they really do live in the greatest country on earth. To ascribe the policies of the United States governments to the voters is true on some level - there is some truth to the old adage that you get the government you deserve - but to take a society in which the ruling class systematically lies and distorts its way through the media every day, and blame its failings on the people who are fooled, is to some extent blaming the victims.

It's no coincidence that the United States is both the most religious country in the developed world and the one with the weakest labour movement. The American ruling elite has worked its whole history to maintain its privileges, to demonize supporters of labour unions as dangerous "socialists", to divide the working class by appealing to racial prejudices, and to distract the people from the faults of this world by pointing them to a fantasy afterlife in another. There's only one way to change that: by educating the people to the point where they can develop a sense of class consciousness.