The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There's never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won't come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it's an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That's another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I'm just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that "we're gonna get out of it," even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that "it will get better."

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world -- you could see it in the business press at the time -- because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, "we're gonna get out of it."

It's quite different now. For many people in the United States, there's a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it's quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you're a worker in manufacturing today -- the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression -- and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren't going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy -- a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it's no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise -- producing things people need or could use -- to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian. The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles -- what's called the "middle class" here, the "working class" in other countries -- but it was real. And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn't benefit the economy -- it probably harms it and society -- but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn't really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There's a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it's been pretty harsh -- and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less -- the .1% -- it's just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they're concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won't run through the corruption, but it's pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances." It urged investors to put money into a "plutonomy index." The brochure says, "The World is dividing into two blocs -- the Plutonomy and the rest."

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that's where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don't really care about them. We don't really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they're sometimes called the "precariat" -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it's not the periphery anymore. It's becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still "Saint Alan" -- hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) -- was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called "growing worker insecurity." If working people are insecure, if they're part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they're not going to make demands, they're not going to try to get better wages, they won't get improved benefits. We can kick 'em out, if we don't need 'em. And that's what's called a "healthy" economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat -- in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That's where we're heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it's going to be necessary to face the fact that it's a long, hard struggle. You don't win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that's just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn't win. But with enough popular support, they could have won. It's a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there's a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that's the basis for a real revolution. That's how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn't profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don't think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce -- which owned it anyway -- turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that's a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there's a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it's very serious. It not only affects people's lives, but the economy. In that regard, here's a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours. I don't know if you've ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it's operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It's a scandal.

It could be done here as it's been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can't happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I've kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we've discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It's kind of a miracle that we've escaped it. That's the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn't being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we're in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it's not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it's pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. "Why pay attention to these scientists?"

We're really regressing back to the dark ages. It's not a joke. And if that's happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn't going to be averted -- and in a generation or two, everything else we're talking about won't matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures. It's inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.
(c) 2012 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Gaza In Crisis.

GENERALS AND secret police chiefs get together for an attack on the politicians.

In some countries, they arrest the president, occupy government offices and TV stations and annul the constitution. They then publish Communique No. 1, explaining the dire need to save the nation from perdition and promising democracy, elections etc.

In other countries, they do it more quietly. They just inform the elected leaders that, if they don't desist from their disastrous policies, the officers will make their views public and precipitate their downfall.

Such officers are generally called a "junta," the Spanish word for "committee" used by South American generals. Their method is usually called a "putsch", a German-Swiss term for a sudden blow. (Yes, the Swiss actually had revolts some 170 years ago.)

What almost all such coups have in common is that their instigators thrive on the demagoguery of war. The politicians are invariably accused of cowardice in face of the enemy, failure to defend national honor, and such.

Not in Israel. In our country we are now seeing a kind of verbal uprising against the elected politicians by a group of current and former army generals, foreign intelligence and internal security chiefs. All of them condemn the government's threat to start a war against Iran, and some of them condemn the government's failure to negotiate with the Palestinians for peace.

Only in Israel.

IT STARTED with the most unlikely candidate to lead such a rebellion: the ex-Mossad chief, Meir Dagan.

For eight years, longer than most of his predecessors, Dagan led the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, comparable to the British MI6. ("Mossad" means "institute". The official name is "The Institute for intelligence and Special Operations".)

Nobody ever accused Dagan of pacifism. During his term, the Mossad carried out many assassinations, several against Iranian scientists, as well as cyber-attacks. A protege of Ariel Sharon, he was considered a champion of the most aggressive policies.

And here, after leaving office, he speaks out in the harshest terms against the government's plans for an attack on Iran's nuclear installations. Not mincing words, he said: "This is the stupidest idea I have heard in my life."

This week he was overshadowed by the recently relieved chief of the Shin Bet. (Shin Bet and Shabak are different ways of pronouncing the initials of the official Hebrew name "General Security Service.") It is equivalent to the British MI5, but deals mostly with the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

For six years, Yuval Diskin was the silent chief of the silent service. His shaved head could be seen entering and leaving meetings of secret committees. He is considered the real father of "targeted eliminations", and his service has been widely accused of extensive use of torture. Nobody ever accused him of being soft on Arabs.

And now he has spoken out. Choosing a most unusual venue - a get together of some two dozen pensioners in a small-town cafe - he let fly.

According to Diskin - and who would know better? - Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran is leading to a world-wide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, but, on the contrary, it will hasten this effort, this time with the support of the world community.

Going further than Dagan, he stated that the only factor preventing peace negotiations with the Palestinians is Netanyahu himself. Israel can make peace with Mahmoud Abbas at any time, and missing this historic opportunity will bring disaster upon Israel.

As chief of the Shin Bet, Diskin was the No. 1 official government expert on Palestinians. His agency receives and collates all the evidence, spy reports, interrogation results and information gathered from listening devices.

Leaving no room for doubt, Diskin said that he knew Netanyahu and Barak from close up, did not trust them and thought they were unfit to lead the nation in a crisis. He also said that they are deliberately deceiving the people. He did not omit to mention that they live in extreme luxury.

Anyone who thought that these accusers were lone voices, and that the whole choir of current and past security chiefs would rise and condemn them unanimously, was disappointed. One after another these experts were quoted by the media as agreeing with the two in substance, though not necessarily on their style. Not a single one questioned their assertions or denied what they said.

The current Chief of Staff and the Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs let it be known that they share the views of the two on Iran. Almost all their predecessors, including all the recent military Chiefs of Staff, told the media that they agree, too. Suddenly there was a united front of experienced security leaders against a war with Iran.

THE COUNTER-ATTACK was not late in coming. The entire battery of politicians and media hacks went into action.

They did what Israelis almost always do: when faced with serious problems or serious arguments, they don't get to grips with the matter itself, but select some minor detail and belabor it endlessly.

Practically no one tried to disprove the assertions of the officers, neither concerning the proposed attack on Iran nor concerning the Palestinian issue. They focused on the speakers, not on what they said.

Both Dagan and Diskin, it was asserted, were embittered because their terms of office were not extended. They felt humiliated. They are venting their personal frustration. They are speaking out of sheer spite.

If they did not trust the Prime Minister, why did they not get up and resign while they were in office? Why didn't they speak out before? If this was a matter of life and death, why did they wait?

Alternatively, why don't they continue to shut up? Where is their sense of responsibility? Why do they help the enemy? Why don't they speak only behind closed doors?

Diskin, it was added, has no idea about Iran. It was not in his area of responsibility at all. Dagan knew about Iran, but had a limited view. Only Netanyahu and Barak knew all the facts and the entire spectrum of opportunities and risks.

Sources "close to the Prime Minister's office" also had another explanation: Dagan and Diskin, as well as their predecessors, were just stupid. Taken together with Dagan's and Diskin's assertion that Netanyahu and Barak are not rational (and perhaps not quite mentally balanced) this means that our national security depends entirely on a group of irrational and stupid leaders - and that this has been the case for years.

A frightening thought: what if everything they say about each other is true?

THE MAN accused by his security advisers of messianic tendencies was exposed to personal scrutiny by another event this week.

His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, died at age 102, having remained of clear mind to the end. At the public funeral, he was eulogized by Binyamin. As could be expected, it was a kitschy speech. The son addressed his dead father in the second person - ("You taught me ..."You formed my character" etc) - a vulgar practice I find particularly distasteful. He also shed tears on camera.

There is no doubt that the father had a huge influence on his son. He was a professor of history, whose whole intellectual life was centered on one topic: the Spanish inquisition - a traumatic chapter in Jewish history comparable only to the Holocaust.

Ben-Zion Netanyahu was an extreme rightist, obsessed by the idea that Jews might be exterminated at any moment, and therefore cannot trust any Goy. He held Menachem Begin in contempt, considering him a softy, and never joined his party. His intellectual attitude was reinforced by a personal trauma: his eldest son, Yoni, the commander of the spectacular Entebbe raid, was the only soldier killed in this operation.

It seems that he didn't have such a high opinion of his second son. He once remarked publicly that Binyamin was unfit to be prime minister, but would make a good foreign minister - an uncannily accurate judgment, if one sees the job of the foreign minister as marketing.

The home in which "Bibi" grew up was not a very happy one. The father was a deeply embittered man. As a historian, he was never accepted by the academic world in Jerusalem, who disavowed his theories. (Mainly, that the Inquisition did not persecuted the Marranos - Jews who had accepted Christianity rather than leave Spain - because they practiced Judaism in secret, but out of pure anti-Semitism. This was an attack on one of the most cherished tenets of Jewish mythology: that these Jews had remained true to their faith to the point of sacrificing their lives at the stake.) Not getting a professorship in Jerusalem, the father emigrated to the US, where Binyamin grew up. The father never forgave the Israeli establishment.

The myth of the Great Historian laboring at his titanic task was a daily reality at home, in America and, later, back in Jerusalem. The three sons had to walk on tiptoe, not being allowed to make any noise that could disturb the great man, nor to bring their friends home.

All this shaped the character and world view of "Bibi" - the specter of imminent national annihilation, the role model of the fiercely rightist father, the shadow of the older and much more admired brother. When Binyamin now speaks endlessly about the coming Second Holocaust and his historical role in preventing it, this need not be just a ploy to divert attention from the Palestinian issue or to safeguard his political survival. He may - frightening thought!!! - actually believe it.

The picture that emerges is exactly that painted by Yuval Diskin: a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father - altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.

Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, and Founder and Chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Psychology and has published more than 275 scientific papers, many chapters and reviews, and edited 13 books. He is the author of the new book (with Sharon Begley) The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Richie (as he is known to his friends) has done more to bring the study of mental well-being into the 21st century than anyone I can think of. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work.

*****

Can you briefly summarize your work up to this point?

The research I summarize in my book The Emotional Life of Your Brain is about emotional styles-differences among people in how they respond to emotional challenges. From quite early on in my career, there were two critical observations that came to form the core of my subsequent life's work. The first observation is that the most salient characteristic of emotion in people is the fact that each person responds differently to life's slings and arrows. Each of us is unique in our emotional make-up and this individuality determines why some people are resilient and others vulnerable, why some have high levels of well-being despite objective adversity while others decompensate rapidly in the response to the slightest setback.

The second observation came from the great fortune I had early in my career to be around some remarkable people. They were remarkable not because of their academic or professional achievements, but rather because of their demeanor, really because of their emotional style. These were extremely kind and generous people. They were very attentive, and when I was in their presence I felt as if I was the sole and complete focus of all of their attention. They were people that I found myself wishing to be around more. And I learned that one thing all of these people had in common was a regular practice of meditation. And I asked them if they were like that all of their lives and they assured me they were not, but rather that these qualities had been nurtured and cultivated by their meditative practices.

It wasn't until many years later that I encountered neuroplasticity and recognized that the mechanisms of neuroplasticity were an organizing framework for understanding how emotional styles could be transformed. While they were quite stable over time in most adults, they could still be changed through systematic practice of specific mental exercises. In a very real and concrete sense, we could change our brains by transforming our minds. And there was no realm more important for that to occur than emotion. For it is so that our emotional styles play an incredibly important role in determining who will be vulnerable to psychopathology and who will not be. Emotional styles are also critical in our physical health. Mental and physical well-being are inextricably linked.

What is the focus of your new book?

In the book I describe 6 emotional styles that are rooted in basic neuroscientific research. The 6 styles are:

1. Resilience: How rapidly or slowly do you recover from adversity?

2. Outlook: How long does positive emotion persist following a joyful event?

3. Social Intuition: How accurate are you in detecting the non-verbal social cues of others?

4. Context: Do you regulate your emotion in a context-sensitive fashion?

5. Self-Awareness: How aware are you of your own bodily signals that constitute emotion?

6. Attention: How focused or scattered in your attention?

I did not decide one day to figure out how many emotional styles there were or to postulate which styles would make sense for humans to have. Rather, each of these styles has arisen inductively from the large corpus of research my colleagues and I have conducted using rigorous neuroscientific methods over the past 30 years. They are not the obvious styles that correspond to well-known personality types such as introversion and extraversion. But, as I explain in my book, they can explain the constituents of commonly found personality types.

The fact that they are grounded in neural systems provides important clues as to how each style affects our emotional behavior and how the styles can also impact downstream bodily systems important for physical health.

How much of a person's emotional style is conscious?

Many aspects of emotional style are not conscious. They constitute emotional habits that largely proceed in the absence of awareness. For example, most of us are rarely aware of how long negative emotion persists following a stressful event. The self-awareness style underscores the fact that there are many bodily processes that contribute to emotion of which we may be unaware. One important motivation for me in writing this book is to bring into awareness habits of mind that previously were not conscious. By describing the nature of emotional styles and their underlying brain bases, it is my fervent aspiration that it will help others to recognize emotional patterns in themselves and such awareness is the first, and often most important, step in producing change. So if there are aspects of your emotional style that you wish to change, first becoming aware of these components of your mind is a key ingredient to change. In the book, I offer simple questionnaires you can take for each of the 6 emotional styles to give you an idea of where you fall on each of the 6 dimensions. And I also offer simple strategies to change your emotional styles should you wish to do so. These strategies are derived from ancient meditation practices and modern scientific approaches. Together, they constitute what I've called "neurally-inspired behavioral interventions:" Interventions that are derived from some understanding of the brain and utilize simple behavioral or mental strategies that offer the prospect of transforming your mind and thereby changing your brain. In the book I show that we can all take more responsibility for our own brains and intentionally shape our brains in a more positive way.

In my experience, the topic of meditation still provokes skepticism among scientists and secularists. Can you describe what you mean by "meditation" and then tell us why you think this practice is relevant to our understanding of the human mind?

One definition of the word "meditation' in Sanskrit is "familiarization." And in a key sense the family of mental practices that constitute meditation can be thought of as strategies to familiarize a person with her own mind. Meditation in this sense can help to cleanse the interior lenses of perception so that we can see our own minds with greater clarity. Particularly for those who are students of the mind, this practice can be enormously informative in providing an inner or phenomenological view that is different from that provided by the objective methods of science. In other senses, meditation refers to mental practices that can be used to cultivate attention and emotion regulation. For example, some practices involve focusing attention on breathing and returning the attention to breathing each time a person notices that her mind has wandered. In this way, gradually over time, selective attention can be improved. The term "mindfulness meditation" refers to a form of meditation during which practitioners are instructed to pay attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally. The process of learning to attend nonjudgmentally can gradually transform one's emotional response to stimuli such that we can learn to simply observe our minds in response to stimuli that might provoke either negative or positive emotion without being swept up in these emotions. This does not mean that our emotional intensity diminishes. It simply means that our emotions do not perseverate. If we encounter an unpleasant situation, we might experience a transient increase in negative emotions but they do not persist beyond the situation.

It didn't take long to crank up the backlash against European voters. This is inevitable whenever a socialist wins a major election, but particularly now, when new French president Francois Hollande rode to victory shouting, "Austerity can no longer be inevitable!"

This sounds like the beginning of what will be a very heated debate over who has to pay for the excesses of the financial crisis. It was previously assumed that everybody but the actual financial services sector would have to pay, but voters in Europe now are refusing to go along, sparking a wave of eye-rolling editorials in the financial press. Even David Brooks got into the act today, penning a lugubrious editorial about the errant political instincts of the populist masses here and abroad.

Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:

Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;

Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;

After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;

Pay for it all by slashing services to what's left of the middle class.

They're replaying the same script in Europe, sort of. The causes of crises in places like Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy vary somewhat and are less simple to define, but a common denominator in all of them is weak growth mixed with giant budget deficits.

In most all of these cases, you had enormous sums of money entering these countries in the middle and late 2000s as global financiers in the midst of the bubble boom looked for higher-yield investments around the world - Spanish real estate, Greek debt, etc.

The local economies sucked up the bubble money, and in Greece's case they used it to ramp up state benefits, which they could no longer afford once the bubble burst. A lot of these countries turned to Wall Street to finance their way out of budgetary messes using swap deals and other hocus-pocus moves, kicking the can down the road as it were, and those decisions are now blowing up in their faces.

Now that it's the next morning, and everyone has a severe hangover from the bubble, the dominant narrative is that these countries brought their troubles on themselves by being reckless spenders with unsustainable welfare states. The solution, naturally, is going to be "austerity," slashing state budgets, reining in those wasteful citizens with their unreasonable demands for returns on taxes.

Take today's Brooks column in the Times, for instance, which seems aimed at his colleague Paul Krugman (who has been arguing that cutting public spending and job stimulus in European countries will be disastrous). Brooks claims that the financial crisis was caused by "structural" problems, the first of which is that we've simply grown out of a need to pay low-skilled workers real wages:

Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

According to Brooks, this organic trend toward lower salaries for everyone but the "superstars" managing those hyperefficient companies has forced politicians into the bad decision of borrowing and taxing to extend more welfare/charity to the less fortunate:

Politicians tried to compensate by reducing the tax bill, increasing deficit spending, ensuring easy credit for homebuyers and by helping workers shift out of the hypercompetitive, globalized part of the economy and into the less productive and more sheltered parts of the economy - mostly into health care, government and education.

But you can only mask structural problems for so long .... The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last.

This world view ignores the fact that those "superstar" leaders of "hyperefficient" companies have been sucking up a thousand times as much welfare as those low-skilled workers Brooks is talking about. Here's how the "superstars" of the banking world sometimes earn their bonuses: they borrow trillions from the U.S. Federal Reserve at zero or near zero interest, then they turn right around and lend chunks of that free money to a place like Greece (ex-FDIC Sheila Bair, in a hilarious editorial on the subject, pegged the ten-year yield at 21%), then they pocket the proceeds and call it capitalism.

Brooks' analysis of the financial crisis leaves out things like the $16 trillion in emergency loans the banks secretly got from the Fed in the years since the crisis. It ignores quantitative easing, bailouts, and the trillions of dollars of bets Wall Street made on the unreal economy during the bubble years that we all ended up paying for, either through taxes or reduced home values or lowered interest on our savings.

The point is, when people talk about "austerity," they only ever talk about the pain the general population should voluntarily accept, in the form of reduced services and curtailed "stimulus." No one ever says the financial services sector should have to cut back on its access to easy money, and there hasn't been much in the way of serious plans to restore some sanity and prudence to the lending and investing business.

Instead, governments have stood by and allowed banks to lend thirty and forty dollars for every one on the books, they've watched lenders almost completely do away with underwriting standards, they've continually pumped the big firms full of cheap cash from the Fed and the ECB (printing new trillions when the real money runs out), and they've allowed Wall Street to build giant sandcastles of illusory wealth using synthetic derivatives, all with minimal reserve requirements.

The result of all of this easy money is an endless succession of speculative bubbles that simply shift from one market to another as financial companies run around the globe in search of high yields. It was Spanish real estate yesterday, and Euro sovereign debt before that, and American home mortgages at other times, and then it was wheat and corn and other food commodities last year (which led to the social unrest in the middle East), and it was oil in 2008, oil in 2011, and oil again this year, and so on.

In addition to the direct consequence of huge stunning losses when these bubbles collapse, the insane volatility of all of these markets creates panic in the business community, and puts a brake on real lending to grow real businesses. When you don't know if oil is going to cost $40 a barrel or $140 three months from now, it's pretty hard to invest in a new airline, or a chain of supermarkets (as commodities, many food prices will also rise and fall with oil), or anything at all, really. It's not surprising that no one wants to lend in this environment.