Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales - 867 Words

At the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s â€Å"The Canterbury Tales,† he opens with a description of twenty-nine characters who are going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Each character in the story represent a stereotype of a kind of person that would be seen in England during the Fourteenth Century. Every single character is unique, but also embodies physical and behavioral traits that would be common for someone in their profession. He writes each character so they have realistic qualities. However, when viewed more closely, a reader can determine which of these characters have a convincing or questionable personality. Chaucer first sets the mood by providing an overall idea of each character before they tell their stories. The physical and†¦show more content†¦Chaucer states that he is an expert in stealing grain and charging three times the amount, but yet he still has a golden thumb. â€Å"An honest miller hath a golden thumb† is a pun used to ironical ly state that this Miller’s golden thumb comes from the increase in his own profit (Chaucer). The portrait that the Miller draws is based upon the negative stereotypes on the lower-class people during the medieval times. The idea was that these people had more brawn than brains, which he clearly demonstrates in his prologue. Another character that is criticized in the Prologue is the Wife of Bath. Her character is larger than life. She is described as having wide hips, a hat as bigs as a boat, and, just in general, taking up a lot of space in the pilgrimage and in the story as a whole. The Wife dresses in expensive clothes such, Her kerchiefs were finely wove†¦/ I dare to swear those weighed a good ten pounds, /That on a Sunday she wore on her head† (Chaucer). Her physical appearance matches a medieval stereotype of a lustful person. This stereotype was seen in a person who could not control their passions. The Wife falls perfectly in line with this stereotype by telling the other characters how she has had five husbands. Having so many husbands has made her skilled in â€Å"the oldest dance† (Chaucer). With the Wife of Bath, Chaucer is laying out the stereotypical medieval state

Vagueness, Ambiguity and clarity in writing Free Essays

Vagueness, Ambiguity, and Clarity In Writing Coastland Bullock June 29, 2014 CRT. 205 In example three, the ambiguity causes this statement to have a lot of vagueness. When dealing with a situation such as collecting money for a project, all details should be clearly and factually stated first. We will write a custom essay sample on Vagueness, Ambiguity and clarity in writing or any similar topic only for you Order Now The first thing said Is, next Sunday; along with this should be a date. Also, when It says the collection will help with the cost I feel that the cost should be stated as well so that a goal can be set for the group as a whole. The rest of the statement is even more vague because all details of the project otherwise they may not be as willing to donate as much. Lastly, the end of the second sentence says to let the committee know if you would like to do something but they do not mention which committee is in charge of the project. Being able to understand this example is not very difficult because its kind of common sense what they are getting at but it is a little hard understand all the details so therefore they may be less likely to get more help with the project. With these types of announcements, thinking critically in order to be clear in your writing is a vital aspect o incorporate into our work. Thinking deeply into whatever we are doing is important so that the result is clear and on point. In example four, the entire statement is vague and unclear of what conclusion or point is trying to be made. I understood from reading it that they obviously agreed with what they read at first but as they continued to read they found out more, this type of writing makes this paragraph ambiguous. At first the reader agrees with what is being stated but after reading on, they become indecisive causing failure to make a choice. Never once was any information stated that said who, where, when, why, or what they were talking about. The example uses words such as they, both, sort of, the author, something, and anything. Using these types of words and phrases will automatically make any writing or conversation vague and ambiguous. These two downfalls in writing influence understanding by not allowing the reader to know what is trying to be proved or concluded in the writing. This paragraph is not an example of clear writing because the writer was obviously not aware that whoever might read it may not know what or who they were talking about due to no details in the statement. How to cite Vagueness, Ambiguity and clarity in writing, Papers

Keeping The Rabble In Line Essay Example For Students

Keeping The Rabble In Line Essay Keeping the Rabble in Line Copyright 1994 by Noam Chomsky and David BarsamianIntroduction | Next section | Contents | Archive | ZNet The World Bank, GATT and Free TradeApril 20, 1992 DB: In 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were both created. What function do these two major financial entities play? Their early role was in helping to carry through the reconstruction of the state capitalist industrial societies that had been wrecked by the Second World War. After that they shifted to what is called development, which is often a form of controlled underdevelopment in the Third World, which means designing and supporting particular kinds of programs for the Third World. At this point we move into controversy. Their effect, and you can argue about their intention, is overwhelmingly to integrate the South, the old colonial areas, into the global society dominated by concentrated sectors of wealth within the North , the rich society. DB: You know that old song, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Well, where have all the billions gone? The World Bank has lent tens of billions of dollars. Who lent what to whom exactly? What did it do there? You cant answer that simply. In the advanced industrial societies that money helped carry out a reconstruction from postwar damage. In the Third World lending has had mixed effects. Its had effects in changing the nature of agriculture, developing infrastructure, steering projects towards particular areas and away from other areas. Its been part of the long process of trying to undercut import substitution and move toward export oriented agriculture. By and large World Bank loans have been a subsidiary to the policies of those who control it. The United States has an overwhelming role in the financial institution because of its wealth and power. And the United States and its immediate allies have designed programs of what they called development throughout the world. The money may have gone into anything from dams to agro-export producers to occasionally some peasant project. DB: The International Monetary Fund has been vilified in the Third World for the draconian measures that it has imposed on those developing countries. Take a Latin American country today. There is a huge debt crisis. Remember that the Bretton Woods system basically broke down in the early 1970s. The Bretton Woods system involved regulation of currencies, convertibility of the dollar for gold, all sorts of other rules which essentially made the United States an international banker. By 1970 or so the U.S. could no longer sustain that. It was very advantageous to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. It allowed enormous overseas investment by American corporations. But by 1970 the U.S. was unable to sustain the role of international banker. President Nixon dismantled the system in 1971. That led to an enormous amount of unregulated currency floating around in inte rnational channels. The world was awash with unregulated capital, particularly after the rise in the oil prices. Bankers wanted to lend that capital, and they did. They lent it primarily to Third World countries, which means to elite elements. For example, Latin American dictatorships would go on huge borrowing binges. The results were praised in the West as economic miracles, like the Brazilian miracle under the generals which left that country saddled with huge indebtedness. When the 1980s came along, U.S. interest rates went up and started pulling money toward the United States and increasing interest payments on the debt. The Latin American economies started going into free fall. Capital flowed out of them at a rapid rate. They were unable to control their own internal wealthy classes. The capital export from Latin America may not have been at the level of the debt, but it probably wasnt very far below it. There was a flow of hundreds of billions of dollars from south to north, partly debt service, which far outweighs new aid by the late 1980s payment of interest on the debt, and so on, and other forms of capital flight. By now, deeply impoverished African countries are even exporting capital to the international lending institutions. The net effect of this is what some people jokingly call a program in which the poor in the rich countries pay the rich in the poor countries. Thats approximately the way it comes out. Then the IMF comes along, run by the wealthy countries, which have certain rules for the weak. They are that if you have a high level of inflation and the currency isnt stable and various other economic indicators arent satisfied, then you impose extreme forms of austerity: balance the budget, cut back services, control the currency, etc. Thats neoliberal free market economics. Thats typically disastrous for the general mass of the population. Thats why the rich countries themselves will never accept those rules unless theyre forced to. For ex ample, there was a time in the late 1970s when Britain was forced to adopt certain IMF rules because of its weakness. But no country rich or powerful enough would ever do it, like the U.S., for example, which has incredible debt but doesnt accept IMF suggestions. Were too powerful to follow those rules. Third World countries, which are much weaker, especially those which are under the control of Western-oriented elites anyway, who often benefit by it, do follow the rules and theres disaster for the population. Thats why you get vilification. The same thing is happening in Eastern Europe now. The whole neoliberal free market story is basically designed for the benefit of the people who are going to win the game. Nobody else follows those rules. The West doesnt follow them either when its not going to win. For example, the World Bank estimates that right now protectionist measures imposed by the rich countries cost the Third World more than twice as much as total aid going from the No rth to the South and that aid is mostly a disguised form of export promotion. DB: To whom are the World Bank and the IMF accountable? To the people who put the money in, which means a bunch of rich countries, primarily the United States, which is the dominant element there. Its mainly funded by the wealthy states, and the U.S. has the largest vote, so thats who theyre beholden to. DB: Where does the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, fit into this economic picture? One commentator has called it the economic teeth of the new world order. GATT is the international trading system, also set up in the 1940s. Its in the news now because for the last several years the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations has been going on with an effort to achieve some new form of freeing up international trade. Freeing up international trade in itself, in a general sense, is not a bad thing. Its often a good thing. The point is, nobody goes into that game, if they have the power, without ample p rotection for their own internal needs. So for example every one of the Western powers, including the United States, is entering the GATT negotiations with a certain agenda, a mixture of liberalization and protectionism geared to the particular strengths and weaknesses of that economy. When we speak of that economy we mean the people in the dominant positions in it. So the European Community wants high level protection for the aerospace industry and agricultural production. The United States has a mixture of policies. Its calling for liberalization and free trade in many areas. On the other hand, its also calling for enhanced protection in areas where the U.S. is strong. Take so-called services like banking. The U.S. is calling for a liberalization of services in the Third World, which would have the instantaneous effect of swamping and overwhelming all Third World banks and financial institutions by western ones, since theyre so much richer and more powerful. That would eliminate t he possibility of any national industrial development programs within the Third World. Thats the kind of liberalization that the U.S. is in favor of. It means that Third World economies would be managed by western banks and those who run them and the governments that are tied to them. On the other hand, the U.S. is calling for more protection in other areas, particularly intellectual property rights, which includes anything from pop music to cinema to software to patents. Right now the U.S. is racing ahead in patenting what may turn out to be parts of genes. The idea is to patent the genes of corn, or for that matter humans, so that future biotechnology, which will involve various kinds of genetic engineering, will be in the hands of mainly U.S. private firms. They will control that field, and they want to make sure its protected. So they want long patent rights and so on. That means that drugs, software, new technology, new agricultural forms, any form of biotechnology that may inv olve health will be in the hands of Merck Corporation and others like them who will make tens of billions of dollars in profits. It means that India, which could duplicate a lot of this much cheaper, duplicate Merck drugs at a fraction of the cost, will not be permitted to do it. The U.S. also demands product rather than only process patents, to insure, say, that Indias pharmaceutical industry doesnt invent a cheaper way to produce some drug a barrier to efficiency and innovation, but a boon for profits. Thats understandable on the part of the rich. They want to control the future, naturally, and that means control technology. The biotechnology aspect, the patenting of genes, has been causing an international furor in the scientific world. It can have a huge impact in the future. One shouldnt minimize it. The U.S. (like others) also insists on a high level of protection for U.S. shipping. Shipping between U.S. ports has to be in U.S. ships. If Alaskan oil comes down to California, it has to be in U.S. ships. The U.S. insists that anything involving U.S. goods be done to a very high percentage in U.S. ships, which benefits the U.S. maritime industry. Similarly, defense expenditures are not considered subsidies under GATT rules. Thats enormously important for the U.S., which spends more on its military system than the rest of the world combined, as has always used that as a cover for massive public subsidy to high-tech industry. The point is that there is a mixture of protectionism and liberalization geared to the interests of those who are designing the policies, which are the powerful economic forces within the state in question. Thats not a great surprise, after all, but thats what GATT is all about, and thats what the negotiations are about. If the current GATT programs succeed, its clear that theyre tending towards a world government ruled by a club of rich men who meet in their organizations, like the G-7 meetings, the meetings of the seven richest indust rial countries, which have their own institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, which have a network of arrangements established in GATT and which administer a system of whats sometimes been called corporate mercantilism. Remember that although this is called liberalization and free trade, theres a tremendous amount of managed trade internal to it. So huge corporations which are often more powerful than many states carry out controlled, managed trade internally. This means trade across borders, too, because theyre internationalized. They do planning of investments, of production, of commercial interactions, manipulation of prices, and so on, and they naturally manage it for their own interests. Corporate mercantilism is fine. Its governments that are not allowed to get into the game. The rich western powers dont have any objection at all to managed trade. They just dont want it to be done by governments, because governments have a dangerous feature that corporations dont have: g overnments may to some extent fall under the influence of popular forces, usually to a limited extent. But to some extent theres always that fear. Theres no such fear in corporations. They are immune from any form of public control or even surveillance. Therefore they are much more acceptable management agents for this mercantilist system being designed globally in the interests of the rich. GATT plays its role in this. DB: You mentioned the powerful economic forces. Increasingly those forces transcend frontiers. There has been a massive internationalization of capital and finance over the last few years. What are the implications of that? First of all, theres nothing novel about it. Back in the 1930s there were, for example, notorious interconnections between, say, I.G. Farben in Germany and Du Pont. In fact, big U.S. corporations were essentially producing for the German war machine right up until the war and some even claim afterwards in various devious ways. But there was a big change after the Second World War. There was a big upsurge in the creation of multinational firms, even beyond the traditional multinationals, for example, the energy corporations, which always were highly internationalized. But it extended much beyond. The Marshall Plan, for example, gave a big shot in the arm to the internationalization of capital. It would designate some project in Belgium where you could build a steel complex. It would then encourage bids from American corporations, which would naturally win the bidding most of the time. Marshall Plan funds were then used, as intended, to underlie the expansion of U.S. investment through the rich areas, primarily in Europe. That led to an explosion of international corporations. U.S. foreign investment exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. Not long after came European international capital. Britain had always been substantially involved in the internationalization of capital. In recent years Japan has joined the game and done plenty of foreign investing. This has increased through the 1980s. There are a lot of reasons for this in the recent period. One is the one I mentioned before, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which led to an enormous amount of unregulated internationalized wealth. Another was a revolution in telecommunications, which makes it extremely easy to control international operations in which production is done in one place and the financing comes from somewhere else and you shift the dollars around. That means you can have executive offices in a skyscraper in New York and production facilities in Papua, New Guinea and fake banks in the Cayman Islands which may be nothing more than a fax machine set up to evade regulation. You can transfer funds around. You can control and manage importing and exporting within the corporate empire through management decisions. It can be scattered all over the world, with branch offices in Zurich. Thats had a lot of effect. Everyone knows that the U.S. s hare in international trade has been declining in the last ten years. But in fact if you look at the share in international trade of U.S.-based corporations, it has not been declining. It may have been either stable or slightly increasing. Everyone knows the U.S. is supposed to have a big trade deficit. On the other hand, if you take into account the operations of overseas producers that are part of U.S.-based corporations, and imports into the United States that are actually transfers from U.S. corporations operating abroad to the same U.S. corporations operating internally, if they import parts for their own production, it probably levels out the trade deficit, maybe even gives the U.S. a trade surplus. The functioning institutions in the world system are increasingly corporate empires. I say increasingly because national states, the rich states, at least, retain substantial importance. They are instruments of integrated corporate systems. And also increasing because its an old ph enomenon. It goes back to the origins of capitalism. It is true that it has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. DB: To continue with GATT: The Environmental News Network has said that GATT will open borders for businesses seeking lower labor costs and less rigorous environmental regulation, thus blackmailing U.S workers to accept deteriorating working conditions and lower wages or lose their jobs. Do you think thats a fair assessment? Its not even controversial. Of course it will have that effect. Its already having that effect. Take the free-trade agreement with Canada. Its actually working both ways. Canada has just objected to U.S. environmental regulations on use of asbestos, claiming that thats interference with free trade. Canada is an asbestos exporter, and they want the barriers lowered. Perhaps theyve already won on that, meaning that U.S. environmental regulations on asbestos will have to decline. Sooner or later the U.S. is probably going to object to the Canadian Health Service as an interference with free trade because it means that Canadian-based corporations are freed from the burden of paying parts of health costs that U.S. corporations have to bear because of the grotesquely incompetent and highly bureaucratized health system. Threats from U.S. insurance companies were enough to cause Ontario to drop plans for a provincial auto insurance program that would have reduced costs, but cut out the highly inefficient private corporations an interference with free trade, they claimed, and won. Canada has lost several hundred thousand jobs. There are various estimates, but none are less than a quarter of a million jobs, to the United States, manufacturing and similar type labor, because Canadian corporations would much prefer to produce in the southeastern United States, where the government enforces what are called right-to-work laws, which means state policy coerces labor to ensure that there will be no unionization. As a result, working cond itions are far inferior. Wages are less. Naturally, corporations will move to such places. Even the threat to move serves to discipline labor. In general, the effect of the free-trade agreements will be to move to the lowest common denominator with regard to wages, and environmental protection. DB: So do you think that under the rubric of free trade that the Canadian health care system would be seen as an unfair advantage that Canadians have? It hasnt yet happened, but I would expect it. I expect that American corporations sooner or later may decide that it would be a good idea to undermine the Canadian Health Service by an argument of that sort. There are a lot of calculations involved in that. One problem is that production is so internationalized that Canadian corporations are often U.S. corporations. DB: What did you make of the spectacle of the President of the United States going to Japan with about a score of CEOs of major U.S. corporations and essentially demanding a kind of international affirmative action, as Jesse Jackson has called it? First of all, remember that the propaganda phrase was, Im going for jobs, jobs, jobs. How much Bush cares about jobs you can see by looking at U.S. policy towards American workers. So while hes talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, the U.S. government is trying to set up the basis for maquiladora industries in Central America to take away American jobs. The phrase means profits, profits, profits. Thats what he was there for. It was kind of stupid for the CEOs to come along. It left the United States as an object of ridicule. But whether they were along or not, thats what the trip was for. Everybody should have known that. The trip was to coerce Japan into accepting managed trade, meaning whats called here fair-trade practices, which means mercantilist arrangements between powerful states to violate free-trade arrangements and ensure that their own powerful economic forces get benefits. Theres nothing novel about that. The Reagan administration combined free-trade bombast with a highly protectionist record. Take control over imports. Various kinds of control over imports amount to duties. They practically doubled, from about twelve percent to about twenty-three percent, during the Reagan years, through what are sometimes called voluntary arrangements, meaning you do what we say or well close off your market. The latest effort to get Japan to buy American auto parts is just another part of the state-managed trade system that the rich always insist upon while of course beating their breasts about free trade when you can use it as a weapon against someone else. DB: Is Japan powerful enough to resist? Thats an interesting question. No one really has answers to these questions. The domestic and international economies are only very dimly understood by anyone. So anything we say will sound a lot more confident than it ought to be. My own suspicion has always been that the strength of the Japanese economy ha s been overestimated, that its much flimsier than is alleged. For objective reasons. Japan is a resource-poor country, highly dependent upon export for survival. In particular it depends very heavily on the U.S. market. Its expanding into Asian markets, but that doesnt compare with the U.S. market. The U.S. remains the richest country in the world. Also, its dependent, unlike the United States which has plenty of internal resources and enough military power to control other sources of raw materials on trade for resources and raw materials as well. Also, the Japanese, when you look at the numbers, look very rich. But if you look at the way people live, they dont look very rich. People are crammed into tiny apartments. They live a highly coerced and submissive existence. If you develop any reasonable quality of life standards, Japan would not rank very high by many measures, although it ranks quite high in others, like health, for example. So its a mixed story. It think there are se rious weaknesses in that economy. Im not all that surprised by the current recession and financial crisis in Japan. They have such resources and capital. Theyll doubtless pull out of this one. DB: Along with the Arab oil producing states and some portions of Europe, Japan seems to be the only other area where there is excess capital formation for investment. There is a lot of excess capital, but its not clear what its going to look like after this crisis has passed. A lot of it was based on very chancy investments and a huge bubble in real estate which was highly inflated. But its still true. They have plenty of excess capital. In my opinion, German-based Europe is a more likely prospect for a world economic leader in the long term. DB: You just said crisis, which reminds me of something Ive been hearing as long as I can remember, and I am certain you have as well, the current crisis in capitalism. It seems to be an ongoing story. Is this particular crisis any different? There has b een a global stagnation for about twenty years now. The growth rates and the rise in productivity of the 1950s and 1960s are things of the past. It leveled off around the early 1970s. Things like the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system were symptomatic. Since then there has been a kind of stagnation. Its not level across the globe. For example, for Africa its been a catastrophe. For Latin America its been a catastrophe. In fact, for most of the domains of the capitalist world it has been absolutely catastrophic, including internally. Large parts of American and British society have suffered severely, too. On the other hand, other sectors have done quite well. The so-called newly industrializing countries of East Asia, the ones in the Japanese orbit, like South Korea and Taiwan, didnt succumb in the 1980s to the international crisis of capitalism as Latin America did. Up until then their growth rates had been pretty comparable. But they separated sharply in the 1980s, with the East Asian ones doing much better. Again, nobody really knows the reasons for this, but one factor appears to have been that, unlike Latin America, the East Asian countries dont make any pretense of following free-market rules. Capital flight was a huge problem in Latin America. The wealthy just sent their capital elsewhere, or else it was just payment on debt. East Asian countries didnt do that. South Korea has no capital flight problem because the state is powerful enough not only to control labor, which is the norm, but also to control capital. You can get the death penalty for capital flight. Other forms of state-corporate managed industrial and financial development did protect them from this global crisis of capitalism. Within the rich countries there were various reactions. The United States and Britain are probably the ones that suffered most from it, thanks to Reaganite and Thatcherite measures. Whether you call this a crisis or not, its not a well enough defined term so you ca n answer the question. For a very large part, probably a considerable majority, of the American work force, real wages have either stagnated or maybe even declined for about a twenty-year period. DB: The decline of major U.S. industries, such as auto, textiles, electronics, etc., is well documented. Its not even a matter of discussion. The fastest area of growth in jobs in the U.S. is in such areas as janitors, waiters, truck drivers. Actually, the fastest growing white collar profession is security guard. DB: What does that tell you? It means that there is a large superfluous population that has to be controlled and a large number of rich people who have to be protected from them. DB: Is there any economic strategy or planning to create real jobs with decent wages? For U.S. workers? Why should there be? DB: It would seem that elites would want to protect their position. But their position does not rely primarily on U.S. labor. They do want to have a domestic work force for services , but production is a different matter. DB: But if theres major economic dislocation in this country, unrest would surely result and their position of power and strength would be threatened. That depends on whether you can keep the public under control. For example, the Washington Post reported on a study about black males in Washington, D.C. DB: Forty-six percent of all black males between 18 and 35 are incarcerated in the District of Columbia. I think they say at any particular moment about seventy percent of them are somehow within the control of the justice system, on probation, etc. Thats a way of keeping people from bothering us: keep them in jail. If theyre not useful for wealth production they have to be controlled somehow. But its not clear that thats a threat to the elites in the Washington area. Or take New York City, which is an absolute disaster. But you can walk around wealthy sectors of downtown Manhattan that look very glitzy and cheery. DB: Prison construction in th e U.S. is one of the fastest growing industries. Yes. The U.S. has by far the highest per capita prison population in the world. Even things like the drug epidemic are functional in a way. Im not claiming that the government starts it for this purpose. Things go on because they have certain functions for elite groups that set policy. One effect of the so-called drug war, which has very little to do with controlling drugs and a lot to do with controlling people, has been to create a huge explosion in the prison population. Anybody who works with prisons will tell you that a very substantial part of the prison population is people who are in there for possession, not for harming anyone. Thats a technique of control. Whether its an economical technique of control you could argue. Look how much it costs to control people by putting them in prison and having them on drugs and therefore not bothering you or having them shooting and robbing each other in inner cities. How that compares wit h other techniques of social control would be a hard question to answer. However, to go back to your original question. If you were a wealthy professional or corporate executive living in Westchester County, there are certain things you want. You want a comfortable environment, a golf course, to be able to go to the theater in downtown Manhattan. You want your executive offices to be in good shape. You want fancy restaurants around. You want to be able to leave your limousine somewhere without having it broken into. You want good schools for your children. You want a powerful army to protect your interests. You want a skilled work force insofar as you need it. But much of what happens in this country is of no interest to you. If most of the country goes down the tube, thats no big problem. DB: I love your comment Ultimately is a notion that does not occur in capitalist planning. Why not? First of all, there are no capitalist systems. If there were a capitalist system it couldnt surv ive for more than a couple of weeks. The only capitalist systems are the ones that are imposed on Third World countries for the purpose of weakening them so that theyll collapse and be taken over by the rich. But there are systems that are more or less capitalist. The more capitalist they are, that is, the more competitive, and less planned and integrated, the more they will tend towards short-term gains. Thats inherent in the system. To the extent that a system is competitive and unplanned, those participating in it will be devoting their resources, both intellectual and capital, to short-term gain, short-term profit, short-term increase in market share. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward. Lets imagine that there are three car companies: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Lets say theyre really competitive. Then suppose that General Motors decided to put its resources into dealing with problems of global pollution or even trying to produce better cars ten years from n ow that would be better than those of Ford and Chrysler. At the same time its competitors Ford and Chrysler would be putting their resources into increasing profits and market share tomorrow, next month, next year. During that period, General Motors would be out of luck. They wouldnt have the capital and the profits to carry out their plans. Thats exactly why in countries like Japan in the 1950s, the ministry that directed and organized the Japanese economy, together with the big corporate conglomerates, explicitly and openly decided to abandon free-market illusions and to carry out national industrial planning aimed at Japanese development in strategic sectors with high long-term potential. In newly developing industries, the industries of the future, the startup costs can be quite considerable. Profit doesnt come for some time. In a competitive, more capitalist society, youre out of luck. But in a more managed society you can deal with that. There are many well-known free-market i nadequacies that typically lead capitalist entrepreneurs to call upon the state to intervene for their benefit. In Japan this led to a conscious decision to carry out substantial, organized, planned interference with the market mechanism so that the economy could prosper. Questions of pollution are perfect examples. If one company tries to devote resources to effects on the environment, they will simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing it. Therefore they will not be in a position to compete in the market. These are matters which are inherent in our capitalist systems. There were experiments with laissez faire in Britain in the nineteenth century, when people actually took their own rhetoric seriously. But they pretty quickly called it off. Its too destructive. DB: So youre saying that this class of managers is impervious to the bridges literally collapsing on the homeless and tunnels bursting under the city of Chicago? Not because theyre bad people, but because if they stopped being impervious to it they wouldnt be managers any more. Suppose that the CEO of some big corporation decides hes going to be a nice guy and devote his resources from that corporation to the homeless people under the bridges that are falling down or to global pollution. DB: Hes out of a job. Hes out of a job. Thats inherent in the system. These are institutional facts. If you want to watch this at its more extreme limits, you should take a look at the World Bank plans on pollution. These recently surfaced. One of my favorite issues of the New York Times must have been February 7, back in the business section. There was a report called something like Can Capitalism Save the Ozone Layer? Ozone being a metaphor for saving the environment. The question was whether capitalism could save the environment. That was a story by their financial correspondent Sylvia Nasser. The World Bank had come out with a consensus report for the rich countries on a position to take at the Rio conference in June on the global environment. It was written by Lawrence Summers, the chief liberal economist from Harvard. The idea is that the rich countries should take the position, led by the World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the poor countries, the Third World, dont follow rational policies. Rational means market policies. Many of them are resource and raw material producers, energy producers, and they sometimes try to use their own resources for their own development. Thats irrational. That means that theyre using resources for themselves, often at below market rates, when there are more efficient producers in the West who would use those resources more efficiently. Thats interference with the market. Also, these Third World countries often introduce some measures to protect their own population from total devastation and starvation, and thats an interference with the market. Its an interference with rational market policies. The effect of this Third World irr ationality is to increase production in places where it shouldnt be taking place, to increase development in places where it shouldnt be going on, and that causes pollution. So if we could only convince those Third World countries to behave rationally, that is, to give all their resources to us and stop protecting their own populations, that would reduce the pollution problem. This document was produced with a straight face. It happened that on the same day on the same page of the New York Times there was a little article, unrelated, about a World Bank memo, an internal memo, that had leaked. It had been published by the London Economist, a right-wing British Wall Street Journal, but weekly. It was written by the same Lawrence Summers. The Times had a brief, slightly apologetic summary of it, including an interview with Summers in which he claimed it was intended to be sarcastic. The World Bank memo added to what I have just said about Third World irrationality. It said that any kin d of production is going to involve pollution. So what you have to do is to do it as rationally as possible, meaning with minimal cost. So suppose we have a chemical factory producing carcinogenic gases that are going into the environment. If we put that factory in Los Angeles, we can calculate the number of people who will die of cancer in the next forty years. We can even calculate the value of their lives in terms of income or whatever. Suppose we put that factory in Sao Paulo or some even poorer area. Many fewer people will die of cancer because theyll die anyway of something else, and besides, their lives arent worth as much by any rational measure. So it makes sense to move all the polluting industries to places where poor people die, not where rich people die. Thats on simple economic grounds. Combine that with the other document. What it says is that the Third World should stop producing and protecting its own population because thats irrational. We should send our polluting industries to them because that is rational. Summers in this memo points out that you might have counterarguments to this based on human rights and the right of people to a certain quality of life. But he points out that if we allowed those arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the World Bank does would be undermined. Thats quite accurate. Thats supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously we cant undermine everything the World Bank does, so obviously we cant allow such considerations to enter. We consider only economic rationality, of course geared to the interests of the World Bank. Thats what you do with pollution. Try to convince the Third World to stop producing and to stop protecting their own population and to accept our pollution. Its all perfectly explicable on rational economic grounds. Any graduate student in economics can prove it to you. DB: Apropos of this blindness of the planners: you have a fantasy Its not blindness. I think its very reasonable on their part. DB: Within their framework. Yes. DB: You tell of a fantasy that involves the Wall Street Journal and the greenhouse effect. Someone asked me once and I simply said that if I had the talent, which I dont, I would write a short story about the Wall Street Journal. I suppose their offices are on the seventeenth floor of some New York skyscraper. Theyre sitting there in that office putting out an issue of the Wall Street Journal claiming once again that the greenhouse effect is just a fraud invented by left fanatics. As the issue goes to press the water level would have risen to that point and you could hear them gurgling as they start the printer running. Thats about what its like. DB: Lets talk about organized labor unions in the United States. Only fifteen or sixteen percent of the total U.S. work force is now unionized, far below, perhaps by half or even more, what it was decades ago. This is the era of givebacks, benefits reductions, skipping, deferri ng or eliminating raises. Does organized labor really have a positive, progressive role to play? It should, but its in a very weakened state. Its been weak for a long time, but it was smashed during the 1980s. It started with Reagans success in breaking the air-traffic controllers strike, and its continuing until today. The UAW just lost a serious strike at Caterpillar. Their strategy has been so overcome by class collaboration We nice guys work together with management that when the crisis came at Caterpillar they were probably unprepared. They were simply wiped out. At this point Caterpillar probably wont even live up to the terms of the latest agreement. It seems to be continuing to lock them out. These are serious blows to the labor movement, and that means to American democracy, but theyre much to the benefit of the small sectors that are enriching themselves. Does labor have a part to play? It depends on whether working people can get their act together and rebuild the labor movement and turn it into a powerful force for both peoples rights and democracy as it once was. Its going to have to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Labors role has declined significantly since the 1940s. Theyre not unaware of it. Doug Fraser, the former head of the UAW, pointed out almost fifteen years ago that there has been a bitter, one-sided class war led by American capitalists fighting against labor, while labor, meaning labor bureaucrats, have been seduced by class-collaboration slogans. Theyre not fighting a class war. The effect of a bitter, one-sided class war is very evident. DB: The New York Times, in talking about the economic woes, says There is little mystery about what caused the economic problems. The country is suffering a hangover from the mergers, rampant speculation, overbuilding, heavy borrowing and irresponsible government fiscal policy in the 1980s. How well did the Times and its brethren in the media during this period of economic dislocation and decline a ctually cover the events and give the American people information that they could act upon? The Times isnt in the business of giving the American people information they can act upon. They hailed the Reagan revolution and its achievements. There were sectors of the population that profited marvelously, including the corporate sectors, of which the Times is a part. They couldnt fail to see that there are social costs. You cant walk around New York City and not see that there are severe social costs, so they probably saw it too. But this was considered as a glorious period of success. There were people who were upset about it. Take a look at, say, Mondales funding in 1984: a lot of it was from fiscal conservatives who were worried about the long-term effects to their own interests of this kind of mad-dog Keynesianism, wild crazed spending, and government stimulation of the economy through borrowing that was going on through the Reagan years. People could see that that was going to be very problematic for the economy. Take whats just happened in Chicago. The estimates of the costs of fixing those leaks in the underground tunnels might have been at the level of $10,000. They didnt fix them because they wanted to save the $10,000 as part of the cutback in civic services. The net effect will be a loss of maybe over a billion dollars or more. Thats a loss to private capital, too. DB: But compared to the SL bailout thats peanuts. Yes, the SL bailout is much bigger than that. Chicago is just one piece of a growing disaster. Spending on infrastructure has declined radically in the last ten years, and thats going to have its costs. What happened in Chicago is going to happen all over the place. DB: It cant help but affect even the elites. The area that was flooded And its hurting them in Chicago. Chicago businesses are suffering. Insurance companies are going to suffer. DB: Theyre not going to like that. No, but theres not a lot that they can do about it except to accep t more long-term, integrated state corporate planning. There are other possibilities, like democracy, but nobodys going to talk about that. DB: Yeah, right. And maybe there will just be more slogans like belt-tightening and austerity and biting the bullet as opposed to genuine economic policy. There is genuine economic policy, but its geared to the short term economic interests of the rich. Its very genuine. And theres plenty of state intervention for that purpose. Take the Pentagon budget. Thats massive state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the rich. Thats what keeps the electronics industry going, for example. Go to the next section. Philosophy Underground Rail Road Essay

Justice Department Essays - Law, Government, Prosecution

Justice Department It is the executive department of the United States federal government, created by Congress in 1870 to assume the functions performed until then by the Office of the Attorney General. The department is headed by the attorney general, which is appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate. The Attorney General is Janet Reno she receives 181, 500 a year. The functions of the department include providing means for the enforcement of federal laws and investigating violations thereof; supervising the federal penal institutions; furnishing legal counsel in cases involving the federal government and conducting all suits brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the federal government is concerned; interpreting laws relating to the activities of the other federal departments; and rendering legal advice, upon request, to the president and to cabinet members. The deputy attorney general and the associate attorney general assist the attorney general. Another high-ranking official of the department is the solicitor general, who directs all U.S. government litigation in the Supreme Court and who is concerned generally with the conduct of the appellate litigation of the government. Assistant attorneys general head most of the divisions of the Justice Department. The functions of the department are carried out regionally by U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals; one of each is appointed to the 94 federal judicial districts by the president, with the consent of the Senate. The department includes the antitrust, civil, civil rights, criminal, environment and natural resources, and tax divisions, as well as administrative offices. The Antitrust Division is charged with the enforcement of the federal antitrust laws and related enactment's against industrial and commercial monopolies; the most important of these laws are the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914. The Civil Division and its seven major branches supervise all matters relating to civil suits and claims involving the U.S. and its departments, agencies, and officers. Among the varied areas of litigation handled by the Civil Division are patents and copyrights, fraud, tort claims, customs and immigration, international trade, veterans' affairs, and consumer affairs. The Civil Rights Division is responsible for enforcing the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974; the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1976; the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980; and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In addition, it is charged with eliminating discrimination in programs that receive federal financial assistance. The Criminal Division is entrusted with enforcing federal criminal statutes relating to such matters as organized crime, kidnapping, bank robbery, fraud against the government, racketeering, obscenity, corruption among public officials, narcotics and dangerous drugs, and certain civil matters such as extradition proceedings and seizure actions under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. The Internal Security Section of the division is charged with the investigation and prosecution of all cases affecting national security (including espionage and sabotage), foreign relations, and the illegal export of strategic commodities and technology. The Environment and Natural Resources Division represents the U.S. in litigation involving public lands and natural resources, Native American lands and claims, wildlife resources, and environmental quality, including enforcement of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar federal laws and of regulations promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Tax Division conducts all civil and criminal litigation arising out of the internal revenue laws, other than proceedings in the U.S. Tax Court. The Office of Policy and Communications oversees policy development, public affairs, and other administrative areas. Other agencies include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which investigates violations of federal laws and collects evidence in cases in which the U.S. may be involved; the Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Parole Commission, which has the authority to release federal prisoners before they complete their entire sentences; the Office of Justice Programs, which provides financial and technical assistance to state and local law enforcement, supports research into justice issues, and accumulates and disseminates criminal justice statistics; the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides protection and other services for the federal courts and responds to emergency situations related to law enforcement; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Executive Office for Immigration Review; the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices; the U.S. National Central Bureau-International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol); and the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. Special sections include the Community Relations Service, which mediates racial disputes in U.S. communities; the pardon attorney, who receives and investigates applications to the president for pardon or clemency; the U.S. Trustee program, which supervises the

The Scandal at Abu Ghrab essays

The Scandal at Abu Ghrab essays So how does the world feel about the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison? The world has a lot of emotions: ashamed, reluctant to trust, and furious of the way the Iraqi prisoners were treated. They were tortured with electrical devices; several naked photos were taken of them with masks on their heads; and one prisoner was beaten almost to the brink of death. It has been the most talked about topic in the world recently has been the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraibs prison. The world has mixed emotions, and the topic has certainly put a damper on all Americans. The American people feel less than perfect right now. Everyone is pointing fingers, but no one wants to take the blame. The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, decided to take responsibility and resign, but the support for him was too strong to let that happen. Recently, Donald Rumsfeld admitted to holding a prisoner and not reporting it to the Red Cross to get assigned a number. This act breaks the Geneva Convention. Most Americans are ashamed that such a disgrace to our reputation could happen like this. American soldiers are in Iraqi trying to regain trust with the Iraqi people to savor the little respect thats left. A big gloomy cloud has formed over our armed forces, and it will take some time for the storm to clear. This scandal has not only affected the United States - but internationally too. N.A.T.O., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has decided to train the new Iraqi interim governments army and security forces, but reluctant to send any of their own troops to help support the new government. N.A.T.O. has not trusted the United States from the beginning. By providing training for the new army, its a way to keep the United States in one place - out of Iraqs new government. America has some allies, but the majority of countries dont want to have anything to do with the entire scandal. Our relati...

Little and Small

Little and Small Little and Small Little and Small By Maeve Maddox A reader asks, Can you illustrate how little and small are correctly used? As adjectives, little and small are often interchangeable, but sometimes one will not do in place of the other. Either is used to describe people or things of reduced dimensions: Last night I saw upon the stair/A little man who wasnt there [The Little Woman] is a great and very inspiring book. I havent read anything like that in a long time. Its a testimony of a small woman who changed the whole country of China Small is preferred when describing something concrete that is of less than the usual size, quantity, value, or importance: Detective Swann showed us  to a small room  and then disappeared. President Grover Norquist [said] that any short-term deficit hit is a small price to pay for structural changes that will generate big savings down the road. Little often refers to concepts: Getting proper Louisiana hunting licenses takes a  little forethought. The writer attempts analysis, but  demonstrates little  or no original thought or insight. Most of these elements, however, are of  little importance in the grand scheme of things. Large is more frequently used than big to modify abstract nouns such as amount, proportion, quantity, size, sum, and volume: A newly published study from NASA shows that Earths atmosphere contains  an unexpectedly large amount  of Carbon tetrachloride. In certain contexts, little can mean miniature or â€Å"smaller than regular size†: The kindergarten room was furnished with little tables and chairs. The children were playing with little cars on the sidewalk. Both little and small can indicate the state of being a child: When I was little, I used to pretend I was invisible. When I was small, I used to pretend I could fly. But â€Å"This is my small sister† means that the sister is small in size, whereas â€Å"This is my little sister† means that the sister is younger than the speaker. In statements of contrast, little is usually paired with big; small is usually paired with large. The big boys wouldnt  let the  little ones  use the basketball. Oklahoma  companies,  large and small, profit from training.    Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:20 Computer Terms You Should KnowThe Possessive Apostrophe8 Great Podcasts for Writers and Book Authors

Intensive Care Competencies Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Intensive Care Competencies - Research Paper Example A qualified and effective nurse understands all the dynamics of patient advocacy (Kassirer, 2009). In the intensive care unit, a nurse becomes the patient’s advocate. If the patient is paralyzed, unconscious, asleep or in pain, the nurse becomes the advocate for his or her rights and integrity (Lundy & Janes, 2009). The patient must always be ventilated and properly positioned (Lipe, 2003). This takes a lot of courtesy and professionalism from a nurse. If the nurse is working in a hostile environment where the services are limited and resources are scarce, the integrity of service delivery may be compromised (Lipe, 2003). Therefore, the nurse has to use all the necessary means to shield the patient from embarrassment or unwanted happenings during the service delivery. Critical reasoning must always be tempered with clinical reasoning in the nursing profession (Brunt, 2008).The willingness and ability to take responsibility is one of the most prominent competencies during the i ntensive care (Joint Commission Resources, 2004). It is always easy for nurses to blame people and other players when things go wrong. Nurses can take advantage of their patients’ ignorance and fail to take the blame upon themselves when things go wrong (Kassirer, 2009). This leaves patients more confused. A professional nurse working in the intensive care unit should be able to take responsibility and blame upon both the team and the patient if need be. This also involves recognizing one’s shortcomings.... Therefore, the nurse has to use all the necessary means to shield the patient from embarrassment or unwanted happenings during the service delivery. Critical reasoning must always be tempered with clinical reasoning in the nursing profession (Brunt, 2008). The willingness and ability to take responsibility is one of the most prominent competencies during the intensive care (Joint Commission Resources, 2004). It is always easy for nurses to blame people and other players when things go wrong. Nurses can take advantage of their patients’ ignorance and fail to take the blame upon themselves when things go wrong (Kassirer, 2009). This leaves patients more confused. A professional nurse working in the intensive care unit should be able to take responsibility and blame upon both the team and the patient if need be (Elliott, 2006). This also involves recognizing one’s shortcomings (Lipe, 2003). During critical thinking, analysis and evaluation are used before a conclusion is r eached (Joint Commission Resources, 2004). Some of the analyses and observations end up pointing at some professional omissions and laxity on the side of nurses in the intensive care unit (Brunt, 2008). This can be solved by admitting these omissions. The ability to think fast enough is also extremely necessary (Elliott, 2006). During clinical reasoning, trial and error decisions can be made in genuine faith. A competent nurse should be able to explain such decisions when called upon (Kassirer, 2009). Sometimes, some of the team members can run out of the ideas while carrying out some sensitive procedures. The ability of a nurse to observe and address the individual needs of team members is critical. Most of these

Project management is not just about the 'tools' we use it is as much Essay

Project management is not just about the 'tools' we use it is as much as anything about people - how they interact, how they - Essay Example Furthermore, I will discuss the project lifecycle and the different processes that go with it. And finally, the importance of people in the success of a project will be investigated before concluding. For a project to be successful, the project manager must understand the different characteristics of a project. A project has a start and end dates. It has dates that properly specify when the project activities will start and when it is going to end. It uses resources – time, money, people and equipment. And finally, a project has an outcome - whether it’s a new condominium, building, satellite or a new highway. ‘A project is considered successful if it delivers the outcome with an agreed quality, does not overrun its end date and remains within the budget (cost resources). Note however, that outcome, time and budget are interrelated, and during a project the project manager may need to do trade-offs between them’ (Singh). Say for instance, if you want the pr oject to be done more quickly, you have to pump in more money for additional resources like people, time and equipment. Because of the increasing competition in the business environment, organisations are forced to come-up with high quality products at a lower cost and in a shorter time. And that’s the reason why project management exists. Project management allows the project manager to plan and organise resources to achieve a specified outcome within the allotted timeframe. The techniques of project management allow the project manager to manage and anticipate risks in a structured manner. Through proper project management better utilisation of resources, shorter development time, reduced costs, interdepartmental cooperation and a better focus on results and quality is achieved. ‘A project has a lifecycle. It starts with the initiating process, then the planning, executing, controlling and monitoring and the last phase is closing’ (Singh). Throughout this lifec ycle people are employed to do the tasks. The workforce spells the success or failure of a project. But before a project starts, a project manager should be appointed. As a project manager, he must have the Project Charter or commercial contract to get the wheels spinning in motion. At the minimum, the Project Charter designates the person as the project manager with the authority to use resources to bring the project to completion. This is formally done by the project sponsor or main stakeholders. The charter provides a short description of the result, outcome, product or services to be produced by the project. It also refers to the commercial contract (if there is a formal contract) as the basis for initiating the project. During the initiating process, the project manager refines the project goals, reviews the expectations of all stakeholders and determines assumptions and risks in the project. This is also the time when he selects the people to form the project team. However, th ere are times when the project team has already been imposed. If that’s the case, the role of the project manager is to familiarise himself to their skills and understands their roles in the project. He should ask the project sponsor and main stakeholders to share with him any emails, letters, memos, project feasibility, meeting minutes, requirements or other documents related

Sexual and Gender Identity, Personality, and Eating Disorders, classifications, components Essay Example for Free

Sexual and Gender Identity, Personality, and Eating Disorders, classifications, components Essay Abnormal disorders diagnosed in the DSM-IV-TR, a multi-axial diagnostic tool, used by clinicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical professionals for the classification of mental disorders (Hansell Damour, 2008). Axis I and Axis II of the DSM-IV-TR covers classifications of mental disorders that include unwelcome types of distress and impairment, that constitutes mental disease, disorder, and or disability. This paper takes into account the diagnostic categories of sexual and gender identity, personality and eating disorders along with the basic distinction. Axis I and Axis II provides a quick reference for the three disorders. Sexual and gender identity disorders tend to be deviant, unsuspecting, fetishism,and erotic. Personality disorders tend to be enduring, pervasive, and subjectively indistinguishable; whereas eating disorders include feelings of hunger, are self-induced, self-defeating, and emotional. This paper will address the biological, emotional, cognitive and behavioral components of three Axis I and Axis II, sexual and gender identity, personality and eating disorders: anorexia bulimia, a, gender identity, exhibitionism, schizoid, paranoid. Diagnose and evaluate our case analysis of Alfred C. Kinsey, inadequate feeling of himself, which gained him explicit interest in sex. Major DSM Categories Sexual and Gender Identity Sex and gender disorders fall into the Axis I categories of: sexual dysfunctions, sexual desire, sexual arousal, sexual pain disorders, orgasmic, Paraphilia’s, and gender identity disorder. When considering sex and gender disorders it is imperative to keep in mind that normal and abnormal behaviors occur on continuing bases and that the factors of impairment and distress most often signify abnormality (Hansell Damour, 2008). Personality Disorder This classification begins with the general definition of personality disorder that has an unhealthy array of behaving, thinking and functioning that applies to each 10 personality disorders these include: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Axis II disorders are more pervasive and less able to be independently distinguished. Personality disorders still include the elements of distress and impairment as guidelines for the diagnosis of dysfunction. Eating Disorder The DSM-IV-TR includes two Axis I categories of eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, restricting to binge-eating, purging types, and bulimia nervosa restricting to purging and non-purging types. Anorexia nervosa affects between 0. 5% and 1% of the general population in the United States currently and bulimia nervosa affects up to 3% (Hansell Damour, 2008). When considering eating disorders it is important to take into account that some sub-groups in the American culture have extremely low body, such as gymnast and models, which complicates the diagnosis of eating disorders. Components of Sexual and Gender Identity Biological There are many biological factors that can affect sexual function. Biological components include aging, cigarette smoking, poor diet, medications, medical illness, brain injuries, and some degenerative diseases have been implicated in paraphilia’s. Research has discovered a connection in gender identity disorder to predispositions in the endocrine system which affects sexual and gender behaviors (Hansell Damour, 2008). Emotional Freud believed deviant sexual behavior is a defense mechanism in response to an internal emotional conflict and such behaviors provide a protective function. The inability to cope with and exert control over past humiliation fits right into paraphilia’s (Hansell Damour, 2008). In gender identity disorders, research emphasizes deviant or deficient parental relationships (Hansell Damour, 2008). Cognitive The greatest component that affects sexual functioning is anxiety. It is generally fluid by cognitive aspects such as psychological hang ups and emotional response. The individual is sexually aroused to deviant stimuli, which create maladaptive thought processes to accommodate the perceived deviance. The inappropriate behavior  preserve the maladaptive thoughts required to accommodate the behavior (Hansell Damour, 2008). Behavioral Deviant sexual behavior can be learned by observing abnormal sexual behavior or participating in such behavior. Children rewarded for inappropriate sexual behaviors, (such as viewing or participating in pornography) can develop paraphilia. Therapy can focus on re-establishing healthy sexual behavior by reinforcing more appropriate behaviors (Hansell Damour, 2008). Components of Personality Disorder Biological Many personality disorders have been linked to genetics. Biological components disorders in personality disorders include altered brain structures, reduced gray and white matter, various neurotransmitter abnormalities, prenatal substance exposure, and low serotonin levels. The beliefs that some personality is the result of an overlap of genetics and environmental effects. Emotional Personality disorders generally reflect a disruptive childhood from which the child learns to rely on maladaptive defense mechanisms. Parental criticism and ridicule are central themes underlying these disorders. Additional research supports claims of childhood sexual or physical abuse, although this is not always characteristic in these disorders (Hansell Damour, 2008). Cognitive Cognitive components of personality disorders include the understanding that childhood experiences shape specific thought patterns or outlines, which have a significant effect on patterns of the individual’s behavior and perception which later becomes the personality. Maladaptive belief’s and behaviors are characteristics in personality disorders were therapy works towards replacing these beliefs and behaviors with more effective and useful ones. Behavioral Personality disorder are produced by maladaptive behaviors and thought processes created in childhood which persist because individuals are usually attracted to experiences that fit into their lives whether or not they are maladaptive. Therefore the maladaptive behaviors are maintained. People affected with personality disorders dictate underlining beliefs onto every facet of their lives, yet they have difficulty questioning these beliefs (Hansell Damour, 2008). Components of Eating Disorders Biological Biological components include a genetic factors, hormonal and neural abnormalities. Individuals who have hormonal and neural abnormalities tend to have no control over their eating habits, which causes them unleveled amounts of hormones related to hunger. Bulimia nervosa is linked to low hormone amount that suppress the appetite, this causes the individual to feel excessively hungry. It is the reverse case for anorexia nervosa. Emotional Eating disorder may be a complex reaction to high expectations set by parents and promoted by the individual. The body image becomes the high standard to an individual and not achieving it becomes the emotional instability part of their lives. Many strive toward high expectations and suffer the effects of not reaching those (Hansell Damour, 2008). Cognitive According to Hansell and Damour (2008), cognitive explanations of eating disorders emphasizes on rigid maladaptive beliefs, fixed thought patterns, self-defeating and self-perpetuating behavioral strategies. Cognitive explanations of eating disorders focus on eating or starvation that reinforces eating. Individual have distorted thoughts about food, body weight, body images and persevere in the belief they need to lose weight, or are afraid of gaining weight. Behavioral People with eating disorders participate in behaviors such as self-induced vomiting, misuse of laxatives, binging, and excessive exercise after eating in an effort to maintain their body weight. In anorexia individuals find comfort in starvation. Eating disorders are a result of inappropriate thoughts that reinforce haphazard eating behaviors (Hansell Damour, 2008). Case Analysis of Alfred C. Kinsey Alfred C Kinsey grew up with a controlling father, which caused him feeling of inadequacy. His family consisted of both parents, himself, very little affection and seemingly sexless household. His inadequate feeling gave Kinsey to accelerate greatly in school and on into his adult life. Using his doctoral degree as a sex education professor, Kinsey married having a family with 4 children, whom viewed sex with openness, allowing nudity in the house. Kinsey interest in sex was extreme and his goal was to â€Å"discover every single thing people did sexually† (Gathorne-Hardy, 1998, p. 182). Kinsey opened Institute for sex research and published the Kinsey report. It then generated two books on sexual behavior. Both books and Kinsey sexual practice throughout his life gave a lot of controversial and extreme allegations, that Kinsey was bisexual, played in masochistic sexual practices and engaged in child sexual abuse. Biological Kinsey family life consisted of both parents, displaying very little affection which caused Kinsey to believe it was a sexless marriage, with a controlling father. Kinsey grew an inadequate feeling about himself. He gained a need to excel academic wise causing him to gather all information possible about others sex lives. He became upset with his sex life as well as others. His marriage and family life dealt with his explicit interest in sex. Emotional Kinsey questions his own sexuality in adolescence and adulthood. Kinsey displayed a need for self-assurance through validation of his achievements. Kinsey â€Å"was a very sickly throughout his childhood and felt demeaned by his father† (Meyer, Chapman, Weaver, 2009,). Kinsey felt as the â€Å"authorities† on sexual research and education. Kinsey gathered and engaged in illegal sexual acts. Cognitive Kinsey thinking was prevalent to psychosexual disorder as the result of faulty socialization and learning, affected by genetic and temperament variables. The psychosexual disorder carries significance development of deviant and disrupted sexual behavior. Kinsey, not caring about his sexual apparatus, bisexual or participating in masochistic united his psychosexual disorder with a gender identity. Behavioral Kinsey â€Å"variation in sexual behavior are limited only by an individual’s imagination† (Laws O’Donohue, 2008; Sbrage O’Donohue, 2004). Kinsey behavior was repressed without any sexual acts. Census had Kinsey bisexual and engaging in Masochistic sexual practices. Conclusion In conclusion, even though impairment and distress are the primary diagnostic criteria for the verdict of abnormal disorders in both Axis I and Axis II disorders, the two categories can still are distinguished through the pervasiveness and subjective assessment of the personality disorder. Axis I categories of bulimia nervosa, sexual and gender disorder, exhibitionism are all rooted in biological or genetic predispositions that find their expression through sociocultural, affective, and behavioral triggers. By addressing these components biological, emotional, cognitive and behavioral factors in these disorders, psychological science develops a more clear understanding of these disorders in an effort to engage the individuals in successful therapeutic applications. Alfred C. Kinsey grew up with a controlling father and a sexless household. But in the long run his life was filled with sexual practices and controlling deviance behavior which initialed him with psychosexual disorder and carefree form of gender identity.

Bullying in our Schools Essay -- Violence Education Bullies Essays

Bullying in our Schools Bullies are an inextricable element of classroom culture, and they have been since long before it occurred to an educational expert to author a study about them. For a long time, the attitude toward bullying was that it is simply a natural part of the school experience – with so many children together, some would say it is unavoidable – but that it was mostly harmless and that the children would grow out of it. The events of April 20th, 1999 demonstrated just how dangerous that way of thinking was. Every American remembers the shooting that occurred that day at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their classmates, thirteen of whom died of their injuries. Although the mass media jumped to blame the tragedy on violent video games and music, most local sources mentioned that Harris and Klebold had constantly been the victims of bullies, some of whom were among the deceased. The media quickly picked up the trail and led with their new story: victims of bullying had brutally fought back against their tormentors. Appropriately, there was a national outcry; parents demanded to know what could be done to prevent â€Å"another Columbine† from happening in their children’s schools. Experts testified on national television, discussing what needed to be done to rectify the situation. The dialogue eventually closed, and, as it often goes, schools maintained the status quo. When the outrage died down, the pressure was lifted from schools’ shoulders, and their impetus to affect change was removed. Pressure must be reapplied to accomplish this necessary goal of reducing (if not eliminating) bullying in our school system. ... ...he elimination of bullying in our schools should be a prominent nationwide goal. Not only does it generally inhibit the performance of victims, but it also can have much more explosive, pernicious effects, such as the Columbine massacre of 1999. It should be the priority of educators everywhere to do whatever they can to ensure the safety and academic success of our students, and one of the first necessary steps in that uphill battle is to educate them in how to protect themselves from bullies. Until we as a society have done this, our main duty to our students, our children, will remain unfulfilled. WORKS CITED â€Å"Columbine High School massacre." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Ingram, Scott. â€Å"Why Bullies Behave Badly.† Current Health Nov 2000. 20-1. Nudo, Lori. â€Å"Fighting the Real Bullies.† Prevention Nov 2004. 123-4.

Warriors in Peace: the Economic Life of the Samurai Class

University of the philippines, baguio| WARRIORS IN PEACE| THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF THE SAMURAI CLASS IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN| | ANIDA, CESNA CO| 3/20/2013| The warriors of Japanese history the samurai belongs to the upper class of the society. During the Warring States and before that samurai were used as killing machines ready to slay anyone who was against with their masters. But during this time of peace, samurai have no war to fight anymore. Despite their high status in the society their economic life is not proportional to it all.They only depended on the rice-stipend given to them by their daimyo and was produced by the farmers. | Table of Contents Introduction2 Short History of the Samurai2 Establishment of Tokugawa Japan3 The Economy4 The Samurai of Tokugawa Japan5 Change of Perspectives6 Social and political Position of the Samurai6 Role in the Economy9 Role in the Fall of Tokugawa11 Conclusion †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 11 Introduction This paper aims to explain primarily the economic life of the samurai class during the Tokugawa Japan.Moreover this also covers the economic structure of the Tokugawa Japan as well as political and social feature, because discussing Japanese economy alone is impossible without covering some of the political and social facets of this country. To make this paper possible records and book archives were studied and analyze. By studying this paper the colorful and vibrant everyday life of the samurai was discovered and what did they contribute to make the modern Japan possible. The life of the samurai was full of extremes from loyalty to the way of death, their economic life to their social status and other paradoxes of their life.Reading this paper will help you to understand the long running history of the one of the most beautiful cultural achievement of the Japanese including their way of thinking and deep rooted sense of identity. Short History of the Samurai Originally from the old Japanese word saburahi which means ‘to serve’ (Ikegami, 1995), samurai class emerged from the Heian period around ninth or tenth century when land became the most important asset and must be protected. There were three groups were the samurai class began. First, the protectors of the aristocratic family in urban areas which also served as police evolved into warriors.Next the kondei or ‘stalwart youth’ was bestowed by the government with power to protect their lands and borders from barbarians and lastly the private soldiers that were systematized to defend the shoen or estates of the local elites against bandits or the government itself. Some families that established power developed military expertise and became regional forces (Andressen, 2002). Example of this was the early sam urai family from the Heian period – Taira and Minamoto. The power of the samurai class became further recognized because the establishment of the Karakura peiod in 12th century by Yoritomo Minamoto.This was the first official government lead by the military shogun or by the shogunate which means literally ‘Barbarian-Subduing Generalissimo’ (Nakane, 1990). Yoritomo was able to rise up in power because he sought support from the samurai class then after usurping the power he created a semi centralized regime with the imperial court on the other side. These were the two power structures governing the medieval Japan but eventually the shogunate was able to monopolize the power whereas the emperor became a mere symbol. This lasted until the fall of Tokugawa in 1868 which was succeeded by the Meiji Restoration. Establishment of Tokugawa JapanThe period of Warring States in Japan was the time of chaos and political instability that eventually cause scrappy political and economic control. The shogunate loses their grip in power while the regional feudal lords arose and fought each other to be on top. One of these feudal lords was Oda Nobunaga from Owari. He wanted to bring the Japan into a one nation state and use the banner Tenka Fubu which means ‘extension of military rule throughout the land’. Unfortunately he was not able to bring this to reality because he was killed by his own vassal Akechi Mitsuhide. But later on he was succeed be his loyal follower, Toyotomi Hideyoshi.By brutal force he was able to win this position by killing Oda’s slayer and murdering his rivals. After the death of Hideyoshi he was succeeded by Tokugawa Ieyaso, by succeeding the seat he benefitted in the land that Oda and Hideyoshi unified. He was the one that established the Tokugawa Japan. He created the bakuhan system wherein the bakufu was the central government under them was the 270 daimyo domains (Nakane, 1990). This was the political framework of this period which the Tokugawa shogunate seized the power. Tokugawa Japan lasted 265 years of peace from 1603-1868 (Tokugawa, 2009). The EconomyThe early Japan was basically a feudal society which means that they were an agricultural based society. The economy depended on land-tilting and crop planting, rice was there main crop and staple food and peasant-farmers dominated the population. Before the official inauguration of the Tokugawa Japan one of the most important propellers of order and stability especially in terms of the economy was the policy that Hideyoshi delivered which was originally planned by Oda. The Taiko Kenchi which refers to the nationwide cadastral survey where the land was surveyed and a uniform official measurement for rice was created called kyo-masu.Thru this nationwide standardization the process of calculating the rice production by means of koku was introduced. This system was called kokudaka system where a certain locality was manage by a daimyo and in that village it was required to produced 100,000 koku of rice measured in kyo-masu (Nakane, 1990). After the death of Hideyoshi which marked the inauguration of Tokugawa Japan by Tokugawa Ieyaso the kokudaka system remained a policy on the economy. Ieyaso benefited in what Oda and Hideyoshi established and accomplished. Tokugawa Japan was the last stage of agricultural society of Japan.Villages that engage in agriculture were called noson aside from them there were the mountain villages the sanson in which upland and forest production was their mode of production and lastly the villages that depend on fishing the gyoson (Nakane, 1990). But still the main source of income came from the agricultural sector and rice production which can be pointed in the richness of the land of the provinces that generated massive agricultural making. More than agricultural economy of Tokugawa Japan also another phase that defined this period was their closed-door policy or sakoku jidai that was imple mented by the bakufu.This solidarity significantly contributed to Japan’s peace and stability by focusing in the internal affairs of the country. The Samurai of Tokugawa Japan In general there was a paradigm shift in the life of the samurai class in the Tokugawa Japan. This transformation happened in their different facets of life. From political, economic and social there were changes in which gave more color and life in the history of samurai. From the brutal and violent warriors they became administrative officers that planned and over looked the lands in where their daimyos was taken post.Samurai now were not allowed to tilt the land and became a farmer at the same time. Instead of learning the art of killing they became also scholars and artist that contributed in the cultural history of Japan. These very men that were once only used as soldiers in war became the leaders that govern and guide Japan in their building of a strong and firm nation. Change of Perspectives Lik e what had been said above change became an element of this period for the samurai. Historically the samurai class was established to become human machines that will be used to protect and to serve their lords with lifelong loyalty.But from the transition of the Warring states to Tokugawa era their identity will change and transform into a simple foot soldiers into leaders that will build an empire. Because of Hideyoshi’s ‘Sword Hunt’ in 1588, the samurai class became a pure samurai class. Sword Hunt restricted peasants to hold swords and other weapons while samurai were not allowed to become farmers. This policy resulted to the rigidity of the social structure in Tokugawa Japan which was only fully executed in the term of the 3rd shogun Iemitsu (Sansom, 1963) where he considered this policy hereditary and fixed. Social and political Position of the SamuraiThe military class includes all weapon-holding family which starts from the warlords to the poorest samurai. Inside of the classes there were sub-structures. Clear distinctions were between upper and lower class samurai. Upper class rode horses while lower class travels only using their feet (Kublin, 1973 ). Koshogumi were the personal attendants to the daimyo belongs to the upper class and other samurai belonging to this class were chief minister, high officials, Confucian scholars as well as doctors. After that, were the lower samurai class and on top of it were calligraphers and then the stable keeper the nakakosho.Other attendants of the daimyo were the tomokosho and those who do the duties of patrolling and guarding the gate and the estate. The lowest of the class were the ashigaru the common foot soldiers (Bellah, 1957). Mobility between these sub-structures was so small that within the 265 years of Tokugawa only hand-full movements in these sub-structures were recorded. Despite these micro-distinctions inside this class, the samurai were highly privileged people. In Tokugawa Japan the basis of the social hierarchy was not wealth but power.The position in the society was based on value system: prestige correlates directly with power (Bellah, 1957). Position in the society was legal and hereditary; wealth has less importance than status. The samurai class does not belong to the common people unlike the other classes– farmers, artisans and merchants. Samurai class was above these classes and had the right in using their swords against the people belonging in the lower class in any chance they disrespect a samurai. Even though Tokugawa Japan was a time of peace the swords of a samurai was not just for decoration but a sign of their social status.Also samurai was the only asides from the nobility that were allowed to use surnames. Politically just like their social status the samurai hold much of the power and control in governing the Japanese people. The very fact that the bakufu or shogunates belong to the warrior class was an evidence of their political domination in Tokugawa Japan. After the bloody war during the Warring States the samurai class have no wars to fight and peace was almost everywhere therefore they were the ones that filled the government position and became officials.This undertaking can be narrated in correlation to the education of the samurai in this period. Because of the problem in unemployment in the samurai during the beginning of Tokugawa Japan the shogunates educated the warrior class and see the potential of them working as officials and government workforces. Ieyasu stated that learning and military arts should be equally pursued (Kublin, 1973 ). These resulted to the employment of the samurai as teachers in military arts and sciences, officers and clerks in the feudal and bakufu government. Moreover some became intellectuals and artist.These war soldiers became steward of the lands of their daimyo being more than just their soldier but their loyal attendees and personnel. These teachings that the samura i class undertake, especially by the upper echelon, came from Song Neo-Confucianism. The change in the system required new models and values to be applied in the military government. Therefore, the scholars and intellectuals develop beliefs system which will work for this kind of regime. The Bushido or â€Å"the ethics or the way of the warrior† was a code created and harmonized only in the early Tokugawa period, during the middle of 1660’s.Though the way of the samurai already existed on the early periods, the samurai were expected to have a life of discipline and loyalty, it was rarely expressed consciously as a structured ideology centered around a preoccupation with moral behavior (Ikegami, 1995). It was only during the time of Tokugawa that the need for a national philosophy has to be established and it was the bushido. In this philosophy the samurai were projected as leaders by showing the people the example of life-long loyalty. Civil officers charged with the m oral and intellectual guidance of the masses.It was also credited that a samurai not doing his ‘moral obligation’ was no different to ‘bandits and drifters’ (Tokugawa, 2009). Also the samurai were also expected to not to think about money or anything that concerns it. The responsibility of the samurai was more than a fighter but he should be a model of morality in doing his duty as a loyal servant to his master, to be wise and a man of character wherein he will lead the people. From the beginning of the; feudal society it was the ethics of loyalty, discipline and obedience that held it together. It was the foundation.Samurai were expected from the beginning to sacrifice their lives for their masters. This is how the samurai culture became really unique and a foundation to the Japanese wholeness. The samurai distinctive belief in honor was the basis of unique cultural style and identity. Samurai were called haji aru mono which means â€Å"those men with a s ense of shame†. This was also another factor that separated them with other classes– they would sacrifice and give their live for by doing this was an honorable act (Ikegami, 1995). The way of the samurai or bushido became the national ethic of Tokugawa (Bellah, 1957).Its basis in the new interpretation of the Neo-Confucianism developed the Tokugawa Japan’s civil service with a strict code of moral values. All in all the social status and education of the samurai which help them to hold the political position in nation building became their way in creating a national identity and a sense of unification, for the samurai were the nation’s leaders that guided their people by showing example of loyalty, discipline and morality which resulted in building a strong and unified country. Role in the EconomyIt may be said that this paper already focus on the wrong direction, but let me clarify again the reason why spending a notable pages in explaining the social an d political role of the samurai in Tokugawa Japan. I believe by narrating these aspects the reader will able to see the real position of the samurai in the Japanese society. It will shred light in understanding the significance of the samurai class in the nation building of Japan. So as I take to the main study of this paper I would like to keep in mind everything that was already discussed and told about the samurai.As told by history before the establishment of the Tokugawa Japan, samurai were also farmers, they were peasant-warriors. They avoided battles during the harvest time or in the plantation itself. Throughout the Warring States, 15th and 16th century there was a risk that a village would become a battleground for the samurai (Tokugawa, 2009). This problem was solved by the Sword Hunt of Hideyoshi by that unemployment flooded the population of the samurai. Mostly those who belong to the low ranking samurai, that sparked the ronin (samurai that were master less or free samu rai) revolt of 1651 (Sansom, 1963).The population of the samurai was only a 5 to 7 percent of the total population of Japan (Tokugawa, 2009). Their economic life was really unique versus with their other contemporaries in other countries that also belonging to the warrior class, the knights of Europe for example. The mode of production of the Tokugawa Japan was feudal which means that they rely highly on agricultural means in producing their resources. The land was rich and Japan feudal society was a rice economy. Rice was the primary commodity and it was not monetized.Surprisingly, samurai did not own any lands and belongs to the â€Å"parasitic class† (Bebedict, 1946). This is why it was said above that the samurai class was different in other warrior classes of that time. Their economic wealth did not reflect their social status at all. Samurai class was said to be â€Å"parasitic class† because they were pensioned by the daimyo and received only stipends from the r ice production that time which was produce by the peasant-farmers. Their houses and lands were basically not their property but only given to them by their daimyo. This stipend was fixed for the family of the samurai (Bebedict, 1946).During the Tokugawa Japan the feudal lords or daimyo were subjected to the bakufu government wherein to subdue them their han (the land they were conducting) were not given to them permanently but daimyos were in a continual rotation. After sometime the shogun will send another daimyo in change of the daimyo that was posted on that land. This system affected the samurai that they will follow wherever their daimyo will go. They were both living in the castle town ‘assigned’ to the daimyo. These factors now clearly show how the samurai is dependent to his daimyo.The loyalty between the samurai and to his lord Tokugawa Japan was based on the unending war that were happening that time but after that their relationship became primary economic in nature. It was also mentioned earlier about the micro-structure inside the samurai class. This discrepancy in position also affects how much the stipend of a samurai was. The higher the rank of the samurai the larger amount of rice was given to him and vice versa. Higher class samurai receive sufficient amount to support his family while the lower did not receive enough.Therefore, some have to supplement themselves by creating handicrafts and some engaged in secretive trading enterprises (Bellah, 1957). Another implication of this stipend-system in the samurai was that some part of their stipend was converted to money in order by selling it to merchants to buy commodities other that rice. But this doing became only eminent during the later years of Tokugawa. Higher ranking samurai were the ones that collect tax in terms of rice and their share in the harvest was about 40 percent (Tokugawa, 2009).While high ranking samurai were taught polite accomplishments the lower class learned w riting and arithmetic to prepare in clerical work. Because of this the lower class became very influential in actual administration (Bellah, 1957). Now it was described how poor the economic position of the samurai class can get no matter how high their social status. This crisis became worst when the rice-dependency declined in the later years of Tokugawa Japan in 18th century. Japan was slowly becoming a money economy and the value of rice started to deteriorate.Moreover, wealth rested on the hands of the merchants that were the lowest in the social structure. The variety of goods or commercial commodities that can be bought by money increased, the importance of the rice within the national economy dropped (sharp) (Tokugawa, 2009). The implication of this to the samurai as well as to their daimyo was they became poorer and some were suffers with large debt. Merchants became richer and samurai became poorer, moneylending became of part of their life were the borrowers were the samu rai and those who lend the money were the users that were mostly merchants too.Furthermore, some samurai were able to acquire money by selling their statuses and rights (Bellah, 1957). Also when they arranged with a merchant an adoption of the merchant’s son in the samurai family the samurai family will be able to attain wealth while the merchant will be able to obtain status. Samurai were poor people that only depended on the rice stipends given to them by their daimyo and produce by the farmers. They were expected to be contented with everything that they have for they were perceived not to live in a comfortable way of living.Their top priority should be their loyalty to their master and guiding the people with their discipline and moral values. Their duty in the government should not be motivated by any compensation per say. But this was not the whole picture. Tokugawa Japan started to decline and the rice based economy was starting to be not able to support the growing de mands of the country. Money became powerful and merchants became richer while those who were sitting in the government itself were becoming poorer. These challenges piled up in front of the bakufu and to add to these pressures were the external factors.Other countries like the Dutch and Americans were finding their way in this close country of Japan. Role in the fall of tokugawa Shift in the economic system of Tokugawa Japan during the middle to the last years cause the gradual fall of it. Rice production was still important and rice still remained as Japanese staple food but its role as the basis of wealth and means of acquiring commodities eventually decline when the economy became more monetized. More commercial commodities were being produce and consumed that implies a more sophisticated urban living.This marked the end of the agricultural society of Japan and modernization was already peeping in the horizon. Though in the late 18th century the economy of the Tokugawa was changi ng the main schema of power shifts still remain political. This was where the role of the samurai came in. There was a huge discrepancy between the wealth of the classes those merchants that belongs to the lower class were the richest and most economically stable rather than the daimyo with their samurai who manage the land and the government itself.Order was able to maintain because of the strong authoritarian principle leading the country. Also the economic revolution in Japan did not trigger war but instead it created more unity between the rising merchants and the government. The Shingaku movement led by Ishida Baigan was an economic movement membered by many merchants in the late Tokugawa. Instead of stratification between the bakufu and the merchant class this movement parallels its ideology to the existing moral principles that time.The way of the warrior or the bushido should be also the way of the merchant as Baigan implies. Merchants should become greedy industrialist. But like the samurai should serve the people but assistance with the empire and the profit they acquire is just a reward of their services (Bellah, 1957). The samurai honesty and loyalty should as be modeled. More than being a role model of the merchants, the samurai class worked and moved in the coming modernization of the old Japan. It was the lower samurai class that was responsible for the restoration of 1868 (Bellah, 1957).Because the lower samurai was the one assigned in the doing the clerical and government jobs they were the ones that know the real situation and seeing that poverty became rampant and the system was no longer effective, the coup d’etat was launched and they were able to overthrow those in power and established back the meaning of the emperor, that it was in his name that the people of Japan will be unified. This was popularly known in history as Meiji Restoration and from the ranks of the lower samurai the new government was formed.The restrictions betwee n classes were abolished and the samurai class was encouraged to enter industry. Samurai were the Meiji architects; they were the one that provided the initiative and leadership that the merchants were not able to develop (Bellah, 1957). The economic change indeed propelled the change in Tokugawa Japan but the primary tool and reason remains political. The young leaders of the Meiji Japan were able to see the need for more national power that could be paralleled with the Western countries. By them we saw an uprising of an Asian power that shook the whole world in the upcoming years.Conclusion The history of Japan cannot be complete without knowing the samurai. Samurai were not just simple foot soldiers but eventually they became the unifiers and leaders of Japan. It was the warrior class that pacifies every people in Japan. We saw in the history of Japan how samurai took part in shaping every periodization in Japan. Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and finally Ieyasu Tokugawa were a n example of the role played by the samurai in the shaping of Japan. Interestingly though samurai held a very high position in the society and respected, their economic life was not that prestigious.Samurai were taught to be disciplined and simple in the way that they live. That is why they just depend on the stipend given to them by the daimyo and farmers. It was against in their morals to be associated in money. Aside from their financial mentality, samurai were expected to have loyalty more than everything. They were expected to give their very lives to their masters. This was where the control and monopoly of the samurai came from. This kind of social upbringing and rigidity in the life of the samurai cause him to be a man of ambition and achievement.Samurai should grab every opportunity to keep his word and morals. This is the kind of leaders the Meiji Restoration had and the secret to the success of the Japan. People were taught of discipline and loyalty. Morality that will se rve not only themselves but to properly embody the role they have for the society. By this it is clearly see how a samurai was created our time and this was shown in the very history of Japan. These warriors are not motivated by money or wealth and it is very obvious in their economic status. But these warriors were propelled by their sense of loyalty and morality.Works Cited Andressen, C. (2002). A Short History of Japan from Samurai to Sony. Australia: Allen & Unwin. Bebedict, R. (1946). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Pattern of Japanese Culture. Boston & Cambringe: Houghton Mifflin Company & Riverside Press. Bellah, R. N. (1957). Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press & The Falcon's Wing Press. Ikegami, E. (1995). The Taming of the Samurai: Honorofic Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kublin, H. (1973 ).Japan. ( Rev. Ed. ). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Olenik, W. S. (2005). Ja pan: Its History and Culture (4th Ed. ). New York: McGraw-Hill. Sansom, G. (1963). A History of Japan 1615-1867. Stanford, California: Stanfrd University Press. Tokugawa, T. (2009). The Edo Inheritance. Tokyo, Japan: Intertional House of Japan. Morton, W. S. ; Olenik, J. K. (2005). Japan: It’s History ; Culture (4th Ed. ). McGraw-Hill. Nakane, C. ; Oishi, S. (Eds. ) (1990). Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan. University of Tokyo Press.