Too many people out of work; the people who do have jobs have to work overtime to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the insurance companies, oil companies, and financial institutions are making record profits and paying their executives huge bonuses on top of prodigious salaries. Does all this sound familiar? It should; it's what's happening in our country today.
I just finished reading Invisible Hands; The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan by Kim Phillips-Fein. As the name of the book implies, the author follows the big companies, the big power brokers and the top company executives as they made, and continue to make, the decisions on how this country should be run.
These relatively few people have somehow convinced the rest of us, including the people who represent us in our government, that they know what is best for the U.S., and should be allowed to do as they please. I think our government representatives have fallen for this line of thinking because they have been dazzled by being chosen to have lunch with, or play golf with, or fly on private jets with, these very wealthy narcissists. These so-called captains of industry are the ideological descendants of the long-ago bosses who opposed doing away with the child labor laws, who opposed limiting the work week to 40 hours, who thought they had a right to pollute the air and water and earth because they could make a few extra dollars doing it. Today, they oppose health care for everyone (only those who can afford it should have it), social security as an entitlement (which it is not; we have all paid for it through our payroll deductions), and any type of a safety net for a person who has had his or her job pulled out from under him or her, among other things.
It is very hard for me to believe that we have been boondoggled by these high-flying thugs for so long, when they are only interested in what makes them money. Why not hire more people at decent wages so each one doesn't have to work 60 hours a week? Families would have more time to spend together. Isn't this what we want? Or do we just want to lament the demise of the American family? Why not support the unions who are fighting for decent wages for all workers? These are just a few of the questions we should be asking.
Isn't it time we woke up? This is our country, and our world; shouldn't we take it back? And by this, I don't mean getting rid of President Obama; he's doing better under the circumstances than expected. I do mean getting rid of, or at least taking a hard look at the senators and congressmen (all right—I mean mostly Republicans) who spout business theories handed to them by big business, and actually believe those things work, or at least pretend to believe. Our country—and our world—is too populous for us to revert back to the good ol' days of the early twentieth century. We need to think about conserving our natural resources so that future generations will be able to live at least as well as we have. We need to consider legislation that would give support to all citizens, no matter their circumstances. We are, or at least were, a very wealthy country, and some of that wealth should be returned as services to the ordinary citizens, in the form of government services, well-kept infrastructure, health care, and especially education. We should not be dictated to by the vandals and villains who seem to own Congress.
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I continue to not understand what motivates my friends who, like me, are among the "small people" of this country to believe in and support the social Darwinism of the current movement to the political right. The only thing that makes any sense at all about this to me is that they believe the myth that if we let the rich get wildly richer by limiting government involvement in the economy, the money will somehow "trickle down" to them in the form of more and better jobs workin' for the man. Yeah, right; we knew better than that as far back as 1932 ... or at least we should have.
ReplyDeleteIt's BETTER government we need, not less. We already have plenty of less government in the current Congress full of do-nothings who spend more time on vacation than they do governing.