By Thurman, on August 29th, 20092009-08-29T16:15:00ZF jS, Y%
The debate over medical insurance reform has turned almost satirical. If the stakes weren’t so high it would make great entertainment. My favorite is when the blue hairs, tea-baggers, and other assorted sheep of the conservative herd start bleating about keeping government out of their medicare. Hilarious!
These folks are so ignorant of reality that I don’t know how or where to begin trying to educate them. It’s probably just as well since most attempts to dissuade such narrow minded ruminants from the fallacies they enjoy are exercises in futility. Continue reading Big Insurance / Bad Medicine
By Thurman, on August 26th, 20092009-08-27T00:30:00ZF jS, Y%
While so many people in this nation struggle to survive, a tiny percentage of our population lives like kings, siphoning off nearly half of the wealth produced by the laboring masses of the world. We’ve all seen the reports: corporate CEO’s raking in salaries of hundreds of thousands, bailed out banks paying employee bonuses in the millions, big insurance companies striking deals to preserve their monopoly on rationing medicine.
What sort of extravagant lifestyle do these people lead that requires such outrageous incomes year in and year out? What does one do with that much money?
How much is enough?
I’ve been asking that question for years now, and until very recently most people looked at me like I had three eyes or called me ugly names when I dared to wonder aloud — but lately things seem to be changing.
While visiting relatives recently, a distant cousin in her seventies went off on a rant that took me by surprise. Our conversation touched briefly on the state of the economy and she railed against the vast disparities in compensation between working people and the executive elites of corporate America, condemning upper level managers and executives who make hundreds of times more money than the lower level employees who actually generate the wealth
A few days later, after the weekly meeting at my workplace, one of my co-workers — a quiet gentleman approaching retirement age — wandered away muttering, “How much is enough?” after the parking lot conversation touched on the differences in what owners and investors reap and what they’re willing to pay the workers who facilitate their success.
Am I dreaming? Can it really be true? Is some part of mainstream America finally beginning to wake up and realize that oligopolistic capitalism and excessive executive compensation is at the root of so many of our problems today?
How much is enough? Continue reading How Much Is Enough?
By Thurman, on August 22nd, 20092009-08-23T04:01:00ZF jS, Y%
Decades of rampant free-market ideology and excessive deregulation have left the United States with a broken public education system, a rapidly crumbling infrastructure, and an ever increasing underclass while affording less than one percent of our populace the means to amass over forty-five percent of our national wealth. Ours is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide for the basic medical needs of its population, nor does it provide affordable higher education to all of its citizens as do most of our global contemporaries.
Why? Unbridled greed at the very highest levels of corporate America.
The American working class has been shrewdly manipulated over the course of several generations. Our ignorance was established and is maintained by a ruling class of corporate elites employing a variety of means including rampant consumerism, factionalism fueled by ignorance and fear, monetary inflation and exorbitant interest rates in banking, and an endless stream of corporate controlled entertainment designed to keep the masses lulled into a blissful state of apathy or churned into a seething mass of hate for all who are “other” — the ones who aren’t like us and must be always be feared and hated. They’re called wedge issues for a reason.
Wage laborers, that vast segment of humanity that keeps the industrial machine of the world functioning, have been lied to and manipulated by an elitist, power drunk minority for so long that most of us don’t even question modern, global capitalism anymore, much less notice the devastating results of its free market reign of terror. Generations of incessant lies and media manipulation have produced a population divided against itself; too busy working to maintain our pitiful lives and too deep in debt to spend much time questioning authority or challenging the status quo. In short, they’ve got us right where they want us. Continue reading Capitali$m & The Prophet$ of Greed
By Thurman, on August 21st, 20092009-08-21T16:13:00ZF jS, Y%
Our world has taken a definite turn for worse in recent years. The climate is becoming a runaway train heading toward an uncomfortable, hot and sticky disaster. Our little blue planet is becoming not only more polluted but more crowded every day. Global population will soon exceed the carrying capacity of our world, if it hasn’t already. The greed and excesses of big business and the influence and power that massive financial resources make possible are threatening the very survival of the human race.
Americans live in a society dominated by information overload. The multimedia circus that is cable television and the mindless online social networks keep most people lulled into complacency; easily manipulated. Huge corporations not only control our government and media outlets, but almost every other aspect of our lives as well: where we work and live, what we eat and drink, the words we read, even thoughts we should think.
I am not opposed to all facets of capitalism nor do I favor pure socialism. Either system alone is fatally flawed and doomed to failure. We need a more sustainable economic model, a monetary system controlled by government instead of private banks, a social democracy with a conscience and insulated from the corrupting influences of big money and corporate oligopolies, a society that rewards work, talent, and skill without leaving the less able among us to survive on leftovers and crumbs from a master’s table. Continue reading Let Us Not Go Quietly
