Allowing a Strong America?
I was reading blogs the other night (like I usually do) and buried in a long comment on one particular blog was the following sentence:
“America will be as strong as the businesses and corporations allow.”
I had to go back and reread the comment and the stream it was in three more times just to make sure I read what I read. I slept on it and read it again the next day. Maybe I took it wrong. I wanted to ask what was actually meant by the statement, but I didn’t want to possibly disrupt the flow of the page by questioning anything. So I took it as the white words on black background that it was.
I don’t know, maybe it was the time period that I was raised in. Maybe it was the experiences of my parents and grandparents that I was raised under. Maybe it’s what I was fed as a child by the media, the education system, and society as a whole. Maybe it’s just the way I feel about it.
That statement scares the crap out of me.
I do not like the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Never have. The first time I watched it, I was in my teens and I thought the story, along with every character in it, was so unbelievably sappy and just truly annoying. I still find the movie annoying, just not as unbelievable. Now, unfortunately, I find the movie to be a bit prophetic in its unbelievably sappy way.
Potterville is a possibility that’s becoming more probable and we (as a Country) are selling off everything of ourselves towards that end. Sadly, our lives are not a movie. I doubt there’s a Clarence the Angel that will come along to make us see how things could be. Sure, in the movie it’s all just a dream, but to see the possibilities of our reality, you just have to look at the history of corporate mentality and behavior.
I really don’t want to live in a company town. I truly don’t want to see indentured servitude brought back as the best option to survive. That’s all been done before. It usually didn’t work out well for anyone/anything, except the companies.
If we are to believe that businesses and corporations are to control whether America will be strong or weak, as that statement suggests, I think we may be doomed already.
Sorry you are fucked. You have a choice. A choice to do something or a Tea party / Republican choice a choice between fucked and as the republicans wuold not go there totallty fucked. Well you are fucked.
In a society where you, “get out of it, what you put into it”, the wealth curve would be a Bell Curve. Very few people are truly lazy, and very few people are total workaholics. The bulk of humanity would be clustered in the middle.
What we see on our planet resembles the lobe of a hyperbola. Most of humanity lives at subsistence (or below) poverty, and they work real hard, just to get that. The curve drops rapidly, and flattens out at the end of insane levels of wealth
The conservatives say that if you work real hard, that you can get rich, and they also say that the poor are poor, because they are lazy. One of the hardest forms of employment, is migrant labor. Ever heard of anybody getting rich doing that?
“America will be as strong as the businesses and corporations allow.”
Somebody seems to have forgotten that the Corporations got rich by exploiting the labor and money of the American people. And just where did these non-living corporations get power over living people?
You might want to do a search on the term, Robber Barons, if you want to look into some very interesting American history.
I like the http://www.ecosia.org Search Engine, because with each use, they buy and protect some Rainforest.
When GM was closing American factories and putting millions of people out of work, so that they could open factories abroad, where they could get away with paying people pennies an hour, they weren’t just putting Americans out of work. They were also bankrupting thousands of small businesses which depended upon the American workers to have enough to shop in them.
And when GM was having trouble selling cars, Roger Moore asked this question : “Who did you think was going to buy those cars?”
Without seeing what came before or after that sentence and to what context it was speaking of, I’m just going to talk out of my ass here. 😀
Somewhere along the way, I’m not sure when or where, people have gotten confused as to what makes America great. It’s the people, and those people can make or break those corporations. How and when did we get to a place where our prosperity as a nation is held hostage and hinges on the whims of corporate America? Corporations that have made record profits while the rest of America forages for crumbs to feed their families. Fuck those corporations. They aren’t providing jobs like Republicans like to tell us. They are taking their record profits and stuffing them in their own pockets instead of reinvesting in the jobs market. Well, yeah, ok, that’s my take of it anyway.
Corporations are churches for those that worship at the altar of God Money. It’s an evil cult that often gets disguised as Conservative Christianity. Corporations will be the death of this country and congresscritters will be their hitmen.
I still believe in the people. We, the people, haven’t done a great job, but we can take control of things if we have the desire to do so.