Before we start this post, thought it would be good to restate CFP Marty Kelman's words: “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to debate any issue with others on an intellectual level and for everybody to be open to sound information that could influence their opinions? And get involved in their community and make it as better place?”
Yes, your toxic cocktail expresses it superbly.
The sea of laws do choke out liberty. Any excessive complication drags down any society too. Even a fair number of lawyers agree.
Well, my good woman, there’s a touch of polemic and emotional grafting in you about good ol’ capitalism, isn’t there? LOL There probably ISN’T any system “better” than it right now, especially if you allow for its many modified versions (the hybrid models that exist in various degrees throughout the world, including here). Yet it would be extremely presumptive to think that nothing better is CONCEIVABLE, especially when considering its inherent precepts.
Ron Paul is correct about how the corporatism grafting onto capitalism has been a very unsymbiotic parasite. But removing it (and it needs removing, desperately) would not magically solve excessive greed or corruption. And even the “pure” market is anything but pure. The Friedman/Chicago school model, seemingly a path to truly free markets and freedom-enhancing capitalism without strictures (“get rid of the regulation!”), is in reality a pathway to excessive exploitation. You don’t need to read The Shock Doctrine or Blowback to understand that. The wealthy and connected few have nearly always manipulated and twisted. Combine that with the emotional propensity of people as decision makers, and you get a system that can wreck itself (although it can also repair itself, albeit at great pain and cost, but at least is always itching to repair itself, one of its great strengths).
Corporatism’s success at getting the law to treat a corporation as a person when convenient and as something else when not, has been damaging. This latest Supreme Court decision saying that corporations have a right to free speech, and that restricting their injection of money into political campaigns is an infringement of that, is just the most recent and greatest lightning jolt.
What better demonstration of who holds real and meaningful power? While the Dim Dems wish they could fire people and hold them accountable about the oil spill, the Repubs who had gutted what little oversight and accountability there was before try to dodge and deflect and turn it all around. And both of them are in reality mere pawns, because for all our politicians’ fuming over oil executives, Heyward and the others still do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and even try to throw it back on the little guy. It is the same pattern as the Wall Street meltdown. Big corporations, especially multinational ones, hold the power. Indeed, they are so arrogantly confident in that, they often don’t even pretend to affect a façade.
Did you see Noam Chomsky’s comments recently? “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering. The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime.” Brings to mind what German anti-Nazi Martin Niemoller is purported to have said.
He goes on to say that the attitudes of the Tea Party folks “are understandable. For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy,” and so class resentment has arisen. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels. The colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.” And perhaps the fear of those not yet! Wonder what many of the members of the Tea Party would think to know that a top left-wing (to use one of those lazy directional terms I don’t like) intellectual agrees with much of what they say!
Our excessively individualistic culture leaves no time for self-inventory or evaluation of “enough” because every nuclear family is essentially on its own. Ever read “The White”? It’s a novel about a real person, Mary Jemison. It shows nicely the difference between two pretty alien (to each other) cultures. Native Americans used to take the winters to work on themselves and their relationships. Modern Americans only rarely take significant time to work on themselves or theirs, and even then it’s usually because a crisis in it has arisen.
Yes, corporations have commoditized labor into an expendable “factor” to help the bottom line. Workers are like Boxer in Animal Farm. Because corporations have no big view or commonality with the larger society, and few loyalties except to themselves, they don’t realize or don’t care that workers are also consumers. Henry Ford, for all his faults, at least tried to tell his fellow bigwigs in the 20s that most of the time your workers have to be able to afford what they are making or doing, or the system will crash. Most of his fellows didn’t listen.
Those corporations also usually don’t care about the mental or emotional health of their workers (well, the good ones do, but they are increasingly rare), although they often care about their physical health because that can affect the bottom line (our culture makes few substantive connections between mental, emotional, and physical health, btw). And their expressed concerns for family time are just the meaningless phraseology to make it appear as though they care, so that you will be deceived long enough to be trapped.
I read the link you provided separately on education. Although there is a fair amount of academic disagreement with Gatto (almost sounds like “John Galt” doesn’t it? LOL), and he makes some extrapolations and represents them as data, there’s little doubt that the education system became increasingly (and stiflingly) standardized and all that entails for being “educated.” Clever title for his book by the way. I’m not quite as critical of the PhD process (although there’s plenty to criticize there!), but I could obviously be biased! :)
And my apologies, dear Madame, for being inexcusably brief on these important subjects today.
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