Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00007541
US SOCIETY
JIM HIGHTOWER ... ALTERNET
5 Signs that America Has Gone Bonkers
... and a Glimmer of Hope ... People are saying enough is enough!
JIM HIGHTOWER ... ALTERNET
5 Signs that America Has Gone Bonkers
... and a Glimmer of Hope ... People are saying enough is enough!
Joshua Collins, 24, demonstrates outside the Burger King restaurant where
he works during a protest calling for higher wages and a worker's union on
Thursday, May 15, 2014, in Atlanta. ... (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Original article: https://www.opednews.com/articles/5-Signs-that-America-Has-G-by-Jim-Hightower-Economy_Hope_People-Power_Political-140601-713.html
Original article: https://billmoyers.com/2014/05/30/5-signs-that-america-has-gone-bonkers-%E2%80%94-and-a-glimmer-of-hope/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Commentary added Novermber 2023, almost 10 years after the article below was written ...
One reality is that I am almost 10 years older than I was in 2014 when the following was written, There are not many things that being old is good for, but one is that you can ... if you can remember ... is that you have a lot more perspective than younger people and maybe can put things in context more usefully.
When I was college age about 60 years ago there was a lot of talk of the 'business cycle' or the 'economic cycle' ... a cycle of about 8 years that seemed to have been going on since the beginning of the industrial revolution or about 150 years.
But we don't talk about that cycle any more. Maybe this is because our economic management is better, but maybe it is because something bigger is now drowning out the old business / economic cycle. I think that thing is what I call 'financialization' where mathematical models are now 'gaming' almost everything to do with business and investment.
Frankly, this could be a good thing if the models were designed in a good ... that is 'fair' way ... but the majority of the models are single purpose and that purpose is to make the maximum of profit for the proprieter of the model. This is going on around the stock market and financial investment and it is going on in all aspects of business. It is immensely powerful, not well understood and generally ignored by reporters and the popular press. This has been going on for 40 years and in this time there has been an enormous concentration of wealth and a steady decline in the well-being of most everyone except a relatively few who are 'running' the system
The good news is that modern technology is amazing and all sorts of things can now be done to benefit society that were difficult or impossible until quite recently. The bad news is that most ... not all, but most of the people with wealth and power and more interested in more wealth and power than actually doing much of substance for the benefit of all. Sad ... but the reality.
I am old and know what is possible ... but I am also aware that most people are way younger than me, and have no idea how good things could be and what needs to be done !!!!!!!
Peter Burgess
Written by Jim Hightower ... ALTERNET NEWS & POLITICS
May 29, 2014
It might appear that the USofA has gone bonkers. So let me clear up any confusion that you might have: Yes, it has!
Yet, it hasn't. More on that in a moment.
First, though -- whether looking at the 'tea party' congress critters who've swerved our nation's political debate to the hard right, or at the peacocks of Wall Street who continue to preen and profit atop the wreckage they've made of our real economy -- it's plain to see that America is suffering a pestilence of nuts and narcissists in high places. These 'leaders' are hell bent to enthrone themselves and their ilk as the potentates of our economic, governmental and social systems, and they are aggressively trying to snuff out the light of egalitarianism that historically has been our society's unifying force.
Bill Moyers, America's most public-spirited journalist, summarized the state of or nation in these terms: 'The delusion is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe to sit at the seat of power.' Symptoms of this national insanity include these examples:
- -- We can't even keep the doors of our government open. In October of last year, Washington's tea party Republican faction, unable to win the budget cuts it had demanded, threw a procedural fit to get what its acolytes wanted. Their stunt literally shut down the nation's government for 16 days and bled $24 billion from the U.S. economy. They won nothing except the widespread public scorn they earned for being self-aggrandizing political fools.
- -- Lloyd Blankfein, bankster-in-chief of Goldman Sachs, runs a financial casino that has bilked its own customers, been so reckless that it took a $10 billion taxpayer bailout to keep it afloat and lobbied furiously to kill regulatory reforms that would've reined in its ongoing destructiveness. So has this wrongdoer faced prosecution and jail? Ha! Blankfein continues to reign, retaining his CEOship at Goldman and hauling in $23 million last year in personal pay.
- -- A narrow, five-man majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are 'persons' with the right to spend unlimited sums of their shareholders' money to elect or defeat whomever they want -- and to do so secretly. This year, in McCutcheon v. FEC, the Court also overturned the campaign finance rules limiting individual's contributions on aggregate federal campaign contributions -- thus enthroning a tiny elite as America's ruling electoral power.
- -- Big Money's control of politics gives it control of public policy. Thus long-term joblessness and underemployment rage on unabated, middle-class income is plummeting, the majority is finding upward mobility roped off, labor unions are being systematically disempowered and our social safety net is being shredded.
- -- From retail workers to adjunct college professors, the new normal for workaday people is poverty-wage, part-time, temporary, no-benefit employment. At McDonald's, the world's biggest burger chain with 860,000 U.S. workers and $5.5 billion in profits, typical pay is only $8.20 an hour and 'full-time' jobs amount to only 30 hours a week. McDonald's business plan: Shift the bulk of its labor costs to taxpayers and workers themselves. The top executives calculate that employees will subsidize their gross underpayment by finding second jobs, and then get health care from emergency rooms and go to welfare offices for food and other basic needs.
Most people know that things are screwy, that this is not the America that's supposed to be. And therein lies the good news: The USA hasn't gone crazy -- its leaders have, and they can be changed.
In opinion polls, tea party Republicans are becoming less popular than swine flu, while solid progressives are on the rise. Such undiluted populist voices as Elizabeth Warren's and Bernie Sanders' in the Senate, Alan Grayson's in the House and Mayor Bill de Blasio's in New York City are shifting the debate from the corporate agenda to the people's.
The anthem by rocker Patti Smith sums up where we Americans are -- and where I think we're going: 'People have the power -- to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.' Ordinary folks are awakening to the realization that the fools have seized power, and the folks are now making moves (and movements) to seize the fools by their short hairs and reclaim our dreams.