Reply With Quote
You can't say though that the system doesn't do a good job of polarizing and pretending there's two sides, so there's always the perception of ever recycling 'winners' and 'losers'...
All organic, of course. Or, American food 50 years ago.
Everything old is new again.
You can't say though that the system doesn't do a good job of polarizing and pretending there's two sides, so there's always the perception of ever recycling 'winners' and 'losers'...
More local sources of food may come in handy at some point.
Patrick Dineen and those front porchers are pretty into it too.
All by design.
Which we learn at a very young age.
It's now everyone for themself. Forced to compete with unlimited cheap labor and inadequately prepared due to a state education focused on state and corporate loyalty and subservience.
Naturally you kill off judgement, empathy, self-reliance, and anything else that might pollute the perfect economic man.
'Farm living is the life for me.'
That the maximization of economic output and wealth might render life unpleasant for so many was forgotten. Ditto for the diminishment of thoughts of morality, ethics, values etc as outdated or what not.
Perfect economic, scientific man. You should be happy. Our theories so declare.
it.
A problem is that the ideologies behind this don't neatly fit into the boxes commonly thought of in current American politics. Nor do potential solutions.
Some will see any greater government assistance as socialism, others will see any attempt to enhance family life as patriarchal religious based traditionalism. The notion that not all are cut out for a collegiate track, with real options for a skilled trade apprenticeship track, will be rejected as heretical to traditional American democratic ideals and perhaps feudalistic.
What won't change, of course, is the 'financialization' of the American economy. That ship has long sailed. Mass consumerism, an older vessel, ensures that it won't. The notion that one might actually take pride in their work, that such work might entail working with one's hands, and that life may be about more than soulless consumption are an hetical to American life circa 2011.
Meanwhile there are real shortages (and opportunities) in the skilled trades, due in no small part to the assumption that the college track is, and should be, for everyone.
Well, we know what the Chinese do.
"college track is, and should be, for everyone"
Europeans, esp the Germans, are way ahead of the US here. Germany's vocational/apprentice/work-study training is the envy of France and UK.
And of course, Europeans have always "tracked" kids to academic HS or non-academic/vocational HS.
Another of Americans' lies they tell themselves is that every ugly duckling must be given the (academic) chance to become a swan. Of course, that very rarely happens, so we have millions of ugly ducklings on the wrong track.
But perhaps there will be a sublime ending. Of course, that's always the assumption in the West, that history moves towards a better tomorrow. Perhaps so, but the detours are downright horrendous.
What happens when an Eastern ethic takes hold? One that doesn't embrace some notion of individual autonomy and rights?
I for one, am just waiting to be plugged into the Matrix.
"Eastern ethic"
kinda broad, ain't it?
Certainly Western/industrial civilization, on a non-sustainable trajectory, is ting in humanity's bed.
Narrowly defined to the political and legal rights of individuals. While, IMO, perhaps we are reaching the outer limits of such individual liberty, at least the assumption at a basic political level (certainly not perfect) is individual political autonomy.
As a political model for a globalized financial-based economy, the Western one with its democratic cons utional forms of national government tends to be messier and unpredictable, as it were.
On the other hand the theme of one-dimensionality is overblown. There are substantial differences too.
The momentous shift after 2008 is that the political masters are no longer ostensibly the masters. The TBTFs we've chosen to coddle unto death are.
In a capitalist system they would have eaten and died. In this one, we ate their , paid for the privilege and protect them even now from any meaningful accountability for taking ill-advised risks that wrecked (or nearly wrecked) the greatest capitalist dynamo history has known to date. Then they shook the USA down more or less openly for protection money.
(brass)
Corporations to Government: Give Us More, Tax Us Less
http://www.truth-out.org/print/67942
=============
How's that corporate/financial trickle-y down-y workin out fer ya?
(Sierra Nevada Torpedo)
True. Of course, the claim was that their burning houses would eventually burn all of our houses down, unless we footed the bill to put out the fires (not the best metaphor, but it'll do). Our elected representatives lacked the capacity and stones to challenge that assertion, and so handed over a blank $700B check to Wall Street. Socialism for Wall Street. And we're supposed to give a damn if the taxpayers pay for a school lunch for a poor kid.
This is a total subversion of American life, of the two major political ideologies, and common sense. And, yes, what has the regulatory/legal apparatus in NY and DC been doing wrt to the financial markets for the last three decades?
Can you really tell me with a straight face that 2008 was surprising at all to you? I think the fallacy is to think that TBTF is a '08 concept. It's been that way before then and will be afterwards.
To me, the only difference is that at that point, they stepped into the spotlight for long enough to shake us up, then went back behind the curtains, leaving Lehman as a sacrificial lamb so we could feel vindicated somehow...
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
