The weekend is almost upon us (for those who still have ends to their weeks, most of us don’t and that, sadly, applies to both ends of the spectrum in our brave new 24/7 world.
I’m not about to ‘waste’ one of my twenty free monthly NY Times articles by posting a link to Mr. ‘Flat Earth’s’ discussion of The Future of the US (despite the article saying ‘America’) with the richest man in the world as you can pretty much tell without going there what either one has to say.
Let it suffice to say that neither Billionaire (didn’t you know that Mr. Friedman is ‘married to it’?) has anything the ‘average’ US citizen would be interested in hearing.
Although we are likely to hear it eventually anyway (at their trial for treason.)
In the meantime we have this commentary from today’s AlterNet to help us reflect on the cesspool this nation has become since the ‘Reagan Revolution’.
Like you and other Americans, I love my country, its wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry, profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren
How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades and where we stand today? One way is to look at how America now compares with other countries in key areas. The group of twenty advanced democracies—the major countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others—can be thought of as our peer nations. Here’s what we see when we look at these countries. To our great shame, America now has
the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
the greatest inequality of incomes;
the lowest social mobility;
the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
the highest homicide rate;
the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP;
and the largest international arms sales.
A rather damning list of indictments, and while we may be ‘the worst’, others aren’t a whole hell of a lot further behind us…
Because of the universal adoption of the ‘debt driven’ economic system that has enslaved the world.
The fucked up thing of it is while the ‘experts’ (like Mr. Flat Earth) keep insisting we have a ‘money problem’ the truth is we don’t, what we have is a MASSIVE LEGAL PROBLEM!
And it starts with CRIMINALS being IN CHARGE of the world’s governments!
Would the (criminal) One Percent EVER admit that?
Not friggin’ likely Bucko, not friggin’ likely!
What ‘words of wisdom’ would a pair of One percenters shower upon those of us they make no secret of considering as ‘surplus’?
Could we sum it up with ‘drop dead’? (shorthand for, ‘You DON’T HAVE a future.’
More interesting, good citizen, is what would YOUR response be?
Do we have to go there? DO YOU want me to tell YOU what YOUR RESPONSE ‘should be’?
Just read down the ‘litany of woe’ the Alternet article provides us and feel the anger welling up inside you.
Is THIS what you signed up for?
How fucking sad is it good citizen that the vast majority didn’t ‘sign up’ for anything, (which only makes what we’ve gotten that much more ironic!)
We, er, ‘expected’ the, er, ‘opportunity to participate’ in this society as an equal partner. So imagine how our kids must feel seeing their ‘opportunity to participate’, er, blocked by the privileged few?
Imagine what tens of millions of US workers, who paid into retirement plans of all kinds only to learn later those funds were, er, ‘lost’ when the company ‘changed hands’…
AND NOBODY DID A FUCKING THING!
You were told you couldn’t sue and the Feds just turned a blind eye…so what were YOU gonna do?
Why does this have ‘bloodbath’ written all over it?
It also makes a very strong case for ‘justifiable homicide’ (something only cops enjoy these days, regardless of circumstances.)
The list of what’s wrong with our society only scratches the surface, the ‘wrong’ goes even deeper. The challenge, good citizen, is what do you do when you find you have been ‘raised’ in a ‘broken society’?
Is ‘turning to god’ the answer?
We’ve been ‘turning to god’ for over 10,000 years with absolutely NOTHING to show for it!
So how do you fix a broken society?
You gotta get A Plan my friend…one that doesn’t rely solely on ‘goodness and virtue’ to protect the rights of the individual!
One that places YOU on an EQUAL FOOTING with everyone else (by preventing the self-interested from seizing control of the law, like they always do.)
It all starts with YOU (standing up for your ‘inalienable’ rights) good citizen!
You aren’t worth less than any of the rest (so you shouldn’t tolerate being treated that way!)
They have no ‘right’ to dispose of you (after they’ve squeezed all of the debt they can from you!) They wouldn’t tolerate it and neither should you!
Get with The Plan!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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