If the United States doesn’t change from its exploitation worship…most of us are doomed
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The sad fact is that citizens of our country worship what is rightly called exploitation. This is bad for all of us, especially those of us born without a silver spoon in our mouths…the spoon often put in the mouths of the rich via the labor of We The people. Nothing could show this more clearly in my opinion that two ideas currently held by people who should know better. Those people, some of them right here on this web site have exhibited this worship by two comments and reactions.
1. The guy in Ferguson was a thug….all you have to do is look at him as a big black youny man to know he is. And obviously by running from the police he proved himself guilty.
2. how dare Obama say that the business persons “didn’t built it”.
Both of these reactions show a profound amount of ignorance about what the lives of the disadvantaged and poor is like and a sad tendency to worship the rich just because they are rich, as well. It takes the point of view that business person built their companies alone, but the sweat of their personal brows, when in fact that is far from the truth. It also ignores the fact that the powerful, including the police, have immense power but also inbuilt trust from those who have. And we know that power usually ends up to the potential of abuse of said power.
Any business person who has any humility at all, knows that without his or her workers and customers, they would NOT have a business. While they may have provided most of their direct capital, they didn’t do all the work themselves, nor did they personally build the roads, or create the modes of transporttion to get their customers to them.
What did in fact “built that business”, in every case I can think of, we all did. That includes every taxpayer and customer that deals with that business. If you want to get Biblical, no person is an island, so ‘no, you didn’t build that company!!!” Not on your own, it took our entire society to get us at this level on industry and commerce.
After reading the article listed below and some of The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, I have realized that there was a bit of disconnect between what the founders of our country said, and what they did. With the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they preached the idea of equality for all. This was a great new undertaking, they indicated, and was going to be different from Europe in a positive life-affirming (for all) way.
Sadly, their educational background and social biases meant that there were huge assumptions made about who should be “represented” and treated as a real citizen and who should not. We know that women were not full citizens. Also Blacks were not. They were either slaves, and considered 3/4 of a human for state representational issues or second class citizens at best. Even where they were counted as 3/4 of a human, they didn’t get any actual input into the government.
In fact, men who didn’t own property were not REALLY citizens. The only people that were full citizens were men who owned property, often 100,000 to 500,000 acres in order to be able to have the right to run for office, especially. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were two examples of the elite who actually had a voice in the ruling of the country.
So why did the Declaration say “all men are created equal”? Well, there are two reasons for that. They wanted the non-elite to actually work with them to get “freedom” from England. Starting in 1740, there was already a large group of people challenging the idea that the United States was anything better than England. Those people would have asked what the difference was, for them, to be ruled by the elite in England or the elite in this country. Most of those people were the ones going into the western areas, where they got less attention, but were on the front line of the Indian wars. There was also the merchants who were starting to amass money and there was a desire to include them for support purposes.
However 200 plus years later, we know better. We have a culture where renters often contribute as much, if not more, to the economy than do the landowners. Certainly with the gradual build up of the middle class, thanks primarily to unions, most of the investment and actual economic growth comes from the middle class.
However, there is a cold war that has depleted much of the middle class. The middle class is getting less and less of a percentage of the overall wealth. Some people theorize, not without evidence, that the middle class is just about ended. That leaves the poor (the have nots) and the rich (the haves). Recently, i think I read that something like 37 percent of the wealth goes to the top 1 percent.
What does that leave the rest of us? Exploitation!!! We exist to prop up the rich, and get little reward for doing so. The middle class has gotten to be endangered because it is no longer possible to exploit Blacks, Hispanics or minorities and get away with it. Now everybody is subject to being exploited. So the only equality we have is to be fairly equally exploited…but not really since minorities are always first hit with any downturn.
And this comes at the time that automation and things like AIs are coming to the forefront. Many of our jobs have been literally eliminated. So what is left? While some are perhaps young enough and lucky enough to find new avenues, others of us are not. And in addition, who knows what job will be eliminated due to automation next? The result is that many of us are obsolete and that number will grow as automation continues to build as it is sure to do.
What we need to do in this country, and now is not too soon to start, is look at ways to help people instead of businesses. Focus on human beings. The economy where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer can not long endure, especially with job cutter technology being a hugely growing reality. We need to, like it or not, adopt a more representative and SOCIALIST agenda or deaths are going to occur as we literally start starving people out.
And you know what people who are starving, especially in the so-called land of equality and plenty, are likely to do as they get hungrier and more frightened?!! Yep, crime and violence will go up.
If we want to survive as a nation and as a people, we might find it definitely to our advantage to explore how we are going to actually live into the promise of the Constition and Declaration and work to ensure the welfare of ALL of us. Not only would it be true to the actual ideals we have taught based on those documents, but it would us a humane way into the future.
Originally published at www.blogster.com.
