"They" say the darndest things

A certain reader did not like my answers to his questions about Milton Friedman's role in the Chilean coup of 9-11-'73 so he went on a little tirade. I deleted his last comment because it sounded like so much sour grapes. His petulant behavior reminded me of some of the axioms and positions of rich white folks.

I'm sure you've heard the old phrase, "If you're not a liberal when you're young, then you don't have a heart. If you're not a conservative when you're old then you don't have a brain." You know who coined that little gem? Some conservative who wanted to justify his not wanting to pay taxes on his bloated income. If anything, I've grown more liberal as I have aged, especially when it comes to equal rights for homosexuals, taxes and the need to reign in the out of control multinational corporations who answer to no one. In case you're keeping score here I favor letting gay people marry one another, low taxes on the working classes and high high high taxes on the wealthy (if we don't tax them like they do in Europe then their wealth will never trickle down to the rest of us), and I favor revoking the outlandish notion that a corporation has the same rights as a living breathing person, a corporation is not a person and it does not deserve the same rights as one, it's an artificial entity that is designed (most of the time) to make profit.


Another thing one hears all the time, especially in the corporate media, is that the "free markets" will sort things out. No, as a matter of fact, they won't. The job of the free markets is not to sort anything out, it's job is to make money for those who own or know how to manipulate it. The free markets care nothing for human beings or our problems. The market is for making money not social engineering. Also the notion that we have anything close to a free market in this country is absurd, even with NAFTA and CAFTA and any other AFTA they come up with next. American businesses could not survive with out the help they get from the US government. Our leaders preach that other countries should stop helping businesses in their lands but we constantly prop up businesses here like the airlines, the sugar manufacturers, and many others. We have nothing close to a free market here and we never will because it will cost American businesses too much money.
And finally another thing one hears is that we've got to stay away from putting any regulations on business because if we do we'll kill it. Bullshit. There was a time not so long ago when there was a good deal of regulation on business in this country, you need look no further than the 1940's and 50's, the years of the post war boom, and business in this country flourished. And the reason it flourished was there was a sense of "we are all in this together." People willingly worked long hours and double shifts because the company they worked for invested so much in them and in their community. Companies paid pensions back then and they looked out for the workers who helped make them so much money. Today there is nothing like that in this country. Jobs are outsourced, people fired, and companies no longer reward the people who helped make them obscenely rich, and it's all due to the "bottom line." It is no longer profitable for corporations to offer pensions or health insurance or to have any type of community involvement. Instead of investing in us like they used to, the corporations use that money to pay their top management boatloads of money. Yep, the new business model is to reward the men, and it usually is men, at the top and to screw over the people at the bottom who did all the work in making that company a success.

If we truly want to make this country a great place for all of us and not just for the people at the very top, we need to go back to the business models they used in the post war boom of the 40's and 50's. Oh wait, what am I saying? According to the economists and pro business people, I'm being naive. If anyone disagrees with their "corporations should be allowed to run amok and do as they please with no oversight or regulation" rhetoric they always accuse them of being "naive." Well guys, I got news for you, I'm not being naive, I'm being fair and I'm looking out for my interests and not for some damn corporation that will screw me in a heart beat. Hopefully more of you will look at things in a similar way that I do and we'll all start to do something to change this screwed up business environment that's being foisted on us.