Corporate infiltration of government is not a recent event. In fact, it was a quiet coup that happened about 1910. That this was after the disbandment of the populist party should not surprise anyone. There was minimal government concession and regulation of pavement level fruit (i.e., not low-hanging) that corporations have gnashed their teeth about ever since and until this day.
No more child labor.
No more forced labor.
A standardized work week (which we’ve lost already to the ‘gig’ lie as they socialize the taxation, too).
A lot more, but I’m only referencing the time and party for context.. let’s fast-forward the full one hundred and eleven years to 2021:
Are we still in denial that allowing business to bail out the government as we did was an unholy and terrible idea?
Are we still denying that the result is other than an abjectly and ethically bankrupt oligarchy?
Rhetorical questions, all. I know full well the world of humanity is hiding its collective head in the deepest sand hole possible.
But we once pointed at this period as the moment in which we chose to try to be better as a country.
I point this out because, for our country, in that moment, it was as likely that the populists would be killed or incarcerated. It wasn’t even uncommon for countries of the time; both Germany and Russia chose violent military suppression. But, in that moment, even if only for their own short-term benefit, there was collaboration and cooperation. (Much more likely to assuage their own strength and protect against another civil war, really.)
All but the extremists settle, around the table. As they always do, because all they really want is to just live a peaceful life with family and friends.
To be able to afford basics.
To be secure in their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
But the reality is clearly visible nothing really changed at all. It is always the same ‘tit for tat’ world because, apparently, no economist can perceive an exchange toward communality as other than “irrational”. Few humans, either.
That is some primo projection, for those who pay attention: No Dove is considered rational.
You may wish to keep that in mind. The lessons of the last one hundred and eleven years are as clear as they are insightful:
The socializing cost and privatizing profit should never be permitted; it is a rot of infrastructure and reality that is causing the implosion of every aspect of our nation; both of ignorance as well as arrogance… neither of which are easily recoverable.
Labor is dominated and forced into subservience of business and government until they refuse to work without legitimate support and maintenance consideration and remuneration. And all such “reconciliations” are ever begrudged and endlessly ‘gamed’ until overturned or economically countered (i.e., paid back elsewhere/how).
“Let the future pay” is a phrase that every human under the age of 40 should commit to their minds and hearts as anathema; an intellectual poison that is directly accountable for where we find ourselves today.
The desolation of our water supply and food chains?
The collapse of our public discourse and ethical steerage? (What little once tried to exist until 1619.)
The off-shoring of highly skilled talent?
The outsourcing of entire manufacturing industries to other counties?
The insult to injury of “Made In America” today meaning ‘assembly only’?
These are all are tacit admissions that there is neither care not conscience for the ultimate conclusions of consumer-capitalism – this reality in which economic and skilled competition is a joke, education is entering the next and newest dark age (technology), and the promise of a new aesthetic and ethic for a country got shanked in an alley between The Hill and the diner.
Every nation of humans that have existed have their unique perspectives, but the result is the same: The world was literally burned and raped of its products and its balance to line the wallets of those who consider both Earth and “everyone else” to be material for the using… human “resources”… literal.
Now this council of the uniquely conceited wants to magically restore itself. How, precisely, can this happen when you’re more concerned with how you look in soundbite than in history?
As if. As if you could possibly escape your disdain, your ignorance, and your insufferable hubris.
None of which the “you” of whom I am speaking even contemplate. I am shattered by the weight of my own impotence to do more than speak and write.
I wonder how many more times around this bush humanity can make it before the planet roots us out? Given that all the long-term outcomes we’ve ignored in the last 111 years are coming home to roost… microplastics, population crashing, the over-harvesting and exhaustion (both ends of the chain here, folks!) of the food supply, and oh yeah, ruining our biosphere.
For billions! You see, the monkey with the most billions wins.
Oh. Sorry. I meant bananas.
(feature image is fair use and not for profit)