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are trying to make it harder for these most vulnerable of Americans to survive.
(Photo:
Pinterest/Screenshot) is the condemnation of anything 'social' as un-American, which has helped modern-day capitalists to justify their belief in individual gain by any means...
In their view of a properly conducted democratic capitalist society, a sort of modern-day Homestead Act was envisioned, in which all Americans would participate in the "capitalist revolution" of growing stock portfolios.
This would be possible because of great technologies ('energy' in the 1950s, 'AI' now) that would allow all of us, in Aristotelian and Jeffersonian property-owning ways, to become 'free' to pursue the arts & sciences and to enjoy more leisure time.
Today, this form of
democratic capitalism could be realized through the
Employee Stock Ownership Plan
promoted by the "Just Third Way" movement.
They thought the newly productive post-war capitalists were being cheated by workers who depended on socialist strategies to even the score. But the opposite has happened.
Average Americans have been cheated out of the gains from technological productivity. Just in the past ten years in our world of big business, over $30 trillion - nearly a third of our nation's TOTAL current wealth - has gone to the richest 10% of Americans...
Yet market-happy
illusionists like the Wall Street Journal keep
spouting nonsense about
a healthy economy built on
today's capitalism.
Wealthy conservatives know that social responsibility might take away some of their riches by providing opportunities and jobs and a decent standard of living for all Americans.
In their minds, the poor have only themselves to blame for being poor, and for dying. But it is capitalism that is killing them.
The Capitalist
Manifesto has been twisted into an assault on poor people.
Little money is to be
made, so little effort is made to save lives. People are DYING
because there's no market for profit-making.
Scientists predict dangerous increases in respiratory and infectious diseases, malaria, meningitis, typhus, and cholera. And global food shortages.
Instead of working in a
cooperative manner to encourage self-sufficient small farms around
the globe, industrial behemoths like
Monsanto and
DuPont are positioning themselves
for a chemical assault on our food supplies.
The American Journal of Public Health flatly states,
One of the most disturbing examples of individual disdain for society is the opioid epidemic.
Purdue Pharmaceutical
executives admitted to the felony charge of lying about their
product's addictive qualities, but no one went to jail. In a
six-year period to follow, other Big Pharma dealers, including
AmerisourceBergen and McKesson, distributed nearly a billion pills
to West Virginia alone.
The great majority of heroin users started with prescription painkillers.
But our social
responsibility seems to dissipate under the cloud of
individual-centered capitalism. Despite a doubling of
opioid overdose deaths in six
years, millions of people live in counties without a licensed
provider of the drugs needed for treatment.
Social consciousness would correct that.
But that won't happen as
long as the media is promoting individual (human and corporate)
gains over collective, cooperative efforts to restore our country to
health.
Individualism over social consciousness is much to blame.
A study (Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy - Fallout from Life in a Risk Society) by the Social Science Research Network found that the shift from employer and government pensions to individuals has increased risk while exacerbating stress.
Meanwhile, much of the stress for working people comes from the 40-year stagnation in wages.
For those who make up the
poorest 60% of America, premature deaths are up 20 percent since the
turn of the century, and the
economic suicide rate has risen
dramatically.
Medicaid work
requirements and drug testing are two of the proposed or implemented
hardships reserved just for poor people.
People around the nation pitch in, through,
No one seems to care
about the skin color or religion or politics of those in need.
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