Winners and Losers

It is no longer difficult to tell the winners from the losers. Just consider the case of WalMart. Whenever I enter one of the zillions of WalMarts around the country I cannot overcome the feeling that I am entering a huge warehouse full of losers, losers as far as the eye can see. It might appear that I am disparaging the good people that shop and work there, but that is not my intention. They are losers only in the sense that those who work there work mostly for minimum wages, are not allowed to unionize, and are otherwise exploited. Those who shop there are losers in that they are desperate to save money as they don’t have much (any more, if ever). The winners are not hard to locate, just look at the list of billionaires, they are right there. It is also hard to escape the knowledge that those who are producing the cheap goods available there are even worse off that the clerks and shoppers. Sweat shops all around the world, but mostly in China, produce most of the items working for very low wages and with virtually no benefits at all. WalMart is the epitome of what is wrong with unregulated capitalism, the exploitation of the labor of others and the exploitation of the environment. It is obviously true, the middle class has almost completely disappeared, leaving only the obscenely rich and powerful and those who are shamelessly exploited and powerless. Of course it is comforting to know that recently a group of billionaires have agreed to give half of their fortunes to charity. What a sacrifice! Now they will only have a half billion or twenty or thirty billion left. I can see no reason why any individual anywhere on earth should be allowed to have a billion dollars. Remember, as above, the only way capital can accumulate is through the exploitation of others labor or the environment. Instead of measuring their fortunes in dollars there should be a misery index showing how much human misery went into their fortunes.

This situation is the inevitable outcome of allowing unregulated capitalism to flourish over a period of time, it is always the case that money will tend to collect in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. WalMart is not the only corporation guilty by any means but it is, I think, the prime example. As money also equals power it is not surprising that those with the money will tend to make the rules, and the rules they make will naturally benefit them, allowing them to increasingly profit at the expense of the increasingly powerless. Money also buys influence so that the individuals who are elected to manage the country are easily bought, and once bought, as long as they continue to do the buyers’ bidding, they will remain in office. Citizens should have run for their lives into the mountains when they heard the words “deregulation,” and “privatization,” but they foolishly did not. They did not decide to stay and fight either, being bamboozled by the powerful into believing all kinds of nonsense and myths about the joys of capitalism and the benefits of things actually opposed to their best interests. This was overlain with all kinds of scare tactics about gay marriage, abortion, black and brown ambitions, and so on, all falling on ears tuned to scapegoating and propaganda. Education and a love of learning would have helped eliminate this but education itself has been commandeered, emasculated, and used for the same propaganda purposes as the similarly captured media. These United States that we have traditionally been so proud of, and our democracy that has historically treated us so well, have changed over time in ways that from the point of view of ordinary citizens are both dysfunctional and undesirable. Government, that device employed by humans over time to presumably regulate themselves and look after the interests and concerns of the citizens, has almost completely divorced itself from those concerns and become an independent organization completely, an entity now totally self-centered, self-regulated, self-renewing, self-justifying, and self-controlled. Votes are no longer cast with the public in mind but, rather, how they perpetuate this ongoing profit-making industrial/military/political complex that now controls our country, and seriously attempts to control the entire world.

It is rather amazing to contemplate the fact that this enormous organization, this attempted empire, this enormous complex and the country that created it, may all come crashing down fairly soon largely due to the simple acts of one man, the now notorious Osama bin Laden. Remember that bin Laden said he would bankrupt us just as the Russians were driven into bankruptcy. With a few men, armed with some primitive knives, he has created a situation that will fulfill his prophecy. How he must be chuckling and enjoying himself, wherever he is, watching us slowly borrowing more and more money, going farther and farther into dangerous debt, winning battles here and there but obviously losing the “war,” to say nothing of how he must enjoy watching millions upon millions every week taking off their shoes just to board an aircraft. Osama bin Laden may your tribe decrease, you certainly woke us from a strange dream of peace.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.