What does our flag mean to them?
The news that General Motors, reporting a record $722-million fourth-quarter loss, is offering buyouts to all 74,000 of its unionized employees suggests to me that we need to talk about what nations are for.
Are they for getting out of the way of global corporations? Except when it’s necessary for the sons and daughters of the poor to defend those corporations? Are they for serving as the foreign office and defense department of global corporations? Are they for breaking the unions that speak for workers?
Or are nations to uphold our collective ideals, give us all a crack at happiness and prosperity, protect us from criminals within and without, and nurture the general good?
The problem is we all pay lip service to that last description, but our policies are calling into question our commitment to it. We seem to be buying the idea that everything will be okay if we just let corporations do whatever they want to do.
What they want to do is make money, and they’re not showing many signs that they care where or how. Is this what we believe in?
And if we do, where will it lead? What do we need the United States of America for? What about its Declaration of Independence, its Constitution, its more than two hundred years of holding out a better life to the world, its tradition of giving a damn for the poor and the underdog?
Do we really believe the corporations care about these things? They’re not even the United Corporations of America, are they? They’re about me. If that weren’t so, why on earth would CEOs be paid obscene salaries and bonuses for failing their shareholders?
Are corporations American? Or will any old flag do? They don’t mind sailing their ships under foreign flags to avoid our laws and pay poverty wages. They want to make all the money they possibly can. How compatible is that with supporting a defense establishment, maintaining our roads and bridges, our transportation systems, our schools and health care? Who is going to keep on paying for all that? The poor? The middle class that the corporations are dismantling and shipping overseas?
Who is going to pay for what we say we want? The free-market argument, which has had a good run, holds that by reducing taxes, especially those for the rich, everybody wins. Is that what has happened? Are the poor winning? Is the middle class winning? Can we really trust the corporations to take their tax breaks and invest them in our country? Or will they invest in cheap-labor markets, countries whose leaders wish us ill?
How can we do what the government has been telling us to do—save money and at the same time spend more money to support a consumer economy? Wages have been stagnant for more than thirty years, and now prices are rising.
Maybe it’s time to tell the politicians to stop dissing our common sense and talk about what’s happening to this beloved miracle of ours, the United States of America. Do you think they could put aside their scare tactics and their what’s-good-for-poobahs-is-good-for-everyone BS to talk to us respectfully?
—DM
“Except when it’s necessary for the sons and daughters of the poor to defend those corporations?” I think you’ve got that wrong. It’s the sons and daughters of the privileged upper quintiles who don’t believe anything is worth defending except their leisure time and personal freedom for more band width. This straw man has been demolished too often for you to still be getting it wrong.
Yes, I have no quarrel with your angle of vision here, othr than to add the caveat that we all have the right to dissent from a particular war policy. I understand the virtues of our voluntary military, but I think the draft served the purpose of calling attention to the idea of all of us, rich and poor, defending our ideals together. And then there is the question of how many privileged will remain in an economy in which wages are stagnant and jobs are disappearing. John McCain says the answer is to retrain Americans. Fine, but I doubt it will be enough to redress what is going on. To your description of the trivial and privileged I would add, How is it that they have no shame, that they are not humiliated by their own willingness to allow the sons and daughters of the poor to go to war while they crash along the streets, mowing down the elderly and pretending not to notice as they yak into their cellphones? How have we bred such boors?—DM