WHAT? THE US ECONOMY HAS NO CLOTHES?!

from AlterNet:




Posted by jay31 at 4:36 pm
August 4, 2010

WHAT? THE US ECONOMY HAS NO CLOTHES?!
Posted by jay31 on @ 4:36 pm


Who is not familiar with the story of the emperor who really had on no clothes? Remember how unscrupulous tailors convinced the emperor that they had made a suit for him that was invisible to incompetents and those unfit for their positions, but was really of the most beautiful material in the entire world.

Because no one wanted to seem incompetent or unfit, no one commented on the emperor’s nakedness, except a little boy who apparently held no position so he didn’t need to worry about losing anything. And he apparently thought anyone who hadn’t noticed the emperor’s nakedness, clearly incompetent themselves. So, as children often do, he blurted out the truth, saying, “The emperor has no clothes!”

Perhaps you, like me, were amazed and amused at the gullibility and faintheartedness of the people who were so much influenced by the silence of their neighbors that they were afraid to speak.

I’ve been feeling like those people. I keep waiting for someone in the media or politics to notice that the kind of Capitalism we practice in this country is not working. I keep thinking of the TV ad for a deodorant popular in the 1970s that went in a kind of sing song style, “It’s not working!” It seems that anyone who does not suffer a severe headache at having a thought, would wonder how anyone believed that it could work.

In the mid 1970s US Corporations decided that they would no longer honor the time-honored practice of paying workers more if they produced more. That practice had seemed to make sense to most manufacturers and certainly to workers for many years. If workers worked harder to make more products so that their company grew, they should share in the benefits of that growth.

Corporate America said No. It also said to workers that if you want more money, invest money in our company; then you can share in the profits we make. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.alternet.org/jay31/2010/08/04/what-the-us-economy-has-no-clothes/

The bones are the educations people get--all cut in the budget crises, or drowned in fundamentalism, or scoffed at by religious idiocrats.

The muscles are manufacturing--all stripped out and sent overseas.

The skin is that veneer of civilization that keeps us from resembling Afghanistan.

aren't the laffin hyenas getting lots? They shore look very mahvellous on foxnews/cnn!