Just a few thoughts here, based on my humble experience:
--Most people by and large cannot be bothered to care. I'm not saying everyone is like this, but, sadly enough, a *lot of us* are. We've simply been beaten over the head with the Media stick so many times on how being sensitive and compassionate is just so much "political correctness" that people are just *scared* to be caught caring for someone "they shouldn't" these days.
It's been going on for the past 26 years, and this Reagan-era "let them rot" attitude hit its peak with New Orleans, post Katrina, Post Military Occupation. Which is a damned, horrifying shame, that we have to lose a whole city of people and see bodies in the water and see *human beings* put in a meat grinder practically before we wake up and realize, "Gee, maybe if we weren't so hard on our poor people, they might have *cars that WORK* so they can get out of the path of a hurricane when they need to."
Among other things.
--Both the society around us and the economy have changed, going from a production based model to a dysfunctional service based model that is fundamentally *parasitic* in nature. Basically, in terms of our *jobs*, the things we have to do so we have enough money to eat, clothe and shelter ourselves, and have something left over with which to maintain our health....we've gone from solving problems to *exploiting them*.
And I don't know whether this is because we've hit Peak Oil and don't know it yet that our economy simply *cannot* grow anymore (well, not without CEOs giving up much of their *decadent, excessive and abusive largesse*, which I will get to shortly). I don't know if this is post-Peak Oil economics we are talking about here or just in *anticipation* of that, ok, but...
I do know that from my point of view as a Problem Citizen, as a poor American with some mental health issues, it sure *looks* like I'm not allowed to solve my own problems or make any lasting, permanent head way here, at least in terms of doing it within the existing system and its protocols. If I make headway on paying *a* debt, the number of credit card offers/Snail Mail Spam roughly doubles. If I seriously look into a debt that went into collection on behalf of my local bank, and see if I can even *try* to pay it off, the number of phone solicitor messages I get increases more than *four fold*.
Never mind for the moment that I'm screwed locally in terms of my work history, and that my income currently sucks hardcore, and that my odds of getting *any* meaningful job that would help out are next to nil....point is, I'm not *allowed* to even attempt to pay off *one* of my debts without debt-related harrassment doubling, tripling, and so on....My debt, bad as it is, has become a cottage industry, if I paid off all my bills (somehow, by some miracle), I'd end up putting too many people out of relatively *high-paying work* and we can't have that, can we?
And look more closely at the *results* of Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. They aren't about getting people better. They are about redefining "better" such that A) the middleman (that Mental Health Care Consumer, mind you, people like you and I) goes back to work full-time regardless of how destructive the consequences are short term (two phrases to search: "income cliffing" in the context of "disability payments"), *and also* B) that the middleman is *stuck in the system* and silenced, conditioned to only say *what the HMOs* want him or her to say.
In short, it is a scam disguised as counseling. It is all about making sure that the system can keep on taking money from clients indefinitely, and that the clients themselves are too conditioned to repress and be silent and compliant to even *notice* that all they are doing is *making more money* for the system itself *to take* from them.
And this is just my myopic view from the belly of the beast, as it were. Point is you can look at the news and see all sorts of examples, mainly in the fields of "environmental protection" and "law enforcement" where it isn't about solving problems and getting citizens better....it is about making sure that the problem sustains as many *salaried jobs* as possible, for as long as possible. Why else do we have some of the most *dictatorial drug laws* in all of Western Civilization and at once spend so *little* money or time or human resources getting people *rehabilitated* from their addictions, leaving that to *church programs* like your 12-step programs instead? Where *does* the Environmental Protection Agency's budget *go* then, if the Superfund disaster areas remain *untouched* for decades and if "pollution credit policies" punch holes in clean-air standards big enough to fly a jetliner through?
We don't solve problems anymore. We turn them into *careers* for hundreds to thousands of people. Every Problem Citizen like myself ends up sustaining at least a *handful* of social workers, doctors, therapists, and yes, even phone solicitors from collection agencies, who would otherwise be out of work. Our problems are *their* bread and butter. They make their living off of OUR suffering.
And that assumes that people are law-abiding like I am, and don't have any drug problems and abstain like I do. Legal and substance abuse issues compound the parasitic sectors's potential for exploitation as career opportunity.....
--And let's not kid ourselves. That Potential is huge. There are hundreds if not thousands of "pocket economies" in America, in your Appalachian mountains, in your Texas "Border Country, in Southeast Missouri, and anywhere near most Indian Reservations, where the local unemployment rate stays at 30-40?or decades on end, where the tax base for social services is nil, and where alcohol and substance abuse is rampant across multiple generations.
Do a search on the recent Yahoo News article about the "Caruthersville suicides" if you don't believe me. I know some of what that's like as me and my family spent several years there in that part of the country, in Southeast Missouri, when I was in late middle school to early high school. The whole "Bootheel area" of Southeast Missouri is riddled with these pocket economies where for many folks there just *are no jobs*, period.
It isn't just New Orleans, ok? That was the worst case. We have hundreds to thousands of small towns that are literally being eaten alive by poverty, ruin, cheap booze and the meth trade. And while each town only numbers in the 3 to 5 digits in terms of population, they are legion in numbers....
And I would humbly submit that for *every* CEO greedhead that *lucks out* on his Crony Capitalist connections, his interlocking directorates...and *gets* 400-500 times the income of his least-paid employee, that for each one of those, you either end up *creating a new pocket economy, a newly ruined town*, or you end up making a pre-existing one that much bigger.
That is the kicker, that is the thing *no* so-called globalist will tell you. *Every* time some CEO pulls down a voted-in bonus with stock incentives numbering in the *hundreds to thousands of millions of dollars* in value, every time they reap the unmerited rewards of being *in that clique* and of being *born that lucky*....
a whole entire *community* is lost. Whole neighborhoods, whole towns, not just individual workers or individual families. Each new CEO creates a *whole population* of Problem Citizens trapped on welfare with little hope for the future....
And a pack of vultures on their backs, courtesy of bill collectors, social workers, doctors, HMOs, PPOs, and worse...
*That's* why. The CEOs, the ultra rich, they've been waging warfare, complete with Media propaganda, upon *everyone else*, poor or not, for the past 26 years, and they're winning...and most of us *don't even know it* because we can't be bothered to take the blinders off.
Don't believe me....check out how many d**n pathetic "Thumbs Down" this answer gets. People just *can't be bothered* to admit to one-tenth of the truth.
Sorry to go on so, and thanks for your time. :)
Answered By: Bradley P - 2/22/2007 |