In 2010, 2016 and last year, I presented the top 10 cures for what ails us. How are we doing? Not too damned good at all.
Maybe I’m demonstrably crazy for beating the same drum while banging my same head against the same wall. So sue me.
Learned professionals far wiser than me always advise that before healing can begin, the victim needs to recognize the problem, name the demon.
OK: Corporations.
I submit that the root of all our ills lies with the way we’ve allowed those greedy, soul-less zombie “people” to live forever. And evolve to a point where they are now making artificial cyber persons to do their bidding. Can the Terminator be far behind, Alexa and Siri?
It all started with a corrupt US Supreme Court justice and an equally corrupt court administrator during a previous Gilded Age.
Cronies of Southern Pacific Railroad perverted the 1868 14th Amendment passed to guarantee former slaves equal protection of the law. Instead, it was mostly used to give corporations the rights of actual living citizens. Most despicably, it even became the basis for the infamous 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which sanctified the racial apartheid that still plagues this country today.
Between 1868 and 1912, the Supremes ruled on 312 cases involving the rights of corporations and a whole 28 regarding African-Americans.
I wonder who dresses as a blackrobed Humpty Dumpty at the court’s annual Hallowe’en Party. Gotta be Clarence, the leader of the ludicrously literal-licking homotextuals.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”- Humpty Dumpty
The law book Olympus has been in the news a lot the past week and I won’t sully this space with much more about that den of iniquity.
I will simply warn of looming anarchy by quoting Czar Donaldov’s favorite president, the first of the two despicable (alas) Andrews: “The chief justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”
Juxtapose that with the tens of thousands who tried treason last January 6 and you have a pretty good template for the nation’s future.
More chillingly, Harvard’s Kennedy School just published a poll of 18-29 year-olds. More than half (52 percent) believe our democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” Worse, 35 percent peg the likelihood of a second civil war in their lifetimes at 50 percent or more.
Zounds.
All of the above mayhem is quite predictable. Keep the lower classes fighting for crumbs that fall off the banquet tables of the mega-rich and their minions. And laugh all the way to the bank.
“Democracy without regulation becomes tyranny without mitigation.” – Prof. Jose C. Canales, Fresno State c. 1966 (quoting some scholar whose name I forgot)
How often have you heard of someone praising the wondrousness of globalization? John Naisbitt’s 1982 best-seller “Megatrends” (ghost-written by his then-wife, Patricia Aburdene), praised companies moving production overseas while America provides “management.”
They ignored the devastation left by outsourcing well-paid jobs to third- and fourth-world countries paying pennies per hour (or downright slavery like China, which we built into a superpower). By 1984, the vaunted American middle class had already shrunk by nine percent. Only an obscure Nevada congressional candidate made the mistake of pointing out that the Emperor Ronald the Vague was naked.
Inequality provides fertile ground for revolutions. And dictators.
Think we got troubles now? The 2005 bestseller “Freakonomics” pointed out that the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 correlated with a drop in crime starting 15 years later. While well-intentioned, Bill Clinton’s 100,000 new street cops were thus a bit of overkill. (Most crime is committed by young men aged 15 to 25. If many unwanted children are not born…you get the idea, disquieting as it may be.)
Mother Nature knows when to curtail the birth rate if we let her. The number of children per family barely budged when the fabled Baby Boom exploded in 1946. Women in their thirties who had postponed pregnancy during the Great Depression starting having babies along with the usual teens and twenty-somethings.
We just need to support families better than we do, which is not much compared to other rich countries. Instead, corporations and their shills exploit everyone and everything to keep the stock price up and the equity options attractive.
And keep the lower classes fighting each other. (Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, lives on his own yacht.)
The Top 10 Cures for What Ails Us have remained festering since I wrote the first list more than a decade ago. You may access them online. I’m tired of re-printing the same old sins.
SPEAKING OF SINFUL BEHAVIOR. “The Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County is anticipating potential transit service changes beginning in January due to unprecedented staffing shortages of drivers regionally and nationwide, a consequence of the pandemic.” So announced the overlords of the bus system and their France-based hatchet men last October, totally ignoring the second of three strikes.
Strike 3 ended last week. As of deadline, RTCWashoe. com has 22 (ahem) “temporary service delay” alerts thereon, a reality all but ignored by the legit media. The foreign operating corporation has proven so inept that passenger loads nosedived their first month on the job in 2019, eight months prior to the plague. Driver numbers are now down by half.
Would you want to work for a toxic outfit that would increase your chances of contracting the plague and bringing it home to your loved ones?
“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” – Yogi Berra.
The effects of the 2021 Hat Trick Strikes will be felt by the least among us for a long time to come.
Take care of each other and be careful out there.
¡Sí se puede!
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 52-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal. org and MississippiWestNV.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988.
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