It All Comes
Back To Greed
Hard-working Americans have some serious problems to deal with. We’re all being bled into bankruptcy.
There are four key issues that are killing us as a nation.
First, student debt. One of the
phony cures of the Great Recession of a decade ago was getting an education. The same people who told us that we needed to
get houses and refinance our homes before the crash were then telling us that
we need education to get better jobs. So
we’re signing up for those colleges, many of them for-profit, on the belief
that any gains we’d make would pay those student loans off. Except they don’t. The jobs that can pay that just aren’t there,
and if you can pay down those loans, then you don’t have the money for other
things, like getting a house or starting a family. The big gimmick now is to have
some wealthy patron pay off those student loans, or to have a college that
can provide an education tuition-free,
but that’s still just a dream for many people.
The second issue is healthcare and medical debt. Even if you have health insurance, people are
finding out the hard way that insurance doesn’t cover everything like it used
to a generation or two ago. There are
all these different doctors groups and specialists that may or may not be
covered. Big Pharma keeps jacking up drug
prices so even more “preferred” drugs are no longer covered by your insurance carrier,
and that continually shifts as more drugs get more and more expensive. You may not have wanted that helicopter
flight to rush you to the hospital, but you got it anyway and now you have to
pay that bill. Presidential wannabes
like Senator Bernie Sanders is
now making medical debt just as urgent of a crisis to fix as student debt,
and that is part of the overall and ongoing problem with healthcare that just
can’t seem to be fixed, even if conservatives had left the Affordable Care Act alone.
The third issue that has just poked its head out from obscurity is credit
card debt. Just like the years preceding
the Great Recession, credit
card debt is rocketing back up again.
Now I can tell you what “the script” says about it. “Oh those lazy millennials!
They’re buying big screen TVs and avocado toast and seven-dollar coffees
and going on vacations with money they don’t have!” Except they’re not. The credit card debt is there because people are
having to use it to buy necessities.
They’re not buying avocado toast with it. They’re just trying to buy bread and milk and
other household things. Because the
money isn’t there after paying for healthcare and college and daycare and a car
and just putting a roof on their heads, be it for rent or mortgage. The money isn’t there, so they are having to
do what Congress has been doing all this time, which is to put it on credit and
pray for a lottery jackpot.
And then there is that fourth issue... work. The United Auto Workers just instigated
a walkout and strike on General Motors.
This in turn has forced GM to
lay off thousands of workers in Canada.
At issue, according to the UAW, is pay.
Ten years ago, the workers agreed to a pay cut to keep GM going. According to them, GM
never made them whole afterward. Add
to this the number of businesses that have either already announced layoffs or
will soon do so, and that’s not even taking into account the trade war with
China. Work will
soon be a big issue for people, just like it was during the Great Recession
and all the other economic downturns in the past.
Four issues... and they all can be traced to the same source problem.
That source problem can be summed up with one word: greed.
All four of these groups operate in the realm of Corporate America. Even state and local colleges have to compete
with for-profit schools that have the money to pilfer teachers on the promise
of better pay, forcing them to raise tuition as well. Big Pharma and Big Heathcare are all about Corporate
America just like Big Banks and Big Auto, and pretty much every other business
in America.
They all have as their goal one thing: profit. Profit at all costs. Profit at the expense of
everything else. Profit at the expense of people. Profit at the expense of the economy. Profit at the expense of America.
Profit is the measuring stick for capitalism. It wasn’t always this way, but it certainly is
now, especially when you have investment groups buying up businesses for the
sole purpose of turning them into profit-generating machines. So if you don’t make your profit numbers, that
business is considered a failure and is sold off or dismantled. If you don’t believe me, then look at the
ongoing power struggle with
AT&T and their newly-acquired DirecTV satellite service.
And it is an inherent and systematic greedy metric, because it continually
demands more and more every year, every quarter, every month, without
exception. There is no allowance for a
recession. There is no excuse for a “bad
season”. It’s make the number or you’re
a failure.
So let’s see how this all fits in, starting with the workplace.
Big corporate companies like GM keep making their profit numbers by keeping
their expenses - including wages - as low as possible. It’s not about “whatever the market will bear”,
because the companies are the ones that are dictating the market. If it means talking the workers into a pay
cut, so be it. If it means getting the
cheapest insurance packages possible with the highest deductible for their
workers, so be it. If it means bringing
in temporary workers and keeping them as long as they can without hiring them
on, then so be it. If they can talk
government into giving them a tax break with the false promise of “investment”,
then so be it. Anything and everything
they can to minimize expenses is fair game to them, because it is all about
making those profit numbers. Period.
And you can forget any notion of “paying back” the workers for their
sacrifices. That is an expense, and no
profit-minded executive would ever consider that. They consider worker sacrifices to be a gift,
not a debt.
So workers are getting paid overall less than their worth, and their
health insurance coverage is putting more and more of the burden onto them. That means less money available to buy the essentials. And, again, we’re not talking avocado toast
and big screen TVs (which are getting
cheaper and cheaper, by the way) and luxurious vacations. We are talking bread, milk, eggs, meat, chicken,
fish. We are talking about toilet paper
and diapers, both infants and elderly.
We’re talking cable and phone bills.
We’re talking daycare and car care. Growing kids need clothes and shoes. Grown-ups need to get new clothes as well at
some point because they can’t keep wearing the same stuff over and over again. All of these are not free. All of these things cost money.
So, yes, at some point, people have to put it on plastic. And then hope
at some point they will be able to pay it down or pay it off. And they hope they won’t ever get sick, because
getting sick means doctors and drugs and those are getting too expensive for
them.
Now let’s add to the job market all those college graduates looking for
that dream job that will help them pay off those student loans they needed to
get, and all of those older workers who thought getting that college degree
would give them better jobs. They both
soon find out that Big Business values profits over people, and thus the “dream
job” is just that, a dream.
All of those problems, connected by a single and ongoing systemic problem
of greed in the name of profits at all cost.
But you’ll notice that nobody except yours truly is talking about
this. None of the presidential wannabes
want to truly address the problem. Nobody
in the media want to talk about the true root cause of these economic miseries. They all want to focus on the peripheral subjects
and come up with jiffy-pop solutions that really won’t work. And the conservatives are screaming “Socialism”
at all of these solutions to the peripheral problems because they too do not
want us to address the root problem.
Let’s get brutally honest here... our “precious” almighty goddammed
capitalist system is flawed, and it is slowly killing America by a thousand
peripheral paper cuts.
And I know Senator Sanders and the rest of the White House wannabes mean
well when they say they have a plan to address these peripheral paper
cuts. Sure, let’s wipe out medical debt
and student debt by taxing the wealthy.
It might even work... for a little while. Then the next batch of conservatives and
fascists come into power and they start dismantling everything again. But, ultimately, they will fail, because they
do not address the root problem. They
are just band-aids trying to patch a cancer.
For-profit schools, Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, Big Insurance, Big Auto,
Big Business, they all use the same metric.
They all put ever-increasing profit ahead of everything else. As long as that is considered all that
matters for business, then everything else with the business will suffer. If you want that to change, then the people
up top need to change their view about the business and put the health of the
business, including its workers, ahead of its wealth. Only then will everyone prosper.
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