I was driving to school this morning and listening to NPR and heard a report on Greece. It has arranged a credit swap which could cut its debt in half, but is having trouble resolving its financial problems because international financiers are refusing an additional bailout unless it cuts its minimum wage.
This is a pattern that is all too familiar, that we are also seeing in our own nation.
If there are government financial problems, those who have not suffered financially will not step up and pay more into government coffers by taxes and fees.
No, instead they want the income of those on the bottom to be cut.
They want government benefits to be cut - social security, medical care, nutrition
They demand privatization of government-run programs and facilities - overseas it is already happening with water supplies, in our nation it is schools and prisons. The Navy no longer builds its own ships.
International corporations play off one nation against another, just as companies have played off one American state against another - demanding tax breaks and infrastructure to be built as a condition of locating or keeping a manufacturing or office facility.
Meanwhile wealth continues to shift into fewer and fewer hands.
More and more people already at the lower end find it almost impossible to go on
increasing numbers of people find themselves downwardly mobile with no ability to reverse course
There is something immoral about what is happening to ordinary people around the world
increasingly all that matters is economic power, which dominates political power, meaning both kinds of power are controlled by fewer and fewer sets of hands.
It may not be too late to change that pattern in the US, but we are running out of time
And if a a Democratic and supposedly at least somewhat liberal administration refuses to end the nonsense of the endless "war on terror" and continues and worsens policies of previous administrations on restriction of rights of individuals at the same time as it allows ever greater power and wealth to those who benefit from the continued 'war' and related issues, then there will be words applicable that should be familiar to students of literature - we have always been at war with East Asia
This is a war.
It is international.
The vast majority of people are losing.
Sadly, too many people do not understand how dire the situation is.
And with these rambling and pointless musings, I now turn to my task of the day, teaching young people about a government that is disappearing even as I wrige.
Peace?