…and stuffed in pods in order to utilize their energy to keep the machines running.

This thread reminds me of that great movie "NETWORK" (where "I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore" became popular) In it, Ned Beatty gives a prophetic speech about how how corporations are the new nations of the world, where the interests of the corporation are not only the same as the government, but supersede the interests of the government. In this age of globilization, corporations cross borders more easily than diplomats. I mean no disrespect to Vets, I am a Vet. But in hind-sight, the way to have won Viet-Nam would have been to send Nike into the North and South and get everybody to start making sneakers. In 5 years it wouldn’t have mattered who won politically- their interests would have been the same as ours. Free Enterprise shows it’s easier and better to control the population thru economic success and the perception of freedom than with an Army. Among the results of free-enterprise though, money takes on an artificial value far in excess of the simple goods and services it’s supposed to represent, A super-class which exercises the real control over most resources, A broadly successful and content middle-class with every aspect of it’s life oriented to some form of paid consumption (which generates the profits that enable the super-class), and finally the losers, whose miserable lives provide the real motivation for everyone else to succeed. In this thinking, a certain percentage of the population losing out is not only a fact of life, it’s a necessity. Also in this scenario, giving welfare and unemployment to those in hardtimes, is economically viable because it’s money that gets returned immediately to the overall economic engine. Besides, uncontrolled suffering only leads to health hazards. The long term vision of globilzation is to create not just a few countries, but a world full of consumers with money. Stable, satiated, and a few pounds overweight. Sorry, – I got into a cynical mode.

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Some things you must love because they’re impossible to like

SteveD
Once again, well said.
Beyond Grapes of Wrath, there is Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. It’s a personal tale of the ’20’s and ’30’s in America .
It can come again. Be prepared by being educated.

My bolshevik background comes from London, Steinbeck, Guthrie, Rogers, Jesus and many others, filtered through fifty six years of life.

Thought I detected some Grapes of Wrath in there. 🙂

When you combine the stories of the depression from your parents and grandparents, with the great works of these men and others, you will be hesitant to believe everything the government and the politicians would have you believe.

Again, I’m not an apologist for corrupt companies, but I also won’t paint all companies as evil. As with many things, there’s a lot of gray to be found between black and white. Believe me, I certainly understand and share your skepticism. I don’t take what a politician or a corporate officer says at face value (for a recent example, see CBS’s “apology” for the “unplanned” activities during the SuperBowl’s halftime show). There are vested interests (their own) involved in either case. But I think the government – being orders of magnitude larger than any corporation, and the purported defender of our rights – deserves the lion’s share of our attention. Personally, I wish they’d stick to defending our liberties and quit worrying about how “progressively” the rich should be punished for being successful.

Those 150 plus years, 80% of the population was on the farm, living on what they grew.

Yep, our ancestors, in general, were more self-sufficient, and that’s my point. They didn’t depend on a wasteful government bureaucracy to take care of them. Progress, I guess…

The corporations took the farms and stuck the people in the cities where they are easier to control.

While there’s a kernel of truth to this statement, there’s also some chaff. There have been, and always will be, vultures. Some of them are individuals, some are corporations, some are government bodies. Corporations didn’t force farmers to go to the cities at gunpoint to become pawns in some social conspiracy. That’d be the Bolshevik Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution. Companies, particularly banks, surely benefited when crops failed and such, but they didn’t cause those root issues. Of course, today, farmers get sizable subsidies to do less, so there’s been some turnabout, I guess.

The rich build gated communities and hire armed guards. Could they be anticipating another Depression?

I suppose since the rich obviously still collude today, they must know what’s going to happen. Or maybe consumers have a lot to do with driving the economy… BTW, don’t confuse “corporation” with “rich”. Not all corporations are awash in profits, and thus want to enslave you. I’d hate to hear tired class warfare arguments applied to my local mom and pop store just because they incorporated.

Ask the people that worked at Enron and the other companies, where money was stolen from the pension plans, if private retirement is the way to go.

First, I’m not defending Enron, or its idiotic policy of holding 401k matching funds in company stock, or how it handled the plan around the time the accounting scandal broke, or the various other brain-dead aspects of its retirement plan. The employees were hosed, without a doubt. And I’m as ticked as anybody that those involved aren’t being prosecuted and doing time.

On the other hand, a 401k is not the only vehicle you can use to save for retirement. You’ve got plenty of options, IRAs and mutual funds outside of your 401k being just a couple. Those matching funds sure look nice, of course, because it’s “free” money. But it’s risky to count on a 401k and Social Security for a comfortable retirement.

There’s no foolproof way to save for retirement, and that’s particularly true for Social Security. Of course, that’s compulsory, so I don’t know if you can really call it “saving”. Like a lot of people my age, I don’t plan on it being there for me when I retire; it’s only going to bleed more as the baby-boomers collect. So “public” retirement is a complete bust. The only retirement I can count on being there when I need it is what I build myself. Part of that is a 401k, but not all of it.

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Some things you must love because they’re impossible to like

SteveD,
Those 150 plus years, 80% of the population was on the farm, living on what they grew. The corporations took the farms and stuck the people in the cities where they are easier to control.
The rich build gated communities and hire armed guards. Could they be anticipating another Depression?
Ask the people that worked at Enron and the other companies, where money was stolen from the pension plans, if private retirement is the way to go.

There are two factors as play here, IMO. First, there’s greed. Now I don’t buy into the notion that all corporations are inherently evil, but there are plenty of corporations that are obsessed with dollar signs. There’s also another factor: it costs a lot to run a business these days. My employer, as a reminder at performance review time, gives us a laundry list of the added expense that they must pay in order to employ me. Stuff that doesn’t show up in your salary. Things like matching Social Security funds (which I’ll probably never see when I retire; your welcome, children of the 60’s), matching 401k, the better part (or all) of my health, disability, and group life insurance. Those are things they have to pay either because the goverment forces them to, or to stay competitive and attract skilled employees. It doesn’t include the other things above what I’d consider “necessary operating costs”, like corporate taxes. Granted, the overhead will be less for companies that don’t offer a full set of benefits (or anything close to it).

Now I’m not shedding tears for the WalMarts of the world at all, but it seems to me that non-behemoth companies may be nudged into considering outsourcing because the overhead imposed by the government – you know, our well-paid, highly-wasteful babysitters – tips the scales. Expenses too high? Get a lower-costing workforce. Sure, you’ll never convince a company truly engulfed in moneylust that paying a foreigner $10 a month with few, if any, benefits is better than an paying an American’s $1000 salary along with insurance and maybe a retirement plan. But reducing the added cost of business imposed by the feds and states sure sounds like a way to encourage job growth from small- and medium-sized businesses here, no? And as Dave says, buying from those businesses – if we all do it – can get the big businesses focused back on what made them big in the first place.

Here’s a revolutionary idea: if you took away the expense of the wastes of payroll money and bureaucracy known as “entitlements” (funny how we survived without those for 150+ years), businesses would have more money to grow and – gasp! – hire more people. And employees would have that money to save or invest in something that will actually be there when they retire. Ah, well, that’d never sell to America today, because we’d hate to have to think for and take care of ourselves. Better to let the government throw our money away.

The humorous-if-it-weren’t-true part of this “evil corporations are moving jobs overseas” talk is when it comes from people who want to “create jobs”, but then want to tax the hell out of the people who’d offer them – thus discouraging those companies from hiring or doing business here. Funny, maybe those folks aren’t really serious about creating jobs. Maybe they just want to be re-elected. Not that I’m cynical or anything…