Thinking: At A Premium In America
By Sean Fenley
03 March, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Where’s Martin Heidegger when you need him? Well, of course, he’s six feet under, and I certainly don’t want to wish undo harm upon anyone; but it seems with each passing day, that it would really be a boon to the American public if many of our ‘leaders’ in Washington would follow him down there also. But in a time in this country when we really need deep thinking, and we don’t need the same old talking points and cookie cutter ’solutions’; we seem to be getting more of the same old stuff.
Of course, many of the Tea Baggers would like to radically decrease government, and ‘free’ up everyone to be exploited by private, ‘free’ enterprise! But it seems that we’ve tried that square dance before, now haven’t we? All we need to do, say the Baggers, is to go back to disemboweling our regulatory agencies, throw hard earned pensions and labor laws off the books, and let private enterprise and the ‘free’ market reign supreme (of course no one seems to recall the 700 billion dollars that was ponied up to bail out some of the wealthiest private institutions in society, without Uncle Sam we’d be talking about them as part of the dustbin of history!)! You know the same old tried and tested (and failed!) formula, let tyrannical big government get out of the way so that the rapacious private sector can bring back casino capitalism (though I’m not enough of an armchair economist to know if it’s already back, Obama certainly has not implemented the appropriate regulations)!
But when the official left and the ‘liberals’ have no coherent and effective program at all/whatsoever is it really a surprise when folks flock to the Tea Bag movement for the ‘answers’!?? Heck, if you’ve got a nifty marketing logo, in this country, you can sell salt to a slug! So if the Tea Baggers can do it, then why shouldn’t we be able to do it also? Why don’t we sell stronger protections to workers and living wages, a guaranteed pension after a certain number of years of work, abandoning free trade policies, guaranteed vacation time (which there currently is no law on in this country, whereas in a country like Sweden six weeks is typical), health care as a right to all Americans, implementing a system of universal daycare (or at least a stipend to parents with young children at home), a decrease in the military budget, and free higher education. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, and this program can be tweaked and amended, hopefully through a democratic process.
Instead of more of the same wrapped up as Ronald Reagan in a libertarian Halloween costume (complete with tea bags!), we need solutions that will raise all boats in this country, and bring more fairness, and justice to America. We don’t want more middle class killing policies, that will accentuate the transition of wealth to the top in this country, let business pollute and abuse workers willy-nilly, and continue the policies that have made one the most egalitarian industrialized countries in 1970, have the greatest disparity of wealth in 2010.
Sean Fenley is an independent progressive who would like to see the end of the dictatorial duopoly of the so-called two party adversarial system. He would also like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current and future U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by such websites as Pravda.ru, Online Journal, and Dandelion Salad.
