We live in a hierarchical society which is getting tougher and tougher where CEOs who are not brutal enough get thrown out. Arianna Huffington in her new book Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, "a world in which there are only two classes: the rich ... and everyone else such as in Mexico and Brazil, where the wealthy live behind fortified gates, with machine-gun-toting guards protecting their children from kidnapping."
She further says that “America’s middle class, the driver of so much of our creative and economic success--the foundation of our democracy -- is rapidly disappearing, taking with it a key component of the American Dream: the promise that, with hard work and discipline, our children will have the chance to do better than we did, just as we had the chance to do better than the generation before us.”
Huffington uses the term Shorting of the Middle Class which is covered in websites such www.Recessnwire.com, www.layoff-SupportNetwork.com and www.HowIGotLaidOff.com with many examples of the brutality and indifference by CEOs in firing employees. One example shows that highly productive and often promoted employees are expendable too. “Dean Blackburn of Alameda, California was a classic success story. Raised in Minnesota by a single mom who worked as a teacher, he was “middle class by default.” Through a combination of smarts and hard work, he made his way to Yale, the, for 17 years,” and progressed to IT director.”
“In February 2009, at age 35, he was laid off on the last day of the month so the company did not have to pay another month of healthcare benefits … that hurt more than the layoff itself -- just knowing that the president of the company was exactly that calculating and that unfeeling about my own and my family’s well-being” … “Ultimately it’s not about a dip in corporate profits, but a change in corporate attitude -- a change that means no one’s job is safe, and never will be, every again.”
What will it take to wakeup the American voters who through laziness or being overworked do not seem to realize that both parties are beholding to corporations with the Republican Party more cruelly beholding to the large corporations?
Huffington relates what happened in the past when “before becoming prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli wanted to issue a wake-up call about the horrible state of the British working class. So, in 1845, he wrote a novel, Sybil, which warned of the danger of England disintegrating into “two nations between whom there is no sympathy … as they were inhabitants of different planets.” The book became a sensation, and the outrage it provoked propelled fundamental social reforms.”
Those of you who watch www.C-Span.org during the day will see that both the Senate and House members make speeches before an largely empty House and Senate.
This afternoon Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, spent her time telling stories about what has happened to real individuals because of the passing of the Healthcare Bill and real people who died because they did not have the privilege of having Healthcare. One involved a brother who died because he worked for a small company with health insurance while his sister with the same inherited disease is living a healthy life because she has health insurance.
The numbers of 129 million Americans losing their health insurance because of preexisting conditions such as childhood cancers and other disease. The health insurance labeled pregnancy as a preexisting condition where the women could not get insurance or if there was violence in a household, the woman could not get insurance!
In 1995 I read Korten's book When Corporations Rule the World which really opened my eyes regarding the reality missing form the press and media what globalization was doing to both the Third World and to Americans. We have now reaped the ills from exporting jobs and importing cheap labor has done to the infrastructure and lives of Americans.
Wikipedia: "David C. Korten (born 1937) is an American economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, political activist and prominent critic of corporate globalization, "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems".[1] His best-known publication isWhen Corporations Rule the World (1995 and 2001). …
He formed the view that the poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world, including the United States and other "developed" countries. He also concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten
I voted for Ralph Nader in 1996 even though I was still a registered Republican and voted for McCain in the Republican 2,000 primary and then campaigned for Al Gore and worked hard to get rid of one of the managers of Clinton’s Impeachment in the House. We won both races and Al Gore was the winner nationally by any permutation of the recount which was misreported on the front page of the New York Times. Executives and Editors determined all the titles of articles and placement on the front page. The jump pages revealed the real truth.
Can the right parenting help children get the skills to be active rather than passive to what is happening to them?
Children are in some ways related to all animals. Survival as adults depends on more than just nurturing. They must develop discipline and be trained to survive in our brutal world. Immigrants do well with proper parents because they are in the survival mode. I remember an editorial in the New York Times who worried about the effect of what interracial marriage will do to the culture of the highly successful Japanese-Americans.
We who live comfortable lives now is due to being raised in the golden age from 1945 to 1975 which had incredible prosperity for the development of a large middleclass. Then we got inflation and Ronald G.E. Reagan’s corporate takeover of America.
Jim Kawakami, Jan 19, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
No More Nice Moms, Judith Warner, NY Times, Jan 11, 2011, There was bound to be some push back. All the years of nurturance overload simply got to be too much. The breast-feeding through toddlerhood, nonstop baby wearing, co-sleeping, “Baby Mozart” co-watching; the peer pressure for never-ending singsong-voiced Mommy niceness, the ever-maddening chant of “good job!”; compulsory school “involvement” (that is, teacher-delegated busywork packaged as a way to Show Your Child You Care), the rapt attendance at each and every school performance, presentation, sporting event — the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting.
The reaction came in waves. There were expert warnings, with moralists claiming that all this loosey-goosey lovey-dovey-ness was destroying the hierarchical fiber of the American family, and psychologists writing that all that self-esteem building was leading to epidemic levels of pathological ninnyishness in kids. Then there was a sort of quasi-hedonist revolt, cries of rebellion like Christie Mellor’s “Three Martini Playdate,” mother-toddler happy hours (postpregnancy liberation from “What to Expect” sanctimony!) and take-the-kid-out-all-night hipster parenting.
Then came “free range” parenting, an appellation with the added advantage of sounding both fresh and fancy, like a Whole Foods chicken; “simplicity parenting” (recession-era lack of cash dressed up as principled rejection of expensive lessons); and, eventually, a kind of edgy irritation with it all: a new stance of get-tough no-nonsense, frequently called — with no small amount of pride — being a “bad” mother.
“Bad,” of course, is relative. “I’m such a bad mother” these days tends to be a boast, as in, “Can you believe that I just said, ‘Not now,’ to my 4-year-old?” The un-self-questioning 1960s-era mother — she of the cream-of-mushroom soup in a can — evokes wistful memories. “Surrendering to motherhood” is over; as a cautionary tale, this spring HBO is running a new miniseries of “Mildred Pierce,” a Todd Haynes remake of the 1945 Joan Crawford film, in which Kate Winslet will play a mother whose life is devoured by her attempts to meet the demands of her grasping, never-satisfied daughter. (“She gave her daughter everything,” the tagline for the trailer reads. “But everything was not enough.”)
The new toughness is only partly about saving Mom’s sanity. A bigger goal is producing tougher, more resilient and (of course) higher-performing kids. “You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you,” writes Amy Chua in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a just-published parenting memoir that clearly aspires to become a battle plan for a new age of re-empowered, captain-of-the-ship motherhood. … http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16fob-wwln-t.html
Brother without health insurance (correction)
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