The twenty-year setback

Our average CEO is paid over 400 times the average employee salary (as compared with European companies that pay about 15 times the average employee’s salary). Our educational system has been tuned to a point where it turns out perfectly trained, niche-oriented graduates that know their profession — and waste no time on economic, political or international subjects. Our population lives on borrowed money so they can afford anything from cars to home entertainment systems. Even our government is in the act, having successfully taken us to war for capitalistic gain — snubbing the United Nations because we are too rich for anyone to challenge us. Yes indeed, this is where unchecked capitalism can take you…

As I was watching late night news (not entertainment news like Fox, serious news — Hardball and Keith Olbermann) I noticed something disturbing. All of the advertisements were clearly focused on a much older crowd. Hair replacement, mini-wheelchairs, and retirement planning ads greeted me at every break. This started me thinking — have we reached a point where the only people that care about our current political mess are… well, on the way out so to speak? What has happened to our nation? What happened to the political interest of the 50′s and 60′s, where the young and old alike took an interest in what was happening?

Are we so complacent in our fancy automobiles and home theater couches that we can’t be bothered to turn off Desperate Housewives and do something?

It occurs to me that we shouldn’t be surprised, though. This is exactly what we (and by “we” I mean “most of us, unfortunately”) asked for. There was a time when we actually turned out well-rounded graduates from schools that weren’t so budget-constrained that they could actually afford music and art programs, books and politics courses. That was a long time ago. Today’s high school students graduate barely literate and with an incomplete education. “No child left behind” has, unfortunately, become a strategy to lower the bar until anyone can graduate. Foreign pre-college education is becoming equivalent to our college education. And for those going on to college in the United States it’s common to choose your major and finish a degree in as little as three years. It’s the product of our corporate, capitalist focus — we aren’t educating people anymore. We’re producing another cog that fits into our great capitalist machine.

Today our social apathy scores are higher than they have ever been. But is it really apathy? Or are we asking the wrong questions?

It might be that we do actually care — but we care about the wrong things. Is it any surprise that a population lacking in international and political education isn’t voting on those topics? Instead they vote for what they do care about — cars and theater systems, and they vote with their credit cards. It’s the perfect solution for our corporate leaders, and make no mistake — it a play that Bush is exploiting quite effectively. Our administration is not about leadership, it’s about capital gain.

Maybe we’ll wake up and smell the coffee before the damage is too bad to undo. I feel like our current administration has undone perhaps twenty years of progress, at least in regard to our standing in the eyes of the world. Now that we have alienated most of the United Nations, lets hope we don’t have a real global crisis to deal with anytime in the near future.

There may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Recently movements like impeachbush.org and impeachbush.tv are cropping up all over the place and web coverage is increasing. The former advertises over 615,000 votes by visitors seeking to impeach. Mainstream media has finally been taking the matter seriously as well, with articles showing up in Barron’s and leading news coverage on television. For example, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann recently itemized 13 possible impeachable charges while interviewing John Dean, author of Worse Than Watergate. The list included Bush’s character, misleading congress regarding Iraq and the recent enhancement of Presidential powers (in regard to the secret wiretapping he has been illegally authorizing).

None of this surprises me given that we have a President that says the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper” (as Doug Thompson reported in The Rant). I hope it’s a sign of a tipping point, and that the end of the tunnel isn’t as far off as the 2008 elections.