The Trouble With Capitalism, Part 1

Well, kick the blocks aside, here it goes...

I try to use politics in the USA as theater, solely for entertainment purposes, and with the emphasis on those most interesting characters that exist in the government.  They aren't hard to spot, normally: the Huffington Post likes to put their names in headlines, with pictures carefully chosen to show caricatured emotion and headlines as thoughtful as "Bad News for..." or "Good News for..."  I've read in histories of the United States and have seen in news stories with a nostalgic twist that the problems we face now are only the new ones, that people in the past have seen problems, viewed in historical context, that mirror and sometimes dwarf those in modern times.

But my ability to be less emotional about it is flagging.  In the last year and some change, I've seen, read, heard, and faced, personally, some insidious problems in politics that simply go beyond theater and run into life-changing.  For example, I am a teacher.  I like being a teacher.  But there are some changes taking place within those bodies of people who shovel money that affect what happens in my school and my classroom every day.  I worry about the direction these people seem to be taking and why each day seems more difficult than the last.

Specifically, what worries me is twofold: one, many people have allowed pols to hijack their votes on social issues, God and such, when applying their votes this way is actually doing them economic harm. Because of this, a new, weird kind of politician, one that would have caused sane people to eat lunch somewhere else if they sat down and started talking just one year ago, are becoming the ones wielding the power in this country.  They are neoconservative, they are plutocratic, and they are ideological to the detriment of everything else.  But most of all, they are persistent.  Two, with the gap in income equality widening at an alarming rate and the middle class, myself one of its last vestiges, disappearing into a sea of joblessness and foreclosure, people are increasingly blaming government and demanding government disappear as punishment.  Those weird politicians have convinced normal, healthy-minded people that government, even applied correctly, is the problem, and that, and this is the most important point I can make here starting out, big business and the wealthy people who own/run it are the answer.

What's alarming here is that anyone who could stay awake in history class knows that mistrust of business and alarm at its callous and evil deeds is cyclical.  Upton Sinclair wears the mascot costume here.  But this time seems different from the Robber Baron days, in that we are aware of unchecked business' caustic principles because they're the reason my school has no money, roughly 9% of Americans are unemployed, and many of us owe far more on our homes than we could ever recover in a sale, those of us who still have homes, that is.  And yet, political rhetoric in favor of deregulation, fewer and less taxes on the wealthy, and taxes on the large corporations that persist in profit while many of us stagnate and disintegrate continues to convince large swaths of Americans (and politicians who used to hold the line against such rhetoric) that our alarm is unfounded in this cycle.  It's the Roaring 20s all over again.

That's sort of my position.  I am a centrist.  But I would like to make the point in my next post, my indictment of capitalism the way it is going right now, that centrism is not the average of conservative and liberal.  In addition, as I clarify (in my own head) what I'm doing here, I will write more on what I believe I am uniquely qualified to write about, the interface between politics and science.  Until then, ciao!