When I was a little boy, Fridays were a special day for me. The last day of school for the week before the weekend. But, it was the fact that our LIFE magazine would be waiting for me when I got home from school that really excited me. There was no Hebrew school on Friday after public school because families were getting ready for the sabbath. That LIFE magazine was my window to the world, and I would get on my knees on the living room floor and turn those big pages of that oversized magazine and study the photographs page by page. There was no TV in those days, and when there was TV, I watched 15 minutes of news brought to you by Camel cigarettes and John Cameron Swayze.
Fast forward 60 years to 2009 and cable news running 24 hours a day seven days a week. And with all that information, Wall Street with the help of Congress has put us in a bigger a deeper hole than we were 60 years ago, even after coming out of the Second World War. People will have to do more than have tea bag rallies to straighten out the problems and the abuse.
Drop down the page and read the last four postings I wrote this week. They are short and to the point. They contain all you need to know and a road map of what you can do. Americans need to take as much interest in the political-economy of this country as they do in the weather. You can not change the weather, but you certainly can try to stop the corruption and the fraud that has covered this nation from coast to coast from Wall Street, and the greed of the commercial banks.
Stay tuned.
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3 comments:
As long as the Bankers own the Senate, and the Insurance Companies own the Bankers, I don't see much chance for change in Financial Oversight (Bankers) or in Healthcare (Insurance Companies). But it's a nice thing to dream about.
Change is possible, but change takes a fight. Perhaps the Internet will make more change possible. We can keep up the struggle to change people's minds about the need for greater oversight of the financial industry and universal healthcare for all the people that want it.
In many ways, these times with the Internet and all those cable channels are richer and more abundant, or at least more cluttered than the past.
Along with this, I think people's expectations have risen as well. Not just at the top, but average folks also.
Higher expectations for things like education, public safety and health care contribute to more government spending.
Modern houses are larger. SUVs on the road with fancier features. People seem to expect more return from investments. Top level management expects higher compensation.
And, of course, population is larger these days.
Sustaining all this is harder.
We can still learn a lesson from Internet technology, however.
Use our smarts to do more with less.
Remember the old computers that still had vacuum tubes? They used a lot more power and space, but did less than the computers of today.
I also remember environmentalists of the late 60s and early 70s complaining about hard to recycle glossy paper in magazines like Look and Life.
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