CORPORATE INTERESTS: NAIL THEM DOWN BEFORE THEY SCREW YOU.

Education. Health care. Shelter. Food.

People need all four of the abovementioned, in adequate and available levels, in order to function and thrive in today’s society. The availability of all four can define the overall quality of life for an entire nation. More and more every day, all of these are being increasingly controlled, limited and priced to the inconvenience of anyone below the upper middle class.

Just like that old saying about how nature abhors a vacuum, in similar fashion capitalism hates to see anything free. Name practically any old thing, and if it is part of the world and existing in it, the chances are close to even odds that some enterprising pig has at least tried to put a price tag on it. When it’s not an outright sale of goods, it’s some sort of service or other designed to either provide something that could be free or (allegedly) improves upon the quality of what would be otherwise unnecessary to pay for.

In this atmosphere of corporate access to the campaign coffers of politicians, what is needed now more than ever is a grassroots groundswell of demand for regulation designed to protect the majority of this nation who do all of the actual work which results in the profit of the privileged few. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth from the corridors of the affected interests, of course. What simply has to happen, when this inevitable tantrum occurs, is for our elected officials to work up their collective spine and reply something upon the lines of “Shut up.” These objectors need to be treated with the same amount of attention given to those who want looser rules on pollution controls, food safety inspections and product safety: in other words, by paying no heed whatsoever to their concerns.

Cost is always a big talking point, or to put it more adequately, a wrench in the gears for the robber barons and their well paid mouthpieces lobbying the pro-corporate anti-regulatory agenda in the nation’s and states’ governments. As anybody who handles their personal finances wisely has learned, however, when one thing is needed, expenses can usually be shifted from one area to another. That said, seeing as Uncle Sam’s discretionary spending on defense is akin to your blue collar dad taking a drunken romp to the casino and whorehouse every weekend, anyone with half a brain functioning can see that the money can be made available in some part of the annual budget somehow and somewhere.

Unfortunately, the decades old complaint, “We can put a man to the moon, but…” still applies to our society today. I would be so bold as to say to those who have any sort of influence or affect on our way of life in this nation the following:

We can put a man on the moon, AND we can make sure that adequate and affordable education, health care, shelter and food is available to all Americans.

I can say that, we can do that, that’s my belief, and I’m sticking to it. Your turn.