Here.

Editor,

Your editorial "Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet" assumes that corporations' interests and the general populations' are the same, but this is not the case.

Why would millions of jobs and thousands of factories have been off-shored if it were? Why would workers' wages be flat to negative over the last 30 years? Why would the few unions still left standing on the American landscape be under withering attack? Why would banks not homeowners be helped to remain solvent? Why does right-wing media demonize mainstream economists, scientists, and sociologists day in and day out?

The more I read about debt peonage through the ages the more I understand that money and power have been and are the only interests of the ruling elite anywhere at any time. Military conquest, opulence, and domination through slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude all add up to one theme that is repeated again and again.

The American middle class was a short-lived anomaly, a consequence of the revolt by organized labor before and after WWII at a time when big money was truly fearful of an articulate, organized, and popular left, a left that does not exist anywhere anymore.

What scares me more than the creeping impoverishment and ultimate enslavement of today's American middle class is fascism: an aggrieved right-wing movement who see themselves as victimized by the left, rely on magical thinking for solutions to economic, political, and environmental problems, and -- the last and most frightening piece -- become utterly lawless in their pursuit of power: murdering political opponents, disappearing intellectuals and journalists, and enforcing the parameters of their rule with a brutal police apparatus.

It has happened before. You're dreaming if you don't think it can happen again. Here.

Re: "Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet" (8/21/2011)