Speaking Truth to Power

One of the cancers eating away at what’s left of America’s soul is the growing power of the corporation. And one of the ways that this cancer projects itself is through corporate manipulation of employees. The first order of business, right up there with profit-making, is to rob the workers of their individuality. In restaurants, stores, hotels and other service industries owned by conglomerates, the employees must wear some (often hideous) uniform, usually with attached buttons, and mouth certain pre-scripted words to the customers.



GWB routinely ignored the sage advice of three men he should have listened to: Colin Powell, Richard Clarke and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill. He opted instead to listen to the ideology-driven neo-cons when it came to war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and soaking the economy with overdone tax cuts. Well, all three are gone now, so that bunch has the run of the ranch.

The early results are that the country has been saddled with an impossibly expensive prescription drug bill (a massive giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies), a new bankruptcy law (a massive giveaway to the mostly unethical credit card companies), and a specious proposal for "saving" Social Security with private accounts (a massive giveaway to Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street) which would entail the government borrowing a few trillion more dollars.



It’s not only not your father’s Republican Party anymore, it’s flat-out not really the Republican Party at all. For generations, the GOP’s core values were pro-business, pro-privacy, anti-foreign entanglements, importance of state’s rights, separation of church and state, smaller federal government, separation of powers and balancing the damn budget. Except for the first one on that list, the Bushies have shredded and trampled the rest of their supposed credo of guiding principles.

What it should be called now is the Money/Power Party. It really just exists as an engine to make the rich richer, something it accomplishes by suckering the religious people of the country to vote for it, even while it’s economically screwing over many of those people at the same time.