Friday, March 13, 2009
American Capitalism
It seems to me the issue here isn't the illusion of American wealth.. It's the absurdity that it takes a commedian to tell the nation that it's an illusion.
I honestly think that the vast majority of people in this nation have bought into the idea that you work hard.. you make something that somebody else values.. and you trade it for money to buy things you need from other people. We get that. It's the "free market". That idea is not what a lot of people value anymore.. and again, I'm going back to Doug, because he's the ideological jackass poster child that drives the root cause of all of this.
Somehow the concept of work and free trade has morphed into an epic battle of individual against individual. It's "winners" and "losers" that is valued now. It only makes sense that when you value that as the entire defining characteristic of self worth that people end up cheating. And then when you end up with a lot of people cheating.. it becomes valued as a pragmatic solution to the problem of how to become a "winner" in a the brutal economic climate that we've created for ourselves.
Then, to top it off, the entire institution of "journalism" that is supposed to be the watchdog of society becomes dominated by the same cheating fuckers that have wrecked our economic system.
You can see it in the way Jim Cramer reacts to Jon Stewart's very obvious observations. He seems like he's going to start crying at any moment, because he probably never thought of himself as the worst sort of thief. You can tell that at some point in his life, he actually had some integrity and belief in "doing the right thing". He just got caught up in "winners" and "losers", and thought he could just go with the flow and nobody would actually get hurt..
But a lot of people got hurt.. a whole hell of a lot of them.. and there will be no consequence for what has happened except to the honest people who were trying to do the right thing all along. The fuckers that did this.. and the fuckers like Jim Cramer that cheered it on.. they got rich.. and will never have to face the consequences for what they've done, not even to themselves. They might have a fleeting moment of self doubt, where they consider that fucking a lot of people in order to get rich might have not been the right way to go about it.. but then, they'll just remember.. there are winners in this world.. and the natural consequence of winning, is other people losing. That's how they'll be able to sleep at night.
Now that some people are becoming aware of how this works, you might think that maybe it'll stop. It won't.
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1 comment:
I can only imagine the ‘off camera’ discussion about Cramer's choice to go on The Daily Show. I would think his producers told him no while Cramer's dignity said yes. So I have to give a +1 to Cramer for having the balls to go on Jon’s show. After all he must be well aware of what happened to Bowtie Tucker’s Crossfire. He chose his dignity over his show. So now we wait and see what happens to Mad Money.
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