Hi guys, Winchinchala AKA Charlie here, thank you for coming by. I had an exchange on Facebook with a person who posted an article ,
This article really got under my skin, especially the line about the Jaguar, a used Jaguar and how "only in American can a person in these straits be seen as impoverished," though the Jag purchaser is living on $300 per week unemployment after having gone belly up on $300,00. It's true that "context" accounts for much as the article author writes. I can appreciate an intellectual exercise of looking at the big picture as much as the next person, but think it is best done in hindsight. Done in the middle of a crisis, such an exercise tends to undermine and minimize the situation and offers no steps toward solutions. I make no claim to know everything, and I do not enjoy arguing, but I am a proud survivor of the 50's & 60's who views the incredible accomplishments of those decades with a happy heart. Oh how we sang and marched and sat-in and insisted on Civil Rights for minorities and women, a higher minimum wage, health care for the elderly and bringing our troops out of freakin' Vietnam! (People were not terribly nice to the troops once they returned though :-( ) I am proud to be an American and to live in a country which invites social change because as they say, "THE ONLY THING THAT IS CONSTANT IS CHANGE." Once again the average citizen, like you and me, well certainly me, is rising up. This time it is the Occupy Movement-- and Hey OM is not a shabby anachronism at all. We, back in the day, got what we wanted, and OM will too.
(Someone does have to come up with a plan to present and I am confident s/he will.)
My first response to the article Attention Protesters, you are Probably part of the 1% was deleted. The article was reposted, and quoted "---"it turns out that place of birth explains more than 60 percent of variability in global incomes." Then the FB Friend writes, “And there are few better places to be born than America America
Study, work and volunteering have allowed me to see how more than 20 countries run, and I can not argue that there is any better place to be born that American, especially as a woman and a minority. I can argue with the logic of the article and give a comment--can't I? So...
I believe, the unfair advantage is given to the 1% the financial institutions—banks, insurance companies, etc. who receive preferential treatment by the government which does their bidding. Yes, I refer to the700 billion which ballooned into 857 Billion dollars specifically "$470billion and disbursed $387 billion," mostly to hundreds of banks and later to A.I.G., the car industry, Chrysler General Motors and the G.M. financing company.
Also the government insists on giving breaks to those who take jobs out of the United States. Remember what Obama said when he was campaigning?
Obama, Nov. 3, 2007: When I am president, I will end the tax giveaways to companies that ship our jobs overseas, and I will put the money in the pockets of working Americans, and seniors, and homeowners who deserve a break.
But : Companies with overseas subsidiaries can keep their income untaxed by the IRS if they don’t transfer that revenue back to the U.S.
Credit card companies were found so abusive that Congress had to pass a law in 2009 prohibiting their dishonorable and exploitative practices such as arbitrarily raising interest; changing the due date, so a person is late; not that it stopped them from dreaming up new ones. They had recently tried to impose a fee for using your cash! Because the billions of dollars they make from the other is not enough.
If, Heaven for fend, a person has lost her job, house and car and becomes destitute, s/he is supposed to continue to repay a student loan. Students on average are indebted to the tune of 28G when they graduate. That would not be so awful if they had better hopes of finding a job. It's a ridiculous Catch 22 because a person has to borrow larger amounts of money lately to get the 4-year education, but it may be impossible to pay it back, and yet without it, one can not get a decent paying job.
What has happened, as I see it is, the 1%'s company policies have created a system of infinite indentured servitude for survival in this society. The 1% dictates who is eligible for medical insurance, what procedures and medicines they will cover which has allowed women and children to die. Of course one has to ask why a procedure costs a million dollars or a band-aid $50.00.
The “American Dream” is, in effect, being denied. In the 30’s historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author James Adams defined that right which came about after the Depression as such-"life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.”
Children, families, invalids, veterans, individuals most of whom worked very hard to pay for an education, pay for the copious gas needed to drive the average 40 miles a day to work and milk for their families, to pay for a home-- can lose them in the blink of an eye. 40% of all homeless are families, and in some cases, they are families who are working!
If one seriously considers the author’s faulty logic, then only 40% of the people would be out “Occupying” not 99% and –though I spent my youth in the Netherlands, I am flattered that you think America has an “unfair advantage,” as if any such thing exists in life—The Legatum Institute, an independent policy, advisory and advocacy organisation which researches and promotes the principles that drive the creation of global prosperity and the expansion of human liberty, theUnited States ranks as a lowly 9th on a list of 20 of countries with an “unfairadvantage” as you call it. Of course, every human who is generous in spirit would like to see every person with equal opportunities, but true egalitarianism, meaning a society, which pools their efforts and shared the rewards of those efforts fairly equally disappeared with hunter-gatherer communities—well unless we take into consideration Communism which, to the best of my knowledge did not work out that well. This is our country. If it has veered off course, we have citizens who know how to stand up. We have a Constitution that says we can speak out. And we will fix it.
Those are my thoughts--
I welcome comments which inform, enlighten or add to mine.
PEACE AND LOVE,
Winchinchala AKA Charlie
