"Capitalism is the Predatory Stage of Human Evolution"
Thoughts on Thursday
I’m sitting at the computer, back to the TV, working on some knitting stuff for tomorrow’s blog and I hear Kathleen Sebelius, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, talking on a morning pseudo-news show. She talking about passing health care reform but she says something like: Small businesses which are the backbone of this country.
Nothing to do with health care really but my little ears perk up.
When did people start believing that small businesses are the backbone of this country? OK, I don’t want to defame the name of a God a lot of people believe in here, but Jesus H. Christ! WTF?
The backbone of this country is the convergence (you could say the perfect storm) of immigrant workers and robber barons which occurred in the second half of the 1800s. Before that, the country was small business and agrarian. After that, tens of thousands of people settled in this country and found work with big businesses - railroads, steel mills, meat packing munitions, etc. They found work in terrible safety conditions and spent most of their lives paying off the “man” for living in his housing or buying at his store. (Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.)
But these jobs were the beginning of prosperity for millions in this country. After a long, hard, and bloody struggle, unions emerged and workers saw higher wages, better working conditions and the economy saw the beginning of a middle class.
That was the backbone of this country. I would like to be Pollyanna and think we grew under a Utopian, idyllic, birds chirping in the background, economy where the worker controlled the price of his labor.
We didn’t.
Nothing to do with health care really but my little ears perk up.
When did people start believing that small businesses are the backbone of this country? OK, I don’t want to defame the name of a God a lot of people believe in here, but Jesus H. Christ! WTF?
The backbone of this country is the convergence (you could say the perfect storm) of immigrant workers and robber barons which occurred in the second half of the 1800s. Before that, the country was small business and agrarian. After that, tens of thousands of people settled in this country and found work with big businesses - railroads, steel mills, meat packing munitions, etc. They found work in terrible safety conditions and spent most of their lives paying off the “man” for living in his housing or buying at his store. (Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.)
But these jobs were the beginning of prosperity for millions in this country. After a long, hard, and bloody struggle, unions emerged and workers saw higher wages, better working conditions and the economy saw the beginning of a middle class.
That was the backbone of this country. I would like to be Pollyanna and think we grew under a Utopian, idyllic, birds chirping in the background, economy where the worker controlled the price of his labor.
We didn’t.
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