The soul has greater need of the ideal than the real for it is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Santayana, if only we knew how right he was,  we MIGHT stop making the same damn mistakes over and over.

A century ago we found ourselves in the throes of corporate takeover.  They owned towns, stores, in essence people, and no one thought it inappropriate.  Until they got too greedy that is. (my research tells me company towns are not outlawed, and the way things are going I expect to see Verizonville any day now. P.S. in 2010speak it's called privatization, we'll have covenants restricting who can live where again if the trend continues.)

Does that sound familiar?

Corporations are doing it again.  They're getting too greedy, they don't want more, they want it all.  If they can't get their money one way, they'll find a way to get it another.  Look at credit card companies, (mine incidentally, is a paragon of virtue, they haven't gouged me at all during any of the recent changes, well the one I still have that is, the other one tried to fee me into the poor house. they got paid off and cut loose I'll take the credit hit.)  they lose the ability to charge a certain fee, and they raise an existing fee or create a new one. Phone companies, as though they didn't learn the lesson the first time, charge you for calling to ask a question.  Wall Street gets a crackdown, they raise fees across the board on 401k's. 

It's coming, maybe not soon, and maybe not as swiftly as it should, but the backlash is coming, the people will rise up and demand it be stopped.  That they be protected from the usury they invited in the first place.

There is no such thing as Shangri-La, but if we keep inviting disaster in the form of corporate malfeasance we're courting the exact opposite.

We get the government we deserve.

And so it goes: