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- 21 April 2014
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Your comment is spot on and then luutzu posted that video which mentions exactly what you did.
The is a very interesting documentary. I think about that working lady's comment, her salary was being cut and her medical insurance downgraded and she said something like "why is it that when someone makes $10 Million or a company makes $20 billion in profits do they want to take away the very little I receive." Pretty sad but true and it is one of the reasons I believe in having unions to help you get that fair pay. Respect your workers, value them, reward them fairly and build a strong middle class. I might add that at least here in Australia we are doing it a bit better than the Americans.
I wish more people like the Robert Reich's of the world were actually in charge and changing the world for the better. Thanks for the video, I watched it all.
It's be great if our leadership are made up of people like Reiche. Though it seems that people like him rarely get to the very top - those jobs tend to go to the politicians who are good looking, friendly and speaks well. And when they're genuinely good, the political side of them tend to compromise the means to get to a prefered end, and as Reich said in one of his other interviews... too often the means then become an end or the end fades and be forgotten.
Yea, I think Australians are better of than Americans... but I think we're heading their way.
Social Security, Medicare, affordable education... it's going to be cut and privatised and we'll be told that there's just too many lazy bums or we have to live within our means.
Not sure if it's in that doco but Reiche said that with the onset of the Great Depression, every American advisors told FDR to turn Communist because Capitalism was finished and the only other option was Fascism. People were starving and lining the streets, there are riots in their MidWest; in Europe the Nazi was rising and the old capitalists were crumbling...
This was predicted by Marx where he said that the nature of capitalists is they're only after money and so will exploit people and gov't for more money, and with more money they will influence politics and so become richer and richer while the masses get poorer and poorer until they won't take it anymore and rises up etc.
The Czars were gone, Hitler planning to rule most of Europe and the British Empire was on the brink.
What saved Democracy wasn't Capitalism... it was the New Deal: Social Security, minimum wages, regulations, gov't policies and investments (Socialism?). These were the things that kept the last great Democracy in place and build those "arsenal of democracy" and all that.
Then after WW2, capitalism didn't finance free or affordable higher education, or invest in roads and bridges...
But these things, apparently since Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the late 70s... are forgotten and we're at it again... with a poorer middle class, less opportunities, and the rich are getting richer and big corporations' profits are privatised while risks and losses are paid for by the public.
Let's hope we don't have to have another world war to learn what we've learnt.