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Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progres
by CleanedStar 13y ago
Yes, the Democratic party is not left wing on either a global scale, as you say, or even on a historical scale. The Democrats used to support the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to put people to work. Massive government projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration were instituted.
More recently the Democrats have been about "ending welfare as we know it" as "the era of big government is over". Words said by a Democratic president, not a Republican. Obama has been the same, and the examples of this are too numerous to mention completely - support of school privatization and charters while attacking teacher's unions, or the more recent nomination of Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce.
This essay has some Orwellian doublespeak sentences which are real howlers - 'The movement towards these more egalitarian corporate structures goes by many names: stakeholder or partner or even conscious capitalism.' Barf! Fantastic, I'll be real glad to be part of a stakeholder corporate structure - YOU own the shares, but I get to be a "stakeholder". Terrific. "Egalitarian corporate structure". There's a contradiction. A corporate structure means one thing - control by the majority shareholders, with the purpose to maximize profit to them. Period. This fact is written into the legal code and court decisions ad nauseum.
If anyone is buying into this idea that today's college educated professional in the US is better off than the college educated professional of the 1950s and 1960s, I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling" where she shows a mountain of evidence of why this is not the case.
If these startups are so great for everyone, where are the older people? Where do they go, since they don't seem to be around, other than a small percentage, at anywhere from a small startup to somewhere like Google. Did professionals have to work as many hours as they do nowadays? Oncall all the time, e-mails and phone calls at home? And so on.
The system doesn't even work for us, the educated elite doing the wealth and creating the wealth. It works even less for the rest of the world.
- svdad 13y agoAll the older people are, in fact, at Google. The average age of software engineers there is much higher than you might think.
- arcosdev 13y agoWow, the comment with the most insight and clarity in this discussion. I couldn't agree more. We are building a future that we can't properly retire from, making "software" of questionable value (socially, economically, sustainably) while our countries crumble around us and the middle class evaporates.