"---cracy:" Its prefix makes a BIG difference

The power of prosperity: How so?

 

The late Justice Louis Brandeis said, "W e can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." And we don't. We don't have a genuine democracy but we do have great and sometimes vulgar (i.e., ill begotten) wealth in the hands of one percent of Americans who possess nearly forty percent of all wealth in the nation.

 

In her magnificent book, The Real Wealth of Nations, Riane Eisler wrote a book about the "real wealth of nations." She argues that their real wealth ultimately depends not on their markets but on the quality of their human and natural capital and that the primary purpose of any economic system ought to be the promotion of human welfare and happiness.

 

That the real and full meaning of wealth and prosperity goes far beyond material wellbeing is no consolation to poor Americans (except, perhaps, those who believe in a prosperous after-life with their oppressors gnashing their teeth in inferno). They can't even get beyond poverty. They are powerless over their life's equations. Wealthy people manipulate their equations to get exactly the outcomes they want, outcomes that add up to yet more material wealth. America's corpocracy, moreover, is not about to help America advance toward meeting Article 25 of the 1948 United Nation's Declaration of Universal Human Rights that everyone on earth is declared to have the right to an adequate standard of living. Neither corporate balance sheets nor politicians' ledgers take that right into account. It's a pathetic fact courtesy of the corpocracy that America has the worse income inequality, the highest poverty rate, the highest unemployment rate, and the biggest war record of all advanced countries.

 

The power of knowledge: How so?

 

In a letter to James Madison in 1787, Jefferson wrote that "to educate and inform is the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." Democracy requires knowledge. It is not the knowing of how to acquire, keep and abuse excessive power and wealth but the knowing of what is required to be healthy, happy, and prosperous and also in knowing what is required to keep from losing democracy or to reclaim it once lost.

 

In his book, Idiot America, journalist Charles Pierce contends that stupidity and ignorance are being glorified in America. Democracy cannot survive in America's version of the Dark Ages where the corpocracy stands in for the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the church. When high school students take a miniature U.S. citizenship test, most flunk it. Ignorant high school students become ignorant adults, uncritical voters and ripe for demagoguery. This is an outcome exactly intended by the corpocracy that is starving before privatizing one of the hallmarks of a democracy, public education.

 

Knowledge is also represented in the left-most input of our life equations, namely, ourselves. Every human being has a psychological makeup of nine elements: needs; abilities; knowledge; values; beliefs; personalities; experiences; gender; and genetic predisposition. Being only one of nine doesn't diminish the importance of knowledge. I once debated when he was in his 90's Edward Deming (since deceased), the famous guru of total quality management. "Knowledge is everything," he said. "No sir," I responded, "the right application of the right knowledge is better." That combination, other elements being equal, gives us more control over our lives. That is true even living in a corpocracy. The more knowledgeable we are the better able we are to skirt, blunt or counteract the corpocracy.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).