Still Stickin' It To The Man

Greetings.

So this quarter it's turning out to be a little difficult to keep my promise to blog every weekday. I will still try to update the site as often as possible, but with the heavy reading load I have, it might be a little less often than some of you would like.

In other news, I started seriously dieting last week and working out this week. It's going well so far. Today I worked out in the University Rec Center for the first time. It's a pretty cool gym. I worked abs, legs, and cardio today. Good stuff.

Now to the real point of today's post:

I was kept up a bit last night by thoughts about Corporate America and the greed and deception inherent therein. If you're new to my rants, then you may need to be informed that when I say "The Man" I feel that the term is defined by Corporate America. It is the current permutation of capitalism that dominates society. The government runs things, sort of, but the corporations run the government, so the corporations are the ones really pulling the strings. Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm not paranoid, and I don't think that there's any one person or even one organized group of people meeting in back rooms plotting to enslave us all. I just think that corporations do only what is in the best interest of the corporations, and in this country, they are allowed to grow big enough to buy politicians and media outlets.

Consider the mining tragedy that happened in West Virginia a few days ago. The corporation that owns the mine was fined around $900,000 last year for hundreds of federal and state safety violations. You read it right. Almost a MILLION DOLLARS in fines, and apparently many of the same unsafe practices continued until the accident this week. Why, you might ask? Because it was cheaper for the company to pay the fines than it would have been for them to change the unsafe conditions. This is nothing new, it happens all the time. I am reminded of Edward Norton's narrative soliloquy in "Fight Club" in which he explains how his job is to weigh the cost of doing recalls on automobiles versus the average out of court settlement and the probability of failure. He concludes his explanation with the line "If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." Kind of makes you wonder just how many Toyota accelerators were predicted to fail, doesn't it?

Then there's the pharmaceutical industry (and this is what kept me awake last night). I got a tetanus shot yesterday, and so as my arm was hurting, I was thinking about what a vaccine does, and then I wondered what exactly the last thing we cured was. I looked up a timeline of vaccines and it seems like, in the last 15 years, we've only made new versions of vaccines that we've already invented. I don't really have any evidence to support what I'm about to say, but I just can't help wondering how much the pharmaceutical companies operate like the mining or automotive companies I just mentioned. How often are decisions made in these companies based on corporate interest rather than public interest? There was a story floating around a few years ago about the death of the electric car. I don't remember the specifics, but there was a lot of evidence that suggested that a successful, completely electric, car produced by GM was discontinued simply because there was no money to be made in after-market care (maintenance, repairs, etc.) It just makes me wonder how much AIDS and cancer research has gone by the wayside because the pharmaceutical companies are not just looking for a cure, they're looking for a PROFITABLE cure. It's not that unimaginable is it? All you have to do is watch TV for a couple of hours and count how many commercials you see for drugs. Really, just pay attention to that the next time you watch TV. Look at all of the commercials, and then look at the length and the production value of those commercials. They're not cheap. A wise man once said that if you want to know what someone really cares about, look at what they spend their money on. How much does the pharmaceutical industry care about getting you in to see the doctor (who, by the way, just basically had his palm greased by said pharmaceutical company in the form of free lunches, golf outings, and other perks) to ask him about using their product? And the best part is that you don't even have to pay the whole fee for seeing the doctor, because that's picked up by your insurance company, who's in-turn charging your employer outrageous amounts of money on premiums to cover their costs.

This is our current system. It's a simplistic explanation, but it's on the mark. Still think we don't need to do something differently? I'm not saying that total government control is the answer, but the government should exist to keep these forces in check when it comes to our health and safety. I want the government to make sure there's no "mad cow" in my beef, or e coli In my mayonnaise. I want them to make sure that the only thing that determines what kind of house I can buy is my income and my credit score. I want them to make sure that people of minority races and those with disabilities can get fair jobs... and oh, by the way, I want those jobs to be in safe working conditions for reasonable hours, and pay decent wages. It's not that I want the government to protect me from myself, I want them to protect me from those with more money and power than me. Plain and simple. That's the government's job. And if that makes me a socialist, marxist, or "Obama's minion," then so be it.

I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.