Reading this was enlightening. It was easier to purchase a home in 1930?

Is living in America just being a corporate citizen?

So much for founding father enlightenment. I'm just a consumer and a producer. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are secondary.

https://www.distractify.com/p/son-boomer-comeback

I don't know that it was easier. My maternal grandfather was a coal miner and earned a good wage. He was able to buy a home around 1930. In the 1960s, my father, an engineer, had a home built with a mortgage somewhere in the $30K region. My mom said that having such a "big mortgage" used to keep him awake nights.

I do think that wages were not keeping up in modern times, but that's starting to change now. What's different is that wealthier people are starting to move out of the big cities, driving up home prices elsewhere.

This is not "off-topic" at all. It is exactly what the church leaders want. It started long before Ezra Benson, but he stands out as the preeminent melder of Mormonism and capitalism. Current Mormonism is indistinguishable from corporatism.Look at who gets promoted. Look at how they operate, from the way they roll out new programs to the way they treat dissent. They dissenters are not excommunicated. They are fired. Look at how revelations happen- via focus groups and surveys- with a heavy dose of clandestine infighting thrown in. To be a Mormon nowadays requires one to fully embrace the corporatization of the entire world.

Right down to corporate dress code (1960 IBM is the prototype), corporate assignment of where you will "work", corporate assignment of jobs, and corporate architecture.

The archetypal corporate Mormon was Steven Covey. Made a small fortune off of it with his "7 Habits" books.

Remember the good old days when all up and coming bishop/stake president wannabes religiously carried around an expensive Franklin-Covey Day Planner? That's about as corporate as it gets.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/07/2022 12:25PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I remember it well- and with horror. All that Pursuit of Excellence drivel. That was also the era of goal-setting. You know, when every Mormon young person was asked to set goals for every possible aspect of their lives. And the goals somehow all reflected what corporate America prized. Nothing about setting a goal to learn how to get over being awkward around girls. It was all about accomplishments that you could use to pad your job-hunting resume.

They invented the geographic goodness gauge. Location, location, location is an indicator of where God wants you to go to church.

Why is it called "human resources" ?

Capitalism is operating precisely as it is designed.
Means quite a few of us are casualties when the music stops and there is no unoccupied chair.
"Just the price of business."

(Essentially right now, we are the inhabitants of a factory farm.)

Factory farm, eh?

Then why is nobody bringing me lunch?

I am most interested in which alternatives (to North America) you find superior.

Tevai Wrote:
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> I am most interested in which alternatives (to
> North America) you find superior.

I'm not really sure this is the right question to ask. It assumes that one place is better in all areas, hands down, than others, and I'm afraid that this is not true. Also, it assumes that there is one answer that will satisfy everybody, and this is not true, either.

For example, I love the U.S. because of the multiple amount and diversity of products available to buy. I also (mostly) love the first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even if I vehemently disagree with some of the arguments I hear.

On the other hand, our wealth, health, and racial inequalities (I'll ignore the issues of disability on this thread) make us look like pariahs to outsiders and even some of us (including yours truly), especially when you compare what we do to what some of the countries in western Europe, Canada, and the southern Pacific (Australia, New Zealand) do in these areas. And while I (mostly) support the U.S. Constitution's first amendment, I'm not so crazy about the second one--both Australia and Germany have taken very different approaches than the U.S. has in that area, and the homicide and suicide statistics bear out their superiority in this area.

So no. There is no one absolute answer to your question, and the various answers you may receive will vary from individual to individual depending upon what priorities they have in choosing where they would prefer to live at the time they choose to answer the question.

Tevai Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am most interested in which alternatives (to
> North America) you find superior.
===============================
. . . note there is in my writing no criticism of the game. No suggestion it must be different.
Simple illumination - yet it stings a bit somehow (even to write).
Why is that?

Because: "Never talk about fight club."

Though all of us know this about the game already (which is why mere illumination causes trace discomfort) there is fortunately for us much daily anaesthesia - sports, drugs/alcohol, Netflix, social media, Hollywood foibles, tragedy-of-the-day, outrage-of-the-minute, etc. which distracts us from our circumstance. Why even "culture wars" is a distraction that consumes our time/attention and divides us, expending our energies (so who benefits from our division against one other? Is it really the merest happenstance?)

The "opioid epidemic" and mass shootings evidence it is known -- at least subconsciously. It is experienced. These are ancillary costs.

But why ask me? My ideas on the matter are many but bore me.
Plus there are across the world a multitude of communities who have "cracked the code" on how a complex industrialized society might have humans living together optimally - everything being a trade-off.

Suggest sort these out by examining maternal mortality rates, and rates of homelessness

Fascinating article, to echo some of summer above, the real estate situation is seriously getting out of control, at my job I have lots of coworkers and friends coming in from so. Cali. The wage is almost the same here but the rents are so much cheaper the San Diego and other "nice" places that tend to be normal, and not quite as liberal. But for these people to all be able to get a house, yard, garage it's not easy. Prices doubled in Two years, Boomers had it different, things were easier, I guess the 70s were bad though when Nixon took us off the gold standard, and had to pay for Vietnam and the monstrosity of Medicare, medicade, and the great society welfare state, inflation was horrible through the 70s until the great ronald Regan came. And cut the corporate taxes for the rich.

I guess you answered my question with a yes and you find a corporate republic better than a democratic one.

Ah yes, Reagan the great fiscal conservative.

US national debt in 1980 was $908 billion.

US national debt in 1988 was $2.602 trillion (2,602 billion) - almost 3 times higher.

Psst! Don't tell Maca that the national debt increased even more sharply under his dermatologically jaundiced hero's reign, or that the debt increases the problem of inflation enormously, or that it is he and his children will pay the price for that.

After all, "cutting the corporate taxes for the rich" leaves the poor holding the bag.

But Maca won't comprehend the arguement.

The "monstrosity of Medicare"? How exactly are you planning on getting your health care needs taken care of in your old age? (I picture you as being either on Medicare or close to it.) Do you realize that Medicare came about because old people are pretty much uninsurable at anything approaching a reasonable price?

I was working in NYC in the 80s, in an industry that catered to the wealthy. Yeah, they did well, very well indeed. They bought houses in the Hamptons, and yachts, and curtains for their windows that at the time went for $10K a pop. But Reagan's theory of trickle-down economics was bunk. Most of the rest of us had mediocre jobs with mediocre wages. When the stock market crashed, the rich were "hurting," but I still had the same job at the same wage.

That's when I figured out that helping the wealthy does nothing for the rest of us. They will always find someplace to park their money. If you want to lift the economy, then help the middle class to get their children a higher education, to start businesses, and to buy homes and goods.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/07/2022 05:52PM by summer.

The great and ironic achievement of the magnates is their success in persuading the poor that their interests are identical.

To paraphrase Lenin, the uneducated will donate the rope for you to hang them.

That explains Stalin.

The rich are always in control. If the rich get killed it’s just their rich enemies exploiting the peasants to do the dirty work. There’s always a top dog. Democracy is a nice peasant dream.

Unless you control the flow of money you don’t control shit. Even our dumb government gave that up to a bunch of private bankers and pays them interest.

Rubicon Wrote:
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> The rich are always in control. If the rich get
> killed it’s just their rich enemies exploiting
> the peasants to do the dirty work. There’s
> always a top dog. Democracy is a nice peasant
> dream.

Your second paragraph contains some wisdom, but your paragraph immediately above is historically demonstrable nonsense.

It perfectly describes the French Revolution. Of course a nobody Corsican named Napoleon picked the crown up out of the gutter with the help of artillery but the old guard of Europe took care of him and resumed control.

The US has been a puppet state of the private bankers for decades. If you can create money from nothing you just slowly buy everything up and when you control everything through front companies you crash the currency and bankrupt everyone else after you have acquired the government and physical assets. That's what's being played right now.

There are many democracies in history that are founded on the redistribution of wealth away from the rich. The US imposed those conditions on Japan and Germany after WWII and on Taiwan and South Korea--all to excellent effect, creating democracies out of dictatorships.

It is true that there is always a push-pull relationship and that the US has moved into egregious distributive territory, but those complications fall well short of your blanket statement that" democracy is a nice peasant dream." For many "peasants"--and particularly for most denizens of the global middle class--democracy is a pleasant reality.

Democracy is about fooling half of the people most of the time. Corruption is the great destroyer of national wealth. Some countries are corrupt more at the local level than at the top. With America, it's more at the top. The fish rots from the head down.

The corporatocracy is an oligarchy of CEOs. That’s why their pay is stratospheric. They are kings in an archipelago of the rich. Kind of like Russian oligarchs but there are more of them and they don't get sanctioned.

I think in the long term, Washington will have its Venezuela moment and power will return to the states.

The dumbest thing nations have done is turn the power to create money over to some private bankers. Look up The Bank of International Settlements and see how many countries they control the money of. Oh you buy shares of stock and keep the markets up as you load the boards of directors with your puppets and you control most everything in a few decades. By then you will control most the media, judges and politicians. It takes about 40 to 50 years to pull of but they did it. Banking is the most powerful man made entity on the planet. You can take nations over without firing a shot.

A Republic, if you can keep it.