I’ve learned one thing at my temporary job: not all workplaces are the same. The University of Denver Bookstore has none of the negativity and management bullying that is practically unwritten policy at Safeway. Thus the customers get experienced help and a genuine human interaction when they walk in, as opposed to Safeway, where they get bored employees half heartedly reading from a canned script.
Clearly, authenticity and real human interaction is not a priority in the larger corporations. That’s why more and more we get these stage managed scripts and interactions in chain stores and restaurants, with actors playing the happy ( ecstatic, actually), fulfilled employees in the ads on TV. Really, why are these people laughing? Apparently they don’t know that most of their jobs are, if current trends continue, going overseas while the economic recovery re-fills corporate coffers. Corporate rewards program? How about the millions pouring into Tea-Bagger campaign coffers as the big corporations take advantage of a recent ruling by the conservative court to put their toadies into office where they can rubber-stamp the gravy train.
I have a friend who is being out-sourced. Only a year after she was laid off. She’s had a first hand taste of corporate greed, but as if this isn’t enough, she actually has to train the people taking her job. She’ll be working HARDER than ever to make her American job extinct. This is not only callous, but stupid.
Now Tea baggerism is the flavor of the month, based mostly on a nostalgia for simpler times (that never existed); and a fantasy that libertarianism can lead to anything but ruined infrastructure, an even LESS efficient healthcare system, and even more corporate welfare. 30 years of mostly conservative rule has already shown us that making the rich richer leads to economic stagnation, not that the rich corporations with their cheap overseas help and massive tax perks, care. But the Tea-baggers, blinded by their rage and narrow self-interest, have allowed these GOP fat cats to play them like a rented fiddle.
So the most likely scenario is a massive Gop fail in congreess followed by a swing back to postve progress0 in 2012. True, jettisoning the Tea bag nonsense and returning to bipartisan compromise would be the easiest way to get necessary progress in Congress, but this GOP, flush with fat cat cash and having already jumped on the demogues’ bandwagon, are likely to continue thinking their shit doesn’t stink. And with the Corporations anxious to keep the gravy-train going, this will also be one of the most corrupt Congresses of the last 100 years. This will undoubtedly It’s going to be a long winter.
But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the pendulumn swings inevitably, and progressive ideas win out in the end. It just takes a while sometimes, along with some hard work. But people also need to band together, and find alternatives to making the corporations rich and powerful. Small businesses and creative entrepreneurs enrich the fabric of life, and don’t send your money overseas. May I suggest you start with a local bookstore?
