I finally arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, late last night — after being forced to switch planes in Chicago after spilling my salmon salad to the point where the entire cabin smelled like dead fish. Ah, the power of change.
The first workshop that I attended this morning had to do with trying to design a new economic system that works for all of us, not just for fat cats and oligarchs at the top.
“An economy based solely on growth doesn’t works,” stated one panel member. “What’s another word for out-of-control growth? ‘Cancer’. In Bhutan, the economy is based on happiness instead.” We should try that, seeing that America currently rates only number 44 on a world-wide happiness scale.
What I hate most about America’s economy now is that it is based on our love affair with obscene-profits-at-any-cost. That’s no way to run a country — or a world! My suggestion? Let’s duplicate nationally on a legal precedence set in California a few years ago, citing that medical marijuana clinics are forbidden to make any profits. And as a result, all the clinics’ profits are plowed back into the business.
This new business paradigm is immeasurably better than our current Vulture Capitalism system, where American businesses and companies are not nourished at all — but only stripped of their infrastructure, assets and ability to either compete with the rest of the world or to serve their customers.
If you visualize America itself as an industry, for many years now it has been stripped of both its capital and its infrastructure. Just compare the economic semi-ruin that America is now with the thriving industrial giant that it used to be. Vulture Capitalism has sucked the life out of our country. Vulture Capitalism sucks eggs.
At the Harborside medical cannabis clinic in Oakland, all profits are returned back into the business — creating more jobs, more services and more equity for itself and its customers. In comparison, when has America’s war industry, stock market casino, oil barons or banking cartel ever given anything back?
Next on the menu at Netroots Nation was the showing of a documentary film on rape in the military. Currently, there is a really good chance that if a woman joins the military, she will be raped. And that no one will ever do anything about it. Thousands of female soldiers are being raped every year by their own freaking co-workers. And the good-ole-boys’ network now in place on most military bases simply laughs it all off. That’s just sad.
Perhaps the Republicans’ current War on Women is based on the original War on Women in the Military model? It appears that it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMEacbeSNRw&feature=player_embedded
Tonight at Netroots Nation, we are going to hear Eric Schneiderman, Bill McKibben and Tammy Baldwin speak. Then I’m gonna take the # 8 bus to a place far, far away, to my little Motel 6 room out in Warwick, where I will dream of a better America and better days than we have now — a better world where the War on the working class and women will be replaced by a War on cruelty, inefficiency and greed.
PS: You can actually watch Netroots Nation too, being streamed live here: http://www.netrootsnation.org/nn12/streaming/
