Increasingly, as citizens we find ourselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit consideration, a society which only values wealth, money and consumers.
As citizens, we are increasingly being brain washed by the corporate state through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres, and a chilling indifference to the plight of others. This reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public, while at the same time extending the culture of the for-profit corporate interest. No doubt, this is increasingly expressed in vicious attacks against such compassionate efforts as health care reform and other human rights.
Instead of free citizens in a social society we are commodities to be sold or traded in the corporate market. We have been turned over as commodities to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving us of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Consequently, there is a growing aspect of cruelty on the part of the corporate state for those citizens caught in the web of misfortune and human suffering. The experience of millions of citizens comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks from the tentacles of corporate America.
It seems in corporate America human suffering is not only sanctioned by law, but is also measured in terms of cost and benefit consideration. The pattern is to curtail services that might help the suffering while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, and then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, and then make it a crime to be homeless. Today the same number of Americans - 2.3 million - resides in prison as in public housing.
The for-profit prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. This multimillion dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, Web sites, and mail-order Internet catalogs. The prison industry now employees more than half a million people - more than any Fortune 500 corporation, other than General Motors.
As a result, this ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current delivering its citizens as commodities to the corporate factory. This, no doubt, saps the strength of us as citizens and, consequently, our social relations and individual character.
We need, as a society to educate students and others to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage, and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of the corporate state that produce hate and cruelty for-profit.
We as citizens have every right to some solutions to our everyday afflictions. Some voice for our everyday concerns. Some remedies for our everyday injustices and, most of all, some civic mechanisms for building character. We need to be citizens in a social society, instead of commodities for the corporate state.
