Who Rules ... You?

The Game of LIFE: Spin the wheel, move your 

car two spaces forward and ... TRAGEDY!!!

Recently in the news, we've been hearing a lot about taxes, power, austerity measures, the plight of Social Security and the right wing's attack against the health care law. Who's telling the truth?


In other countries around the world, when the youth and the oppressed have been pushed to the limits, they demonstrate in the streets for real and positive change. Here in the U.S., well ... we're given Super Bowl Sunday to soothe the pain away.

Following is how everyone should digest their daily dose of the national news. 


Excerpt from the 6th edition of Who Rules America?: Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance by G. William Domhoff, published in 2010 by McGraw-Hill:


"... Although the corporate community focuses its complaints on taxes and government spending, the deeper issue is power: In particular, its leaders are wary of the federal government due to its capacity to aid average Americans by (1) creating government jobs for the unemployed, which might make people less likely to take low-paying or dangerous positions in the private sector; (2) making health, unemployment, and social security benefits more generous, which also might make people less willing to work in low-paying jobs; (3) helping employees gain greater workplace rights and protections, which would make it more difficult to control the workplace; and (4) investing tax dollars in publicly controlled enterprises, which might compete with private corporations. The corporate community generally opposes all of these possibilities on the grounds that they might increase taxes, impede economic growth, or limit freedom. Most of all, however, corporate leaders oppose any government support for unions because unions are a potential organizational base for advocating a whole range of policies that threaten corporate power. In a phrase, control of labor markets is a crucial issue in the eyes of the corporate community.


In the context of the current economic crisis, the corporate community also is concerned that government leaders could take permanent control of the banks, mortgage companies, and automobile manufacturers it had to rescue in the last four months of 2008. Moderate conservatives within the corporate community are holding their breath and praising the efforts of the Obama Administration, but the ultraconservatives are loudly announcing their fear of "socialism," which is the term they use to express the fact that a strong government can control the economic sector, as it does in many countries that are far from socialist. They know that bailouts and financial rescues have occurred in the past - to save the fraudulently managed savings and loan industry in the 1980s, for example - but they worry that the current bailout may be too large and last too long for them to regain their former degree of dominance."