<
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/>
"From my parents’ teenage years in the 1930s and ’40s through my teenage
years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and
democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparents were
teenagers. But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed,
stopped, and in many ways reversed.
I didn’t really start understanding the nature and enormity of the
change until the turn of this century, after the country had been fully
transformed. One very cold morning just after Thanksgiving in 2006, I
was on the way to Eppley Airfield in Omaha after my first visit to my
hometown since both my parents had died, sharing a minivan jitney from a
hotel with a couple of Central Casting airline pilots—tall, fit white
men around my age, one wearing a leather jacket. We chatted. To my
surprise, even shock, both of them spent the entire trip sputtering and
whining—about being bait-and-switched when their employee-ownership
shares of United Airlines had been evaporated by its recent bankruptcy,
about the default of their pension plan, about their CEO’s recent 40
percent pay raise, about the company to which they’d devoted their
entire careers but no longer trusted at all. In effect, about changing
overnight from successful all-American middle-class professionals who’d
worked hard and played by the rules into disrespected, cheated,
sputtering, whining chumps."
Via Jennifer Freeman.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
