Repost: Focusing On the Wrong End of Money

I think it's important to stop and realize that no one president's (or vice president's) budget plans are going to fix our problems. Moving our limited resources around does nothing but move where our difficulties are--not eliminate them. Meanwhile, the causes of these difficulties march on, benefitting from our passive ignorance.

It's all short term. We talk about "oh well in 200x so-and-so did such-and-such and it helped this or that!" If we need a major budget overhaul every 4 years, we're doing it wrong.

Stop playing with our limited budget and start playing with the way the money and power work in the first place. Shut down these predatory banks. Strip the power from mass-production food companies to produce (and infect) all of our foodstuffs (from companies like Monsanto and Purdue.) Stop allowing private companies to help police the people, locally and abroad (for example, our red light cameras, and Blackwater, the latter of which is also now owned by Monsanto.) Stop allowing pharmaceutical companies to control every aspect of our medical rights (and yes, these should be rights, not an industry. The control includes the production of our medical textbooks, power over the FDA, power over medical studies and scientific breakthroughs, etc.) Stop allowing single corporations (like Amway and Procter & Gamble) to control every product and service we consume, thereby also limiting all of our talents, knowledge, skills, and educational incentives to serving these singular companies. Stop allowing companies to abuse the planet for profit, because without a healthy planet, eventually there IS no profit. There is nothing. The planet is not a money factory. The planet is where we live and coexist with more than just other human beings (which we do poorly) but every other living and non-living system.

Money is not the purpose of life. When we focus our politics on reorganizing money rather than changing the power we give it and the power we give those who hoard all of it, we accomplish nothing. All we do is help those with the money and the power keep playing their game.

Meanwhile, money is not an evil thing. It is a tool. We let our tools run our lives far too often. (Technology is also a tool. We rely so heavily on technology that we abuse it to complete our every task. No one knows how to DO anything anymore.)

I'm tired of budget arguments. They're empty because they were never intended to actually make the country a better place. They're intended to move money around, so long as we keep the status quo afloat. At the same time, I get caught up in pointing out the blatant problems with candidates' budget plans. Because our ability to encourage real change has been wrenched out of our hands, and when we try to exercise it, we are arrested and called terrorists and made to be the enemy of the people.

Sighing all day long.