I watched Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and have also been reading A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and I have to say it's given me quite a different perspective. Most of us see our economic system and government as generally fine, only needing certain legislation here and there to fix the problems of the day.

What Capitalism: A Love Story suggests outright and what the book forces the reader to consider is that the economic and political systems that largely run our lives are fundamentally flawed and not fixable while still within them. I did not previously think a complete overhaul was necessary to solve our problems (poverty, joblessness, environmental degradation) but I now do.

What A People's History absolutely proves is that corporations must be dragged, kicking and screaming, to consider any interest outside of their bottom line, and that their lack of care for simple human dignity literally costs lives. Well, duh, but it's fascinating to read the history of this. We didn't start out generous and idealistic and nice. We started out conniving, controlling, manipulating, and cruel.

How well does an economic system "work" if the average person and-hopefully-politician has to constantly, relentlessly bully each industry, one by one, to pay a decent wage, stop polluting the environment, etc. It's horribly inefficient and, of course, maddeningly frustrating. Yet it's all marketed so brilliantly that even the sufferers of this pathetic machine support it.

I'm so often reminded of the children's story, The Emperor's New Clothes. Will anyone just point out the obvious here? Well, people do, but they are essentially ridiculed.

We live in a country where businesses have actually convinced us that they have rights. That, like people, they deserve help from the government (ex: subsidies) and that they have interests that should be considered. Like they are living and breathing, and they will suffer like any life-form if they don't get protection. (They're not alive!!!!) They are not people, who ask only to survive with enough food, shelter, and clothing. Businesses ask something completely different: obscene profits, increasing stock prices, exorbitant salaries, power, status, and--what it boils down to--food for their big, gigantic, enormous ego. These rights are somehow seen side by side with a request for simple human dignity and are weighed as though they have similar degrees of importance.

I was shocked to learn after Obama's student loan reform bill just got signed, that the government was previously handing out subsidies to private loan organizations. Excuse me? The government is giving money to banks or whomever so they can give me a student loan at 4 x the interest rate I would get if I'd gotten a government loan? But some schmuck business guy convinced the government to give his bank money to "help" students go to college. Why don't you just hand them profits in an envelope?

What Howard Zinn's incredible book shows is that the U.S. government formed for really one purpose: to protect the money of the elite of the country, and to make more for them through business and trade. This sounds like a cynical statement, but it is laid out very simply with direct quotes and hundreds of citations. It is too complex to detail here--please read for yourself before making up your mind. To describe the issue as a "conflict-of-interest" would be a pathetic understatement. It is hard to even come close to describing the corruption involved in the birth of this country. Our political party system is little more than a disguise to give us the impression of choice, freedom, and control, when everything has been set up ever-so carefully so that the interests of the rich "capitalists," as you may call them, can never actually be threatened.

I wish everyone would just read a hundred pages of this book and see the desperate, desperate attempts made to be simply allowed a 10-hour workday (instead of 16) and a 6-day workweek instead of a 7-day workweek. The marches to stop child labor. Requests for simple safety in the workplace. The strikes, demonstrations, arrests, union efforts, etc, etc, went on for decades. The corporations enlisted the National Guard to squelch strikes. The government itself used the military to kill people for asking for the tiniest dignity.

We may have evolved since those times (though I would argue that the evolution really means that what we used to be able to get away with in public we now have to do in secret), but it is important to see where these present-day institutions come from. They do not come from a tradition of charity, generosity, "freedom and justice for all." We must be at least educated and realistic.

Know what I read the other day? Pharmaceutical companies actually control medical school education in America. You can be sure your doctor never learned a thing about health in all those years of college--only disease and drug prescription. They can draw the chemical composition of Lipitor but don't know that eating oatmeal is proven more effective in lowering cholesterol than drugs.