Sometimes I wonder what happened with our ability to think critically. I thought this was the role of universities. Our country was based on free thought and wisdom inspired by revolutionary individuals such as Kant, Rousseau, and Foucult. The famous quote “I think, therefore I am” definitely does not coincide with today’s popular ideas. Instead universities seem to be overrun by corporate influences. College students are a favorite target for credit card companies. Students do not seem to realize that this is just another way that corporations make you dependent on them. Corporations such as Microsoft and IBM invest large sums of money in colleges and universities in order to ensure that their next generation of employees can maximize
their profits. At the same time there are people in this country that are so poor they
are forced to leave their homes and live in the streets. All this economic injustice is evident, and one must ask why we as citizens do not oppose it. The simple explanation is that we are both a partner and a victim of the corporate world.
When I here that our unemployment rate is above normal since our real GDP is above potential GDP, I know that the normal rate of unemployment is 6 percent. Yet, the average citizen is tricked in believing our economy is fine. One must realize that for every 100 people in the work force 6 people are unemployed when we are at economic equilibrium. This means that while economists tell the president everything is fine there are 6 out of 100 families struggling to feed their children. If you transfer this figure to the overall population this means approximately 15 million people are without jobs; that’s a lot of people out on the streets during so called economic stable times.
Furthermore, economists, politicians, CEO, and other elites constantly gloat that the U.S. has the richest economy or the highest GDP in the world. Yet, are we not forgetting that there is such a tremendous gap between rich and poor in this country, and thus a large number of our citizens are forced to live under near Third World like conditions?