Your point about blaming downward is interesting. It is always easier to erect shields of protection around "winners", because at some level everyone in a competition-drioven society needs to become one. Conversely those down the slope are "losers" and their way of being is to be scorned.

Except that none of this is true. By the standards of pure gelt, the biggest liar and stealer can become the biggest "winner"; and a Quaker of peaceful mien can become a "loser". Is that the measure we want to use of human value? It makes winners out of Bush and Cheney, and losers out of those who balance their greed with integrity and fair-dealing in a thousand thousand small businesses all over the country.

Perhaps, then, we need to get a lot clearer about the game we atre playing, the rules we are playing by, and what makes a winner as distinguished from a cheater. Maybe we have gotten entirely too reasonable about what kinds of cheats and evasions we think are tolerable? THat's often the case when a government becomes too oppressive or burdensome. Folk heros get born who are "winners" because they outsmart the bureaucrats with wits or gall.

I work hard, and my wife and daughter do too, and we manage to get along okay. I work in a small company -- less than 250 people -- which designs and innovates specialized devices used in locating underground cables and pipes and in pipe inspection. We wrestle all day with very complicated technological problems and try to come up with better products and sell them successfully.

I have absolutely no desire to see the corporate interests of this group undermined. I like the poeple who are here earning their keep and who depend on the success of the company to be able to do so.

So when we focus on "corporate interests" as an enemy target, we have to be careful to notice th ebaby lying in the bathwater -- corporations are a good way to bring people together to build mor eefficiently and operate more successfully than individuals could do alone. That's the "baby" part.

That said, they are also breeding grounds of unreason, greed, manipulation, economic domination and soul-killing redundancy.
THat part is the bathwater.

A