America for Sale

by William Norman Grigg
September 4, 2006

As our government careens toward bankruptcy, Americans are being dispossessed by the outsourcing of industrial jobs and the buyout of our infrastructure by foreign interests.

We begin with a parable: Driven to the streets after a run of relentless misfortune, a man took up station on a street corner holding a hand-lettered sign stating: "Will work for food."

Most pedestrians and motorists passed the desperate man without so much as a second's worth of thought. One exception was a well-dressed businessman, who read the sign while waiting for the street light to change. But burdened by thoughts of his own concerns, the businessman gave in to a moment of imprudent sarcasm.

"You 'work for food'? I work for Visa!" he exclaimed to the sign-bearing man. "I'm working for food I ate years ago!" After getting the green light, the businessman launched one last unworthy gibe: "You're not broke — you're even!"

The homeless man eventually found a steady job paying just enough for him to get by and save a little money. His employer, a large and amoral conglomerate paying most of its employees subsistence wages, used its workers' savings (which the conglomerate controls) to make loans to spendthrifts like the heavily leveraged businessman — people who continued to live well beyond their means by stretching their credit lines well past the breaking point. At the same time, the conglomerate quietly used its expanding financial holdings to buy up practically everything in sight.

Eventually, the loans were called in, the debtors were unable to pay, and the businessman found himself — along with many of his fellow spendthrifts — working for that same predatory conglomerate. His earnings and standard of living were "harmonized downward" to those of the homeless man whose plight he had once mocked.

Adapted from a stand-up routine broadcast on Comedy Central about a decade ago, this parable is not intended to inspire mockery of the homeless or other unfortunate people. It's intended to encourage a realistic appraisal of our national economic condition. Think of the homeless man as symbolizing the poor but industrious Chinese population, willing and eager to work for a fraction of what Americans earn, and the businessman as a stand-in for an American population whose prosperity is largely a debt-enhanced illusion.

The conglomerate, of course, is the entity upon which our nation and our government have become increasingly dependent to underwrite that pseudo-prosperity: the Communist Chinese regime, which is rapidly acquiring the means quite literally to buy our country out from underneath us.

Indeed, the process of selling off public assets to foreign interests is already underway.


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