Throughput

That’s all you are as a patient, you know. "Throughput." You have, on average, 8 minutes of face time with the MD. Meanwhile, they've got from 25 to 70 more patients to see today; I'm sorry what was your problem again? Ironic, isn’t it, that doctors, who did so much to kill the devil of “socialized medicine” after the Second World War have now become highly-trained assembly line workers themselves.

Elsewhere, of course, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages are retrograde if not stagnant. What else? Your masters are making tens of millions off of you (while "income tax" cuts put the burden on those, the great majority of us, whose wages are taxed). The hedge funds, unregulated as pirates until they crash and burn and come begging to be rescued by the rest of us because “they are too big to fail,” are creating an unprecedented ruling class. The politicos of both parties are snugly in their pockets. Garbage made of cheap corn is subsidized to fatten and stupefy you. They want you to be "team players": passive and orderly and powerless. Unthinking. You are being creamed, skimmed, even proletarianized in your white collars. Harry Potter, Inc. and the other technologies to prevent you from reaching (conscious, critical) adulthood are here to pretend to massage your soul, sooth the ache of anomy, alienation, the hollowness, but only to leave you wanting more. They want you to think you have to buy your way to happiness, again and again and again, instead of fighting for it.

The solution remains an old one: Unite and take it back.