Too many readers of my Blogs about our Corporate Nation are responding too literally. I have not attempted to identify the first battle of the Nez Perces with our US Cavalry as the specific origin of our modern Corporate Country. Back up and look at this incident as an example of an attitude. The attitude being that Profit has always been a guiding light of America.

Profiting individually from one’s personal efforts to survive and thrive is not intrinsically a bad thing. However, at this point in time – with all the problems facing all of us: the entire earth and its total population – a more secure strategy is available. That strategy is to realize that assuming an attitude of cooperation and collaboration would gain all nations and their people what everyone is striving for: a degree of financial security and stability.

Conceivably, cooperating and collaborating are the only two things that can permit us to survive and thrive. All the other options we so enthusiastically invoke are obviously failing. Worldwide, we have deftly created an economic mess. We continue to have endless expensive wars. Natural disasters refuse to leave us alone. Violence is the rule rather than the exception. Millions in every country, including ours, barely exist. Existential uncertainty dogs all of us.

And through it all, a tiny inarticulate fraction of our population grows wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. They acknowledge nothing. They live above and beyond serious criticism. Actually, most of us envy them. We would change places with them if we could. But, at bottom, our economic problem is that we, their essential middle management and workforce, repeatedly allow the super wealthy to decimate our own fellow citizens. In our individual frantic race to riches, we all methodically weaken our own domestic market by accepting, even nurturing, the major unemployment that the super wealthy create, and its consequent gnawing poverty.

One out of ten Americans wanting work does not have work. Therefore, they do not have steady income. And the rest of us with incomes do not organize and help them reintegrate into our economy, although that would benefit our national economy, and us. That is a sociological situation with profound consequences. It deserves our attention. We won’t find its answer in a media world owned by the silent wealthy who, by virtue of their ownership of 90% of our country’s assets, are paradoxically the only ultimate key to our salvation.

In our self-inflicted apathy and disengagement from reality, we are not exhibiting excessively good use of our brainpower. And as the village elders of our country, with more life experience than anyone else, and possessing the only other aggregate sum of wealth at our combined disposal to devise a solution, that is not particularly smart of us.