Dusty Hinz Calling Out Our Generation — I wrote this my senior year of college in the final issue of the school newspaper that year

I flew from President Obama’s inauguration in DC to Venezuela to study abroad for my final semester at Augsburg in January of 2009. I wrote this when I was down in Venezuela and had it published in the year’s final issue of Augsburg’s school newspaper, the Echo.

Dusty Hinz Calling Out Our Generation

Fellow professors, staff, students, and friends, I write this to you all as my final message to a community that has most certainly changed me as a person. I think most of us know it already, but if you will allow me the opportunity, I am going to try to put our current situation into words: massive corporations and mega banks – the bourgeoisie class of our society – have our country (and have had our country) at the throat, and as they suffocate us, this incredible power force has an unending amount of reaches into our public wallet in the name of catastrophic systemic risk. But if systemic risk simply refers to the risk that our current system – which has literally just dug its own grave – will collapse, should not we the people be rooting for this?

We see the destruction and injustice of our current system all over the United States and the world, as too often the incredible benefits of a few are owed to the exploitation and unnecessary hardship of so many others:

• Wal Mart moves into rural area, pays their workers as if they are less than human, and runs mom and pop out of business.
• The privatization of our prison system and the private mercenaries over seas.
• Massive agribusiness corporations that receive government subsidies as they simultaneously drive small farms out of business inside the US and out.
• The entire corporate mainstream media that sold us our beloved Iraq War.
• Slave labor in China and other countries that allow us to buy our precious cheap stuff.
• IMF and World Bank policies that trade debt relief for privatization and leave countries vulnerable to the volatile world market as they are forced to open their domestic markets to transnational corporations.
• The current economic crisis which is a result of deregulation, which is a result of the lobbying power of corporations and the financial dependency that our politicians have on these massive corporations and mega banks.

In our society there are three power sectors: corporations, government, and the people. Fascism, a concept that has many different characteristics, is when corporations and government merge. With the presence of the corporate-government revolving door (ex: Dick Cheney, Henry Paulson, so many more) in this country, it is apparent that this problem has already arrived here. It is just that our corporations, as opposed to Hitler´s, are jacked up on steroids.

I write this to you because I truly believe that the defining challenge of our generation will be our fight against these corporate powers that be. I am sorry, but if you think it is all over just because we elected Obama, think again. True progressives were trapped in the locker room for the past eight years and the election of Obama has simply allowed us to get onto the field; WE HAVE NOT STARTED PLAYING THE GAME.

Our current system of international neoliberal capitalism is unsustainable and puts the well being of millions and millions at risk.

This is our future. I choose to fight.