When a person, usually as a child or adolescent, is wounded by others, often overly-severe disciplinarian parents, nannies, or teachers, or routine bullying by siblings or peers, and does not have anyone upon whom they can lean for love and support, that person often loses a piece of their natural personality, leaving heartache as a symptom.

In this way, in many parts of the world, in whole regions of the US, and some families in every region, where young people are forced to adhere to rigid masculine and feminine stereotypes, boys tend to have the tenderness knocked out of them while girls have the toughness knocked out of them.

Such people form the types of relationships where each person's continuing heartache is relieved by using the other person to fill in for their own missing pieces - he fills in for her toughness, she fills in for his tenderness, but in most such relationships the partners ask far too much of each other leading to destructive, damaging breakups which often subtract more pieces from the personalities of the people involved.

After a series of such experiences, the people with these types of dysfunctions often give up on seeking their emotional satisfaction and sense of completeness in relating to other people, although they may settle into relationships or marriages that serve other purposes.

For such people, money often becomes the tool they seek to use to buy whatever they think they need to relieve their essential (and often completely unconscious) heartache and loneliness. Since men in this position usually no longer have access to their ability to be tender, empathetic, or compassionate, they are capable of being quite "heartless" in their pursuit of and use of money.

But this attempt to use money to relieve such heartache is never successful for the same reason Co-dependent relationships are doomed to failure - because the source of the heartache is deeply, internally psychological. NOTHING you can apply to the outside of yourself will relieve that heartache, so when it comes to using money to "buy happiness," you can NEVER have enough.

Sadly, we have a large class of such heartless people in possession of a great deal of money, who are clinging to that money in this psychologically dysfunctional way, who have more money than they could ever use in an entire lifetime of extravagant spending, and still feel as if they don't have "enough."

They are continuously impoverishing the world and react with bitterness, anger, aggression and paranoia whenever it's suggested that there is something wrong with the picture they've been able to impose on the rest of us as the result of their wealth and the power and influence it buys. They are surrounded by, enabled by, and supported by sycophants, often folks with far less money, but who share the same dysfunctions and thus approach the world with the same personality dysfunctions in play.

If we don't begin to call these folks on their dysfunctions, drive them toward finding healing and greater health; if we don't, at least, turn aside from the path they are driving us toward, we will take the US and likely the entire world into very dark times, indeed.

Like Cheney did with his "energy policy advisors." That way, we would NEVER have known who they were or what they advised. Somehow, I think Jones, even if he were still an outright, unrepentant communist (which, of course, is what the paranoid righties think he was), could never have done as much damage or ripped people off as egregiously as those smart guys from Enron who ripped off their own employees and the people of California (among others) for billions, while managing to collapse their company, all the while lying through their teeth about what was going on.

It's not the communists like Jones once was whom I fear, it's the radical fascistic, xenophobic, jingoistic, gun toting, "free market" capitalists who seem likely to blow up buildings if not our entire national system of government in order to protect the ability of the rich to continue to extract resources out of these supporters' back pockets and bank accounts, all the while believing the false promise that those same supporters have a chance to get rich, too (while the free market fascists are busy gaming the system to make it impossible for that to happen).

The facts are these. In a "free market" capitalistic system there's not room for everyone at the top, and if you think the rich guys who own the media and a few of our senators and congressmen are going to let you join them up there, you've been HAD.

If I remember correctly, several members of Bushco resigned because they had told the truth (about the cost of the Iraq war, about the number of troops needed to secure Iraq after the initial conquest, about the cost of the Medicare prescription drug program, etc.). Each then also lied about the reasons for their departure: "so that they could spend more time with their family." They were brought down from the inside, essentially fired, because they used facts to challenge the blind ideology of Buscho insiders.

Now, Mr. Jones, who has, admittedly, had a checkered past, and has never sought to lie about nor hide that past, but who now seems to have changed directions and to have been widely admired and quite effective in his job, has resigned, not because he lied, nor because he challenged the ideology of the Obama administration, but because he has been repeatedly lied ABOUT by a prominent media agitator and right-wing propagandist who was already well known for his dishonesty and his often-tenuous grip on reality.

What a tragedy!... that our nation has reached this point where telling the truth gets you fired if you're a conservative, and the lies of "conservatives" can get you fired if you're moderate, liberal, or progressive.