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America's Race to the Bottom
But, I'll be honest. I doubt that there will be. Most of the upticks following our latest national downturns have been dismal enough that economists have had to invent a new term for them. The phrase is "jobless recovery", and the implications are as ugly as they sound.
What it means is that GDP rises, but life remains crappy for real people with real jobs. If they're lucky enough to have one, that is.
Where does the money from rising GDP go, then? Funny you should ask. It goes exactly where it's been going for the last three decades. Not to the public, and not to raising the living standards of ordinary folks. But, rather, to the über-class.
My guess is that "The Great Recession" - as some are calling the current disaster (presumably to avoid using the "D" word) - will be followed by what history will record as the "The Tepid and Rather Jobless, Thank You Very Much, Recovery". If that.
And, more importantly, my guess is that this will be the latest and greatest click yet of what is the most massive ratcheting project of the last three decades, perhaps the most wholesale redistribution of wealth in human history.
Consider the numbers...
The ratio of executive salary to the average paycheck during the mid-twentieth century was about thirty to one. In the last decade it has ranged from three hundred to over five hundred to one.
The richest four hundred Americans were worth an average of about $13 million each in the middle of the century, using today's dollars. Now they average over $260 million each.
The top taxpayers in America now pay the same proportion of their income in taxes as those earning less than $75,000 per year. Those taxes on the wealthy went from being more than half of their income fifty years ago to about a sixth today.
In the past three decades, the income of the richest Americans quadrupled, while the income of the lowest ninety percent actually fell. Today, the median wage is lower than it was in the 1970s, even though productivity has grown by nearly fifty percent.
All told, from the 1930s through the 1970s, America produced the biggest and richest middle class in human history. But then many of us made the mistake - as I did - of assuming that this had become, based on a solid society compact, the default status quo for the foreseeable future.
In fact, it was instead an aberration. And it was contingent.
It was an aberration because we are now speedily returning (if we haven't already arrived) to the days prior to the New Deal, when the rich had everything and the middle class was small and insecure. And it was contingent because the good old days depended on a combination of elite satiation and/or a strong progressive defense of an equitable economic order.
But both have disappeared in the Age of Reagan. Today, there are seemingly no bounds conceivable to what the already astonishingly wealthy will do in order to further magnify their holdings. No suffering of the struggling middle class - let alone impoverished brown people inconveniently sitting on top of desirable resources somewhere abroad - represents the slightest impediment to a greed which long ago ceased to have any passing relationship with utility. We are simply talking here about sociopaths - people who cannot fathom a reason to alter their predatory behavior under any circumstances, even when the lives of millions are at stake, and even when another pile of millions of dollars in their investment portfolio does nothing to improve their condition because they are already so rich to begin with.
Okay, well, that's not exactly a new thing. Unless, say, you're a geologist and you happen to think that human beings are a new thing. But what is new is that the other possible protection against the gutting of the middle and working classes - that is, the existence of a progressive bulwark against greed - has all but disappeared. At the level of elites, this has transpired because the Democratic Party has simply joined the GOP in becoming a corporate tool, serving the interests of Goldman Sachs and a few others, with near complete disregard for the public interest. At the mass level, Americans have embraced their own petite bourgeois form of greed, and have become stupider and Republicaner with each passing year.
The result is that the aberration is ending, albeit slowly and somewhat fitfully, and the country is returning to its natural state, where outrageous disparities of wealth are common. So common, in fact, that no serious political movement exists to redress ths injustice. So common that the wealthy go to churches where Jesus the proto-socialist who talked about camels and needles has been morphed instead into the First Coming of Ayn Rand. So common that a guy can run for president incessantly repeating the word "change", invoking the greatest moral struggles of history, and come to office during a time of multiple crises for a deeply stressed American public, only to turn out to be just another Wall Street hack, busy diverting the remaining chunks of the commonwealth to the plutocracy.
It's not exactly a mystery how we ended up here, although there's more obfuscation on this question than there are hypocritical sinners at a GOP family values convention. And that's a lot. Every American government since Reagan has essentially been consumed with the task of denuding the middle and working classes of their paltry share of the national pie, in order to deliver those dollars into the hands of wealthy political benefactors. This includes Democrats as well as Precambrians. Indeed, probably the president least tenacious in pursuing this project, of the five we've been blessed with these last three decades, was George H. W. Bush. That really tells you something, right there, doesn't it?
Yes, it's true that even a mixed economy system practicing both Keynesianist and monetarist countercyclical macro-economic strategies will experience oscillations in growth. (Although, remember when, a decade ago, people were speculating about whether the business cycle had forever been tamed? Remember when people thought Alan Greenspan walked on water? Seems like a lot longer than ten years ago now...) But at the same time, government policies on economic and political issues really do matter, especially when it comes to cutting up the pie.
If you adopt policies that decimates unions, you're gonna wind up decimating unions. Never particularly high in America, and peaking historically at about thirty-five percent, the share of workers who are organized in this country is now down to about seven percent. Guess what sort of effect that is going to have on worker negotiating power over wages, benefits, safety, general treatment and respect?
If you adopt trade policies that undermine labor at every turn, you're gonna wind up with a lot of unemployed Americans competing against low-wage Mexican, Chinese and Indian workers overseas. This wasn't exactly hard to see coming as NAFTA and the WTO were being negotiated, two of the biggest priorities of the Clinton administration. It was even less hard to see when Republicans created tax incentives for companies to ship jobs outside America, and when John Kerry was either too stupid or too fully coopted to turn that slam-dunk issue into the Willie Horton of the 2004 presidential campaign.
If you adopt policies that slash taxes on the already wealthy, guess what that's going to do to the distribution of wealth in the country? Guess what impact it will have on the federal government's revenues and debt? Guess who will be stuck, in the future, paying for the loans to finance the share of revenue that the wealthy are excused from today? Plus interest, of course.
And guess what that will mean for social needs spending as the government grows so deeply indebted that its creditors force it to make cuts in outlays, like some banana republic getting the whip hand from the IMF? Will those cuts be on the military, or on healthcare? Wars or food stamps? We know they won't be on service to the debt. That interest we now pay on the $12 trillion or so we've already borrowed is currently one of the biggest single items in the federal budget, and cannot be defaulted upon without producing disaster. We already know from the Clinton administration the answer to these questions about spending priorities. Even in the flushest of times, this supposed Democratic president slashed welfare spending.
So how shocking is it, when you add it all together, to find that anti-American labor, trade, tax and spending policies turn out to hurt the middle and working classes?!?! The only thing really shocking about the entire affair is that voters have been swallowing whole that baited hook for thirty years now. And that they will likely do so again, in 2010 and 2012, as they perceive the failure of Democratic Party ‘liberalism', and knee-jerk their way into a reign of repeated GOP pillaging, after just rejecting it in deserved disgust only a year or two ago.
Of course, new Republican governments won't be any more successful at generating public prosperity than Democrats, not least because neither has much interest in doing so, except perhaps incidentally. What the Grand Old Pricks might be able to pull off, however, is some more raghead slaughtering, fag bashing, or terror traumatizing in order to keep the hoi polloi focused on anything and everything but the emptying of their wallets.
Ultimately, the game will end, and we'll wind up looking like the British following the Second World War - a great empire bled dry, all its people running around with bad teeth. Right now, Republicans and Democrats are essentially competing, as in a game of musical chairs, to avoid being the party in charge when the fictions of our economic condition can absolutely no longer be sustained. Kinda like what you see in California, the once great state. Looks to me like the Democrats lost. Now there's a shocker, huh? - the party of Obambi getting reamed by the party of Tom "The Hammer" DeLay.
Politicians continue to play the same old cards about resurrecting the same old prosperity. No one will say the truth about how the US standard of living will probably never be restored for the bottom ninety-eight percent, while elites now have the kind of wealth that European kings once had to conquer entire continents in order to acquire. In fact, none of our courageous politicians will even tell you that you can't afford to have tax cuts and full governmental services at the same time. They're too busy borrowing it all from their kids and ours. Well, really just ours. Anyhow, isn't responsibility kinda boring? Isn't that whole honesty thing so twentieth century?
The simple and sad fact is that greedy elites will always use their power to acquire unseemly quantities of wealth, unless one or both of two conditions obtain. The first is that they are socialized to be slightly less greedy, slightly more patriotic, and remotely compassionate about those who have nothing. They may also recognize, as Henry Ford did, that their long-term prospects are rather heavily tied to those of all the rest of us.
The other option is that we, acting through genuinely progressive politics, distribute the cash more fairly. Even if we do this, the wealthy will still have ridiculous amounts of absolute wealth, of course, and truly sickening amounts of relative wealth. It's just that the rest of us will be a bit less impoverished. Perhaps all full-time workers would be guaranteed a living wage, for example. What a concept, eh? Perhaps if we throw all-in with our subversive little Bolshevist revolution, we'll go so far as to even join the rest of the world's developed countries in supplying our people with healthcare. Radical, man.
We got part of the way to a more just society during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, though it was a minor miracle that we did. And it probably really required the Great Depression to do it, along with the twin legislative forces of nature more commonly known as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
We may actually get there again.
Though if I had to guess, I suspect instead that the next stop is Palinism.
Whether we'd have the brains subsequently to ever transcend that disaster for a moderately equitable American economic order is a real question.
Whether we even could at that point is quite another.
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Show AllI’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the Powers-That-Be within the Democratic Party intentionally groomed a black man to be president, because they know damn well that many voters wrongly assume that a black leader is more likely to be a champion of the common man and that the mainstream media is less likely to criticize a black leader for fear of being accused of racism. They believe, and rightfully so, that having a black man as president will make it far easier for them to accomplish their goal of transferring even more wealth and power towards the top.
Exactly, it was a brilliant move by the PTB, and it furthers the narrative with which they manipulate people.
Obama for his part, played along. He sweet-talked the "progressives" into bed and now they're scratching their heads thinking he still loves them but is busy, etc.
Obama was ushered in through the "progressive" door.
You are right.
So instead of a MLK, or JFK, RFK, what we get is simply a we'll-groomed, ultimate "Boy", to do their bidding.
Yessa, masta! Whutevah you want...masta!
Who'd have ever thunk it? Obama: The Ultimate Slave Boy.
Unbelievable.
Sigh.
Mumia Abu Jamal said in an interview 6 months ago that Obama was a light-skinned "house negro" that spoke well and was acceptable to many white folks.
As is all too common, he turned his back on the "field negroes" who were darker and less eloquent, and identified himself with well to do whites.
Over 6 months later, Mumia's allegory fits quite well.
I agree, he was groomed to be the perfect Public Relations and Brand manager money could buy. However, even the best cannot fool all the people...
"They (the wealthy) may also recognize, as Henry Ford did, that their long-term prospects are rather heavily tied to those of all the rest of us."
Not true. The wealthy get their money from debt, not from people buying things. It is in the interest of the oligarchs to keep people poor and in debt. Besides, national boundaries are meaningless in the modern capitalist world--the American people are no more important than the inhabitants of Zambia--as far as extorting wealth goes. This capitalist crowd has figured out the game--letting capital flow where it will world-wide and extorting interest payments from everyone--and they will not stop their plundering no matter what the cost to the world's people and to the planet.
David Michael Green, once AGAIN, goes dancing around in circles, delineating and describing, but still trapped within the phony outlines of the pinball machine of the "two-party" structure.
Mr. Green, I regret to inform you that while you are focussed on this obscene pinball game, the building is burning to the ground around you.
Oh, by the way, the pinball machine is what started the fire.
So, if you are REALLY concerned, you will start helping direct people toward an alternative location instead of distracting them with your ideas about how to fix the machine.
Besides, isn't it also time to admit that you do not and will never be allowed to own the machine?
It seems some people expect one person to provide analysis and then come up with the alternative and how to get there all wrapped up in a nice package. Sort of a 'Blue Tag Sale Revolution'.
Fortunately, societal change comes about when everyone contributes ideas and sweat equity. There are no off-the-shelf solutions. As the writer pointed out, the populace of other industrialized countries manage to find common cause with one another as opposed to being highly individualistic. I suggest starting there when searching for solutions.
Birdbrain Alley, I agree with your sentiment but I think we should give Green some credit. He did finally hold the Dims equally responsible for the 30-year upward transfer of wealth which has climaxed with the Obama Goldman orgasm. I think he just needs a little more time to completely admit defeat and devote himself to a new solution. And I don't mean to sound patronizing. The only chance we have to change this fascist system is to create a broad base of resistance, including (soon to be former?) Repugs and Dims who are rational and ethical enough to grasp the horrible reality of the cancerous one-party plutocracy and want to act for change. Surely there must be one or two :-)
Desmoulins (Mills?)
Yes. I agree.
My response is based on Mr. Green repeatedly trying, in numerous articles, to stay within the two party frame. Even here, where he does reach a little further, he still had to end the article with the specter of a Palin administration. This is the set-up for the same OLD routine of "My god, You can't seriously vote for anyone other than a democrat! The democrat is our only HOPE!"
As long as there are fools who cling to the corruption of the republican/democrat mentality, I hope there will be fools like me who try to push them toward sanity.
Thanks.
I think you are putting words in his mouth. Yes, he is possibly giving too much to the Palin-fear-fest, and some might interpret this to mean that he would support voting democrat as a lees-bad option. But he does not say this, you do.
I admit that his republican bashing feels like the old two party tango. And, yes, it seems totally useless to me. But show me where he is pimping democrats. Is there anything in this article, or any of his recent articles that makes you think he would support voting democrat again? He is basically calling Obama a puppet to Wall Street. What more do you need?
In the end, it all comes down to "me" and my pay check. And this is exactly how the oligarchy wants it. Kiss up to management or lose your livelihood. Where you gonna go as jobs become more scarce? You can't just jump to another ship any more.The corporatocracy has behind it the legal uses of the military in its off shore accounts. With rising unemployment, the conditions are ripening for them to use it here. Can you feel it when you push for equal treatment in the work place? Can you feel it when Obama talks about a civilian army here at home? Can you feel it when no one is prosecuted for wire tapping? Can you feel it when AIG distributes bonuses straight from the public trough? Can you feel it when someone running 2 wars gets the Nobel Peace Prize? Truth is being turned on its head.
I'm for a practice used out here in the wild west. It tends to make the recipient less aggressive. Turns their minds from ass to grass shall we say. Most importantly allows you to keep bad genetic traits from infiltrating the herd. It's called a roundup and castration bee. Yup I recomend it for every bankster, politician, lobbyist, wall street broker, health insurance executive, corporate CEO, pentagon official, and those Mr. Green refers to as the uber wealthy. However I think in this instance the proceedure should be changed some what with the cut being made directly below the adams apple.
I believe the Romans used such people for service in their government. They make good singers also.
Ah, the castrati. In fact, the practice extended into the 1700s, with Handel writing parts for what they called "Male counter tenor".
I say that is too much work. Just take the whole lot of them and put them on a very small island in the middle of the ocean. They can await the rising oceans from there. Fish need to eat, too.
A very good and sober analysis by Mr. Green. Too true.
Thank you for this piece Mr. Green. I'm happy to see that you've managed to survive the detox from Obama apologist which you've been undergoing for some months now and refind your poli-sci prof. voice. Thanks also for the momentary relief your words gave me from the burning desire I've felt since O's war is peace speech (really since the bank bailout) to see key members of the Bush and Obama admins tortured--publicly--in the same way their victims at Guantanamo and elsewhere around the world have been. Ok, don't worry, I'm conscious enough to distinguish which of my rage-driven fantasies are righteous indignation and which aren't.
But your last couple of paragraphs ending with:
"We got part of the way to a more just society during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, though it was a minor miracle that we did. And it probably really required the Great Depression to do it, along with the twin legislative forces of nature more commonly known as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
We may actually get there again.
Though if I had to guess, I suspect instead that the next stop is Palinism."
That space between your last two sentences is very large, large enough to accommodate a movement, a peaceful(?) revolution, full spectrum organizing and action, whatever you want to call it. I would love to read your article about the practical possibilities which could fill that space, specifically in the context of the history of the US in the 20th century or of other successful progressive/revolutionary movements which could suggest models. I've read with great interest CD posts in the last few days which offer rough proposals for concerted purposeful planned action to jumpstart a movement--those by "metal" in particular stay with me. (Surely that vile and profoundly offensive speech put the last nail in the coffin of any hope held out for Obama, at least for people with a modicum of intelligence and a modicum of independence from cushioned "liberal/progressive" bourgeois wannabee elites). FULL BLOWN FASCISM, LIKE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, MAY BE JUST AROUND THE CORNER. CAN WE AFFORD TO WAIT? ARE WE GOING TO TAKE IT LYING DOWN?
I would add to -
"We got part of the way to a more just society during the middle chunk of the twentieth century, though it was a minor miracle that we did. And it probably really required the Great Depression to do it, along with the twin legislative forces of nature more commonly known as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson."
And also possibly due to the fact that we were the only major power after WWII left standing fully erect and were able to ride the crest of the world economic wave until the '80s when we began our inexorable slide backward.
Well, it may be the best of times or worst of times however you want to approach it. Enough people are disillusioned with the status quo that the country is ripe for organized movement progressive politics and true progressive candidates. We should find good progressive candidates and campaign for them NOW through internet and word of mouth where you work and play. Now is not the time to give up as the uber wealthy are playing with the future of this earth. We are looking at doing something now or going extinct. How many more wars can we take? How much more pollution can this planet take? There is a limit.
If thirdworldization of the US is part of the corporate agenda(consciously or not), then they won't mind letting us slip into a civil war. Because this idea seems so unimaginable in a country as advanced as this one, it keeps anyone from contemplating it. That's not a good thing.
..."the wealthy go to churches where Jesus the proto-Socialist who talked about camels and needles has been morphed instead into the First Coming of Ayn Rand." So true. We are witnessing the end result of the implementation of Rand's philosophy: the worship of the dollar, the elevation of the rich to hero status.
Rand, Friedman, von Hayek, the WTO, IBRD, Ebenezer Scrooge, now under new D management
Rand was not a supporter of enriching oneself at the expense of others. Most of the massive wealth redistribution which is happening is directly enabled by the federal government, and is coming from redistributed tax dollars, inflation, borrowed money, and shady financial practices. If you go to aynrand.org you'll find tons of articles against the bailouts, which was the greatest corporate heist in modern history. All of these "too big to fail" corrupt corporations should have gone bankrupt, downsized, and restructured yet it was your darling liberals who supported feeding the cancer. Show me the top 1% of wealthy Americans, and I will show you a group of people who depend heavily on the federal government to retain and increase their wealth.
I see your point, this could be considered a form of neo-fascism.
There is nothing "neo" about it. It's just fascism. Those who run the businesses think they should run everything else, too. It doesn't matter that they have destroyed the country, THEY KNOW BETTER.
See my statement above about the small island treatment.
Not to split hairs but Fascism was pretty much created by Benito Musolini and his party. Neo-fascism refers to more recent variants. No matter the term is often mis-understood and mis-used, as are most political terms.
I don't think the blue dogs are his "darling liberals." The left wanted the banks nationalized-not bailed out. Wouldn't letting them fail result in the collapse of the financial system?
Mr. Gullible, Ayn Rand is a monster.
Though most ordinary people not in boardrooms know it, we have been under too much of the influence of Ayn Rand for the last three decades of this nation, from Reagan on, due to immense corporate influence and interference. So what we have now is in part the responsibility of the 'thinking' of Ayn Rand, enough so that it discredits her thouroughly, no matter how many twisted apologetics come forward (now blaming 'liberals' or 'leftists' perhaps for the entire debacle.)
Though technically correct in saying the top 1% depend heavily on the government to retain and increase their wealth, the 1% do so knowing that They are the Blessed Randian Atlases upon whose shoulders the world depends, so as Randian Bob Rubin would say, they "deserved" and "earned" the government spoils- really deserved even MORE that they took- that really should not belong to the lazy, stupid plebians who do not deserve anything that the Atlases can get away with stealing. If the plebes are worthy, why aren't they Atlases? And anyway, if the Atlases refuse to do their stealing, won't the economic-political world collapse and come to a halt?
And after all, did not the Blessed 1% BUY the government, and so ought to now OWN the government? Hell, I know stockbrokers who have said as much. So now your beloved government is Private Property of the 1% Atlases, just like Ayn Rand would have LOVED. And if you don't like what the property owners are doing and don't want to pay their 'rent', they can tell you to 'Get Off My Private Property and Get Out of this bought-and-paid-for privately-owned-nation!'
Hooray Ayn Rand!
It is just as the White Russian Royalist Ayn Rand had hoped for. That is why Ayn Rand is the most popular 'filosofer' among the corporate elite and the Neo-Cons and the 'Free' Market' buccaneers and the Friedmanite uber-capitalists. Enriching oneself at the expense of others, and the redistribution of wealth UPWARDS is EXACTLY what Ayn Rand was FOR, only in true Orwellian style, she imputed she was for the opposite- BUT only when it came to government imposing rules on the Atlases of Money and taxing the rich for redistribution to the unworthy, deserve-to-be-poor.
She HATED democracy, and the people; she thought it was mob rule. She was an extreme individualist libertarian (see kook Ron Paul), who denied any social contract, who thought Money was sacrosanct and made people what they were. She worshipped MONEY (her funeral substituted '$' signs for religious symbols), her True God. She was FOR top-down, ruling elite, unbridled corporate control of all world governments, or rather corporate statism, also called Fascism, wherein the ruling corporations run the government. And we are just about there. So welcome to the United States of Super Randianism, the USSR. Look around. Like what you see? I don't.
And who is perhaps Randian #1? Why, surprise, surprise, it is Alan Greenspan, who is so Randian he actually helped Ayn Rand write ATLAS SHRUGGED way back when, and who is a billionaire who enriched himself mightily in government service- serving Goldman Sachs, because, as Ayn Rand would sum up her philosophy,... Greed Is Good!
To hell with Ayn Rand!
And last but most, applause and kudos to Mr. Green, whose erudition and enlightening commentary is always appreciated. Good to have you aboard, sir. Though our ship of state is listing badly and is dead in the water.
Yeah! Rand....and Darwin and all his survival of the fittest! The powerful crush the weak. I'd say its wrong, whatever that means, but who am I to say?
"We are simply talking here about sociopaths - people who cannot fathom a reason to alter their predatory behavior under any circumstances, even when the lives of millions are at stake, and even when another pile of millions of dollars in their investment portfolio does nothing to improve their condition because they are already so rich to begin with."
Toward the end of Roman Polanski's film "Chinatown" the detective Gittes played by Jack Nicholson figures out the murders were committed by the John Huston character, the obscenely wealthy former owner of the Los Angeles Water Department. The motive was money, lots of money. Nicholson asks Huston: "How much better can you eat? What more can you buy that you don't already own?" Huston, baffled by such a stupid question, huffily answers, "The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!"
That's what today's locusts have done - bought the future, which for us will be fucked at the root. And the nation sits around with its collective thumb up its ass and does nothing except fantasizing about being one of the locusts.
Obama is a terrible disappointment. That he's turned out to be the political equivalent of a gangster rapper is even a bit of a surprise though to me. WTF do we need to do to get any Change around here?
Well, we can start by getting rid of bigotry.
When everybody stops believing in the fairy tale that the two party establishment is going to produce and support a viable candidate who will shake up the status quo. Either Ron Paul or Mike Gravel would have at least stopped the wars. But the media, even progressive websites like this one, swept them under the rug.
I can't tell you how many times I hear stuff like, "Well, I really like their ideas, but they're just not presidential." We as Americans need to stop choosing gloss over substance and choose leaders with integrity, not polished lawyers who talk with elegance out of both sides of their mouth.
"We as Americans need to" stop trusting what we're told by the media, including the "progressive" media, and start thinking instead. That Obama was annointed as an acceptable establishment candidate was immediately clear to me when I saw his glowing portrait on the cover of Time magazine in the fall of 2006 (October 23, 2006) with the caption "Why Barack Obama Ccould Be The Next President" (for other magazine covers see www.obamamagazine.com/?p=95). The ruling class owns and runs the media. I'm 53 and despite becoming more educated, sophisticated and nuanced since my teems, my inner Marxist has called it right consistently for the past 35 years in both domestic and international affairs.
"[E]ven progressive websites like this one" are controlled (either surrepticiously or outright) by the elites. Do you really think that the people running these boards are that stupid? How come little old me could see through the "Obama phenomena" immediately and not these people who are so much smarter and more informed than me? They "swept under the rug" (deleted) anything that detracted from Obama. It was deliberate.
Interesting that Prof. Green sees the relatively healthy wider spread of wealth economy of the mid-20th century as an "aberration". Is a top-heavy wealth distribution system 'normal'?
'Aberration' in the sense of 'departing from the normal' might be true considering how mankind from earliest times has allowed 'leaders' and the greediest, those with the biggest personalities and smallest morals, to seize power and wealth.
I would prefer to think that such asocial power grabbing and personal accumulation of valuable resources is the aberration. Certainly, all major religions prescribe caring actions for others, and they have wielded influence for millennia.
And we are discovering that empathy is related to genetics.* Hopefully, humankind will evolve into the best we can be.
* http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moral-molecule/200906/moral-sentiments-in-the-brain
* http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6919399.ece
I do not know if empathy is related to genetics, some control experiments may or may not support a theory here.
But I know for certain that sympathy is a function of imagination, this is why art and compassion and the strength it gives is so necesssary for our community.
:)
Sioux Rose
XZORLOC: Excellent observation.
Thanks for your certainty, xzor!@? I'm convinced! On the other hand, I can allow my imagination to wander, hold on a sec....eeeeeya. Man, that was a bit scary...I can imagine all manner of good AND evil, or whatever our relative morality wants to call that shit. I hope I avoid that community with the troubling imagination; you know, the one that eats twelve year old virgin schnauzers! I like schnauzers, but not for dinner, raw.
Well, that's a good observation about Britan and its people, much the same could be said of Germany. How many times did the German people have to get their noses rubbed in it. How desparate did they have to get? How many generations had to live under pure chauvanistic militarism before they decided to act differently? And why are we different than the Germans? Our long night has just begun and a move towards the right seems inevitable. War, even nuclear war looms before us and I can't say that a society as stupid, greedy. ignorant and foolish as the U.S. with Sarah Palin as President doesn't deserve it.
Your view of people and American people in particular is very grim and I feel not based in reality.
While the system here sucks, I have found most individuals here to be very kind, generous, loving and non-materialistic.
Don't you think everyone dying in a nuclear blast to be a bit excessive?
Think about our karmic debt.
We live lush lives, while weaker others are robbed of their resources for our benefit.
Yes, life is getting harder for americans. But relatively speaking, we're getting fat eating stolen food while our victims starve.
I don't see many people in this country that really give a fuck. I don't think the necessary change can come from within. Nobody really cares.
"...We are simply talking here about sociopaths..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopath#Classification
Factor 1
Aggressive narcissism
1. Glibness/superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self-worth
3. Pathological lying
4. Cunning/manipulative
5. Lack of remorse or guilt
6. Emotionally shallow
7. Callous/lack of empathy
8. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Factor 2
Socially deviant lifestyle
1. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
2. Parasitic lifestyle
3. Poor behavioral control
4. Promiscuous sexual behavior
5. Lack of realistic, long-term goals
6. Impulsiveness
7. Irresponsibility
8. Juvenile delinquency
9. Early behavioral problems
10. Revocation of conditional release
Traits not correlated with either factor
1. Many short-term marital relationships
2. Criminal versatility
Mr. Green writes that 'greedy elites will always use their power to acquire unseemly quantities of wealth'. The elites he is reffering to are the wealthiest of people in the U.S.A. The 'bottom 98 percent' of people in the U.S.A. are supposedly the downtrodden masses yearning to be free of the oppressive upper class. But...let's take a look at this from a world point of view. The U.S.A. has about 4% of the worlds' population and consumes about 25% of the worlds' resources. If an equitable redistribution of wealth is to take place, who is going to have to downsize their piggy share of the worlds' pie? Of course! It is the people in the U.S.A. who will need to downsize their consumption so that the people in China, India etc. can have a higher quality of life. The U.S.A. has largely gotten around this so far by borrowing money and by swindling the rest of the world with fraudulent Wall Street investments. The U.S.A. is still consuming a disproportionate amount of the worlds' wealth through borrowing. Foisting bad investments on the rest of the world has gotten nearly impossible since the downfall of Leyman. Eventually borrowing will get more expensive and possibly even dry up. Then the U.S.A. will be up against a wall. And what will the good people of the U.S.A. do when they are faced with the prospect of living a lifestyle comparable to the average dweller on the earths' surface? Is it possible that the U.S.A. will use that massive military machine to try and secure continued wealth by any means necessary?
"Is it possible that the U.S.A. will use that massive military machine to try and secure continued wealth by any means necessary?"
They are doing it now.
I'd like to see more articles like this in the mainstream media (fat chance) to help wake up the American public to what's happening in this country. Electing Obush and his fellow Republicrats obviously isn't going to change much.
Where the article lost me was on the wealth statistics of the richest 400 Americans. According to their October 2009 issue, the average net worth of The Forbes 400 was $3.17 billion and their minimum net worth was $950 million. That's quite a difference from the $260 million figure quoted in the article above.
What that means is that even if the very poorest of the Forbes 400 can invest their wealth at just 1%, they can count on making almost $10 million a year for just sitting on their asses.... which is more in one year than most Americans will earn in five lifetimes working 8-10 hours a day . Talk about wretched excess!
I wish I knew how to fix this huge disparity, but someone much smarter is going to have to figure out how to fix a system where the richest team owners have moved the goalposts, bought off the rule makers, the referees, the announcers and the media, got the public to finance a new stadium, raised the price of admission... and hired some bombastic shills to convince us all that things could be even better if we just cut the team owners taxes and eliminated burdensome rules and regulations.
>>All told, from the 1930s through the 1970s, America produced the biggest and richest middle class in human history. But then many of us made the mistake - as I did - of assuming that this had become, based on a solid society compact, the default status quo for the foreseeable future.
How much of that was due to the prescence of that "Workers Paradise" the USSR?
Is it not interesting that the race towards the bottom really took off when the USSR collapsed? The "Capitalist Class" no longer feeling they have to worry about a Workers Revolution?
Is it possible that all those workers that worked the factories and assembly lines in the USA from the 1940's and through to the 1970's , always under the fear of the "Communists" , were digging their own graves?
Like everything else in a consumer society they were "disposable" .
It was only necessary to reward Americans with a better standard of living up until the premise of "Socialism" was descredited and Americans thoroughly convinced it "unworkable". Now the Owners want it all back. It was just a loan.
I agree. I remember thinking, and remarking to another leftist friend at the time, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was very bad news for the working class and middle class of the US. I knew the elites would swamp us with propaganda to convince the multitudes that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant all socialism was fatally flawed ("unworkable" as you state) and corporate capitalism was the only possible system for the future. That would have the effect of making socialist revolution unimaginable and therefore the elite predators could take back all the concessions won by working people over the decades without worrying about revolution or even successful political organizing by the left.
I think many on the US left over the years never fully appreciated how the Soviet revolution/experiment put the so-called "fear of god" or, more appropriate here, the "fear of the people" into the minds of the capitalist elites.
Very perceptive kivals. At the time I never thought the demise of the Soviet Union would have a negative impact on the American working class.
I wonder how long it will take folks that feast at the MSM buffet everyday to figure out that our current capitalist system is raping them blind? It seems like most of them have fallen for the scapegoat that socialism has become, in the mean time American style out of control capitalism picks their bones clean.
Those statistics are unassailable, glaring, and in your face.
The more you brandish them, the more the flock are told that only prayer and Palin can protect them from the godless communists in our universities who brandish statistics about wealth, climate, or anything else. Knowledge is the enemy of faith.
(I should qualify that I personally believe in both God and the healing powers of congregation, but sheesh, has America taken that into a new Puritan Age or what?)