The most unlikely people are outing themselves as DFHs. Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, dissects “The costs of rising economic inequality“:
… If you asked Americans how much of the nation’s pretax income goes to the top 10 percent of households, it is unlikely they would come anywhere close to 50 percent, which is where it was just before the bubble burst in 2007… Even within that top “decile,” the distribution is remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a 15-year run in which they captured more than half – yes, you read that right, more than half – of the country’s economic growth. As Tim Noah noted recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that’s the kind of income distribution you’d associate with a banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world’s oldest democracy and wealthiest market economy.
[…] __
There are moral and political reasons for caring about this dramatic skewing of income, which in the real world leads to a similar skewing of opportunity, social standing and political power. But there is also an important economic reason: Too much inequality, just like too little, appears to reduce global competitiveness and long-term growth, at least in developed countries like ours.
[…] __
People don’t work hard, take risks and make sacrifices if they think the rewards will all flow to others. Conservative Republicans use this argument all the time in trying to justify lower tax rates for wealthy earners and investors, but they chose to ignore it when it comes to the incomes of everyone else.
__
It’s no coincidence that polarization of income distribution in the United States coincides with a polarization of the political process. Just as income inequality has eroded any sense that we are all in this together, it has also eroded the political consensus necessary for effective government. There can be no better proof of that proposition than the current election cycle, in which the last of the moderates are being driven from the political process and the most likely prospect is for years of ideological warfare and political gridlock.
__
Political candidates may not be talking about income inequality during this election, but it is the unspoken issue that underlies all the others. Without a sense of shared prosperity, there can be no prosperity. And given the realities of global capitalism, with its booms and busts and winner-take-all dynamic, that will require more government involvement in the economy, not less.
Scuffletuffle
Word.
WereBear
That’s gold, Jerry. Gold!
Odie Hugh Manatee
Shorter and to the point: “Why try to accomplish anything in a career when the deck is stacked against you?”
We are in a serious mess with the imbalance in our distribution of wealth. Supply and demand are dead once you control the supply or act in cahoots with others to do so. Dropping tax rates on the rich only gave them more money to reward/bribe politicians with, which in turn led to more favorable policies that further favored the rich. Having few people who control much of the money in a country like ours is a recipe for disaster. We are so far off the rails that I don’t see how we are going to get back on them.
The rich own us and that is pretty much it.
ChrisS
A little late to the party in the sense that I’ve just gotten around to reading “The Big Short,” but the difference between what is considered money in the financial industry and what is considered money in the day-to-day lives of probably 250 million Americans is fucking enormous.
geemoney
I think I saw this here, first: http://www.lcurve.org. The absolute worst thing that has happened to America is the systematic dismantling of the middle class. The greed in this country is fucking toxic, and it’s killing what has made us, historically, strong.
Edited to include the link text. Link Fail.
Linda Featheringill
If the upper crust confiscates all the goodies, the rest of the population won’t be able to buy things.
Which is sort of where we seem to be going.
Napoleon
This whole subject has gotten several mentions in the MSM in the last week or so. NPR had a whole segment on it this morning.
geg6
We’ve been a banana republic ever since St. Ronnie, may his corpse be vandalized by rats and dung beetles, got into office and started all this with his bullshit trickle down, Laffer curve Ponzi scheme. Nice to see Steven Pearlstein finally noticed.
bkny
read some of the comments to pearlstein’s column. it’s depressing — though, sadly, not surprising at the ugly being expressed there.
Punchy
It will be comedy gold to watch all these Teatards get elected, then epic fail in their attempts to repeal the 17th, the 14th, the 13th, HRC, attempts to kill the filly, attempts to pass guns on campuses, nursery schools, halfway houses, and drug rehab clinics, attempts to secede from the nation, ban abortion, and kill all the Browns.
And their constituency, who hasn’t been steeped in reality since 2001, wont understand and the intra-party bitching and protesting and “primary-his-ass!” calls will become comical.
Earl Butz
@Punchy: Comedy gold, indeed. America as a Third World Nation, coming live to a neighborhood near you.
Ha ha!
Bulworth
Once someone outs themselves as a DFH, then it’s all down hill from there.
WyldPirate
What Perlstein and all of the rest neglect to say is that this income inequality won’t change until there are armed mobs and rivers of blood running in the streets.
Then the cycle will start again.
“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.”
orogeny
Of course, Pearlstein had to throw in a little “on the one handism:”
’cause everyone knows that the Democrats are just as far to the left as the Republicans are to the right.
Dennis SGMM
OT: Happy Anniversary, America! Today marks the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan. On this date in 2001America launched a series of air strikes that were the opening of the war.
Comrade Dread
Spot on.
When you’re working harder and harder not even to get ahead, but to keep yourself afloat in a middle class existence, at some point, you’re just going to give up, and when you see enough people in similar situations, and you see businesses shipping jobs overseas, rich jacka$$es reaping millions in bonuses while contributing nothing to society, eventually you’re going to conclude that there’s no point, you’re getting screwed, and the government is for the rich, by the rich, and of the rich.
Zifnab
@WyldPirate:
The Great Depression did a great job of leveling out incomes. Once you had a handful of plutocrats reigning over a broken nation, and folks from New York to California developing newfound respect and appreciation for the Communist Party, things changed fairly rapidly.
The Eisenhower Era 95% tax bracket wasn’t the result of armed revolution, but it was the result of a very powerful social backlash.
Have a little faith in Democracy. We’ll sort ourselves out once things get bad enough.
geg6
As always, my hero, the Rude Pundit has exactly the right take on our fine country today:
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2010/10/destructive-con-job-of-modern-gop-for.html
Omnes Omnibus
@WyldPirate: Based on your comment over the past few weeks, it almost sounds like you are rooting for collapse and violent revolution. Be careful what you wish for.
kay
@orogeny:
He just misses Republican moderates, because then he could promote how wonderful they are. Democratic moderates don’t count.
It’s great that he wrote it, but it’s just a variation on FDR, right? He’s getting a little nervous because there’s this big mass of poor people out there, and they might get feisty. Even it up! Pronto! The vast majority are getting restless! They may stop working, and….organize or something.
How many times do people have to figure this out and have this big ground-breaking conversion? 100? 500?
I swear to God, there simply isn’t time to bring conservatives up to speed. We hashed all this shit out decades ago. It won’t work if there’s a huge group at the bottom.
bkny
@WyldPirate: the national security state will crush any citizen uprising. look at the types of weaponry being developed — heavily on the crowd control side.
and then you get to deal with all the legislation and the vague definitions of ‘terrorist’.
i honestly think the powers that be are so looking forward to civil unrest. they get to test out all of their shiny new toys and robogear.
WyldPirate
@Zifnab:
I think the aftermath of economic reforms during and after the Great Depression were an anomaly.
We are just as likely to go the route of the Wiemar Republic, in fact, probably moreso now than then.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: And isn’t their wealth based, at least in part, on the rest of us buying things?
Might be a flaw in their ointment.
geg6
@WyldPirate:
I agree. America’s response to the Depression was a historical anomaly. Facism and dictatorships are a much more likely outcome based on the historical record of similar times.
WyldPirate
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, I’m not rooting for it at all. I see nothing at all in our political system or in our citizenry to convince me that the Republic can be pulled out of its spiral down the toilet bowl.
I’m not buying the horseshit that all of you Tinkerbell fans are selling. You’re welcome to keep clapping, though.
Bill Section 147
I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords.
I always find it funny when I hear someone who makes the majority of their income from actually working complain about the government regulations, taxes, or social services. If the magic fairy eliminated any and all costs associated with those almost nothing in your life would improve.
Zero regulations on industry? Look at any example of a low-to-no-regulation government in the world today. American exceptionalism? Study American history from 1870-1920. Look up pictures of American cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland and St. Louis in the early ’60s – nothing but blue skies.
No taxes? If you or your boss is paying you for your efforts and your after-tax income is $0-infinity today and you had no taxes starting tomorrow I think you would be in for a pay cut. If you take home $30K after taxes now – you, or some other worker, is going to be happy taking home $30K with zero taxes tomorrow.
No Social Services. Back to history. All of the ill, sick, unemployed, criminals and insane people won’t suddenly disappear. They will live on your streets, slums and alleys. Their poor health, filth and disease will be part of your daily life. Dickens wasn’t writing about some future dystopia.
And political power is always, has always been, the control of wealth.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Pearlstein’s typically been a pretty neutral observer over the last 5 years.
One thing where he does parrot Rethug talking points is the whole “public sector employees are vastly over compensated” bullshit. What he fails to see is the public sector folks have suddenly become the last bastion of middle class jobs in this country and the Repups have them in the cross hairs as they work on taking the country back to 1890.
So, Pearlstein’s no Krugman, that’s for sure. But given the quality of the wankers who opine (and report for that matter) at the (com)Post these days, he’s golden.
EconWatcher
Income inequality seems to be a more respectable topic recently among some right-leaning intellectuals. I’m working my way now through “Fault Lines,” by Raghuram Rajan, a Chicago school economist. One of his major themes is that growing inequality and lack of income growth for the middle class was a prime cause of the financial collapse–which I think is spot on.
While I haven’t finished, it appears that one of his major proposed solutions is “education reform.” I suspect I’m going to find his remedies for the situation less than convicing. Kids living in deep poverty are not going to be helped much by an improved school system. But still. Recognizing the problem is a big first step.
WyldPirate
@<a href="#comment-2094808"bkny:
I think you’re probably right.
It won’t effect me too much as I’ll likely be dead before it happens or shortly after as I’m old, and dependent on insulin. But a “Bladerunner” sort of scenario might not be too far-fetched.
MaximusNYC
I love my friends and family, I love many things about this country, I love my city (NYC). I don’t want to leave.
But when I see stories like this — and when I see the party of the “left” afraid to let grotesque tax breaks for millionaires expire on schedule, when I see the Supreme Court opening the floodgates to letting anonymous corporate donors buy the government — I grow increasingly convinced that the political elite of America are almost completely corrupted. We are sliding, faster and faster, toward plutocracy. And I don’t see how any vote I cast can do much to stop it.
Canada and Germany are looking pretty good by comparison. Assuming I could ever find a way to live and work in one of those places.
Omnes Omnibus
@WyldPirate: Your Tinkerbell metaphor is interesting since both democracy and capitalism are dependent on faith and belief on part of participants. Money has value because we believe it does. Governments have power because we believe that they do (coercive power is there, but people can, and have, overcome it).
WereBear
They didn’t get that way by magic.
I believe it was Edith Hamilton who introduced me to the concept that the ancient Greeks felt that in the long run, the forces of evil would prevail.
But they fought, anyway.
Stefan
Have a little faith in Democracy. We’ll sort ourselves out once things get bad enough.
Yes, but prior historical experience in places like Russia, Germany, China, France, etc. shows that they can get bad and stay bad for very, very long periods of time before they get better. “Just hang on and it’ll all be better in 70 years” isn’t exactly comforting.
Short Bus Bully
It’s the fall of Rome. I think we’re right on schedule for how long that empire lasted, complete with the “exceptionalism” part.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: It would really help me out a lot if you people would stop depressing me. I have an interview this afternoon for a great position with the state gov’t; it would involve enforcing state labor laws. I am trying to get up for it, and you people are killing me.
Bill in OH
Robert Reich just wrote a book about this. I haven’t read it yet, but his thesis is something similar to Wyldpirate’s. We dodged a bullet last time, thanks to Marriner Eccles’ prescience. Not so likely this time around.
Kryptik
The most likely scenario is that the poor, the ‘illegals’, and the Muslims (as well as anyone sufficiently brown and swarthy) will continue to be scapegoated, corporations and fat cats will continue to demand more breaks and generally holding the economy hostage, and the media will wonder why we even have a lower class since they’re all leeches anyway.
The conversations and the frames we have are so utterly skewed it almost seems inevitable that the upcoming collapse won’t result in anything more but the rich getting richer and fuck everyone else, let them drown in American Idol reruns.
WereBear
I felt like this in 2004. I couldn’t believe so many people were that stupid.
But now, more people are not that stupid!
Who thought the election of our first President who is not a WASPY white male type would go smoothly?
Anyone? Bueller?
Martin
The wealthiest 400 Americans have a combined net worth of $1.4T. The bottom 50% (50,000,000 households) are working hard, taking risks, and making sacrifices and the rewards are mostly flowing to those 400 people.
Capitalism is a redistribution of wealth system just like soçialism is. It merely uses different criteria to do that redistribution, and our current flavor of it gives massive preference to those that have found themselves in very specific positions.
Democrats really need to learn how to shift the narrative off of these bumper sticker GOP slogans into a meaningful education of the population. It doesn’t need to be any more than the 4 sentences above, but they aren’t even getting those 4 sentences out.
MaximusNYC
@Werebear:
True. I admire that attitude. And when I was younger I had more fighting spirit.
Now, as I approach 40, and I’m trying to figure out how to live the rest of my life in freedom and solvency, I fear that America may remain hostile to middle-class security longer than I can remain employed.
My company is shipping jobs — white-collar jobs — to India. My boss’s boss was just over there for a week, and the scuttlebutt is that 1 of our projects has already been covertly moved to the Hyderabad office.
I can’t fight this. I am a tiny cog in my company’s machine. And there is virtually no one on the political scene that I could vote for, work for, or donate to who would make any real effort to change the system that is greasing the skids for this.
The elites of this country decided some time ago that their own financial enrichment was not only more important than, but could be completely decoupled from, the project of building up the nation as a whole. In fact, they are now seeking profit cannibalistically, by destroying the American middle class.
Cat Lady
Income inequality is a feature not a bug. Capitalism has always been in competition with democracy, with government acting as league commissioner to keep the game relatively fair. Gordon Gekko’s cheerleading for greed was adopted in the 80s, and the game has been rigged since. The media used to act as the referees throwing a red flag now and again, but now they all want to screw the Red Team’s quarterback. We’re well and truly fucked. Have a nice day!
Kryptik
It really is upsetting how many people truly and honestly buy into the idea that ‘The Rich are rich ‘cuz they worked hard. The poor are poor because they’re lazy bastards and deserve to be poor’.
Like one of our wisest minds said: ‘It’s called ‘The American Dream’ for a reason: You have to be asleep to believe in it’.
kay
@WereBear:
It feels like 2004 to me too, not 1994 or the rest.
I’m considering it a do-over, rather than predictive, because I can’t operate under this doom cloud.
So, like 2004, but with a different ending.
AhabTRuler
@Omnes Omnibus: Good luck, but be prepared to be demonized for your paltry salary and benefits, and if you accept a pension plan, be prepared for it to be taken from you later. Especially because you are a JD (MYRIH), you will be targeted as a”fat cat living off the public teat,” even though you could likely get more money in the private sector.
One of the most consistent examples of innumeracy and bad-faith reporting over the last two or so years has been reportage (not opinion) on public sector salaries. News orgs appear to be completely baffled by the statistical analysis of factors like tenure, experience, age, and education level when examining the subject. Furthermore, articles generally fail to make the connection as to what the use of contractors for low-skill or low-level positions does to the average pay rate.
The good news is that your pay will be compared to a number that includes Wallmart greeters and migrant laborers, and you will determined to be a free-loader. But good luck!
Dennis SGMM
I’m in my sixties and, until recently, I’ve always believed that the ship of state would eventually right itself. What changed? A lot of things, some of them have been have mentioned on this thread. To me, the most disheartening of them all is that a short two years after a largely GOP-induced collapse their candidates instead of being booed off the podium are instead making noises about taking back one or both houses of Congress. It’s beyond me how so many of my fellow citizens have become either amnesiac or just plain stupid to the point that they haven’t the faintest idea of how badly they’ve been fucked and who’s doing the fucking. I fully anticipate that Jeb Bush will run for president in 2012 – and win.
homerhk
The Health Care law in 2010 was the largest attempt to address that inequalilty since, oh, the Stimulus passed in 2009 which in turn was the largest wealth distribution to poorer members of society in decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/business/24leonhardt.html
Is it enough to address all the inequality? No. But this shouldn’t get lost in all the debate about these two signature achievments of the Obama administration.
Omnes Omnibus
@AhabTRuler: That really helped with getting me up for the interview.
AhabTRuler
@Omnes Omnibus: If you want someone to lie to you, hire a prostitute (or turn on the teevee).
Countme?
“years of ideological warfare and political gridlock.”
No. There will massive violence and bloodshed throughout this country in a shorter time than that.
Ash Can
Isn’t this the same Steven Pearlstein who recently wrote an article on how the Teabaggers would be bad for American business? He’d better watch out, he’s getting shrill.
AhabTRuler
@Countme?: Thirty years passed between the Russian Famine of 1891 and the revolution, and the modern security state has tools available to it that would have made the Tsar’s security services wet themselves.
minachica
@Omnes Omnibus: Good luck – hope you get the job! As for a mood-enhancer, I’d recommend taking a walk by the lake – it’s a beautiful day, and that will keep you away from the internets. ;)
Elizabelle
Got to stand up for my man Steven Pearlstein, one of the last remaining bright spots at the Washington Post, and then it’s lights out.
He took on the Republicans and their idiotic ideology but good about 4 columns back. Pearlstein has always inhabited the reality-based world.
Does it taste like fruitcake, yet?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/21/AR2010092106747.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
And yes, the Post reader comments are depressing, but that’s the readership management is going for.
Maybe they don’t moderate the comments because they can’t stand to read the sh*t either.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Dennis SGMM:
I’ve wondered about this too. My guess is that there are several things driving this:
– Dem complicity in disasterous policy choices (NAFTA, repealing Glass-Steagall, etc.) over that last several decades. The GOP was smart in making sure that Dems got their hands dirty too. Thanks Blue Dogs!
– The timing was too close between the crash in 2008 and the change in administration in Jan 2009 for an ADHD public to deeply internalize that the GOP was in the driver’s seat when the car went into the ditch. Contrast that with what happened during the Great Depression 1.0, in which Hoover, et. al. were in power from 1929 to March 1933. It didn’t hurt that FDR let Hoover twist slowly in the wind between Nov 1932 and March 1933 as the banking system collapsed, just in case anybody had missed the point.
– Corporate news media, DC press corpse, etc. You know the story.
– Politics has gotten so toxic most people don’t want to pay any attention to it, at all. Who wants to tune in to a show that is a cross between The Three Stooges and Saw – the endless movie series.
– The social safety net worked, kinda-sorta. Mass immiseration of the sort we had during the 1930s has been prevented by the tattered shreds of the New Deal and subsequent Dem driven programs like SS, Medicare and Medicaid, SCHIP etc. Basically our current troubles aren’t bad enough to ignite a popular revolt against capitalism itself. For all of our jokes about pitchforks and torches, and setting up guillotines on Wall St., how many rich people have been killed so far? Are there car bombs and IEDs going off on Wall St. and in DC? No – there aren’t. The only people who have died from polical violence in the Great Recession are cops and unitarians and museum guards who have been victims of sporadic right wing nuts with guns. From the standpoint of our economic and political elites, the system is working as designed.
Elizabelle
@Ash Can:
re teabaggers bad for business.
Yup. Here’s the link.
Can Business Afford Jim DeMint?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092806308.html
addressing business leaders:
Michael Carpet
Typical false equivalency: “There can be no better proof of that proposition than the current election cycle, in which the last of the moderates are being driven from the political process and the most likely prospect is for years of ideological warfare and political gridlock.” Uh, there are plenty of moderates in the Democratic Party, it is the GOP that has gone Full Whackaloon.
Kryptik
@Michael Carpet:
It’s like the Blue Dogs don’t exist as long as it’s for the sake of ‘Pox On Both House’.
Then again, I could try and be generous, and pretend Pearlstein is talking about how the Blue Dogs are essentially pushing out genuine moderates to the left of them for the sake of their proto-centrist corporatism.
Elizabelle
John Cole bait:
WV GOP senate candidate pulls ad from youtube; used out of state actors to portray Obama detractors.
Delish.
Folksy Ad not so folksy after all
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/folksy-ad-not-so-folksy-after-all/?hp
They don’t even spell John Deere right in the casting memo.
geg6
@Kryptik:
And this is exactly why, unlike too many in this thread, I don’t consider Pearlstein to be any better than any of his fellow WaPo whores. It’s false equivalency ALL THE FUCKING TIME, with breaks for fellating our wackaloon GOP/Wall Street/energy behemoth overlords.
Fuck the WaPo and every fucking dimwit who lowers him or herself to work for that rag. For that matter, fuck the entire media of this country. I have completely given up on all print and televised “news” organizations. And now, the Internet is about to become no better.
I truly am becoming an America hater. I’ve been called that every since about 1972 and it’s never been true until now.
geg6
@Elizabelle:
And, still, the dumb hillbillies are going to vote for him, based on the polling. They like Manchin as governor, but still will vote for this asshole who doesn’t even live in WV (his residence is in FL).
Fuck this country.
Mnemosyne
Isn’t Pearlstein the one who just wrote that “a pox on both their houses” column a couple of weeks ago where he said that Republicans and Democrats are both the same so he’s quitting political journalism? Or was that a different WaPo writer called Pearlstein?
Chuck Butcher
After banging the income inequality drum for over 4 yrs I’m worn out with it. Proposing that FDR was the one to deal with it ignores the other “R”, TR. Some have made a saint of TR but in reality the country was coming unglued and he pretty much had to act.
Ah well, just another goddam hippie yelling…
There is an economic reason for high top marginal rates and a broad income scale – ie higher brackets, 250K is ludicrous as top rate. There is a reason for higher capital gains taxes and even a progressive rate. When it becomes stupid to take that last gadzillion dollars it goes back down the ladder or into business. Of course that also means not rewarding cheating with various loop holes.
Sure it qualifies as a dope dream, there is an alternative thanks to the 2nd Amendment.
Mnemosyne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Not only that, but there’s no competing system to put the fear of God into the capitalists. In the 1930s, the Russian Revolution was still fresh in everyone’s memory. Now the worst that could happen is a fascist state, and capitalists do well under fascism. So what’s the downside for them of letting the country slide into a fascist state?
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
Not a goddam thing. In fact, for them, it’s all good!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mnemosyne:
I’ve been saying the same thing for a couple of year now. The downfall of the US system began when the USSR collapsed and left-wing anti-capitalist ideologies in general were discredited by the failure of communism. Since 1991 our political and economic elites have had nothing left of serious consequence with which to restrain their irresponsibility and stupidity, by a sense that there might be a price to pay for fucking it all up.
Honestly I don’t see any way out of this trap, short of a recurrence of the sort of anarchist violence which was a common event back in the Gilded Age. The reformers back in TR’s day had good reason to fear for what might happen, not just to our system but to them personally, if they didn’t find a way to restrain the worst excesses of 1890s style capitalism. Today’s elites do not live in fear, and their stranglehold on our political system will continue so long as that condition persists.
Bill Section 147
@geg6: I want my country back. Also.
A lot of conservatives want some wayback machine to the Ike era but none of them want to pay for it. They can put the Freedom Isn’t Free! bumpersticker on the car but they won’t pay for the one made in the U.S. Walmart has one for $.99 cents and the local guy is charging $1.29. He must think I’m stupid if I’m going make him rich.
Linda Featheringill
On revolution:
In any given situation, the Establishment probably has the big guns, the force. Armed rebellion against the Establishment is likely to be a form of suicide. I mean that literally.
Nonviolent means exist but it would require a MASSIVE amount of people engaged in civil disobedience to really change a government’s ways. A nationwide strike might be an example of this. Perhaps coupled with millions of people milling around the capital. These methods would involve a lot of cooperation between people and I don’t know if the US could do that.
We could elect government officials that propose radical change, and elect such individuals by very large margins. But I don’t think that the US can do that, either.
The US might break out in several small rebellions. We are quite capable of doing that. The first few would be crushed utterly but if they kept popping up here and there, it might have an effect.
I think that the most effective means of revolution would be economic. That is how capitalism replaced feudalism. People developed ways to meet their needs that basically sidestepped the feudal lords and their lands. The bourgeoisie did it with trade and cash money instead of land.
Such an economic revolution could not stop at merely seizing the means of production, although I wouldn’t rule such seizures out. An economic revolution would have to offer an alternative way to meet our needs. And I don’t have one of those.
Ruckus
@bkny:
the national security state will crush any citizen uprising. look at the types of weaponry being developed—heavily on the crowd control side.
This.
This is one of the main differences between history and current events. If all you have is pitchforks and pikes you will be no match for the forces that will try and most likely succeed to control any uprising. The only way violence would have a chance to succeed would be if it was so large as to overwhelm the police and military. Anything less would just cause much death and bloodshed. Not that overwhelming force wouldn’t do the same. And it would not be easy or maybe even possible to arrange. So I don’t see violence being useful at all, because it would fail to achieve any goals, other than possible martyrdom. So like everything else that evolves or dies off, we need to adapt better non-violent ways of getting positive, progressive change.
ETA I see Linda F @67 beat me to it while I was away from the computer, actually working.
mclaren
Sure they do. Just whip them and torture them with rats and acid. They’ll come right around.
That’s how the Confederacy dealt with slaves who slacked off, isn’t it?
mclaren
@Ruckus:
You’re completely ignorant of real life in the real world.
Here’s how it works: a bunch of people armed with nothing more than rocks and sticks and can and often have overwhelmed highly armed infantry. They do it by charging in human waves until the infantry runs out of bullets.
People keep yapping about the depleted-uranium munitions and claymore mines and yadda yadda yadda. I’ve got news for you people…American forces had claymores in Nam. The cong had no trouble overrunning American positions in Nam. They just sent in more cong and more cong and still more cong until there were no claymores left. Then they charged until the guys at Khe Sanh or wherever ran out of bullets.
As for all these whizbang hi-tech gizmos like depleted uranium rounds…did it ever occur to you that the more hi-tech and the more lethal the weaponry, the more fragile it is and the harder it is to get to the troops via supply lines?
Imagine you’ve got a bunch of national guardsmen firing depleted uranium rounds at a whole city that’s rioting. They run out of depleted uranium rounds, now they need some more. But, oh, gosh, that ammo truck full of depleted uranium rounds was just blown off its axle by a home-made IED and it ain’t comin’. So now the national guardsmen are left with the rounds in their M16s. Unfortunately, the M16 doesn’t hold a lot of rounds, so they run out fast. Now the rioters are in the razor wire and they’re coming for those national guardsmen with sticks and tire irons.
The perennial cry of panicked U.S. troops is: “They’re in the wire! They’re in the wire!” That’s the last thing you hear from an overrun American army position just before the radio goes dead and the insurgents hang up the dead American soldiers from their heels on the nearest razor wire fence.
You people seem to imagine that just because the U.S. army has lots of hi-tech Buck Rogers whizbang weaponry, that makes ’em invincile. Just the opposite — the more hi-tech weapons, as a general rule, the less mobile and the more fragile and harder they are to resupply.
All those whizbang hi-tech weapons the American army has makes them weaker, not stronger. Our troops can’t deal with a bunch of barefoot fifteen-year-old kids in Afghanistan who are armed with bolt-action rifles — what makes you think American troops can deal with enraged starving Americans charging at ’em in human waves?
During WW II one dedicated tank-killing soldier could usually take out 4 or 5 enemy tanks. You’ll see the same think happening in America if we ever get an insurgency over here. In fact, with all the Radio Shacks and WalMarts in America, this country is a paradise of ingredients for home-made IEDs. Within a month, there wouldn’t be a humvee or M1A1 Abrams tanks left working on the streets and all the American troops would be on the run, out of ammo, their whizbang hi-tech weapons busted and smashed, and mobs of enraged citizens dragging U.S. flyboys from their helicopters and setting ’em on fire, just like in Somalia.
Unless American troops are willing to carpet-bomb American cities with napalm, there wouldn’t be a contest if U.S. citizens ever rose up against our army. The American army is a pitiful helpless impotent giant, regularly defeated by third world peasants. How long do you think the U.S. army would be able to hold out against citizens of the first world?