Fenian Rising says ” we need an alternative to this barbaric system” while Angry Bears opines that the wealthy are maybe dangerously clueless.
The Wealthy are poor Class War strategists. They are self defeating in such a way that they remove all ability for either side to win the Class War. The Wealthy must let the Enemy win the war in order for the Wealthy to win. I would caution that any approach toward a treaty by the Enemy to the Wealthy must be taken with care. It is not certain as to whether the Wealthy have the strength of character to accept that they are failures. By evidence of their tactics in the face of the data, forming a treaty with the Wealthy who act irrationally will be met with great frustration by the Enemy.
As the economy worsens, and it will, class distinctions will become even more pronounced. Judging from financial blogs I read, more than a few wealthy investor types really don’t get it about how angry people are getting. And we’re just seeing the leading wave of the anger now, it’s a populist upsurge coming out of seemingly nowhere. Of course, it’s been building for years. Now it’s in the open.
Populism can be a powerful force for the good, like the kind that Jim Hightower preaches. But it can also get ugly, as in the blaming of immigrants and foreigners for the problems or stoning the limos of the wealthy (or worse.) Actions like that just increase the ugliness and division and lessen the chance of real solutions. I hope we don’t go that route.
Burning the mansions and stoning the limos and mining the yachts…
These are not BAD THINGS. Stop making them sound like BAD THINGS.
The “people” have been–are again being–suckered.
It’s been going on a long time, of course.
The latest round began when, at the behest of their CorpoRat paymasters, the pols on both right wings of the Party of Property connived and collaborated with their owners to decouple wages from productivity, and make up the difference with credit. The Raygun years.
Since then, productivity of USer workers has risen steadily, but wages have stagnated, and the economy has stumbled along from crisis/bubble to crisis/bubble. Meanwhile debt has risen, to become the sole product of the USer economy in the post-industrial age. Afaik, all those “derivatives” are nothing more than collections of debt, re-wrapped and repackaged and peddled endlessly in more and more intricate ponzi schemes.
Nowadays, (if we were counting ‘troops’) debt outnumbers value by a factor of about 16-1.
Bad odds, if you’re value…
This particular class war has been going on a long time. The strategy was laid out in “The Limits to Growth” a plan prepared for the Club of Rome. I first tumbled to it in the foreward to the sequal, “Beyond the Limits”, where Dr. Meadows is whining about how the rich people have failed to take his advice. I said to myself “That’s not the way the rich people I know act. They just chose the alternative outcome to the one you naievly expected them to.” We are about at the endgame where the middle class is destroyed by both the private and national debts and the collapse of the dollar. Welcome to the 2 class world: the rich and the wage/debt slaves.
A very wise person… and I wish to hell I could remember who it was… recently said something along the lines of, “If we took every wannabe robber baron, every wall street parasite, every stock broker, every investment bank executive… in short, every sonuvabitch who had anything to do with this debacle and especially those who made money from it and laid them all out end to end… it would probably be the best thing that ever happened to this country.”.
Just about sums it up, eh?
They’re afraid of this: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4810644.ece
Normally, any decent person would be saddened at the headlines that yet another person has been murdered.
BUT, the big “but”…. Last few days I had seen seen headlines to a story that a CEO was murdered by the people he laid off made me debit my own Karma on lay-a-way because made me think: that guy’s Karma was a mother, not the mother that bakes cookies.
Yup, a CEO of an auto parts manufacturer that outsourced jobs to India was murdered by the very people he laid off in their Indian factory.
If those headlines were front page news in Wall Street Journal and/or major America news papers, needless to say, those headlines were buried away from Americans but quite big font headlines in the foreign press.
sorry for sentence slipup: correction
If those headlines were front page news in Wall Street Journal and/or major America news papers, needless to say the discussions in DC, the “who me puppy” face President’s scripted begging and our American CEO’s may be a bit more “humble” instead of “demanding…
Alas, those headlines were buried away from Americans but quite big font headlines in the foreign press for a reason.
There is one outcome to the Class War and the war will continue until that outcome is reached.
The “Wealthy” (more properly identified as the oppressing class) have been brilliant strategists for quite some time (maybe not “brilliant” but effective). Their great achievement, successfully propagandizing the “middle-class” into viewing their slave-masters as allies, has finally begun to fail.
Onward to the International Socialist Revolution!
For the classless society by way of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
> For the classless society by way of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
Good luck with that. Americans tend to run the other way when socialism is mentioned, much less agreeing to violent communist revolution.
But the reality of class differences is (finally) intruding into the general consciousness in the US.
Given global warming, coming water shortages, the crumbling infrastructure, and the sickly economy, it’d be way preferable to have everyone working together towards solving them rather than have a raging and possibly violent class war that solved nothing and distracted from the problems at hand.
I don’t know if this has happened in the U.S., but here in Canada the rich have used the MSM business pages to promote class warfare. I’ve seen plenty of griping about how those non-taxpaying freeloading low-income losers always vote against the free-enterprise party. Every time people have a protest march about poverty or homelessness, the conservatives say “We pay taxes; you don’t; go to hell.”
I guess with this middle-class squeeze, the rich have an interest in diverting middle-class anger towards a scapegoat. It’s uncool to blame immigrants and/or Aboriginals, but the poor are still a safe target.
You guys ought to get out more. News Flash: You ARE the priviledged class. I know this because you have internet access. That puts you in the top 10% of the world. So quitcherbitchin and do something for that 90% that’s never seen a blog, and never sent an email… or that 50% that lives on $2 a day or less. Seventy percent more people in this world are hungry than have internet access. Sure, the ultra-wealthy aren’t giving much of themselves to fix it. But as one of the world’s wealthiest people, what are YOU giving up?
And whoever said “Burning the mansions and stoning the limos and mining the yachts… are not BAD THINGS,” what makes you any different than them, using violence to achieve your own ends? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The financial system and the economy explained to the dummies :
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
We’re all dummies on the subject of money. We don’t know where it comes from. This 47 minutes video has some surprising revelations about money, and the ecnomy. A good base for discussion.
Disclaimer : My comment looks like an infomercial, but I have nothing to do with this video. I’ve just seen it yesterday, and loved it.