There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here’s one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
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In the United States, the emerging aristocracy remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that it’s the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class system is clandestine.
Given the state of the economy, the unwillingness of our politicians to do anything about pretty much anything, the realization by business at all levels that they just don’t need as many people as before, manufacturing jobs moving to other countries that are never coming back, computerized equipment requires less people for the remaining manufacturing jobs, etc., is there any real hope for reversing what the article talks about?
#32–So What==are there any? I don’t even know, suppose so statistically probable. I didn’t fit in a bit of a segue to Ivanna Trump==whatever the Donald’s daughter is named. Nice looking, cultured, educated, smart, hard working, and advantaged. That doesn’t bother me because there is merit in those born of advantage as well. But Paris Hilton? And the mix of merit vs inheritance becomes heavily weighted towards the inheritance when a society has been captured by the Super Rich. In North Korea–you see it with inheritance directly taking the power of government. In the GOUSA, its done indirectly with money.
I think in the next 20 years without a for real reform candidate we are going to see our own society unravel. Think “Knock Out” is a game that can only be played by punks with their dukes? Not in this country founded on Second Amendment remedies.
Even the Super Rich will mourn what they have created and fought for. A little less money and a lot more social ease is not a hard bargain to make==unless you live in a total vacuum.
Pro’s and Con’s to all we do.
How many bong hits are required to achieve the level of pragmatic existential evangelical anti-theist AND social critic?
Do you drink the bong water too?
The key to more equality is to eliminate inequality of power brought by more government.
The key to more equality is to be born rich.
#36–orchi==btw, I can’t see your name and not think of chinese therapy balls rolling around in someone’s sweaty palm. too large for anal foreplay for most of us, but the image is solidly there.
But to your pimp: No, its mostly book reading. That and Dr Phil. There is no more important question for understanding just about everything there is to understand: “How’s that working out for you?”
Yeah, it crack me up everytime I think that. Obama trying to compromise with the Pukes: “How’s that working out for you?”
And to America: tax cuts for the rich expecting jobs to trickle out as a result? ((talk about your orchi therapy)): “How’s that working out for you?”
And drill baby drill as we choke on the carbon asphyxiation and bleeding of our national treasure: “How’s that working out for you?”
THATS all “pragmatism.” All about “what works.” Sad how often isolated leaders can believe that which does not work is the way to go. How often do they seriously consider: “How’s that working out for you?”
Even weekly mid day tv offers a wealth of wisdom should you be open to it.
Always a “joy” of sorts to find my own ideas “not working out for me.” Swoosh……there goes a another six pack as I think about it….. ideas i had that didn’t work for me. “…..and the beast in the jungle lept….” Everything you can think about has already been published in a book. Sometimes quite thick books—and more than once.
Quite humbling this hooman condition.
The name orchidcup is a symbolic reference to the vagina.
Dr. Phil is a douchebag with an opinion and a fat checkbook.
Books are my favorite hobby, next to computers. I owned one of the first TI 99/4A computers released in 1981.
I just wonder how it is that silly hoomans waste their time talking trash on a blog like this.
We accomplish nothing. Nothing is gained.
Might as well take another hit from the bong….
I think Kurt Vonnegut wrote (maybe Slaughterhouse 5) that humans talked when they had nothing to say just to stay in practice for when they might have something important to say.
Same with blogs.
The wonderful is built on a foundation of drek.
Why have dreams, when nightmares are free?
Civilized countries, like civilized individuals, like to keep their budgets balanced. For years old-fashioned Italian leaders tried to make income and outgo jibe. But in 1876 there came to power a modern politician for whom red entries had no terror, but even a certain charm. Agostino Depretis, Italy’s first Liberal prime minister, started Italy on the road to fascism. He was a journalist who discovered that the key to modern power politics is the masses and their mouthpieces, the Left politicians. With their help, he managed to stay in power for eleven years. He owed this achievement to a technique that seemed inspired then, but is familiar enough now: he had no program. He simply promised every sort of reform regardless of whether or not his promises were contradictory. Thus he promised to reduce taxation but increase public works, to restore prosperity but introduce social security. This catholicity attracted men from all schools of thought. Oppressed tenants and underpaid workers, reactionary landlords and big employers all sought to collect on the promissory notes which he issued on his way to power.
When your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep will be your downfall.
I agree with the premise of a class system.
You can see the extreme, pretentious douche-bag behavior among people who think they are high class and pretend to be intellectually inclined, but who never question authority. These are the corporate lackeys. They know they are obedient and they’re proud of it. They watch TED talks. They ridicule 9/11 truthers or act scared of them. And they screw over the common man every chance they get.
You are a truther? You should have started with that. This post is a magnet for idiots
Hate all the crackers…even the whole wheat crackers!
It may eventually descend into a caste systems.
Who will be tomorrow’s untouchable?
I nominate the disabled.
The healthy representatives (bwa ha ha ha, like I should be so rich and well fed,) have been paying nothing but lip service to the Americans with Disabilities Act that I figure the congress will dispose of their hypocrisy and the act once and for all as a cost-saving measure.
Maybe not the disabled specifically, but the unhealthy.
Medical expenses are already the leading cause of bankruptcy.
Denying insurance claims will be a social good, since the sick are so unsightly. {/sarcasm}
We’ve become a government
• OF the thousandaires (the 99%, that would be me and thee,)
• BY the millionaires (the 1%, that would be the extremely insular privileged overlords and bosses,)
• FOR the billionaires (the 12,400 individuals identified by the IRS as the people who count (though they don’t really count as they hire some thousandaires to run machines to do that.)
As long as you have parties, its going to suck, badly…
If you’ve never bothered to read the ADA, you should…. It’s a self-employment manual for lawyers. No Congress will ever repeal or significantly change that, except to add more lawyer-stuff….
In very short, the law says that an employer “should, or might, or could” do something, and an aggrieved employee can then sue the employer if he/she doesn’t like the employer’s choice of remediation (or if the employer chose to ignore it).
If the employee sues, there’s all kinds of legal help for him/her. The employer generally has to cover his/her/it’s own costs, even if the whole thing is specious….
MSB, you keep posting that. Are you saying there are 12000 billionaires in the US?
Look at the IRS data. There are only 12,000 billionaires (or hundreds-of-millions’aires,) and 400 really rich (can you imagine?) people in the ‘States.
The IRS’s own statistics reveal that the economy is set up for the few % who own almost everything.
To put in terms you can understand at a glance:
183,000,000 poor Americans own/control as much wealth as
…………400 rich Americans
120,000,000 lower middle class Americans own/control as much wealth
………12,000 upper middle class americans.
…60,000,000 middle class Americans own/control as much wealth as is left.
That’s what is for the ‘States.
Government went after the #1 source of investment capital for black businesses in Michail Milliken, with the press playing up the evil of ‘junk bonds.’ Then they raised the minimum wage to make it harder for minorities to get work. Then they rolled back welfare reform.
Barack Obama: Bringing cynicism and despair to a new generation!
Dear Esquire;
“Post-Hope”? Really?
You media maggots told us that we had elected HOPE itself.
Maybe we shouldn’t take your assessment of Ron Paul seriously.
Illuminati Jews have over time toxicated every aspect of American life. When the women in a society are trashed out whores and have no respect or self-esteem, then that society crumbles from within, within no time. The main-stream media propaganda run and controlled by these same Illuminati Jews can spin it, do smoke and mirrors, create false terrorists and pose Iran and China as potential enemies..but the fact remains..and that is the enemy is within us…and we know who they are. the greedy bastards, money loving, God-hating, humanity-hating Illuminati Jews/banksters/elite who have the govt in their pockets. We’ve seen the amount of destruction they’ve caused in 2011. just goes again to show they have no regard for American people, humanity whatsoever. These bastards are shameless non-Americans.
This thread started out with a well thought out description of the affairs of our nation and the world, and has been answered by every paranoid extremist of whatever stripe can be found. Mostly, what he describes is already fact on the ground. The mistake is in building grand conspiracy theories.
I am sure that at any one time there are about as many conspiracies as there are people to imagine them. The problem is that we are running up against human nature here. We are highly competitive, occasionally rational, naturally xenophobic omnivores who only occasionally act even in our own best interest, much less the interests of humanity as a whole.
As much as we do actually change, we fear change. In civilization and specific societies, orthodoxy breaks down after a period of time. Our orthodoxy is breaking down because we are unwilling to correct the cracks in it before they become yawing canyons.
This nation was formed with some fundamental contradictions at it’s base. We have a most undemocratic body at the base of things, the Senate. It was set up to preserve the power of the slave-holding Southern agrarianist plutarchs. Now, we have a situation, with the filibuster, where Senators representing states with less than 15% of the population can totally control all legislation. The real power brokers in this country started to really figure this out in the 60′s and 70′s, and that theoretical imbalance has turned into a real and not so practical one.
Though the power of money in politics has ebbed and flowed, it was finally codified as untouchable with the Citizens United case. All political transparency, as minimal as it may have been started fading to black with that decision.
Now, this is no great conspiracy. It is the natural tendency of people to acquire money and power, and the tendency of those with money and power to defend that lofty position. Mobility never quite disappears because ossified power needs occasional new blood to allow it to last a bit longer, but it has decreased until it is more a myth than a reality.
Our various organs of government are creaking into antiquity. In a nation where 20% of people move every decade, many of them across boundaries to include state boundaries, most of those boundaries have lost their meaning. Even states have become entities too small to resist the blandishments of corporations with enough money and power to bend those institutions to their will. Cities have outgrown both county and state boundaries, paralyzing and destroying the efficiency of those aggregations of people. As we push aside regulation, the good of the commons is replaced by the good of those with the most money and power. These are all natural tendencies, born of our evolutionary trail.
The only way that we can fight these trends is to be more flexible, to recognize power where it exists and limit it so that the will of the people is at least occasionally understood and expressed. Sadly, with the rise of the psychology of focus groups and other such entities, I don’t see much potential for actual reform. In the past, that has always eventually led to revolution, usually bloody and destructive, breaking things down to be rebuilt in more or less predictable patterns, with enormous suffering in the process. I wish that I could see a way past this cycle, but unless we actually educate enough of our population so that at least somewhat rational decision making can be had, I see no other. If such rational process is not soon pursued, events will sweep us all up into that revolution. The events on which it pivots will be no more predictable than the Arab street vendor’s self-immolation that triggered the “Arab Spring” that we saw this year.
Hold on. Rough water ahead.