A new history asks: Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone?
slate.com
slate.com
Because that's how much of the rest of the world feels re. USA/"the west". One-percenters... complaining about their own one-percenters...
And yes, there is deep resentment brewing indeed.
Class warriors wanting to decrease inequality by getting the 1% to pay their fair share, not enter into global trade agreements, and keep jobs in America end up increasing inequality globally by focusing only on efforts to prop up the global 1%, the majority of whom live in the U.S. Sounds pretty ironic to me.
Look no further, there's a global crisis of climate change that must be solved. We have a cause, but unfortunately not one that is nicely contained within the borders of a country.
One is entertainment, the other ends in violent revolution. I suspect we can't fix the climate until we fix inequality because its the 1% that profits from climate destruction yet holds the power of regulation.
But it's not this fact what, precisely, make things worse?.
I mean, we live in the most prosperous age. The productivity increase of the last decades has been nothing short of stunning.
And anyway, we have to heard that "we" can't afford health care for everybody, that "we" should work longer years, that "we" have to cut the expenses of social protections because "we" have not "enough money".
Ah, the irony..
But we still have a significant portion of the population that has to work 2+ jobs to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world to my knowledge where this is expected, let alone imagined (hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs).
Americans (myself included) should be ashamed at how much of an abject failure we've been to so much of the population. Say what you will about Western Europe, but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.
edit: which isn't to say that France doesn't have higher (comparable) unemployment rates than the US, I believe it does but different government types have different tolerances and expectations for unemployment levels naturally.
I bet a hell of a lot less people go hungry in France compared to the US.
If I recall correctly he received about $80 a month for a single person which is not enough to even purchase the necessities of a healthy and balanced diet, really. I was paying his mortgage and he was fortunate that he had siblings who could supplement his meager allotment until he could find employment far below his education level and previous salary.
He had lost his job due to, from what I could tell, the early onset of Parkinson's and a heartless employer who would rather dosh a loyal employee of 20+ years than accept the continued employment of an employee with the condition.
You mean the welfare which expires under certain circumstances? The food stamps that got cut during the last budget? The nutrition programs that pay for slop lunches at school?
Medicaid, which still doesn't prevent people from going bankrupt from medical fees?
The US safety net is about as solid as a paper bag.
Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the "create jobs!" mantra. Jobs for job-numbers' sake has little point, in practice it's just further enslaving the population.
The government has an incentive in keeping unemployment down and cut spending, so it forces people to work shitty jobs by taking away subsidies, which in turn drives down salaries and only helps high-manpower low-skill enterprises like burger-flipping. Is that good for society as a whole?
People working two jobs (great for employment numbers!) are not bettering themselves, they're just producing more surplus for owners, often not even by choice. It doesn't really matter if you have 0% unemployment but everyone is forced to do stuff they don't like in order to survive.
If not, you are forced to work. You can choose what to work on, but that's about it. Even something as passive as investing capital or extracting rent requires some work. Being homeless is a full-time job asking others for money.
Whenever you'll get free food and free shelter (we can argue about clothes), then you won't be forced to work.
And to provide that, others will be forced to work. So no matter what we end up with some people being "forced to work", which I don't agree is even a thing. Even if you could just live off the land you'd be "forced" to work a hell of a lot harder to survive than you would getting any minimum wage job. You are perhaps underestimating how bad life sucked before modern society took root.
Incorrect. Whilst I am still shocked by the way America treats homeless people and those at the bottom of society, the UK is headed down the same path.
Over a million people used food banks in the UK last year. These are essentially "last resort" facilities run by charities where people can get food parcels if referred by social services or a doctor. The main reason for using them is having welfare benefits withdrawn.
Is it ?
>Over a million people used food banks in the UK last year.
~1.6% of the UK's ~60M population, seems to fit 'most everyone' even if those FB users didn't get three squares for themselves and their family, which thanks to the work of the food banks, they do.
Apropos the parent's point, the food banks exist. Which means that you live in a society that values you so highly that it will step in to protect you even when the universal welfare system that is supposed to look after you fails to do so and you slip through the cracks.
You are therefore one of the luckiest people on the planet.
Meta : Incidentally, that 'over a million' figure is only from Trussell Trust, there are other food banks around the UK that do not operate under their umbrella, and as for 'the main reason', meh, certainly the largest single reason reported by users at a shade under 30% which means that 70% of food bank use is for other reasons (though this includes 13% 'benefit changes').
Trussell Trust's reported stats can be found here http://www.trusselltrust.org/stats
They exist because the state is quick to put people on benefits suspension (a temporary withdrawal of benefits while they seek more information) or sanctions (a temporary or permanent loss of benefits as a punishment for breaking one of the very many rules (which is easy to do because there are so many rules and it's impossible to get advice about whether an action is rule-breaking or not)).
This is a change in the current / last government. Previous governments would have had the sanctions, but provided emergency loans for people to buy food.
These changes have seen an increase in suicides among people claiming benefits.
1. US tax code makes very expensive to have people in the payroll. This was originally intended to incentivize mechanization and later automation, but shady employers can exploit the rules by paying cash-only to illegal immigrants and save a lot of money, even if their take home pay is equal or better than that of citizens.
2. It is very expensive to raise a family while complying with US rules. You can have your children taken away if you fail to comply with any of that. Many illegal immigrants shortcut through that issue by leaving their families behind and living like frugal single men. Even those that immigrate as full families are already used to breaking the rules, and since they already face deportation if caught they do not fear doing without with "necessities" like cars, up-to-code housing, child care, etc.
3. Communities matter a lot. Poor citizens are every man for his own more often than not. Arriving illegal immigrants, typically in their teens or early twenties, usually can count on having relatives or former neighbors take care of their needs (which amount to little beyond room&board) while they find their footing in the country. They will later pay it forward.
(hell, in France it's illegal to have two jobs).This is also another disturbing trend I'm witnessing in my generation. Sure, ok, you're not happy with some of the stuff that happened. DO something about it.
My experience is that voting in every election and writing your politicians does nothing. Contributing to their campaigns does nothing, because you don't contribute nearly enough to matter. Protesting in the streets does nothing; nobody cares, and then the cops stop you from protesting. Raising awareness does nothing, everyone is aware of the largest problems. Organizing the public does nothing; they are powerless. Reducing apathy does nothing; refer to the inability to do anything even when voting/writing/protesting. Rioting in the streets does nothing except ruin the areas people live in and make a strong backlash against whatever issue. The citizenry are fully disenfranchised from making changes.
I get it, I haven't tried starting a company to fix the USA's smorgasboard of problems yet. Maybe that's the ticket.
There's also the other problem of bad things being done in your name, even when you speak out. Millions of people protested the Iraq war, and look what we got for it. There is far too large of a disconnect between the public will and the government's execution of that will.
Look around you, there is always people working against your values and people supporting your values. You can do worse than withdrawing your labor and your money from the former and prefer to do business with the later.
You say raising awareness does nothing. That's because hard facts are mostly irrelevant. People live by narratives, and the current mainstream narrative tells them to ignore your facts as irrelevant. You can use creativity to paint a more compelling narrative that will make them want to look for the facts themselves.
You say organizing the public does nothing. That's because what passes for organization nowadays is naive stupidity. Not every opinion is equal, or even valuable. Go learn some how to organize people for real, then get some practice with no more than a handful of friends working in small scale stuff. You could also do worse than that!
The one core point of all of our liberal struggles -- whether "class warfare" as you call it or feminism -- isn't about being content, happy, alive etc.. It is about power[1] and its distribution. Absolute measures of wealth are very important, but so is the distribution of power. As long as the distribution of power is so grossly imbalanced, it means that few of us have a lot of control over the many, or, if you prefer, that the many aren't free[2]. If people learn only one thing about this class-warfare or feminism, it should be this.
This unfair distribution of power is a problem at any scale: within the West, the West vs. the rest of the world etc..
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)
[2]: The word free is a loaded one, and in the taxonomy of values it is an ill-defined one because it is self-contradictory, but I'm using it here very loosely.
Who's this "we"? 40% of school children have free/reduced lunch due to poverty.
There was no free or reduced-price school lunch.
Class warfare against the rich is now a concept because most of the country lost the last round of class warfare around the time the economic depression started, in which the rich got far richer while everyone else got poorer. Whether this is a great struggle for rights or not is unclear, but based off of the last Gilded Age, it will be glossed over in the history books such that people do not understand that change can be effected under certain circumstances.
We have a bevy of great causes, but for the most part, our empowerment to affect changes in service of those causes has been nullified. We are disenfranchised, and disgruntled. That we live in relative comfort is no relief; we feel excluded from the making of our own society, and it is a serious problem. This exclusion needs to change first before the other issues can be pursued. The last time there was such a disenfranchisement of public power in the US, a world war caused it to fall out of attention.
Treating our highly skewed wealth distribution strictly as a matter of material welfare is a diversion from the fact that extreme income inequality is evidence of regulatory capture and rent seeking. When war contractors and bankers whisper in the ear of the executive branch to lobby for legislation by executive order and extra judicial legal clarifications (as in the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales fiasco), massive anonymous campaign donations are upheld by the supreme court as "free speech", and so on, the wealthy have many times more political influence than you do.
Recall the scandals surrounding massive, secret, quid pro quo political donations by the tycoons of the first Gilded Age; now the supreme court has found that when the rich buy an election they have a legal right to do it in secret. The problem is not that I want more money; it's that our votes are counted in dollars.
This is how we ended up with a regressive tax system (20-30 percent for earned income, %15 for capital gains, %0 percent for offshore “wealth managed” assets), “Torte Reform”, “Bankruptcy Reform”, and plea bargaining, to keep you from having your day in court, privatized prisons, repeal of Glass-Steagall, and all sorts of other rules that structurally advantage people who control capital.
The state arguably sponsors consumer indebtedness: the education, health care, and housing markets are all inflated by government money, and medical and student debts are exempt from bankruptcy. Low interest rates seem to create asset bubbles, and we socialize the losses by bailing out banks but not individuals. A good life means more than just “three meals a day” eaten in prison, on parole, or as an indentured servant.
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Anatole France
Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age. A travesty of the highest order. Remember when people were protesting this in the streets and were hung out to dry by the media and their fellow citizens? Remember when those protesters were smashed by the cops for having the gall to ask for a better deal? That happened in the US, not China or Russia.
"The authors are only the slightest bit sympathetic to Obama. They concede that he operated under conditions not of his own making. But he “was not a transformational president.” He caved to Wall Street in bailing out the banks without demanding any meaningful reform; the Affordable Care Act may have insured millions, but countless others have been forced to pay more because its biggest beneficiaries were insurance and drug companies. And his foreign policy effectively continued to do by stealth what George W. Bush barely kept secret at all: drone strikes, secret wiretaps. Other fundamental problems that began at the start of the 20th century have re-emerged under Obama: racial segregation abetted by a criminal justice system that is the New Jim Crow; anti-immigration nativism, which has hardly been helped by an immigration policy whose only achievement is a record number of deportations. Meanwhile, as of 2012, a woman still made 81 cents for every dollar a man earned."
My sentiments as well.
Unequal with whom ? You are considerably less unequal with millions of people who a decade or two ago were desperately scratching their survival out of subsistence farming.
Some people would call that a win. YMMV.
The frame of reference is in-country and between the country's peers. The worrying part of this frame is that relatively poor places like Latin America are catching up or have caught up already. We are losing ground.
on a more serious note; whatever it takes to ensure that we don't end up becoming bankrupt over healthcare---despite paying for insurance, whatever it takes to ensure that even the poorest and destitute of us all shouldn't worry about their next meal, whatever it takes so that anyone with ill mental health can pursue a life of happiness, ...
there's no point in picking specific #s and making a whole argument out of them even more so with vague notions such as "fair society" which will elicit 101 opinions from 100 people.
Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology and industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily course corrected by a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two overspeculating brokerage houses. There were also, simultaneously, great advances in progressive causes like worker's rights and food quality, all on the background of decreasing importance of religion among educated whites in favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional morality manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of new porn the likes of which never existed before.
"That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids inherit, what did they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?"
I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Men starts 1960.'
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...
* Decreased demand for US workers — factories closing to move to other countries; technology replacing human labor; increased capitalist competition with a global economy consisting of countries finally recovered from their wars
* Increased supply of US workers — the women's liberation movement; the continued influx of immigrants
The country's rotting social justice can successfully be expressed in terms of the prosperity of its workers.
A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been developed by successive governments in the UK.
https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product...
The increasing gap between wages and productivity symbolizes growing exploitation — the inequality you're talking about.
History keeps repeating itself. Usually any civil rights have come with the expense of either fighting in the military or funding the military. I just wondered how suspiciously easy it was for women to gain their rights, but total war seen in world wars explains it nicely.
Organizations only change when they have to. With fall of soviet union, stagnation of American civil rights progress seems inevitable. Rise of China could be a good thing for Civil rights. But in the post-Vietnam high tech weapons age, it's likely to be "how can we motivate people to pay more taxes" than the seemingly more equal "how can we motivate every man to fire a rifle".
Any suggestions?
American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.
In my opinion, the issue is that those who are most successful are being rewarded with far too much and creating a system that will inevitably make those who are most successful even more successful by shrinking the total number of successful people and increasing the number of unsuccessful people. Another concern is that this will lead to general stagnation of the economy and a slow-down of progress in general.
For the developing world to get to the basics (rights/health/edu) the developed world is used to, we need a couple more planet earths in terms of resources.
We seem to end up with what happens in nature. Randomness. In one ecosystem a couple of whales and whole lot of plankton, in another a couple lions and herds of wildebeest.
So progress towards what? It's not entirely clear. And where are the incentives to produce consensus about it or even focus on it? We can be doing a much better job creating those incentives.
I don't think that's true. Human rights, health services and education needn't use much resources. The ability the whole planet to drive 3 ton SUVs might be an issue but that's a different matter.
I am not even talking about the extreme cases like Somalia and Afghanistan. Even in countries like India and China try getting a good lawyer/policeman/doctor/teacher to stay in areas where they are most needed. They have no hope of any semblance of the lifestyle their urban counterparts enjoy.
And I pulled in the couple more planet earths from sustainability calculations Craig Simmons did for the Guardian a while back. http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.ht...