The haves and the have nots

[nadinbrzezinski]

do me a favor, if you are in the upper one percent of income, do us a favor and don't read this.

To the rest of you, thank you for your attention.

While doing that readying on the history of labor I have come to that coming to Christ moment, as they say... this is not about right or left or center. Those are ancient concepts, that have nothing to do with current reality.

But what about the left? I hear some of you... ancient concept, that does not work in an age where we are all neo liberals, and ahem free marketeers. Yep, in that fantasy I dream about we would have a huge class uprising and destroy them capitalist... you know the dream, and given that they are not even capitalists...

So what is the underlying system? Why is it that the old Marxist standard of class is gone? Well, look 'round your house. Yours is not that different from oh a Favela household. I can hear it now, but I got internal plumbing and heat and all the niceties of life, while they don't.

True, but you and the favela resident are buying stuff. You and him are what is keeping our consumerist society going, and damned the consequences. You and him will never rise because you and him are now slaves to the system, through credit. To him this is the Remesa Familiar, where he can buy all kinds of stuff on payments to the big bosses. To you, well if you are like any average American you owe all that you own, or most of it, and your credit card debt is up there.

That is what you both have in common.

By the way, that includes the tea baggers... they are part of the have nots. Sadly they have been convinced that they have to defend the world against them rapacious commies that hide under the bed. As I said in another post, the cold war is not over boys and girls, not in the imagination of many areas of this country.

So here is the deal. This is no longer about Marxists dreams, or the left, or for that matter right dreams of privatizing all. That fight's over, and we lost. This is about a mercantistic system that depends in increasingly cheap labor, and consumption to keep going. This is what this is about. Union busting is just a necessary cost, and they know that the population is so fragmented that the haves can do whatever they want. After all, we all need a new bauble, made with slave labor in insert cheap market here. And yes, I am part of the problem, and so are you.

So the first step is to realize that this is no longer about the loony right or loony left. It is about the haves, increasingly small, and the have nots. You want to change things? Well, perhaps it is time to realize that we are all part of the problem. That, as they say, is a first step. The second is to call this by it's proper name. No, not free market, consumerism... with a tinge of fascism.

Oh and I expect the usual suspects who think they are part of that 1%, nice dreaming there tex, to tell me why I am so wrong about this.

:hi:

You know who you are by the way... and here is a huge secret for you... there is no rational center either. You are part of the haves or the have nots. And I have the sneaky that chances are you are part of the second group, even if you do not want to realize this.

[cali]

1. say what?

The beginning part of this is so incoherent and poorly written it's nigh on unreadable.

"But what about the left? I hear some of you... ancient concept, that does not work in an age where we are all neo liberals, and ahem free marketeers. Yep, in that fantasy I dream about we would have a huge class uprising and destroy them capitalist... you know the dream, and given that they are not even capitalists..." wtf????

And you're making assumptions about how DUers live that may or may not be true. They aren't true regarding my life.

[stray cat]

2. The have nots with a job, house and retirement have a bit more than the homeless

and most of us are better off than the average Haitian or Somalian - doesn't that make all of us evil haves in their eyes?

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. And thank you for proving my point

you have far more in common with them than you think. The Haves would love to drive you to the same level of desperation, they cannot yet get away with it in core economies, but when they can they will. And you will accept it gladly. They count on it.

[cali]

4. you really should steer clear of such gross generalizations. Teddy Kennedy

was a have. John Kerry is a have.

And you have no fucking idea what that poster will or will not accept.

Oh, and that post most certainly did not prove any of your rambling, poorly thought out post.

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. I've hit a nerve with my shadow

:-)

Ah a good day...

[cali]

6. don't delude yourself.

[Odin2005]

7. There are 2 kinds of people, the Corporate Elites and Everyone Else

Both the Dems and the Pukes are controlled by the Corporate Elites, one party throwing economic bones and the other party throwing cultural bones to Everyone Else. They play Kabuki Theater to keep voters energized and obsessed with "Red" vs. "Blue", as if Politics were a sport (as shown by the apologists for Obama's pro-Corporate actions).

There is no real Democracy anymore. The US is a single party Authoritarian state subservient to a Multinational Corporate Elite whose decisions are enforced by transnational institutions like the IMF. Old-fashioned censorship is not needed because people's minds are controlled by the MSM, thus the illusion of a Free Press is kept up.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Well here is one for you

according to a few historians (Carlton comes to mind right now since I am in the process of readying him) the Constitution is NOT democratic.

He made an interesting case, and one to pursue for later on.

But the US is currently an Empire.

Now to your point of the Free Press, taken, fully. Add to that old fashioned labor direct action, that is not going to happen when people are in debt...

[Odin2005]

10. The US seems to be becoming an embyonic example of what Arnold J. Toynbee called...

...a "universal state", like Rome or Han China. We are in a period similar to Rome in the age of the Gracchi, and we all know what happened to the Gracchi brothers when they got in the way of Rome's version of the Corporate Elites (aristocratic plantation-owners) and tried to push land reform.

The rest of the century is really gonna suck.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. I know, and Toynbee knew his stuff

:-)

Now if I could do my readying for more than two hours I'd be able to work at this much faster.

[Odin2005]

13. The similarities between now and the late Roman Republic are so numerous it's terrifying.

To quote Twain, "History doesn't repeat, but it sure rhymes."

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. RLOL... only difference, there were no nukes back then

Or massive environmental degradation. Oh wait, that reminds me of a few OTHER periods of history.

[Odin2005]

17. Heh, the Roman Legion WAS a WMD for it's time.

And one of the things that contributed to the fall of the Republic was PRIVATE ARMIES loyal to the people that paid them. Remind anyone of Blackwater?

At the time of the Gracchi many free-holding "middle class" small farmers got into debt and lost their land to rich landowners that turned that land into plantations worked by imported slaves, similar to how our jobs are being exported to slave-like labor in the developing world.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. And on the plantations, don't forget

how many small time farmers are losing their lands to farm conglomerates in the US, which are worked by illegal workers that just like slaves, you work to death, but you do not want to see.


Of course the lesson of the private armies was learned by no less than Machievelli who warned the Prince NOT to hire mercenaries, or see his kingdom go away. But Neo cons did not learn that lesson... and Blackwater is just the tip of the iceberg of that nightmare started by SecDef Chenney.

[Odin2005]

20. Sadly, you are right.

[eugeneliberal]

30. What's "readying"?

[Fire1]

51. I think it's misspelling of 'reading.' n/t

[lib2DaBone]

9. You are correct in what you say.. the problem is not " Left vs Right....."

The problem... (well it's not a problem if you are in the top 1%) The problem is not between the Left and the Right.... it's the HAVES vs the HAVE NOTS.

The Bankers WANT you to think that opposing political views are causing this economic depression.

The truth is.. if they can keep the population fighting each other.. it deflects the truth away from the real culprets... The Federal Reserve and the Goldman-Sachs Bankers.

And btw.. they own all the media.. which (conveniently) works day and night to keep the Left/Right Paradigm alive... while they gang-rape the middle class.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Not just the middle class

the goal is a new neo-feudal order, with company stores and all (Yes I am sure Wally Mart would love to do that and functionally it is almost that in Mexico already... ah NAFTA).

But as you can see some of our Du'ers cannot see the forest for the trees.

But this race to the bottom is not just the middle class, it is all of us.

[Odin2005]

19. And we are made into corporate serfs.

Made completely dependent on Corporations.

[lib2DaBone]

31. The people think that they still have a voice...lol....

..they think that if they write, call, fax or e-mail... that the dumb-fucks in Washington will respond.... what a croc

NAFTA is here to atay.. and the goal of both parties is to reduce America to below Cambodia wages.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Bankers"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."

William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, then a privately owned bank.

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild.

"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863.

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain slaves of the Bankers and pay for the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits." Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, the second richest man in Britain.

[Odin2005]

43. "Banks are more dangerous than standing armies" -Jefferson

[studav8or]

46. You have reaches the same conclusions that I have.

Your original post states what I have come to understand over the last decade. I go one step further, however, in describing our economy. Rather than consumerism, I describe it as devourerism. It is the only accurate way to convey the rate at which we are taking the fruits of the earth - iron, coal, gas, water, forests, oil - and turning them into what is, from a long-term environmental perspective, and from a very limited 'time of useful usefulness' to humans, junk. We dig up the iron, the bauxite, the oil - frame into some plastic fob or another that stays in our home from 1 day, to, in most cases, less than 10 years. It is then irretrievably lost in a landfill forever - no way to recover all of the steel, aluminum, paper, plastic, gold, silver, that sits in the landfills (most gold is recycled into the system; most silver, however, is lost forever in electrical components, solders) and make it of any use again. At any rate, I have also reached the same neo-feudal order concept that you have. I followed this simple logical path, and it was the only logical conclusion:

What is the problem with natural resources? Are they too short on supply? No. It is simply a matter of overuse. It is a matter of overpopulation. Quite simply, we could continue on our current devourist cavort for a thousand years if the population were stemmed. Studies have been done. Without petroleum, which forms the basis for all farming (petroleum bases for fertilizer, and for the tractors, and the trucks, and the workers, and the short-haul trucks, trains, then long-haul trucks to bring it all to a market that is energized by fossil fuel electricity, where devourers have driven there in gas-fueled autos), our earth could only support, from some conservative estimates, a population of 80M, and the most liberal estimates, 500M. It is the simple math of arable farm land on the earth per human being. With modern petroleum-powered technology, it takes from 1.2 to 1.7 acres to feed one human being for one year. It takes 5 with moderately decreased means such as organic farming, which, despite its' name, still consumes massive amounts of fossil fuels, and over 10 acres per person per year using primitive and/or traditional means including use of animals to pull plows. This does not even account for crop failures, blights, over-farming (ala dust bowl Oklahoma), or other disasters, which cannot be compensated for by trucking massive amounts of food cross-country by donkey, bull, or horse, but can only be accomplished by use of oil-powered vehicles. And no, you can't use a Prius, as ultimately, even its' battery power comes from a fossil-fueled electrical outlet. You can't use a solar-powered vehicle, as they are not powerful enough to haul truckloads of food. I could discuss this for pages, but essentially, when we are without oil, which will occur this century, the population will find itself naturally falling to the 80M to 500M that the earth can sustain without modern farming, or, the powers-that-be will cause this population trimming to occur unnaturally, which will leave the remaining humans with oil and other natural resources to continue devourerism.

With a population reduced by 90 to 99%, based on the pure mathematics of the acreage of available arable farm land to feed the human population without fossil fuels, the remaining humans will need to aggregate in population centers to make available every possible acre of farmland. This is where the neo-feudal system will develop. There may or may not be centralized government at this point. This depends on whether the population reduction is orderly or disorderly. A new feudal class, complete with knights, serfs, peasants, and self-declared royalty, is the only form of government that could possibly arise under such circumstances. It will not be the romanticized version of feudal society. It will be the pure, ugly, elite-run barbarism that truly existed in the middle ages, where the strong survived and the weak were victimized. This is because of the power differential that will still exist between the haves and the have-nots, only it will be much worse.

For example, during the French Revolution, citizens were able to rise up virtually using pitchforks against swords. How does one rise up against a tank with a pitchfork? Or even a shotgun? The highest place royalty could formerly retreat to was a tower or a mountain. Now, they can retreat to the heavens. We can be fired down upon with weapons from 1,000 feet, 50,000 feet, and space. There is no hiding from the technology of satellites that can see in the infrared spectrum and count every campfire in a forest. This means that you cannot retreat like a hermit into the boreal forest - if the powers that be wish to find you, they will. So the future holds a planet devoid of resources to support a population even of the size we have now, the power differential has grown so huge that rising up is really not a possibility, and the only hope is to live in yet another form of servitude as a peasant, rather than as a devourerist.

People do not understand the simple mathematics of supply, demand, and the ability to meet demand. If I close 20 people in a room, leave them with a barrel of apples and 5 gallons of water, then bury the room in concrete, I ask you who will have the apples, who will have the water? It will be a bloody struggle, and in the end, even the winner will die. And yet, people can not understand that we are in a sealed system - the earth is just as sealed as a concrete room. You can't grow apples on the moon, or even 100 feet in the sky, far closer than the moon. Iron doesn't last forever, nor does oil, nor coal, nor gas, and by extension, prosperity. At current rates, coal is gone in less than 300 years, natural gas in less than 150, and oil in less than 75. It will be catastrophic, however, far earlier than that. As oil wells cross the 50% mark, it becomes geometrically more expensive to extract the oil. Current oil wells are capped at around 25% remaining because of the great expense. In other words, the availability, and affordability, of oil for plastic (think of all the plastic in operating rooms, farms, and grocery stores), transportation (the trucks and trains and planes that bring you food, prescriptions, the farm equipment that is able to take 10 acres and make it feed 10 people rather than just 1), and roads (asphault) - the list goes on endlessly, will strangle the have-nots in less than half that time - less than 40 years.

The only possible outcome is neo-feudalism for the (lucky?) few.

[studav8or]

47. And don't beat me up on "You have reaches"... freaking spell checker does not check the subject line

-eom

[Jack Sprat]

12. Good post.

You make some people nervous when you hint at a living wage for Americans or unions and such. Hey, and we have those beneficiaries of cheap foreign labor. They loves themselves some $1 a day workers.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. One dollar a day? Just watch them move

the WHOLE factory to where they can get workers that will get 85 cents a day!

And sadly I am not kidding.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

21. The Wobblies had the right idea.

Or as a friend of mine once put it, 'you are either an owner, or a worker'. There is nothing else.

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. And today those are ancient concepts

that no longer work. Hell, I was reading a little Marx today and the nature of production, to use the classic term, has also changed in so many ways that we need to change the dynamic.

[Jack Sprat]

28. I can remember a time

when owners and workers often lived in the same neighborhoods....in the USA. But that was before the owners felt the need to have it all. That was scarcely less than a decade following the end of WWII. Our workers played such a crucial role in manufacturing during the years of war that we actually respected our working class and felt good about rewarding their service, both on the homefront and overseas. Our President could hold our economy up as a model of healthy society to our adversary in the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War. We were all in it together and there was not a large disparity between the haves and have-nots. The Dow industrials averaged less than 500 and holders of blue chip stocks seemed satisfied. Then came Reagan Almighty. Working people were suddenly disparaged, unions busted, and suits needed Mercedes and BMWs to feel their worth. All the rules were changed. Regulations dumped. Mutual funds, hedge funds, credit default swaps, the stock holders became the new privileged class. I haven't recognized us since. We now pride ourselves in receiving the profits of other peoples' hard work....from Malaysia or China or Bangladesh.

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. And at the same time the unraveling was afoot

while the haves and have nots lived in the same places, legislative efforts to turn the New Deal on its head were well under way.

The RNC, which controlled Congress in 1948, managed to pass Taft Harley, aka the origin of Right To Work laws.

Then came the 1950s and the second Red Scare... and of course, as much as I think Kennedy was a good President he did lower capital tax rates from ninety to seventy percent.

Reagan came in at a time when a lot of the work was already in place, just that most people didn't notice. Reagan didn't just break PATCO because he hated Unions. That action was actually SUPPORTED in the public mind, and of course the propaganda about opening economies started, building on it until NAFTA.

We like to blame Reagan, but the building blocks precede Reagan by a few decades and Reagan was able to do what he did because the country was primed for it.

[Jack Sprat]

37. You may be right

We may have been given a short reprieve following the Depression years and WWII aftermath. The plans to overturn New Deal policy was likely devised as soon as it was enacted. Boomers were just able to enjoy a brief respite.

I still can't justify the Reagan Revulsion, though. He sold war bonds, headed the Actors' Guild as a marginal performer, then saw the opportunity to become a corporate voice, and then ultimately turned on the generation he emerged from because he got some enormous breaks.

[nadinbrzezinski]

40. There is more to Reagan and his transformation

his second wife's dad, he was very much a member of the core Republican Party. Until that moment Ronnie was a different man. It is said that him and his future father and law had a man to man talk on how things really work.

Been readying on Bridges, a labor leader in San Fran, and it is amazing how even under FDR there was a fear of the red scare. Of course that goes all the way back to before Jacksonian Democracy and the fear of the moneyed elites from the lumpen proletariat. (I am paraphrasing Carlton and his book on the history of labor published in 1920).

As to what Reagan did, not gonna justify it, but I think part of our collective problem is that Americans in general do not know about their own history. So all sounds new and it is easy to miss what the patterns of history are. (And why I have undertaken this huge project)

[Ozymanithrax]

The biggest problem with the way consumerism works is that it purposefully creates the illusion...

that we are all haves.

Advertising, whether it is the obvious advertising through commercials and adds or the hidden advertising, product placement and dream selling in everything we watch is designed to keep liquidity flowing through the illusion that we are part of that ideal middle class, and that the middle class is rich. The middle class is not the reality out here of a family with 2.5 children and an average of $16,000.00 dollars owed on credit cards. We can drink the beer that the rich drink, a thereby be rich. We can drive the cars the rich drive. We are like the middle class on television, CSI agents who are handsome/beautiful with more integrity in their little fingers than Henry Fonda had in every movie he ever made. We are the middle class like that in Eureka, a town where everybody is a genius and even the janitors have PHD's. (I love this show but it is the most extreme sales job of the dream of the middle class I can find.)

While we are all believing, and often cursing, that we are mired in a capitalist economy, that is also an illusion. We live in a society designed to remove the maximum wealth that the population can surrender. Consumerism provides easy credit, which is a system where individuals print money and spend that money they printed on things that few of us need. Very few of us, that 1% mentioned in the OP, are the real beneficiaries. The rest are encourage to chase the dream of affluence and end up bathing in effluent.

[nadinbrzezinski]

25. My only caveat is that we are NOt a capitalist economy

we have become what Adam Smith ranted against, to use a modern term.

[Ozymanithrax]

26. No, we are not capitalist, but we live under that illusion.

[nadinbrzezinski]

27. And to my mind language matters

and it is time to call a duck a duck, and not a goose, even of both have a bill, feathers and can fly.

[Odin2005]

44. read up on Edward Bernays.

It was he, back in the 1910s, that got the idea that ads should sell not the quality of the product, but fantasies in order to create artificial demand.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. Family of Freud if my memory serves

[Initech]

23. It's not the "haves and have nots" in charge.

It's the "I want it all for myself and fuck everybody else" crowd that's in charge.

[nadinbrzezinski]

24. The haves take advantage of that crowd

and they have created most of the "needs."

[tabasco]

32. This is what unregulated capitalism produces.

Ultimately, revolution.



http://www.lcurve.org/

[nadinbrzezinski]

36. Part of the problem, this is NOT capitalism, regulated or otherwise

in fact, it has a lot more in common with what Capitalism (in its ideal form) replaced, MERCANTILISM.

Just that it is upside down. The Core economies now export raw materials and the developing (colonial so you get it) economies produced finished goods.

Oh and revolution? You kid me right? The demonstrations against the war should have been your clue... so we need to rethink how to do things.

[tabasco]

38. Pick up a history book, professor.

Get yourself a clue.

If you would, please show me where I said this country was anywhere near a revolution. People have been "rethinking how to do things" since time began.

Your narrow focus is tedious.

Your manner of communicating indicates a weak mind.

[nadinbrzezinski]

39. And we are not in for discussion

reality is that we have not been able to effect any change by taking to the streets. Or to get what we the people want. If it helps you, we are not alone, and the country has been here before.

But you can pick a few books yourself.

[tabasco]

41. I really need to do that.

I admit my ignorance.

It's a technique.

[nadinbrzezinski]

42. I could recomend a few

I am doing a lot of readying you know. A few are even in Goggle books and you can download them for free.

:-)

And I am not kidding. It is one of those... the more I read the more I find out I don't know enough.

[studav8or]

49. ... you have just given me my new favorite site...

[Make7]

33. For some reason this series of posts reminds me of the following:

 

CLARK: ... I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian precapitalist and...

WILL: Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob'ly, and so naturally that's what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That'll last until sometime in your second year, then you'll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

CLARK: Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of--

WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from "Work in Essex County," Page 421, right? Do you have any thoughts of your own on the subject or were you just gonna plagiarize the whole book for me?

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/goodwillhunting.html

 

[tabasco]

34. Your post reminds me of this picture:

[nadinbrzezinski]

35. I realize independent thought is not something that is done anymore

but this is ludicrous.

By the way, while I have read Marx, and Smith (which I suspect you have not) I dare say neither of these two applies to our current condition.

It woudl take many hours to explain to you why.

[AngryAmish]

52. c'mon explain away

It is Chuggo week, afterall.

[Fire1]

48. K&R

[Klukie]

50. Good post........thanks