Americans are like the retarded offspring growing at the edge of a lush and healthy European field. You know, the row of corn too close to the road commission’s weed kill spray to flourish, but not close enough to die out completely.
We just don’t get it, but think all corn should look like us. USA! USA!
When I used to speak daily with people in Sweden, Germany, and Belgium working as an Atlas Copco distributor (tooling for auto plants) they were amused and disgusted by our working conditions.
You don’t have a year off paid with your new baby? 9 weeks, unpaid? Your husband has no time off with his baby either? You don’t get a month paid Holiday in the summer? No free health care? No free College? The option for a 4 day work week?
You Americans let them treat you like slaves.
I was STUNNED, had no idea how good they had it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vermont) recently spoke about this on Bill Maher. Worth the 5 and a half minutes of clips:
The top 1 percent earns more than the bottom 50 percent in America.
The top 1 percent has more WEALTH than the bottom 90 percent.
As Bill Maher said in reply, we tend to vote like we are that rich person in our imaginary lives. We vote against someone taking what we don’t have as we drive to work in our beat up Honda Civics.
We are watching the GM/Chrysler merger slash bankruptcy closely.
Have you noticed every commercial is slated towards uber-rich people buying Luxury cars these days?
A sexy perfectly coiffed woman murmurs huskily, “When you turn on your car, does it return the favor?”
My husband always answers, “Only since they added the heated dildo to the heated seats, huh lady?”
Gee willakers, I coulda saved the auto industry by telling them a couple things.
Market inexpensive cars that get good milage and maybe more than 1% of the population could afford them…. or quit sending jobs overseas and people could afford better ones.
The 250/1 ratio of exec pay to the pay of the people that actually produce the product sunk your asses.
Detroit… actually all of Michigan is dying due to that corporate greed.
Henry Ford had wished to use mass production to lower the price of his automobiles which in turn increased the market size at which is automobiles would be sold. Ford chose this method of selling a large quantity of cars over increasing the maximum profit made per car.
Duh.
But he also said, “Money doesn’t change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that’s all.” and I have to wonder if he had any insight at all, for time has proven the rich have become ever more greedy.
Socialism as done in European countries has made them happy, relatively wealthy, healthy and educated.
The rich don’t want us to be any of those things.
We live in a serfdom where we all believe we will be masters one day by some imaginary American Lottery.
Redistribute baby!!!!!
It IS Patriotic, and should be the American way. America is not the 1%ers, its us! We should not be wage slaves!
Worker Party 2012!
a hasty pre-work rant, but it needs saying…
Social is Un-american, WHY? No what it is, is anti-elitist, they hate that.
“The top 1 percent has more WEALTH than the bottom 90 percent“.
two quotes come to mind:
“A mask of gold hides all deformities“.
Thomas Dekker (Decker)
“Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defense of their idolatry–the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite“.
Charles Caleb Colton
it is the prerogative of a beneficent society to insure that the wealth is not so concentrated in the hands of a few that it is a detriment to the society as a whole.
we are now seeing the unravelling and exposure of all the deformaties surrounding the myth of the free market…and none to soon, imo.
unfortunately, it’s once again the people who can least afford it that will bear the brunt of the empires’ decline.
brilliant comment, dada, thank you!
I’ve posted this one last year, but it is highly appropriate wrt the top part of your entry. Michael Moore decided to scrap this scene from Sicko…
I was STUNNED, had no idea how good they had it.
wow, this is exactly the kind of things they told me, only better….. Thanks so much for this, I’m going to share this you tube on my blog!
First of all the US of A is not a Democracy… It is a NATIONALIST OLIGARCHY!! That’s why businesses from every sector of Wall Street are all lining up for their turn at the big swollen debt fueled teats of the official government sow, the U.S. Treasury. As for the current dire situation for the US middle class, let me lay out a scenario for you.
The time of American Unionism reached its peak and immediately started its precipitous decline with the death of Walter Reuther, the long time leader of the UAW on May 9, 1970. Reuther though the greatest labor leader this country has ever seen, did not subscribe to the traditional “nickle in-the-pay-envelope” philosophy of old time unionists. He saw the union as being more than just a bargaining instrument for wages and hours. Although Reuther earlier in his career had socialist leanings, later in the post World War II era he developed a new economic plan for unions which unfortunately was never implemented due to his tragic death in 1970.
Reuther’s plan required a closing of functions between labor and business. He proposed such a plan to General Motors, who quickly rejected it as unworkable. Undaunted, Reuther decided the way to forge such a partnership was through using excess union funds and retirement funds to purchase GM stock from the market. The goal of his plan was to gradually assume some control over GM via a huge stake in the ownership of the company.
If we can imagine that Reuther was successful in his quest for shared ownership in GM, it would be safe to say that the automotive world would be completely different than the crawling begging $6.04 GM Corporation that we see today. Back in 1946, during wage negotions between Walter Reuther and GM leader Harry Coen, Walter Reuther shared the following:
“I think when monopolies like the aluminum industry, owned 85 per cent nowadays, and magnesium, when the monopolies jeopardize the safety of the country, they can no longer be trusted in private hands to use them for a profit. That is my private philosophy…”
The Reuther proposal for the Labor-Business connection would serve the company well on all levels, from the quality control on the manufacturing floor(similar to W. Edwards Deming’s Total Quality Management used to build ALL JAPANESE CARS from the 1950’s) extending up to important management marketing decisions which would have prevented bonehead projects such as the Cadillac Cimarron.
However, alas in the wake of Reuther’s death the succeeding union leadership allowed the huge union pension fund to be raided by organized crime affiliates, ending the lofty dream of Walter Reuther for all time. What we are left with is a country whose manufacturing facilities are completely eroded and a decimated middle class with little or no future.
Beautiful example of what should have happened US-wide, actually world-wide.
This is not a US-only problem, this greed that fells every society.
We need a new way of thinking.
I just posted a new essay on the philosophy of that change on my blog, but will have to re-code too much to post it here until tomorrow.
My family duties call.
Thanks for the excellent answer, and reading me….
His distinction between Democratic Socialism and Soviet style communism was something all Americans should watch.
The media could perform a real public service by giving him more exposure.
But they won’t.
they won’t. we know why.
I get a chuckle from Sarah Palin calling Obama the Wealth Spreader
Seems that’s what she has been doing in Alaska.
“Redistribution” was at the core of Bush’s tax cut for the rich and the only difference now is the framing, and the Republicans always pay considerable attention to framing issues in ways that elicit emotional responses from their base.
I don’t like to see the redistribution frame used since it reinforces that frame. However, it’s not as if redistribution hasn’t occurred, but the economic truth of the matter doesn’t lend itself to the sound bites that activate the visceral, mid-brain response to this issue. Redistribution certainly occurred, but it came at the expense of the middle and lower classes and was given to the rich.
There’s more to this issue than simple fairness, it’s about macroeconomics, too. As we’ve all seen lately, markets don’t always work. Moreover, when they become inefficient, they can dramatically distort the value of goods & services thus impeding the normal, efficient functioning of the market. At its worst, a market can require government intervention such as the recent “rescue/bailout.” Broken markets happen, and there’s really no serious disagreement on this issue. Moreover, recent events provide a graphic illustration of what can happen when they do break.
If the recent meltdown could be described as a massive intestinal blockage requiring emergency surgery then the chronic mal-distribution that occurred over the last 30+ years would be blockage of the arteries which robs parts of the body economic of blood. This is not simply a metaphor, it’s literally true.
Economic systems are feedback systems, just like biological organisms and ecosystems, as well as many others in nature. Bush’s tax cut for the rich was like responding to a blockage of the arteries by sending more blood to the head even though the blockage was elsewhere. Empirical economic studies show (as opposed to theoretic economics which is often dominated by ideologues) that the Bush tax cut did very little to stimulate economic growth. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate share of the tax cut was spent on luxury goods by the rich, which does little to stimulate the economy as a whole. On the other hand, middle and lower income groups, who have seen their wages stagnate despite productivity increases, were unable to make investments and purchases that would have allowed the economy to continue to grow.
A simple way of viewing our economy is to divide people into buyers and sellers. In a normal, efficient economy the buyers and sellers are well matched. Producers of goods can find buyers who can afford to buy their goods, and all is well. Neither the buyers or sellers hold an advantage over the other, and economic decisions are made rationally. Irrationality or inefficiency occurs when this normal arrangement breaks down. For instance, a needed good like emergency surgery is so important to the buyer that he’s willing to risk financial ruin in order to obtain it. The seller, on the other hand, can sell surgeries at almost any price.
Under these inefficient economic conditions, sellers can still get wealthy by charging exorbitant prices, and they can do that — oddly — even though they perform far fewer surgeries. On the other hand, buyers of surgeries can afford far fewer of them and suffer the negative consequences. There is a disjunction between what the sellers can sell and what buyers can buy. This market is inefficient at best or completely dysfunctional at worst.
Markets naturally devolve into inefficiency — despite claims to the contrary — and the only remedy is to restore equilibrium through government intervention. Notably, Bush’s tax cut was made under this same logic. The only problem with the cut was that it was given to the wrong sector. The rich weren’t suffering from a lack of motivation to get rich, far to the contrary. Moreover, the rich weren’t being rewarded for working harder — which is absurd (and look at CNN’s Culprits of the Collapse if you want to see what I mean). Decisions on macroeconomic interventions aren’t made willy nilly, just as blocked arteries aren’t treated by prescribing fatty foods. The regimen is tailored to the disease. The fact that some people aren’t given the same medicine is no more significant than the fact that doctors treat healthy people differently than sick ones. Finally, to extend the metaphor, giving more food to a vastly overfed upper class makes absolutely no sense, especially when the middle and lower classes are so obviously underfed. Each requires different regimens, and the health of each is dependent on the health of all.
It is on everyone’s minds, so now is the time to take the sting out of the term.
Everything you say is true, but they have redistributed 90% to 1%, it is time to take some back.
People get that.
Their campaign bullshit backfired!
My main point was that we currently have an upward redistribution and it’s not working very well — not surprisingly. The argument for letting people get what they ‘earn’ is more difficult to frame because economics is a byzantine science. Working, or productivity, should be rewarded. Recent increases in productivity haven’t yielded wage increases, a sure sign that earnings are being misappropriated initially. And our system is heavily tilted towards large capital formations, which is a lot like the aristocratic system we fought the Revolutionary war to overthrow. To use the biological metaphor once again, we’ve got a giant tumor that’s consuming most of our resources while our limbs are suffering from a lack of blood flow. We need to restore our health, not feed the disease. I like framing that makes this distinction clear.
Twenty-Five Key Indicators of Social Development 2002
(Canadian Council for Social Development, CCSD)
In order CANADA USA SWEDEN
INCOME AND POVERTY
JOBS
EMPLOYMENT SECURITY
SOCIAL SUPPORTS
HEALTH
CRIME
EDUCATION
CIVIC PARTICIPATION
25. Voter Turnout 56.2% 49.1% 83.2%
Unless otherwise indicated, data are from the OECD Social Indicators Database.
22.and 23. Data from International Adult Literacy Survey.
Right on Shergald, thanks so much for this!