How the 99 percent was born
The Great Recession destroyed the right’s myth of a “liberal elite,” and forced the middle class to band together
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/how_the_99_percent_was_born/singleton/
An interesting article on the (surely deliberate) efforts to misdirect and dilute the focus of the sheeple, to divide and conquer, so to speak, the anger and angst of the shrinking middle class.
This is another interesting comment regarding our so-called safety net that divides so many people:
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60 percent of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.
So many conservative types I interact with appear to have the total conviction that any sort of population aid just makes lazy couch potatoes out of recipients and totally fail to comprehend that when our society can’t allow a significant fraction of the working population to pay their bills the entire economy takes a giant nose dive and EVERYONE is hurt (except, of course, the 1%, to whom money is just a way to keep score and earning less really doesn’t matter to them as long as no one else makes more).
The point of the social safety net (which I freely admit is abused by a certain percentage of people (why don’t they exclusively focus their ire on the few that abuse it instead of the majority that need it to keep from having to live under a bridge?)) is to provide a cushion to absorb the blow of the inevitable economic downturns against the common man. Just because you get lucky in a particular downturn and are not needing such tools doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you on the next go ’round. And anyone who thinks that the average Joe that gets government help is living large clearly hasn’t tried to live off of the meager resources grudgingly meted out. That sort of money is only ideal for people who have made the life long decision to game the system and I bet the majority of those could be trivially caught by the government with a few sweeps through their databases.
When part of our society is hurt our entire society is hurt and the point of helping out those in need is so that when you become the one in need there is an infrastructure in place. Could the government do things more efficiently? Of course! Having said that, if you try to privatize such activities (as is increasingly common as our bought-and-paid-for politicians sell out municipalities to their cronies) you automatically make the process less efficient in the long term because corporations exist to make a profit and corporate executives exists to maximize that profit and everyone in that situation loves a monopoly.
Of course, knowing why you are beaten down and exhausted from working so hard to pay the bills doesn’t change that the oligarchy is still in power and I still don’t see any path to overturning their power short of a bloody revolution and as I have pointed out before, as long as the oligarchy provide enough illusion to the sheeple that they can influence events, our society is immune from revolution.
