Economic Inequality

[pbrower2a]

(05-29-2016, 07:21 AM)radind Wrote:

(05-28-2016, 10:23 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: 2000 marks, much as did 1920 roughly eighty years ago, the start of the last phase of a Third Turning: what I call the Degeneracy, a time of depraved mass culture, weak government unable or unwilling to address the moral issues of the time, and business practices that sink to the worst for about eighty years. A Degeneracy eventually pushes society as a whole onto a destructive course to be rectified only in a Crisis.

It is sad and tragic that we cannot act to correct things before a Crisis occurs. But the cycle does seem to repeat.

Yes, it is. The cycle has a biological reality behind it -- that people generally lose all competence to participate in public life in their middle-to-late 80s.

It is easy to read into Generations whatever fits one's ideology. The previous 4T had so many horrors that have been etched into the minds of people born after the Crisis. I may have been born in 1955, but the images that I have of the Nazi concentration camps are as strong in my mind as those that people living at the time in which those atrocities were first exposed must be as powerful. Likewise the images of mass destruction from war, whether of Warsaw, London, Manila, Hamburg, or Hiroshima. I hoped that the Crisis would be relatively benign, largely a transformation of America in its culture to adapt to economic realities of productivity so great and technology so sophisticated that we can live without need. We all share in the dirty work and have meaningful, rich leisure.
 
So maybe we would avoid a similar Crisis by avoiding the depravities that lead to such Crises. So don't single out innocent people as pariahs. That's easy to say. Remember well that the German gentiles who put gaudy yellow stars on Jews were the gentiles most similar by culture to the Yiddish-speaking, let alone German-speaking Jews. So we don't use a military build-up as a substitute for social justice. So we don't have a back-to-the-land movement that depends upon stealing land from people already living there. We watch anything resembling Big Brother (the police system, and not the TV show) as closely as Big brother watches us. We turn against hate speech when we see or hear it.

But we can't avoid the Degeneracy, can we? Maybe this time we needed a full-scale meltdown of the 1929-1932 to wipe out the pervasive narcissism among American elites and to make people turn to a New Deal instead of the Tea Party. Maybe we needed the same meltdown to bring an end to decrepit bureaucracies and become more self-reliant upon our own enterprise.

I look at the 2008 financial crisis (which really began in 2007) as an analogue to the truly-destructive start of the real meltdown of 1930. 78 years apart? It might not be 80 years, precisely, but close enough. But politically, 2006 was the equivalent to 1930 when Democrats got control of both Houses of Congress -- but because of the President's bungling of the war and not due to an economic collapse.

I see the Tea Party movement as a successful version of the Business Coup.  We are stuck with even more corporate power and even more inequality as solutions. Americans are to work harder and longer under harsher conditions for the enrichment and pampering of economic elites who have only one virtue -- a disdain for mass violence. America's economic elites combine the rapaciousness of Gilded entrepreneurs, the lust for economic inequality of pre-Civil-War planters of the Old South, the insensitivity of the old Soviet nomenklatura, and the amorality of intellectuals of the witch-doctor heritage. That's four different elites -- big landowners, financiers and industrialists, bureaucrats out for themselves alone, and well-educated shysters -- and all four of those elites exploit us Americans badly. They also fully cooperate politically. I failed to mention a fifth elite, organized crime, and only because I cannot readily characterize its politics. It exploits harshly, too.

President Barack Obama rescued the banks to prevent a replay of the latter half of the 1929-1932 meltdown, and the people that he rescued turned on him. He got us a rudimentary version of a welfare system in medical care, but this is shaky. He has made life more precarious for anti-American terrorists than was so under his dreadful predecessor... but I question what we have solved.

In many respects (racism, sexism, and homophobia excluded) we are no better than Americans were in the 1930s. Sure, we have more sophisticated techniques of entertainment, but much of it is amoral, mindless dreck. Do we need a meltdown as bad as the three-year economic collapse that made the Great Depression sting so badly?