Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[pbrower2a]

(02-13-2018, 01:29 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: We are maybe entering the Information Age / a post scarcity culture.  I would not assume that patterns that worked in the Industrial Age will work now.  I am not seeing the spiral of violence that usually proceeds a revolution, civil war or crisis war.  Both Bobc and you may be making a mistake in assuming an immediate violent confrontation.  The cycle has worked less well anyway outside of the Anglo American civilization.  Either of you using crisis theory to assume triumph of your values may well be disappointed.

Every great transformation of economic norms has its winners and losers. One warning that Howe and Strauss gave was of the "Great Devaluation" of assets and earning capacity. Inflation gutted the value of Continental currency; Confederate currency felt severe deflation before becoming worthless. The great stock market crash of 1929 and ensuing three-year meltdown of the value of common stock ensured that people would be unable to get the nominal value of stock purchased (if one goes with value indexes)at the peak of the bubble until the 1950s, by which time a dollar was not worth as much.

But this said -- the potential for economic gain from commercial and farming activities did not disappear.  Tangible stores of income-generating wealth, whether farmland, manufacturing, and shipping did not disappear.There was no confiscation of property, unless one wishes to discuss the abolition of slavery. Even in the wreckage of the Confederate cities, people made fortunes by rebuilding what the war had destroyed.


Real harm comes from either the destruction of human capital, especially in entrepreneurial talent and blue-collar skilled trades (think of the extermination of Jewish populations under Nazi rule or of the Polish intelligentsia) or if those whose contributions are necessary enough to be rewarded well before the Great Devaluation are rendered much less valuable without viable alternatives. A neo-Marxist analysis could suggest that if the capitalist classes saved themselves from proletarian revolutions and thus Marxist-Leninist Socialism by transforming the proletariat into participants in a consumer economy, then things could be really bad for working people if their toil is greatly devalued and the ruling classes of the post-Crisis time can get away with treating industrial workers as badly as they do in Marx' depiction of the capitalism that he knew. That is one horrid world.


The reality remains; the industrial worker or the potential industrial worker has nothing to sell but his toil, whether in the early capitalism of the sweat shop with industrial workers working seventy-hour weeks and having forty-years of life expectancy or in the more modern capitalism in which workers do forty-hour workweeks and have seventy-years of life expectancy. The economic realities for white coal miners in Appalachia as the coal seams are worked out have their analogy in the decline of manufacturing as a share of the4 economy in the 1960s and 1970s that made millions of black men superfluous in the economies of such citie4s as Detroit, Gary, and Cleveland. Such manifested itself in drug epidemics and crime waves.

So what do we do? Good question.  The economic elite of shareholders, executives, landlords in cities that still have vibrant economies, and political bosses have never had thing so good. This elite (and Donald Trump is a stereotype of the worst) isn't going to change its ways until it starts to feel economic distress or is dislodged in war or revolution. This elite so far has the means of ensuring that others will feel any economic distress without recourse or relief.

Quote:Usually, the crisis leads to the culture shift.   In the 1960s era, the awakening led to a culture shift.  I am sort of expecting that the see saw between the cultures will end in an era that smells more like an awakening than a crisis.  It isn't supposed to be, but I am not seeing the expected spiral of violence domestically, yet some problems (division of wealth, global warming, productivity increase) are building up.  We are stuck calling those using violence lone nuts rather than see them organizing into large culture altering groups.

In an awakening, ideals lead to changes of values and to a cultural shift. In a Crisis, the harsh reality of war, revolution, and coups forces changes of values and of the culture. This Crisis Era can still end with a more complete consolidation of elite power, with the economic elites having more brutal means than they now have. Such would be the achievement of an inhuman economic and political order in which this sort of image



is possible again, and with the excuse 'at least he was spared execution'.

Sorry folks, this is part of the political heritage of America, and no time can so bring out the demons of the discredited past as can a Crisis Era. There are many ways in which a Crisis can end, and this one offers even the chance of the destruction of our civilization in a nuclear exchange.