03-18-2022, 11:58 AM
$23,660 goes much further in Columbus, Mississippi than in Columbus, Ohio. $23,660 is poverty in any high-cost urban area. If one earns such as an hourly worker one at least can get a second job and still be poor. If one gets that as a salaried worker in New York City has an open end on hours worked, then one lacks even that solution. Much of the prosperity that America enjoys depends upon people being both sweated and starved. The neoliberal economy is tantamount to economic fascism. It has allowed arrogant and rapacious elites to wax intensely off the suffering of multitudes in the names of 'growth' and 'prosperity'. Such was the rationale for slavery back in its day.
Employment at will seems on paper as the reasonable assumption that one can be fired for misconduct, a reasonable assumption. Heck, I would be quick to fire someone who violates safety standards, does sexual harassment (which can be as costly a judgment as the cost of a large-scale embezzlement), does any irregularity of accounting, pilfers property, or rips off vendors or customers. Management by fear is how such people as Hitler and Stalin, people widely reviled in America, did things in the furtherance of prosperity. After a certain point, even with "milder" villains such as Pinochet or Castro, it breaks people down.
Sure, one can get work elsewhere -- starting over at the ground floor. If one never advanced far in the bureaucratic chain, like a truck driver, one might lose little accept not getting a vacation. If your first job fresh out of college required you to work 60 hours a week for starvation pay (you still lived with your parents) at odious, sol-crushing tasks, then such might not be so easy if one has family obligations and no support from parents when one is 35.
If I am to suffer for something, then it should be something noble (unusually high, and highly-compensated achievement) or a very good meal-ticket. If it is simply drudgery for bare and precarious survival, then I am likely to have the attitude of "Burn in Hell!" to "Suffer for (elite power, profit, and privilege). Most of us reasonably expect prole reward for prole efforts and entrepreneurial rewards for competence in entrepreneurial effort. Elites capable of compelling entrepreneurial efforts, risk-taking, and competence for proletarian rewards deserve ruin or overthrow.
Neoliberal economics is mirror-image Marxism, acceptance of extreme inequality and harsh terms of employment and survival as desirable ends in themselves.Mirror-image Marxists recognize and accept a plutocratic order as a norm for capitalism, differing from Marxists only in that Marxists condemn such as objects first for excoriation and then overthrow. Any capitalist order is tolerable to the extent that it does not fit a Marxist stereotype.
Employment at will seems on paper as the reasonable assumption that one can be fired for misconduct, a reasonable assumption. Heck, I would be quick to fire someone who violates safety standards, does sexual harassment (which can be as costly a judgment as the cost of a large-scale embezzlement), does any irregularity of accounting, pilfers property, or rips off vendors or customers. Management by fear is how such people as Hitler and Stalin, people widely reviled in America, did things in the furtherance of prosperity. After a certain point, even with "milder" villains such as Pinochet or Castro, it breaks people down.
Sure, one can get work elsewhere -- starting over at the ground floor. If one never advanced far in the bureaucratic chain, like a truck driver, one might lose little accept not getting a vacation. If your first job fresh out of college required you to work 60 hours a week for starvation pay (you still lived with your parents) at odious, sol-crushing tasks, then such might not be so easy if one has family obligations and no support from parents when one is 35.
If I am to suffer for something, then it should be something noble (unusually high, and highly-compensated achievement) or a very good meal-ticket. If it is simply drudgery for bare and precarious survival, then I am likely to have the attitude of "Burn in Hell!" to "Suffer for (elite power, profit, and privilege). Most of us reasonably expect prole reward for prole efforts and entrepreneurial rewards for competence in entrepreneurial effort. Elites capable of compelling entrepreneurial efforts, risk-taking, and competence for proletarian rewards deserve ruin or overthrow.
Neoliberal economics is mirror-image Marxism, acceptance of extreme inequality and harsh terms of employment and survival as desirable ends in themselves.Mirror-image Marxists recognize and accept a plutocratic order as a norm for capitalism, differing from Marxists only in that Marxists condemn such as objects first for excoriation and then overthrow. Any capitalist order is tolerable to the extent that it does not fit a Marxist stereotype.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.