Rich getting richer
 

Linkage

A bunch of charts compiled together to give you an idea on how borked the US really is...

Oh, and Darrell Issa can really go jump off a cliff. Chris Dodd is on that list too since he's going to work for the MPAA from being a Senator and compromise ANY integrity he had left. Of course, he was a senator. Not many of them come out of the revoling door with morals.

Marx predicted this in 1867- it's pretty inevitable really.
Edit: Thoughthe figures are pretty damning.

I think this rich, elitist, republicans want a return to the practice of slavery. Not in the sense that we get shackled up in huts to work the cotton fields but so that they only give us enough money to survive off of to work for them and to buy their merchandise.

That is what is at the heart of the Wisconsin event. The Unions were willing to let just about everything go except the loss of their bargaining rights, and that was the one thing the republicans wanted eliminated. It was unions that put in place the limit on work hours, child labor laws and safety considerations of the work place.

If you can strip the unions of their power the corporations, through the politicians on their payroll, have complete immunity to strip away these things to increase profit for themselves.

If this sets a precedent for trends to follow anyone not making at least 500 grand a year is doomed.

All of this is in the Church of the Sub-Genius stuff. This elite, rich, aristocracy could bring this country to a very dark place.

Collective bargaining may go by the wayside but at the end of the day the people will form unions again, and strike again, and cause general mayhem and discontent against the corporations again. We have infinitely more tools at our disposal now than we did back in the 1800s and it's not so easy to just tell the people to sit down and shut up.

The problem isn't the corporations. Well, they're the root problem, but the real problem is the network of fear, misinformation and outright lies. The problem is the media -- they have been thoroughly corrupted as all the major media outlets are now owned by corporations, and their bottom-line goal is to promote the desires of the corporation.

I'm worried as hell for the future, but not worried at the same time, because the idiot redneck wingnut team sport assholes that have so emboldened, encouraged and solidifed the base of support for the fascism that's overshadowing the country...they will eventually be dead, or reality will set in when they realize they are also in the unemployment line. Provided the conservative supermajority isn't made permanent by then by effectively outlawing contrary votes, things will swing back to normalcy again.

That said, say goodbye to the rights we lost over the past 20 years 'cause those are gone and never coming back without likely bloodshed.

From the outside, the US of A is looking more and more like an experiment at least as callous, as radical and as far removed from serving the actual needs of people as any nation that's ever been run into the ground in our sordid past. With the difference that it's not done out of any lofty political ideals or misguided fundamentalism, but for profit; knowingly by clever and educated people who can think of nothing better to do with the enormous resources at their disposal than grab all they can from everyone they can.

I don't know what to say about it. Hopefully a lot of people will not die before their time working three or four jobs without being able to afford health insurance.

I'm worried it'll spread. We have certain parties and politicians here, who seem to think we should do what the USA does/has done in the past economically, just because you know, it's the USA. I mean, they didn't get to be a super power by looking out for everyones social interests and not just those of the rich, amirite? Even more worrying is how many people buy into that shit. So many people who aren't in the end of the spectrum that would benefit from these policies.

And thats talking only about politicians and nothing about how big a say international corporations will have in our "development" as a society.

I'm having a feeling that a captalistic system is not a successful system in sustaining a nation. It certainly seems it did a good job at building one, by rewarding ingenuity and fostering many, many technological leaps forward, but it ultimately leads to, and very quickly, a small wealthy elite group owning most of the money.

Perhaps there may be something to say about considering a less private corporation oriented system. For example: In my local state the corporations that own the heating and electrical services have been launching this advertising campaign to tell people to turn their thermostats down a few degrees this winter (this is MN) to save money. At the same time they are trying to get the rates for the heating costs in the area raised. That way they will charge us the same amount for less heat.

It might be better for the government to own the power companies if the privately owned ones are going to try that kind of game.

That's another thing; state ownership. A lot of the companies that provided shall we say 'essential' services nation wide were bought or founded by our goverment (or regional goverments) during the process of building a modern nordic wellfare state. The Capital Area counties for example each own their main producer of electricity, the national goverment used to own Finnair (then Aero) and still owns Alko (alcohol). These are just a few of the easiest examples.

Now everything is being privatized. Now I'm not a huge supporter of state ownership as such. But while I have little trust in my goverment, I trust privately run (large) corporations even less. And on top of that, this wave of privatization has gone so far that it often considered the goal in itself rather than means to an end.

This amuses me much more greatly than it should. :)

So long as people are happy to be thoroughly ignorant of their surroundings and/or willfully destructive toward their countryment, this will keep happening.

I saw a great quote just a moment ago: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - John Steinbeck

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This is why the wealth divide continues to increase, because instead of choosing someone who will do something about the problem, those who suffer simply assume the situation will cease applying to them once they become rich.

Privatization has been compared to selling your house to stay at a luxurious hotel for a year. That might not be a bad generalization, but more to the point in my localized experience every single public service that's been privatized or deregulated to any extent have shown a distinct lack of improvement. Prices go up, standards go down, workers get less training and less job security, advertising becomes more irritating, millions and millions are spent on making corporate logos more cool and happening. I'm not seeing a single damn example of anything that's gotten better by being privatized.

(Admittedly I haven't looked very hard.)

Those charts actually make me feel nauseous.

We should drop some socialist/communist hammers in this thread and see which pro-capitalists show up now.

I can't remember where I read it, but that top 1% isn't actually a whole percent apparently - it's closer to being something like just 400 people.

To be honest, Alko is more to control the sale of a substance that has potentially large effects on society as a whole. It's basically nanny state sort of stuff. But I consider it to be an essential service, and it is sort of great to be able to go to one single place for all of your alcohol needs. Don't even get me started on alcohol and its importance in Finnish student culture.

Me neither. But somehow these people always claim that privatization has been proven to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of services.

Hey, Smarty, I'm currently teaching Animal Farm, got anything to say to the kids? This is your chance to impress/scar them for life with something, so think up something good and post it here.

(Note: Already mentioned Trotsky was murdered with an ice axe, you have to think of something else).

As for the thread topic, I'd say the current attack on unions is only the first step in slowly regressing us back to the age of the robber barons, union busting, and wage slavery of the late 1800 to early 1900s. It's gonna be a ton of fun, let me tell ya.

The chart I thought was funniest was the distribution of wealth chart entitled "What Americans think it is". People in this country are just totally clueless about how just enormous the gigantic piles of the wealth are that is owned by an incredibly tiny, fractional amount of people.