The 1% Should Be Afraid: The New Norm in the Workplace Is Unstable

[Purveyor]

A new study from Oxfam published just ahead of this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, reported that just one percent of the world's population controls nearly half of the planet's wealth and 70 percent of the world's people live in countries where income inequality has been growing in the last 30 years. In the US, the gap between rich and poor has grown faster than in any other developed country. The top one percent has captured 95 percent of all growth since the putative "recovery" of 2009. This is the "new normal." Is it sustainable?

Barbara Garson is the author of a series of books describing American working lives at historically important turning points. If this is one of those turning points, it's one in which the one percent have won:

"That the so-called recovery that everyone is bragging about is this," Garson told GRITtv in a recent interview. "We've recovered, we've taken your full-time job away and given you a part-time job, and we've given the difference to our stockholders."

The trouble is, this cockeyed situation is not stable, and even the capitalists, maybe especially the capitalists, should be worried.

"There are capitalist solutions, like redistribution, but they're not doing it. That may be why we have a socialist solution this time," she concludes. "If seventeen percent of the houses are vacant, we'll just move into them."

more...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/21785-the-one-percent-should-be-afraid-the-new-norm-in-the-workplace-is-unstable

[democratisphere]

1. The idiot 1%ers are killing off their beloved consumers that keep our.....

70% consumer based economy stumbling along. The 90% will eventually revolt and end this crazy wealthaholic money grab.

[Lifelong Protester]

3. You said it all!

[Enthusiast]

21. Worse than grabbing the wealth, they

have also grabbed the media and the political and legislative process rendering "our" democracy a thing of the past.

[democratisphere]

22. If the founders could only see what has happened to the nation they created.

I have faith that the American people will eventually reclaim their country.

[hankthecrank]

2. 1% will not see that way

They just think I got mine and I'm going to get yours too

[Warpy]

4. Busting full time workers to part time is how things should be headed

now that health insurance is no longer absolutely tied to employment. What has to change is the hourly pay, making sure that part time workers are paid enough to sustain themselves and their families. The 1% has to be forced into doing the right thing there and everybody knows it even the 1%.

They will fight it tooth and nail, of course, but depressed wages are the main thing preventing any sort of meaningful recovery in this country.

[bemildred]

5. So they are all together masturbating with their money in their markets.

Essentaily the argument Hardt & Negri made in "Empire": more and more money with fewer ways to make the necessary returns on it. Hence privatization, and all the other frantic activity to increase profits.

[Doctor_J]

6. When the first head drops into the basket I'll believe it

or the first 100 Hate Radio stations are firebombed. Until then this is just like the "Republican Party is Dying" we've been hearing for 25 years.

[Oakenshield]

15. Completely agree.

[TxVietVet]

7. The 1% better be worried.

99% are going to get tired of their fascist bu$hit.
A revolution will probably be in the making when it gets a little worse.
The 1% are paying politicians to do their orders, not what the voters want.
That will change also.

I'm glad I'm not in the 1%.

[dogknob]

16. Nah, it will just keep getting "a little worse"

Hillary and a GOP House. 8 more years of "a little worse..." while everyone continues to wait for the last straw.

After our first woman President, we'll get our first openly ALEC President in 2024.

[Curmudgeoness]

8. My mother grew up during the Great Depression.

The article suggests that people will just start moving into vacant houses. That is actually what happened with her family when she was young....hers and lots of others. A factory closed up and left all the company row houses to rot. People who had no homes just took them over, and my mother's family was one of them. It did happen, and there is no reason that it can't happen again.

In fact, I don't know what people are waiting for. The only thing different about the vacant homes now and the row houses back then is that those houses were all in one spot, which made it harder to remove people without a riot. Every person there was a squatter.

[jwirr]

9. It would be interesting to know why they were so afraid of a communist/socialist take over in the

1930s - enough so that they welcomed FDR until of course he started working on his agenda. What exact action were they taking to scare them so much?

[Curmudgeoness]

10. It is easy to imagine why they were concerned.

The majority of people were hurting. The workers had started to unite not long before the depression. The people knew that the ruling class and the wealthy were responsible for the collapse of the economy. And there were no safety nets at that time. One of my mother's uncles lost a leg working on the railroad, and all he got was fired because he could no longer do his job. And of course that meant that he would not find another job.....ever. If they had not convinced the people of the USA to be very afraid of socialism/communism today, they would have to be very worried again. But those are now dirty words.

[jwirr]

24. Sounds like today only we still have some of the safety net in place. And you are right they do not

think we will ever go communist. But socialist may be another matter if things get worse. Of course they are fixing that with their voter reforms.

[Curmudgeoness]

32. I believe that we could go socialist

if we frame it in a different way, and with a different word. The term "socialism" has too much negativity associated with it these days, but the principles are still popular. People just have a misunderstanding of socialism.

[Kablooie]

11. Isn't that what Marx predicted?

That capitalism would create an imbalance so great that there would be a revolution and the result would be a socialist society?

[bemildred]

25. Yes, pretty much.

It has not had the efect Marx expected because of the "redistribution" mentioned in the OP, i.e. because concessions were made to the needs of the not-wealthy.

[jsr]

12. It's only a matter of time

[jtuck004]

20. Careful what you wish for. After the tyrants they beheaded tens of thousands of ordinary citizens,

many who were the sans-coulotte, i.e. the people. Progressives, urban workers, graphic designers, grad students, bakers, cops, etc were killed, and the rich wound up in the place of the tyrant, forcibly repressing them. Amazing the power of money.

[yurbud]

36. I would be satisfied with the equivalent being down to their secret bank accounts, trust funds, and

political power.

[reformist2]

13. I think it's pretty much over for 20th-century capitalism.

The old system was based on paying hard-working citizens decent wages for decent jobs. The big thing that has changed is that there aren't enough decent jobs left to go around. We can raise the minimum wage, but it isn't enough - we need to come to terms with what to do with the millions of able and willing workers who will never find full-time work again, simply because of the 21st century economy we live in, where if jobs aren't lost to outsourcing, they are lost to labor-saving technology.

What we need is the 21st-century counterpart to the minimum wage - it's called basic income, and people should get it whether they can find work or not. You can tell by the howls from the business community, the same type of people that were outraged by the idea of the minimum wage 100 years ago, that this is the only real solution that will work.

[A Little Weird]

17. +1 for basic income n/t

[JNelson6563]

14. Interesting thread.

I am sorry to tell everyone but here is bad news: The difference between now and other times there have been such inequality is very simple. There are more people who get by comfortably, or just short of, who have been completely brainwashed into believing that if someone isn't making it, it's simply because they are lazy and want to sponge off of those who are.

Daily I marvel at how prevalent this mindset is.

Julie

[AndyTiedye]

18. That is Why So Many 1%ers Want to Impose a Theocracy

It's not that the Koch brothers and the other robber barons who bankroll the teabaggers actually want to live under a theocracy (actually they would live above it like the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia).

They want a theocracy because theocracies never fall to popular uprisings, no matter how repressive they become.

No other form of government can subjugate the people the way a theocracy can.

That is why some very rich people are trying to turn our country into Jesusland.

[jtuck004]

19. She titled that wrong. The whole point of the interview is that the 99% should be afraid.

Nothing in what was said threatened those who have the money, the assets, the water, control of the food, media, politics...etc, that I could hear?

All I heard was increasing levels of misery for everyone else.

She said it was a dangerous game and that the rich should be careful that they don't crater the economy, but that doesn't imply that they will be the target. Hell, I doubt they care whether they burn the country into the ground anymore than some sociopathic Teabagger.

I am perplexed by what in hell possesses perfectly reasonable people to think that most of the people in this country, who today consistently blame gays, blacks, women, immigrants, "foreigners", liberals, socialists, social security, entitlements, yada, yada, yada, everyone and everything EXCEPT the bastards (and their political lapdogs in both parties) that are causing their woes, would suddenly sit up and point themselves in the right direction?

We are FAR more likely to get mad and kill each other while trying to be the first ones to get the rice thrown off the back of the truck. And driver bringing them the food. (Think I'm not talking about you, dear reader? Find the Twilight Zone episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" on you tube. Those people are us, to a T.

One very effective method of fighting a war is to cut the enemies supply lines, deprive them of ammo and fuel. In this case money, which they get by us working ourselves to death for it, and organizing our government so it gives them more. To fix that we need to be able to walk away from the government and quit providing the wealthy the means to hurt us. We will lose everything, but we are going to anyway, and our current path likely brings more misery and tragedy than just biting the bullet. Frankly, many of the truly wealthy look forward to a revolution, because they see that as the buying opportunity it could easily become. ("The time to make money is when there is blood running in the streets" JD Rockefeller.). If you put more good pols in they will become just like the friends of the rentiers we have now.

To topple the tyrant, you have to take away their support. In this case we must take away the money. It is what they are killing everyone else with. We have to quit making it for them. Sort of like the Socialist in Seattle is talking about, but more along the lines of what the Industrial Unions were talking about before they were killed off by the government, business, and the business unions in the 20s and 30s of the last century. They did not want socialism, but had not finalized their vision - which mostly resembles cooperative ownership and work as we know it today - before they were emasculated.

It's kinda fun to think about revolutions, but it's the stuff comic books are made of, until a consciousness-raising effort which surpasses that of the anti-war and civil rights training of the 50's and 60's takes places, I think.

I say that because the wealthy already own our minds, which means they have the single most effective weapon we need already on their side. Until we steal it back, comic books are all we have.

[Doctor_J]

23. post of the year

We need to make sure that some of the blood in the streets belongs to those who would make money while it's happening.

[gwheezie]

26. The 1% will not lose

I don't think the rest of us can beat them, we can make it a little harder for them or throw them off for a while, but since the industrial age, the power they have is really global, it doesn't matter if one country has it's citizens rise up, the 1% have no country, they have no allegiance, they don't even have an ideology. We work for them, we go to war for them, we destroy each other to protect their wealth and power.I am satisfied to scare the shit out of them every few decades when they get too cocky.
Other than that, I am basically a cheerful person.

[bemildred]

27. You need to read up on the French Revolution.

They don't call it the Ancient Regime there for nothing.

[gwheezie]

30. I get that

Like I said, we can beat them back for a while,scare them but there always are enough of them left.

[bemildred]

31. Do you get that a lot of them died, and the new big shots were nobody before?

Napoleon?

It is true that all of the wealthy were not exterminated, but it is also true that many of them were. Such events are not respecters of much of anything or anybody. And this time it won't just be in one country. It isn't just one country already.

[TheKentuckian]

37. Think Russian Revolution rather than French. Completed dismantle the connections and the wealth.

Wipe them all out with extreme prejudice, let God sort them out.

[yurbud]

28. we're coming up on a moment like the shift from feudalism to capitalism

The then new merchant and factory owner class made the feudal nobility economically and eventually politically irrelevant.

The democratization of knowledge through the internet and the crowdsourcing of solutions to problems will eventually make those with the massive accumulated fortunes, especially those based on inheritance and financial chicanery, irrelevant too.

[bemildred]

29. Yep. nt

[justabob]

33. I hope so

I think you're right, it is just a question of when. Sometimes I think that day might never come, but other times, I realize there are little tiny shifts happening all over the place, on many levels, and at some point critical mass will be reached. There is a lot going on on many fronts and it does appear that certain institutions are in the process of self destructing. Things like mega-churches and religion in general come to mind. It's like they know they are dying so they are trying to force through as much of their agenda as possible in as many locales as possible before they finally flame out. The GOP itself is the same way. I know the people I talk to are a lot more plugged in to the pervasive corruption of both parties being on the payroll of every corporation that wants to fuck us, and the multitude of ways those corps fuck us on an hourly basis. It does seem like there is a shift in overall consciousness out there. It is slow to be sure, but it is happening.

[magical thyme]

34. the took the money that was loaned to them when they threatened to take down the economy

and bought up, not only all the commodities and farmland, but warehouses and transportation. Now they hoard goods, in the same way they hoard money.

They can cause the supermarket shelves and gas stations to sit empty. How will the internet and crowdsourcing heat homes when the 1% hoard oil in tankers parked at sea? How will it feed people when they let the food rot in warehouses?

[yurbud]

35. good questions. But if they do those things, it will show that they need to be taken out of loop

even more clearly.

When energy traders blackmailed California out of $14 billion dollars with rolling blackouts around 2000, some people got the message that they need a power supply other than the grid, like solar if they have a home that can use it.

Likewise, if you recenter your diet on foods that don't require long term storage or long distance transportation, you'll be less vulnerable. Buy local if possible.

Neither is a complete solution. But the greater the pain the 1% inflict, the more it will come back to bite them on the ass.

It's like the Pentagon Papers said about putting more troops in Vietnam: it would take more troops to "win," but the more troops we put in the greater the resistance of the Vietnamese would be--meaning effectively a lose now or lose later scenario.

The tighter the 1% turn the screws, the sooner they will be screwed themselves.