Social Darwinism - the only logical explanation?

Great Debates
21

You’re right on so many levels it’s not funny. There is an old saying, “the world owes you nothing”. This pithy little he-man quote ignores the other side of that sword. “If the world owes you nothing, what do you owe the world?” We’re about to reap the consequences of this thinking.

That’s why the riots in Egypt are scaring the powers that be. It’s not the fear over access to the Suez Canal or the instability caused by the loss of Egypt as a mediator between Israel and the Middle East. It’s not even the threat of increased terrorism or the non-starter issue of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The fear with Egypt is that when you have so many out of work men out there (and this recession has far and away hit American men harder than women) and these men realize that the jobs problem is not cyclical or structural, but rather institutional, the men, the working class, can still revolt… and win.*

Those men in Egypt are even worse off than we are, though. We’re in another period of growth in which 1/8th of America’s working age male populace is being left behind (on welfare, basically waiting to be cut off and set adrift). Does 1/8th lead to rebellion? Time will tell. I certainly hope it does. A society that leaves so many of its most vulnerable behind does not deserve civilization for anyone. You’ll never get rid of poverty but what we have in America is a totally avoidable mess that the rich absolutely do not want to see go away.

I’ll even go further with this - this is all about population control. This is the use of capitalism to do what liberal population control activists failed to do; instead of coerced birth control we’re using poverty and the politics of total neglect to cull the herd.

Now here’s an exercise. Take what I just said and assume this to be the Republican party’s motivation. This will accurately predict every political move they make. You will cease to be surprised at anything they do.

  • The sad fact of reality is that when you have a ton of men unemployed and hopeless, this leads to what’s called a (male) Youth Bulge Effect, and many huge historical events stem from this problem. Germany in WW-II, the Middle East problem, and so on, in modern times. The Viking invasions were also the product of a huge male youth bulge. Women don’t have “youth bulges” - when things go to hell history says that women are the victims of the male rampage: not a good position to be in.

LOL. Tap the hornets’ nest will ya. :smiley:

We used to have an employee’s market in America. Yeah, we did. Jobs chasing workers, not vice-versa. Somehow we’ve been brainwashed into believing that this is a bad thing for America. America was this stone aged hell hole where progress never happened and everyone was poor when we had job stability. Workers are a necessary evil and the less they’re paid and the fewer there are the more efficient we are.

America is becoming increasingly aware of this. As soon as the older white male voters (the strongest voting block in America) gets rid of the Socialist Muslim Terrorist Evil Dark Non-Citizen President (and I say that in the most facetious tone possible), that’s going to be next on their agenda. A lot of white men are out of work out there and they’re getting mad as hell. It wasn’t so bad when the dark people (again, being facetious here) were the ones who were unemployed, but this last recession made men its Ground Zero. Bad move by the captains of industry.

At this point is it that big a conspiracy theory to wonder if Obama was put in office as a distraction?

Ayup. And gasoline and food prices will be off the scale. Don’t forget about that.

We’re the most productive workforce in the world. We have a lot of skills and knowledge. That gives us an advantage in the entire Asian and South Asian & islands region (west of the Middle East, at least). Of course that’ll scare the bejeezus out of the locals. They’re highly protectionist over there - which is why they blasted right through the recession.

And to that I say a-men.

That’s how it’s been working so far. But then nobody expected the Tunisians. Or the Egyptians. This rebellion thing is moving up the value chain. If anything the next revolution will be in Yemen, Jordan and then it might spark even larger riots in austerity-plagued Europe.

Europe has a HUGE population of long-term unemployed men that have been stewing for years.

Ya know, it would actually behoove the captains of industry to help the poor leave. Before the Evil Muslim Socialist leaves office…

22

Fuck me. Sideways, no less.

What is the address of this Gordon’s place? I know of no such thing in this area. I would invest my money in franchising that business. That’s not a crazy idea - look at DLTR’s stock. Before I sold out on Jan 6 their stock had gone up to nearly 60 bucks a share. From 15 a share way back in 2008. It’s because people are now shopping there like crazy. Even Wal Mart is trying to get into that market.

With fuel and food prices already rising (thus squeezing America’s poor even more), this is a major growth business to get into.

23

Gordon Food Service stores are in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee and Florida.

Store locator.

24

Thanks for the info on Gordon’s. It was a longshot, but I tried their store locator on a whim, and there’s a marketplace store not too far from me. I’d never even heard of them. I will give them a look-see.

25

What is morally unjustifiable is how this is only an emergency now that it is affecting educated white men. The U3 for black people was close to 10% back when the economy was good and the total U3 was about 5% several years ago. Now that the U3 for everyone is at 9-10% (about 15% for blacks now), it is treated as a serious problem. That has got to sting the same way reactions to youth violence does. As long as it stays out of the white neighborhoods, nobody in power gives a shit. Once it gets out it becomes a national trajedy. Columbine vs gang violence as an example.

Someone on this board a few weeks ago said revolutions need the middle and upper classes to succeed, strictly lower class revolutions do not work. There may be something to that if you look at how the national reaction is to problems when they affect white vs. black america. Youth violence and 10% unemployment go from being unimportant to national issues depending on which socioeconomic class is hit.

But sadly in this recession the truly wealthy and powerful have recovered more or less. Corporate profits are up to 1.6 trillion a year adjusted, income for the top 1% is more unequal than ever. So the truly ‘valuable’ people in our society are doing fine. So I don’t know if there will be any real movement to change since those at the top are doing well.

I think the real resentment will come from white middle class people who have discounted the wants/needs to lower class workers and non-whites their entire lives slowly waking up to the fact that they themselves are just as unimportant to the power brokers who run this society as the people they themselves look down upon are. This realization may have effects on our society, but I don’t know what. Maybe all the class divisions and class war will become less effective (people less willing to blame all their problems on those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. Single mothers, blacks, latinos, the poor, atheists, etc) since they will know they themselves are just as irrelevant to the powerful. I work with several tea party arch-conservative types, and despite their heirarchial beliefs on culture and race all realize that our nation’s shift towards plutocracy is unsustainable and morally unjustifiable.

26

The minority unemployment problem is going to get more attention as the white population continues its rapid decline as a percentage of America. (White births are on track to be outnumbered by minority births as of 2010.) Once the Mark Rubio’s of the world have shot their political wad and shown their true colors it’s all downhill for the Right and for business-as-usual.

Exactly. Man, the Columbine vs gang thing got laughed out of the room when I watched it get brought up years ago. “Apples vs oranges”, they’d say. Times sure change.

This appears to have played out in Tunisia. It may also explain why America’s rich are working so hard to get rid of the middle class. Get rid of the middle class and you get Mexico. Nobody’s rebelling in Mexico. Mexico will remain a drug war-ridden plutocracy forever.

They just have to get over their fear of the brown people. The rich in America are good at keeping tribalism alive to keep attention off of themselves.

By forcing the poor to stay here, however, they’re leaving themselves open to a potentially critical weakness: they might get pissed and actually get out and vote.

27

Ah, no such luck out West. The poor out here will need to rely on local farmer’s markets.

28

Thank you. Apparently there’s one in my town that I never knew about. I’ll definitely be checking them out once the weather lets me leave my damned house.

29

They tend to be very low key, generic looking buildings (at least in my area) so they don’t stand out very much.

30

I don’t think you understand what the word “lazy” means. You post a lot of long convoluted threads ranting about joblessness. That is an incredibly useless waste of your time if you don’t have a job. Every hour you waste bullshiting on some message board is an hour you aren’t performing activities that are helping you to find a job.

And really. The guy in your link can’t find a bartending job? What did we outsource all the bars to China or something?

31

In the article he said that there are a flood of applicants, and a male in his 50s isn’t going to be picked over a woman in her 20s for a position like that. Which is likely true. Add in that he is in Vegas which has a high unemployment issue, and it is even bigger. Plus with the economy down people probably aren’t as willing to go out and pay for mixed drinks they can make at home for 1/6 the price.

Your advice about using all time for finding a job ignores the massive structural problems in the US. Not everyone is content fighting longer and harder for fewer and fewer scraps. Some want to push for structural changes in the US instead.

32

I love conspiracy theories. The assumption that the rich and powerful know what they’re doing and they they can consciously direct the economy long-term into a form they desire is a lot less scary than the truth (we’re all a bunch of clueless apes), I suppose.

That’s not to say that a bunch of people don’t try (see Bernanke, Ben Shalom, or the pro-immigration lobby in the business community), but the reality is that, after a few years, actions and laws that they thought were working for them and for their goals always end up biting them in the ass and having a completely unpredicted effect.

33

So the reason we have 9% unemployment is that:
A) The unemployed are wasting their lives complaining about being unemployed.
B) They’re not bothering to take one of the infinite number of bartending jobs available.

Can you see how one individual’s situation doesn’t explain the entire picture?

34

One of the dark ironies of the current crisis is that the pro-poor policies promoting home ownership during the housing boom years have become a factor limiting the mobility of people who would have otherwise long moved to (marginally) more job-friendly places.

Talk about being tied to the land! But perhaps this was part of the diabolical elite plan all along, no?

35

Structural changes like what exactly? The usual cries for protectionism that all the macroeconomic morons think will make everything better?

The thing is, not everywhere is experiencing “fewer and fewer scraps”. How long do you stay in cities like Detroit or Las Vegas hoping “the jobs will come back”? Or do you move to a growing city like Austin or Raleigh?

I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that people were to good to work in a bar to pay the bills. So what will people use as an excuse when unemployment isn’t at 9%?

36

Actually you don’t have to assume the rich are engaging in some super-competent conspiracy in order to do what they do. They are, quite simply, greedy, and will do ANYTHING they can do to maintain their levels of affluence. This has led them to literally cannabilize the middle class, stripping them of their wealth, over the last few decade, outsourcing jobs, keeping wages stagnant, getting more productivity out of fewer people with computers and such … all in search of higher profits for the companies they own and control.

Problem is, the middle class is the market for the products these people sell, some of them. Which is why a lot of the big corporations are doing a lot of their seling overseas. The US is still the biggest marketplace for goods in the world, but it is wasting away. Eventually if trends continue we will be rich or poor but there will be damn few people in between. And frankly, the middle class has been damn stupid and blind not to see this, jumping and barking like trained dogs whenever the cynical pols dangle bugaboos like abortion, gay marriage and (back in the day) black people gaining acceptance before them, while the greatest wealth transfer in America goes on behind their backs, allowing themselves and those children they claim to love so much to be robbed blind.

37

Wow, literally? The rich are actually eating the middle class? Are there special restaurants?

But, getting back on topic, you missed the point. Policies that adversely affect the middle class not only aren’t a conspiracy of the rich; they aren’t even an effort by the irhc to screw the middle class. New flash; rich people don’t have any particular desire to see middle class people made poor, and if anything would like to see them succeed as long as it doesn’t cost them anything (though some rich people would be happy to let it cost them something.) The rich aren’t that organized, and they aren’t that smart, since policies that adversely affect the middle class are likely to eventually screw the rich over as well. Bill Gates can’t get rich selling Windows to the homeless.

You get it half right when you say that the middle class, or members thereof, are partically to blame because they’re concerned about ideological matters that they allow to trump their self-interest - but again, that’s not a concerted decision. It’s simply the incredibly complex interplay of economic forces, political ideology and the structural nature of American governance. Nobody is directing a campaign against the middle class; what you have here are hundreds of millions of individual actors and a series of complex system that have resulted in a bad recession.

Canada has rich people just like the US does, and yet the recession wasn’t as bad here and there aren’t as many people out of work. I don’t for an instant believe our rich are less greedy than yours, so why the difference, especially when historically Canada had just as much, if not more, poverty and joblessness? It’s simply a matter of the way of today’s prevailing ideology (in Canada, over the last 15 years, running a deficit at the federal level is a significant political issue that will lose you votes) and the way the country’s government is structured (for a variety of reasons too long to get into here, it is politically easier in Canada for the government to cut spending.) Well, it’s not that simple, actually, but that’s the reason.

38

Literally providing pot? :slight_smile:

Oh, I see now, you don’t understand economics. A lot of people that don’t have the foggiest idea about the economy (usually they’re on the left) have this conception that “wealth” is just something that is just there, like lumps of coal, and rich people get rich by taking the coal from the less rich. I would tell you about productivity, and risk-taking, but judging by your next few sentences, the point would be surely lost somewhere along the way.

My god, these corporations are increasing productivity! Quickly, let’s go and destroy their robots. Surely, they’ll employ more Americans then. Oh, oh, and let’s set tariffs at 2000%. Surely, our economy will start to truly thrive then.

Which is precisely why rich people have no interest in destroying the middle class, paranoid assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

That might have something to do with the US having 300 million people, while the rest of the world has 6.6 billion, many of whom are or are becoming middle class.

<sarcasm>Right, everything would be peachy if it weren’t for those racist, bigoted Republicans and the fools that vote for them</sarcasm>

39

Changing the tax structure to make it more regressive. Supporting free trade when competitors use tariffs, currency manipulation and subsidies. Weakening groups that can press for worker rights. The rapid growth in lobbying. Not enforcing violations of labor law. Citizens united. Allowing companies to hire permatemps. Not prosecuting wall street fraud (vs the 80s when the SnL saw numerous prosecutions). Politicians repeating business taking points. The list goes on.

For a variety of reasons not everyone can move around the country, or wants to. Some have spouses or sick family tied to home and they can’t move their spouse or relatives with them. Or they may have houses they can’t sell in this depressed real estate market and they can’t afford to move. Or the psychological shock of leaving behind community, friends and family is hard to do. Moving may be necessary but it isn’t always easy.

Even if you do move, are there even enouh jobs in growing cities like Austin or Raleigh? People have said ‘go into healthcare’ in this economy. But that’ll just create another glut of qualified workers, driving down wages and increasing unemployment. So moving to a new city isn’t a long term solution, even if there is growth it isn’t near enough to affect the national unemployment crisis w/o city after city experiencing a glut of applicants.

40

And leftists could retort that a CBO study found conserative economic policy (supply side tax cuts) were the worst way to stimulate job growth. Or that you can’t have an economy 70% based on consumption where consumers are chronically unemployed/underemployed/insecure. Or that ignoring environmental damage doesn’t make it go away.

The US economy grew fine during periods of lower income inequality.

What is your point?