It’s hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell ‘em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.
Bill “Poverty is a lack of hard work” O’Reilly, for Fox News
When are people going to realize how ignorant this statement is? Social mobility is becoming more and more limited each day, and poverty has nothing to do with hard work. It is blatantly obvious that,
1. Bill O’Reilly has never had a service job in his life
2. inherited wealth, and
3. has never studied sociological theory or any sociology related topic in his life, or else he might actually understand the concepts of social mobility and oppression/greed.
A guy who gets paid millions for working an hour a day gets to call full-time minimum-wage workers irresponsible and lazy?
[animated image: Judge Judy sits in her courtroom in front of an American flag and New York state flag. She glances to towards the right side of the image and gives an incredulous smirk.]
The 99% posters I see MOSTLY complain about this lie. This piece of shit we all get fed that “getting educated” will put us on the path to success. Now we all took out student loans to pay hyper-inflated tuition prices for bullshit degrees that don’t matter when there are NO JOBS you can put that degree to work with.
of course he’s insulting his fans and dissenters alike, but the difference is his fans will agree with him. They’re the 53%-ers, the ones who think it’s okay to work 100 hours a week to make ends meet. Because they believe this bullshit myth of “hard work.”
Newsflash: The people telling us we just have to “work hard” have no fucking idea what that really even means. It’s just like being told you didn’t pray hard enough for something to come. If you’re provided for, you’re working hard enough, whether that means broadcasting one hour a day on television or working 100 hours a week with no benefits. If you’re not provided for, then you’re not working hard enough. Even if you’re working 110 hours a week.
Just like God can’t lose, Capitalism can’t lose either. Corporations can’t lose. It’s not their fault when the economy collapses, it’s not their fault when they don’t create any jobs for people to “work hard” at. It IS their doing when things are going well, though.
It’s opinions and attitudes like O’Reilly’s that will raise the collective temperature of the lower class to a boiling point. History shows us that poor people, if pushed, will turn to violence to quench their thirst for “justice” or “fairness” when, really it will be about jealousy and revenge. But what you call it won’t matter. Back during the late 1800s and early 1900s, rich people’s homes were sacked in cities like New York. Rich people hired guards to make sure no one would burn their homes down. See—they weren’t common thieves—they wanted revenge and it’ll happen again, just like back then (read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” for more on this—it’s a brilliant history book as it is told from the loser’s point-of-view).
But the thing is, the attitude of the rich isn’t entirely inaccurate—if you work hard you are more likely to do well. After all, success is when preparation meets opportunity. So the rich are right in this way. Of course, they don’t talk about the lack of opportunities. Also, just because the rich are partially right doesn’t give them license to be douchebags about it. And the bigger the douchebag they are, the more anxious the “unprivileged” will be to pop that bag and shower in that vinegar and water goodness (sorry, metaphor went off the rails there).
Now, when the rich get all uppity about “class warfare” they’re just Orwellian-style doublespeaking. In other words, when rich people talk of “class warfare” they’re doing it to distract us from noticing that they, themselves are committing acts of class war.
When a rich person says to a jobless, homeless or penniless person (JHP), “work hard and you will succeed!” that is class warfare. The rich person is withholding all aid and resources from this “JHP” person. Now consider what you do to your enemy in a time of war: you cut off their resources.
Therefore cutting funding to social programs, health programs, libraries and education is literally class warfare. It’s wonderful since they get mad when they’re accused of class warfare, but they don’t have a problem accusing everyone else.
And capitalism is JUST like God, as one of the rebloggers above said. And it’s just as impossible to have a rational conversation with someone who has an irrational belief in something.
The system is failing us—and it will continue to fail us because of this absurd faith in the magical properties of capitalism. So, until something dramatically changes, the system will continue to fall apart because the people in charge are just ignoring the problems, even denying they exist—as though belief is enough. They’re like economic Christian Scientists.
It comes down to values and power. The fate of America turns on the outcome of a contest between forces aligned behind two competing economic systems with dramatically different values, structures, and agendas. One is the greed-driven, money-serving corporate-ruled Wall Street Economy that measures its success exclusively by the financial profits it generates for the already rich. It neither acknowledges nor accepts responsibility for the economic, social, environmental, and political devastation it leaves in its wake.
The other economy is comprised of the democratic, community-rooted, market-based life-serving Main Street economies that ordinary people are rebuilding across the nation and around the world. This emerging New Economy measures success by its contribution to securing adequate and meaningful livelihoods for everyone in a balanced relationship to nature.
Huh. Interesting take, but the first paragraph seems to be an “Incredible Hulk” version of the second paragraph since the second paragraph describes what the Western World was like for quite a while.
This is why I always take issue with people telling me I’m anti-corporate—I’m not. I just believe in moderation. I’m 99% sure that if we go back in time with how corporations are run (not just to make as much money as possible, aka, not to the extreme) we’d see a return to the good old days of the American economy. I think we need to regulate the shit out of corporations, passing laws that prohibit any outsourcing of ANY and ALL jobs, ban tax incentives for businesses completely, make it a jailable offense to hire illegal immigrants, force environmental and worker safety standards, require products be made with materials ONLY found inside the country and put caps on executive salaries.
Will this kill a lot of businesses in the US? Damn right it will. But only the assholes. Good people who run businesses are already doing this sort of thing. RIGHT?
Oh, you say you’re a good person who is running a business that would be killed by this draconian, sweeping changes? Well, good riddance then. Because if you’re not caring about your workers, your customers, the environment, and you’re only in it for the money you can’t call yourself a good person.
We need to grow up and face the music. Our economy is falling apart around our ears and we’re mostly pretending it isn’t. Only sweeping changes like this will make a difference. We need to pull back from the extreme we’ve let the corporations get to.
Oh and the “emerging new economy” the original post refers to? I have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Nothing “market-based” ever has a “balanced relationship to nature.” We need to constantly ride the levels of regulation. Sometimes we need a bit more and sometimes a bit less, but clearly, we need a LOT more right now as corporations are just a bunch of sociopathic Godzillas.
In this week’s episode, my old buddy Stew takes a walk with me in Manhattan as we discuss how China bought the company he works for and other signs of American economic doom.
NPR: The Fed’s $600 Billion Statement, Translated Into Plain English (Can’t believe they did this—now everyone will know! OK, now every NPR listener/reader will know. So like five people?)
What’s also nice about the above capped piece (you can click on it to go to the article) is that they took Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke’s statement about inventing $600 billion from nothing and translated it into plain English, line-by-line, so you can actually understand what the cagey fucker is talking about. Here’s an example:
“Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow.”
becomes:
“The economy still sucks.”
another:
“Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters.”
becomes:
“Inflation has gone from low to super low.”
Of course, nowhere do they explain why the rate of inflation going up is good, but hey, at least a fairly mainstream news source is doing us the favor of actually reporting facts that inform us about one of the most important, life-changing things in our life:
Money…
…and how it’s actually worth nothing at all, since some white guys in suits can just conjure it from the aether—like Zero Point Money or something. Zero Point Energy is a theoretical type of electricity you’d create from nothing. It’s widely viewed by physicists and engineers as impossible because energy must come from somewhere. Similar physical laws exist for money, as well (the more you have the less they’re worth), but no one seems to mind the consequences, for some reason. This allows the Fed to just tappity-tap on their computers and VOILA—$600 billion. Just like they did back in 2008.
They don’t even need to mix a potion in a boiling cauldron or cast a spell or sign their souls over to the devil. Well, hopefully, they had to do that last part.
So, how does it feel knowing that while you work your ass off to make money, a group of rich guys in posh offices work to take value away from that money?
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s decision to pump a further $600 billion into the economy shows his grasp of economics is weak, said investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings.
“Dr. Bernanke unfortunately does not understand economics, he does not understand currencies, he does not understand finance,” Rogers, 68, said in a lecture at Oxford University’s Balliol College yesterday. “All he understands is printing money.”
“His whole intellectual career has been based on the study of printing money,” said Rogers, who predicted the start of the global commodities rally in 1999. “Give the guy a printing press, he’s going to run it as fast as he can.”
I’m continually surprised that most people who are aware of how the Fed works and yet aren’t upset by the fact that there’s a bunch of unelected white guys in suits someplace who can just print up more money while the rest of us have to work for it.
I’m not sure how else to describe this aside from mass devaluation.
I think the idea is to encourage foreign investment and make it super cheap for domestic businesses to borrow money. Since that money won’t buy much, what are businesses supposed to do with it? Hire new employees and pay ‘em!
That’s the hope, I suppose. In the meantime, our money buys less. The other irony is that the inflation rate will go up and make your savings accounts useless or even costly to you. Think about it. The inflation rate this year has fluctuated between 1 and 2.6(ish)%. What’s your savings account interest rate? If it’s not more than that window, you’ve already taken a hit.
Don’t have a savings account? Good boy! Shove that cash under the mattress or buy stuff with it. You’re probably better off.
No matter how much yen the Bank of Japan pumps into the economy, deflation deepens. It’s all about confidence, of which there is virtually none. Companies don’t trust that growth will return and so they avoid investing and hiring and trim salaries. Households fret about the future.
Was puzzling about that article is that it talks about deflation being the cause of a race to the bottom for prices. He cites Hooters as an example because they sell cheap food and cheap alcohol. But does that mean deflation? How many wings is the Yen actually buying? Hm, maybe it’s that we’re switching positions with Japan. We’ll all be making more money (if this plan works) but the money won’t buy as much so we’ll have to spend more to get the same stuff.
But injecting money into the economy in Japan hasn’t worked and has inspired price-drops across every sector because the money injection didn’t work. So, maybe we’re seeing into our own futures?
The Federal Reserve’s policy-setting panel began a crucial two-day meeting Tuesday, poised to cast aside its long-held reluctance to micro-manage the economy in a bid to avoid a lost decade of growth.
The central bank’s open market committee (FOMC) is expected to approve massive stimulus spending not seen since the depths of the economic crisis.
At the conclusion of the meeting Wednesday, the Fed is expected to announce it will resume the large-scale purchase of long-term US bonds — essentially printing billions of dollars — in the hope of boosting a weak recovery.
I wonder if this actually happens if it’ll show up on the MSM.
Funny how the Fed has tried things very similar to this before and it hasn’t worked. It didn’t work the time before that, either. It’s so funny how these allegedly intelligent people keep doing the same thing, thinking it will yield different results.
The BIG problem here is they’re essentially loaning money to themselves—at least, if I understand this whole thing correctly. Usually, they loan money they create from nothing to banks. Again, that’s assuming I understand this correctly. This means they’ll be able to loan more and profit more.
Whether we’re voting for political leaders who we pretend care for our interests or use money that we pretend has actual value, we are living in a virtual virtual reality.
Kinda scary when you realize this is the other side of the looking glass.
“In dim times, Japan’s young men search for a new model” wait, just Japan’s young men?
First off, I’d like to thank the Washington Post for defining “20-34” as “young” in an October 25, 2010 article on the changing socioeconomic landscape in Japan for young men. That makes me 5 years older than young. That makes me feel good :)
Secondly, however, I’d like to point out some bad reporting in the same article and after that I’ve got a question. Check out this cutting:
To hear the analysts who study them tell it, Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are staging the most curious of rebellions, rejecting the 70-hour workweeks and purchase-for-status ethos that typified the 1980s economic boom. As the latest class of college graduates struggles to find jobs, a growing number of experts are detecting a problem even broader than unemployment: They see a generation of men who don’t know what they want.
I emboldenededed that last bit for a reason I’ll get to in a second. So, wow—an entire generation are just fumbling around in the proverbial dark, clueless as to what they are doing or where they are heading. If that’s true, then don’t “the experts” answer the question I emboldenededed in that same paragraph? “The experts” say these guys are “rejecting the 70-hour workweeks” etc, etc. So, doesn’t it follow that they know exactly what they want? Less time at work, more time with people they care about and more personal fulfillment? I mean, who can blame them? Why work your life away for some company? Why ignore any potential dreams you may have, just some other guy can get rich?
At this point, I realized this scenario was starting to sound familiar. However, there was one more point in the article that said to me that maybe “the experts” and the person writing this article, weren’t connecting the fairly obvious dots as they should be. Here’s another cutting from much further on in the piece (important bit emboldenededed by me):
Japan’s dim economic climate, experts say, has spawned a generation of unsentimental job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options.
So, there you go. There’s your answer. There’s no mystery here, Mr. or Ms. WaPo Reporter. It sounds like “the experts” know that, too. What’s more is how this scenario sounds all too familiar.
A “dim economic climate,” you say? “Job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options,” huh? Dude, you just described America. You just described me.
Our way of life has crashed and burned around us. The Japanese have shared this with us for decades—their whole “salaryman” movement was just an analog to the “Me Generation,” here in the US, that idolized Gordon Gekko from the Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street”. So, it follows that we’re both seeing all of the same promises made to us by society broken.
Just the other day I was musing to my wife about how the sushi platters at Trader Joe’s now had fewer pieces in them. Same price, but six instead of eight pieces.
“This, right here,” I explained, “is inflation in action.”
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
SLICE…
Read the entire piece.
We are living in a police state, but it is one hundred times worse if you are black.
The net result of the drug wars has been to create a permanent undercaste — mostly young black men — disenfranchised, and unable to participate in a meaningful way in American society.
Yeah, the rest of that is stuff we’ve all heard before—the truth is, you don’t need to read it again because you already know that statistically our society is still absurdly racist. The important thing to read in that post, in my opinion, is Boyd’s own commentary:
We are living in a police state, but it is one hundred times worse if you are black.
The net result of the drug wars has been to create a permanent undercaste — mostly young black men — disenfranchised, and unable to participate in a meaningful way in American society.
I’ve emboldened the part I think is extra important. All you have to do is look at the statistics to know how much harder it is for blacks to make it in the world. Then again, it’s hard for *any* person born into poverty to be able to “participate in a meaningful way in American society.”
Until we can retool our society to *actually* make opportunities equally available for *all*, there will always be this dynamic. The symptom is institutionalized racism, but the disease is an unequal world for us all.
The idea is that all of human society is based on a power structure that enslaves the trusting/ignorant and rewards the greedy and the dishonest. From government, to business to our individual lives, all of our actions are tailored to further support a system that exploits all of us and wastes our lives in the process. Website666.com endeavors to explain how. Shape-shifting lizards aren't running the world, but they might as well be. Only a sociopath would think they deserve to run things.
thepete
on Sunday, October 9th at
7:51 PM. [link]
