text:
|May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
|Scripting in shell and Perl
|Network troubleshooting
|Over 50 and unemployed
|Recommended Links
|The problem of inequality
|Computers eat people
|Eroding Western living standards
|The neoliberal myth of human capital
|Perma Temps
|Adverse Selection
|The problem of inequality
|Productivity Myth and "Rising labor costs" hypocrisy
|Scapegoating and victimization of poor
|Neoliberalism as a New Form of Corporatism
|Casino Capitalism
|If Corporations Are People, They Are Psychopaths
|Toxic Managers
|Office Stockholm Syndrome
|Learned helplessness
|Unemployment after graduation
|Fake Employment Statistics
|Destructiveness of GDP Mania
|Financial Sector Induced Systemic Instability
|Notes on Republican Economic Policy
|John Kenneth Galbraith
|Invisible Hand Hypothesis
|Inflation vs. Deflation
|Financial Humor
|Unemployment offices, homeless shelters, hospitals, prisons and casinos.
and are the only real growth industries of Obama Administration. In Jan 2010 35 millions,
or one in eight Americans, were on food stamps.
Obama's biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military
|When I was a kid they told us that automation would "free" us from working
long hours. What they didn't tell us what that they weren't going to pay us for all this leisure
time we'd get.
Mass unemployment is the primary indication of the collapse of a given form of society -- James Burnham
|"Unemployment" statistics has been the political advertising media for every Administration
in modern times
From comment in
The institutions of neoliberal capitalism, while promoting an expanded role in the economy for "market forces" (read "financial oligarchy") simultaneously transform labor relations. The "market" under neoliberalism certainly no longer refers to competition as a form of the production and distribution goods and services. Instead, it means something more along the lines of international financial monopolies protected by collusion between captured vassal state institutions (including neoliberal fifth column domination in the all major branches of government, especially executive and legislative branches, educational institutions and media) and multinationals, which pay money to sustain this social order. The term "Free markets" under neoliberalism means letting rich people do what they want, not promoting efficient allocation of resources through competition and the price mechanism. The core of the fifth column are local oligarchs and so called "Chicago boys": sons and daughters of local elite who are trained for and indoctrinated for this purpose in Western universities. As George Monbiot aptly noted Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems ( The Guardian, April 15, 2016)
We internalize and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.
Under neoliberalism labor relations assumes the form of full domination of labor by capitalists. Unions are officially suppressed and large part of middle class is brainwashed to hate using set of propaganda stories about unions corruption, welfare quinsy, lack of competitiveness in unionized industries (with Detroit as a prime story), etc. In this sense crushing by Reagan of the strike of air controllers was one of the first manifestation of this dominance. Workers again are downgraded to the role of debt slaves, who should be glad to get subsistence wages. And, for example, wages in Wal-Mart are really on subsistence level, no question about it (Making Change at Wal-Mart » Fact Sheet – Wages):
Wal-Mart jobs are poverty-level jobs.
Wal-Mart's average sale Associate makes $8.81 per hour, according to IBISWorld, an independent market research group. This translates to annual pay of $15,576, based upon Wal-Mart's full-time status of 34 hours per week1. This is significantly below the 2010 Federal Poverty Level of $22,050 for a family of four. The Wall Street Journal reported that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes just $8.48 an hour, far below the $11.22 national average for all cashiers.
This contrasts with the capital-labor compromise that characterized the state capitalism that existed several post-WWII decades and that was crushed by neoliberalism in 1970th. Neoliberalism also brought change in the relation between financial and non-financial capital: financial capital now again like in 1920th plays a dominant role dictating the rules of the game to manufacturing sector and controlling it via banks.
Under neoliberalism the wealthy and their academic servants, see inequality as a noble outcome. University professors of economics form the most corrupt part of intellectual elite – they are nothing more than employees of the financial oligarchy paid to administer intellectual anesthetic to those among debt slaves, who still have enough time to ask what's going on. They want to further enrich top 1%, shrink middle class making it less secure, and impoverish poor. That's an officially state goal. Then in 1992, when asked what Iran-Contra was really all about, Bush I replied that it was done for "...the continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter and righter hands."
The upward redistribution of wealth requires high unemployment to weep prols into unconditional obedience. In other words neoliberalism and high unemployment are twins.
Under the disguise of "free market" Newspeak neoliberals promote a type of economy which is often called a plantation economy. In this type of the economy all the resources and power are in the hands of a wealthy planter class who then gives preference for easy jobs and the easy life to their loyal toadies. The wealthy elites like cheap labor: it's much easier to dictate their conditions of employment when unemployment is high.
Keynesian economics values the middle class and does not value unemployment or cheap labor, so it is incompatible with neoliberal ideology and needs to be suppressed. Neoliberals created the system which richly reward stooges of neoliberalism for their loyalty to the top 1% bestowing on them an easier life than they otherwise merit. In a meritocracy where individuals receive public goods and services that allow them to compete on a level playing field, many neoliberal academic toadies would be losers who cannot compete.
One of the most important measures of the health of an economy is the following criteria: how many fulfilling, living-wage jobs are created or destroyed (most other economic factors can be distilled to this.). For example, widely used measure of economic growth, GDP is too influenced by financial masturbation and does not distinguish useful activity from harmful or irrelevant.
Under neoliberalism the elite revived Roman emperor Septimius Severus advice to his sons before he died at Eboracum (York) on February 4, 211:
"Avoid infighting, pay well the soldiers, and ignore everybody else" .
So during the Great Recession Congress simply tuned backs to unemployed. With the implicit message you just need to die out folks ;-).
Military budget at the same time was greatly expanded and several unnecessary wars were launched. Brainwashed American public eats all those neoliberal policies like real lemmings, demonstrating the level of groupthink and lack of critical thinking that is typical for high demand cults. So the myth about highly conscious "proletariat" that Marxists cherished remains a myth. Moreover quite opposite tendencies to creation of "enlightened lower classes" show their ugly face (Chris Hedges America is a Tinderbox naked capitalism):
ictus92, July 21, 2013 at 5:07 pm
To paraphrase Madeline Albright: "What's the point of creating a totalitarian police state if you're not going to use it?"
So where is the American totalitarian state going? If you look at the NDAA and the discussion around repealing the Posse Comitatus Act, the key words include quelling "domestic civil unrest"… So what are the "deep government" types anticipating so hysterically?
Well, the financial crisis keeps grinding away and is about to enter another phase of collapse as "quantitative easing" has run its course. Interest rates are rising, posing "technical insolvency" of the Federal Reserve itself. What this means is that time's up for the 46 million in the Food Stamp Supplemental Program; 56 million getting Social Security retirement or disability benefits; and at least 20 million more needing full time employment. Obviously there's some overlap, but the total number of people living on the margins of subsistence pushes 30% of the population.
For these, they face an immediate "Final Solution"… not exactly direct extermination, but death by deprivation, illness etc. Can work camps be far off for these tens of millions and the many millions more living paycheck to paycheck? This population and their sympathizers comprise the tinder for "civil unrest". Hence the corollary to the famous "Collect it all" (communications) is "control it all" (civil disorder following further economic collapse).
Furthermore, prolonged neglect of key infrastructure will lead inevitably to severe food, water and electric power access shortages — another source of civil unrest potential.
Of course, overseas the totalitarian police state eliminates all expression of opposition that can change policies in the quest for "Permanent War" and "full spectrum" military dominance. This ends in global military confrontation… just as the financial crisis of the 30's gave rise to another World War… only this time around world war will pitch towards thermonuclear war in short order. That's how totalitarian regimes collapse into catastrophe, dragging the rest of us to an unpleasant demise.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a damn thing any of us can do to arrest this beserk Levithan…
tongorad, July 20, 2013 at 3:21 pm
"This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness.
They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.
The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix "if only the people knew the Truth."
But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated."
"We, The Spiteful" by Mark Ames
Dave, July 20, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Please consider that the "right" is far more realistic in their assessment of human nature. The "left" wants things to be according to what they think it should be, mostly because of their left wing educators. The majority of humans are not perfectible.
Even Asians, with their highly socialized societies, have behaved very badly towards those outside their country.
This tendency of self-deception of "blue color America" and resonating of Republican Party ideas within "working poor" and lower middle class, two strata of the US society that typically votes against its own economic interests is analyzed in What's the matter with Kansas And to fight neoliberal machine is not easy as media dominance is total, and on a new technological level, which does not require silencing of opponents, just ignoring them, approach the level typical for the USSR or Nazi Germany. And even if some people question the system, like (at the very beginning) Tea Party did, or later "Occupy Wall Street" movement did, they are mercilessly co-opted or crashed by well paid guard labor. The latter is one of the few types of employment which prospers under neoliberal empire. See The Rise of Guard Labor (dollarsandsense.org)
The reality is that many rich countries including the USA now face two problems. One is a shortage of jobs, especially middle class jobs. The other is stagnant (or falling) wages for those outside top 1%. This is not a temporary problem. Despite all the propaganda smoke this is an immanent feature of neoliberal regimes that now dominate in the USA and most other countries. Neoliberalism requires high unemployment as a way to keep workers in check and prevent attempts to slow down redistribution of wealth toward the top.
As George Bush Sr . noted in November 1992 neoliberalism is "the continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter and righter hands". The essence is the consolidation of money and power to the top 0.1% or even 0.01%. In a very deep sense our new lords from financial and political oligarchy are not that different from feudal aristocracy, may be only less educated, more prone to avoid military service and much more greedy.
Unlike Keynesian economy which put middle class in the center of society serving a buffer between rich and poor, under neoliberalism middle class is no longer needed as a buffer between aristocracy and proles, as repressive power of the state and regime of total surveillance (National Security State) makes an organized opposition practically impossible. The fate of "Occupy Wall Street" movement is nice illustration here.
On the other hand neoliberalism as an ideology, while discredited by event of 2008 still does not have any viable alternative. Socialism was discredited by collapse of the USSR (which in reality was a neoliberal counterrevolution by Soviet nomenklatura including part of KGB). Authoritarian versions of state capitalism does not look too attractive, despite being quite effective as was proven by economic progress of "Asian tigers".
Other important factors are also in play. Technology has stripped away the ability for many to hold a job and the trend continues. In other words automation eats jobs. Outsourcing eats jobs too. Between those two trends almost no job growth left. This is a structural situation, not transitional caused by recession due to aftermath of 2008 financial bubble bust. In other words jobs that disappeared will never return. And jobs in construction sector and finance were artificial and unsustainable in any case, crisis or no crisis (as in "what can't last forever eventually stops." )
We are in the midst of slow motion employment collapse. Eurozone unemployment recently reached 12%. The US has probably 20% rate of involuntary unemployment now. The official unemployment "rate" is lower, but that is because both 60-65 years old and 20 to 24 year olds are dropping out of the wage force.
Add to this "peak energy" problem and the situation looks really bleak. That's the funny thing about oil and modern civilization -- almost everybody in large western urban centers is dependent on mass produced technology (much of which was invented before we were born) and cheap oil (and generally cheap energy), Those who live in those urban centers no longer have any direct control or ability to produce own food or transportation energy or heating. those three activities are completely outsourced. See Peak Oil Demand is Already a Huge Problem.
Globalization is yet another problem. I was actually surprised by how many jobs large corporations managed to shred during 2008-2013 without negatively affecting profitability. The impression is that it is no low limit. Usual wisdom is that if you shred too much, this labor shortage will bite you in a couple of years. This is no longer the case in the USA. No visible backlash at all. Even consumption that should be suffering due to destruction of middle class in this process is no suffering much, because it was already mostly top 1% game and, as such, is recession proof. Here is one interesting comment form Krugman column Globalization and Macroeconomics - NYTimes.com
Floxo Australia
The analysis is flawed. The issue is not goods trade - on its own, this is relatively benign. The real problem is the associated capital drain. Owners of capital will transfer productive capital abroad for better returns. This process creates deep structural problems for all developed economies. Here are some basic predictions:
- Real wage stagnation. Labor is less productive having less capital to work with.
- Rapid rise in income by capital owners. The big winners in this scenario, not only do they earn higher rents abroad, they earn higher rents at home as capital is now more scarce there.
- Rise in inequality - obviously, from above.
- Slow growth. Capital formation is moderated by the constant capital drain so grows more slowly than otherwise.
- Increase in structural unemployment. Because capital transfer abroad is slower than internal capital transfer, the restructuring is long term as opposed to the short to medium term restructuring that occurs in goods trade.
Recessions are difficult to manage and may become protracted. In a downturn, capital formation dries up but the capital drain continues. This erodes the output gap. A fiscal stimulus now has less headroom for expansion. On top of that, an increase in domestic demand may be met by investment in productive capital abroad; the domestic investment response is missing. This may even cause a fall in labor productivity ( UK productivity puzzle?).
In short, globalization IS the problem.
Recessions generate inequality in both income and well-being: people who lose their jobs bear a disproportionate burden of the recession. As Kathleen Geier noted the impact of unemployment on well-being it's even worse than you thought
While reading this odd and meandering New York Times op-ed this morning, I stumbled upon a link to a fascinating study from last year on the impact of unemployment on non-monetary well-being. It was conducted by Stanford sociologist Cristobal Young, who discovered that unemployment has an even more catastrophic effect on personal happiness that we thought.
The study produced three major findings. The first is the devastating impact job loss has on personal well-being. Job loss, says Young, "produces a large drop in subjective well-being":Job loss into unemployment, however, is a different matter; this brings on deep distress that is greater in magnitude than the effect of changes in family structure, home-ownership or parental status. The distress of job loss is also hard to ameliorate: family income does not help, unemployment insurance appears to do little and even reemployment does not provide a full recovery [italics mine].
The second finding is that while unemployment insurance (UI) is successful as a macroeconomic stabilizer, it doesn't make unemployed people any happier. UI, says Young:is not central to their sense of well-being… [Snip] …[ I]t does little to support their identity, sense of purpose or self-regard.
Third, job loss has a strong, lasting negative impact on well-being that may persist for years:[J]ob loss has consequences that linger even after people return to work. Finding a job, on average, recovers only about two thirds of the initial harm of losing a job. It is not clear how long it takes for the nonpecuniary effect of unemployment to heal.
Other research suggests that what Young refers to as "the scarring effect" of job loss can last from three to five years, or even longer. He also notes that "the more generalized fear of becoming jobless" may persist.
Young's discussion of these findings stresses the inequality theme. He points out that "recessions generate inequality in both income and well-being: people who lose their jobs bear a disproportionate burden of the recession." He suggests job-sharing as a way to reduce the concentrated misery of unemployment. That's a great idea that unfortunately never seems to go anywhere. Employers today seem more interested in squeezing as much labor out of employees as possible for the lowest cost. They're looking to shrink their payroll rather than expand it. And unfortunately, there are very few public policies that promote job-sharing, let alone do it effectively.
The sheer human misery created by the economic downturn has been stunning. The economic damage is, in some ways, the least of it. Another study shows that the long-term unemployed experience shame, loss of self-respect, and strained relationships with friends and family. They even suffer significantly higher rates of suicide.
Yesterday, Paul Krugman and others discussed the impact of economic inequality vs. unemployment on income. Krugman argued that inequality has had the greater impact, and I agree. Among other things, inequality is also the root cause of the unemployment problem. Special interests which have disproportionate power in our political system prevented more stimulus and inflicted an austerity agenda, which has had a disastrous effect on employment. Enacting an economic equality agenda will be huge political challenge, but it's the only way I can see of ultimately resetting the priorities of our government so that it starts working on behalf of ordinary Americans again.
There are two popular unemployment measured U3 (commonly cited as "official unemployment rate", which dramatically understates real unemployment) and U6, which is close to actual unemployment rate as was measured during the Great Depression. U3 is often as low as half of U6 (that's why it sometimes called 50 cents unemployment rate). As The Big Picture note in the entry Unemployment Reporting
- U3 is the "official unemployment rate" according to the BLS website. Due to this, it is the current measure of Unemployment that gets focused upon by most media, and therefore the public. It has, over the years, slowly excluded many of the factors that USED to go into how the US reported unemployment. Hence, there has been a gradual decrease in the Unemployment rate that has occurred regardless of what was happening in the Jobs market. U3 is now comprised in a way that merely repeating it without a slew of caveats borders on fraud.
- U6, on the other hand, is the broadest measure of Unemployment: It includes those people counted by U3, plus marginally attached workers (not looking, but want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past), as well as Persons employed part time for economic reasons (they want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule).
Its been pretty obvious for sometime that the Financial Media are doing a disservice to their readers by only reporting U3, given how dramatically it understates Unemployment. Indeed, consumer sentiment reports are at deep negative levels that only occur when Unemployment is much than what U3 has been saying. It is painfully obvious that U3 does not paint an accurate view of the Employment situation.
Here's the experiment I propose: Let's start reporting both, with appropriate descriptions of each. Report U3, add U6, provide monthly and year over year changes. Let the reader see the full picture, via BLS data.
I would like to stress it again: many factors point to the fact that the current level of unemployment is mostly structural. In other words jobs eliminated will not be coming back. Among the most important factors we can mention:
The first three factors changed the distribution of power between labor and capital in favor of capital; and those guys are not inclined to take prisoners, when there is a chance to fatten their pockets. None of the first three factors will probably be reversed soon, although neoliberal ideology is after 2008 entered a zombie state.
Also computerization and Internet allowed capital and political forces behind it much better organize politically. So like in in previous human history well organized and wealthy minority dictates its will less-organized poor majority.
I think that financial capital might eventually experience some setbacks. This bacchanalia of greed with those hedge fund which hack financial system left and right might come to an abrupt end with the rise of the price of oil. Even now price of oil indirectly pressure "masters of the universe". And remember famous slogan of 2008 "Jump suckers" ;-). It reflects the society attitude to financial oligarchy and as such entail certain dangers of "blowback" for all those derivatives games.
Not under Obama watch as he is essentially a sock puppet of financial oligarchy. But eventually setback for "big finance" can happen. At the end of the day it is oil that is the real convertible currency and when oil production is diminishing or flat, financial oligarchy will be pushed back.
Measures taken by political elite to save financial institutions after 2008 collapse means that unemployment is a part of a general political problem with neoliberalism as a social system. Under neoliberal regime the elite can't care less about long term unemployment. National Security State ensures the security of the neoliberal elite. Elections in the USA are a sham as two party system effectively blocks candidates outside the list approved by the current elite. The latter might even see sharp division of the society into "have" and "have nots" as a solution of oil depletion problem (Economist's View):
Monetary policy does not operate in a vacuum. Monetary policy operates in an economic system that includes fiscal and regulatory tools. It is a mistake to lock the fiscal and regulatory tools in a shed.
Fiscal policy ALWAYS operates in a recession, at least in the form of automatic stabilizers, (UI, etc.) and sometimes in the form of additional stimulus.
The meagre automatic stabilizers currently in place are enough for a mild recession, but are woefully short of what is needed in a recession like the recent one.
The primary objection to fiscal policy manipulations is that fiscal policy is more easily politicized. This overlooks the fact that monetary policy is not only political, but bankers (who constitute a wealthy special interest) have an agenda that tilts monetary policy to their own self interests.
The primary objection to using fiscal stimulus to address our unemployment crisis is POLITICAL. Wealthy special interests want pay less taxes and short term stimulus would interfere with their political agenda to roll back spending and reduce spending as a percent of GDP.
Wealthy special interests have the upper hand at the moment because enough politicians are dependent on their campaign donations. However, this politicalization of fiscal policy, doing too little to address unemployment, is the prime force behind the Fed keeping interest rates low. If enough fiscal stimulus was enacted to quickly return to full employment and inflation at or slightly above the target, the Fed would not have to consider extraordinary measures.
Anyone unhappy about extraordinary monetary measures should be urging Congress to fix unemployment now. This is not what our elites are doing. They are complaining about extraordinary monetary measures AND about additional stimulus. This suggests that these policy elites care nothing about social problems of long term unemployment, are content to have the US become a divided nation between haves and have nots and are content to oversee the creation of an underclass in order to concentrate wealthy upward.
When one is saying that unemployment became a structural problem that means that it is immune to the business cycle. For example, during the last economic expansion (Jan 2002 -Dec 2007), the median US household income dropped by $2,000. In other words many Americans were worse off at the end of an economic cycle as jobs went outsourced to low wage countries due to wage arbitrage...
The collapse of "casino capitalism" model in 2008-2009 was so profound that all sectors of the economy became depressed. As securitization mess exploded in the face of their creators as it became clear to everybody that the king is naked. Debt overhand of financial industry is tremendous and it was just socialized, not removed. Essentially it became the problem of the USA government debt. In many ways problems the USA faces now are more serious then the problems the country faced during Great Depression because economic crisis doubles as the crisis of dominant ideology -- the ideology of neoliberalism. And the Great Recession, despite Economic Cycle Institute premature desire to bury it, is still with us. Five years in the making as of 2013.
Ideology on which FIRE sector dominance was based is now questioned and that creates additional problems both nationally and internationally, much more internationally. Internationally it means a substantial loss of the USA "soft power", the factor that played tremendous role in the decade of 1990-2000. When other country laugh at the US financial oligarchy tribulations it is difficult to open new markets selling old neoliberalism doctrine. due to debt overhand the US dollar is replaced by currency swaps in national currency for several major trading partners of China such as Brazil and Russia. First of all that makes the crisis even deeper and analogies between the USSR and the USA more sinister. As with Stalinists in USSR who destroyed the country economically, there is a powerful block of republican dead enders and democratic supporters of financial oligarchy (blue dogs) who will continue to promote the current neoliberal course with its deification of "free markets" (free as in "free shooting zone"), oblivious to consequences of neoliberal policies which eat the society and protected by the size of their accounts. There is nothing new here. Oligarchic democracies can commit suicide. Actually none lasted long. And with such a formidable political wrecking crew in action and gridlock in Congress even over minor reforms that became less probable.
For all practical purposes two party system actually works like one-party system: democrats were also captured by FIRE industries to the extent that they should not be considered an independent party, but as a slightly more moderate wing of the Republican Party. Similarly by all accounts Obama is a moderate Republican with the policies to the right of such Republican Presidents as Dwight Eisenhower and Theodore Roosevelt. In a way, Democratic Party perform the role of spoiler: it exists for the sole purpose of attracting disgruntled left-wing electorate away from more radical parties. Republicans play symmetrical role for right wing crazies. None can or want to became the agent of change. In this sense Obama electoral slogan "change we can believe in" was a nasty, cruel joke of political insiders over political outsiders. Note how unceremoniously Obama dumped labor after his reelection, while courting it during his reelection campaign.
As private sector is still downsizing, and government can't be the employer of last resort due to dominance of neoliberal ideology, the whole situation looks more and more like Japanese lost decade. The only area where government can expand workforce are defense contractors (military keysianism):
Minsky, however, argued for a "bubble-up" approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call "Big Government" - should become the "employer of last resort," he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else's wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.
It is important to understand that the USA is not just coping with the largest financial crisis in history, the USA is also going through a major restructuring of the American economy as well as the world economy due to plato in oil extraction. This transformation, which was postponed by two decades due the collapse of the USSR (which gave the USA companies half billion of new consumers and huge area to dollarize and buy assets for pennies on a dollar), will be very long, very painful and very slow. One additional factor that complicates the picture of "peak oil", is that it is more properly can be called "end of cheap oil", as at higher prices more oil became economically available. So this is not a peak but long plato.
As GDP is highly correlated with the energy consumption, the side effect of peak oil will probably be stagnant (close to zero after inflation) growth and with it speed up in permanent decline of the standard of living for middle class
Also complicating the situation is the status of baby boomers which lost significant part of their savings during last two bubble bursts and now need to retire or will be pushed out of workforce. Pensions are already cuts either directly or indirectly (via inflation). For example, defined benefit pensions almost disappeared outside of government job force. After housing crash middle class no longer has a realistic prospect to fund their retirement and need to work longer: that increases competition for jobs. For middle aged professionals who are unemployed now the odds of finding reasonably paid work are low and they create additional competition for young people entering work force from universities. People over 50 now face especially poor job prospects.
At the same time corporate executives became corporate aristocracy (with differences in pay raising from 10-20 to 100-200 more of average corporate salary; this is the differences close to what used to exist in feudal societies). Most corporations are taking a lazy way out of the crisis with relentless cost-cutting. This is a self-defeating strategy as cost cuttings eventually returns back via supply chain and bite the corporation which performs it. But so far this did not happened.
In addition productive sectors of economy are now under pressure of rampant financial speculation which serves as a huge tax on productive sectors of economy. Financial system is controlled by small number of large firms that permanently shifted their main activity into gambling and hacking of the financial system. There is some justice that computers which fueled all this crazy gambling on the strength of global reserve currency led to outsourcing of IT professionals to the extent that this part of US economy was destroyed and became a shadow of its former self in just ten years (2000-2010).
Another important sign of stagnation is that new college graduates face extremely bad job market which squeezes out anybody without substantial experience so for them it's Catch 22. Only graduates form Ivy League colleges has real prospect to get a job after graduation. Plus those with good family connections. In a way education is no longer a guarantee for better paying job, the same situation what was typical for the USSR and other countries of Eastern block during Brezhnev's stagnation.
There is also an interesting transformation of the quality of the education that also parallel transformation experienced by the USSR in post-war period, but in especially acute form, three decades before the collapse. Private education became more like subprime lending. It's quality became fake, as the term "diploma mills" suggests. This rat rate to the lowest possible quality (quality instead of quality) was the central tendency in Brezhnev's USSR.
In the USA in addition to devaluation of education caused by low quality "everything passes, everybody graduates, just pay" modus operandi of diploma mills, graduates from lower middle class families are now overloaded with debt, which creates for them really difficult situation and push many of them into low level service jobs like waiting. In other words excessive debt after college make getting into workforce using acquired specialty even more difficult as there is no space for long job search, relocation is more difficult and so on and so forth.
There is also huge criminal industry that flourished around people desperate attempts to find well paying jobs. Many educational scams like "we will make you an ultrasound technician in six month; 90% of our graduates found jobs that pay over $60K in the first month after graduation" or " software tester in four month; 100% of our graduates find jobs" are trying to capitalize of people desperate to find job, any job and getting into crushing debt trying to improve their chances in job market. Those criminals are not prosecuted. For more information see:
The employment growth comes mainly from the service sector which feeds off of consumer spending. It was hit by outsourcing especially in such areas as IT. Manufacturing no longer create jobs – outsourcing and computers eat them and you no longer need more people to make more stuff.
Peter Dornan at EconoSpeak has the following comment which perhaps looks deeper at why the elite is so indifferent to mass unemployment and growing poverty in the U.S.
"…The process is more complicated: where one sits in society and the kinds of problems one typically has to solve leads to a way of thinking, and this manner of thinking then informs politics.
For centuries, the finance perspective has played a central role in economic theorizing, and there is ordinarily a body of research to support it. What I am proposing is this: economic orthodoxy is regaining control over policy because it reflects the outlook of those who occupy the upper reaches of government and business…."
IMHO to get the economy out of this mess, government should concentrate on direct job creation (like was the case with Roosevelt administration), not on propping zombie banks hoping that they will generate credit necessary for creation o new jobs. Growth of credit will not happen and if it will happen it will not generate new jobs: most of it is pushed into speculation. Spectacular rise of S&P500 in first half of 2013 is a pretty good illustration of the process.
Long term high unemployment is a disaster for the country and disaster for the people, despite the fact that it is irrelevant for banksters, too busy playing in the huge casino they created. Failure to address this problem directly by Obama administration (which in economic terms is the second Summers-Bush administration making a joke in the slogan "change we can believe in") make Obama a real serial betrayer of people who elected him, the role he seems enjoy playing.
There are several additional factors that makes addressing the problem of chronic, structural unemployment even more difficult:
One can't solve the current problems the US are facing without the reform of the political system
and institutions. Power of lobbyists need to be curtailed. Senate needs to be reformed. Republican
Party probably should be dissolved or temporary prohibited like Communists after the dissolution
of the USSR as it is unable to reform. As there is no political will for political changes the crisis
is structural and little people have to suffer.
- There has been some evidence of a shift by employers to more temporary workers ("We are all temporary now!"). Increase of temporary workforce is the most trend that signifies a changing employment relations and social structure. Most recent research throw "cold water on the notion" that temporary workers turn into full-time workers. The notion that temp positions help low-skill workers to acquire experience and eventually join the permanent workforce in better long-term jobs. Actually opposite, very brutal process is happening. Many waiter/waitresses has a college degree and are pretty proficient in calculus and/or C language. The US workforce (and Japan's and Europe's) have been increasingly temporary for many years now.
- Even most 'permanent' jobs don't have the protections of seniority etc., and are basically temporary in nature. Due to capturing of the government it can block any significant reforms.
Essentially net job growth might occur only if three sectors: health, education and government related jobs. Municipalities are under tremendous financial stress and will start shedding jobs in late 2010 when Fed stimulus expires.
Peak Baby Boomer demographic drag effects and the composition of household spending are structural factors underlying the "new normal".
The composition of household spending is shifting from growth-oriented high-GDP-multiplier spending for housing, autos, durables, and child rearing to maintenance/subsistence, low-multiplier spending for property taxes, house maintenance, insurance premia, out-of-pocket spending for medical services and medications, and utilities.
Moreover, the composition of the labor force is becoming increasingly feminized, if you will, as the fastest growing sectors, education and health care services, are composed of 80-85% female employees, even as the labor force participation rate for males age 24-54 continues a mutli-decade decline to under 90%. If the pattern of the 1930s to WW II and that of Japan from the early '90s to date repeats, males under age 30-35 and over age 50-55 will suffer the highest rates of labor force dislocation, unemployment, underemployment, and loss of occupational continuity.
Thus, as structural demographic drag effects bear down on the US labor force and economy, and males experience lower participation rates and higher unemployment and underemployment, females will become increasingly relied upon by households and by underemployed, unemployed, or retired males to bear a larger financial burden as the debt-deflationary depression persists well into the end of the decade and early '20s.
That females do most of the discretionary household spending, the increasing share of females' after-tax incomes required for household subsistence will further reduce discretionary expenditures for meals out, travel, gifts, apparel, jewelry, etc.
With Libya and Syria added to the list, the hidden costs of foreign wars will weight on weakened economics more heavily. Annual cost per soldier oversees is approximately $1 Million per year.
The disability rates are higher. The cost of caring for the disabled are higher. Almost one out of two people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are disabled. This is an unfunded liability of—we calculate now to be almost a trillion dollars, over $900 billion. So, one of the big ways of reducing our deficit is a—is cut back some expenditures....
The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.
Any expectations that Obama would show some sense of restraint about military spending have long ago vanished.
"It is my intention to finish the job" translates to "I will blow another $3 trillion war mongering if that is what it takes". And of course Pelosi does not think war idiocy should be at the expense of domestic idiocy.
War mongers want war but they do not want to pay for it. Sadly, Obama, Bush, Pelosi are all alike. Thus, Congress and the Administration is committed to having military idiocy and domestic idiocy at the same time.
God do we ever need a balanced budget amendment and a sound currency. We should not fund a damn thing unless we are willing to raise taxes to pay for it. Virtually no one but the war mongers and the military beneficiaries would be in support of raising taxes to pay for this monstrosity.
Rent that hypertrophied financial sector extracts from the rest of the society continues to be a serious drag on the economy. This drag adds to substantial drag caused by foreign wars and military bases as well as huge military industrial complex. While parasites are omnipresent in nature, two large parasites instead of one might spells trouble for the host. Moreover the ascendancy of the financial sector and the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. ("Casino Capitalism" ) has implications similar to consequences of an organized crime running the country. The creation of tangible products whose utility/quality can be more or less objectively measured were phased out in favor of "financial products," whose utility/quality is much easier to conceal behind legal/technical jargon and junk economics. That created a huge new class of white collar criminals. While Blankfein is out claiming that GS is doing God's work, the reality is quite different: it became a training ground for new type of ruthless criminals, much more dangerous then bank robbers. Killing of Glass-Steagall by Clinton and leverage obtained by financial sector operating without regulatory limit created prerequisites to the financial panic of 2008. Glass-Steagall enshrined two principles that were abandoned:
The violation of the second principle directly leads to a regulatory capture in which anything goes and a corresponding observed "need" to accommodate indiscretions, as with the Greenspan/Bernanke put. It perhaps should be identified as THE primary cause, since it left Wall Street with the well-founded (LTCM, Latin America debt crisis, etc. ) and since-proved belief that prudence and capital were quite unnecessary, and that reckless, sociopathic deal making is profitable. Four examples :
A cynic believes that only selfishness motivates human actions. As
Gordon Gekko said "Greed is good". I believe that the bonus structure led Wall Street to line
up all the pieces for the clash as fast as they could. Stan O'Neal is the poster child. After
presiding over all four of the steps above at Merrill Lynch he was paid $200 million to leave.
Where is the clawback!
The collapse in the U.S. commercial real estate market is fought by the government will maximum force but government resources to fight the crisis are diminishing too. in 2011 state financial crises led to cuts in state budget. In addition, in June 2013 municipal bonds came under fire, making financing more costly. Commercial debt is approximately one third of the size of the total residential debt and it is concentrated in the same places creating double whammy. In Florida commercial loans, broadly defined, are bigger then residential. Unlike residential real estate, problem with commercial real estate are not solved by growth of population and creation of new families.
Retail and white-collar positions will be directly impacted by CRE crash. As stores and offices
close, mall and office building owners suffer from cuts in cash flow and severely limited prospects
for new tenants. Insurance companies, hedge funds and regional banks are heavily invested in CRE
and are next in line so some financial jobs will be lost too. Extend and pretend might work but the
question is if there is enough liquidity to stretch loans.
My feeling is that even in corporate IT after drastic cuts that were the standard game for large corporations in 2008-2009, additional cuts are possible. But the situation on the ground is somewhat paradoxical as real cuts runs deeper that you would assume from headcount: a lot of current IT personnel belongs to "untouchable" caste -- wives of somebody higher up in this or linked by the supply chain company, sons of somebody important and so on. I can't give you percentage, but probably 10%-20% of "untouchables" would be an educated guess. So removing of at least 10% of the current IT workforce means removal of 12% or more those who do actual work.
Another factor is that cuts in IT are one way street as they stimulate replacing of people with technology and there are still tremendous potential for computerization of many areas including first of all IT itself.
For example all this cloud initiatives are in disguise politically correct way to move things
in the direction of higher automation and outsourcing because under the surface there is not much
innovation in those "new" technologies.
With the rising oil all bets for re-inflating the economy (aka kicking the can down the road)
are off.
Unemployment is a very harsh condition, that traumatize the workers greatly (Sliding into the Great Depression)
At first the unemployed searched eagerly and diligently for alternative sources of work. But if four months or so passed without successful reemployment, the unemployed tended to become discouraged and distraught.
After eight months of continuous unemployment, the typical unemployed worker still searches for a job, but in a desultory fashion and without much hope.
And within a year of becoming unemployed the worker is out of the labor market for all practical purposes: a job must arrive at his or her door, grab him or her by the scruff of the neck, and through him or her back into the nine-to-five routine if he or she is to be employed again.
The USA as a whole is facing the worst labor market prospects since 1929. In terms of duration of elevated unemployment we already rival the early 80s. But in no way we can expect a steep decline in the rate of unemployment in the way that happened in 1983 when unemployment declined at a brisk 2%. And permanent high unemployment creates economic conditions that feel like the USA brought back slavery. The new reserve army of the unemployed drives wages down, while average productivity continues to rise, as a way to generate surpluses to be channeled into executive bonuses. The whole sectors like IT were decimated by outsourcing. Unfortunately given the current overcapacity and ample supply of qualified job seekers in many occupations, I certainly don't expect labor arrangements and employment conditions to become more favorable.
Looks like 7% unemployment is going to become the "new normal". In any case government statistics is very suspect (see Fake Employment Statistics) and actually unemployment is higher. For example, the declining participation in work force means that actual unemployment rate is higher then reported.
Obama-Bush administration saved banks waiting most of taxpayers money and piling up debt in hopes that they restore credit flow in the economy. But this was a fallacy: banks aren't lending to prospective home buyers, small businesses and real estate developers because bankers recognize the obvious — many of those loans won't get repaid. Of course, as bankers refuse to lend, the stagnation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But since society is burdened with too much debt, piling on more debt would not be the solution in any case.
There is no smooth, painless route back to the easy-money based false prosperity of Reagan-Clinton-Bush era (age of leveraging). We entered the age of deleveraging. Obama's "you owe us" message to the banks is the height of naïveté' and tells us a lot about him. In 2013 our problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis. Peak credit is as dangerous for the economy as peak oil...
The inability of the economics profession to forecast unemployment in the short, medium, or long run would be downright comical, if not for the human tragedy involved. While the Occam Razor approach suggests incompetence as a culprit, I think it's a manifestation of the corruption of the profession by financial interests (with some "don't rock the boat" variations). First of all, economists much like elected officials and Wall Street executives have a vested interest in keeping the perception of a robust economy. The employment data announced each month are critical to this perception. That's why government "prints up jobs out of thin air" the same way the Federal Reserve prints money. This is economic propaganda and as such it is not that much different from the over-stated earnings practiced by companies of all striped and colors.
The second problem is that fiscal policy cannot solve the problem of job creation in all circumstances, especially in deleveraging environment. Position of people like The Fed Can Help, But Fiscal Policy Is The Key To Job Creation ) is a step in right direction. But without something like Jobs Corps to get out of the current situation is very difficult. In 1982 SETH S. KING wrote in NYT (PROPOSAL FOR JOB CORPS RECALLS ROOSEVELT PLAN):
Few of this city's recent celebrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 100th birthday have passed without nostalgic references to the Civilian Conservation Corps, that President's cherished vehicle for getting thousands of jobless, hungry youths off the streets and putting them to work refurbishing the nation's parks and forests.
With today's unemployment rate nearing a postwar high and new thousands of young people again unable to find work, Congress is preparing to wrestle with the Reagan Administration for money to start a new youth job training program and reconstitute the Job Corps, the pale copy of the old C.C.C. that emerged in the Carter days.
But there is little in these plans that is likely to reproduce those Depression era pictures of sturdy, bare-chested young men planting trees, building bridges and saving the nation's battered farmlands.
Nor is today's procedure-encumbered Washington, where a year usually elapses between idea and action, likely to duplicate the astonishing start on the C.C.C., which four months after being conceived had been approved by Congress and had more than 300,000 young men being clothed, housed, fed and paid $30 a month while they breathed all that fresh air.
In this crisis the main lesson was that theologically captured by free market fundamentalism government can destroy economy at a really staggering rate. This is "Back in the USSR" situation. Eight years of Clinton and eight years of Bush administration (see The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush, by Joseph E. Stiglitz) are as good proof of this as one can ever get. Clinton and Bush regimes (especially Rubin-Greenspan alliance and "vice president from an undisclosed location" activities) proved to be a real wrecking crew. But that does not mean that government cannot put it weight on easing the unemployment burden. Incentives such a investment tax credit matters. Not tax cuts for the rich, but direct investment credit. direct job creation which is anathema to market fundamentalism would be even better and less costly. Roosevelt administration did it, so why not capitalize on positive experience and develop it further ?
|In this crisis the main lesson was that theologically captured by free market fundamentalism government can destroy economy at a really staggering rate.
In any case socializing losses and privatizing gain (crony capitalism) should be downsized. Insurance for gambling by big banks should be cut.
As long as economists believe their report card is the rise in GDP (GDP Mania), we will remain in a failure mode. A country is not defined by GDP but by the quality of life of its citizens. And quality of life cannot be assessed by a simplistic, one-dimensional metric such as GDP. The key dimensions for well-being are: employment, earnings, wealth, health, infrastructure, and living conditions. In that particular order. With employment as the critical factor: the USA looks like an underdeveloped banana republic by the current measure of unemployment and in many respect has became such.
It looks like high persistent unemployment became the defining feature of this recession. Jobs creation prospect in 2014 look pretty grim -- there is no sector other then government that can absorb redundant workforce and automation in manufacturing makes sure that those who are unemployed right now will stay unemployed in the foreseeable future. Most jobs cut are permanent, not temporary, especially in such sectors as IT (structural shift). As Robert Reich noted:
...The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that's been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.
Under the pressure of this awful recession, many companies have found ways to cut their payrolls for good. They've discovered that new software and computer technologies have made workers in Asia and Latin America just about as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently outsourced abroad.
This means many Americans won't be rehired unless they're willing to settle for much lower wages and benefits. Today's official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which Americans are already on this path. Among those with jobs, a large and growing number have had to accept lower pay... Or they've lost higher-paying jobs and are now in a new ones that pays less.
The current crisis also means that financial services and real estate (FIRE) economy, this gigantic casino that the US government was trying to build for the last 25 years is now in trouble and shed workers in vast numbers (although working condition in financial industry are still good or very good depending on your position in the food chain). But the profitability of large banks and can achieved only by oversees expansion and derivatives games with foreign assets. The most profitable essentially converted themselves into hedge funds, getting most profits from trading operations, not from the traditional banking activities.
The simplest and the most obvious solution in the current situation is to cut work week and hours of work (4 days six hours a day). That will put enough people to work to make unemployment bearable and it might slightly help entertainment and hospitality industries which now is suffering more that others. From the other point of view if lower standard of living is inescapable, why not to make the transition smoother and more fun by cutting work hours.
But that's not enough. The USA needs drastically cut military budget. Military Keynesianism no longer works as expected. As John Maudin in his e-letter proposed (see Thoughts on the Economy- Problems and Solutions):
Mauldin: Unemployment is likely to continue to rise and last longer than ever before. We have to take care of the basic needs of those who want work but can't find it. Unemployment insurance should be extended to those who are still looking for work past the time for benefits to expire, and some program of local volunteer service should be instituted as the price for getting continued benefits after the primary benefits time period runs out. Not only will this help the community, but it will get the person out into the world where he is more likely to meet someone who can give him a job. But the costs of this program should be revenue-neutral. Something else has to be cut.
Mish: Can we deal with 15 million volunteers? Somehow I doubt it.
Mauldin: We have to re-think our military costs (I can't believe I am writing this!). We now spend almost 50% of the world's total military budget. Maybe we need to understand that we can't fight two wars and support hundreds of bases around the world. If we kill the goose, our ability to fight even one medium-sized war will be diminished. The harsh reality is that everything has to be re-evaluated. As an example, do we really need to be in Korea? If so, why can't Korea pay for much of the cost? They are now a rich nation. There are budgetary fiscal limits to being the policeman for the world.
Mish: Bingo. We can easily slash our military budget by 70% and still be the most powerful nation in the world. Moreover, it is time to declare the war in Iraq and Afghanistan over, pack our bags and leave. Gradually, over the next 5-8 years we should bring home all our troops from literally every county they are stationed.
This chart shows the absurdity of our spending.
Chart courtesy of Global Issues - World Military Spending.
By the way that chart does not include the latest increase in the US military budget. Please consider US lawmakers pass 680-billion-dollar defense budget billThe US House of Representatives passed a 680-billion-dollar defense authorization bill on Thursday that includes funds to train Afghan security forces and more mine-resistant troop carriers.
Lawmakers defied President Barack Obama's veto threat and approved 560 million dollars to continue work on an alternative engine for the F-35 fighter jet built by General Electric and British manufacturer Rolls-Royce.
The compromise legislation would also raise military pay by 3.4 percent -- half a percentage point higher than Pentagon recommendations -- and assign 6.7 billion dollars for mine-resistant armored vehicles known as MRAPs, which is 1.2 billion dollars more than the administration had proposed.
Nearly $700 billion dollars of "defense" spending. The amount needed for actual defense is 20% of that at most, and more likely 5%. Balancing the budget is easy if you start here.
Mauldin: Glass-Steagall, or some form of it, should be brought back. Banks, which are subject to taxpayer bailouts, should not be in the investment banking and derivatives-creating business. Derivatives, especially credit default swaps, should be on an exchange, and too big to fail must go. Banks have enough risk just making loans. Leverage should be dialed down, and hedge funds selling what amounts to naked call options in any form, derivative or otherwise, should be regulated.
Mish: What we need to do is get rid of the Fed, FDIC, and fractional reserve lending. Regulation has failed every step of the way. Regulation created Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Fed. Regulation by the SEC anointed Moodys, Fitch, and the S&P as debt rating companies. We do not need more regulation, we need less regulation, a sound currency, and no Fed. Regulation is clearly the problem, yet the cries for still more regulation come from nearly every corner save the Austrian economists.
Mauldin: Let me see, is there any group I have not offended yet? But something like I am suggesting is going to have to be done at some point. There is no way we can continue forever on the current path. At some point, we will hit the wall. The fight between the bug and the windshield always ends in favor of the windshield. The bond market is going to have to see a credible effort to get back to a reasonable deficit, or we risk a very difficult economic environment. The longer we wait, the worse it will be.
Mish: "Is there any group I have not offended yet?" Yes. You failed to offend those on public pension plans. Not to fear, I did that myself in Five Major Pension Problems - One Simple Solution.
Unsolvable Problems
- Expecting 8% returns in a 4% world. When 30 year treasury bonds are yielding 4%, the dividend yield of the S&P 500 is 2%, and the S&P 500 PE is 140 (26 if you use operating earnings), 8% returns are from Fantasyland.
- Pension benefits start too early. People are living longer.
- Private employees do not receive these kind of benefits. Public employees should not either, especially at taxpayer expense.
- Indeed, continuing to chase high-yield in a low-yield world is a guarantee those plans will blow up again down the road.
- Pension plans are so underfunded that it is virtually impossible to catch up, no matter what risks the plan managers undertake. When asked how long it would now take for its investments to put the fund back on track, Ohio officials simply said: "Infinity."
|Past week
|Past month
Oct 16, 2017 | www.insidehighered.comAngry About Adjuncting? The radical move might be to quit, writes Claire B. Potter. 150 Comments
Recently I stumbled across an article in The New York Times about my favorite topic: online academic rage -- and whether it spikes among those frustrated by the struggle to find a tenure-stream job. "Is there something about adjunct faculty members that makes them prone to outrageous political outbursts?" Colby College sociologist Neil Gross asked.
Citing recent examples in which the most vulnerable among us have been fired for an impolitic tweet or Facebook post, Gross argues that full-time faculty members are not the "tenured radicals" that American conservatives have feared since the 1990s. Instead, he proposes, the vast majority of full-timers are "tamed" by the prospects, or long-term comforts, of tenure. Research accounts, regular raises, the orderliness of being able to plan our lives and the satisfaction of promises kept inevitably sutures most of us to civility in all its forms.
But what incentives do workers who are already vulnerable in so many ways have to be polite? Although many people with humanities Ph.D.s do other jobs, this stubborn belief that they have trained for one thing, and one thing only, keeps many adjuncts on the hamster wheel long past a time when frustration and sorrow have turned to rage. Aside from the stress of trying to piece together a career one course at a time, the adjunct army -- permanently contingent, underemployed, overworked and underpaid faculty members -- has every reason to demand radical change.
But do these conditions produce a truly political radicalism, or are they simply radical utterances that get contingent faculty into trouble and leave a system that relies on a reserve army of labor unchanged? And since people with doctorates aren't tied to a particular factory or industry, would the radical solution be to stop teaching as a per-course adjunct?
... ... ...
Academic Ranter , October 16, 2017 10:57 AMDudewithtwoBAsMAMFAandPhD -> Academic Ranter , October 16, 2017 7:37 PM
There are two types of problems here. One concerns the individual misfortunes that plague adjuncts. Adjuncts' problems are lamentable, even if solvable, and it would be nice to see people in our society have some compassion rather than excuse their own apathy with callous blaming of people in unfortunate circumstances.
The other problem is systemic. This is the vicious, capitalist devaluation of academic labor. Anyone who holds some asinine fantasy about the "logic" of the market solving the adjunctification of the academy needs to shut up. You do terrible damage to our society. The simplest and most obvious solution to a lack of PhDs to work as adjuncts is to hire MAs.
Universities are already hiring undergrads to do some of the academic work. You are off your gourd if you think the people who want to siphon profits to the top will not try to further degrade academic labor, or, haven't you been paying attention to the hoopla around MOOCs? The only solution to the precariate is unionization and a demand for all academic labor to provide middle-class standards of living.
That means that the cowardly and lazy tenured faculty will finally have to do their jobs and guard the academy.RBatty024 -> Academic Ranter , October 16, 2017 12:50 PM
I agree with most of what you say, except that my experience says that administrations would rather hire MAs than PhDs because PhDs demand the salaries that align with their higher education; and, because PhDs are generally more experienced in academe, they are less agreeable than MAs to accepting administrative initiatives that are tangential to faculty teaching and research.CuriousHamster -> RBatty024 , October 16, 2017 7:14 PM
"The simplest and most obvious solution to a lack of PhDs to work as adjuncts is to hire MAs."
This is already occurring, even outside of the humanities. I know some great instructors without their doctorate, but hiring a large number of instructors without a terminal degree does seem to go against the ideal that a professor teaches undergraduates, keeps up with the latest in his or her field, and produces knowledge in that field.
While in a master's program at a large research institute, I was given my own classes, even though I only had a bachelor's degree. I was happy to get the experience, but with my background, I probably should not have been teaching those studentshrhdhd -> CuriousHamster , October 16, 2017 9:48 PM
Actually, if you look at 50-60 year old faculty lists a fair number of faculty had masters. Masters were originally meant to be a teaching qualification, PhDs were a research qualification. The masters as a teaching qualification got squeezed out because of too many PhDs between 2 and 3 generations back.TheJonesest , October 16, 2017 8:13 AM
Not at community colleges.Aaron Barlow -> TheJonesest , October 16, 2017 11:50 AM
Adjuncting is not now, and was never meant to be, a career. We can complain about working conditions, lack of benefits/stability, and the stress of cobbling together enough courses to pay the rent all we want (and we do) but the bottom line is this: If you haven't landed a FT teaching gig within three years of earning your Ph.D., bail out and choose another career. The person who can't eat after 20 years of adjunct work has no one to blame but themselves. Keep fighting, but take care of yourself, too.AdjunctNYC -> Aaron Barlow , October 16, 2017 1:59 PM
Whether "meant" to be a career or not, adjuncting is a career for many--and our institutions have made it that way by refusing to hire enough full-time professors to cover the courses offered. Adjuncts are being exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus on, not individual career choices.Michael Dixon -> TheJonesest , October 17, 2017 6:12 PM
I agree. Blaming adjuncts for being adjuncts, wishing they would not have enrolled in PhD programs, and encouraging them to take jobs in fields for which they did not study (alt-ac), is a very ugly game.
This is compounded by the fact that people of color and women are far less likely to be on the tenure line. None of this seems to bother the rising tide of neoliberal academics, who almost without exception have never worked off the tenure track, and maintain pushing people toward careers they do not want to do, are not educated to do, and could do with out a PhD, is a way to solve the problem.
I don't know if neoliberal professors are increasing in numbers or if they just have greater access to publish. I imagine it's the latter. The take on the situation from those off the tenure track is quite the opposite, obviously. This is what we need to reiterate: "Adjuncts are being exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus on"RedinHigherEd , October 16, 2017 9:39 AM
There is no reason the job has to be set up the way it is. Most colleges & universities use far more adjuncts than fluctuation in enrollment and funding would account for.
The "too many Ph.D's" argument falls apart when you think about how easy it is to get an adjunct job. Two of the four districts I've worked in didn't even do a formal interview. I just met with the department chair to discuss when I was available. I work more than the equivalent of full time at two different districts every semester, so theoretically, one full time job could exist for me.
My wife is a K-12 public school teacher, and her first year teaching, she made as much as I did after ten years as an adjunct with a master's (except she didn't have to work summers and did get health insurance for our whole family).
We could probably fix it in a cost neutral way if administrative positions and salaries weren't growing faster than the number of full time teaching positions.
As an academic you should know that the way things are wasn't handed down by god, and isn't an immutable law of nature. Someone made it this way and it can be unmade too.
Frankly, I feel sorry for you as I do for the administrators and full time faculty who look down on their adjunct colleagues. You have been a subject in a real life Milgram or Stanford Prison experiment and took the baitrob -> RedinHigherEd , October 16, 2017 12:43 PM
Fair warning, what I'm about to say is completely anecdotal. I'm a career advisor and every once and a while an adjunct faculty person will come visit career services for assistance. They are generally completely absent of career management skills. They tend to be people who were very good at college, so they went to grad school sort of assuming they'd be able to get a job that way.
They continued to do no meaningful career planning while in grad school, and after completing were able to use their familiarity with college systems to piece together some adjunct work. When asked simple questions such as "what types of careers outside of academia have you explored?" they are unable to answer.
They lack the ability to identify and describe their transferable skills, have only shallow understanding of what career paths are available, and struggle to engage in even simple job search tasks. These are extremely intelligent people with a huge gap in their career competencies.
I think a major reason we don't see more adjuncts quit and move to other industries or even other roles on campus is because they simply do not know how.RedinHigherEd -> rob , October 17, 2017 11:48 AM
On the flip side of this though is the fact that those with a lot of applied (in terms of non academic aspects) work in their field often do not fair as well in FT searches. Those from working class backgrounds or who worked throughout grad school are often seen as less desirable in searches even though they are the ones who are most likely to know how to advise students on realistic career paths. I finished my PhD with 10 years of industry experience in the non profit, consulting, and governmental sectors but even at undergraduate serving institutions this often had less cache then the handful of publications I had produced.Yiddishist -> RedinHigherEd , October 16, 2017 7:14 PM
Yeah it's a catch 22 for grad students. If they take the time to get industry experience, that will help them volumes in alt ac careers, but ding them in academic ones.
All that your comment shows is that adjuncts are easy targets, even for career advisors. The fact that you recognize your comment as anecdotal does not exempt you from giving information about how many cases your negative generalizations were made from, at what type of higher education institution you encountered them, and so on. I have not noted any defects of the type you claim in career skills, and I have known scores of adjuncts, but I would be far more cautious than you are about generalizing either way. I would go so far as to say that the ones I have known compare favorably to law students and the many job applicants I worked with as a job-placement specialist at an employment agency in Manhattan some years ago. I worked as an adjunct myself for some time, and found few jobs that so hone one's survival skills, in the employment market and elsewhere.
www.chronicle.comOctober 3, 2017
The CIA Within Academe 21 Comments
Book documents how foreign and domestic intelligence agencies use -- and perhaps exploit -- higher education and academe for spy operations.
Foreign and domestic intelligence services spar and spy on one another all across the world. But it would be naïve to think it's not happening in the lab or classroom as well.
In his new book, Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities ( Henry Holt and Company ), investigative journalist Daniel Golden explores the fraught -- and sometimes exploitative -- relationship between higher education and intelligence services, both foreign and domestic. Chapters explore various case studies of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation using the open and collaborative nature of higher education to their advantage, as well as foreign governments infiltrating the U.S. via education.
"It's pretty widespread, and I'd say it's most prevalent at research universities," Golden, an editor at ProPublica and an alumnus of The Boston Globe 's "Spotlight" team, told Inside Higher Ed . "The foreign intelligence services have the interest and the opportunity to learn cutting-edge, Pentagon-funded or government-funded research."
Golden, who has also covered higher education for The Wall Street Journal , previously wrote about the intersection of wealth and admissions in his 2006 book The Price of Admission .
Each of the case studies in Spy Schools , which goes on sale Oct. 10, is critical. One could read the chapters on the Chinese government's interest in U.S. research universities as hawkish, but then turn to the next chapter on Harvard's relationship with the CIA and read it as critical of the American intelligence establishment as well.
"People of one political persuasion might focus on [the chapters regarding] foreign espionage; people of another political persuasion might focus on domestic espionage," Golden said. "I try to follow where the facts lead."
Perhaps the most prestigious institution Golden examines is Harvard University, probing its cozy relationship with the CIA. (While Harvard has recently come under scrutiny for its relationship with the agency after it withdrew an invitation for Chelsea Manning to be a visiting fellow -- after the agency objected to her appointment -- this book was written before the Manning incident, which occurred in September.) The university, which has had varying degrees of closeness and coldness with the CIA over the years, currently allows the agency to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school's knowledge. When the officers apply -- often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover -- the university doesn't know they're CIA agents, but once they're in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they're undercover. Their fellow students, however -- often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy -- are kept in the dark.
"Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard's knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide," Golden writes. "For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence."
But the CIA isn't the only intelligence group operating at Harvard. Golden notes Russian spies have enrolled at the Kennedy School, although without Harvard's knowledge or cooperation.
When contacted by Inside Higher Ed , Harvard officials didn't deny Golden's telling, but defended the university's practices while emphasizing the agreement between the university and the CIA -- which Golden also writes about -- on not using Harvard to conduct CIA fieldwork.
"Harvard Kennedy School does not knowingly provide false information or 'cover' for any member of our community from an intelligence agency, nor do we allow members of our community to carry out intelligence operations at Harvard Kennedy School," Eric Rosenbach, co-director of the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said in a statement.
While Golden said the CIA's involvement on campus raises existential questions about the purpose and integrity of higher education, Harvard maintained that the Kennedy School was living up to its mission.
"Our community consists of people from different spheres of public service. We are proud to train people from the U.S. government and the intelligence community, as well as peace activists and those who favor more open government," Rosenbach said in his statement. "We train students from a wide range of foreign countries and foreign governments, including -- among others -- Israel, U.K., Russia and China. That is consistent with our mission and we are proud to have that reach."
On the other hand, other countries are interested in exploiting U.S. higher education. Golden documents the case of Ruopeng Liu, a graduate student at Duke University who siphoned off U.S.-government-funded research to Chinese researchers. Liu eventually returned to China and has used some of the research for his Chinese-government-funded start-up ventures.
Golden is comprehensive, interviewing Duke researchers who worked with Liu, as well as dispatching a freelance journalist in China to interview Liu (he denied wrongdoing, saying his actions were taken as part of higher education's collaborative norms regarding research projects). Despite questions that arose while Liu was a student, he received his doctorate in 2009 without any formal questions or pushback from the university. A week before Liu defended his dissertation, Golden notes that Duke officials voted to move forward in negotiations with the Chinese government regarding opening a Duke campus in China -- raising questions about whether Duke was cautious about punishing a Chinese student lest there were negative business implications for Duke. ( The building of the campus proved to be a controversial move in its own right. )
The Duke professor Liu worked under told Golden it would be hard to prove Liu acted with intentional malice rather than out of genuine cultural and translational obstacles, or ethical slips made by a novice researcher. Duke officials told Inside Higher Ed that there weren't any connections between Liu and the vote.
"The awarding of Ruopeng Liu's degree had absolutely no connection to the deliberations over the proposal for Duke to participate in the founding of a new university in Kunshan, China," a spokesman said in an email.
These are just two chapters of Golden's book, which also goes on to document the foreign exchange relationship between Marietta College, in Ohio, and the controversial Chinese-intelligence-aligned University of International Relations. Agreements between Marietta and UIR, which is widely regarded a recruiting ground for Chinese intelligence services, include exchanging professors and sending Chinese students to Marietta. Conversely, Golden writes, as American professors teach UIR students who could end up spying on the U.S., American students at Marietta are advised against studying abroad at UIR if they have an interest in working for the government -- studying at UIR carries a risk for students hoping to get certain security clearances. Another highlight is the chapter documenting the CIA's efforts to stage phony international academic conferences, put on to lure Iranian nuclear scientists as attendees and get them out of their country -- and in a position to defect to the U.S. According to Golden's sources, the operations, combined with other efforts, have been successful enough "to hinder Iran's nuclear weapons program."
But Golden's book doesn't just shed light on previously untold stories. It also highlights the existential questions facing higher education, not only when dealing with infiltration from foreign governments, but also those brought on by cozy relationships between the U.S. intelligence and academe.
"One issue is American national security," Golden said. "Universities do a lot of research that's important to our government and our military, and they don't take very strong precautions against it being stolen," he said. "So the domestic espionage side -- I'm kind of a traditionalist and I believe in the ideal of universities as places where the brightest minds of all countries come together to learn, teach each other, study and do research. Espionage from both sides taints that that's kind of disturbing."
After diving deep into the complex web that ties higher education and espionage together, however, Golden remains optimistic about the future.
"It wouldn't be that hard to tighten up the intellectual property rules and have written collaboration agreements and have more courses about intellectual safeguards," he said. "In the 1970s, Harvard adopted guidelines against U.S. intelligence trying to recruit foreign students in an undercover way they didn't become standard practice [across academe, but], I still think those guidelines are pertinent and colleges would do well to take a second look at them."
"In the idealistic dreamer mode, it would be wonderful if the U.N. or some other organization would take a look at this issue, and say, 'Can we declare universities off-limits to espionage?'"
Nicholas Dujmovic , October 3, 2017 8:18 AMGrace Alcock -> Nicholas Dujmovic , October 4, 2017 1:30 AM
Equating the presence and activities of US intelligence on campuses with that of foreign intelligence is pretty obtuse moral relativism. US academia and US intelligence alike benefit from cooperation, and the American people are the winners overall. By the way, is it really necessary to twice describe this relationship as "cozy"? What does that mean, other to suggest there's something illicit about it?alsotps -> Nicholas Dujmovic , October 3, 2017 5:20 PM
It'd be nice if American intelligence was paying a bit more attention to what goes on in academic research--as far as I can tell, the country keeps making policies that don't seem particularly well-informed by the research in relevant areas. Can we get them to infiltrate more labs of scientists working on climate change or something?
Maybe stick around, engage in some participant observation and figure that research out? It's not clear they have any acquaintance with the literature on the causes of war. Really, pick a place to start, and pay attention.Nicholas Dujmovic -> alsotps , October 4, 2017 12:38 PM
If you cannot see how a gov't intelligence agency, prohibited from working in the USA by statute and who is eye-deep in AMERICAN education is wrong, then I am worried. Read history. Look back to the 1970's to start and to the 1950's with FBI and the military agents in classrooms; then read about HUAC.
Now, look back to Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Mussolini et.al with THIER use of domestic agencies to impose lock-step thinking and to ferret out free-thinkers.
Get it? it is 'illicit!"Former Community College Prof -> Nicholas Dujmovic , October 3, 2017 12:12 PM
Actually, I read quite a bit of history. I also know that US intelligence agencies are not "prohibited from working in the USA." If they have relationships in academia that remind you of Stalin, Hitler, etc., how have US agencies "imposed lock-step thinking and ferreted out free-thinkers?" Hasn't seemed to work, has it? Your concern is overwrought.alsotps -> Former Community College Prof , October 3, 2017 5:21 PM
"Cozy" might refer to the mutual gains afforded by allowing the federal government to break many rules (and laws) while conducting their "intelligence operations" in academe. I do not know if I felt Homeland Security should have had permission to bring to this country, under false premises supported by ICE and accrediting agencies, thousands of foreign nationals and employed them at companies like Facebook, Apple, Morgan Stanley and the U.S. Army. While Homeland Security collected 16K tuition from each of them (and the companies that hired these F-1s didn't have to pay FICA) all our nation got was arrests of 20 mid level visa brokers.
Personally, I think cozy was quite complimentary as I would have chosen other words. Just imagine if there are additional "undercover students" with false credentials in numbers significant enough to throw off data or stopping universities and colleges from enforcing rules and regulations. If you set up and accredit a "fake university" and keep the proceeds, it strikes me as illicit.Trevor Ronson -> Nicholas Dujmovic , October 3, 2017 2:36 PM
Hey...don't imagine it. Read about Cointelpro and military 'intelligence' agents in classes in the early 1970's....alsotps -> Trevor Ronson , October 3, 2017 5:16 PM
And behaving as if the "the presence and activities of US intelligence on campuses" is something to accept without question is also "obtuse moral relativism". We are talking about an arrangement wherein a / the most prestigious institutions of higher learning has an established relationship with the CIA along with some accepted protocol to ongoing participation.
Whether it is right, wrong, or in between is another matter but please don't pretend that it's just business as usual and not worthy of deeper investigation.George Avery , October 3, 2017 9:46 AM
Unfortunately for many people, it IS business as usual.alsotps -> George Avery , October 3, 2017 5:22 PM
It is amazing how many biochemists and microbiologists from the People's Republic of China would e-mail me asking if I had a position in my "lab," touting their bench skills, every time I published a paper on the federal bioterrorism program, medical civic action programs, etc.
Never mind that I primarily do health policy and economics work, and have not been near a lab bench since I returned to school for my doctorate.....anything with a defense or security application drew a flurry of interest in getting involved.
As a result, I tended to be very discerning in who I took on as an advisee, if only to protect my security clearance.John Lobell , October 3, 2017 6:25 AM
PAr for the course for both UG and grad students from China who have not paid a head hunter. ANY school or program offering money to international students was flooded by such inquiries. Get over yourself.jloewen , October 3, 2017 10:38 AM
When I started teaching 48 years ago, the president of my college was James Dovonan, Bill Donovan's (founder of the OSS) brother, portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie, "Bridge of Spies."
We had a program in "Tropical Architecture" which enrolled students form "third world" countries. Rumor was -- --alsotps -> jloewen , October 3, 2017 5:24 PM
When I got my Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968, the Shah of Iran got an honorary doctorate at the same commencement. The next year, by pure coincidence!, he endowed three chairs of Near Eastern Studies at H.U.Kevin Van Elswyk , October 3, 2017 9:31 AM
Absolutely a coincidence! You don't think honoraria have anything whatsoever to do with the Development Office do you? (Snark)Robert4787 , October 4, 2017 6:28 PM
And we are surpised?TinkerTailor1620 , October 3, 2017 5:29 PM
So glad to see they're on campus. Many young people now occupy the CIA; the old "cowboys" of the Cold War past are gone. U may find this interesting>> http://osintdaily.blogspot....Phred , October 3, 2017 1:49 PM
Hundreds of government civil servants attend courses at the Kennedy School every year. That a few of them come from the CIA should be no surprise. It and all the other intelligence agencies are nothing more than departments within the federal government, just like Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, the FDA, Energy, and so on. Nothing sneaky or suspicious about any of it. Why anyone with cover credentials would tell the Kennedy School admin that is beyond me. When I was in cover status, I was in cover status everywhere; to not be was to blow your cover, period, and was extremely dangerous.
Beyond NIH funded grant-based research, Homeland Security, Energy, Defense, and the Intelligence Community agencies have long histories of relationships with American academia. This could be funded research, collaborative research, shared personnel relationships, or all other manner of cooperation. Sometimes it's fairly well known and sometimes it's kept quiet, and sometimes it's even classified. But it is much more extensive and expansive than what Golden describes, and much less "cozy" or suspicious.alsotps -> Phred , October 3, 2017 5:25 PM
For years I have said that it is foolish to look to universities for moral guidance, and this story is one more instance. In this case, the moral ground is swampy at best, and the universities do not appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about possible problems as long as the situation works to their advantage financially.Jason , October 4, 2017 6:34 PM
The key, here, is financially. The bean counters and those whose research is funded don't look hard at the source of the funding. Just so it keeps coming.Sanford Gray Thatcher , October 4, 2017 6:13 PM
Academic treason.donald scott , October 3, 2017 6:05 PM
Does Golden discuss at all the way in which the CIA and other intelligence services funnel money into academic research without the source of the funding ever being revealed? This was common practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and colleges like MIT were among those involved in this chicanery.
Remember also how intelligence agency money was behind the journal Encounter? Lots of propaganda got distributed under the guise of objective social science research.
Where has IHE been for the past several decades? Read Rosenfeld's book, Subversives..... about the FBI's illegal acts at Berkeley. Or read this, a summary of his book: https://alumni.berkeley.edu... Or read George R. Stewart, The Year of the Oath.
In the research for my biography of Stewart I found significant information about CIA presence on the UC Berkeley campus, in the mid-twentieth century, which reached in to the highest levels of the administration and led to a network of "professors" recruited by that unAmerican spy agency.
The oaths, the current gender wars and the conviction by accusation of harassment are all later attempts to politicize education and turn fiat lux into fiat nox. IHE should be writing more about that and about the current conviction by sexual accusation, and the effect of such on free thought and free inquiry.
Oct 10, 2017 | www.chronicle.comSpies on Campus
How the CIA secretly exploits higher educationPremium content for subscribers. Subscribe Today
Graham Spanier rolled out the red carpet for the intelligence services to conduct covert operations involving colleges.
Oct 17, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Yves here. On the one hand, as someone who is getting to be pretty long in tooth, I'm not sure about calling un and under-employed older workers "spare". But when the alternative is being thrown on the trash heap, maybe that isn't so unflattering.
Even though this analysis is from Australia, most of if not all of its finding would almost certainly prove out in the US. However, there is a whole 'nother set of issues here. Australia is 85% urban, with most of the population living in or near four large cities. So its labor mobility issues are less pronounced than here. Moreover, a lot of the whinging in the US about worker shortages, as even readers of the Wall Street Journal regularly point out in its comment section is:
1. Not being willing to pay enough to skilled workers, which includes not being willing to pay them to relocate
2. Not being willing to train less skilled workers, as companies once did as a matter of course
By Leith van Onselen. Originally published at MacroBusiness
A few weeks back, the Benevolent Society released a report which found that age-related discrimination is particularly rife in the workplace, with over a quarter (29%) of survey respondents stating they had been turned down for a job because of their old age, whereas 14% claimed they had been denied a promotion because of their old age.
Today, the Regional Australia Institute (RAI) has warned that Australia is facing a pension crisis unless employers stop their "discrimination" against older workers. From The ABC :
[RAI] has warned the Federal Government's pension bill would rise from $45 billion to $51 billion within three years, unless efforts were made to help more mature workers gain employment, particularly in regional communities.
Chief executive Jack Archer said continued unemployment of people older than 55 would cut economic growth and put a greater strain on public resources.
"We hear that there is a lot of people who would like to work, who would love to stay in the workforce either part-time or full-time even though they're in their late 50s, 60s and even into their 70s," he said.
"But we're not doing a very good job of giving them the training, giving them the incentives around the pension, and working with employers to stop the discrimination around employing older workers"
"It basically means you've got a lot of talent on the bench, a lot of people who could be involved and contributing who are sitting around homes and wishing they were doing something else," he said
Mr Archer said as the population aged the workforce shrank, and that risked future economic growth.
But he said that could be reversed provided employers embraced an older workforce
"[When] those people are earning [an income], their pension bills will either disappear or be much lower and the government will get a benefit from that."
For years the growth lobby and the government has told us that Australia needs to run high levels of immigration in order to alleviate so-called 'skills shortages' and to mitigate an ageing population. This has come despite the Department of Employment showing that Australia's skills shortage "remains low by historical standards" and Australia's labour underutilisation rate tracking at high levels:
Economic models are often cited as proof that a strong immigration program is 'good' for the economy because they show that real GDP per capita is moderately increased via immigration, based on several dubious assumptions.
The most dubious of these assumptions is that population ageing will necessarily result in fewer people working, which will subtract from per capita GDP (due to the ratio of workers to dependents falling).
Leaving aside the fact that the assumed benefit to GDP per capita from immigration is only transitory, since migrants also age (thereby requiring an ever-bigger immigration intake to keep the population age profile from rising), it is just as likely that age-specific workforce participation will respond to labour demand, resulting in fewer people being unemployed. This is exactly what has transpired in Japan where an ageing population has driven the unemployment rate down to only 2.8% – the lowest level since the early-1990s:
The ABS last month revealed that more Australians are working past traditional retirement age, thereby mitigating concerns that population ageing will necessarily reduce the employment-to-population ratio:
Clearly, however, there is much further scope to boost workforce participation among older workers.
Rather than relying on mass immigration to fill phantom 'labour shortages' – in turn displacing both young and older workers alike – the more sensible policy option is to moderate immigration and instead better utilise the existing workforce as well as use automation to overcome any loss of workers as the population ages – as has been utilised in Japan.
It's worth once again highlighting that economists at MIT recently found that there is absolutely no relationship between population ageing and economic decline. To the contrary, population ageing seems to have been associated with improvements in GDP per capita, thanks to increased automation:
If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades we show that since the early 1990s or 2000s, the periods commonly viewed as the beginning of the adverse effects of aging in much of the advanced world, there is no negative association between aging and lower GDP per capita on the contrary, the relationship is significantly positive in many specifications.
The last thing that Australia should be doing is running a mass immigration program which, as noted many times by the Productivity Commission cannot provide a long-term solution to ageing, and places increasing strains on infrastructure, housing and the natural environment.
The sustainable 'solution' to population ageing is to better utilise the existing workforce, where significant spare capacity exists.
Enquiring Mind , October 17, 2017 at 10:26 amVatch , October 17, 2017 at 11:29 am
At what point might an impatient constituency demand greater accountability by its elected representatives? In the business world, the post-2000 accounting scandals like Enron resulted in legislation to make company execs sign off on financial statements under threat of harsh personal penalties for misrepresentation. If legislators were forced by constituents to enact similar legislation about their own actions, the transparency could be very enlightening and a type of risk reduction due to acknowledgement of material factors. Imagine seeing in print the real reasons for votes, the funding sources behind those votes and prospect of jail time for misrepresentation about what is just their damn job. Call it Truth-In-Legislating, similar to the prior Truth-In-Lending act.sgt_doom , October 17, 2017 at 2:11 pm
It's a nice idea, but I don't think that very many executives have been penalized under the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Jamie Dimon certainly wasn't penalized for the actions of the London Whale. I guess we'll see what happens in the near future to the executives of Wells Fargo. I suspect that a Truth-In-Legislating law would be filled with loopholes or would be hampered by enforcement failures, like current Congressional ethics rules and the Sarbanes Oxley Act.RUKidding , October 17, 2017 at 10:55 am
At what point might an impatient constituency demand greater accountability by its elected representatives?
At that point when they start shooting them (as they did in Russian in the very early 1900s, or lop their heads off, as they once did in France).
Personally, I'll never work for any Ameritard corporation ever again, as real innovation is not allowed, and the vast majority are all about financialization in some form or other!
My work life the past thirty years became worse and worse and worse, in direct relation to the majority of others, and my last jobs were beyond commenting up.
My very last position, which was in no manner related to my experience, education, skill set and talents -- like too many other American workers -- ended with a most tortuous layoff: the private equity firm which was owner in a failed "pump and dump" brought a "toxic work environment specialist" whose job was to advise the sleazoid senior executives (and by that time I was probably one of only four actual employee workers there, they had hired a whole bunch of executives, though) on how to create a negative work environment to convince us to leave instead of merely laying us off (worked for two, but not the last lady there I myself).
The American workplace sucks big time as evidenced by their refusal to raise wages while forever complaining about their inability to find skilled employees -- they are all criminals today!jrs , October 17, 2017 at 1:34 pm
Interesting article and thanks.
I lived and worked in Australia in the late '70s and early '80s. Times were different. Back then, the government jobs came with mandatory retirement. I believe (but could be wrong) that it was at 63, but you could request staying until 65 (required approval). After that, one could continue working in the private sector, if you could find a job.
The population was much less than it is now. I believe the idea was to make room for the younger generation coming up. Back then, government workers, as well as many private sector workers, had defined benefit pension plans. So retiring younger typically worked out ok.
I had one friend who continued working until about 70 because she wanted to; liked her job; and wasn't interested in retiring. However, I knew far more people who were eager to stop at 63. But back then, it appeared to me that they had the financial means to do so without much worry.
Things have changed since then. More of my friends are putting off retirement bc they need the money now. Plus defined benefit pension plans have mostly been dispensed with and replaced by, I believe (I'm not totally clear on this), the Aussie version of a 401 (k) (someone can correct me if I'm wrong).
What the article proposes makes sense. Of course here in the USA, older workers/job seekers face a host of discriminatory practices, especially for the better paying jobs. Nowadays, though, US citizens in their golden years can sell their house, buy an RV, and become itinerant workers – sometimes at back breaking labor, such as harvesting crops or working at an Amazon gulag – for $10 an hour. Yippee kay-o kay-aaay!
So let us also talk about cutting Medicare for all of those lazy slacker Seniors out there. Woo hoo!RUKIdding , October 17, 2017 at 4:44 pm
There is really two issues:
1) for those whom age discrimination in employment is hitting in their 50s or even younger, before anyone much is retiring, it needs to be combatted
2) eventually (sometimes in their 60's and really should be at least by 65) people ought to be allowed to retire and with enough money to not be in poverty. This work full time until you drop garbage is just that (it's not as if 70 year olds can even say work 20 hours instead, no it's the same 50+ hours or whatever as everyone else is doing). And most people won't live that much longer, really they won't, U.S. average lifespans aren't that long and falling fast. So it really is work until you die that is being pushed if people aren't allowed to retire sometime in their 60s. Some people have good genes and good luck and so on (they may also have a healthy lifestyle but sheer luck plays a large role), and will live far beyond that, but averagescocomaan , October 17, 2017 at 11:06 am
Agree with you about the 2 issues.
Working past 65 is one of those things where it just depends. I know people who are happily (and don't "really" need the money) working past 65 bc they love their jobs and they're not taking a toll on their health. They enjoy the socialization at work; are intellectually stimulated; and are quite happy. That's one issue.
But when people HAVE TO work past 65 – and I know quite a few in this category – when it starts taking a toll on their health, that is truly bad. And I can reel off several cases that I know of personally. It's just wrong.
Whether you live much longer or not is sort of up to fate, no matter what. But yes, if work is taking a toll on your heath, then you most likely won't live as long.HotFlash , October 17, 2017 at 4:19 pm
In January, economists from MIT published a paper, entitled Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation, which showed that there is absolutely no relationship between population aging and economic decline. To the contrary, population aging seems to have been associated with improvements in GDP per capita, thanks to increased automation:
From the cited article.
I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but there's no reason to ditch your most knowledgeable, most skilled workers toward the eve of their careers except if you don't want to pay labor costs. Which we know that most firms do not, in their mission for profit for shareholders or the flashy new building or trying to Innuhvate .
There's a myth that innovation comes from the 20 something in their basement, but that's just not the case. Someone who has, for instance, overseen 100 construction projects building bridges needs to be retained, not let go. Maybe they can't lift the sledge anymore, but I'd keep them on as long as possible.
Good food for thought! I enjoyed this piece.fresno dan , October 17, 2017 at 11:08 am
There's a myth that innovation comes from the 20 something in their basement, but that's just not the case.
Widely held by 20 somethings. Maybe it's just one of those Oedipus things.Disturbed Voter , October 17, 2017 at 1:26 pm
1. Not being willing to pay enough to skilled workers, which includes not being willing to pay them to relocate
2. Not being willing to train less skilled workers, as companies once did as a matter of course
3. older workers have seen all the crap and evil management has done, and is usually in a much better position than young less established employees to take effective action against itJeremy Grimm , October 17, 2017 at 2:25 pm
This. Don't expect rational actors, in management or labor. If everyone was paid the same, regardless of age or training or education or experience etc then the financial incentives for variant outcomes would decrease. Except for higher health costs for older workers. For them, we could simply ban employer provide health insurance then that takes that variable out of the equation too. So yes, the ideal is a rational Marxism or the uniformity of the hive-mind-feminism. While we would have "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" we will have added it as an axiom that all have the same need. And a whip can encourage the hoi polloi to do their very best.BoycottAmazon , October 17, 2017 at 11:16 am
Fully agee! To your list I would add a corollory to your item #3 -- older workers having seen all the crap and evil management has done are more likely to inspire other employees to feel and act with them. -- This corollory is obvious but I think it bears stating for emphasis of the point.
I believe your whole list might be viewed as symtoms resulting from the concept of workers as commodity -- fungible as cogs on a wheel. Young and old alike are dehumanized.
The boss of the branch office of the firm I last worked for before I retired constantly emphasized how each of us must remain "fungible" [he's who introduced me to this word] if we wanted to remain employed. The firm would win contracts using one set of workers in its bids and slowly replace them with new workers providing the firm a higher return per hour billed to the client. I feel very lucky I managed to remain employed -- to within a couple of years of the age when I could apply for Medicare. [Maybe it's because I was too cowed to make waves and avoided raises as best I could.]
[I started my comment considering the idea of "human capital" but ran into trouble with that concept. Shouldn't capital be assessed in terms of its replacement costs and its capacity for generating product or other gain? I had trouble working that calculus into the way firms treat their employees and decided "commodity" rather than "capital" better fit how workers were regarded and treated.]Jim Haygood , October 17, 2017 at 1:35 pm
"skills vs. demand imbalance" not labor shortage. Capital wants to tip the scale the other way, but isn't willing to invest the money to train the people, per a comment I made last week. Plenty of unemployed or under-employed even in Japan, much less Oz.
Keeping the elderly, who already have the skills, in the work place longer is a way to put off making the investments. Getting government to tax the poor for their own training is another method. Exploiting poor nations education systems by importing skills yet another.
Some business hope to develop skills that only costs motive power (electric), minimal maintenance, and are far less capital intensive and quicker to the market than the current primary source's 18 years. Capitalism on an finite resource will eat itself, but even capitalism with finite resources will self-destruct in the end.Arthur Wilke , October 17, 2017 at 1:44 pm
Importantly, the chart labeled as Figure 2 uses GDP per capita on the y-axis.
Bearing in mind that GDP growth is composed of labor force growth times productivity, emerging economies that are growing faster than the rich world in both population and GDP look more anemic on a per capita basis, allowing us rich country denizens to feel better about our good selves. :-)
But in terms of absolute GDP growth, things ain't so bright here in the Homeland. Both population and productivity growth are slowing. Over the past two-thirds century, the trend in GDP groaf is relentlessly down, even as debt rises in an apparent attempt to maintain unsustainable living standards. Chart (viewer discretion advised):
Van Onselen doesn't address the rich world's busted pension systems. To the extent that they contain a Ponzi element premised on endless growth, immigration would modestly benefit them by adding new
victimsworkers to support the greying masses of doddering Boomers.
Will you still need me
Will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four?
-- The BeatlesYves Smith Post author , October 17, 2017 at 4:54 pm
There's been an increase in the employment of older people in the U.S. in the U.S. population. To provide a snapshot, below are three tables referring to the U.S. by age cohorts of 1) the total population, 2) Employment and 3) employment-population ratios (percent).based on Bureau of Labor Statistics weightings for population estimates and compiled in the Merge Outgoing Rotation Groups (MORG) dataset by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).
The portion of the population 16 to 54 has declined while those over 54 has increased.
1. Percent Population in Age Cohorts: 1986 & 2016
18.9 15.2 16-24
53.7 49.6 25-54
12.2 16.3 55-64
9.4 11.2 65-74
The portion of the population 16 to 54 employed has declined while the portion over 54 has increased..
2 Percent Employed in Age Cohorts: 1986 & 2016
18.5 12.5 16-24
68.4 64.7 25-54
10.4 16.9 55-64
2.3 4.8 65-74
The employment-population ratios (percents) show significant declines for those under 25 while increases for those 55 and above.
3. Age-Specific Employment Population Ratios (Percents)
59.5 49.4 16-24
77.3 77.9 25-54
51.8 61.8 55-64
14.8 25.9 65-74
None of the above data refute claims about age and experience inequities. Rather these provide a base from which to explore such concerns. Because MORG data are representative samples with population weightings, systematic contingency analyses are challenging.
In the 30 year interval of these data there have been changes in population and employment by education status, gender, race, citizenship status along with industry and occupation, all items of which are found in the publicly available MORG dataset.
AWArthur Wilke , October 17, 2017 at 6:27 pm
I think you are missing the point. Life expectancy at birth has increased by nearly five years since 1986. That renders simple comparisons of labor force participation less meaningful. The implication is that many people are not just living longer but are in better shape in their later middle age. Look at the dramatic drop in labor force participation from the 25-54 age cohort v. 55 to 64. How can so few people in that age group be working given that even retiring at 65 is something most people cannot afford? And the increase over time in the current 55=64 age cohort is significantly due to the entry of women into the workplace. Mine was the first generation where that became widespread.
The increase in the over 65 cohort reflects desperation. Anyone who can work stays working.paul , October 17, 2017 at 1:54 pm
Even if life-expectancy is increasing due to improved health, the percentage of those in older cohorts who are working is increasing at an even faster rate. If a ratio is 6/8 for a category and goes up to 10/12 the category has increased (8 to 12 or 50%) and the subcategory has increased (6 to 10 i or 67% and the ratios go from 6/8 or 75/100 to 10/12 or 83.3/100)
I assume you are referencing the employment-population (E/P) ratio when noting "the dramatic drop in labor force participation from the 25-54 age cohort v. 55 to 64." However the change in the E/P ratio for 25-54 year olds was virtually unchanged (77.3/100 in 1986 to 77.9/100 in 2016) and for the 55-64 year olds the E/P ratio INCREASED significantly, from 51.8/100 in 1986 to 61.8/100 in 2016.
You query: "How can so few people in that age group be working given that even retiring at 65 is something most people cannot afford?" That's a set of concerns the data I've compiled cannot and thus cannot address. It would take more time to see if an empirical answer could be constructed, something that doesn't lend itself to making a timely, empirically based comment. The data I compiled was done after reading the original post.
You note: ". . . ;;[T] the increase over time in the current 55-64 age cohort is significantly due to the entry of women into the workplace." Again, I didn't compute the age-gender specific E/P ratios. I can do that if there's interest. The OVERALL female E/P ratio (from FRED) did not significantly increase from December 1986 ( 51.7/100) to December 2016 (53.8/100).
Your write: "The increase in the over 65 cohort reflects desperation. Anyone who can work stays working." Again, the data I was using provided me no basis for this interpretation. I suspect that the MORG data can provide some support for that interpretation. However, based on your comments about longer life expectancy, it's likely that a higher proportion of those in professional-middle class or in the upper-middle class category Richard Reeves writes about (Dream Hoarders) were able and willing to continue working. For a time in higher education some institutions offered incentives for older faculty to continue working thereby they could continue to receive a salary and upon becoming eligible for Social Security draw on that benefit. No doubt many, many vulnerable older people, including workers laid off in the wake of the Great Recession and otherwise burdened lengthened their or sought employment.
Again the MORG data can get somewhat closer to your concerns and interests, but whether this is the forum is a challenge given the reporting-comment cycle which guides this excellent site.Livius Drusus , October 17, 2017 at 3:20 pm
Institutional memory (perhaps, wisdom) is a positive threat to institutional change (for the pillage).
In my experience,those in possession of it are encouraged/discouraged/finally made to go.
The break up of British Rail is a salient,suppurating example.
The break up of National Health Service is another.
It would be easy to go on, I just see it as the long year zero the more clinical sociopaths desire.flora , October 17, 2017 at 7:42 pm
I don't understand how the media promotes the "society is aging, we need more immigrants to avoid a labor shortage" argument and the "there will be no jobs in the near future due to automation, there will be a jobs shortage" argument at the same time. Dean Baker has discussed this issue:
In any event, helping to keep older workers in the workforce can be a good thing. Some people become physically inactive after retirement and their social networks decline which can cause depression and loneliness. Work might benefit some people who would otherwise sink into inactivity and loneliness.
Of course, results might vary based on individual differences and those who engaged in hard physical labor will likely have to retire earlier due to wear and tear on their bodies.TarheelDem , October 17, 2017 at 5:24 pm
Increase in life expectancy is greatly influenced by a decrease in childhood mortality. People are living longer because they aren't dying in large numbers in childhood anymore in the US. So many arguments that start out "we're living longer, so something" confuse a reduction in childhood mortality with how long one can expect to live to in old age, based on the actuarial charts. Pols who want to cut SS or increase the retirement age find this confusion very useful.
" Life expectancy at birth is very sensitive to reductions in the death rates of children, because each child that survives adds many years to the amount of life in the population. Thus, the dramatic declines in infant and child mortality in the twentieth century were accompanied by equally stunning increases in life expectancy. "
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/dmortality.htmJBird , October 17, 2017 at 5:57 pm
I've noticed ever since the 1990s that "labor shortage" is a signal for cost-cutting measures that trigger a recession. Which then becomes the excuse for shedding workers and really getting the recession on.
It is not just older workers who are spare. There are other forms of discrimination that could fall by the wayside if solving the "labor shortage" was the sincere objective.SpringTexan , October 17, 2017 at 6:59 pm
Often productively, sales, and profits decrease with those cost cuttings, which justified further cuts which decreases productivity, sales, and profits which justifies
It's a pattern I first noticed in the 1990s and looking back in the 80s too. It's like some malevolent MBAs went out and convinced the whole of American middle and senior business management that this was the Way to do it. It's like something out of the most hidebound, nonsensical ideas of Maoism and Stalinism as something that could not fail but only be failed. It is right out of the Chicago Boys' economics playbook. Thirty-five years later and the Way still hasn't succeeded, but they're still trying not to fail it.JBird , October 17, 2017 at 5:42 pm
Love your reflections. Yeah, it's like a religion that they can't pay more, can't train, must cut people till they are working to their max at ordinary times (so have no slack for crises), etc. etc., and that it doesn't work doesn't change the faith in it AT ALL.Dan , October 17, 2017 at 7:12 pm
This is ranting, but most jobs can be done at most ages. If want someone to be a SEAL or do 12 hours at farm labor no of course not, but just about everything else so what's the problem?
All this "we have a skilled labor shortage" or "we have a labor surplus" or "the workers are all lazy/stupid" narratives" and "it's the unions' fault" and "the market solves everything" and the implicit "we are a true meritocracy and the losers are waste who deserve their pain" and my favorite of the "Job creators do make jobs" being said, and/or believed all at the same time is insanity made mainstream.
Sometimes I think whoever is running things are told they have to drink the Draught of UnWisdom before becoming the elites.flora , October 17, 2017 at 7:46 pm
So I'm a middle aged fella – early thirties – and have to admit that in my industry I find that most older workers are a disaster. I'm in tech and frankly find that most older workers are a detriment simply from being out of date. While I sympathize, in some cases experience can be a minus rather than a plus. The willingness to try new things and stay current with modern technologies/techniques just isn't there for the majority of tech workers that are over the hill.
Well, if you're lucky, your company won't replace you with a cheaper HiB visa holder or outsource your job to the sub-continent before you're 40.
Oct 16, 2017 | discussion.theguardian.com
cognitivedissonance1 , 15 Oct 2017 13:25Nothing new here, C Wright Mills, the US state as a plutocracy , government by the few , said it all fifty years ago , especially the economic oligarchsimipak -> NoBets , 15 Oct 2017 13:21
http://plutocratsandplutocracy.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/the-power-elite.htmlI would again point to Plato. Those whose affluence exceeds the critical threshold stagnate. They have no need to work, no need to hold anything as valuable, they contribute nothing and take everything.Viddyvideo , 15 Oct 2017 13:19
What is the point in being so rich? There's nothing you can gain from it, other than bank account pinball.
The purpose of being rich is to enable you. It is the only purpose. Once you are fully enabled, money has no value.
Those who are poor can't afford the tools to work well, the education/training needed, anything by which they could better themselves and be upwardly mobile.
There are some who are poor by choice. Voluntary hermits are common enough. They're not included in here because they're self-sufficient and have the tools they need so fall out of scope.
The middle band, where prone work the best, function the best, are mentally and physically the best, is very very big. Nothing stops you cramming society into there because they've plenty of room to stretch out.
But people always want to improve. No big. Make tax follow a curve, so that you always improve but the game gets harder not easier. Would you play a computer game where level 100 was easier than level 1? No, you'd find it boring. As long as it's a single curve, nobody gets penalized.
You now get to play forever, level billion is better than level million is better than level thousand, but it's asymptotic so infinite improvement never breaks outside the bounds.
"Asymptotic" is a word that meets your objection AND my rebuttal. You do not have to have either a constant, infinity or hard ceilings. Leave straight lines to geometers and enter the world of inflection points.Elites exist the world over -- East, West, North and South. Question is how do we create a world where power is shared -- Plato and his Guardians perhaps or are we doomed to be ruled by elites until the end of time?handygranny -> R Zwarich , 15 Oct 2017 13:14Indeed; smart, intelligent, "clever" folks in no way confers any degree of civility on their "vested" interests. Manipulation and control are suitably useful tools for their purposes.memo10 -> ashleyhk , 15 Oct 2017 13:11RecantedYank -> mjmizera , 15 Oct 2017 13:09
Yet most of the media is resolutely "liberal" or leftist How do you explain that?
The media is not a major player in running the country, contrary to what much of the right has been brainwashed to believe. It's a tool of the elite. A hammer is also a very useful tool but it doesn't do much to determine what the carpenter builds.Rapid is still quite right... We convinced ourselves that our form of oligarchy was somehow "better" than other forms, when in fact, the end game was always the same..concentrating the power in as few hands as possible. Denial was the name of the game here in the US.CommanderMaxil -> Elgrecoandros , 15 Oct 2017 13:08jessthecrip's comment was clearly not calling for JRM to be imprisoned or in any way punished for his views , but for his votes . Specifically his votes in the House of commons to support benefit cuts for disability claimants. Admittedly that a pretty extreme position from my point of view, but nonetheless you are misrepresentating what was said, whether deliberately or because you genuinely have not understood only you can knowSpudnik2 -> Gunsarecivilrights , 15 Oct 2017 13:05More people should simply look up from time to time and quit living in fantasy books. The whole and real truth is not written in a book its all around you if you are willing to except what you see.vinny59er , 15 Oct 2017 13:04Form a government in same way we select juries. No entrenchment of the same old guard, no lobbyists,no elite, no vested interests.Just people like you,and you.People like your children.People like your parents.People like your neighborsmjmizera -> RecantedYank , 15 Oct 2017 13:03The industrial-military complex of the 50-70s didn't just disappear, but morphed into today's structures.mjmizera -> voogdy , 15 Oct 2017 13:00Not anymore, as conspiracy nuts are now serving their new masters, the altRight. They joined the enemy.theseligsussex -> Sailor25 , 15 Oct 2017 12:59Not really driven by the oligarch, more looted. And there's normally 1 greedy bugger, Sulla or Pompey, who has to have it all and upsets the apple cart, and then you get Augustus.mjmizera -> ashleyhk , 15 Oct 2017 12:58There is never the right far enough that one can't be to the left of.mjmizera -> RecantedYank , 15 Oct 2017 12:55All the good/bad labels lose their meaning without a qualifier - for whom.winemaster2 , 15 Oct 2017 12:54The US and it being a democracy, the word that is no where mentioned in the Constitution is one big hoax and the perpetuation of the same, where the missed people in this country are further conned by the elite and the rich. Then on top of it all we f or sure not practice what we preach. To that end our political system with two senators from each of 50 states m irrespective to the population is lot to be desired in terms of any real democratic process, let alone equality in representation. To add insult to injury, the US House of Representatives where Congressional Districts are gerrymandered just about every two years, is even worst. Just as the US Congress in which over 90% of the people have no confidence.sejong -> ashleyhk , 15 Oct 2017 12:50Yet most of the media is resolutely "liberal" or leftist How do you explain that?makingalist , 15 Oct 2017 12:47
Liberal MSM has been emasculated. It doesn't know it's dead. It doesn't move any needles. It just brays on in ineffective anti-Trump outrage and one identity politics issue after another.
Rightwing media is king in USA.One way they get away with it is by having their own separate education system. It's high time private schools were closed down.handygranny -> ID3924525 , 15 Oct 2017 12:47Who was it again who said he loves the undereducated and uninformed during the campaign season of 2016?laerteg -> ValuedCustomer , 15 Oct 2017 12:44Yes- the demonization of liberalism on the right and the turning away from liberalism on the left *has* paved the way for oligarchy.Shrimpandgrits -> imperium3 , 15 Oct 2017 12:44
Divide and conquer, as usual, is working.Slavery -- chattel slavery -- was an element.Leon Sphinx , 15 Oct 2017 12:41
Socialist, mass slavery was not.The House of Lords in the U.K. and the Senate in the US were originally there to prevent poor people - always the majority - from voting to take away wealth and lands from the rich. Basically, if such a vote was cast, the HoL and Senate - filled with the elites of society - had the power to block it.ashleyhk , 15 Oct 2017 12:41This is a fascinating dissection of how the "leftist/liberal" media was completely disrupted by Trump. It is a long read and quite difficult (so not likely to appeal to most of the knee-jerk commentators) but, whatever your politics it is well worth a lookLaurence Bury , 15 Oct 2017 12:41
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502 /The human (and probably animal) world is made up of oligarchies that deal with each other. History has shown that only lone soldiers can upset established orders: Alexander, Napoleon, Lenin, Castro and Bin Laden come to mind.laerteg -> Hibernica , 15 Oct 2017 12:40I agree with the article's premise. We have allowed the oligarchs to consolidate power.Matt Quinn , 15 Oct 2017 12:40
Why? Because Americans revere wealth and power. We have bought into the capitalist model hook, line, and sinker. We willingly elect candidates and sign on to policies that allow oligarchs to consolidate their power, increase their wealth and income inequality, pomote greed and selfishness, and undermine democracy - the power of the people.
We have been busy electing agents of oligarchy to Congress since 1980. Buying ino the "small government" con, the "taxes are theft" con, "the business is overregulated" con, the "corporations are the job creators" con and its twin the "government never created jobs" con, the anti-union con, etc, etc, etc.
Our political system would be a lot more representative of the people if the people would get off their butts and start participating in it. Our electoral ststem is open to anyone who wants to participate.
But who and how many participate any more?
When the people create a vacuum with their apathy and cynicism, the oligarchs fill it with their greed.
Oligarchs will always be attracted to power, no matter what system is in place. What's needed to minimize their ability to entrench themselves is vigilance in defending our institutions against corruption.
And vigilance is something that the American people seem to have less and less of every day.Maximise aggregate happiness as John Nash suggested. Cooperation beats competition in almost every sphere. Uniting the 99% will happen after the 1% have brought civilisation to a standstill and a billion people starve.vinny59er , 15 Oct 2017 12:38The biggest impediment to true and real democracy is the existence of political parties.RapidSloth -> RecantedYank , 15 Oct 2017 12:27Denial is a powerful mental mechanism, that and also people tend to associate oligarchy with brutal, straight forwards autocratic rule.RecantedYank , 15 Oct 2017 12:20
US has a very sophisticated socio-political system that has isolated the elite and the common man through many filters rather than one solid brick wall - so people dont see it. This paired with large enough populations who are cretinous enough to actually vote for somebody like Trump or give a second term to the likes of G.W Bush makes fooling extremely easy.
There is also the tendency of treating laws like dogma and the constitution like the bible. A stark example of it is how they boast about freedom of speech. Everybody is keen to point out that one can publicly criticize politicians without fear of prosecution but nobody seems to notice how useless that speech is and how effectively the political elite shelters itself from negative opinion and is able to proceed against the public will. I find it quite fascinating.ALL oligarchies are bad...they just function from a different starting point.virgenskamikazes , 15 Oct 2017 12:20
In the US, we have an oligarchy based on wealth,who then uses their money to buy the political animals.
In Communist countries, you had a political oligarchy, who used their political powers to corner the wealth.
And in religious oligarchies you have a few selected "high priests" using religious fervor/special communication lines with whatever deity, to capture both wealth and politics.
None of these are preferable over the other as they all concentrate power into the hands of the few (1-2%), against the interests of the many.The fact is Western Democracy (democratic capitalism) is not and was never a true democracy.sejong , 15 Oct 2017 12:15
Historians from at least 300 years from now, when studying our historical time, will state our system was capitalism, whose political system was plutocracy -- the rule of the capitalist class from behind the curtains, through puppet governors.
Sure, the same historians will, through archaeological evidence, state, correctly, that we called and considered ourselves to live in a democracy. But they will also find evidence that this claim was always contested by contemporaries. Emperor Augustus restored the façade of the Republic and called himself princeps instead of king, and, officially, Rome was still a Republic until the time of Marcus Aurelius to Diocletian (maybe the first emperor to openly consider himself a monarch) -- it doesn't fool today's historians, and it seems it didn't fool the Roman people also.Oligarchy in USA is secure. For a generation, it has leveraged rightwing media to get unquestioning support from white America based on aggrieved truculence toward the liberal, the brown, and the black. And that was pre-Trump.voogdy , 15 Oct 2017 12:10
Now Trump rampages against the very symbol of the grievance: Obama.
It's midnight in the world's leading third world countryAnyone who's been accusing united states of being an oligarchy so far was branded as a conspiracy nut. So does this article rehabilitates them and confirms their assertions?j. von Hettlingen , 15 Oct 2017 12:07In ancient Greece: "While the ruling class must remain united for an oligarchy to remain in power, the people must also be divided so they cannot overthrow their oppressors." Today the oligarchs aren't always united, because they see each other as rivals. But they have nothing against dividing and weakening the people in order to prevent them from rising up to "their oppressors."PeterlooSunset -> maddiemot , 15 Oct 2017 12:06
Mass indoctrination is the answer. Oligarchs around the world seek to build up a media empire to brainwash a gullible public and sow discord in the society. The most notorious members of a civil oligarchy in the West are Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch. Like oligarchs in ancient Greece, their modern counterparts need democratic support to legitimise their goals. And they support candidates in elections who will do their bidding once in office.
Oligarchy and plutocracy will continue to rule America, because the worship of money is a popular faith. As long as an individual is well off, he/she sees little incentive to help improve social equality. A revolution will only be possible if a critical mass is behind it.The current US education system was put in place by the oligarch foundations of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Guggenheims . It exists to keep the majority of the citizenry misinformed, thus docile workers and passive consumers.ID3924525 -> 37Dionysos , 15 Oct 2017 12:05Sounds about right - a least some, a very small minority, realise they're being suckered - the overwhelming majority die pig ignorant, whether they believe they've made it or live in a trailer park.lasos2222 , 15 Oct 2017 12:03it's very rare that an article in the Guardian doesn't have an obvious agenda. Simple click bait stuff. This article is different, and worthwhile reading. Excellent.RecantedYank , 15 Oct 2017 12:02I am only surprised that anyone would still be in the dark about whether or not the US is an oligarchy. It's been obvious now for at least the past three-four decades.RapidSloth , 15 Oct 2017 12:01If the general public opposes rule-by-economic-elites, yep sure... too elections held in the last two decades contradict that statement.37Dionysos -> OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 12:01Yep---for where very few have very much and most have nothing, you have a pressure-cooker. The property-police must indeed grow in number and brutality.37Dionysos -> ID3924525 , 15 Oct 2017 11:58And the other half of it is what Ben Franklin warned about, "the corruption of the people." The gangsters really sense and know how to play people against themselves---arousing appetites, appealing to short-term pleasure, to short-term feel-good thinking and acts, and to greed and lust for seemingly easy power. When you realize you're had, it's too late: "In every transaction, there's a sucker. If you're wondering who that is, it's you."Feindbild -> PSmd , 15 Oct 2017 11:55Yep sure. The 'big white kid' pritecting the brown kid does tend to be working class or middle class Jewish, and indeed, more likely to be socialist than liberal (in my experience).MTorrespico -> OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:52
I wouldn't limit credit for this kind of thing to any particular ethnicity. But I will say that most major successful reform 'crusades' of modern Western history were inspired by Christian ideals, and often led by Christian clergy, including the anti-slavery Abolition movement in 19th-century America, the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and '60s, and the anti-Communist revolutions in 1980's Eastern Central Europe. Even in the anti-Apartheid movement, the churches played a leading role, personified, of course, by Bishop Tutu.Correct, because that would be too easy . . . for 'Muricans, because Other people might benefit, and because it is too, too logical a solution for the Turd World USA.37Dionysos , 15 Oct 2017 11:51In the Oxford English Dictionary you find that "profit" and "advantage" are close cousins etymologically. Makes sense, since "profit" (the word for value you did not put into an exchange) creates "advantage"---and then you use advantages to give even less and take even more profit. Round and round she goes, and there's no bottom. "Advantage" of course is also inherently relative to somebody else's "DIS-advantage": hence our planet full of "disadvantaged" working people.OldTrombone -> rg12345 , 15 Oct 2017 11:50No, I think the Democrats are the ones most successful at diverting the people from their own power in favor of the banks. The Republicans are far less successful by their own control, instead benefitting only from luck such as Wasserman-Schultz denying Elizabeth Warren from her rightful place in the Oval Office. Sanders was the consolation candidate for Warren voters. Warren would have beaten Trump 50-nil.MTorrespico -> Nash25 , 15 Oct 2017 11:50Correct. Two equal evils from the same nest-egg, a political party with two right-wings. At the least, the public know why the First Nazi of Great America has an aura of flies.name1 -> Skip Breitmeyer , 15 Oct 2017 11:46Divisions or hijacking? I suspect the latter.PeterlooSunset , 15 Oct 2017 11:39teamofrivals , 15 Oct 2017 11:38
a colleague of mine asked if America was really at risk of becoming an oligarchy. Our political system, he said, is a democracy. If the people don't want to be run by wealthy elites, we can just vote them out.
Thanks for the cracking joke. That was hilariously funny.There's a term on everything and a rhythm to all things and its an impertinence to think that any political system lasts forever for our security.brianBT , 15 Oct 2017 11:34full and transparent disclosure of all finical and gift transactions between elected official and anyone not in govt.. this include "payments" to family, friends their charities.. etc.. if you cant see the lie no one fight to have the laws and rules changed... additionally lobbyist must no longer be allowed to have the type of closed door access to our leaders.. all these conversations must be moderated or flat out banned and a new form of communication is developed.... put it this way I have never been able to get a meeting with my leading politician yet big business can at almost any time.. I'm glad this issues is being more openly discussed.. we need more of the sameID3924525 -> ID3924525 , 15 Oct 2017 11:32Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto , indentified this in his concept, "False Consciousness", and Orwell, taking Stalinism to exemplify it, points to the same in Animal Farm , though I bet they weren't the first, and hope they won't be the last.OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:31Machiavelli was right, when you need political favors to get to the top, then you will always owe the favor-givers when you get there. Machiavelli also said this:laerteg , 15 Oct 2017 11:29
Sortition works!
When the most powerful person has literally zero interest in the outcome, they will defer to moral utilitarianism every time. Ask Canada's John Ralton Saul "The Unconcious Civilization" and Australia's Ricky Muir from the Motoring Enthusiasts Party [seriously] who scuppered Aussie right-wingers from bringing US-style education-loans to rent-seek our economy to death.The problem is that today's so-called "populists" have been so propagandized into despising the liberalism that could fight the oligarchs, and buying into the very policies and philosophies that allow the oligarchs to consolidate their power (endless tax cuts, undermined government, deregulation, big money in politics, destruction of unions, etc, etc.) that they play right into their hands.Elgrecoandros -> jessthecrip , 15 Oct 2017 11:28
They've mistaken a demagogue for a man of the people and continue to cheer on the dismantling of the checks on oligarchy that our system provides.
This country is in a world of hurt and those who should be exercizing their democratic power to diminish the power of the oligarchs are busy dismantling it, thanks to decades of right wing media propaganda.
All I see is more oligarchy, more autoctacy, and less power to the people. We just keep sticking it to ourselves.I literally copy pasted the comments in order, how have I twisted anything?OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:25
The person complained about some reaction to Rees-Mogg for having different political views being over the top and you promptly justified their claim.Capitalist oligarchies = bad, right?ID3924525 , 15 Oct 2017 11:22
So... communism, then, right?
It's time for SORTITION
When anyone could instantly become president, then everyone has to be educated as much as possible. Right? Hey classical policy scholars, sortition worked in Ancient Greece too! As well as everywhere else ever since. Ever heard of court juries?Divide and rule - the oldest trick in the book, and incredibly easy, as long as people are kept ignorant by propaganda (currently known as The Media) and education.rg12345 -> Rainborough , 15 Oct 2017 11:21Many (most?) Of us do understand it, that's why we're opposed to Citizens United, whereas the Republicans are for it.Nash25 , 15 Oct 2017 11:20Hillary Clinton lost because the working class (correctly) perceived her to be a supporter of oligarchy in the USA. Her ties to Wall Street, corporate power, and the upper class were too obvious.jessthecrip -> Elgrecoandros , 15 Oct 2017 11:19
Yes, Trump fooled many voters into believing that he was populist, but their perception of Clinton was still accurate.
If the Democratic party leaders had chosen Sanders as their candidate, they would have won the election. But the "Democratic" party leaders (ironically) feared what he offered: real democracy.You are an expert twister and no mistake. I can only salute youSoxMcCarthy -> TragicomedyBeholder , 15 Oct 2017 11:18"The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into "serfdom." The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek's implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx's forecast of the coming "immiserization of the working class.""fivefeetfour , 15 Oct 2017 11:18Lenin has written that politics is a concentrated economy more than a century ago.rg12345 -> OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:16Do you think Democrats are the only ones trying to consolidate wealth and power? You must have missed the part about keeping people divided.Lafcadio1944 , 15 Oct 2017 11:15This of course is a simplified version and can't really touch on everything, however he glaringly leaves out the deliberate human suffering results from the oligarchy protecting its wealth and aggressively taking over ever more markets. Yes, of course, what today is called "alignment of interests" among the oligarchy is necessary but that alone is not enough they mus also be ruthless beyond that of others. Nothing stands in the way of profits nothing stands in the way of ever greater control. The oligarchy has decided that nature itself is just another obstacle profit making - there is no room for empathy in the world of the oligarchy poverty suffering from curable disease mutilation from bombs are acceptable external consequences to their obsessive accumulation of wealth.Elgrecoandros -> jessthecrip , 15 Oct 2017 11:14
The real reason the oligarchy wins is because they are willing to be ruthless in the extreme and society rewards ruthlessness and ridicules the empathetic."Perhaps the OP was proposing prison for JRM for expressing a viewpoint..."R Zwarich -> Kay Nixon , 15 Oct 2017 11:14
Nobody was proposing that, it was hyperbole from rjm2017.
Well it was hyperbole until your comment calling on punishment for those with different political views.This may be true, they often seem so blinded by their raw greed that their powers of reason become dysfunctional. I don't think, however, that the stupid things they do to slake their greed means that they are stupid. When the chips are down, they are capable of bringing their considerable powers of reason to bear.fragglerokk , 15 Oct 2017 11:13
However stupid or smart they might be, we surely must realize that they have been at least smart enough to gain total ownership and control of all our mass media. They use this tool, the most powerful tool of social control that has ever existed, with consummate skill in pursuit of their agenda(s).
If you look at the overall content of our mass media, you can see an impressive level of 'mind' at work, 'behind the curtain'. This 'mind' is constantly manipulating our consciousness, using very highly sophisticated, highly skilled techniques.Their understanding of human psychology, and their ability to manipulate us using our most basic appetites and desires, is characterized by true genius, even ig that genius is diabolical in its designs.
'They' choose what movies get made. Which TV shows are produced. Which songs get airplay. Which social and political issues are sensationalized and which are buried.
Most of the citizens of our ostensible 'democracy' have been 'trained', just as any animals are trained to any behavior, to be 'consumers' rather than 'citizens'. We are well trained by an omnipresent mass media that assaults us constantly. In any direction that we turn our gaze, or our attention, 'they' are there, to direct our thoughts as they think serves their purposes.
I sure wouldn't sell these people's intelligence short. They may often do stupid things to serve their greed, but they did not acquire the power that they have through any lack of intelligence.what everyone seems to forget is that whilst ancient Greece was the cradle of democracy it was not only a slave state (whose slaves had no rights to vote) but that only an elite minority were eligible to vote themselves - power very much rested with the vested interests of the few.OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:13
I agree that societies are a reflection of the 'will' of the people these days, even if that will is ill informed, reactionary or, as seems to be the case, largely uninterested in voting. You get the governments you deserve and people in the West have become lazy, permanently distracted, often ignorant and usually in the grip of one addiction or another, thus allowing 'democracy' to be subverted. The media have had their role in this by allowing themselves to be manipulated and owned by vested interests, rarely reporting the truth and doing as they are told by various govt offices and departments. Uninformed people make poor decisions.What the Black Lives Matter movement is telling us is that the Oligarch's enforce their rules of 'law' precisely at the barrels of guns, and by the words of one man after one man, each with a uniform on and a camera off.TheResult -> J.K. Stevens , 15 Oct 2017 11:13National Anthems only make sense in context of International GamesElgrecoandros -> Elgrecoandros , 15 Oct 2017 11:11
Where 2 anthems are played out of respect for each otherFurther, you stated above that you were "...responding to a poster who called for imprisonment for those concerned", when in fact the quote shows they were complaining about people calling for imprisonment, not calling for it.Skip Breitmeyer -> sparkle5nov , 15 Oct 2017 11:09
That shows you are twisting what was said, it is incredibly disingenuous of you.It's the divisions of the left that allow Tory and Republican minority rule to prevail. In the US the divide is quite bitter between Hillary and Bernie wings of the Dems- at the moment I don't really see where reconciliation can emerge. And of course in Great Britain you actually have two major parties competing rather self-destructively for the available votes on the left. (As well as the mighty Greens...). Divided and conquered, indeed. And such a bloody cliche!OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:06jessthecrip -> Elgrecoandros , 15 Oct 2017 11:06
Democracy is vulnerable to oligarchy because democrats focus so much on guaranteeing political equality that they overlook the indirect threat that emerges from economic inequality
And yet Marx doesn't rate a single mention in the entire article...No, even though you've quoted me you have misunderstood what was perfectly plain. I stated 'like everyone else who voted to cut even more from disabled people's benefits'. Perhaps the OP was proposing prison for JRM for expressing a viewpoint, but that was not and is not where I'm coming from.OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 11:05PSmd -> Dark Angel , 15 Oct 2017 11:02
At its core, oligarchy involves concentrating economic power and using it for political purposes.
Here is the exact reason why the Democratic Party is lost now. The Clintons, Wasserman-Schultz, and their new Goldman Sachs alumni hero in New Jersey, and now Kamala Harris seeking the same money from the same bankers.
And who did Hillary blame? Bernie, of course.It's sort of worked against the right though. Take a look at the last election. Yes, the Tories got most votes, but they've pretty much lost all ethnic minorities, including asian professionals, hindus and sikhs. Why is this, especially when Labour moved to left and are now more socialist than left liberal?Elgrecoandros -> jessthecrip , 15 Oct 2017 11:01
Purely because the right has been subsumed by angry grievance mentality, or aggreived entitlement. The internet is awash by people who hate assertive blacks and asians, Dianne Abbott received half of all abuse of female MPs. And so.. the Labour pick up votes that Tories had gained under Cameron. If you are a prosperous hindu dentist or stockbroker, sure you might have shrugged off your parents labour voting tendencies and might be Tory. But also, you might be seeing this sort of stuff, the bile on the internet, the resentment expressed behind internet anonymity. And you might be thinking that deep down underneath that expensive suit of yours, you are your father and mother, a tentative, slightly frightened, cheaply dressed immigrant who has arrived as an outsider and are visibly aware that half the population likes you, but the other half doesn't.
And so you vote Labour.
Divisiveness actually divides the core group you are aiming to win. If you do white chauvinism, well, you end up unite everyone who is not white. Black, brown, yellow, all huddle together scared, back under the labour fold. And you end up dividing the whites into the patriotic and the 'self hating libtard'.The sequence of comments was...barciad -> FrankLittle , 15 Oct 2017 10:57
"Just read the language of many in here...apparent JRM should be banished and locked away. You don't need to look to far to find odeous beliefs."
Your reply to that:
"Not locked away. Prison is expensive for the taxpayer. Assets sequestered for the good of the commons and put to work cleaning - streets, hospitals, care homes - on workfare. Like everyone else who voted to cut even more from disabled people's benefits, causing what the UN has described as a 'catastrophe' for disabled people in this country"
My reply to you:
"You are advocating confiscation of private property and forced physical labour for people who hold different political views to you. Is Stalin a hero of yours?"
Yours is a call to punish people for holding different political views to you.
Yours is an extremist position and, like all extremists, you think it is justified.Skip Breitmeyer -> BayardDC , 15 Oct 2017 10:56
e.g. Park Chung-hee sent thousands of homeless people to camps where they were used as slave labour, many were were tortured and executed.
Like I said, benignish. He took a third world basket case (which is what South Korea was up until his seizure of power) and set it on the way to becoming a first world economy.One of the most interesting mini-discourses I've read anywhere. I would only add that the 'mob' currently in charge of the polity of the House is actually a minority that has gamed the system.AladdinStardust -> Gunsarecivilrights , 15 Oct 2017 10:56which is exactly what the author did when her ill health meant that she no longer had medical insurance. Ain't life a bitch?OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 10:55Rainborough , 15 Oct 2017 10:55
They also tried to keep ordinary people dependent on individual oligarchs for their economic survival, similar to how mob bosses in the movies have paternalistic relationships in their neighborhoods
Like Wine-stine? (Wine-stain?)"Democracy is vulnerable to oligarchy because democrats focus so much on guaranteeing political equality that they overlook the indirect threat that emerges from economic inequality."ChesBay -> maddiemot , 15 Oct 2017 10:52
No democrat with two working brain cells to rub together could honestly suppose that great concentrations of wealth, which necessarily confer political power on the wealthy class, can fail to undermine democracy. A capitalist democracy is an oxymoron and a delusion.They admire the rich, and the lifestyles of the rich, although it is out of their reach.AveAtqueCave , 15 Oct 2017 10:51
They do not admire the wise, and the experienced.
They don't know who are their state and federal representatives.
They don't know the reason for the Civil War.
They don't know much about our history, our constitution, or anything about civics.
They don't know much about world history.
They don't read much, and are suspicious of education, and the properly educated.
They are easy marks for lies, and negative influence, because they never question.
They refuse to address, or even admit, their own irrational prejudices.
They don't vote, but they do plenty of complaining, and like to blame others for the problems of our nation.Good luck with that.FrankLittle -> barciad , 15 Oct 2017 10:45I do not think that benign or even benign(ish) suits the majority of the above e.g. Park Chung-hee sent thousands of homeless people to camps where they were used as slave labour, many were were tortured and executed.DammedOutraged , 15 Oct 2017 10:44
Not sure how Carl Mannerheim gets to be on your list? He was appointed Military chief during the Finnish civil war and he was elected President of FinlandOh you mean a bit like all those plebs going out and voting to wreck the EU oligarchy's vision as to whats best?vastariner , 15 Oct 2017 10:44StephenR45 -> TheWindsOfWinter93 , 15 Oct 2017 10:43
At the same time, they sought to destroy monuments that were symbols of democratic success. Instead of public works projects, dedicated in the name of the people, they relied on what we can think of as philanthropy to sustain their power.
That was more because there was no income tax regime - something difficult to impose when there was no centralized collection from a single consistent professional government. So if the Athenian navy wanted a ship, it got a rich chap to pay for it. Rather than out of general taxation.
Athens got rich on levies it imposed on its allies by way of protection money, which eventually collapsed in acrimony, but that's a different story.You'll be first "over the top" then?Alfandomega -> timiengels , 15 Oct 2017 10:41Owen Jones ? ......a man of high minded principle and unblemishedsomebody_stopme , 15 Oct 2017 10:41
virtue . Don't think he would object to a spot of terror........in defence
of his liberal principles , of course..I guess we are seeing some of oligarchy break down. Many oligarchs support many socialist policies to avoid tension between classes. For eg: many rich support universal basic income and some even support single payer healthcare.imperium3 -> Sailor25 , 15 Oct 2017 10:41Kay Nixon , 15 Oct 2017 10:40
You make a good point but in my wide but less than comprehensive knowledge of rapid development often occurrs in periods of oligarchy.
All those mills that drove the industrial revolution, created by oligarchy.
All those armies and aqueducts that drove the Roman Empire, created by oligarchy.
All those libraries and universities that drove Greek learning, funded by the oligarchy.
The great library of Alexandria, oligarchy.
OK, I'll concede that. Which makes for an interesting perspective on things overall, actually. One can see the advantage of an oligarchy - wealth and power is concentrated in few enough hands to achieve great things, but not so few that, like in a monarchy or dictatorship, the leader must spend most time and effort on keeping their power. Whereas a more equal democracy lacks the capacity to make bold steps or drive through unpopular new ideas. But this also means the oligarchs have the power to grind down those underneath them, and therefore in order to enjoy the fruits of that development, the oligarchy needs to be destroyed.
In other words, oligarchies deliver growth, democracies deliver prosperity. I would certainly not like to live under an oligarchy (assuming I'm not an oligarch) but it would be beneficial for a country to have had one in the past.I have come to the conclusion that the oligarchy which rules the world are complete imbeciles who haven't a clue that the whole Neoliberal system they built in the 1970's is collapsing and they are clueless on how to handle it. Just because they are wealthy and greedy doesn't mean they are intelligent.J.K. Stevens -> TheResult , 15 Oct 2017 10:40In order to prevent the protests from going out over the airwaves Fox (sports) in all their 'logic' started excluding broadcast of the Anthem. Early on I said I would not watch any of these sporting events with, as you say, these jingoistic displays going out and Fox has obliged me but I wont say thanks.desertrat49 -> BayardDC , 15 Oct 2017 10:39Yes....Nothing in current affairs would surprise the ancient political philosophers who were students of real human nature ...and real history!yule620 , 15 Oct 2017 10:37Understanding Greece is not something you associate comfort with.desertrat49 -> DrPepperIsNotARealDr , 15 Oct 2017 10:36It serves as a relieve valve...just as it did in Ancient Greece and Rome.Obfusgator , 15 Oct 2017 10:36It's very simple really. The law system makes a complete mockery of democracy and the judiciary is comprised of a bunch of laissez-faire twits.desertrat49 -> TheResult , 15 Oct 2017 10:35The last recourse of scoundrels is patriotism!...always been thus because it always works...see H.L. Mencken et. al. !Postconventional -> SenseiTim , 15 Oct 2017 10:34Britain isn't different. Oligarchy is built into our system of governance, e.g. royals and house of lords. We even have special oligarch schools where children are sent to be educated for leadershipdesertrat49 -> zootsuitbeatnick , 15 Oct 2017 10:33You do not think the pomp and circumstance of Oligarchs, Monarchs and Military Dictators is without purpose or effect, do you?StephenR45 -> DolyGarcia , 15 Oct 2017 10:32Ban Keeping up with the Kardashians.Gunsarecivilrights -> ID059068 , 15 Oct 2017 10:31Or in other words, "I can't take care of myself, so I demand the government take money from others and give it to me!"maddiemot , 15 Oct 2017 10:31"An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy." - Thomas JeffersonEquilibriaJones -> Sailor25 , 15 Oct 2017 10:31
We have Americans who don't know when the Civil War was fought, or even who won, but insist we must stand for the national anthem before a ballgame.
So much for 'the Land of the Free'.Saying life can only get better if we are all collectively greedy together is not a logical argument. Ask the polar bears.StephenR45 -> davshev , 15 Oct 2017 10:30It didn't start with Trump.Gunsarecivilrights -> DirDigIns , 15 Oct 2017 10:30More people need to read Atlas Shrugged.desertrat49 -> MarmaladeMog , 15 Oct 2017 10:30All of the wishful thinking is hugely naive.....they have not been studying the lessons of history.J.K. Stevens -> OldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 10:29And in the older grades, they prescribe (hand out) adderall, CSN stimulants, like chiclets to help student study (cram) and with comprehensive test taking.desertrat49 -> DolyGarcia , 15 Oct 2017 10:28
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/why-are-so-many-college-a_b_8331958.htmlThis is the rub.....and the mob does not value education while the rulers value propaganda. Notice the close association between Autocratic and Oligarchic systems and religion, historical mythology and hyper-patriotism!EquilibriaJones -> Sailor25 , 15 Oct 2017 10:28Or that's the evil of it. Economic inequality rises until people die. Like homeless on the streets, starving food banks, grenfell tower, waiting on hospital beds instead of famine and pitchfork wars.desertrat49 -> Crusty Crab , 15 Oct 2017 10:25
The idea is to progress and solve problems before they escalate to pitchfork wars. Praising grotesque inequality is not part of the solution, it's the cause of the problems.H. L. Mencken is a must read on this!Alfandomega -> Peter Martin , 15 Oct 2017 10:24Very remote possibility . I think you'll find their over inflated salariesSenseiTim , 15 Oct 2017 10:24
weigh more heavily in the balance than their " principles ".This article should be required reading for all Americans. I am posting a link to Twitter and Facebook to get as many Yank eyeballs on it as possible.desertrat49 -> Langsdorff , 15 Oct 2017 10:24What emerges from Plutocracy is Oligarchy...what emerges from Oligarchy is Autocracy. Autocracy is one form or another is the natural state of human society....all the others are ephemeral systems...or systems that disguise the actual Oligarchy or Autocracy!davshev , 15 Oct 2017 10:23The biggest contributor to America's plutocracy is our abysmally uninformed electorate.desertrat49 , 15 Oct 2017 10:20
HL Mencken knew this nearly a century ago when he said:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."Just exactly when was it that "democracy defeated oligarchy in ancient Greece"?jessthecrip -> Elgrecoandros , 15 Oct 2017 10:18
What proportion of the population in Ancient Athens, for example, were actually citizens...and what proportion of those actually held the franchise?...I believe that you would find the numbers surprising!
Also ...when these (and other) writers speaks of Ancient Greece.....it is usually Athens that they are mythologizing....most the Ancient Greek world had little by way of representative government...let alone "Democracy"!No I wasn't. I already responded to you regarding this. To remind you, I saidOldTrombone , 15 Oct 2017 10:17I was not suggesting punishment for 'thought crime' or for expressing views, but for actions seriously damaging to our citizens.
when people in positions of power take £28 billion (at least) off one of the most powerless and already impoverished groups in our country (disabled people), resulting in hundreds of suicides, enormous suffering, worsened isolation, serious lack of care support, and thousands dying soon after being found 'fit to work' (a situation the UN has described as a 'catastrophe') then I think it perfectly reasonable to favour some punishment for those politicians who inflicted such suffering on their fellow citizensI have worked in several of the American rich's schools where they charge $30k per kid, families have 3-5 kids there, plus they donate another $30k per kid per year. These schools shame their $50k/year teachers into donating hundreds and thousands per year to their own schools in order to prompt further donations from parents, who expect the poor teachers to prove their fidelity to these rich kids by giving their own money to them. I have seen these schools' principals fire teachers who teach "how to change things". I have seen them promote teachers who teach absolutely nothing, because then the rich kids enjoy insulting and demeaning those teachers' weaknesses. I have heard rich $chool principals tell Harvard psychology lecturers that grade inflation is a marketplace necessity. I have seen rich principals tell school inspectors that the curriculum presented for verification is supplied by a currently-employed teacher (who was awfully bad at teaching) when in fact it was written and prepared by a teacher who had just been fired "for methodology problems"...davshev -> ID50611L , 15 Oct 2017 10:15
American rich schools are the sickest schools on earth, even sicker than British boarders, even sicker than other countries' orphanages.Yes, but we now have the consummate...emphasis on "con"...bullshit artist in the White House whose first order of business has been to discredit the media whenever it exposes him for what he truly is. Trump has thousands of people believing that any media story about him which is negative is "fake."Sailor25 -> JosephCamilleri , 15 Oct 2017 10:14Yes they did and in all those political systems there where rich bastards at the top making the decisions.RutherfordFHEA , 15 Oct 2017 10:13
They may have been bastards but on balance they actually made some pretty good decisions.In his book Culture Inc. , Herbert Schiller quoted a recent study on neoliberal deregulation in the US which began with the question:Sailor25 -> Dan2017 , 15 Oct 2017 10:13
"Is deregulation... a strategy on the part of corporations to re-appropriate the power lost to democratic reforms of the mid-20th century?"So you are in favour of populism?ID50611L -> debt2zero , 15 Oct 2017 10:12
I consider populism an important part of the process as it creates a balance for oligarchy.
I would consider that the greedy big picture thinking of oligarchy drives growth while the greedy small picture thinking of the plebs (of which I am one) tries to get that growth more equally distributed.Spot onMoonMoth -> Tenthred , 15 Oct 2017 10:10It is perhaps unlikely that a radical Athenian democrat from ancient Greece would recognise any current form of government as genuinely democratic.Dark Angel , 15 Oct 2017 10:10
The cleverest way to maintain a long term oligarchy in these enlightened times might be to have an elective one, only dressed up as something like say a 'parliamentary democracy'. Luckily no-one has come up with this idea yet.Exactly that is going on now - we have 'workers' and 'benefit scroungers', British against 'immigrants' who exactly are not immigrants as having legal rights to live in the UK (EU citizens), 'deserving' poor and 'undeserving' poor.Sailor25 -> Swoll Man , 15 Oct 2017 10:09
Divide and rule.
Without knowing the past, it is impossible to understand the true meaning of the present and the goals of the future.
It's so annoying that is has been so easy to manipulate with our society - Tories and UKIP say 'hate!' and people do as if they are trained animals - hate people on benefits, EU citizens, immigrants, asylum seekers, a conflict between Brexiters/Remainers...Laughing at the fact that you chose to write an insult rather than engage in debate.barciad -> FrankLittle , 15 Oct 2017 10:08Benign(ish) dictators of the 20th Century:-Sailor25 -> Boghaunter , 15 Oct 2017 10:07
Tito (Yugoslavia)
Carl Mannerheim (Finland)
Kemal Ataturk (Turkey)
Fidel Castro (Cuba)
Nasser (Egypt)
Park Chung-hee (South Korea)
Like I said, benign(ish). Each one the subject for a debate within themselves.There is always winners and losers but the worst loser in modern British society had a better standard of living than a winner of a century ago.Langsdorff , 15 Oct 2017 10:06
The key to human development is driving sustainable progress not worrying about who losses out today.
Of course there must be balance because morally we must consider who loses our today. The question is how much do we hamstring the children of tomorrow to help the losers of today.To war on the Oligarchs is to war on our own nature.whitman100 , 15 Oct 2017 10:03The super rich conservative oligarchy, currently running the UK, get away with it because enough of the British people vote against their own economic interest.GKB507 -> Giftshop , 15 Oct 2017 10:02
Parents, for example, effectively vote for the food to be taken from their children's mouths, converted to cash and given in tax cuts to the super rich conservative elite so they can send their children to £30k a year private schools.
Political economy and political science should be compulsory in primary and secondary school so that the ripping-off of the British people is made obvious through education and ended through democratic revolution... it's scary though.. automation will eliminate the economic support line for many, while companies like Google have eyes and ears in every household.JamesKeye -> webapalooza , 15 Oct 2017 10:02Definition of democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives." You are presenting an anti-Democratic party talking point, not an enlightened understanding of subtle political differences. Of course, the intention was a democracy in the USA, as compromised as it was and is. What we are not, and never have been, is an absolute direct democracy -- a form of governance appropriate only to small communities.dcroteau -> Hibernica , 15 Oct 2017 10:01Considering that "the people" are not that much more enlightened than they were in ancient Greece, yes it is the will of the people that allowed the US to become an oligarchy.KK47 , 15 Oct 2017 10:00
Considering the voting turnout around 56%, that means that 44% decided that they didn't care whether or not their leader would be a good or a bad one.
That's more than 1 in 3 people who couldn't care less about the outcome of the elections.
So political apathy is the will of the people.Oligarchs would fund the creation of a new building or the beautification of a public space.J.K. Stevens -> Peter Martin , 15 Oct 2017 10:00
When I read this I think: why am I reminded of the words 'gentrification' and 'privately-owned public spaces'?
Excerpt from the above link:
the spread of pseudo-public space in London – large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers
And I'm also reminded of Attlee's great words about the attitudes of oligarchs in general:
Excerpt from the above link:
Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim. - AttleeI know that it's just geography but it appears that the 'left coast (west coast) teams (players))' are taking a leadership role in this struggle. Unlike other professional sports systems, the NFL players are at a disadvantage in terms of career length and working conditions (eg, head injuries). I believe they're going to need some outside help (in whatever form) to be successful which doesn't give me hope. There are a bunch of chicken s____ outfits and power players out there at present that, as an example, allowed (contributed) the Executive Branch takeover by a Russian backed interloper.ID50611L -> Giftshop , 15 Oct 2017 09:58agree 100%Sailor25 -> imperium3 , 15 Oct 2017 09:58You make a good point but in my wide but less than comprehensive knowledge of rapid development often occurrs in periods of oligarchy.sparkle5nov -> FE Lang , 15 Oct 2017 09:58
All those mills that drove the industrial revolution, created by oligarchy.
All those armies and aqueducts that drove the Roman Empire, created by oligarchy.
All those libraries and universities that drove Greek learning, funded by the oligarchy.
The great library of Alexandria, oligarchy.
I recognise that it takes a plebeian revolt now and again to get the wealth shared out fairly but the engine that drives the wealth so it can be shared often seem to be oligarchy.Agree! I've been saying for years; cheap fast food, cheap ale and cheap television have replaced religion as the opiate of the people.ID50611L -> zootsuitbeatnick , 15 Oct 2017 09:57Trump is using the toolbox created by the Bush & Obama administrations.Crusty Crab , 15 Oct 2017 09:57A free educated and honest press may be the answer to a true democracy ?DolyGarcia -> Hector Hajnal , 15 Oct 2017 09:55And how do you keep the people informed and educated when the oligarchs control the media?ID50611L , 15 Oct 2017 09:54how is it, then, that the wealthy control so much of government? ...consequence of a lap dog media who lick the ass rather than expose and speak the truth to power elites.TheResult -> J.K. Stevens , 15 Oct 2017 09:53Now is the right time to ban the National AnthemW.a. Thomaston , 15 Oct 2017 09:50
Brainwashing jingoist nonsense is a bandwagon platform for wet fartsThe captured author/minions have obviously not had full access to the reading roomHector Hajnal , 15 Oct 2017 09:49
*And the secret writings of
Part of a small cache of loose leaf scrolls smuggled out of Alexandria before the fire
Last entrusted to a small elite 13th century band of chainsaw wielding warrior...
Comedy writing nunsIs about education, oligarchy wins to ignorant people. In order to have a healthy democracy the people must be informed and educated other wise oligarchies groups will inundate everything with cheap adds, will manipulate and will win control, methinksId1649 -> Sailor25 , 15 Oct 2017 09:45And all brought down when the elites forgot that they were only the top of a pyramid and that they ultimately relied on those below. We at the foot of the monolith can see that the oligarchs serve only themselves so no longer buy into their project. We see that it is one big club and we - unlike our political masters - ain't in it. So empires fall.MarmaladeMog , 15 Oct 2017 09:45Sitaraman's colleague sounds worryingly naive.Sailor25 -> EquilibriaJones , 15 Oct 2017 09:44True, perhaps that's the beauty of it.webapalooza , 15 Oct 2017 09:44
The senators have to supply the bread and circuses the plebs want or out come the pitchforks.The author demonstrates his ignorance of the American system of government. He uses the word "democracy" no less than 8 times, yet American is not a democracy and never has been a democracy. You will find no form of the word "democracy" in any of the founding documents. The Founding Fathers knew very well the dangers of democracies, and so they created the American government as a constitutional republic. Not once does the author mention that; I doubt he even knows what it means, let alone the difference.NoBets -> imipak , 15 Oct 2017 09:43If you're complaining because prices are (inevitably) regressive on the "poor" (however defined), what do you say to the obvious retort that this is indeed the main difference between being "poor", being comfortable, being affluent and being rich?FrankieOwen -> TheResult , 15 Oct 2017 09:38
What is the point of working and earning if it isn't aimed at making oneself less "poor" or more affluent?Dunno, doesnt appear that they do in the rough parts of Chicago.furryandrew -> Commem , 15 Oct 2017 09:38Or as Mayer Amschel Rothschild correctly summed up the situation in 1790 - "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws"Peter Martin -> J.K. Stevens , 15 Oct 2017 09:36
What this article fails to draw our attention to , and they never do, is that private banks CREATE 97% of our entire money supply (look up "fractional reserve banking"). Whilst that remains the case the "oligarchy" will always have firm control over the rest of us.Wonder what would happen if all players took a knee, if they all stood together then the owners would start to fret.nhickman -> TheWindsOfWinter93 , 15 Oct 2017 09:32There was a time when the deadliest military weapon was the longbow. It could only be handled by men who had been trained up since infancy.zootsuitbeatnick , 15 Oct 2017 09:32
It enabled the English to rout a numerically superior French force at Agincourt, 1415.
The notion that the early 15th century was a period of democratic government is an interesting reading of history.imoNewmacfan , 15 Oct 2017 09:30
In the US today, the oligarchy cannot win without an assist from a significant segment -- not necessarily a majority -- of the overall population.
9/11 taught us that many people are willing to give up freedoms for the myth of security.
The Trump presidency is teaching us that many people are willing to give up their voice -- democracy -- for the myth of returning to a perceived better way of life (group superiority over racial, gender, religious, etc equality) from some bygone era.
imoWe are currently experiencing a destabalisation of our nation and fellow Western Nations by the dominant Western Nation to try to halt the failure of this vastly endebted bigger brother......how do we stop this?J.K. Stevens , 15 Oct 2017 09:28On this NFL Sunday it is not hard to imagine the secret meetings that owners and/or their representatives had to coalesce against Kaepernick's 'taking a knee' to stop this form of protest in its tracks as a oligarchical institution. On Tuesday, when Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones declared that any player taking a knee would not play today, the circle of the objective to chill dissent was complete.TheLibrarianApe -> imperium3 , 15 Oct 2017 09:27
And the plutocratic beat goes on.Top post.DrPepperIsNotARealDr , 15 Oct 2017 09:26Democracy was always like this. What is that famous quote, by Earl Grey or Sandwich or someone, in Parliament, about allowing peasants to have the vote? "I do this, not to weaken our power, but to preserve it"FE Lang -> zippy200 , 15 Oct 2017 09:25
Democracy in the UK and the US has always been a forum for the oligarchy to resolve their own disputes rather than rule for the people by the people. Brexit is an example, a referendum held essentially because of the split in conservative party.And conservatives are going to save us all from done minded feel good policies of the left, is that it?BayardDC , 15 Oct 2017 09:21
Since the 80's American politics had swing do far to the right liberals are capitalists monied elites, but the right had an army of simple minded uneducated lemmings on thier side, people that will be against thier own personal interests because of 12th century religious horse spit or group think. Thier are more Right winners in State houses, leadership positions then ever before, they control the Congress, the courts, the Presidency and yet dolts like you still say the country is going in the wrong directions and listen to son misters tell you its the fault of the left. Somewhere in your reptilian brain you know this makes no sense, but you lack of depth, you inability to comprehend what you read or to shake free from the group think or right wing ideology will never let you understand that the bet people you vote in time after time are the very ones whom have sold your job to the Chinese, profited from your child's illnesses, war, chaos in some far off land.
Keeping voting Republicans, it's working out so well for you tailer, Nascar types...The article obfuscates a distinction laid out by Aristotle, in The Politics: aristocracy - rule by the few, focused on the common good; and oligarchy - rule by the few (wealthy), focused on their selfish good. He argues that aristocracy, rule by the best, inevitably turns into oligarchy, rule by the wealthy. In Aristotle's three forms of government - rule by one, by few, by many - the three legitimate forms (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) degenerate into their evils twins (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy). For Aristotle, Democracy was not a legitimate form of government, but a corrupted form: mob rule, we might call it. The US Constitution deliberately set out to create a mixed form of government: monarchy (president); aristocracy (Senate and Supreme Court); polity (House of Reps.). From the beginning, Americans have focused on the potential for our "monarch" (president) to turn into a tyrant: Trump is the poster child for a single executive ruling on his own, selfish behalf. We have been less aware of the fact that the Senate has become a simple oligarchy, while the House has degenerated into a bastion of deputies chosen by what Aristotle would have called democracy, that is, a corrupted form of rule by the many. Aristotle's citizens - those who rule and are ruled in turn - can constitute about 10% of the population; in today's US that would mean 20+ million people actively and continuously involved in politics (i.e., not simply showing up every four years to mark a ballot). Millions of Americans have long done such things, and political life remains active at the local level in many areas. On the national level, the Tea Party has shown how this level of enhanced involvement can transform politics, and has further shown that a coherent, organized minority can demolish what we think of as democratic norms. They are about to elect a Senator in Alabama who has twice been removed as a judge on the state's Supreme Court (an elective body), for violations of judicial norms. Here in the US, all three forms of our original government - monarchy, aristocracy, polity - have degenerated into their evil twins. Yes, the wealthy 1% will always game the system in their favor, but until we restore each of the parts of our forma mixta, we can never reduce their advantages to a level consonant with a decent form of society. Under W Bush, the oligarchs got the tax rates (above all on capital gains) reduced to their 1929 levels. That legislation had a time limit, and Obama chose not to continue it: indeed, he raised capital gains rates a further 3.8% [making the rate 23.8% as against the 15% of Bush]. Now, the two greatest goals of the oligarchs are a return to the 15% rate and the abolition of the estate tax, so all of the fantastically rich Baby Boomers (say, Sec'y of Commerce Ross, net worth $2.5 billion) can leave their wealth unencumbered to their heirs, solidifying the oligarchy's control. The Tea Party, through all the yahoos now in the House, can focus on creationism, climate change denial, immigration, etc., while the oligarchs quietly change the tax system to perpetuate their dominance. Over here, we are already in fiscal year 2018 (started on Oct 1), so tax changes would really go into effect in 2019, that is, after the mid-term election. If Mnuchen and Co. get their changes to capital gains rates and other technical loopholes aimed at the 0.1% [sic], and eliminate the estate tax, we'll know that the oligarchs have eliminated any barriers to their collective dictatorship.TheLibrarianApe -> Commem , 15 Oct 2017 09:20This is a blindingly excellent article.BlueberryMuffin -> zippy200 , 15 Oct 2017 09:17
What's new is, like this article, we have the vocabulary to frame both the problem and the solution. Oligarchy is no longer inevitable and whilst the means of control are greater, the means for derogation are too and there are fewer oligarchs than plebs.
Its now easier to spot bad behaviour and harder to keep secrets. Oligarchs have to use force more often to hold into power and that tips their hand.
This article has left me (an avowed pessimist) feeling rather more optimistic.Liberalism is about freedom. Personal and economic. Not about "proletariat solidarity" and totalitarian Marxist regimes.FE Lang -> GusDynamite , 15 Oct 2017 09:15They learned their lessons well after the 60's, the last time the people really raised up against the machine, so they have given us all the; junk food at a low cost, all the TV and mindless sexually charged entertainment, all the "debt wealth", a simple minded, unread, semi-literate, beer swilling fool could ever ask for. And we all gladly gobble it up and follow the crowd, for who wants to be on the outside looking in...Giftshop , 15 Oct 2017 09:12There is always a ruling elite because power is the wellspring of all human actions. There is also a certain moral consciousness that many people argue is innate in human nature, and that consciousness is fairness. The fairness instinct survives where ordinary human sympathy may fail. Based upon this basic morality of fairness those of us who are willing to take risks in the interest of fairness need to prune and tend the ruling elites as soon as possible. We proles need to act together.W.a. Thomaston -> awilson5280 , 15 Oct 2017 09:09
Democracy is not enough and besides democracy we also need reason, facts,and fighting spirit.As the inventor of the "hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica" once said: " you have a Republic if you can keep it"amwink -> awilson5280 , 15 Oct 2017 09:06Sparta was more than just militarism, and slavery was also practised in Athens, as well as in Rome and quite much everywhere else in the ancient world.logos00 -> apacheman , 15 Oct 2017 09:05
Sparta did something that today's democracies have forgotten: it cared about protection of its citizens. That's the most elementary reason why a State exists, not to provide health or education.
Now, regarding a replacement, epistocracy has yet to be tried. And the same democracy, but with census suffrage, or via election of electors, who in turn elect the ones who will hold office, have worked quite well in many places, producing better politicians, less inclined to populism (take the Venetian Republic, for example).richard160458 -> MattSpanner , 15 Oct 2017 09:05
Waiting for the oligarchy to rot from within isn't what i would call a viable plan. Not when there is a far better and far more sure way to get the job done. Start with capping wealth accumulation.
One must have already broken, or at least sufficiently loosened, the oligarchic grip on politics to institute such a policy.
Here in the UK, things are the darkest they have been in my lifetime, including the Thatcher years, but we are in a moment of possibilities that can lead in opposite directions.
The author is surely right when he says
With all the upheaval in today's politics, it's hard not to think that this moment is one in which the future of the political system might be more up for grabs than it has been in generations.
Dominance of oligarchic political power, through neoliberalism, over the last four decades has effectively put such policies out of bounds.
We had a Labour government that won convincingly under Blair while declaring itself relaxed about the accumulation of great wealth.And democracy failed after generations of poor decisions and warrichard160458 , 15 Oct 2017 09:02Greece had a long period of decline at the hands of democracy. Plato wrote his Republic as a protest, and to put forward an alternative. Eventually the romans took control.debt2zero , 15 Oct 2017 09:01
There are indeed parallels with today but given the external challenges I for one believe that western society will be overtaken by q new set of rules.Very good, interesting article. You know, every now & then this paper, for all it's faults, serves up an article that is quite enlightened/ing.GusDynamite , 15 Oct 2017 09:00
The last one I recall was an article by Kenan Malik on identity politics . For what exists in this country, the UK, I have previously used the term "oligarchy by profession" ... meaning a pool of the usually upper half of the middle class, or a group in whom that group is disproportionally represented, who not only likely have a select education but who go on to become part of certain professions - accountants, lawyers, journalists, bankers, doctors etc. ... and of course, politicians tend to be drawn from these.
And revolving door arrangements is one of the ways this pool retains a certain cohesion, or as in the article "homogeneity in culture and values".
As for division, how many times have I read, "oh, we are so divided .. blah, blah", as though some journalists have an almost unconscious need to promote it.
Interesting article.Bit too late, really. Not to mention it's super easy to take what they want while we're all so distracted by arguing about who is the most racist misogynist, defending ourselves from the accusations or applauding comic book movies. Apparently we're so distracted that we're also all genuinely shocked that Hollywood is rife with pedophilia and extreme sexual harassment as though it's some revelation that we didn't know already, but that's another conversation.PhilJoMar -> ConBrio , 15 Oct 2017 08:53
If we're all so distracted then it's not difficult for our political 'representatives' -- I use that word very tentatively because they barely ever do -- to subject themselves to the oligarchs for a few scraps more than we have ourselves.
Maybe if we didn't bicker like kids we'd beat them.Either you've not read the article attentively enough or your bias is irremediable. Limiting govt still leaves economic power and the tendency towards monopoly untouched. The genetic impulse you mention is a spurious concept in itself. If there were such a genetic impulse we would not have seen such a change as the major advances of women in the last half century. Culture is the key, much more than any genetic impulse, which is practically meaningless and so explains nothing.
As wealth defense is so important to oligarchs, there is a constant pressure to cheat and break the law. One solution therefore is to apply the law but also to construct legislation with specific principles in mind. If the point of tax legislation is to contribute your share towards the general good then those who avoid and evade tax would be guilty of a technical breach but also a breach of the principle.
However our laws are skewed to allowing the wealthy to defend their wealth and so a party of the people is always needed. Always.
Lastly private schooling needs to be looked at. I mean FFS Eton has charitable status!
Oct 15, 2017 | www.unz.com
Headliner of the week for immigration patriots was President Trump's immigration reform proposal , which he sent to Congress for their perusal last Sunday. The proposal is a very detailed 70-point list under three main headings:Border Security (27 items) Interior Enforcement (39 items) Merit-Based Immigration System (four items)
Item-wise, the biggest heading there is the second one, "Interior Enforcement." That's very welcome.
Of course we need improved border security so that people don't enter our country without permission. That comes under the first heading. An equally pressing problem, though, is the millions of foreigners who are living and working here, and using our schools and hospitals and public services, who should not be here.
The President's proposals on interior enforcement cover all bases: Sanctuary cities , visa overstays , law-enforcement resources , compulsory E-Verify , more deportations , improved visa security.
This is a major, wonderful improvement in national policy, when you consider that less than a year ago the White House and Justice Department were run by committed open-borders fanatics. I thank the President and his staff for having put so much work into such a detailed proposal for restoring American sovereignty and the rights of American workers and taxpayers.
That said, here come the quibbles.
That third heading, "Merit-Based Immigration System," with just four items, needs work. Setting aside improvements on visa controls under the other headings, this is really the only part of the proposal that covers legal immigration. In my opinion, it does so imperfectly.
There's some good meat in there, mind. Three of the four items -- numbers one, three, and four -- got a fist-pump from me:cutting down chain migration by limiting it to spouse and dependent children; eliminating the Diversity Visa Lottery ; and limiting the number of refugees admitted, assuming this means severely cutting back on the numbers, preferably all the way to zero.
Good stuff. Item two, however, is a problem. Quote:
Establish a new, points-based system for the awarding of Green Cards (lawful permanent residents) based on factors that allow individuals to successfully assimilate and support themselves financially.
sounds OK, bringing in talented, well-educated, well-socialized people, rather than what the late Lee Kuan Yew referred to as " fruit-pickers ." Forgive me if I have a rather jaundiced view of this merit-based approach.
For most of my adult life I made a living as a computer programmer. I spent four years doing this in the U.S.A. through the mid-1970s. Then I came back in the late 1980s and worked at the same trade here through the 1990s. (Pictured right–my actual H-1B visa ) That gave me two clear snapshots twenty years apart, of this particular corner of skilled middle-class employment in America.
In the 1970s a programming shop was legacy American, with only a thin scattering of foreigners like myself. Twenty years later programming had been considerably foreignized , thanks to the H-1B visa program. Now, twenty years further on, I believe legacy-American programmers are an endangered species.
So a well-paid and mentally rewarding corner of the middle-class job market has been handed over to foreigners -- for the sole reason, of course, that they are cheaper than Americans. The desire for cheap labor explains 95 percent of U.S. immigration policy. The other five percent is sentimentality.
On so-called "merit-based immigration," therefore, you can count me a cynic. I have no doubt that American firms could recruit all the computer programmers they need from among our legacy population. They used to do so, forty years ago. Then they discovered how to game the immigration system for cheaper labor.
Now they are brazen in their crime: you have heard, I'm sure, those stories about American workers being laid off, with severance packages conditional on their helping train their cheaper foreign replacements. That's our legal immigration system in a nutshell. It's a cheap-labor racket.
A "merit-based" points system won't fix that. It will quickly and easily be gamed by employers to lay waste yet more middle-class occupational zones for Americans. If it was restricted to the higher levels of "merit," we would just be importing a professional overclass of foreigners, most East and South Asians, to direct the labors of less-meritorious legacy Americans. How would that contribute to social harmony?
With coming up to a third of a billion people, the U.S.A. has all the talent, all the merit , it needs. You might make a case for a handful of certified geniuses like Einstein or worthy dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, but those cases aside, there is no reason at all to have guest-worker programs. They should all be shut down.
Some of these cheap-labor rackets don't even need congressional action to shut them down; it can be done by regulatory change via executive order. The scandalous OPT-visa scam, for example, which brings in cheap workers under the guise of student visas.
Here is John Miano writing about the OPT program last month, quote:
Measured by the number of workers per year, the largest guestworker program in the entire immigration system is now student visas through the Optional Practical Training program (OPT). Last year over 154,000 aliens were approved to work on student visas. By comparison, 114,000 aliens entered the workforce on H-1B guestworker visas.
Because there is no reporting on how long guestworkers stay in the country, we do not know the total number of workers in each category. Nonetheless, the number of approvals for work on student visas has grown by 62 percent over the past four years so their numbers will soon dwarf those on H-1B visas.
The troubling fact is that the OPT program was created entirely through regulation with no authorization from Congress whatsoever. [ A History of the 'Optional Practical Training' Guestworker Program , CIS, September 18, 2017]
End quote. (And a cheery wave of acknowledgement to John Miano here from one of the other seventeen people in the U.S.A. that knows the correct placement of the hyphen in "H-1B.")
Our legal immigration system is addled with these scams. Don't even get me started on the EB-5 investor's visa . It all needs sweeping away.
So for preference I would rewrite that third heading to include, yes, items one, three, and four -- cutting down chain migration, ending the Diversity Visa Lottery, and ending refugee settlement for anyone of less stature than Solzhenitsyn; but then, I'd replace item two with the following:End all guest-worker programs, with exceptions only for the highest levels of talent and accomplishment, limit one hundred visas per annum .
So much for my amendments to the President's October 8th proposals. There is, though, one glaring omission from that 70-item list. The proposal has no mention at all of birthright citizenship.
have abandoned it . It leads to obstetric tourism : women well-advanced in pregnancy come to the U.S.A. to give birth, knowing that the child will be a U.S. citizen. It is deeply unpopular with Americans , once it's explained to them.
Yes, yes, I know: some constitutional authorities argue that birthright citizenship is implied in the Fourteenth Amendment , although it is certain that the framers of that Amendment did not have foreign tourists or illegal entrants in mind. Other scholars think Congress could legislate against it.
The only way to find out is to have Congress legislate. If the courts strike down the legislation as unconstitutional, let's then frame a constitutional amendment and put it to the people.
Getting rid of birthright citizenship might end up a long and difficult process. We might ultimately fail. The only way to find out is to get the process started . Failure to mention this in the President's proposal is a very glaring omission.
Setting aside that, and the aforementioned reservations about working visas, I give two cheers to the proposal. email him ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books . He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013 . (Republished from VDare.com by permission of author or representative)
SimpleHandle > > , October 14, 2017 at 2:56 am GMTDiversity Heretic > > , October 14, 2017 at 5:04 am GMT
I agree with ending birthright citizenship. But Trump should wait until he can put at least one more strict constitutionalist in the supreme court. There will be a court challenge, and we need judges who can understand that if the 14th Amendment didn't give automatic citizenship to American Indians it doesn't give automatic citizenship to children of Mexican citizens who jumped our border.Diversity Heretic > > , October 14, 2017 at 5:16 am GMT
@Carroll Price
Insofar as your personal situation is concerned, perhaps you would find yourself less "relatively poor" if you had a job with higher wages.bartok > > , October 14, 2017 at 6:32 am GMT
John's article, it seems to me, ignores the elephant in the room: the DACA colonists. Trump is offering this proposal, more or less, in return for some sort of semi-permanent regularization of their status. Bad trade, in my opinion. Ending DACA and sending those illegals back where they belong will have more real effect on illegal and legal immigration/colonization than all sorts of proposals to be implemented in the future, which can and will be changed by subsequent Administrations and Congresses.
Trump would also be able to drive a much harder bargain with Congress (like maybe a moratorium on any immigration) if he had kept his campaign promise, ended DACA the afternoon of January 20, 2017, and busloads of DACA colonists were being sent south of the Rio Grande.
The best hope for immigration patriots is that the Democrats are so wedded to Open Borders that the entire proposal dies and Trump, in disgust, reenacts Ike's Operation Wetback.Negrolphin Pool > > , October 14, 2017 at 7:53 am GMT
@Carroll Price
Once all the undocumented workers who are doing all the dirty, nasty jobs Americans refuse to do are run out the country, then what?
White people couldn't possibly thrive without non-Whites! Why, without all of that ballast we'd ascend too near the sun.Joe Franklin > > , October 14, 2017 at 12:24 pm GMT
Well, in the real world, things just don't work that way. It's pay me now or pay me later. Once all the undocumented workers who are doing all the dirty, nasty jobs Americans refuse to do are run out the country, then what?
Right, prior to 1965, Americans didn't exist. They had all starved to death because, as everyone knows, no Americans will work to produce food and, even if they did, once Tyson chicken plants stop making 50 percent on capital they just shut down.
If there were no Somalis in Minnesota, even Warren Buffett couldn't afford grapes.Carroll Price > > , October 14, 2017 at 12:27 pm GMT
Illegal immigrants picking American produce is a false economy.
Illegal immigrants are subsidized by the taxpayer in terms of public health, education, housing, and welfare.
If businesses didn't have access to cheap and subsidized illegal alien labor, they would be compelled to resort to more farm automation to reduce cost.
Cheap illegal alien labor delays the inevitable use of newer farm automation technologies.
Many Americans would likely prefer a machine touch their food rather than a illegal alien with strange hygiene practices.
In addition, anti-American Democrats and neocons prefer certain kinds of illegal aliens because they bolster their diversity scheme.Jonathan Mason > > , October 14, 2017 at 2:57 pm GMT
@Realist "Once all the undocumented workers who are doing all the dirty, nasty jobs Americans refuse to do are run out the country, then what?"
Eliminate welfare...then you'll have plenty of workers. Unfortunately, that train left the station long ago. With or without welfare, there's simply no way soft, spoiled, lazy, over-indulged Americans who have never hit a lick at anything their life, will ever perform manual labor for anyone, including themselves.George Weinbaum > > , October 14, 2017 at 3:35 pm GMT
@Randal Probably people other than you have worked out that once their wages are not being continually undercut by cheap and easy immigrant competition, the American working classes will actually be able to earn enough to pay the increased prices for grocery store items, especially as the Americans who, along with machines, will replace those immigrants doing the "jobs Americans won't do" will also be earning more and actually paying taxes on it.
The "jobs Americans/Brits/etc won't do" myth is a deliberate distortion of reality that ignores the laws of supply and demand. There are no jobs Americans etc won't do, only jobs for which the employers are not prepared to pay wages high enough to make them worthwhile for Americans etc to do.
Now of course it is more complicated than that. There are jobs that would not be economically viable if the required wages were to be paid, and there are marginal contributions to job creation by immigrant populations, but those aspects are in reality far less significant than the bosses seeking cheap labour want people to think they are.
As a broad summary, a situation in which labour is tight, jobs are easy to come by and staff hard to hold on to is infinitely better for the ordinary working people of any nation than one in which there is a huge pool of excess labour, and therefore wages are low and employees disposable.
You'd think anyone purporting to be on the "left", in the sense of supporting working class people would understand that basic reality, but far too many on the left have been indoctrinated in radical leftist anti-racist and internationalist dogmas that make them functional stooges for big business and its mass immigration program.
Probably people other than you have worked out that once their wages are not being continually undercut by cheap and easy immigrant competition, the American working classes will actually be able to earn enough to pay the increased prices for grocery store items, especially as the Americans who, along with machines, will replace those immigrants doing the "jobs Americans won't do" will also be earning more and actually paying taxes on it.
There might be some truth in this. When I was a student in England in the 60′s I spent every summer working on farms, picking hops, apples, pears, potatoes and made some money and had a lot of fun too and became an expert farm tractor operator.
No reason why US students and high school seniors should not pick up a lot of the slack. Young people like camping in the countryside and sleeping rough, plus lots of opportunity to meet others, have sex, smoke weed, drink beer, or whatever. If you get a free vacation plus a nice check at the end, that makes the relatively low wages worthwhile. It is not always a question of how much you are paid, but how much you can save.Auntie Analogue > > , October 14, 2017 at 7:10 pm GMT
We can fix the EB-5 visa scam. My suggestion: charge would-be "investors" $1 million to enter the US. This $1 is not refundable under any circumstance. It is paid when the "investor's" visa is approved. If the "investor" is convicted of a felony, he is deported. He may bring no one with him. No wife, no child, no aunt, no uncle. Unless he pays $1 million for that person.
We will get a few thousand Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes a year under this program
As to fixing the H-1B visa program, we charge employer users of the program say $25,000 per year per employee. We require the employers to inform all employees that if any is asked to train a replacement, he should inform the DOJ immediately. The DOJ investigates and if true, charges managerial employees who asked that a replacement be trained with fraud.
As to birthright citizenship: I say make it a five-year felony to have a child while in the US illegally. Make it a condition of getting a tourist visa that one not be pregnant. If the tourist visa lasts say 60 days and the woman has a child while in the US, she gets charged with fraud.
None of these suggestions requires a constitutional amendment.Jim Sweeney > > , October 14, 2017 at 8:26 pm GMT
In the United States middle class prosperity reached its apogee in 1965 – before the disastrous (and eminently foreseeable) wage-lowering consequence of the Hart-Celler Open Immigration Act's massive admission of foreigners increased the supply of labor which began to lower middle class prosperity and to shrink and eradicate the middle class.
It was in 1965 that ordinary Americans, enjoying maximum employment because employers were forced to compete for Americans' talents and labor, wielded their peak purchasing power . Since 1970 wages have remained stagnant, and since 1965 the purchasing power of ordinary Americans has gone into steep decline.
It is long past time to halt Perpetual Mass Immigration into the United States, to end birthright citizenship, and to deport all illegal aliens – if, that is, our leaders genuinely care about and represent us ordinary Americans instead of continuing their legislative, policy, and judicial enrichment of the 1-percenter campaign donor/rentier class of transnational Globali$t Open Border$ E$tabli$hment $ellout$.JP Straley > > , October 14, 2017 at 9:42 pm GMT
Re the birthright citizenship argument, that is not settled law in that SCOTUS has never ruled on the question of whether a child born in the US is thereby a citizen if the parents are illegally present. Way back in 1897, SCOTUS did resolve the issue of whether a child born to alien parents who were legally present was thereby a citizen. That case is U.S. vs Wong Kim Ark 169 US 649. SCOTUS ruled in favor of citizenship. If that was a justiciable issue how much more so is it when the parents are illegally present?
My thinking is that the result would be the same but, at least, the question would be settled. I cannot see justices returning a toddler to Beijing or worse. They would never have invitations to cocktail parties again for the shame heaped upon them for such uncaring conduct. Today, the title of citizen is conferred simply by bureaucratic rule, not by judicial order.Realist > > , October 14, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT
Arguments Against Fourteenth Amendment Anchor Baby Interpretation
J. Paige Straley
Part One. Anchor Baby Argument, Mexican Case.
The ruling part of the US Constitution is Amendment Fourteen: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Here is the ruling part of the Mexican Constitution, Section II, Article Thirty:
Article 30
Mexican nationality is acquired by birth or by naturalization:
A. Mexicans by birth are:
I. Those born in the territory of the Republic, regardless of the nationality of
their parents:
II. Those born in a foreign country of Mexican parents; of a Mexican father and
a foreign mother; or of a Mexican mother and an unknown father;
III. Those born on Mexican vessels or airships, either war or merchant vessels. "
A baby born to Mexican nationals within the United States is automatically a Mexican citizen. Under the anchor baby reasoning, this baby acquires US citizenship at the same time and so is a dual citizen. Mexican citizenship is primary because it stems from a primary source, the parents' citizenship and the law of Mexico. The Mexican Constitution states the child of Mexican parents is automatically a Mexican citizen at birth no matter where the birth occurs. Since the child would be a Mexican citizen in any country, and becomes an American citizen only if born in America, it is clear that Mexico has the primary claim of citizenry on the child. This alone should be enough to satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment jurisdiction thereof argument. Since Mexican citizenship is primary, it has primary jurisdiction; thus by the plain words of the Fourteenth such child is not an American citizen at birth.[MORE]
There is a second argument for primary Mexican citizenship in the case of anchor babies. Citizenship, whether Mexican or American, establishes rights and duties. Citizenship is a reciprocal relationship, thus establishing jurisdiction. This case for primary Mexican citizenship is supported by the fact that Mexico allows and encourages Mexicans resident in the US, either illegal aliens or legal residents, to vote in Mexican elections. They are counted as Mexican citizens abroad, even if dual citizens, and their government provides widespread consular services as well as voting access to Mexicans residing in the US. As far as Mexico is concerned, these persons are not Mexican in name only, but have a civil relationship strong enough to allow a political voice; in essence, full citizenship. Clearly, all this is the expression of typical reciprocal civic relationships expressed in legal citizenship, further supporting the establishment of jurisdiction.
Part Two: Wong Kim Ark (1898) case. (Birthright Citizenship)
The Wong Kim Ark (WKA) case is often cited as the essential legal reasoning and precedent for application of the fourteenth amendment as applied to aliens. There has been plenty of commentary on WKA, but the truly narrow application of the case is emphasized reviewing a concise statement of the question the case was meant to decide, written by Hon. Horace Gray, Justice for the majority in this decision.
"[W]hether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution." (Italics added.)
For WKA to justify birthright citizenship, the parents must have " permanent domicile and residence " But how can an illegal alien have permanent residence when the threat of deportation is constantly present? There is no statute of limitation for illegal presence in the US and the passage of time does not eliminate the legal remedy of deportation. This alone would seem to invalidate WKA as a support and precedent for illegal alien birthright citizenship.
If illegal (or legal) alien parents are unemployed, unemployable, illegally employed, or if they get their living by illegal means, then they are not ". . .carrying on business. . .", and so the children of indigent or criminal aliens may not be eligible for birthright citizenship
If legal aliens meet the two tests provided in WKA, birthright citizenship applies. Clearly the WKA case addresses the specific situation of the children of legal aliens, and so is not an applicable precedent to justify birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens.
Part three. Birth Tourism
Occasionally foreign couples take a trip to the US during the last phase of the wife's pregnancy so she can give birth in the US, thus conferring birthright citizenship on the child. This practice is called "birth tourism." WKA provides two tests for birthright citizenship: permanent domicile and residence and doing business, and a temporary visit answers neither condition. WKA is therefore disqualified as justification for a "birth tourism" child to be granted birthright citizenship.Alfa158 > > , October 15, 2017 at 2:10 am GMT
@Carroll Price Unfortunately, that train left the station long ago. With or without welfare, there's simply no way soft, spoiled, lazy, over-indulged Americans who have never hit a lick at anything their life, will ever perform manual labor for anyone, including themselves. Then let them starve to death. The Pilgrims nipped that dumb ass idea (welfare) in the bud
@Carroll PriceAn equally pressing problem, though, is the millions of foreigners who are living and working here, and using our schools and hospitals and public services, who should not be here.Has it ever occurred to anyone other than me that the cost associated with foreign workers using our schools and hospitals and pubic services for free, is more than off-set by the cheap price being paid for grocery store items like boneless chicken breast, grapes, apples, peaches, lettuce etc, which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive even for the wealthy?
Let alone relatively poor people (like myself) and those on fixed incomes? What un-thinking Americans want, is having their cake and eating it too. Well, in the real world, things just don't work that way. It's pay me now or pay me later. Once all the undocumented workers who are doing all the dirty, nasty jobs Americans refuse to do are run out the country, then what? Please look up;History; United States; pre mid-twentieth century. I'm pretty sure Americans were eating chicken, grapes, apples, peaches, lettuce, etc. prior to that period. I don't think their diet consisted of venison and tree bark.
But since I wasn't there, maybe I'm wrong and that is actually what they were eating.
I know some people born in the 1920′s; I'll check with them and let you know what they say.
Oct 11, 2017 | www.unz.com
Originally from: The elites "have no credibility left" by Chris Hedges
...The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these people: traitors.
Oct 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com
H. I. on May 13, 2011This Book Explains EVERYTHING!!!!!
Hedges cogently and systematically dismantles the most pernicious cultural delusions of our era and lays bare the pitiful truths that they attempt to mask. This book is a deprogramming manual that trims away the folly and noise from our troubled society so that the reader can focus on the most pressing matters of our time.
Despite the dark reality Hedges excavates, his screed is a liberating tonic against the crazy-making double-speak and the lies Americans are sold by our country's elite in order to distract us from the true threat and nature of the Corporate State, from the cult of celebrity, to how our nation's Universities have been hijacked to serve the interests, not of the public, but of our corporate overlords. It explains the self-same conditions in all aspects of our society and culture that we now must face, the ever-shrinking flame of enlightenment being exchanged for the illusory shadows on a cave wall.
As a twenty-something caught in the death-throes of American Empire and culture, I have struggled to anticipate where our country and our world are heading, why, and what sort of life I can expect to build for myself. Hedges presents the reader with the depressing, yet undeniable truth of the forces that have coalesced to shape the world in which we now find ourselves. The light he casts is searing and relentless. He fearlessly and incisively calls us out on the obvious farce our democracy has become, how we got here, and highlights the rapidly closing window in which we have to do something to correct it. It is a revelation, and yet he merely states the obvious. The empire has no clothes.
One of the most powerful aspects of this book was in regard to how our Universities are run these days. I may be in the minority, but I experienced a life-changing disillusionment when I gained entrance to a prestigious "elite" University. Instead of drawing the best and the brightest, or being a place where scholarship was valued, where students were taught critical thinking skills, the University I attended was nothing more than an expensive diploma mill for the children of the wealthy. In the eyes of the University, students were not minds to be empowered and developed, but walking dollar signs.
Instead of critical thinking, students were taught to OBEY, not to question authority, and then handed a piece of paper admitting them to the ruling class that is destroying America without a moral compass. Selfishness, deceit, disregard for the common good, and a win-at-all-costs attitude were rewarded. Empathy, curiosity, dissent, and an honest, intellectually rigorous evaluation of ourselves and our world were punished. Obviously I am not the only one to whom this was cause to fear for the future of our country.
Five stars is not enough. Ever since I began reading Empire of Illusion, I have insisted friends and family pick up a copy, too. Everyone in America should read this incredibly important book.
The truth shall set us free.
Oct 05, 2017 | www.unz.com
Billionaires in the commercial conglomerates, like Walmart, exploit workers by paying poverty wages and providing few, if any, benefits. Walmart earns $16 billion dollar a year in profits by paying its workers between $10 and $13 an hour and relying on state and federal assistance to provide services to the families of its impoverished workers through Medicaid and food stamps. Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos exploits workers by paying $12.50 an hour while he has accumulated over $80 billion dollars in profits. UPS CEO David Albany takes $11 million a year by exploiting workers at $11 an hour. Federal Express CEO, Fred Smith gets $16 million and pays workers $11 an hour.
Inequality is not a result of 'technology' and 'education'- contemporary euphemisms for the ruling class cult of superiority – as liberals and conservative economists and journalists like to claim. Inequalities are a result of low wages, based on big profits, financial swindles, multi-trillion dollar public handouts and multi-billion-dollar tax evasion. The ruling class has mastered the 'technology' of exploiting the state, through its pillage of the treasury, and the working class. Capitalist exploitation of low paid production workers provides additional billions for the 'philanthropic' billionaire family foundations to polish their public image – using another tax avoidance gimmick – self-glorifying 'donations'.
Workers pay disproportional taxes for education, health, social and public services and subsidies for billionaires.
Billionaires in the arms industry and security/mercenary conglomerates receive over $700 billion dollars from the federal budget, while over 100 million US workers lack adequate health care and their children are warehoused in deteriorating schools.
Workers and Bosses: Mortality Rates
Billionaires and multi-millionaires and their families enjoy longer and healthier lives than their workers. They have no need for health insurance policies or public hospitals. CEO's live on average ten years longer than a worker and enjoy twenty years more of healthy and pain-free lives.
Private, exclusive clinics and top medical care include the most advanced treatment and safe and proven medication which allow billionaires and their family members to live longer and healthier lives. The quality of their medical care and the qualifications of their medical providers present a stark contrast to the health care apartheid that characterizes the rest of the United States.
Workers are treated and mistreated by the health system: They have inadequate and often incompetent medical treatment, cursory examinations by inexperienced medical assistants and end up victims of the widespread over-prescription of highly addictive narcotics and other medications. Over-prescription of narcotics by incompetent 'providers' has significantly contributed to the rise in premature deaths among workers, spiraling cases of opiate overdose, disability due to addiction and descent into poverty and homelessness. These irresponsible practices have made additional billions of dollars in profits for the insurance corporate elite, who can cut their pensions and health care liabilities as injured, disabled and addicted workers drop out of the system or die.
The shortened life expectancy for workers and their family members is celebrated on Wall Street and in the financial press. Over 560,000 workers were killed by opioids between 1999-2015 contributing to the decline in life expectancy for working age wage and salary earners and reduced pension liabilities for Wall Street and the Social Security Administration.
Inequalities are cumulative, inter-generational and multi-sectorial.
Billionaire families, their children and grandchildren, inherit and invest billions. They have privileged access to the most prestigious schools and medical facilities, and conveniently fall in love to equally privileged, well-connected mates to join their fortunes and form even greater financial empires. Their wealth buys favorable, even fawning, mass media coverage and the services of the most influential lawyers and accountants to cover their swindles and tax evasion.
Billionaires hire innovators and sweat shop MBA managers to devise more ways to slash wages, increase productivity and ensure that inequalities widen even further. Billionaires do not have to be the brightest or most innovative people: Such individuals can simply be bought or imported on the 'free market' and discarded at will.
Billionaires have bought out or formed joint ventures with each other, creating interlocking directorates. Banks, IT, factories, warehouses, food and appliance, pharmaceuticals and hospitals are linked directly to political elites who slither through doors of rotating appointments within the IMF, the World Bank, Treasury, Wall Street banks and prestigious law firms.
Consequences of Inequalities
First and foremost, billionaires and their political, legal and corporate associates dominate the political parties. They designate the leaders and key appointees, thus ensuring that budgets and policies will increase their profits, erode social benefits for the masses and weaken the political power of popular organizations .
Secondly, the burden of the economic crisis is shifted on to the workers who are fired and later re-hired as part-time, contingent labor. Public bailouts, provided by the taxpayer, are channeled to the billionaires under the doctrine that Wall Street banks are too big to fail and workers are too weak to defend their wages, jobs and living standards.
Billionaires buy political elites, who appoint the World Bank and IMF officials tasked with instituting policies to freeze or reduce wages, slash corporate and public health care obligations and increase profits by privatizing public enterprises and facilitating corporate relocation to low wage, low tax countries.
As a result, wage and salary workers are less organized and less influential; they work longer and for less pay, suffer greater workplace insecurity and injuries – physical and mental – fall into decline and disability, drop out of the system, die earlier and poorer, and, in the process, provide unimaginable profits for the billionaire class . Even their addiction and deaths provide opportunities for huge profit – as the Sackler Family, manufacturers of Oxycontin, can attest.
The billionaires and their political acolytes argue that deeper regressive taxation would increase investments and jobs. The data speaks otherwise. The bulk of repatriated profits are directed to buy back stock to increase dividends for investors; they are not invested in the productive economy. Lower taxes and greater profits for conglomerates means more buy-outs and greater outflows to low wage countries. In real terms taxes are already less than half the headline rate and are a major factor heightening the concentration of income and power – both cause and effect.
Corporate elites, the billionaires in the Silicon Valley-Wall Street global complex are relatively satisfied that their cherished inequalities are guaranteed and expanding under the Demo-Republican Presidents- as the 'good times' roll on.
Away from the 'billionaire elite', the 'outsiders' – domestic capitalists – clamor for greater public investment in infrastructure to expand the domestic economy, lower taxes to increase profits, and state subsidies to increase the training of the labor force while reducing funds for health care and public education. They are oblivious to the contradiction.
In other words, the capitalist class as a whole, globalist and domestic alike, pursues the same regressive policies, promoting inequalities while struggling over shares of the profits. One hundred and fifty million wage and salaried taxpayers are excluded from the political and social decisions that directly affect their income, employment, rates of taxation, and political representation. They understand, or at least experience, how the class system works. Most workers know about the injustice of the fake 'free trade' agreements and regressive tax regime, which weighs heavy on the majority of wage and salary earners.
However, worker hostility and despair is directed against 'immigrants' and against the 'liberals' who have backed the import of cheap skilled and semi-skilled labor under the guise of 'freedom'. This 'politically correct' image of imported labor covers up a policy, which has served to lower wages, benefits and living standards for American workers, whether they are in technology, construction or production. Rich conservatives, on the other hand, oppose immigration under the guise of 'law and order' and to lower social expenditures – despite that fact that they all use imported nannies, tutors, nurses, doctors and gardeners to service their families. Their servants can always be deported when convenient.
The pro and anti-immigrant issue avoids the root cause for the economic exploitation and social degradation of the working class – the billionaire owners operating in alliance with the political elite.
In order to reverse the regressive tax practices and tax evasion, the low wage cycle and the spiraling death rates resulting from narcotics and other preventable causes, which profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical billionaires, class alliances need to be forged linking workers, consumers, pensioners, students, the disabled, the foreclosed homeowners, evicted tenants, debtors, the under-employed and immigrants as a unified political force.
Sooner said than done, but never tried! Everything and everyone is at stake: life, health and happiness.
conatus > , October 5, 2017 at 9:02 am GMTjacques sheete > , October 5, 2017 at 2:29 pm GMT
Ronald Reagan can be blamed for the excess of billionaires we now have. His lauding of the entrepreneurial spirit and how we are all brave individual risk takers makes it seem you are an envious chickensh$t if you advocate against unlimited assets.
But even Warren Buffet has come out for the estate tax saying something like now the Forbes 400 now possesses total assets of 2.5 trillion in a 20 trillion economy when 40 years ago they totaled in the millions. The legal rule against perpetuities generally used to limit trusts to a lifetime of 100 years, now some states offer 1000 year trusts which will only concretize an outlandishly high Gini coefficient(a measure of income inequality).
The rationale for lowering taxes and the untouchable rich is usually the trickle down theory but, as one of these billionaires said, "How many pairs of pants can I buy?" It takes 274 years spending 10,000 a day to spend a billion dollars.
Better Henry Ford's virtuous circle than Ronald Reagan's entrepreneur.
Ban all billionaires. Bring back the union label. Otherwise .. what do we have to lose?
http://nobillionairescom.dotster.com/advancedatheist > , October 5, 2017 at 2:53 pm GMT
@Wally "According to the US Internal Revenue Service, billionaire tax evasion amounts to $458 billion dollars in lost public revenues every year – almost a trillion dollars every two years by this conservative estimate."
No, it's $458 billion that the government has not managed to steal.
An income tax is the most degrading and totalitarian of all possible taxes. Its implementation wrongly suggests that the government owns the lives and labor of the citizens it is supposed to represent.
Tellingly, "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax" is Plank #2 of the Communist Manifesto, which was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848.
To provide funding for the federal government, Ron Paul supports excise taxes, non-protectionist tariffs, massive cuts in spending
"We could eliminate the income tax, replace it with nothing, and still fund the same level of big government we had in the late 1990s. We don't need to "replace" the income tax at all. I see a consumption tax as being a little better than the personal income tax, and I would vote for the Fair-Tax if it came up in the House of Representatives, but it is not my goal. We can do better."
No, it's $458 billion that the government has not managed to steal.
There was a time that I would have agreed with that, and technically still get the point, but what it really means is that the government merely allows the corporations which they favor, subsidize, and bail out to keep the chump change they've stolen from the workers, besides that which the government steals from the workers and hands to the corporations.
Corporations and government work hand in hand to fleece the herd and most of the herd apparently think it's just fine.
Never forget that thanks to government, corporations socialize risk while privatizing profit. They are partners in gangsterism.anonymous > , Disclaimer October 5, 2017 at 3:05 pm GMT
Private, exclusive clinics and top medical care include the most advanced treatment and safe and proven medication which allow billionaires and their family members to live longer and healthier lives.
Sorry, I don't buy the notion that billionaires have access to some super-healthcare that the rest of us don't know about. In the real world rich people notoriously waste a lot of money on quackery, like the current fad of receiving plasma transfusions from young people as a phony "anti-aging" treatment.
More likely the kinds of men who become billionaires just enjoy better health and longevity for genetic reasons. They tend to have higher IQ's, for example, and some scientists think that IQ correlates with "system integrity" in their bodies which just make higher IQ people more resilient. Look up the growing body of research on cognitive epidemiology.MarkinLA > , October 5, 2017 at 3:29 pm GMT
I'm disappointed there was no mention of the "Billionaires" use of social media. They've always controlled the press of course: startin' wars, hatin' on those guys, gettin' the blood up, jailin' the 'bad guys', preaching an empty delusion of social justice propaganda, payin' Ken Burns to propagandize and put a new coat of paint on the industrial scale killing of Vietnam. Probably just in time for more violence.
Let's face it, many of the workin' stiff will blow a hedge fund manager and kneel before the so-called free market corpse of Sam Walton but most importantly they'll grab their guns outa' patriotic fervor and social media will be right there with 'em. "I love Elon Musk!"
It's a great thing we're watched and datamined for our own good – information is how billionaires became billionaires along with a lot of help from the Government they usually encourage you to dislike. Keep posting!
Rich conservatives, on the other hand, oppose immigration under the guise of 'law and order' and to lower social expenditures – despite that fact that they all use imported nannies, tutors, nurses, doctors and gardeners to service their families. Their servants can always be deported when convenient.
BZZZZ – wrong. Rich conservative support massive immigration so they can get cheap labor while simutaneously virtue signaling. I thought you just got done sayiong they don't pay for the costs of the working poor? The middle class is who is against immigratioin. They bear the burden and pay the taxes that support it.
Oct 04, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com
But how "American" is the Brooks view, encapsulated in the sentence "The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity"? Brooks holds up the American territorial frontier as a hallmark of this ethos and of the American identity.
There are two problems with this. First, this conception of what it means to be American has propelled the nation into a lot of folly, heartache, and international treachery. Consider the implications of "founded on universal principles active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity." Almost word for word, that's what was said when the United States invaded Iraq, and how did that turn out? It unleashed a spate of instability and violence in that country that have generated more than 175,000 civilian deaths.
Secondly, Brooks' description of the essence of the American identity is false. His invocation of America's frontier -- as a proxy also for the country's "technological, scientific, social and human frontiers" -- misses a fundamental reality of the American story. America was in fact a tribal enterprise.
Brooks would have us believe that the United States began as a pristine crusader state on behalf of global democracy and internationalism, a "universal nation" devoted to "diverse hopefulness" as opposed to "fear-driven homogeneity." No, the people who ventured onto these shores and then pushed westward inexorably were highly conscious not only of their religious provenance but also of their cultural and ethnic heritage. They brutally pushed aside the aboriginal peoples, declined to mix with them, and created societies that mirrored those of the Old Country, even naming their towns and cities after those inhabited by their overseas ancestors.
As more and more people arrived from places removed from the English Motherland and other English-speaking regions (but almost entirely from Europe), those newcomers were abjured to accept the established Anglo-Saxon elite and bend to its mores and sensibilities. In return the elite gave the nation a relatively gentle and more or less disinterested stewardship based on a strong sense of national service inculcated at WASP prep schools and universities such as Yale and Harvard.
No one expressed more forcefully than Theodore Roosevelt this sentiment that newcomers must assimilate into prevailing American culture, for that culture had no intention of adjusting to the newcomers. "We freely extend the hand of welcome and good fellowship to every man," wrote Roosevelt, "no matter what his creed and birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us; but we have a right, and it is our duty, to demand that he shall indeed become so, and shall not confuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old-World quarrels and prejudices."
As late as the early postwar period, the elite represented by Roosevelt still dominated many of America's major national institutions -- the big banks, the media, the universities, the foreign policy apparatus. Extensive academic treatment has been given to the ways by which the waning Anglo-Saxon elite of America, still dominating foreign policy at the end of World War II, created the postwar global structure that maintained stability for decades throughout the world.
But there were frictions, of course, as new arrivals began to chafe under America's ancient elite, and most of it was tribal. When the Irish of Boston reached such numbers that they could upend the old WASP establishment of that city, it was tribal. When American Jews thrilled to the creation of Israel and sought to bend U.S. policy toward today's special relationship, it was tribal. Ethnic politics is tribal politics, and ethnic politics has become an ever more powerful force within the American polity.
Brooks is not wrong when he says that much of the Trump constituency is driven by tribal impulses. But he is wrong to say that these sensibilities are un-American and the result of bigotry. Tribalism is a part of the American story, and Brooks can't shame it away. That he wants to is encapsulated in this paragraph:
Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it's division -- between rich and poor, white and black, educated and less educated, right and left. Where there is division there are fences. Mobility is retarded and the frontier is destroyed. Trumpist populists want to widen the divisions and rearrange the fences. They want to turn us into an old, settled and fearful nation.
Aha, the true Brooks herein steps forward. It is the Trump constituency that is responsible for all the divisions between rich and poor, white and black, educated and less educated, right and left. He doesn't quite call these people deplorable, but he comes close. If they would just stand down and give up their tribal ways, we could get back to being the America of our past and our heritage -- a "universal nation" drawing unlimited immigrants to our shores in the service of a national mission to spread "democracy and dignity" around the world. Sounds like a return to George W. Bush.
This is policy folly based upon a myth of America. The divisions Brooks laments with such invidious intent won't vanish until the fears and concerns of Trump voters are addressed in ways that can alleviate, at least to some extent, those grievances. That's a reality that David Brooks, for all his clever locutions, can't wish away.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing executive, is editor of The American Conservative . His next book, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century , is due out from Simon & Schuster in November.
Oct 02, 2017 | www.theguardian.com
This month, millions of children returned to school. This year, an unprecedented number of them will learn to code.
Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American schools now offer coding classes – up from only 25% a few years ago. New York, with the largest public school system in the country, has pledged to offer computer science to all 1.1 million students by 2025. Los Angeles, with the second largest, plans to do the same by 2020. And Chicago, the fourth largest, has gone further, promising to make computer science a high school graduation requirement by 2018.
The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.
This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won't make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that's precisely the point.
At its root, the campaign for code education isn't about giving the next generation a shot at earning the salary of a Facebook engineer. It's about ensuring those salaries no longer exist, by creating a source of cheap labor for the tech industry.
As software mediates more of our lives, and the power of Silicon Valley grows, it's tempting to imagine that demand for developers is soaring. The media contributes to this impression by spotlighting the genuinely inspiring stories of those who have ascended the class ladder through code. You may have heard of Bit Source, a company in eastern Kentucky that retrains coalminers as coders. They've been featured by Wired , Forbes , FastCompany , The Guardian , NPR and NBC News , among others.
A former coalminer who becomes a successful developer deserves our respect and admiration. But the data suggests that relatively few will be able to follow their example. Our educational system has long been producing more programmers than the labor market can absorb. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the supply of American college graduates with computer science degrees is 50% greater than the number hired into the tech industry each year. For all the talk of a tech worker shortage, many qualified graduates simply can't find jobs.
More tellingly, wage levels in the tech industry have remained flat since the late 1990s. Adjusting for inflation, the average programmer earns about as much today as in 1998. If demand were soaring, you'd expect wages to rise sharply in response. Instead, salaries have stagnated.
Still, those salaries are stagnating at a fairly high level. The Department of Labor estimates that the median annual wage for computer and information technology occupations is $82,860 – more than twice the national average. And from the perspective of the people who own the tech industry, this presents a problem. High wages threaten profits. To maximize profitability, one must always be finding ways to pay workers less.
Tech executives have pursued this goal in a variety of ways. One is collusion – companies conspiring to prevent their employees from earning more by switching jobs. The prevalence of this practice in Silicon Valley triggered a justice department antitrust complaint in 2010, along with a class action suit that culminated in a $415m settlement . Another, more sophisticated method is importing large numbers of skilled guest workers from other countries through the H1-B visa program. These workers earn less than their American counterparts, and possess little bargaining power because they must remain employed to keep their status.
Guest workers and wage-fixing are useful tools for restraining labor costs. But nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers. And where better to develop this workforce than America's schools? It's no coincidence, then, that the campaign for code education is being orchestrated by the tech industry itself. Its primary instrument is Code.org, a nonprofit funded by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others . In 2016, the organization spent nearly $20m on training teachers, developing curricula, and lobbying policymakers.
Silicon Valley has been unusually successful in persuading our political class and much of the general public that its interests coincide with the interests of humanity as a whole. But tech is an industry like any other. It prioritizes its bottom line, and invests heavily in making public policy serve it. The five largest tech firms now spend twice as much as Wall Street on lobbying Washington – nearly $50m in 2016. The biggest spender, Google, also goes to considerable lengths to cultivate policy wonks favorable to its interests – and to discipline the ones who aren't.
Silicon Valley is not a uniquely benevolent force, nor a uniquely malevolent one. Rather, it's something more ordinary: a collection of capitalist firms committed to the pursuit of profit. And as every capitalist knows, markets are figments of politics. They are not naturally occurring phenomena, but elaborately crafted contraptions, sustained and structured by the state – which is why shaping public policy is so important. If tech works tirelessly to tilt markets in its favor, it's hardly alone. What distinguishes it is the amount of money it has at its disposal to do so.
Money isn't Silicon Valley's only advantage in its crusade to remake American education, however. It also enjoys a favorable ideological climate. Its basic message – that schools alone can fix big social problems – is one that politicians of both parties have been repeating for years. The far-fetched premise of neoliberal school reform is that education can mend our disintegrating social fabric. That if we teach students the right skills, we can solve poverty, inequality and stagnation. The school becomes an engine of economic transformation, catapulting young people from challenging circumstances into dignified, comfortable lives.
This argument is immensely pleasing to the technocratic mind. It suggests that our core economic malfunction is technical – a simple asymmetry. You have workers on one side and good jobs on the other, and all it takes is training to match them up. Indeed, every president since Bill Clinton has talked about training American workers to fill the "skills gap". But gradually, one mainstream economist after another has come to realize what most workers have known for years: the gap doesn't exist. Even Larry Summers has concluded it's a myth.
The problem isn't training. The problem is there aren't enough good jobs to be trained for . The solution is to make bad jobs better, by raising the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to form a union, and to create more good jobs by investing for growth. This involves forcing business to put money into things that actually grow the productive economy rather than shoveling profits out to shareholders. It also means increasing public investment, so that people can make a decent living doing socially necessary work like decarbonizing our energy system and restoring our decaying infrastructure.
Everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to code. Coding can be a rewarding, even pleasurable, experience, and it's useful for performing all sorts of tasks. More broadly, an understanding of how code works is critical for basic digital literacy – something that is swiftly becoming a requirement for informed citizenship in an increasingly technologized world.
But coding is not magic. It is a technical skill, akin to carpentry. Learning to build software does not make you any more immune to the forces of American capitalism than learning to build a house. Whether a coder or a carpenter, capital will do what it can to lower your wages, and enlist public institutions towards that end.
Silicon Valley has been extraordinarily adept at converting previously uncommodified portions of our common life into sources of profit. Our schools may prove an easy conquest by comparison.
See also:
- Forget Wall Street – Silicon Valley is the new political power in Washington
- Disruption's double standard: tech firms get rich but street vendors get fined
willyjack, 21 Sep 2017 16:56MrFumoFumo , 21 Sep 2017 14:54
"Everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to code. " OK, and that's what's being done. And that's what the article is bemoaning. What would be better: teach them how to change tires or groom pets? Or pick fruit? Amazingly condescending article.However, training lots of people to be coders won't automatically result in lots of people who can actually write good code. Nor will it give managers/recruiters the necessary skills to recognize which programmers are any good.
congenialAnimal -> alfredooo , 24 Sep 2017 09:57A valid rebuttal but could I offer another observation? Exposing large portions of the school population to coding is not going to magically turn them into coders. It may increase their basic understanding but that is a long way from being a software engineer.alfredooo -> racole , 24 Sep 2017 06:51
Just as children join art, drama or biology classes so they do not automatically become artists, actors or doctors. I would agree entirely that just being able to code is not going to guarantee the sort of income that might be aspired to. As with all things, it takes commitment, perseverance and dogged determination. I suppose ultimately it becomes the Gattaca argument.Fair enough, but, his central argument, that an overabundance of coders will drive wages in that sector down, is generally true, so in the future if you want your kids to go into a profession that will earn them 80k+ then being a "coder" is not the route to take. When coding is - like reading, writing, and arithmetic - just a basic skill, there's no guarantee having it will automatically translate into getting a "good" job.Wiretrip , 21 Sep 2017 14:14This article lumps everyone in computing into the 'coder' bin, without actually defining what 'coding' is. Yes there is a glut of people who can knock together a bit of HTML and JavaScript, but that is not really programming as such.Taylor Dotson -> youngsteveo , 21 Sep 2017 13:53
There are huge shortages of skilled developers however; people who can apply computer science and engineering in terms of analysis and design of software. These are the real skills for which relatively few people have a true aptitude.
The_Raven , 23 Sep 2017 15:45I'm an embedded software/firmware engineer. Every similar engineer I've ever met has had the same background - starting in electronics and drifting into embedded software writing in C and assembler. It's virtually impossible to do such software without an understanding of electronics. When it goes wrong you may need to get the test equipment out to scope the hardware to see if it's a hardware or software problem. Coming from a pure computing background just isn't going to get you a job in this type of work.waltdangerfield , 23 Sep 2017 14:42All schools teach drama and most kids don't end up becoming actors. You need to give all kids access to coding in order for some can go on to make a career out of it.TwoSugarsPlease , 23 Sep 2017 06:13Coding salaries will inevitably fall over time, but such skills give workers the option, once they discover that their income is no longer sustainable in the UK, of moving somewhere more affordable and working remotely.DiGiT81 -> nixnixnix , 23 Sep 2017 03:29Completely agree. Coding is a necessary life skill for 21st century but there are levels to every skill. From basic needs for an office job to advanced and specialised.nixnixnix , 23 Sep 2017 00:46Lots of people can code but very few of us ever get to the point of creating something new that has a loyal and enthusiastic user-base. Everyone should be able to code because it is or will be the basis of being able to create almost anything in the future. If you want to make a game in Unity, knowing how to code is really useful. If you want to work with large data-sets, you can't rely on Excel and so you need to be able to code (in R?). The use of code is becoming so pervasive that it is going to be like reading and writing.DolyGarcia -> Carl Christensen , 22 Sep 2017 19:24
All the science and engineering graduates I know can code but none of them have ever sold a stand-alone software. The argument made above is like saying that teaching everyone to write will drive down the wages of writers. Writing is useful for anyone and everyone but only a tiny fraction of people who can write, actually write novels or even newspaper columns.Immigrants have always a big advantage over locals, for any company, including tech companies: the government makes sure that they will stay in their place and never complain about low salaries or bad working conditions because, you know what? If the company sacks you, an immigrant may be forced to leave the country where they live because their visa expires, which is never going to happen with a local. Companies always have more leverage over immigrants. Given a choice between more and less exploitable workers, companies will choose the most exploitable ones.xxxFred -> Tomix Da Vomix , 22 Sep 2017 18:52
Which is something that Marx figured more than a century ago, and why he insisted that socialism had to be international, which led to the founding of the First International Socialist. If worker's fights didn't go across country boundaries, companies would just play people from one country against the other. Unfortunately, at some point in time socialists forgot this very important fact.SO what's wrong with having lots of people able to code? The only argument you seem to have is that it'll lower wages. So do you think that we should stop teaching writing skills so that journalists can be paid more? And no one os going to "force" kids into high-level abstract coding practices in kindergarten, fgs. But there is ample empirical proof that young children can learn basic principles. In fact the younger that children are exposed to anything, the better they can enhance their skills adn knowlege of it later in life, and computing concepts are no different.Tomix Da Vomix -> xxxFred , 22 Sep 2017 18:40You're completely missing the point. Kids are forced into the programming field (even STEM as a more general term), before they evolve their abstract reasoning. For that matter, you're not producing highly skilled people, but functional imbeciles and a decent labor that will eventually lower the wages.Carl Christensen -> xxxFred , 22 Sep 2017 16:49
Conspiracy theory? So Google, FB and others paying hundreds of millions of dollars for forming a cartel to lower the wages is not true? It sounds me that you're sounding more like a 1969 denier that Guardian is. Tech companies are not financing those incentives because they have a good soul. Their primary drive has always been money, otherwise they wouldn't sell your personal data to earn money.
But hey, you can always sleep peacefully when your kid becomes a coder. When he is 50, everyone will want to have a Cobol, Ada programmer with 25 years of experience when you can get 16 year old kid from a high school for 1/10 of a price. Go back to sleep...it's ridiculous because even out of a pool of computer science B.Sc. or M.Sc. grads - companies are only interested in the top 10%. Even the most mundane company with crappy IT jobs swears that they only hire "the best and the brightest."Carl Christensen , 22 Sep 2017 16:47It's basically a con-job by the big Silicon Valley companies offshoring as many US jobs as they can, or "inshoring" via exploitation of the H1B visa - so they can say "see, we don't have 'qualified' people in the US - maybe when these kids learn to program in a generation." As if American students haven't been coding for decades -- and saw their salaries plummet as the H1B visa and Indian offshore firms exploded......Declawed -> KDHughes , 22 Sep 2017 16:40Dude, stow the attitude. I've tested code from various entities, and seen every kind of crap peddled as gold.Declawed -> IanMcLzzz , 22 Sep 2017 15:35
But I've also seen a little 5-foot giggly lady with two kids, grumble a bit and save a $100,000 product by rewriting another coder's man-month of work in a few days, without any flaws or cracks. Almost nobody will ever know she did that. She's so far beyond my level it hurts.
And yes, the author knows nothing. He's genuinely crying wolf while knee-deep in amused wolves. The last time I was in San Jose, years ago , the room was already full of people with Indian surnames. If the problem was REALLY serious, a programmer from POLAND was called in.
If you think fighting for a violinist spot is hard, try fighting for it with every spare violinist in the world . I am training my Indian replacement to do my job right now . At least the public can appreciate a good violin. Can you appreciate Duff's device ?
So by all means, don't teach local kids how to think in a straight line, just in case they make a dent in the price of wages IN INDIA.... *sheesh*That's the best possible summarisation of this extremely dumb article. Bravo.Zach Dyer -> Mystik Al , 22 Sep 2017 15:18
For those who don't know how to think of coding, like the article author, here's a few analogies :
A computer is a box that replays frozen thoughts, quickly. That is all.
Coding is just the art of explaining. Anyone who can explain something patiently and clearly, can code. Anyone who can't, can't.
Making hardware is very much like growing produce while blind. Making software is very much like cooking that produce while blind.
Imagine looking after a room full of young eager obedient children who only do exactly, *exactly*, what you told them to do, but move around at the speed of light. Imagine having to try to keep them from smashing into each other or decapitating themselves on the corners of tables, tripping over toys and crashing into walls, etc, while you get them all to play games together.
The difference between a good coder and a bad coder is almost life and death. Imagine a broth prepared with ingredients from a dozen co-ordinating geniuses and one idiot, that you'll mass produce. The soup is always far worse for the idiot's additions. The more cooks you involve, the more chance your mass produced broth will taste bad.
People who hire coders, typically can't tell a good coder from a bad coder.Tech jobs will probably always be available long after your gone or until another mass extinction.edmundberk -> AmyInNH , 22 Sep 2017 14:59No you do it in your own time. If you're not prepared to put in long days IT is not for you in any case. It was ever thus, but more so now due to offshoring - rather than the rather obscure forces you seem to believe are important.WithoutPurpose -> freeandfair , 22 Sep 2017 13:21Bit more rhan that.peter nelson -> offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 12:44Sorry, offworldguy, but you're losing this one really badly. I'm a professional software engineer in my 60's and I know lots of non-professionals in my age range who write little programs, scripts and apps for fun. I know this because they often contact me for help or advice.xxxFred , 22 Sep 2017 12:18
So you've now been told by several people in this thread that ordinary people do code for fun or recreation. The fact that you don't know any probably says more about your network of friends and acquaintances than about the general population.This is one of the daftest articles I've come across in a long while.timrichardson -> offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 12:16
If it's possible that so many kids can be taught to code well enough so that wages come down, then that proves that the only reason we've been paying so much for development costs is the scarcity of people able to do it, not that it's intrinsically so hard that only a select few could anyway. In which case, there is no ethical argument for keeping the pools of skilled workers to some select group. Anyone able to do it should have an equal opportunity to do it.
What is the argument for not teaching coding (other than to artificially keep wages high)? Why not stop teaching the three R's, in order to boost white-collar wages in general?
Computing is an ever-increasingly intrinsic part of life, and people need to understand it at all levels. It is not just unfair, but tantamount to neglect, to fail to teach children all the skills they may require to cope as adults.
Having said that, I suspect that in another generation or two a good many lower-level coding jobs will be redundant anyway, with such code being automatically generated, and "coders" at this level will be little more than technicians setting various parameters. Even so, understanding the basics behind computing is a part of understanding the world they live in, and every child needs that.
Suggesting that teaching coding is some kind of conspiracy to force wages down is well, it makes the moon-landing conspiracy looks sensible by comparison.I think it is important to demystify advanced technology, I think that has importance in its own right.Plus, schools should expose kids to things which may spark their interest. Not everyone who does a science project goes on years later to get a PhD, but you'd think that it makes it more likely. Same as giving a kid some music lessons. There is a big difference between serious coding and the basic steps needed to automate a customer service team or a marketing program, but the people who have some mastery over automation will have an advantage in many jobs. Advanced machines are clearly going to be a huge part of our future. What should we do about it, if not teach kids how to understand these tools?rogerfederere -> William Payne , 22 Sep 2017 12:13tl;dr.Mystik Al , 22 Sep 2017 12:08As automation is about to put 40% of the workforce permanently out of work getting into to tech seems like a good idea!timrichardson , 22 Sep 2017 12:04This is like arguing that teaching kids to write is nothing more than a plot to flood the market for journalists. Teaching first aid and CPR does not make everyone a doctor.James Jones -> vimyvixen , 22 Sep 2017 11:41
Coding is an essential skill for many jobs already: 50 years ago, who would have thought you needed coders to make movies? Being a software engineer, a serious coder, is hard. IN fact, it takes more than technical coding to be a software engineer: you can learn to code in a week. Software Engineering is a four year degree, and even then you've just started a career. But depriving kids of some basic insights may mean they won't have the basic skills needed in the future, even for controlling their car and house. By all means, send you kids to a school that doesn't teach coding. I won't.Did you learn SNOBOL, or is Snowball a language I'm not familiar with? (Entirely possible, as an American I never would have known Extended Mercury Autocode existed we're it not for a random book acquisition at my home town library when I was a kid.)William Payne , 22 Sep 2017 11:17The tide that is transforming technology jobs from "white collar professional" into "blue collar industrial" is part of a larger global economic cycle.Vereto -> Wiretrip , 22 Sep 2017 11:17
Successful "growth" assets inevitably transmogrify into "value" and "income" assets as they progress through the economic cycle. The nature of their work transforms also. No longer focused on innovation; on disrupting old markets or forging new ones; their fundamental nature changes as they mature into optimising, cost reducing, process oriented and most importantly of all -- dividend paying -- organisations.
First, the market invests. And then, .... it squeezes.
Immature companies must invest in their team; must inspire them to be innovative so that they can take the creative risks required to create new things. This translates into high skills, high wages and "white collar" social status.
Mature, optimising companies on the other hand must necessarily avoid risks and seek variance-minimising predictability. They seek to control their human resources; to eliminate creativity; to to make the work procedural, impersonal and soulless. This translates into low skills, low wages and "blue collar" social status.
This is a fundamental part of the economic cycle; but it has been playing out on the global stage which has had the effect of hiding some of its' effects.
Over the past decades, technology knowledge and skills have flooded away from "high cost" countries and towards "best cost" countries at a historically significant rate. Possibly at the maximum rate that global infrastructure and regional skills pools can support. Much of this necessarily inhumane and brutal cost cutting and deskilling has therefore been hidden by the tide of outsourcing and offshoring. It is hard to see the nature of the jobs change when the jobs themselves are changing hands at the same time.
The ever tighter ratchet of dehumanising industrialisation; productivity and efficiency continues apace, however, and as our global system matures and evens out, we see the seeds of what we have sown sail home from over the sea.
Technology jobs in developed nations have been skewed towards "growth" activities since for the past several decades most "value" and "income" activities have been carried out in developing nations. Now, we may be seeing the early preparations for the diffusion of that skewed, uneven and unsustainable imbalance.
The good news is that "Growth" activities are not going to disappear from the world. They just may not be so geographically concentrated as they are today. Also, there is a significant and attention-worthy argument that the re-balancing of skills will result in a more flexible and performant global economy as organisations will better be able to shift a wider variety of work around the world to regions where local conditions (regulation, subsidy, union activity etc...) are supportive.
For the individuals concerned it isn't going to be pretty. And of course it is just another example of the race to the bottom that pits states and public sector purse-holders against one another to win the grace and favour of globally mobile employers.
As a power play move it has a sort of inhumanly psychotic inevitability to it which is quite awesome to observe.
I also find it ironic that the only way to tame the leviathan that is the global free-market industrial system might actually be effective global governance and international cooperation within a rules-based system.
Both "globalist" but not even slightly both the same thing.not just coders, it put even IT Ops guys into this bin. Basically good old - so you are working with computers sentence I used to hear a lot 10-15 years ago.Sangmin , 22 Sep 2017 11:15You can teach everyone how to code but it doesn't necessarily mean everyone will be able to work as one. We all learn math but that doesn't mean we're all mathematicians. We all know how to write but we're not all professional writers.Vereto -> Jared Hall , 22 Sep 2017 11:12
I have a graduate degree in CS and been to a coding bootcamp. Not everyone's brain is wired to become a successful coder. There is a particular way how coders think. Quality of a product will stand out based on these differences.Very hyperbolic is to assume that the profit in those companies is done by decreasing wages. In my company the profit is driven by ability to deliver products to the market. And that is limited by number of top people (not just any coder) you can have.KDHughes -> kcrane , 22 Sep 2017 11:06You realise that the arts are massively oversupplied and that most artists earn very little, if anything? Which is sort of like the situation the author is warning about. But hey, he knows nothing. Congratulations, though, on writing one of the most pretentious posts I've ever read on CIF.offworldguy -> Melissa Boone , 22 Sep 2017 10:21So you know kids, college age people and software developers who enjoy doing it in their leisure time? Do you know any middle aged mothers, fathers, grandparents who enjoy it and are not software developers?Bread Eater , 22 Sep 2017 10:02
Sorry, I don't see coding as a leisure pursuit that is going to take off beyond a very narrow demographic and if it becomes apparent (as I believe it will) that there is not going to be a huge increase in coding job opportunities then it will likely wither in schools too, perhaps replaced by music lessons.From their perspective yes. But there are a lot of opportunities in tech so it does benefit students looking for jobs.Melissa Boone -> jamesbro , 22 Sep 2017 10:00No, because software developer probably fail more often than they succeed. Building anything worthwhile is an iterative process. And it's not just the compiler but the other devs, oyur designer, your PM, all looking at your work.Melissa Boone -> peterainbow , 22 Sep 2017 09:57It's not shallow or lazy. I also work at a tech company and it's pretty common to do that across job fields. Even in HR marketing jobs, we hire students who can't point to an internship or other kind of experience in college, not simply grades.Vereto -> savingUK , 22 Sep 2017 09:50It will take ages, the issue of Indian programmers is in the education system and in "Yes boss" culture.Melissa Boone -> offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 09:50
But on the other hand most of Americans are just as bad as IndiansA lot of people do find it fun. I know many kids - high school and young college age - who code in the leisure time because they find it pleasurable to make small apps and video games. I myself enjoy it too. Your argument is like saying since you don't like to read books in your leisure time, nobody else must.Owlyrics -> CapTec , 22 Sep 2017 09:44
The point is your analogy isn't a good one - people who learn to code can not only enjoy it in their spare time just like music, but they can also use it to accomplish all kinds of basic things. I have a friend who's a software developer who has used code to program his Roomba to vacuum in a specific pattern and to play Candy Land with his daughter when they lost the spinner.Creativity could be added to your list. Anyone can push a button but only a few can invent a new one.Owlyrics -> Maclon , 22 Sep 2017 09:40
One company in the US (after it was taken over by a new owner) decided it was more profitable to import button pushers from off-shore, they lost 7 million customers (gamers) and had to employ more of the original American developers to maintain their high standard and profits.Masters is the new Bachelors.Maclon , 22 Sep 2017 09:22So similar to 500k a year people going to university ( UK) now when it used to be 60k people a year( 1980). There was never enough graduate jobs in 1980 so can't see where the sudden increase in need for graduates has come from.PaulDavisTheFirst -> Ethan Hawkins , 22 Sep 2017 09:17Julian Williams -> peter nelson , 22 Sep 2017 09:12
They aren't really crucial pieces of technology except for their popularity
It's early in the day for me, but this is the most ridiculous thing I've read so far, and I suspect it will be high up on the list by the end of the day.
There's no technology that is "crucial" unless it's involved in food, shelter or warmth. The rest has its "crucialness" decided by how widespread its use is, and in the case of those 3 languages, the answer is "very".
You (or I) might not like that very much, but that's how it is.My benchmark would be if the average new graduate in the discipline earns more or less than one of the "professions", Law, medicine, Economics etc. The short answer is that they don't. Indeed, in my experience of professions, many good senior SW developers, say in finance, are paid markedly less than the marketing manager, CTO etc. who are often non-technical.AmyInNH -> freeandfair , 22 Sep 2017 09:05
My benchmark is not "has a car, house etc." but what does 10, 15 20 years of experience in the area generate as a relative income to another profession, like being a GP or a corporate solicitor or a civil servant (which is usually the benchmark academics use for pay scaling). It is not to denigrate, just to say that markets don't always clear to a point where the most skilled are the highest paid.
I was also suggesting that even if you are not intending to work in the SW area, being able to translate your imagination into a program that reflects your ideas is a nice life skill.Your assumption has no basis in reality. In my experience, as soon as Clinton ramped up H1Bs, my employer would invite 6 same college/degree/curriculum in for interviews, 5 citizen, 1 foreign student and default offer to foreign student without asking interviewers a single question about the interview. Eventually, the skipped the farce of interviewing citizens all together. That was in 1997, and it's only gotten worse. Wall St's been pretty blunt lately. Openly admits replacing US workers for import labor, as it's the "easiest" way to "grow" the economy, even though they know they are ousting citizens from their jobs to do so.AmyInNH -> peter nelson , 22 Sep 2017 08:59"People who get Masters and PhD's in computer science" Feed western universities money, for degree programs that would otherwise not exist, due to lack of market demand. "someone has a Bachelor's in CS" As citizens, having the same college/same curriculum/same grades, as foreign grad. But as citizens, they have job market mobility, and therefore are shunned. "you can make something real and significant on your own" If someone else is paying your rent, food and student loans while you do so.Ethan Hawkins -> farabundovive , 22 Sep 2017 07:40While true, it's not the coders' fault. The managers and execs above them have intentionally created an environment where these things are secondary. What's primary is getting the stupid piece of garbage out the door for Q profit outlook. Ship it amd patch it.offworldguy -> millartant , 22 Sep 2017 07:38Do most people find it fun? I can code. I don't find it 'fun'. Thirty years ago as a young graduate I might have found it slightly fun but the 'fun' wears off pretty quick.Ethan Hawkins -> anticapitalist , 22 Sep 2017 07:35In my estimation PHP is an utter abomination. Python is just a little better but still very bad. Ruby is a little better but still not at all good.millartant -> Islingtonista , 22 Sep 2017 07:26
Languages like PHP, Python and JS are popular for banging out prototypes and disposable junk, but you greatly overestimate their importance. They aren't really crucial pieces of technology except for their popularity and while they won't disappear they won't age well at all. Basically they are big long-lived fads. Java is now over 20 years old and while Java 8 is not crucial, the JVM itself actually is crucial. It might last another 20 years or more. Look for more projects like Ceylon, Scala and Kotlin. We haven't found the next step forward yet, but it's getting more interesting, especially around type systems.
A strong developer will be able to code well in a half dozen languages and have fairly decent knowledge of a dozen others. For me it's been many years of: Z80, x86, C, C++, Java. Also know some Perl, LISP, ANTLR, Scala, JS, SQL, Pascal, others...You need a decent IDEmillartant -> offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 07:24Ethan Hawkins -> Wiretrip , 22 Sep 2017 07:12
One is hardly likely to 'do a bit of coding' in ones leisure time
Why not? The right problem is a fun and rewarding puzzle to solve. I spend a lot of my leisure time "doing a bit of coding"The worst of all are the academics (on average).Ethan Hawkins -> KatieL , 22 Sep 2017 07:09This makes people like me with 35 years of experience shipping products on deadlines up and down every stack (from device drivers and operating systems to programming languages, platforms and frameworks to web, distributed computing, clusters, big data and ML) so much more valuable. Been there, done that.Ethan Hawkins -> Taylor Dotson , 22 Sep 2017 07:01It's just not true. In SV there's this giant vacuum created by Apple, Google, FB, etc. Other good companies struggle to fill positions. I know from being on the hiring side at times.TheBananaBender -> peter nelson , 22 Sep 2017 07:00You don't work for a major outsourcer then like Serco, Atos, Agilisysoffworldguy -> LabMonkey , 22 Sep 2017 06:59Plenty of people? I don't know of a single person outside of my work which is teaming with programmers. Not a single friend, not my neighbours, not my wife or her extended family, not my parents. Plenty of people might do it but most people don't.Ethan Hawkins -> finalcentury , 22 Sep 2017 06:56Your ignorance of coding is showing. Coding IS creative.Ricardo111 -> peter nelson , 22 Sep 2017 06:56Agreed: by gifted I did not meant innate. It's more of a mix of having the interest, the persistence, the time, the opportunity and actually enjoying that kind of challenge.Ricardo111 -> eirsatz , 22 Sep 2017 06:50
While some of those things are to a large extent innate personality traits, others are not and you don't need max of all of them, you just need enough to drive you to explore that domain.
That said, somebody that goes into coding purelly for the money and does it for the money alone is extremely unlikelly to become an exceptional coder.I'm as senior as they get and have interviewed quite a lot of programmers for several positions, including for Technical Lead (in fact, to replace me) and so far my experience leads me to believe that people who don't have a knack for coding are much less likely to expose themselves to many different languages and techniques, and also are less experimentalist, thus being far less likely to have those moments of transcending merely being aware of the visible and obvious to discover the concerns and concepts behind what one does. Without those moments that open the door to the next Universe of concerns and implications, one cannot do state transitions such as Coder to Technical Designer or Technical Designer to Technical Architect.LabMonkey , 22 Sep 2017 06:50
Sure, you can get the title and do the things from the books, but you will not get WHY are those things supposed to work (and when they will not work) and thus cannot adjust to new conditions effectively and will be like a sailor that can't sail away from sight of the coast since he can't navigate.
All this gets reflected in many things that enhance productivity, from the early ability to quickly piece together solutions for a new problem out of past solutions for different problems to, later, conceiving software architecture designs fittted to the typical usage pattern in the industry for which the software is going to be made.From the way our IT department is going, needing millions of coders is not the future. It'll be a minority of developers at the top, and an army of low wage monkeys at the bottom who can troubleshoot from a script - until AI comes along that can code faster and more accurately.LabMonkey -> offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 06:46CapTec , 22 Sep 2017 06:29
One is hardly likely to 'do a bit of coding' in ones leisure time
Really? I've programmed a few simple videogames in my spare time. Plenty of people do.Interesting piece that's fundamentally flawed. I'm a software engineer myself. There is a reason a University education of a minimum of three years is the base line for a junior developer or 'coder'.offworldguy -> thecurio , 22 Sep 2017 06:19
Software engineering isn't just writing code. I would say 80% of my time is spent designing and structuring software before I even touch the code.
Explaining software engineering as a discipline at a high level to people who don't understand it is simple.
Most of us who learn to drive learn a few basics about the mechanics of a car. We know that brake pads need to be replaced, we know that fuel is pumped into an engine when we press the gas pedal. Most of us know how to change a bulb if it blows.
The vast majority of us wouldn't be able to replace a head gasket or clutch though. Just knowing the basics isn't enough to make you a mechanic.
Studying in school isn't enough to produce software engineers. Software engineering isn't just writing code, it's cross discipline. We also need to understand the science behind the computer, we need too understand logic, data structures, timings, how to manage memory, security, how databases work etc.
A few years of learning at school isn't nearly enough, a degree isn't enough on its own due to the dynamic and ever evolving nature of software engineering. Schools teach technology that is out of date and typically don't explain the science very well.
This is why most companies don't want new developers, they want people with experience and multiple skills.
Programming is becoming cool and people think that because of that it's easy to become a skilled developer. It isn't. It takes time and effort and most kids give up.
French was on the national curriculum when I was at school. Most people including me can't hold a conversation in French though.
Ultimately there is a SKILL shortage. And that's because skill takes a long time, successes and failures to acquire. Most people just give up.
This article is akin to saying 'schools are teaching basic health to reduce the wages of Doctors'. It didn't happen.There is a difference. When you teach people music you teach a skill that can be used for a lifetimes enjoyment. One might sit at a piano in later years and play. One is hardly likely to 'do a bit of coding' in ones leisure time.Alex Mackaness , 22 Sep 2017 06:08
The other thing is how good are people going to get at coding and how long will they retain the skill if not used? I tend to think maths is similar to coding and most adults have pretty terrible maths skills not venturing far beyond arithmetic. Not many remember how to solve a quadratic equation or even how to rearrange some algebra.
One more thing is we know that if we teach people music they will find a use for it, if only in their leisure time. We don't know that coding will be in any way useful because we don't know if there will be coding jobs in the future. AI might take over coding but we know that AI won't take over playing piano for pleasure.
If we want to teach logical thinking then I think maths has always done this and we should make sure people are better at maths.Am I missing something here? Being able to code is a skill that is a useful addition to the skill armoury of a youngster entering the work place. Much like reading, writing, maths... Not only is it directly applicable and pervasive in our modern world, it is built upon logic.thecurio , 22 Sep 2017 05:56
The important point is that American schools are not ONLY teaching youngsters to code, and producing one dimensional robots... instead coding makes up one part of their overall skill set. Those who wish to develop their coding skills further certainly can choose to do so. Those who specialise elsewhere are more than likely to have found the skills they learnt whilst coding useful anyway.
I struggle to see how there is a hidden capitalist agenda here. I would argue learning the basics of coding is simply becoming seen as an integral part of the school curriculum.The word "coding" is shorthand for "computer programming" or "software development" and it masks the depth and range of skills that might be required, depending on the application.sbw7 -> ragingbull , 22 Sep 2017 05:44
This subtlety is lost, I think, on politicians and perhaps the general public. Asserting that teaching lots of people to code is a sneaky way to commodotise an industry might have some truth to it, but remember that commodotisation (or "sharing and re-use" as developers might call it) is nothing new. The creation of freely available and re-usable software components and APIs has driven innovation, and has put much power in the hands of developers who would not otherwise have the skill or time to tackle such projects.
There's nothing to fear from teaching more people to "code", just as there's nothing to fear from teaching more people to "play music". These skills simply represent points on a continuum.
There's room for everyone, from the kid on a kazoo all the way to Coltrane at the Village Vanguard.I taught CS. Out of around 100 graduates I'd say maybe 5 were reasonable software engineers. The rest would be fine in tech support or other associated trades, but not writing software. Its not just a set of trainable skills, its a set of attitudes and ways of perceiving and understanding that just aren't that common.offworldguy , 22 Sep 2017 05:02I can't understand the rush to teach coding in schools. First of all I don't think we are going to be a country of millions of coders and secondly if most people have the skills then coding is hardly going to be a well paid job. Thirdly you can learn coding from scratch after school like people of my generation did. You could argue that it is part of a well rounded education but then it is as important for your career as learning Shakespeare, knowing what an oxbow lake is or being able to do calculus: most jobs just won't need you to know.savingUK -> yannick95 , 22 Sep 2017 04:35While you roll on the floor laughing, these countries will slowly but surely get their act together. That is how they work. There are top quality coders over there and they will soon promoted into a position to organise the others.zii000 -> JohnFreidburg , 22 Sep 2017 04:04
You are probably too young to remember when people laughed at electronic products when they were made in Japan then Taiwan. History will repeat it's self.Yes it's ironic and no different here in the UK. Traditionally Labour was the party focused on dividing the economic pie more fairly, Tories on growing it for the benefit of all. It's now completely upside down with Tories paying lip service to the idea of pay rises but in reality supporting this deflationary race to the bottom, hammering down salaries and so shrinking discretionary spending power which forces price reductions to match and so more pressure on employers to cut costs ... ad infinitum.ID0193985 -> jamesbro , 22 Sep 2017 03:46
Labour now favour policies which would cause an expansion across the entire economy through pay rises and dramatically increased investment with perhaps more tolerance of inflation to achieve it.Not surprising if they're working for a company that is cold-calling people - which should be banned in my opinion. Call centres providing customer support are probably less abuse-heavy since the customer is trying to get something done.vimyvixen , 22 Sep 2017 02:04I taught myself to code in 1974. Fortran, COBOL were first. Over the years as a aerospace engineer I coded in numerous languages ranging from PLM, Snowball, Basic, and more assembly languages than I can recall, not to mention deep down in machine code on more architectures than most know even existed. Bottom line is that coding is easy. It doesn't take a genius to code, just another way of thinking. Consider all the bugs in the software available now. These "coders", not sufficiently trained need adult supervision by engineers who know what they are doing for computer systems that are important such as the electrical grid, nuclear weapons, and safety critical systems. If you want to program toy apps then code away, if you want to do something important learn engineering AND coding.Dwight Spencer , 22 Sep 2017 01:44Laughable. It takes only an above-average IQ to code. Today's coders are akin to the auto mechanics of the 1950s where practically every high school had auto shop instruction . . . nothing but a source of cheap labor for doing routine implementations of software systems using powerful code libraries built by REAL software engineers.sieteocho -> Islingtonista , 22 Sep 2017 01:19That's a bit like saying that calculus is more valuable than arithmetic, so why teach children arithmetic at all?JohnFreidburg -> Tommyward , 22 Sep 2017 01:15
Because without the arithmetic, you're not going to get up to the calculus.I disagree. Technology firms are just like other firms. Why then the collusion not to pay more to workers coming from other companies? To believe that they are anything else is naive. The author is correct. We need policies that actually grow the economy and not leaders who cave to what the CEOs want like Bill Clinton did. He brought NAFTA at the behest of CEOs and all it ended up doing was ripping apart the rust belt and ushering in Trump.Tommyward , 22 Sep 2017 00:53So the media always needs some bad guys to write about, and this month they seem to have it in for the tech industry. The article is BS. I interview a lot of people to join a large tech company, and I can guarantee you that we aren't trying to find cheaper labor, we're looking for the best talent.finalcentury , 22 Sep 2017 00:46
I know that lots of different jobs have been outsourced to low cost areas, but these days the top companies are instead looking for the top talent globally.
I see this article as a hit piece against Silicon Valley, and it doesn't fly in the face of the evidence.This has got to be the most cynical and idiotic social interest piece I have ever read in the Guardian. Once upon a time it was very helpful to learn carpentry and machining, but now, even if you are learning those, you will get a big and indispensable headstart if you have some logic and programming skills. The fact is, almost no matter what you do, you can apply logic and programming skills to give you an edge. Even journalists.hoplites99 , 22 Sep 2017 00:02Yup, rings true. I've been in hi tech for over 40 years and seen the changes. I was in Silicon Valley for 10 years on a startup. India is taking over, my current US company now has a majority Indian executive and is moving work to India. US politicians push coding to drive down wages to Indian levels.liberalquilt -> yannick95 , 21 Sep 2017 23:45
On the bright side I am old enough and established enough to quit tomorrow, its someone else's problem, but I still despise those who have sold us out, like the Clintons, the Bushes, the Googoids, the Zuckerboids.Sure markets existed before governments, but capitalism didn't, can't in fact. It needs the organs of state, the banking system, an education system, and an infrastructure.thegarlicfarmer -> canprof , 21 Sep 2017 23:36Then teach them other things but not coding! Here in Australia every child of school age has to learn coding. Now tell me that everyone of them will need it? Look beyond computers as coding will soon be automated just like every other job.Islingtonista , 21 Sep 2017 22:25If you have never coded then you will not appreciate how labour intensive it is. Coders effectively use line editors to type in, line by line, the instructions. And syntax is critical; add a comma when you meant a semicolon and the code doesn't work properly. Yeah, we use frameworks and libraries of already written subroutines, but, in the end, it is all about manually typing in the code.jamesbro -> peter nelson , 21 Sep 2017 21:31
Which is an expensive way of doing things (hence the attractions of 'off-shoring' the coding task to low cost economies in Asia).
And this is why teaching kids to code is a waste of time.
Already, AI based systems are addressing the task of interpreting high level design models and simply generating the required application.
One of the first uses templates and a smart chatbot to enable non-tech business people to build their websites. By describe in non-coding terms what they want, the chatbot is able to assemble the necessary components and make the requisite template amendments to build a working website.
Much cheaper than hiring expensive coders to type it all in manually.
It's early days yet, but coding may well be one of the big losers to AI automation along with all those back office clerical jobs.
Teaching kids how to think about design rather than how to code would be much more valuable.Thick-skinned? Just because you might get a few error messages from the compiler? Call centre workers have to put up with people telling them to fuck off eight hours a day.Joshua Ian Lee , 21 Sep 2017 21:03Spot on. Society will never need more than 1% of its people to code. We will need far more garbage men. There are only so many (relatively) good jobs to go around and its about competing to get them.canprof , 21 Sep 2017 20:53I'm a professor (not of computer science) and yet, I try to give my students a basic understanding of algorithms and logic, to spark an interest and encourage them towards programming. I have no skin in the game, except that I've seen unemployment first-hand, and want them to avoid it. The best chance most of them have is to learn to code.Evelita , 21 Sep 2017 14:35Educating youth does not drive wages down. It drives our economy up. China, India, and other countries are training youth in programming skills. Educating our youth means that they will be able to compete globally. This is the standard GOP stand that we don't need to educate our youth, but instead fantasize about high-paying manufacturing jobs miraculously coming back.cwblackwell , 21 Sep 2017 13:38
Many jobs, including new manufacturing jobs have an element of coding because they are automated. Other industries require coding skills to maintain web sites and keep computer systems running. Learning coding skills opens these doors.
Coding teaches logic, an essential thought process. Learning to code, like learning anything, increases the brains ability to adapt to new environments which is essential to our survival as a species. We must invest in educating our youth."Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers." This really looks like a straw man introducing a red herring. A skill can be extremely valuable for those who do not pursue it as a full time profession.DJJJJJC , 21 Sep 2017 14:23
The economy doesn't actually need that many more typists, pianists, mathematicians, athletes, dietitians. So, clearly, teaching typing, the piano, mathematics, physical education, and nutrition is a nefarious plot to drive down salaries in those professions. None of those skills could possibly enrich the lives or enhance the productivity of builders, lawyers, public officials, teachers, parents, or store managers.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the supply of American college graduates with computer science degrees is 50% greater than the number hired into the tech industry each year.
You're assuming that all those people are qualified to work in software because they have a piece of paper that says so, but that's not a valid assumption. The quality of computer science degree courses is generally poor, and most people aren't willing or able to teach themselves. Universities are motivated to award degrees anyway because if they only awarded degrees to students who are actually qualified then that would reflect very poorly on their quality of teaching.
A skills shortage doesn't mean that everyone who claims to have a skill gets hired and there are still some jobs left over that aren't being done. It means that employers are forced to hire people who are incompetent in order to fill all their positions. Many people who get jobs in programming can't really do it and do nothing but create work for everyone else. That's why most of the software you use every day doesn't work properly. That's why competent programmers' salaries are still high in spite of the apparently large number of "qualified" people who aren't employed as programmers.
Oct 01, 2017 | links.org.au
Most contemporary discussions of globalization, and especially of the impact of neoliberal economic policies, focus on the countries of the Global South (see, for example, Bond, 2005; Ellner and Hellinger, eds., 2003; a number of articles in Harris, ed., 2006; Klein, 2007; Monthly Review, 2007; and, among others, see Scipes, 1999, 2006b). Recent articles arguing that the globalization project has receded and might be taking different approaches (Bello, 2006; Thornton, 2007) have also focused on the Global South. What has been somewhat discussed (see Giroux, 2004; Piven, 2004; Aronowitz, 2005) but not systematically addressed, however, is what has been the impact of globalization and especially related neoliberal economic policies on working people in a northern country? [i]
This paper specifically addresses this question by looking at the impact of neoliberal economic policies on working people in the United States . Following Frances Fox Piven, "neoliberal economic policies" refers to the set of policies carried out, in the name of individualism and unfettered markets, for "the deregulation of corporations, and particularly of financial institutions; the rollback of public services and benefit programs; curbing labor unions; 'free trade' policies that would pry open foreign markets; and wherever possible the replacement of public programs with private markets" (Piven, 2007: 13).
The case of the United States is particularly useful to examine because its elites have projected themselves as "first among equals" of the globalization project ( Bello , 2006), and it is the place of the Global North where the neoliberal project has been pursued most resolutely and has advanced the farthest. In other words, the experiences of American workers illuminate the affects of the neoliberal project in the Global North to the greatest extent, and suggest what will happen to working people in other northern countries should they accept their respective government's adoption of such policies.
However, care must be taken as to how this is understood. While sociologically-focused textbooks (e.g., Aguirre and Baker, eds., 2008; Hurst, 2007) have joined together some of the most recent thinking on social inequality -- and have demonstrated that inequality not only exists but is increasing -- this has been generally presented in a national context; in this case, within the United States. And if they recognize that globalization is part of the reason for increasing inequality, it is generally included as one of a set of reasons.
This paper argues that we simply cannot understand what is happening unless we put developments within a global context: the United States effects, and is affected by, global processes. Thus, while some of the impacts can be understood on a national level, we cannot ask related questions as to causes -- or future consequences -- by confining our examination to a national level: we absolutely must approach this from a global perspective (see Nederveen Pieterse, 2004, 2008).
This also must be put in historical perspective as well, although the focus in this piece will be limited to the post-World War II world. Inequality within what is now the United States today did not -- obviously -- arise overnight. Unquestionably, it began at least 400 years ago in Jamestown -- with the terribly unequal and socially stratified society of England's colonial Virginia before Africans were brought to North America (see Fischer, 1989), much less after their arrival in 1619, before the Pilgrims. Yet, to understand the roots of development of contemporary social inequality in the US , we must understand the rise of " Europe " in relation to the rest of the world (see, among others, Rodney, 1972; Nederveen Pieterse, 1989). In short, again, we have to understand that the development of the United States has been and will always be a global project and, without recognizing that, we simply cannot begin to understand developments within the United States .
We also have to understand the multiple and changing forms of social stratification and resulting inequalities in this country. This paper prioritizes economic stratification, although is not limited to just the resulting inequalities. Nonetheless, it does not focus on racial, gender or any other type of social stratification. However, this paper is not written from the perspective that economic stratification is always the most important form of stratification, nor from the perspective that we can only understand other forms of stratification by understanding economic stratification: all that is being claimed herein is that economic stratification is one type of social stratification, arguably one of the most important types yet only one of several, and investigates the issue of economic stratification in the context of contemporary globalization and the neoliberal economic policies that have developed to address this phenomenon as it affects the United States.
Once this global-historical perspective is understood and after quickly suggesting in the "prologue" why the connection between neoliberal economic policies and the affects on working people in the United States has not been made usually, this paper focuses on several interrelated issues: (1) it reports the current economic situation for workers in the United States; (2) it provides a historical overview of US society since World War II; (3) it analyzes the results of US Government economic policies; and (4) it ties these issues together. From that, it comes to a conclusion about the affects of neoliberal economic policies on working people in the United States .
Prologue: Origins of neoliberal economic policies in the United States
As stated above, most of the attention directed toward understanding the impact of neoliberal economic policies on various countries has been confined to the countries of the Global South. However, these policies have been implemented in the United States as well. This arguably began in 1982, when the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, launched a vicious attack on inflation -- and caused the deepest US recession since the Great Depression of the late 1920s-1930s.
However, these neoliberal policies have been implemented in the US perhaps more subtly than in the Global South. This is said because, when trying to understand changes that continue to take place in the United States, these economic policies are hidden "under" the various and sundry "cultural wars" (around issues such as drugs, premarital sex, gun control, abortion, marriages for gays and lesbians) that have been taking place in this country and, thus, not made obvious: most Americans, and especially working people, are not aware of the changes detailed below. [ii]
However, it is believed that the implementation of these neoliberal economic policies and the cultural wars to divert public attention are part of a larger, conscious political program by the elites within this country that is intended to prevent re-emergence of the collective solidarity among the American people that we saw during the late 1960s-early 1970s (see Piven, 2004, 2007) -- of which the internal breakdown of discipline within the US military, in Vietnam and around the world, was arguably the most crucial (see Moser, 1996; Zeiger, 2006) -- that ultimately challenged, however inchoately, the very structure of the established social order, both internationally and in the United States itself. Thus, we see both Democratic and Republican Parties in agreement to maintain and expand the US Empire (in more neutral political science-ese, a "uni-polar world"), but the differences that emerge within each party and between each party are generally confined to how this can best be accomplished. While this paper focuses on the economic and social changes going on, it should be kept in mind that these changes did not "just happen": conscious political decisions have been made that produced social results (see Piven, 2004) that make the US experience -- at the center of a global social order based on an "advanced" capitalist economy -- qualitatively different from experiences in other more economically-developed countries.
So, what has been the impact of these policies on workers in the US?
1) The current situation for workers and growing economic inequality
Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times published a piece on September 4, 2006, writing about entry-level workers, young people who were just entering the job market. Mr. Greenhouse noted changes in the US economy; in fact, there have been substantial changes since early 2000, when the economy last created many jobs.
- Median incomes for families with one parent age 25-34 fell 5.9 per cent between 2000-2005. It had jumped 12 per cent during the late '90s. (The median annual income for these families today is $48,405.)
- Between 2000-2005, entry-level wages for male college graduates fell by 7.3 per cent (to $19.72/hr)
- Entry-level wages for female college graduates fell by 3.5 per cent (to $17.08)
- Entry-level wages for male high school graduates fell by 3.3 per cent (to $10.93)
- Entry-level wages for female high school graduates fell by 4.9 per cent (to $9.08)
Yet, the percentage drop in wages hides the growing gap between college and high school graduates. Today, on average, college grads earn 45 per cent more than high school graduates, where the gap had "only" been 23 per cent in 1979: the gap has doubled in 26 years (Greenhouse, 2006b).
A 2004 story in Business Week found that 24 per cent of all working Americans received wages below the poverty line ( Business Week , 2004). [iii] In January 2004, 23.5 million Americans received free food from food pantries. "The surge for food demand is fueled by several forces -- job losses, expired unemployment benefits, soaring health-care and housing costs, and the inability of many people to find jobs that match the income and benefits of the jobs they had." And 43 million people were living in low-income families with children (Jones, 2004).
A 2006 story in Business Week found that US job growth between 2001-2006 was really based on one industry: health care. Over this five-year period, the health-care sector has added 1.7 million jobs, while the rest of the private sector has been stagnant. Michael Mandel, the economics editor of the magazine, writes:
information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the greatest job-growth disappointments of all time. Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google and Yahoo!, businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semi-conductors, telecom, and the whole range of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. These businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear (Mandel, 2006: 56) .
In fact, "take away health-care hiring in the US, and quicker than you can say cardiac bypass, the US unemployment rate would be 1 to 2 percentage points higher" (Mandel, 2006: 57).
There has been extensive job loss in manufacturing. Over 3.4 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1998, and 2.9 million of them have been lost since 2001. Additionally, over 40,000 manufacturing firms have closed since 1999, and 90 per cent have been medium and large shops. In labor-import intensive industries, 25 per cent of laid-off workers remain unemployed after six months, two-thirds of them who do find new jobs earn less than on their old job, and one-quarter of those who find new jobs "suffer wage losses of more than 30 percent" (AFL-CIO, 2006a: 2).
The AFL-CIO details the US job loss by manufacturing sector in the 2001-05 period:
- Computer and electronics: 543,000 workers or 29.2 per cent
- Semiconductor and electronic components: 260,100 or 36.7 per cent
- Electrical equipment and appliances: 152,500 or 26 per cent
- Vehicle parts: 153,400 or 18.6 per cent
- Machinery: 289,400 or 19.9 per cent
- Fabricated metal products: 235,200 or 13.3 per cent
- Primary metals: 144,800 or 23.5 per cent
- Transportation equipment: 246,300 or 12.1 per cent
- Furniture products: 58,500 or 13.4 per cent
- Textile mills: 158,500 or 43.1 per cent
- Apparel 220,000 or 46.6 per cent
- Leather products: 24,700 or 38.3 per cent
- Printing: 159,300 or 19.9 per cent
- Paper products: 122,600 or 20.4 per cent
- Plastics and rubber products: 141,400 or 15 per cent
- Chemicals: 94,900 or 9.7 per cent
- Aerospace: 46,900 or 9.1 per cent
- Textiles and apparel declined by 870,000 jobs 1994-2006, a decline of 65.4 per cent (AFL-CIO, 2006a: 2).
As of the end of 2005, only 10.7 per cent of all US employment was in manufacturing -- down from 21.6 per cent at its height in 1979 -- in raw numbers, manufacturing employment totaled 19.426 million in 1979, 17.263 million in 2000, and 14.232 million in 2005. [iv] The number of production workers in this country at the end of 2005 was 9.378 million. [v] This was only slightly above the 9.306 million production workers in 1983, and was considerably below the 11.463 million as recently as 2000 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2006b). As one writer puts it, this is "the biggest long-term trend in the economy: the decline of manufacturing." He notes that employment in the durable goods (e.g., cars and cable TV boxes) category of manufacturing has declined from 19 per cent of all employment in 1965 to 8 per cent in 2005 (Altman, 2006). And at the end of 2006, only 11.7 per cent of all manufacturing workers were in unions (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007).
In addition, in 2004 and 2005, "the real hourly and weekly wages of US manufacturing workers have fallen 3 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively" (AFL-CIO, 2006a: 2).
The minimum wage level went unchanged for nine years: until recently when there was a small increase -- to $5.85 an hour on July 24, 2007 -- US minimum wage had remained at $5.15 an hour since September 1, 1997 . During that time, the cost of living rose 26 percent. After adjusting for inflation, this was the lowest level of the minimum wage since 1955. At the same time, the minimum wage was only 31 per cent of the average pay of non-supervisory workers in the private sector, which is the lowest share since World War II (Bernstein and Shapiro, 2006).
In addition to the drop in wages at all levels, fewer new workers get health care benefits with their jobs: [vi] in 2005, 64 per cent of all college grads got health coverage in entry-level jobs, where 71 per cent had gotten it in 2000 -- a 7 per cent drop in just five years. Over a longer term, we can see what has happened to high school grads: in 1979, two-thirds of all high school graduates got health care coverage in entry-level jobs, while only one-third do today (Greenhouse, 2006b). It must be kept in mind that only about 28 per cent of the US workforce are college graduates -- most of the work force only has a high school degree, although a growing percentage of them have some college, but not college degrees.
Because things have gotten so bad, many young adults have gotten discouraged and given up. The unemployment rate is 4.4 per cent for ages 25-34, but 8.2 per cent for workers 20-24. (Greenhouse, 2006b).
Yet things are actually worse than that. In the US , unemployment rates are artificially low. If a person gets laid off and gets unemployment benefits -- which fewer and fewer workers even get -- they get a check for six months. If they have not gotten a job by the end of six months -- and it is taking longer and longer to get a job -- and they have given up searching for work, then not only do they loose their unemployment benefits, but they are no longer counted as unemployed: one doesn't even count in the statistics!
A report from April 2004 provides details. According to the then-head of the US Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, "the average duration of unemployment increased from twelve weeks in September 2000 to twenty weeks in March [2004]" (quoted in Shapiro, 2004: 4). In March 2004, 354,000 jobs workers had exhausted their unemployment benefits, and were unable to get any additional federal unemployment assistance: Shapiro (2004: 1) notes, "In no other month on record, with data available back to 1971, have there been so many 'exhaustees'."
Additionally, although it's rarely reported, unemployment rates vary by racial grouping. No matter what the unemployment rate is, it really only reflects the rate of whites who are unemployed because about 78 per cent of the workforce is white. However, since 1954, the unemployment rate of African-Americans has always been more than twice that of whites, and Latinos are about 1 1/2 times that of whites. So, for example, if the overall rate is five percent, then it's at least ten per cent for African-Americans and 7.5 per cent for Latinos.
However, most of the developments presented above -- other than the racial affects of unemployment -- have been relatively recent. What about longer term? Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist who writes for The New York Times, pointed out these longer term affects: non-supervisory workers make less in real wages today (2006) than they made in 1973! So, after inflation is taken out, non-supervisory workers are making less today in real terms that their contemporaries made 33 years ago (Krugman, 2006b). Figures provided by Stephen Franklin -- obtained from the US Bureau of Statistics, and presented in 1982 dollars -- show that a production worker in January 1973 earned $9.08 an hour -- and $8.19 an hour in December 2005 (Franklin, 2006). Workers in 2005 also had less long-term job security, fewer benefits, less stable pensions (when they have them), and rising health care costs. [vii]
In short, the economic situation for "average Americans" is getting worse. A front-page story in the Chicago Tribune tells about a worker who six years ago was making $29 an hour, working at a nuclear power plant. He got laid off, and now makes $12.24 an hour, working on the bottom tier of a two-tiered unionized factory owned by Caterpillar, the multinational earth moving equipment producer, which is less than half of his old wages. The article pointed out, "Glued to a bare bones budget, he saved for weeks to buy a five-pack of $7 T-shirts" ( Franklin , 2006).
As Foster and Magdoff point out:
Except for a small rise in the late 1990s, real wages have been sluggish for decades. The typical (median-income) family has sought to compensate for this by increasing the number of jobs and working hours per household. Nevertheless, the real (inflation-adjusted) income of the typical household fell for five years in a row through 2004 (Foster and Magdoff, 2009: 28).
A report by Workers Independent News (WIN) stated that while a majority of metropolitan areas have regained the 2.6 million jobs lost during the first two years of the Bush Administration, "the new jobs on average pay $9,000 less than the jobs replaced," a 21 per cent decline from $43,629 to $34,378. However, WIN says that "99 out of the 361 metro areas will not recover jobs before 2007 and could be waiting until 2015 before they reach full recovery" (Russell, 2006).
At the same time, Americans are going deeper and deeper into debt. At the end of 2000, total US household debt was $7.008 trillion, with home mortgage debt being $4.811 trillion and non-mortgage debt $1.749 trillion; at the end of 2006, comparable numbers were a total of $12.817 trillion; $9.705 trillion (doubling since 2000); and $2.431 trillion (US Federal Reserve, 2007-rounding by author). Foster and Magdoff (2009: 29) show that this debt is not only increasing, but based on figures from the Federal Reserve, that debt as a percentage of disposable income has increased overall from 62% in 1975 to 96.8% in 2000, and to 127.2% in 2005.
Three polls from mid-2006 found "deep pessimism among American workers, with most saying that wages were not keeping pace with inflation, and that workers were worse off in many ways than a generation ago" (Greenhouse, 2006a). And, one might notice, nothing has been said about increasing gas prices, lower home values, etc. The economic situation for most working people is not looking pretty.
In fact, bankruptcy filings totaled 2.043 million in 2005, up 31.6 per cent from 2004 (Associated Press, 2006), before gas prices went through the ceiling and housing prices began falling in mid-2006. Yet in 1998, writers for the Chicago Tribune had written, " the number of personal bankruptcy filings skyrocketed 19.5 per cent last year, to an all-time high of 1,335,053, compared with 1,117,470 in 1996" (Schmeltzer and Gruber, 1998).
And at the same time, there were 37 million Americans in poverty in 2005, one of out every eight. Again, the rates vary by racial grouping: while 12.6 per cent of all Americans were in poverty, the poverty rate for whites was 8.3 percent; for African Americans, 24.9 per cent were in poverty, as were 21.8 per cent of all Latinos. (What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that 65 per cent of all people in poverty in the US are white.) And 17.6 per cent of all children were in poverty (US Census Bureau, 2005).
What about the "other half"? This time, Paul Krugman gives details from a report by two Northwestern University professors, Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, titled "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?" Krugman writes:
Between 1973 and 2001, the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 per cent per year. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint. Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year, the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The Center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year (Krugman, 2006a) .
But how can we understand what is going on? We need to put take a historical approach to understand the significance of the changes reported above.
(2) A historical look at the US social order since World War II
When considering the US situation, it makes most sense to look at "recent" US developments, those since World War II. Just after the War, in 1947, the US population was about six per cent of the world's total. Nonetheless, this six per cent produced about 48 per cent of all goods and services in the world! [viii] With Europe and Japan devastated, the US was the only industrialized economy that had not been laid waste. Everybody needed what the US produced -- and this country produced the goods, and sent them around the world.
At the same time, the US economy was not only the most productive, but the rise of the industrial union movement in the 1930s and '40s -- the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) -- meant that workers had some power to demand a share of the wealth produced. In 1946, just after the war, the US had the largest strike wave in its history: 116,000,000 production days were lost in early 1946, as industry-wide strikes in auto, steel, meat packing, and the electrical industry took place across the United States and Canada , along with smaller strikes in individual firms. Not only that, but there were general strikes that year in Oakland , California and Stamford , Connecticut . Workers had been held back during the war, but they demonstrated their power immediately thereafter (Lipsitz, 1994; Murolo and Chitty, 2001). Industry knew that if it wanted the production it could sell, it had to include unionized workers in on the deal.
It was this combination -- devastated economic markets around the world and great demand for goods and services, the world's most developed industrial economy, and a militant union movement -- that combined to create what is now known as the "great American middle class." [ix]
To understand the economic impact of these factors, changes in income distribution in US society must be examined. The best way to illuminate this is to assemble family data on income or wealth [x] -- income data is more available, so that will be used; arrange it from the smallest amount to the largest; and then to divide the population into fifths, or quintiles. In other words, arrange every family's annual income from the lowest to the highest, and divide the total number of family incomes into quintiles or by 20 percents (i.e., fifths). Then compare changes in the top incomes for each quintile. By doing so, one can then observe changes in income distribution over specified time periods.
The years between 1947 and 1973 are considered the "golden years" of the US society. [xi] The values are presented in 2005 dollars, so that means that inflation has been taken out: these are real dollar values, and that means these are valid comparisons.
Figure 1: US family income, in US dollars, growth and istribution, by quintile, 1947-1973 compared to 1973-2001, in 2005 dollars
Lowest 20%
Second 20 %
Third 20%
Fourth 20%
95 th Percentile [xii]
Difference (26 years) $11,386
Difference (28 years) $3,323
Source: US Commerce Department, Bureau of the Census (hereafter, US Census Bureau) at www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f01ar.html . All dollar values converted to 2005 dollars by US Census Bureau, removing inflation and comparing real values. Differences and percentages calculated by author. Percentages shown in both rows labeled "Difference" show the dollar difference as a percentage of the first year of the comparison.
Data for the first period, 1947-1973 -- the data above the grey line -- shows there was considerable real economic growth for each quintile . Over the 26-year period, there was approximately 100 per cent real economic growth for the incomes at the top of each quintile, which meant incomes doubled after inflation was removed; thus, there was significant economic growth in the society.
And importantly, this real economic growth was distributed fairly evenly . The data in the fourth line (in parentheses) is the percentage relationship between the difference between 1947-1973 real income when compared to the 1947 real income, with 100 per cent representing a doubling of real income: i.e., the difference for the bottom quintile between 1947 and 1973 was an increase of $11,386, which is 97 per cent more than $11,758 that the top of the quintile had in 1947. As can be seen, other quintiles also saw increases of roughly comparable amounts: in ascending order, 100 percent, 107 percent, 101 percent, and 91 percent. In other words, the rate of growth by quintile was very similar across all five quintiles of the population.
When looking at the figures for 1973-2001, something vastly different can be observed. This is the section below the grey line. What can be seen? First, economic growth has slowed considerably: the highest rate of growth for any quintile was that of 58 per cent for those who topped the fifth quintile, and this was far below the "lagger" of 91 per cent of the earlier period.
Second, of what growth there was, it was distributed extremely unequally . And the growth rates for those in lower quintiles were generally lower than for those above them: for the bottom quintile, their real income grew only 14 per cent over the 1973-2001 period; for the second quintile, 19 percent; for the third, 29 percent; for the fourth, 42 percent; and for the 80-95 percent, 58 percent: loosely speaking, the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer.
Why the change? I think two things in particular. First, as industrialized countries recovered from World War II, corporations based in these countries could again compete with those from the US -- first in their own home countries, and then through importing into the US , and then ultimately when they invested in the United States . Think of Toyota : they began importing into the US in the early 1970s, and with their investments here in the early '80s and forward, they now are the largest domestic US auto producer.
Second cause for the change has been the deterioration of the American labor movement: from 35.3 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce in unions in 1954, to only 12.0 per cent of all American workers in unions in 2006 -- and only 7.4 per cent of all private industry workers are unionized, which is less than in 1930!
This decline in unionization has a number of reasons. Part of this deterioration has been the result of government policies -- everything from the crushing of the air traffic controllers when they went on strike by the Reagan Administration in 1981, to reform of labor law, to reactionary appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees administration of labor law. Certainly a key government policy, signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, has been the North American Free Trade Act or NAFTA. One analyst came straight to the point:
Since [NAFTA] was signed in 1993, the rise in the US trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 US jobs. Most of these lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA's impact on the US economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers' collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits (Scott, 2003: 1).
These attacks by elected officials have been joined by the affects due to the restructuring of the economy. There has been a shift from manufacturing to services. However, within manufacturing, which has long been a union stronghold, there has been significant job loss: between July 2000 and January 2004, the US lost three million manufacturing jobs, or 17.5 percent, and 5.2 million since the historical peak in 1979, so that "Employment in manufacturing [in January 2004] was its lowest since July 1950" (CBO, 2004). This is due to both outsourcing labor-intensive production overseas and, more importantly, technological displacement as new technology has enabled greater production at higher quality with fewer workers in capital-intensive production (see Fisher, 2004). Others have blamed burgeoning trade deficits for the rise: " an increasing share of domestic demand for manufacturing output is satisfied by foreign rather than domestic producers" (Bivens, 2005). [xiii] Others have even attributed it to changes in consumer preferences (Schweitzer and Zaman, 2006). Whatever the reason, of the 50 states, only five (Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming) did not see any job loss in manufacturing between 1993-2003, yet 37 lost between 5.6 and 35.9 per cent of their manufacturing jobs during this period (Public Policy Institute, 2004).
However, part of the credit for deterioration of the labor movement must be given to the labor movement itself: the leadership has been simply unable to confront these changes and, at the same time, they have consistently worked against any independent action by rank-and-file members. [xiv]
However, it must be asked: are the changes in the economy presented herein merely statistical manipulations, or is this indicating something real?
This point can be illustrated another way: by using CAGR, the Compound Annual Growth Rate. This is a single number that is computed, based on compounded amounts, across a range of years, to come up with an average number to represent the rate of increase or decrease each year across the entire period. This looks pretty complex, but it is based on the same idea as compound interest used in our savings accounts: you put in $10 today and (this is obviously not a real example) because you get ten per cent interest, so you have $11 the next year. Well, the following year, interest is not computed off the original $10, but is computed on the $11. So, by the third year, from your $10, you now have $12.10. Etc. And this is what is meant by the Compound Annual Growth Rate: this is average compound growth by year across a designated period.
Based on the numbers presented above in Figure 1, the author calculated the Compound Annual Growth Rate by quintiles (Figure 2). The annual growth rate has been calculated for the first period, 1947-1973, the years known as the "golden years" of US society. What has happened since then? Compare results from the 1947-73 period to the annual growth rate across the second period, 1973-2001, again calculated by the author.
Figure 2: Annual percentage of family income growth, by quintile, 1947-1973 compared to 1973-2001
Population by quintiles
1973-2001 95th Percentile
Fourth quintile
Third quintile
Second quintile
Lowest quintile
Source: Calculated by author from gather provided by the US Census Bureau at www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f01ar.html .
What we can see here is that while everyone's income was growing at about the same rate in the first period -- between 2.51 and 2.84 per cent annually -- by the second period, not only had growth slowed down across the board, but it grew by very different rates: what we see here, again, is that the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer.
If these figures are correct, a change over time in the percentage of income received by each quintile should be observable. Ideally, if the society were egalitarian, each 20 per cent of the population would get 20 per cent of the income in any one year. In reality, it differs. To understand Figure 3, below, one must not only look at the percentage of income held by a quintile across the chart, comparing selected year by selected year, but one needs to look to see whether a quintile's share of income is moving toward or away from the ideal 20 percent.
Figure 3: Percentage of family income distribution by quintile, 1947, 1973, 2001.
Population by quintiles 1947 1973 2001
Top fifth (lower limit of top 5percent, or 95th Percentile)-- $184,500 [xv]
43.0% 41.1% 47.7% Second fifth--$103,100 23.1% 24.0% 22.9% Third fifth--$68,304 17.0% 17.5% 15.4% Fourth fifth--$45,021 11.9% 11.9% 9.7% Bottom fifth--$25,616 5.0% 5.5% 4.2%
Source: US Census Bureau at www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f02ar.html .
Unfortunately, much of the data available publicly ended in 2001. However, in the summer of 2007, after years of not releasing data any later than 2001, the Census Bureau released income data up to 2005. It allows us to examine what has taken place regarding family income inequality during the first four years of the Bush Administration.
Figure 4: US family income, in US dollars, growth and distribution, by quintile, 2001-2005, 2005 US dollars
Lowest 20%
Second 20%
Middle 20%
Fourth 20%
Lowest level of top 5%
(4 years)
Source: US Census Bureau at www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f01ar.html . (Over time, the Census Bureau refigures these amounts, so they have subsequently converted amounts to 2006 dollar values. These values are from their 2005 dollar values, and were calculated by the Census Bureau.) Differences and percentages calculated by author.
Thus, what we've seen under the first four years of the Bush Administration is that for at most Americans, their economic situation has worsened: not only has over all economic growth for any quintile slowed to a minuscule 1.94 per cent at the most, but that the bottom 80 per cent actually lost income; losing money (an absolute loss), rather than growing a little but falling further behind the top quintile (a relative loss). Further, the decrease across the bottom four quintiles has been suffered disproportionately by those in the lowest 40 per cent of the society.
This can perhaps be seen more clearly by examining CAGR rates by period.
We can now add the results of the 2001-2005 period share of income by quintile to our earlier chart:
Figure 5: Percentage of income growth per year by percentile, 1947-2005
Population by quintiles
Top 95 percentile
Fourth fifth
Third fifth
Second fifth
Bottom fifth
Source: Calculated by author from data gathered from the US Department of the Census www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f01ar.html .
As can be seen, the percentage of family income at each of the four bottom quintiles is less in 2005 than in 1947; the only place there has been improvement over this 58-year period is at the 95th percentile (and above).
Figure 6: Percentage of family income distribution by quintile, 1947, 1973, 2001, 2005.
Population by quintiles 1947 1973 2001 2005
Top fifth (lower limit of top 5percent, or 95th Percentile)-- $184,500
43.0% 41.1% 47.7% 48.1% Second fifth--$103,100 23.1% 24.0% 22.9% 22.9% Third fifth--$68,304 17.0% 17.5% 15.4% 15.3% Fourth fifth--$45,021 11.9% 11.9% 9.7% 9.6% Bottom fifth--$25,616 5.0% 5.5% 4.2% 4.0%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau at www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f02ar.html .
What has been presented so far, regarding changes in income distribution, has been at the group level; in this case, quintile by quintile. It is time now to see how this has affected the society overall.
Sociologists and economists use a number called the Gini index to measure inequality. Family income data has been used so far, and we will continue using it. A Gini index is fairly simple to use. It measures inequality in a society. A Gini index is generally reported in a range between 0.000 and 1.000, and is written in thousandths, just like a winning percentage mark: three digits after the decimal. And the higher the Gini score, the greater the inequality.
Looking at the Gini index, we can see two periods since 1947, when the US Government began computing the Gini index for the country. From 1947-1968, with yearly change greater or smaller, the trend is downward, indicating reduced inequality: from .376 in 1947 to .378 in 1950, but then downward to .348 in 1968. So, again, over the first period, the trend is downward.
What has happened since then? From the low point in 1968 of .348, the trend has been upward. In 1982, the Gini index hit .380, which was higher than any single year between 1947-1968, and the US has never gone below .380 since then. By 1992, it hit .403, and we've never gone back below .400. In 2001, the US hit .435. But the score for 2005 has only recently been published: .440 (source: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f04.html ). So, the trend is getting worse, and with the policies established under George W. Bush, I see them only continuing to increase in the forthcoming period. [And by the way, this increasing trend has continued under both the Republicans and the Democrats, but since the Republicans have controlled the presidency for 18 of the last 26 years (since 1981), they get most of the credit -- but let's not forget that the Democrats have controlled Congress across many of those years, so they, too, have been an equal opportunity destroyer!]
However, one more question must be asked: how does this income inequality in the US, compare to other countries around the world? Is the level of income inequality comparable to other "developed" societies, or is it comparable to "developing" countries?
We must turn to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for our data. The CIA computes Gini scores for family income on most of the countries around the world, and the last time checked in 2007 (August 1), they had data on 122 countries on their web page and these numbers had last been updated on July 19, 2007 (US Central Intelligence Agency, 2007). With each country listed, there is a Gini score provided. Now, the CIA doesn't compute Gini scores yearly, but they give the last year it was computed, so these are not exactly equivalent but they are suggestive enough to use. However, when they do assemble these Gini scores in one place, they list them alphabetically, which is not of much comparative use (US Central Intelligence Agency, 2007).
However, the World Bank categorizes countries, which means they can be compared within category and across categories. The World Bank, which does not provide Gini scores, puts 208 countries into one of four categories based on Gross National Income per capita -- that's total value of goods and services sold in the market in a year, divided by population size. This is a useful statistic, because it allows us to compare societies with economies of vastly different size: per capita income removes the size differences between countries.
The World Bank locates each country into one of four categories: lower income, lower middle income, upper middle income, and high income (World Bank, 2007a). Basically, those in the lower three categories are "developing" or what we used to call "third world" countries, while the high income countries are all of the so-called developed countries.
The countries listed by the CIA with their respective Gini scores were placed into the specific World Bank categories in which the World Bank had previously located them (World Bank, 2007b). Once grouped in their categories, median Gini scores were computed for each group. When trying to get one number to represent a group of numbers, median is considered more accurate than an average, so the median was used, which means half of the scores are higher, half are lower -- in other words, the data is at the 50th percentile for each category.
The Gini score for countries, by Gross National Income per capita, categorized by the World Bank:
Figure 7: Median Gini Scores by World Bank income categories (countries selected by US Central Intelligence Agency were placed in categories developed by the World Bank) and compared to 2004 US Gini score as calculated by US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Income category
Median Gini score
Gini score, US (2004)
Low income countries (less than $875/person/year)
Lower-middle income countries (between $876-3,465/person/year)
Upper-middle income countries (between $3,466-10,725/person/year
Upper-income countries (over $10,726/person/year
As can be seen, with the (CIA-calculated) Gini score of .450, the US family income is more unequal than the medians for each category, and is more unequal than some of the poorest countries on earth, such as Bangladesh (.318 -- calculated in 2000), Cambodia (.400, 2004 est.), Laos (.370-1997), Mozambique (.396, 1996-97), Uganda (.430-1999) and Vietnam (.361, 1998). This same finding also holds true using the more conservative Census Bureau-calculated Gini score of .440.
Thus, the US has not only become more unequal over the 35 years, as has been demonstrated above, but has attained a level of inequality that is much more comparable to those of developing countries in general and, in fact, is more unequal today than some of the poorest countries on Earth. There is nothing suggesting that this increasing inequality will lessen anytime soon. And since this increasing income inequality has taken place under the leadership of both major political parties, there is nothing on the horizon that suggests either will resolutely address this issue in the foreseeable future regardless of campaign promises made.
However, to move beyond discussion of whether President Obama is likely to address these and related issues, some consideration of governmental economic policies is required. Thus, he will be constrained by decisions made by previous administrations, as well as by the ideological blinders worn by those he has chosen to serve at the top levels of his administration.
3) Governmental economic policies
There are two key points that are especially important for our consideration: the US Budget and the US National Debt. They are similar, but different -- and consideration of each of them enhances understanding.
A) US budget. Every year, the US Government passes a budget, whereby governmental officials estimate beforehand how much money needs to be taken in to cover all expenses. If the government actually takes in more money than it spends, the budget is said to have a surplus; if it takes in less than it spends, the budget is said to be in deficit.
Since 1970, when Richard Nixon was President, the US budget has been in deficit every year except for the last four years under Clinton (1998-2001), where there was a surplus. But this surplus began declining under Clinton -- it was $236.2 billion in 2000, and only $128.2 billion in 2001, Clinton 's last budget. Under Bush, the US has gone drastically into deficit: -$157.8 billion in 2002; -$377.6 billion in 2003; -$412.7 billion in 2004; -$318.3 billion in 2005; and "only"-$248.2 billion in 2006 (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-78).
Now, that is just yearly surpluses and deficits. They get combined with all the other surpluses and deficits since the US became a country in 1789 to create to create a cumulative amount, what is called the National Debt.
B) US national debt. Between 1789 and1980 -- from Presidents Washington through Carter -- the accumulated US National Debt was $909 billion or, to put it another way, $.909 trillion. During Ronald Reagan's presidency (1981-89), the National Debt tripled, from $.9 trillion to $2.868 trillion. It has continued to rise. As of the end of 2006, 17 years later and after a four-year period of surpluses where the debt was somewhat reduced, National Debt (or Gross Federal Debt) was $8.451 trillion (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-78).
To put it into context: the US economy, the most productive in the world, had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $13.061 trillion in 2006, but the National Debt was $8.451 trillion -- 64.7 per cent of GDP -- and growing (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-1).
In April 2006, one investor reported that "the US Treasury has a hair under $8.4 trillion in outstanding debt. How much is that? He put it into this context: " if you deposited one million dollars into a bank account every day, starting 2006 years ago, that you would not even have ONE trillion dollars in that account" (Van Eeden, 2006).
Let's return to the budget deficit: like a family budget, when one spends more than one brings in, they can do basically one of three things: (a) they can cut spending; (b) they can increase taxes (or obviously a combination of the two); or (c) they can take what I call the "Wimpy" approach.
For those who might not know this, Wimpy was a cartoon character, a partner of "Popeye the Sailor," a Saturday morning cartoon that was played for over 30 years in the United States . Wimpy had a great love for hamburgers. And his approach to life was summed up in his rap: "I'll gladly give you two hamburgers on Tuesday, for a hamburger today."
What is argued is that the US Government has been taking what I call the Wimpy approach to its budgetary problems: it does not reduce spending, it does not raise taxes to pay for the increased expenditures -- in fact, President Bush has cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans [xvi] -- but instead it sells US Government securities, often known as Treasuries, to rich investors, private corporations or, increasingly, to other countries to cover the budget deficit. In a set number of years, the US Government agrees to pay off each bond -- and the difference between what the purchaser bought them for and the increased amount the US Government pays to redeem them is the cost of financing the Treasuries, a certain percentage of the total value. By buying US Treasuries, other countries have helped keep US interest rates low, helping to keep the US economy in as good of shape as it has been (thus, keeping the US market flourishing for them), while allowing the US Government not to have to confront its annual deficits. At the end of 2006, the total value of outstanding Treasuries -- to all investors, not just other countries -- was $8.507 trillion (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-87).
It turns out that at in December 2004, foreigners owned approximately 61 per cent of all outstanding US Treasuries. Of that, seven per cent was held by China ; these were valued at $223 billion (Gundzik, 2005).
The percentage of foreign and international investors' purchases of the total US public debt since 1996 has never been less than 17.7 percent, and it has reached a high of 25.08 per cent in September 2006. In September 2006, foreigners purchased $2.134 trillion of Treasuries; these were 25.08 per cent of all purchases, and 52.4 per cent of all privately-owned purchases (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-89). [xvii] Altogether, "the world now holds financial claims amounting to $3.5 trillion against the United States , or 26 per cent of our GDP" (Humpage and Shenk, 2007: 4).
Since the US Government continues to run deficits, because the Bush Administration has refused to address this problem, the United States has become dependent on other countries buying Treasuries. Like a junky on heroin, the US must get other investors (increasingly countries) to finance its budgetary deficits.
To keep the money flowing in, the US must keep interest rates high -- basically, interest rates are the price that must be paid to borrow money. Over the past year or so, the Federal Reserve has not raised interest rates, but prior to that, for 15 straight quarterly meetings, they did. And, as known, the higher the interest rate, the mostly costly it is to borrow money domestically, which means increasingly likelihood of recession -- if not worse. In other words, dependence on foreigners to finance the substantial US budget deficits means that the US must be prepared to raise interests rates which, at some point, will choke off domestic borrowing and consumption, throwing the US economy into recession. [xviii]
Yet this threat is not just to the United States -- according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is a threat to the global economy. A story about a then-recently issued report by the IMF begins, "With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy ." The report suggested that net financial obligations of the US to the rest of the world could equal 40 per cent of its total economy if nothing was done about it in a few years, "an unprecedented level of external debt for a larger industrial country" according to the report. What was perhaps even more shocking than what the report said was which institution said it: "The IMF has often been accused of being an adjunct of the United States , its largest shareholder" (Becker and Andrews, 2004).
Other analysts go further. After discussing the increasingly risky nature of global investing, and noting that "The investor managers of private equity funds and major banks have displaced national banks and international bodies such as the IMF," Gabriel Kolko (2007) quotes Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, on April 24, 2007: "a major financial crisis seemed imminent and that the global institutions that could forestall it, including the IMF, the World Bank and other mechanisms of the international financial architecture, were utterly inadequate." Kolko recognizes that things may not collapse immediately, and that analysts could be wrong, but still concludes, "the transformation of the global financial system will sooner or later lead to dire results" (Kolko, 2007: 5).
What might happen if investors decided to take their money out of US Treasuries and, say, invest in Euro-based bonds? The US would be in big trouble, would be forced to raise its interest rates even higher than it wants -- leading to possibly a severe recession -- and if investors really shifted their money, the US could be observably bankrupt; the curtain hiding the "little man" would be opened, and he would be observable to all.
Why would investors rather shift their investment money into Euro-bonds instead of US Treasuries? Well, obviously, one measure is the perceived strength of the US economy. To get a good idea of how solid a country's economy is, one looks at things such as budget deficits, but perhaps even more importantly balance of trade: how well is this economy doing in comparison with other countries?
The US international balance of trade is in the red and is worsening: -$717 billion in 2005. In 1991, it was -$31 billion. Since 1998, the US trade balance has set a new record for being in the hole every year, except during 2001, and then breaking the all time high the very next year! -$165 B in 1998; -$263 B in 1999; -$378 B in 2000; only -$362 B in 2001; -$421 B in 2002; -$494 B in 2003; -$617 B in 2004; and - $717 B in 2005 (Economic Report of the President, 2007: Table B-103). According to the Census Department, the balance of trade in 2006 was -$759 billion (US Census Bureau, 2007).
And the US current account balance, the broadest measure of a country's international financial situation -- which includes investment inside and outside the US in addition to balance of trade -- is even worse: it was -$805 B in 2005, or 6.4 per cent of national income. "The bottom line is that a current account deficit of this unparalleled magnitude is unsustainable and there is no hope of it being painlessly resolved through higher exports alone," according to one analyst (quoted in Swann, 2006). Scott notes that the current account deficit in 2006 was -$857 billion (Scott, 2007a: 8, fn. 1). "In effect, the United States is living beyond its means and selling off national assets to pay its bills" (Scott, 2007b: 1). [xix]
In addition, during mid-2007, there was a bursting of a domestic "housing bubble," which has threatened domestic economic well-being but that ultimately threatens the well-being of global financial markets. There had been a tremendous run-up in US housing values since 1995 -- with an increase of more than 70 per cent after adjusting for the rate of inflation -- and this had created "more than $8 trillion in housing wealth compared with a scenario in which house prices had continued to rise at the same rate of inflation," which they had done for over 100 years, between 1890 and 1995 (Baker, 2007: 8).
This led to a massive oversupply of housing, accompanied with falling house prices: according to Dean Baker, "the peak inventory of unsold new homes of 573,000 in July 2006 was more than 50 per cent higher than the previous peak of 377,000 in May of 1989" (Baker, 2007: 12-13). This caused massive problems in the sub-prime housing market -- estimates are that almost $2 trillion in sub-prime loans were made during 2005-06, and that about $325 billion of these loans will default, with more than 1 million people losing their homes (Liedtke, 2007) -- but these problems are not confined to the sub-prime loan category: because sub-prime and "Alt-A" mortgages (the category immediately above sub-prime) financed 40 per cent of the housing market in 2006, "it is almost inevitable that the problems will spill over into the rest of the market" (Baker, 2007: 15). And Business Week agrees: "Subprime woes have moved far beyond the mortgage industry." It notes that at least five hedge funds have gone out of business, corporate loans and junk bonds have been hurt, and the leveraged buyout market has been hurt (Goldstein and Henry, 2007).
David Leonhardt (2007) agrees with the continuing threat to the financial industry. Discussing "adjustable rate mortgages" -- where interest rates start out low, but reset to higher rates, resulting in higher mortgage payments to the borrower -- he points out that about $50 billion of mortgages will reset during October 2007, and that this amount of resetting will remain over $30 billion monthly through September 2008. "In all," he writes," the interest rates on about $1 trillion worth of mortgages or 12 per cent of the nation's total, will reset for the first time this year or next."
Why all of this is so important is because bankers have gotten incredibly "creative" in creating new mortgages, which they sell to home buyers. Then they bundle these obligations and sell to other financial institutions and which, in turn, create new securities (called derivatives) based on these questionable new mortgages. Yes, it is basically a legal ponzi scheme, but it requires the continuous selling and buying of these derivatives to keep working: in early August 2007, however, liquidity -- especially "financial instruments backed by home mortgages" -- dried up, as no one wanted to buy these instruments (Krugman, 2007). The US Federal Research and the European Central Bank felt it necessary to pump over $100 billion into the financial markets in mid-August 2007 to keep the international economy solvent (Norris, 2007).
So, economically, this country is in terrible shape -- with no solution in sight.
On top of this -- as if all of this is not bad enough -- the Bush Administration is asking for another $481.4 billion for the Pentagon's base budget, which it notes is "a 62 per cent increase over 2001." Further, the Administration seeks an additional $93.4 billion in supplemental funds for 2007 and another $141.7 billion for 2008 to help fund the "Global War on Terror" and US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (US Government, 2007). According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2006, the US "defense" spending was equivalent to 46 per cent of all military spending in the world, meaning that almost more money is provided for the US military in one year than is spent by the militaries of all the other countries in the world combined (SIPRI, 2007).
And SIPRI's accounting doesn't include the $500 billion spent so far, approximately, on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .
In short, not only have things gotten worse for American working people since 1973 -- and especially after 1982, with the imposition of neoliberal economic policies by institutions of the US Government -- but on-going Federal budget deficits, the escalating National Debt, the need to attract foreign money into US Treasuries, the financial market "meltdown" as well as the massive amounts of money being channeled to continue the Empire, all suggest that not only will intensifying social problems not be addressed, but will get worse for the foreseeable future.
4) Synopsis
This analysis provides an extensive look at the impact of neoliberal economic policies enacted in the United States on American working people. These neoliberal economic policies have been enacted as a conscious strategy by US corporate leaders and their governmental allies in both major political parties as a way to address intensifying globalization while seeking to maintain US dominance over the global political economy.
While it will be a while before anyone can determine success or failure overall of this elite strategy but, because of is global-historical perspective, sufficient evidence is already available to evaluate the affects of these policies on American working people. For the non-elites of this country, these policies have had a deleterious impact and they are getting worse. Employment data in manufacturing, worsening since 1979 but especially since 2000 (see Aronowitz, 2005), has been horrific -- and since this has been the traditional path for non-college educated workers to be able to support themselves and their families, and provide for their children, this data suggests social catastrophe for many -- see Rubin (1995), Barnes (2005), and Bageant (2007), and accounts in Finnegan (1998) and Lipper (2004) that support this -- because comparable jobs available to these workers are not being created. Thus, the problem is not just that people are losing previously stable, good-paying jobs -- as bad as that is -- but that there is nothing being created to replace these lost jobs, and there is not even a social safety net in many cases that can generally cushion the blow (see Wilson, 1996; Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane, eds., 2003).
Yet the impact of these social changes has not been limited to only blue-collar workers, although the impact has been arguably greatest upon them. The overall economic growth of the society has been so limited since 1973, and the results increasingly being unequally distributed since then, that the entire society is becoming more and more unequal: each of the four bottom quintiles -- the bottom 80 per cent of families -- has seen a decrease in the amount of family income available to each quintile between 2001-05. This not only increases inequality and resulting resentments -- including criminal behaviors -- but it also produces deleterious affects on individual and social health (Kawachi, Kennedy and Wilkinson, eds., 1999; Eitzen and Eitzen Smith, 2003). And, as shown above, this level of inequality is much more comparable internationally to "developing" countries rather than "developed" ones.
When this material is joined with material on the US budget, and especially the US National Debt, it is clear that these "problems" are not the product of individual failure, but of a social order that is increasingly unsustainable. While we have no idea of what it will take before the US economy will implode, all indications are that US elites are speeding up a run-away train of debt combined with job-destroying technology and off-shoring production, creating a worsening balance of trade with the rest of the world and a worsening current account, with an unstable housing market and intensifying militarism and an increasingly antagonistic foreign policy: it is like they are building a bridge over an abyss, with a train increasingly speeding up as it travels toward the bridge, and crucial indicators suggest that the bridge cannot be completed in time.
Whether the American public will notice and demand a radical change in time is not certain -- it will not be enough to simply slow the train down, but it must turn down an alternative track (see Albert, 2003; Woodin and Lucas, 2004; Starr, 2005) -- but it is almost certain that foreign investors will. Should they not be able to get the interest rates here available elsewhere in the "developed" parts of the world, investors will shift their investments, causing more damage to working people in the United States .
And when this economic-focused analysis is joined with an environmental one -- George Monbiot (2007) reports that the best science available argues that industrialized countries have to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 90 per cent by the year 2030 if we are to have a chance to stop global warming -- then it is clear that US society is facing a period of serious social instability.
5) Conclusion
This article has argued that the situation for working people in the United States, propelled by the general governmental adoption of neoliberal economic policies, is getting worse -- and there is no end in sight. The current situation and historical change have been presented and discussed. Further, an examination and analysis of directly relevant US economic policies have been presented, and there has been nothing in this analysis that suggests a radical, but necessary, change by US elected officials is in sight. In other words, working people in this country are in bad shape generally -- and it is worse for workers of color than for white workers -- and there is nothing within the established social order that suggests needed changes will be effected.
The neoliberal economic policies enacted by US corporate and government leaders has been a social disaster for increasing numbers of families in the United States .
Globalization for profit -- or what could be better claimed to be "globalization from above" -- and its resulting neoliberal economic policies have long-been recognized as being a disaster for most countries in the Global South. This study argues that this top-down globalization and the accompanying neoliberal economic policies has been a disaster for working people in northern countries as well, and most particularly in the United States .
The political implications from these findings remains to be seen. Surely, one argument is not only that another world is possible, but that it is essential.
© Kim Scipes, Ph.D.
[Kim Scipes is assistant professor of sociology , Purdue University, North Central, Westville , IN 46391. The author's web site is at http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes .This paper was given at the 2009 Annual Conference of the United Association for Labor Education at the National Labor College in Silver Spring , MD. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Kim Scipes' permission.]
* * *
Note to labor educators: This is a very different approach than you usually take. While presenting a "big picture," this does not suggest what you are doing is "wrong" or "bad." What it suggests, however, is that the traditional labor education approach is too limited: this suggests that your work is valuable but that you need to put it into a much larger context than is generally done, and that it is in the interaction between your work and this that we each can think out the ways to go forward. This is presented in the spirit of respect for the important work that each of you do on a daily basis.
Oct 01, 2017 | www.theguardian.com
Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. Thats significantly more than most adjuncts: a 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500. We take a kind of vow of poverty
Recent reports have revealed the extent of poverty among professors, but the issue is longstanding. Several years ago, it was thrust into the headlines in dramatic fashion when Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an adjunct professor of Romance languages in her 50s, revealed she was homeless and protested outside the New York state education department.
We take a kind of vow of poverty to continue practicing our profession, Debra Leigh Scott, who is working on a documentary about adjuncts , said in an email. We do it because we are dedicated to scholarship, to learning, to our students and to our disciplines.
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A quarter of part-time college academics are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs
Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, dont receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.
This is why adjuncts have been called the fast-food workers of the academic world : among labor experts adjuncting is defined as precarious employment, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career .
... ... ...If she were to lose her home her only hope, she says, would be government-subsidized housing.
Most of my colleagues are unjustifiably ashamed, she said. They take this personally, as if theyve failed, and Im always telling them, you havent failed, the system has failed you."A precarious situation
Even more desperate are those adjuncts in substandard living spaces who cannot afford to fix them. Mindy Percival, 61, a lecturer with a doctorate from Columbia, teaches history at a state college in Florida and, in her words, lives in a shack which is in the woods in middle of nowhere.
Oct 01, 2017 | www.jacobinmag.com
I've always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.
In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world -- Mozambique, Angola, China etc. -- but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.
Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency , the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.
So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, What to do?. The ruling class wasn't omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.BSR Can you talk a bit about the ideological and political fronts and the attacks on labor? DH The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell . He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgment at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.
The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did -- for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.
This process took a long time. I think now we've reached a point where you don't need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.
With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.
Instead they chose the other way -- to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.
At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change , deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.
It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.
I don't think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just intuitively said, We gotta crush labor, how do we do it? And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.
Sep 24, 2017 | hardware.slashdot.org
(wired.com) Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday September 23, 2017 @09:30PM from the looking-inside dept. Amazon aggressively recruited thousands of retirees living in mobile homes to migrate to Amazon's warehouses for seasonal work, according to a story shared by nightcats . Wired reports: From a hiring perspective, the RVers were a dream labor force. They showed up on demand and dispersed just before Christmas in what the company cheerfully called a "taillight parade." They asked for little in the way of benefits or protections . And though warehouse jobs were physically taxing -- not an obvious fit for older bodies -- recruiters came to see CamperForce workers' maturity as an asset. These were diligent, responsible employees. Their attendance rates were excellent. "We've had folks in their eighties who do a phenomenal job for us," noted Kelly Calmes, a CamperForce representative, in one online recruiting seminar... In a company presentation, one slide read, "Jeff Bezos has predicted that, by the year 2020, one out of every four workampers in the United States will have worked for Amazon." The article is adapted from a new book called " Nomadland ," which also describes seniors in mobile homes being recruited for sugar beet harvesting and jobs at an Iowa amusement park, as well as work as campground hsots at various national parks. Many of them "could no longer afford traditional housing," especially after the financial downturn of 2008. But at least they got to hear stories from their trainers at Amazon about the occasional "unruly" shelf-toting "Kiva" robot: They told us how one robot had tried to drag a worker's stepladder away. Occasionally, I was told, two Kivas -- each carrying a tower of merchandise -- collided like drunken European soccer fans bumping chests. And in April of that year, the Haslet fire department responded to an accident at the warehouse involving a can of "bear repellent" (basically industrial-grade pepper spray). According to fire department records, the can of repellent was run over by a Kiva and the warehouse had to be evacuated.
Sep 16, 2017 | it.slashdot.org
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 03, 2017 @07:30AM
dcblogs shared an interesting article from IEEE-USA's "Insight" newsletter: Millennials, which date from the 1980s to mid-2000s, are the largest generation. But what will happen to this generation's tech workers as they settle into middle age ?
Will the median age of tech firms rise as the Millennial generation grows older...? The median age range at Google, Facebook, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple and Adobe, is 29 to 31, according to a study last year by PayScale, which analyzes self-reported data...
Karen Panetta, the dean of graduate engineering education at Tufts University and the vice president of communications and public relations at the IEEE-USA, believes the outcome for tech will be Logan's Run -like, where age sets a career limit...
Tech firms want people with the current skills sets and those "without those skills will be pressured to leave or see minimal career progression," said Panetta... The idea that the tech industry may have an age bias is not scaring the new college grads away. "They see retirement so far off, so they are more interested in how to move up or onto new startup ventures or even business school," said Panetta.
"The reality sets in when they have families and companies downsize and it's not so easy to just pick up and go on to another company," she said. None of this may be a foregone conclusion.
Millennials may see the experience of today's older workers as a cautionary tale, and usher in cultural changes... David Kurtz, a labor relations partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, suggests tech firms should be sharing age-related date about their workforce, adding "The more of a focus you place on an issue the more attention it gets and the more likely that change can happen.
It's great to get the new hot shot who just graduated from college, but it's also important to have somebody with 40 years of experience who has seen all of the changes in the industry and can offer a different perspective."
Aug 24, 2017 | www.unz.com
The argument is that admitting academically unqualified blacks to elite schools is, at core, a policy to protect the racial peace and, as such, has nothing to do with racial justice, the putative benefits of diversity or any other standard justification. It is this peace- keeping function that explains why the entire establishment, from mega corporations to the military, endorses constitutionally iffy racial discrimination and why questioning diversity's benefits is the most grievous of all PC sins. Stated in cost-benefit terms, denying a few hundred (even a few thousand) high-SAT scoring Asians an Ivy League diploma and instead forcing them attend Penn State is a cheap price to pay for social peace.
This argument rests on an indisputable reality that nearly all societies contain distinct ethnic or religious groups who must be managed for the sake of collective peace. They typically lack the ability to economically compete, may embrace values that contravene the dominant ethos, or otherwise just refuse to assimilate. What makes management imperative is the possibility of violence either at an individual level, for example, randomly stabbing total strangers, or on a larger scale, riots and insurrections. Thus, in the grand scheme of modern America's potentially explosive race relations, academically accomplished Asians, most of whom are politically quiescent, are expendable, collateral damage in the battle to sustain a shaky status quo.
Examples of such to-be-managed groups abound. Recall our own tribulations with violent Indian tribes well into the 19 th century or what several European nations currently face with Muslims or today's civil war in Burma with the Karen People. Then there's Turkey's enduring conflict with the Kurds and long before the threat of Islamic terrorism, there were Basque separatists (the ETA ), and the Irish Republican Army . In the past 45 years, there have been more than 16,000 terror attacks in Western Europe according to the Global Terrorism Database . At a lower levels add the persistently criminal Gypsies who for 500 years have resisted all efforts to assimilate them. This listing is, of course, only a tiny sampling of distinct indigestible violence-prone groups.
The repertoire of remedies, successful and failed, is also extensive. Our native-American problem has, sad to say, been largely solved by the use of apartheid-like reservations and incapacitating a once war-like people with drugs and alcohol. Elsewhere generous self-rule has done the trick, for example, the Basques in Spain. A particularly effective traditional solution is to promote passivity by encouraging religious acceptance of one's lowly state.
Now to the question at hand: what is to be done regarding American blacks, a group notable for its penchant for violence whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs.
To appreciate the value of affirmative action recall the urban riots of the 1960s. They have almost been forgotten but their sheer number during that decade would shock those grown accustomed to today's relative tranquility. A sampling of cities with major riots includes Rochester, NY, New York City, Philadelphia, PA, Los Angeles, CA, Cleveland, OH, Newark, NJ, Detroit, MI, Chicago, IL, Washington, DC and several smaller cities.
The damage from these riots! "uprisings" or "rebellions" according to some!was immense. For example, the Detroit riot of 1967 lasted five days and quelling it required the intervention of the Michigan Army National Guard and both the 82 nd and 101 st Airborne divisions. When it finally ended, the death toll was 43, some 7200 were arrested and more than 2000 buildings destroyed. Alas, much of this devastation remains visible today and should be a reminder of what could happen absent a policy of cooling out black anger.
To correctly understand how racial preferences at elite colleges serves as a cost-effective solution to potential domestic violence, recall the quip by comedian Henny Youngman when asked "How's your wife?" He responded with, "Compared to what?" This logic reflects a hard truth: when confronting a sizable, potentially disruptive population unable or unwilling to assimilate, a perfect solution is beyond reach. Choices are only among the lesser of evils and, to repeat, under current conditions, race-driven affirmative action is conceivably the best of the worst. A hard-headed realist would draw a parallel with how big city merchants survive by paying off the police, building and food inspectors, and the Mafia. Racial preferences are just one more item on the cost-of-doing business list–the Danegeld .
In effect, racial preferences in elite higher education (and beneficiaries includes students, professors and the diversity-managing administrators) separates the top 10% measured in cognitive ability from their more violent down market racial compatriots. While this manufactured caste-like arrangement hardly guarantees racial peace (as the black-on-white crime rate, demonstrates) but it pretty much dampens the possibility of more collective, well-organized related upheavals, the types of disturbances that truly terrify the white establishment. Better to have the handsomely paid Cornel West pontificating about white racism at Princeton where he is a full professor than fulminating at some Ghetto street corner. This status driven divide just reflects human nature. Why would a black Yalie on Wall Street socialize with the bro's left behind in the Hood? This is the strategy of preventing a large-scale, organized rebellion by decapitating its potential leadership. Violence is now just Chicago or Baltimore-style gang-banger intra-racial mayhem or various lone-wolf criminal attacks on whites.
Co-optation is a staple in the political management repertoire. The Soviet Union adsorbed what they called the "leading edge" into the Party (anyone exceptionally accomplished, from chess grandmasters or world-class athletes) to widen the divide the dominant elite, i.e., the Party, and hoi polloi. Election systems can be organized to guarantee a modicum of power to a handful of potential disruptors and with this position comes ample material benefits (think Maxine Waters). Monarchies have similarly managed potential strife by bestowing honors and titles on commoners. It is no accident that many radicals are routinely accused of "selling out" by their former colleagues in arms. In most instances the accusation is true, and this is by design.
To appreciate the advantages of the racial preferences in higher education consider Henny's "compared to what"? part of his quip. Certainly what successfully worked for quelling potential Native American violence, e.g., forced assimilation in "Indian Schools" or confinement in pathology-breeding reservations, is now totally beyond the pale though, to be sure, some inner-cities dominated by public housing are increasingly coming to resemble pathology-inducing Indian reservations. Even less feasible is some legally mandated homeland of the types advocated by Black Muslims.
I haven't done the math but I would guess that the entire educational racial spoils system is far more cost effective than creating a garrison state or a DDR-like police state where thousands of black trouble-makers were quickly incarcerated. Perhaps affirmative action in general should be viewed as akin to a nuisance tax, probably less than 5% of our GDP.
To be sure, affirmative action at elite universities is only one of today's nostrums to quell potential large scale race-related violence. Other tactics include guaranteeing blacks elected offices, even if this requires turning a blind eye toward election fraud, and quickly surrendering to blacks who demand awards and honors on the basis of skin color. Perhaps a generous welfare system could be added to this keep-the-peace list. Nevertheless, when all added up, the costs would be far lowers than dealing with widespread 1960s style urban violence.
This peace-keeping aspect of affirmative action understood, perhaps we ought to view those smart Asians unfairly rejected from Ivy League schools as sacrificial lambs. Now, given all the billions that have been saved, maybe a totally free ride at lesser schools would be a small price to pay for their dissatisfaction (and they would also be academic stars at such schools). Of course this "Asian only" compensatory scholarship might be illegal under the color blind requirements of 1964 Civil Right Act, but fear not, devious admission officers will figure out a way around the law.
Carlton Meyer > , Website August 16, 2017 at 4:21 am GMTThomm > , August 16, 2017 at 4:56 am GMT
This 18 second video clip is a great real world summary:Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 5:03 am GMT
Interesting take. But risky because :
1) Asians will grow in power, and either force more fairness towards themselves, or return to Asia.
2) WN idiots happy about Asians returning to Asia fail to see that Asians will return only when they control enough of America to manage large parts of it from afar (like the tech industry).
3) 2-3 million top caliber white male Western Expats might just move to Asia, since they may like Asian women more, and want to be free of SJW idiocy. This is all it takes to fill the alleged gap Asia has in creativity, marketing, and sales expertise. Asia effectively decapitates the white West by taking in their best young men and giving them a great life in Asia.
4) America becomes like Brazil with all economic value colonized by Asians and the white expats in Asia with mixed-race children. White trashionalists left behind are swiftly exterminated by blacks, and white women mix with the blacks. America becomes a Brazil minus the fun culture, good weather, and attractive women.Diversity Heretic > , August 16, 2017 at 5:12 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer At first, I was surprised that they listened to him.
After a while, I realized that many negros are stupid enough to think that Hispanics and Asians would like to be in some anti-white alliance with blacks as a senior partner. In reality, they have an even lower opinion of blacks than whites do. US blacks have zero knowledge of the world outside America, so this reality just doesn't register with them.War for Blair Mountain > , August 16, 2017 at 5:26 am GMT
John Derbyshire has made similar arguments–racial preferences are the price for social peace. But, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, we're running out of white and Asian children to buffer black dysfunction and Asians are going to get less and less willing to be "sacrificial lambs" for a black underclass that they did nothing to create and that they despise.
There are other ways to control the black underclass. You can force the talented ones to remain in their community and provide what leadership they can. Black violence can be met with instant retributive counter-violence. (Prior to the 1960s most race riots were white on black.) Whites can enforce white norms on the black community, who will sort-of conform to them as best they are able.
Finally, Rudyard Kipling had a commentary on Danegeld. It applies to paying off dysfunctional domestic minorities just as much to invading enemies.
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"jim jones > , August 16, 2017 at 5:30 am GMT
Robert Weissberg
Could care less about your smart Asians The smart Asians are enthusiastivally voting Whitey into a racial minority on Nov 3 2020 They don't belong on Native Born White American Living and Breeding SpaceWally > , August 16, 2017 at 5:32 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer This 18 second video clip is a great real world summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHhy2Gk_xik You can just hears someone shouting at the end "Go back to Beijing"Bro Methylene > , August 16, 2017 at 5:34 am GMT
Once you give in, they will keep demanding more & more.
There's always a manufactured excuse.
It's time to say no.Priss Factor > , Website August 16, 2017 at 5:55 am GMT
Please stop trying to confuse Orientals with Indians and other subcontinentals. They are quite distinct.
This reminds me of the sinister (but largely successful) campaign to conflate San Francisco with "Silicon Valley." The two are separate in every way.Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 6:21 am GMT
Hell with those 'smart Asians'. They are among the biggest Proglob a-holes.
Asians have servile genes that seek approval from the power. They are status-freaks.
They make perfect collaborators with the Glob.
Under communism, they made the most conformist commies.
Under Japanese militarism, they made the most mindless military goons who did Nanking.
Under Khmer Rouge, they were biggest looney killers.
Under PC, they make such goody good PC dogs.
If the prevailing culture of US was patriotic and conservatives, Asians would try to conform to that, and that wouldn't be so bad.
But since the prevailing culture is PC, these yellow dogs are among the biggest homomaniacal PC tards.
Hell with them. Yellow dogs voted for Obama and Hillary in high numbers. They despise, hate, and feel contempt for white masses and working class. They are servitors of the empire as Darrell Hamamoto said. He's one of the few good guys.
Just look at that Francis Fukuyama, that slavish dog of Soros. He's so disgusting. And then, you got that brown Asian tard Fareed Zakaria. What a vile lowlife. And that fat Jeer Heet who ran from dirty browns shi ** ing all over the place outdoors to live with white people but bitches about 'white supremacy'. Well, the fact that he ran from his own kind to live with whites must mean his own choice prefers white folks. His immigration choice was 'white supremacism'. After all, he could have moved to black Africa. Why didn't he?
PS. The best way of Affirmative Action is to limit it only to American Indians and Blacks of slave ancestry. That's it.
Also, institutions should OPENLY ADMIT that they do indeed discriminate to better represent the broader population. Fair or not, honesty is a virtue. What is most galling about AA is the lies that says 'we are colorblind and meritocratic but ' No more buts. Yes, there is discrimination but to represent larger population. Okay, just be honest.Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 6:28 am GMT
@Bro Methylene
Please stop trying to confuse Orientals with Indians and other subcontinentals. They are quite distinct.
In their original countries they are, but in America they are almost identical in all ways except appearance and diet.
Plus, since SE Asia has always had influence from both, there is a smooth continuum in the US across all of these groups by the time the 2nd generation rolls around.helena > , August 16, 2017 at 6:33 am GMT
@War for Blair Mountain
They don't belong on Native Born White American Living and Breeding Space
Three things wrong with this sentence.
1) I don't think you know that Native Americans (i.e. Siberians) were here first.
2) I will bet anything that all 128 of your GGGGG-GPs are not English settlers who were here in 1776. You are probably some 2nd gen Polack or something who still worries that WASPs look down on you.
3) There is very high variance among whites, and white trashionalists are SOOOO far below the quality threshold of any moderately successful white that they can't claim to speak for all whites. White Trashionalists represent the waste matter that nature wants to purge (which is the process that enables exceptional whites to emerge on the other end of the scale). That is why white women are absolutely doing what nature wants, which is to cut off the White Trashionalists from reproduction. If you care about the white race, you should be glad that white women want nothing to do with you and allow you to complete you wastebasket role.
There.Priss Factor > , Website August 16, 2017 at 6:36 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer That's hilarious. Anti-ma should replace their flags with placards saying, "Hey, Hey, this is Library!" at all counter-anti-fa demos.jilles dykstra > , August 16, 2017 at 7:00 am GMT
Will this really keep the peace?
Obama was one of the beneficiaries of AA along with his wife and their kids. Did that prevent Baltimore and Chicago and etc from blowing up?
In a way, AA and Civil Rights made black communities more volatile. When blacks were more stringently segregated, even smart and sensible blacks lived among blacks and played some kind of 'role model'. They ran businesses and kept in close contact with black folks.
It's like white communities in small towns used to be much better when the George Baileys stayed in them or returned to them and ran things.
But as more and more George Bailies left for the big cities, small towns had fewer top notch role models and leaders and enterprisers. Also, the filth of pop culture and youth degeneracy via TV corrupted the dummies. And then, when globalism took away the industries, there were just people on opioids. At least old timers grew up with family and church. The new generation grew up on Idiocracy.
Anyway, AA will just taken more black talent from black community and mix them with whites, Asians, and etc. Will some of these blacks use their power and privilege to incite black mobs to violence? Some do go radical. But most will just get their goodies and forget the underclass except in some symbolic way. It's like Obama didn't do crap as 'community organizer'. He just stuck close to rich Jews in Hyde Park, and as president, he was serving globo-wars, Wall Street, and homos.
When he finally threw a bone at the blacks in his second term, it lit cities on fire.
Did the black underclass change for the better because they saw Obama as president? No. If anything, it just made them bolder as flashmobs. The way blacks saw it, a bunch of fa ** ogty wussy white people voted for a black guy created by a black man sexually conquering a white woman. They felt contempt for cucky whites, especially as rap culture and sports feature blacks as master race lording over whites. To most underclass blacks, the only culture they know is sports and rap and junk they see on TV. And they are told blacks are magical, sacred, badass, and cool. And whites are either 'evil' if they have any pride or cucky-wucky wussy if they are PC.
The Murrayian Coming-Apart of whites took place already with blacks before. And more AA that takes in smarter blacks will NOT make things better for black underclass. And MORE blacks in elite colleges will just lead to MORE anger issues, esp as they cannot keep up with other students.
Even so, I can understand the logic of trying to win over black cream of crop. Maybe if they are treated nice and feel 'included', they won't become rabble-rousers like Al Sharpton and act more like Obama. Obama's race-baiting with Ferguson was bad but could have been worse with someone like Sharpton.
The Power can try to control a people in two ways. Crush everyone OR give carrots to comprador elites so that sticks can be used on masses. Clinton did this. He brought over black elites, and they worked with him to lock up record number of Negroes to make cities safer. As Clinton was surrounded by Negroes and was called 'first black president' by Toni Morrison, many blacks didn't realize that he was really working to lock up lots of black thugs and restore order.
Smart overlords play divide-and-conquer by offering carrots to collaborator elites and using sticks on masses.
British Imperialists did that. Gandhi would likely have collaborated with Brits if not for the fact that he was called a 'wog' in South Africa and kicked off a train. Suddenly, he found himself as ONE with the poor and powerless 'wogs' in the station. He was made equal with his own kind.
Consider Jews in the 30s and even during WWII. Many Western European Jews became rich and privileged and felt special and put on airs. Many felt closer to gentile elites and felt contempt and disdain for many 'dirty' and 'low' Eastern European Jews. If Hitler had been cleverer and offered carrots to rich Jews, there's a good chance that many of them would have collaborated and worked with the Power to suppress or control lower Jews, esp. of Eastern European background.
But Hitler didn't class-discriminate among Jews. He went after ALL of them. Richest Jew, poorest Jew, it didn't matter. So, even many rich Jews were left destitute if not dead after WWII. And this wakened them up. They once had so much, but they found themselves with NOTHING. And as they made their way to Palestine with poor Eastern European Jewish survivors, they felt a strong sense of ethnic identity. Oppression and Tragedy were the great equalizer. Having lost everything, they found what it really means to be Jewish. WWII and Holocaust had a great traumatic equalizing effect on Jews, something they never forgot since the war, which is why very rich Jews try to do much for even poor Jews in Israel and which is why secular Jews feel a bond with funny-dressed Jewish of religious sects.
For this reason, it would be great for white identity if the New Power were to attack ALL whites and dispossess all of them. Suppose globalism went after not only Deplorables but Clintons, Bushes, Kaineses, Kerrys, Kennedys, and etc. Suppose all of them were dispossessed and humiliated and called 'honkers'. Then, like Gandhi at the train station, they would regain their white identity and identify with white hoi polloi who've lost so much to globalism. They would become leaders of white folks.
But as long as carrots are offered to the white elites, they go with Glob and dump on whites. They join with the GLOB to use sticks on white folks like in Charlottesville where sticks were literally used against patriots who were also demeaned as 'neo-nazis' when most of them weren't.
So, I'm wishing Ivy Leagues will have total NO WHITEY POLICY. It is when the whites elites feel rejected and humiliated by the Glob that they will return to the masses.
Consider current Vietnam. Because Glob offers them bribes and goodies, these Viet-cuck elites are selling their nation to the Glob and even allowing homo 'pride' parades.
White Genocide that attacks ALL whites will have a unifying effect on white elites and white masses. It is when gentiles targeted ALL Jews that all Jews, rich and poor, felt as one.
But the Glob is sneaky. Instead of going for White Genocide that targets top, middle, and bottom, it goes for White Democide while forgoing white aristocide. So, white elites or neo-aristocrats are rewarded with lots of goodies IF they go along like the Romneys, Clintons, Kaines, Bidens, and all those quisling weasels.Simon in London > , August 16, 2017 at 7:18 am GMT
" Now to the question at hand: what is to be done regarding American blacks, a group notable for its penchant for violence whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs. "
I read an article, making a learned impression, that on average USA blacks have a lower IQ.
I do suppose that IQ has a cultural component, nevertheless, those in western cultures with a lower IQ can be expected to have less economic success.
A black woman who did seem to understand all this was quoted in the article as that 'blacks should be compensated for this lower IQ'.
One can discuss this morally endless, but even if the principle was accepted, how is it executed, and where is the end ?
For example, people with less than average length are also less successful, are we going to compensate them too ?Kyle McKenna > , August 16, 2017 at 7:45 am GMT
"economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs"
It only stalled when the Great Society and the uplift programs started. According to The Bell Curve there was basically an instant collapse when LBJ started to wreaking his havoc. Go back to pre-1964 norms and no late-60s riots.Realist > , August 16, 2017 at 8:04 am GMT
We have sacrificed smart white students for three generations to keep the hebraic component around 30% at our highest-ranked colleges and universities, and no one (except the jewish Ron Unz himself) made so much as a peep. And as he copiously documented, whites have suffered far more discrimination than asians have. The difference is, whites are more brainwashed into accepting it.
I hope this doesn't need linking here, but wth
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/Tom Welsh > , August 16, 2017 at 9:11 am GMT
"Sacrificing Smart Asians to Keep the Racial Peace"
It is the sacrificing of smart white students that is the problem. Of all the races whites, on average are more innovative and ambitious.Tom Welsh > , August 16, 2017 at 9:16 am GMT
"The argument is that admitting academically unqualified blacks to elite schools is, at core, a policy to protect the racial peace "
In simpler language, appeasement.Tom Welsh > , August 16, 2017 at 9:24 am GMT
@War for Blair Mountain "They don't belong on Native Born White American Living and Breeding Space "
Your statement would be perfectly correct if it read, "White people of European origin don't belong on Native American Living and Breeding Space "
Yet there they are, in immense, pullulating numbers. And now they have the gall to complain that other people – some of whom resemble the few surviving Native Americans far more closely than Whites do – are coming to "their" continent.
Honestly, what is the world coming to when you spend centuries and millions of bullets, bottles of whisky and plague-ridden blankets getting rid of tens of millions of people so you can steal their land – and then more people like you come along and want to settle peaceably alongside you? That's downright un-American.
Maybe you'd be more comfortable if the Asian immigrants behaved more like the European settlers – with fire, sword, malnutrition and pestilence.Wizard of Oz > , August 16, 2017 at 9:27 am GMT
@Diversity Heretic The Kipling quote is stirring and thought-provoking (like most Kipling quotes). But it is not entirely correct.
Consider the kings of France in the 10th century, who were confronted by the apparently insoluble problem of periodic attacks by bands of vicious, warlike, and apparently irresistible Vikings. One king had the bright idea of buying the Northmen off by granting them a very large piece of land in the West of France – right where the invading ships used to start up the Seine towards Paris.
The Northmen settled there, became known as Normans, and held Normandy for the rest of the Middle Ages – in the process absolutely preventing any further attacks eastward towards Paris. The dukes of Normandy held it as a fief from the king, and thus did homage to him as his feudal subordinates.
They did conquer England, Sicily, and a few other places subsequently – but the key fact is that they left the tiny, feeble kingdom of France alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans#Settling_of_NormandyLogan > , August 16, 2017 at 9:45 am GMT
Ratioal cost benefit arguments could be applied much more widely to the benefit of America and other First World countries. If otherwise illegal drugs were legalised, whether to be prescribed by doctors or not, it would save enormous amounts of money on law enforcement and, subject to what I proffer next, incarceration.
What is the downside? The advocates of Prohibition weren't wrong about the connection of alcohol and lower productivity. That was then. If, say, 10 per cent of the population were now disqualified from the workforce what would it matter. The potential STEM wizards amongst them (not many) would mostly be nurtured so that it was only the underclass which life in a daze. And a law which made it an offence, effectively one for which the penalty was to be locked up or otherwise deprived of freedom to be a nuisance, to render oneself unfit to perform the expected duties of citizenship would have collateral benefits in locking up the right underclass males.Colleen Pater > , August 16, 2017 at 10:19 am GMT
@Bro Methylene "Orientals," east Asians, or just Asians in American parlance are indeed quite different from south Asians, called "Asians" in the UK,. These are quite different groups.
But the groups of east and south Asians include widely differing peoples. A Korean doesn't have much in common with a Malay, nor a Pathan with a Tamil. Probably not much more than either has in common with the other group or with white Americans.
That they "all look alike" to use does not really mean the do, it just means we aren't used to them.
Was recently watching an interesting Chinese movie and had enormous difficulty keeping the characters straight, because they did indeed all look alike to me. I wonder if Chinese people in China have similar trouble watching old American movies.Colleen Pater > , August 16, 2017 at 10:28 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer yeah and hispanics are natural conservatives. dont be a cuck once that slant is here long enough he will tumble to the game and get on the anti white bandwagon. and sure asians will eventually out jew the jews just what we need another overlord, only this one a huge percentage or world pop. .joeshittheragman > , Website August 16, 2017 at 11:12 am GMT
You know weisberg youre not fooling anyone here peddle that cuck crap elsewhere affirmative action leads to nothing but more affirmative action at this point everyone but white males gets it, and you my jew friend know this so selling it to sucker cucks as the cost of doing business is just more jew shenanigans. There is a much better solution to the problem peoples deport them back where they belong israel africa asia central america.Jake > , August 16, 2017 at 11:47 am GMT
This is all about nothing now. The only thing White people have to learn anymore is controlled breathing, good position, taking up trigger slack, letting the round go at exactly the right moment – one round, one hit.Astuteobservor II > , August 16, 2017 at 11:58 am GMT
When your child tosses a tantrum and tears up his bedroom, and you tell him his mean-spirited, selfish cousins caused it and then you reward him with a trip to Disneyland and extra allowance: then you guarantee more and worse tantrums.
That is what America and America's Liberals, the Elites, have done with blacks and violence.TG > , August 16, 2017 at 12:18 pm GMT
ha, there is another group that is preying on the asian group and it is omitted.Anonymouse > , August 16, 2017 at 12:58 pm GMT
A very interesting post. Really a unique perspective – who cares if it's not fair, if it is necessary to keep the peace?
I do however disagree with one of your points. " whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs."
I think you have missed the main event. Over the last half-century the elites of this nation have waged ruthless economic warfare AGAINST poor blacks in this country, to an extent that far dwarfs the benefits of affirmative action (for a typically small number of already privileged blacks).
Up through the 1960′s, blacks were starting to do not so bad. Yes they were in a lot of menial jobs, but many of these were unionized and the pay was pretty good. I mean, if nobody else wants to sweep your floors, and the only guy willing to do it i s black, well, he can ask for a decent deal.
Then our elites fired black workers en masse, replacing them with Mexican immigrants and outsourcing to low-wage countries. Blacks have had their legs cut off with a chainsaw, and the benefits of affirmative action (which nowadays mostly go to Mexicans etc.!) little more than a bandaid.
And before we are too hard on blacks, let me note that whites are also being swept up in the poverty of neoliberal globalization, and they too are starting to show social pathology.
Because in terms of keeping the social peace, there is one fundamental truth more important than all others: there must be some measure of broadly shared prosperity. Without it, even ethnically homogeneous and smart and hard working people like the Japanese or Chinese will tear themselves apart.Jake > , August 16, 2017 at 1:00 pm GMT
Not New York. Wife & I were living there then and Mayor Lindsay went to Harlem and NYC negroes did not riot after MLK Jr was assassinated.George Weinbaum > , August 16, 2017 at 1:04 pm GMT
Note that there is not a word in this article about what this does to the white working class and how it can be given something in return for allowing Elites to bribe blacks with trillions and trillions of dollars in goodies. Nor is there is there any indication that this process eventually will explode, with too many blacks demanding so much it cannot be paid.dearieme > , August 16, 2017 at 1:05 pm GMT
Was this written tongue in cheek?
Affirmative action will never end. The bribes will never end. The US made a mistake in the 1960s. We should have contained the riots then let the people in those areas sleep in the burned out rubble. Instead through poverty programs we rewarded bad black behavior.
By filling the Ivy League with blacks we create a new class of Cornell West's for white people to listen to. We enhance the "ethos" of these people.
Eventually, certainly in no more than 40 years, we will run out of sacrifices. What then when whites constitute only 40% of the American population? Look at South Africa today.
We have black college graduates with IQs in the 80s! They want to be listened to. After all, they're college graduates.
I do not believe you have found "a cost-effective solution to potential domestic violence".
You mix in this "top 10%" and they get greater acceptance by whites who are turned left in college.anonymous > , Disclaimer August 16, 2017 at 1:19 pm GMT
"The argument is that admitting academically unqualified blacks to elite schools is, at core, a policy to protect the racial peace "
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
"We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
"Though we know we should defeat you,
we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"Truth > , August 16, 2017 at 1:54 pm GMT
whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs.
The reality of this is become a huge stumbling block. In fact this group has actually been mostly regressing into violence and stupidity, going their own separate way as exemplified by their anti-social music which celebrates values repugnant to the majority. Look at the absurd level of shootings in cities like Chicago. That's not changing anytime soon. They're by far overrepresented in Special Ed, juvenile delinquency, prisons and all other indicators of dysfunction. Their talented tenth isn't very impressive as compared to whites or Asians. Their entire middle class is mostly an artificial creation of affirmative action. The point is that they can only be promoted so far based on their capability. The cost of the subsidy gets greater every year and at some point it'll become too heavy a burden and then it'll be crunch time. After the insanity of the Cultural Revolution the Chinese had to come to their senses. It's time to curtail our own version of it.You All Look Like Ants > , August 16, 2017 at 1:57 pm GMT
It really is terrible and unfair that an Asian needs to score so much higher than you white oppressors to get into the Ivy league
A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called "the Asian tax."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/affirmative-action-battle-has-a-new-focus-asian-americans.htmlhelena > , August 16, 2017 at 2:05 pm GMT
I think this is brilliant satire.
It is actually an argument that is logically sound. Doesn't mean that it's good or sensible or even workable over the long run.
It's just logically sound. It holds together if one accepts the not-crazy parts its made out of.
I don't believe it's meant to be taken literally, because both the beneficiaries and those who get screwed will grow in their resentment and the system would melt down.
New fields with the word "studies' in them would get added and everyone would know – deep down – why that is so, and Asians would continue to dominate the hard sciences, math and engineering.
Still, as satire, it's so close to the bone that it works beautifully.Rich > , August 16, 2017 at 2:08 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh "Yet there they are, in immense, pullulating numbers. And now they have the gall to complain that other people – some of whom resemble the few surviving Native Americans far more closely than Whites do – are coming to "their" continent."
Agree. The country should be returned to pre-1700 conditions and given over to anyone who wants it.Thorfinnsson > , August 16, 2017 at 2:12 pm GMT
@Anonymouse I guess one man's riot is another man's peaceful night. There was a bit of rioting in Brooklyn that night, businesses burned and looted, and a handful of businesses were looted in Harlem. There was a very heavy police presence with Mayor Lindsey that night and blacks were still very segregated in 1968, so I'd guess it was more that show of force that prevented the kind of riots we'd seen earlier and in other cities at that time. Still, there was looting and burning, so New York's blacks don't get off the hook. As a personal note. my older brother and his friends were attacked by a roving band of blacks that night in Queens, but managed to chase them out of our neighborhood.War for Blair Mountain > , August 16, 2017 at 2:18 pm GMT
The costs of BRA may be lower than the costs of 1960s urban riots, though an accurate accounting would be difficult as many costs are not easily tabulated.
Consider, for instance, the costs of excluding higher performing whites and Asians from elite universities. Does this result in permanently lower salaries from them as a result of greater difficulty in joining an elite career track?
What costs do affirmative action impose upon corporations, especially those with offices in metropolitan areas with a lot of blacks? FedEx is famously centralized in Memphis. What's the cost to me as a shipper in having to deal with sluggish black customer service personnel?
The blacks are 15% of the population, so I doubt "garrison state" costs would be terribly high. I am certain that segregation was cheaper than BRA is. The costs of segregation were overlooking some black talent (negligible) and duplication of certain facilities (I suspect this cost is lower than the cost of white flight).Jason Liu > , August 16, 2017 at 2:28 pm GMT
How did America ever manage to survive when there hardly any Chinese Hindus..Sihks .Koreans in OUR America?
Answer:Very well thank you!!!! ..America 1969=90 percent Native Born White American .places two Alpha Native Born White American Males on the Moon 10 more after this Who the F would be opposed to this?
Answer:Chinese "Americans" Korean "Americans" Hindu "Americans" .Sihk "Americans" .Pakistani "Americans"anarchyst > , August 16, 2017 at 3:01 pm GMT
There would still be racial peace if affirmative action was abolished. They'll bitch for a while, but they'll get used it and the dust will settle.
Side note: Affirmation action also disproportionately helps white women into college, and they're the largest group fueling radical leftist identity politics/feminism on campus. In other words, affirmative action is a large contributor to SJWism, the media-academia complex, and the resulting current political climate.bjondo > , August 16, 2017 at 3:15 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra The statement "blacks should be compensated for this lower IQ" is no different than the descendents of the so-called jewish "holocaust ™" being compensated in perpetuity by the German government. Now, there are calls by the jewish "holocaust ™" lobby to extend the financial compensation to children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these so-called "holocaust ™ survivors, stating the fake concept of "holocaust ™" transference" just another "holocaust ™" scam
Same thing.Poupon Marx > , August 16, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT
Smart means what?
More Monsanto, DuPont cancers and degraded foods.
New diseases from medical, biological, genetic research
More spying and censorship and stealing by Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, high IQ thieves.
All jobs overseas, domestic unemployment, endless wars, by the best and brightest.
Toxic pollution, mental pollution that dwarfs the back yard pollution of tires and old refrigs by "low IQ deplorables (white and black and brown".
Degraded, degrading entertainment and fake news to match fake histories by Phds.
Tech devices that are "wonderful" but life is actually better more meaningful without.jim jones > , August 16, 2017 at 3:28 pm GMT
[Blacks] "whose economic advancement over the last half-century has largely stalled despite tens of billions and countless government uplift programs." No, Professor, it is Trillions spend over the last 50 years and millions before that. Countless Whites and other non-Negroid people have had to step aside in education, military, government, private industry, to let the lesser person advance and leap frog the accepted virtue-merit path to advancement. AND IT STILL IS NOT ENOUGN FOR BLECKS.
The obvious solution is to separate into uni-racial/ethnic states. For Whites, this would include a separate autocephalous, independent state of Caucasians, Asians, and Hindu. This is the Proto-IndoEuropean Family, related by genes and languages.Rdm > , August 16, 2017 at 3:44 pm GMT
@Logan I have the same trouble with Korean movies, all the women look the same:Greg Bacon > , Website August 16, 2017 at 3:52 pm GMT
@Thomm Interesting take. But risky because :
1) Asians will grow in power, and either force more fairness towards themselves, or return to Asia.
2) WN idiots happy about Asians returning to Asia fail to see that Asians will return only when they control enough of America to manage large parts of it from afar (like the tech industry).
3) 2-3 million top caliber white male Western Expats might just move to Asia, since they may like Asian women more, and want to be free of SJW idiocy. This is all it takes to fill the alleged gap Asia has in creativity, marketing, and sales expertise. Asia effectively decapitates the white West by taking in their best young men and giving them a great life in Asia.
4) America becomes like Brazil...with all economic value colonized by Asians and the white expats in Asia with mixed-race children. White trashionalists left behind are swiftly exterminated by blacks, and white women mix with the blacks. America becomes a Brazil minus the fun culture, good weather, and attractive women. Could agree 1 and 2.
2-3 millions Top caliber White males moving to Asia?
haha, Top caliber White males (American) will stay in America, screw the rest WN, devour all the resources available, not only in America, but from the rest of the world.
This is a real White so-called Top caliber White males enjoying in Philippines.
You can see the typical features of White in Asia
1. Bald
2. Obese
3. Lanky
4. Gold watch
5. Cargo pants
6. Flip flop
You can't get away those Top caliber White males features in Asia.Abelard Lindsey > , August 16, 2017 at 3:58 pm GMT
I'm guessing the author would be screaming at the top of his lungs if it was Jewish students being told to go to some state university–instead of Harvard–since we have to make room for blacks.
BTW, your comment "..Recall our own tribulations with violent Indian tribes" needs clarification. Maybe the tribes got violent because of the 400 treaties Uncle Sam made with the various tribes, he honored NONEüeljang > , August 16, 2017 at 4:12 pm GMT
I would call it the Diversity Tax.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 4:14 pm GMT
@jim jones A great part of that is because, well, let's say that the place where those actresses have got their work done is the same.
Whites have much greater natural variations in hair and eye color, but skin color among East Asian individuals is more naturally variable (especially when the effect of tanning is considered), and their facial features and somatotypes are also more diverse in my opinion. For example, East Asian populations contain some individuals who have what the Japanese call futae mabuta "double eyelids" and some individuals who have what they call hitoe mabuta "single eyelids," whereas White populations contain only individuals who have "double eyelids." Whether such increased physical variability is positive or negative probably depends on one's viewpoint; in the case of that eyelid polymorphism, the variant that is found in Asians but not in Whites is generally considered neutral or even positive when it occurs in male individuals, but negative when it occurs in female individuals, so plastic surgeons must be overflowing with gratitude for the single eyelid gene.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 4:31 pm GMT
@Thorfinnsson The separate school facilities meant a major saving in the costs of school police and security guards, resource teachers, counselors buses and bus drivers, and layers and layers of administrators trying to administer the mess.
Separate schools were a lot cheaper in that the black teachers kept the lid on the violence with physical punishment and the White teachers and students had a civilized environment.
The old sunshine laws kept blacks out of White neighborhoods after dark which greatly reduced black on White crime. In the north, informal neighborhood watches kept black on White crime to a minimum until block by block the blacks conquered the cities.
George Wallace said segregation now, segregation forever. I say sterilization now, problem solved in 80 years.
Asians??? I went to college with the White WASP American young men who were recruited and went to work in Mountain View and Cupertino and the rest of Santa Clara county and invented Silicon Valley.
Not one was Asian or even Jewish. And they invented it and their sons couldn't even get into Stanford because their sons are White American men.
I think the worst thing about affirmative action is that government jobs are about the only well paid secure jobs that still stick to the 40 hour work week. Government is the largest employer in the country. And those jobs are "no Whites need apply".
BTW I read the Protocols years before the Internet. I had to make an appointment to go into a locked section of a research library. I had to show ID. It was brought to me and I had to sit where I could be seen to read it. I had to sign an agreement that I would not copy anything from the protocols.
And there it was, the fourth protocol.
"We shall see to it brothers, that we shall see to it that they appoint only the incompetent and unfit to their government positions. And thus we shall conquer them from within"Beckow > , August 16, 2017 at 4:44 pm GMT
@Thomm Actually, Europeans arrived 20, to 30,000 years ago from Europe and were wiped out by the later arriving Asians.nickels > , August 16, 2017 at 4:52 pm GMT
@Thomm Only 4) is remotely possible. And Brazilian women are not that attractive, they are nice looking on postcards, but quite dumpy and weird-looking in person. But that is a matter of personal taste.
The reason 1,2,3 are nonsensical is that geography and resources matter. Asia simply doesn't have them, it is not anywhere as attractive to live in as North America or Europe and never will be. It goes beyond geographic resources, everything from architecture, infrastructure, culture is simply worse in Asia and it would take hundreds of years to change that.
So why the constant 'go to Asia' or 'Asia is the future'? It might be a temporary escape for many desperate, self-hating, white Westerners, a place to safely worship as they give up on it all. Or it could be the endless family links with the Asian women. But that misreads that most of the Asian families are way to clear-headed to exchange what the are trying to escape for the nihilistic dreams of their white partners. They are the least likely to go to Asia, they know it instinctively, they know what they have been trying to escape.
It is possible that the West is on its last legs, and many places are probably gone for good. But Asia is not going to step up and replace it. It is actually much worse that that – we are heading for a dramatic downturn and a loss of comfort and civilization. Thank you Baby Boomers – you are the true end-of-liners of history.Alec Leamas (hard at work) > , August 16, 2017 at 5:04 pm GMT
Except that, of course, as with all forms of appeasement, it isn't working .Realist > , August 16, 2017 at 5:07 pm GMT
Bright and talented white kids from non-elite families stuck between the Scylla and Charybdis of Cram-Schooled Study-Asians with no seeming limit to their tolerance for tedium and 90 IQ entitled blacks is 2017 in a nutshell.Liberty Mike > , August 16, 2017 at 5:08 pm GMT
Weissberg is a nutless quisling. The proper way to handle blackmail is to stop it in it's tracks.
Peaceful demonstrations are fine, property destroying riots should be stopped by any means necessary. Blacks would soon stop their dumb shit actionsLiberty Mike > , August 16, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT
@George Weinbaum That there Cornell West is a learned fellow. I bet his vocabulary is bigger than that of GWB and DJT – combined.Jeff77450 > , August 16, 2017 at 5:17 pm GMT
@Truth That study was slanted.MEFOBILLS > , Website August 16, 2017 at 5:34 pm GMT
Said in all seriousness: I genuinely feel sorry for blacks but not because of slavery & Jim Crow. Those were great evils but every group has gone through that. No, I feel sorry for them because their average IQ of 85–yes, it is–combined with their crass thug culture, which emphasizes & rewards all the wrong things, is going to keep them mired in dysfunction for decades to come. Men like Thomas Sowell & Walter Williams have all the information that blacks need to turn themselves around but they won't listen, I guess because the message is take responsibility for yourselves and your families and refuse to accept charity in all its different forms to include AA.
"Thomas Sowell vs Affirmative Action's failures" (~13 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkye3vlG0QAstuteobservor II > , August 16, 2017 at 5:41 pm GMT
From the author:
some legally mandated homeland of the types advocated by Black Muslims.
Why not pay people to leave? A law change would convert the money supply from bank money to sovereign money.
AMI's HR2990 would convert the money supply overnight, and nobody would be the wiser.
At that point, new public money could be channeled into funding people to leave. Blacks that don't like it in the U.S. would be given X amount of dollars to settle in an African country of their choice. This public money can be formed as debt free, and could also be directed such that it can only buy American goods. In other words, it can be forced to channel, to then stimulate the American economy.
In this way, the future works, to then get rid of disruptive future elements.
It always boils down to the money system. There is plenty of economic surplus to then fund the removal of indigestible elements.
People automatically assume that the money supply must be private bank credit, as that is the way it always has been. NO IT HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY.
http://www.sovereignmoney.euRdm > , August 16, 2017 at 5:48 pm GMT
@Alden source please, that I would like to read. something new.segundo > , August 16, 2017 at 6:34 pm GMT
@helena If Whites leave America and go back to their origin, no one, I repeat, NO ONE would complain about that. They'd be singing "God Riddance" song all along.
No one wants to migrate to Ukraine, a white country.
No one wants to migrate to Hungary, a white country.
No one wants to migrate to Austria, a white country.
Everyone wants to migrate to the place where there's an over-bloated sense of job availability. In this case, America offers an ample amount of opportunity.
Let's wait and see how universities in CA populated with merit-based Asian Americans overrule all universities in the US anytime soon.
Name any state in the US that produces more than two universities (in the Top 50 list) in the world.
No state can compete against CA. You wonder why?Diversity Heretic > , August 16, 2017 at 7:01 pm GMT
Are you utterly oblivious to the fact that well over 95% of the blacks getting AAed into universities are then being trained/indoctrinated into being future disruptive activists? Activists with credentials, more money and connections. Entirely counterproductive and much of it on the taxpayers' dime. If there is a solution, AA isn't it.David > , August 16, 2017 at 7:05 pm GMT
@Rdm Can I count you in on the Calexit movement–followed by the purge of whites? Freed from the burden of those miserable European-origin Americans, the Asian-Negro-Mestizo marvel will be a shining light to the rest of the world!Alec Leamas (hard at work) > , August 16, 2017 at 7:20 pm GMT
I waited to make this comment until the serious thinkers had been here. Did anyone notice the dame in the picture is giving us the finger? I did a little experiment to see if my hand could assume that position inadvertently and it couldn't. It aptly illustrates the article, either way.The Realist > , Website August 16, 2017 at 8:18 pm GMT
Name any state in the US that produces more than two universities (in the Top 50 list) in the world.
No state can compete against CA. You wonder why?
If you took the land mass of CA and imposed it on the U.S. East Coast between Boston and South Carolina, I don't think it'd be a problem to surpass California in any Top 50 University competition.
I'm not sure what your point is here.Mis(ter)Anthrope > , August 16, 2017 at 8:23 pm GMT
Here's a simpler and more effective solution-KILL ALL NIGGERS NOW. See, not so difficult, was it? Consider it a Phoenix Program for the American Problem. Actually, here's another idea-KILL ALL LIBERALS NOW. That way, good conservative people of different races, sexes, etc., can be saved from the otherwise necessary carnage. Remember, gun control is being able to hit your target.Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 8:23 pm GMT
The affirmative action game may well serve the interests of the cognitive elite whites, but it has been a disaster for the rest of white America. I have a better solution.
Give the feral negroes what they have been asking for. Pull all law enforcement out of negro hellholes like Detroit and South Chicago and let nature take its course.
Send all Asians and other foreigners who not already citizens back to their homelands. End all immigration except very special cases like the whites being slaughtered in South Africa or the spouse of a white American male citizen.Wally > , Website August 16, 2017 at 8:31 pm GMT
@Rdm I am not referring to guys like in the picture.
I am referring to the very topmost career stars, moving to Asia for the expat life. Some of that is happening, and it could accelerate. Only 2-3 million are needed.Liberty Mike > , August 16, 2017 at 8:31 pm GMT
@Kyle McKenna " And as he copiously documented, whites have suffered far more discrimination than asians have. The difference is, whites are more brainwashed into accepting it. "
And that's the function of the fraudulent, impossible '6M Jews, 5M others, gas chambers'.[MORE]
"The historical mission of our world revolution is to rearrange a new culture of humanity to replace the previous social system. This conversion and re-organization of global society requires two essential steps: firstly, the destruction of the old established order, secondly, design and imposition of the new order. The first stage requires elimination of all frontier borders, nationhood and culture, public policy ethical barriers and social definitions, only then can the destroyed old system elements be replaced by the imposed system elements of our new order.
The first task of our world revolution is Destruction. All social strata and social formations created by traditional society must be annihilated, individual men and women must be uprooted from their ancestral environment, torn out of their native milieus, no tradition of any type shall be permitted to remain as sacrosanct, traditional social norms must only be viewed as a disease to be eradicated, the ruling dictum of the new order is; nothing is good so everything must be criticized and abolished, everything that was, must be gone."
from: 'The Spirit Of Militarism', by Nahum Goldmann
Goldmann was the founder & president of the World Jewish Congress
see the 'holocaust' scam debunked here:
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.comMis(ter)Anthrope > , August 16, 2017 at 8:32 pm GMT
@Rdm Almost all white people would rather migrate to Austria, Hungary, and the Ukraine than the following citadels of civilization:
Central African Republic
Equatorial Guinea
South Africa
You know what? I bet most blacks would as well.Wally > , August 16, 2017 at 8:40 pm GMT
@Liberty Mike I don't know if anyone else got it, but that is pretty damn funny.Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 8:57 pm GMT
@Rdm - 45% of California is Federal land.
- Without US taxpayers money CA would be a 3rd world country completely filled with unemployable & dumb illegal immigrants.
- Think about this brief list made possible by the US taxpayers / federal government, money CA would not get and then tens of thousands of CA people would lose their jobs (= lost CA tax revenues):
aerospace contracts, defense contracts, fed gov, software contracts, fed gov airplane orders, bases, ports, money for illegal aliens costs, federal monies for universities, 'affirmative action monies, section 8 housing money, monies for highways, monies for 'mass transportation', monies to fight crime, monies from the EPA for streams & lakes, monies from the Nat. Park Service, monies for healthcare, monies for freeloading welfare recipients, and all this is just the tip of the iceberg
- Not to mention the counties in CA which will not want to be part of the laughable 'Peoples Republic of California'.
- And imagine the 'Peoples Republic of California Army', hilarious.
CA wouldn't last a week without other peoples money.
Calexit? Please, pretty please.Macumazahn > , August 16, 2017 at 8:58 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain You just want intra-white socialism so you can mooch off of productive whites.Rdm > , August 16, 2017 at 9:18 pm GMT
It's particularly unfortunate that Asians, who can hardly be blamed for the plight of America's Blacks, are the ones from whom the "affirmative action" #groidgeld is extracted.Rdm > , August 16, 2017 at 9:19 pm GMT
@Diversity Heretic My impression and overall experience from interacting with White Americans is good in general. I have a very distinct view on both White Americans and Europeans. I'd come back later.
I don't recommend purging of Whites in America. Neither do I prohibit immigration of all people. But I do wish "legal" immigration from all parts of the world to this land. But I also understand why people are fed up with White America.
There is a clear distinction between Europeans and White Americans. White Americans born and bred here are usually an admixture of many European origins. They usually hide their Eastern European origin and fervently claim German, French, English whenever possible -- basically those countries that used to be colonial masters in the past.
White Americans are generally daring, optimistic and very open-minded. Usually when you bump into any White Americans born and bred here, you can sense their genuine hospitality.
Europeans, usually fresh White immigrants in this land, tend to carry over their old mentality with a bit of self-righteous attitude to patronize and condescend Americans on the ground that this is a young country.
My former boss was Swiss origin, born in England, and migrated to America. If there's an opportunity cost, he'd regale his English origin. If there's a Swiss opportunity, he'd talk about his ancestry. He'd bash loud, crazy Americans while extoling his European majesty. He became a naturalized American last year for tax purposes so that his American wife can inherit if he kicks the bucket.
Bottom line is, every immigrant to the US, in my honest opinion, is very innocent and genuinely hard working. They have a clear idea of how they like to achieve their dreams here and would like to work hard. It seems after staying here for a while, they all change their true selves to fit into the existing societal structure, i.e., Chris Hemsworth, an Australian purposely trained to speak American English in Red Dawn, can yell "This is our home" while 4th generation Asian Americans will be forced to speak broken English. This is how dreams are shaped in America.
Coming back to purge of Whites, I only wish those self-righteous obese, bald, bottom of the barrel, living on the alms Whites, proclaiming their White skin, will go back to their origin and do something about a coming flood of Muslim in their ancestral country if they're so worried about their heritage.Saxon > , August 16, 2017 at 9:26 pm GMT
@Alec Leamas (hard at work) My point is, universities in CA are doing well commensurate with hard working students without AA action.Rdm > , August 16, 2017 at 9:30 pm GMT
@Thomm No, he just wants the street-defecating hangers-on like you to go back and show how awesome you claim you are in your own country by making a success of it rather than milking all of the entitlements and affirmative action and other programs of literal racial advantage given to you by virtue of setting foot in someone else's country.Stan d Mute > , August 16, 2017 at 9:36 pm GMT
@Wally - 45% of California is Federal land.
- Without US taxpayers money CA would be a 3rd world country completely filled with unemployable & dumb illegal immigrants.
- Think about this brief list made possible by the US taxpayers / federal government, money CA would not get and then tens of thousands of CA people would lose their jobs (= lost CA tax revenues):
aerospace contracts, defense contracts, fed gov, software contracts, fed gov airplane orders, bases, ports, money for illegal aliens costs, federal monies for universities, 'affirmative action monies, section 8 housing money, monies for highways, monies for 'mass transportation', monies to fight crime, monies from the EPA for streams & lakes, monies from the Nat. Park Service, monies for healthcare, monies for freeloading welfare recipients, and all this is just the tip of the iceberg
- Not to mention the counties in CA which will not want to be part of the laughable 'Peoples Republic of California'.
- And imagine the 'Peoples Republic of California Army', hilarious.
CA wouldn't last a week without other peoples money.
Calexit? Please, pretty please. So you're talking about Calexit in AA action?
Let us play along.
If CA is existing solely due to Fed Alms, I can agree it's the tip of the iceberg. But we're talking about Universities, their performance and how AA is affecting well qualified students.
Following on your arguments,
UC Berkeley receives $373 Millions (Federal Sponsorship) in 2016.
Harvard University, on the other hand, receives $656 millions (Federal sponsorship) in 2012.
I'm talking about how Universities climb up in World ranking, based upon their innovations, productivity, research output, etc etc etc. Which to me, is reflective of what kind of students are admitted into the programs. That's my point.
If you want to talk about Calexit, you'd better go and refresh your reading comprehension ability.War for Blair Mountain > , August 16, 2017 at 9:36 pm GMT
The thing that is forgotten is that white Americans DO NOT need the Africans in any way whatsoever. There is NOTHING in Detroit that we want – we abandoned it deliberately and have no interest in ever returning.
On the other hand, what do the Africans need from us?
Food. We own and operate all food production.
Medicine. Ditto.
Clean water. Look at Flint.
Sanitation services. Look at anywhere in Africa.
To put a stop to African behavior from Africans is an idiot's dream. They will never stop being what they are. They simply cannot. So if we cannot expel them, we must control them. When they act up, we cut off their food, medicine, water, and sewer services. Build fences around Detroit and Flint. Siege. After a month or two of the Ethiopian Diet, the Africans in Detroit will be much more compliant.The peril of appeasement > , August 16, 2017 at 9:40 pm GMT
@Thomm You just want intra-white socialism so you can mooch off of productive whites. Thomm=the girly boy blatherings of a White Libertarian Cuck
The benefit to the Historic Native Born White American Working Class of being voted into a White Racial Minority in California by Chinese "Americans" Korean "Americans" .Hindu "Americans" Sihk "Americans" and Iranian "Americans"?
Answer:0 . Bring back the Chinese Legal Immigrant Exclusion Act!!!
Two Great pro-White Socialist Labor Leaders:Denis Kearney and Samuel Gompers go read Denis Kearney's Rebel Rousing speeches google Samuel Gompers' Congressional Testimony in favor of the passage of The Chinese Legal Immigrant Exclusion ActTruth > , August 16, 2017 at 9:42 pm GMT
As some have pointed out, the trouble with appeasement is, it never ends. Those who are used to the handouts will always want more. There's the saying parents tend to strengthen the strong and weaken the weak, that's what paternalistic policies like affirmative action and welfare do to a society. It creates a cycle of dependency.
Those who think multiculturalism coupled with identity politics is a good idea need to take a good look at Malaysia, arguably the most multicultural country outside the US. The country is in Southeast Asia, with roughly 30m people, roughly 60% ethnic Malay(100% muslim), 23% Chinese(mostly buddhist or christian), brought in by the British in the 1800s to work the rubber plantations and tin mines, and 7% Indian(mostly Hindu), brought in by the British to work the plantations and civil service.
In 1957 the Brits left and left the power in the hands of the ethnic Malays. The Chinese soon became the most successful and prosperous group and dominated commerce and the professional ranks. In 1969 a major race riot broke out, the largely rural and poor Malays decided to "take back what's theirs", burnt, looted and slaughtered many ethnic Chinese. After the riot the government decided the only way to prevent more riots is to raise the standard of living for the Malays. And they began a massive wealth transfer program through affirmative action that heavily favors ethnic Malays. First, all civil service jobs were given to only ethnic Malays, including the police and military. Then AA was instituted in all local universities where Malays with Cs and Ds in math and science were given preference over Chinese with all A's to all the engineering, medicine and law majors. Today no one in their right mind, not even the rich Malays, want to be treated by a Malay doctor. I know people who were maimed by one of these affirmative actioned Malay "neurosurgeons" who botched a simple routine procedure, and there was no recourse, no one is allowed to sue.
Thanks to their pandering to the Malay majority and outright voting fraud, the ruling party UMNO has never lost an election and is today the longest serving ruling party in modern history. Any dissent was stifled through the sedition act where dissidents are thrown in jail, roughed up, tossed down 14th story buildings before they even go to trial. All media is strictly controlled and censored by the government, who also controls the military, and 100% of the country's oil production, with a large portion of the profit of Petronas going to the coffers of the corrupt Malay government elites, whatever's left is given to hoi polloi Malays in the form of fluff job positions created in civil service, poorly run quasi-government Malay owned companies like Petronas, full scholarships to study abroad for only ethnic Malays, tax free importation of luxury cars for ethnic Malays, and when the government decided to "privatize" any government function like the postal service or telcom, they gave it in the form of a monopoly to a Malay owned company. All government contracts e.g. for infrastructure are only given to Malay owned companies, even as they have zero expertise for the job. The clever Chinese quickly figured out they could just use a Malay partner in name only to get all government contracts.
As opposed to the US where affirmative action favors the minority, in Malaysia AA favors the majority. You know it can't last. The minority can only prop up the majority for so long. Growth today is largely propped up by oil income, and the oil reserve is dwindling. Even Mahathir the former prime minister who started the most blatant racial discrimination policy against the Chinese started chastising the Malays of late, saying they've become too lazy and dependent on government largess.
Yet despite the heavy discrimination, the Chinese continued to thrive thanks to their industriousness and ingenuity, while many rural Malays not connected with the governing elite remain poor -- classic case of strengthening the strong and weakening the weak. According to Forbes, of the top 10 richest men in Malaysia today, 9 are ethnic Chinese, only 1 is an ethnic Malay who was given everything he had. Green with envy, the ethnic Malays demanded more to keep the government in power. So a new law was made – all Chinese owned businesses have to give 30% ownership to an ethnic Malay, just like that.
Needless to say all this racial discrimination resulted in a massive brain drain for the country. many middle class Indians joined the Chinese and emigrated en masse to Australia, NZ, US, Canada, Europe, Singapore, HK, Taiwan, Japan. The ones left are often destitute and poor, heavily discriminated against due to their darker skin, and became criminals. Al Jazeera recently reported that the 7% ethnic Indians in Malaysia commit 70% of the crime.
To see how much this has cost Malaysia -- Singapore split off from Malaysia 2 years after their joint independence from Britain and was left in destitute as they have no natural resources. But Lee Kuan Yew with the help of many Malaysian Chinese who emigrated to Singapore turned it into one of the richest countries in the world in one generation with a nominal per capita GDP of $53k, while Malaysia is firmly stuck at $9.4k, despite being endowed with natural resources from oil to tin and beautiful beaches. The combination of heavy emigration among the Chinese and high birthrate among the muslim Malays encouraged by racialist Mahathir, the Chinese went from 40% of the population in 1957 to 23% today. The Indians went from 11% to 7%.
I fear that I'm seeing the same kind of problem in the US. It's supremely stupid for the whites to want to give up their majority status through open borders. Most Asians like me who immigrated here decades ago did it to get away from the corrupt, dishonest, dog-eat-dog, misogynistic culture of Asia. But when so many are now here, it defeats the purpose. The larger the immigrant group, the longer it takes to assimilate them. Multiculturalism is a failed concept, especially when coupled with identity politics. Affirmative Action does not work, it only creates a toxic cycle of dependency. The US is playing with fire. We need a 20 year moratorium on immigration and assimilate all those already here. Otherwise, I fear the US will turn into another basketcase like Malaysia.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 9:43 pm GMT
@Liberty Mike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrWfNonLDQTruth > , August 16, 2017 at 9:43 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh There were only about one million Indians living in what is the United States in 1500. There are now 3 million living in much better conditions than in 1500.
I would be willing to accept non White immigration if the non White immigrants and our government would end affirmative action for non Whites.
Asians are discriminated against in college admissions. But in the job market they have affirmative action aristocratic status over Whites.Joe Wong > , August 16, 2017 at 9:45 pm GMT
@Liberty Mike The sno percentage is much higher an Ukraine, Hungary and Austria than here.Thomm > , August 16, 2017 at 9:50 pm GMT
@Diversity Heretic John Derbyshire has made similar arguments--racial preferences are the price for social peace. But, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, we're running out of white and Asian children to buffer black dysfunction and Asians are going to get less and less willing to be "sacrificial lambs" for a black underclass that they did nothing to create and that they despise.
There are other ways to control the black underclass. You can force the talented ones to remain in their community and provide what leadership they can. Black violence can be met with instant retributive counter-violence. (Prior to the 1960s most race riots were white on black.) Whites can enforce white norms on the black community, who will sort-of conform to them as best they are able.
Finally, Rudyard Kipling had a commentary on Danegeld. It applies to paying off dysfunctional domestic minorities just as much to invading enemies.
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"
admitting academically unqualified blacks to elite schools is, at core, a policy to protect the racial peace and, as such, has nothing to do with racial justice,
The Black are protesting relentlessly and loudly verbally and thru assertive actions about the racial discrimination they have been facing. I have never seen those academically unqualified blacks admitted to the elite schools have stood up using themselves as shiny examples to refute the discrimination allegations the Black made against the White.
While the policy to protect the racial peace by admitting academically unqualified blacks to elite schools failed miserably, the restricting the smart and qualified Asians to elite schools is blatantly racial injustice practice exercised in broad day light with a straight face lie. The strategy is to cause resentment between the minorities so that the White can admitting their academically unqualified ones to elite schools without arousing scrutiny.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 10:04 pm GMT
@Saxon I'm white, you stupid faggot.
I am extremely committed that you White Trashionalists fulfill your duty as wastebaskets of genetic matter.
Excellent whites exist only because the waste produced gets removed in the form of WN wiggers.
Like I said, there is a huge variance within whites. Therefore, you have no business speaking for respectable whites.
Worst of all, you Nationalist-Leftists are un-American.Priss Factor > , Website August 16, 2017 at 10:05 pm GMT
@Astuteobservor II Just google solutrean theory Europeans arrived in America 20,000 years ago. Many articles come up including from smithsonian.
The east coast Canadian Indians always had the founding myth they came over the ocean.
There's a book, Across The Atlantic Ice by Dennis Stanford on kindle, Amazon and many book stores.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 10:20 pm GMT
Here is one 'smart Asian' who is not a Self-Righteous Addict of Proglobalism, but what a clown.
Dineshisms are always funny as hell.
Because KKK were Southern Democrats, Democratic Party is forever the KKK party. Never mind Democrats represented a broad swatch of people.
And Dinesh finds some parallels between Old Democrats and Nazi ideology, therefore Democrats are responsible for Nazism. I mean
Doesn't he know that parties change? Democratic Party once used to be working class party. Aint no more.
GOP used to be Party of Lincoln. It is southern party now, and most loyal GOP-ers are Southerns with respect for Confederacy. GOP now wants Southern Neo-Confed votes but don't want Confed memorials. LOL.
Things change.
Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond came over to the GOP for a reason.
Dinesh seems to be stuck in 'caste' mentality. Because Dems once had KKK on its side, Democratic Party is forever cast or 'casted' as KKK. And now, 'Democrats are real Nazis'.
Actually, the real supremacism in America at the moment seems to be AIPAC-related.
Anyway, there were leftist elements in National Socialism, but its was more right than left.
Why? Because in the hierarchy of ideological priorities, the most important core value was the 'Aryan' Tribe. Socialized medicine was NOT the highest value among Nazis. Core conviction was the ideology of racial identity and unity. Thus, it was more right than left.
Just because National Socialism had some leftist elements doesn't make it a 'leftist' ideology.
Same is true of Soviet Communism. Stalin brought back high culture and classical music. He favored traditionalist aesthetics to experimental or avant-garde ones. And Soviets promoted some degree of Russian nationalism. And even though communists eradicated certain aspects of the past, they also restored respect for classic literature and culture. So, does that mean USSR was 'conservative' or 'rightist'? No, it had some rightist elements but its core ideology was about class egalitarianism, therefore, it was essentially leftist.Liberty Mike > , August 16, 2017 at 10:22 pm GMT
@Joe Wong All the Whites and Asians who are admitted to the top 25 schools are superbly qualified. There are so many applicants every White and Asian is superbly qualified.
The entire point of affirmative action is that Asians and Whites are discriminated against in favor of blacks and Hispanics. Harvard proudly proclaims that is now majority non White.
Don't worry, the Jews decided long ago that you Asian drones would have medicine and tech, Hispanics construction, food, trucking,and cleaning and Hispanics and blacks would share government work and public education.
Whites will gradually disappear and the 110 year old Jewish black coalition will control the Asians and Hispanics through black crime and periodic riots.Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 10:31 pm GMT
@Truth Do you think Beavis and Butthead are choosing Angola over Austria?Alden > , August 16, 2017 at 10:35 pm GMT
@Macumazahn Affirmative action punishes Whites as well and Asians are always free to go back to wherever their parents or grandparents came from.
After 400 years, Whites can't go anywhere.Joe Wong > , August 16, 2017 at 10:40 pm GMT
@Thomm Do you favor affirmative action?Liberty Mike > , August 16, 2017 at 10:44 pm GMT
@Wally So you are a tough guy, and never give in anything to anyone in your life? It seems the Jews have similar view as yours, the Jews insist that if they give in an inch to those Holocaust deniers, they will keep demanding more & more, at the beginning the Holocaust deniers will demand for the evidence, then they will demand the Jews are at fault, then they will demand the Nazi to be resurrected, then they will demand they can carry out Holocaust against anyone they don't like, Pretty soon they will demand they to be treated like the pigs in the Orwellian's Animal Farm.F the media > , August 16, 2017 at 10:46 pm GMT
@Thomm "Un-American" is descriptively flaccid. It means nada, nothing, zero. It is vapid and so empty and such a lame lexeme.
Any word that is hackneyed, lifeless, and so low energy would never be scripted by a White committed to excellence.Anon > , Disclaimer August 16, 2017 at 10:46 pm GMT
@Priss Factor Hell with those 'smart Asians'. They are among the biggest Proglob a-holes.
Asians have servile genes that seek approval from the power. They are status-freaks.
They make perfect collaborators with the Glob.
Under communism, they made the most conformist commies.
Under Japanese militarism, they made the most mindless military goons who did Nanking.
Under Khmer Rouge, they were biggest looney killers.
Under PC, they make such goody good PC dogs.
If the prevailing culture of US was patriotic and conservatives, Asians would try to conform to that, and that wouldn't be so bad.
But since the prevailing culture is PC, these yellow dogs are among the biggest homomaniacal PC tards.
Hell with them. Yellow dogs voted for Obama and Hillary in high numbers. They despise, hate, and feel contempt for white masses and working class. They are servitors of the empire as Darrell Hamamoto said. He's one of the few good guys.
Just look at that Francis Fukuyama, that slavish dog of Soros. He's so disgusting. And then, you got that brown Asian tard Fareed Zakaria. What a vile lowlife. And that fat Jeer Heet who ran from dirty browns shi**ing all over the place outdoors to live with white people but bitches about 'white supremacy'. Well, the fact that he ran from his own kind to live with whites must mean his own choice prefers white folks. His immigration choice was 'white supremacism'. After all, he could have moved to black Africa. Why didn't he?
PS. The best way of Affirmative Action is to limit it only to American Indians and Blacks of slave ancestry. That's it.
Also, institutions should OPENLY ADMIT that they do indeed discriminate to better represent the broader population. Fair or not, honesty is a virtue. What is most galling about AA is the lies that says 'we are colorblind and meritocratic but...' No more buts. Yes, there is discrimination but to represent larger population. Okay, just be honest. Asia is a big continent and Asians of different ethnicity have very different voting patterns due to their culture and history. Japanese-Americans tend to be the most liberal ethnic group of all Asian groups because of their experience with internment during WWII. Somehow they conveniently forgot that it was a Democrat president who put them in internment, and are now putting the blames squarely on the right for what happened. These Japanese-Americans are drinking the kool-aid big time, but in the 90s I remember a Japanese prime minister got in big trouble for saying America's biggest problem is we have too many blacks and hispanics dragging us down.
Filipinos, Hmongs and other Southeast Asians tend to be poor and rely on government largess to a certain extent, and also benefit from affirmative action at least in the state of CA, they also tend to be liberal.
In this election cycle Indian-Americans have become the most vocal anti-Trumpers. From Indian politicians from WA state like Kshama Sawant, Pramila Jayapal to Indian entertainers like Aziz Ansari, Hasan Minaj, Kumail Nanjani, to Silicon Valley techies like Calexit mastermind VC Shervin Pishevar, Google CEO Sundra Pichai, all are socialist libtards. In my local election, several Indians are running for city council. All are first generation, all Democrats and champions of liberal policies. It's as if they have amnesia(or just lower IQ), not remembering that socialism was why they had to leave the shithole India to begin with. A Korean American is running as a Republican.
There are Chinese idiots like Ted Lieu and other asians who've gone to elite schools therefore drinking the kool-aid and insisted AA is good for Asian Americans, but most Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese tend to be more conservative and lean Republican. During the Trump campaign Breitbart printed a story about a group of Chinese Americans voicing their support for Trump despite his anti-China rhetoric because they had no intention of seeing the US turned into another socialist shithole like China.
Per the NYT a major reason Asians vote Republican is because of AA. Asians revere education, esp. the Chinese and Koreans, and they see holistic admission is largely bullshit set up by Jews to protect their legacy status while throwing a few bones to under qualified blacks and hispanics. Unfortunately it didn't seem to dampen their desire to immigrate here. Given that there are 4 billion Asians and thanks to open borders, if it weren't for AA all our top 100 schools will be 100% Asian in no time. I suggest we first curtail Asian immigration, limit their number to no more than 10,000 a year, then we can discuss dismantling AA.Anon > , Disclaimer August 16, 2017 at 10:46 pm GMT
@Wally This is false. See:
California sends far more to Washington than it sends back. Also, there is no correlation between percentage of federal land and dependence on federal funding. If there were, Delaware would be the least dependent state in the US.
Clue: It isn't.Astuteobservor II > , August 16, 2017 at 10:47 pm GMT
@Wally This is false. See:
California sends far more to Washington than it sends back. Also, there is no correlation between percentage of federal land and dependence on federal funding. If there were, Maine would be among the least dependent states in the US.
Clue: It isn't.Astuteobservor II > , August 16, 2017 at 10:48 pm GMT
@Alden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solutrean_hypothesis
if the wiki is reliable. you shouldn't be telling others like it is a cold hard fact. But still a very interesting read. thanks for bringing it up.F the media > , August 16, 2017 at 11:06 pm GMT
But in the job market they have affirmative action aristocratic status over Whites.
that is another bold claim. I know of black quotas, but asian quota???THe Realist > , Website August 16, 2017 at 11:13 pm GMT
@Astuteobservor II The Indian tribe in tech is known to favor Indians in hiring. I've read from other Indian posters elsewhere that Indian managers like to hire Indian underlings because they are easier to bully.
Indian outsourcing firms like Infosys, TCS, Wipro are like 90% Indian, mostly imported directly from India, with token whites as admin or account manager.F the media > , August 16, 2017 at 11:14 pm GMT
@Truth See #65 above. You die, too, boy.Joe Wong > , August 16, 2017 at 11:27 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer That's pretty funny. The guy's got balls. Probably son of some corrupt Chinese government official used to being treated like an emperor back home, ain't taking no shit from black folks.
I suppose this is what happens when universities clamor to accept foreign students because they are full pay. His tuition dollar is directly subsidizing these affirmative action hacks, who are now preventing him from studying. He has fully paid for his right to tell them to STFU.Joe Franklin > , August 16, 2017 at 11:33 pm GMT
@Beckow Romans did not think Europe was a nice place to live, full of bloodthirsty barbarians, uneducated, smelly, dirty, foul mouth and rogue manner, even nowadays a lot of them cannot use full set of tableware to finish their meal, a single fork will do, it is a litte more civilized than those use fingers only.
After a millennium of dark age of superstition, religious cult suppression, utter poverty medieval serf Europe, it followed by centuries of racial cleanses, complete destruction of war, stealing and hypocrisy on industrial scale, this time not only restricted to Europe the plague flooded the whole planet.
Even nowadays the same plague from Europe and its offshoots in the North America is threatening to exterminate the human beings with a big bang for their blinding racial obligatory. The rest of the world only can hope this plague would stay put in North America and Europe, so the rest world can live in peace and prosperity.Reg Cæsar > , August 16, 2017 at 11:38 pm GMT
Asians receive federal entitlements the same as the other protected class groups of diversity.
Diversity ideology lectures us that Asians are oppressed by Occidentals.
1. Preferential US immigration, citizenship, and asylum policies for Asian people
2. Federal 8a set-aside government contracts for Asian owned businesses
3. Affirmative Action for Asians especially toward obtaining government jobs
4. Government anti-discrimination laws for Asians
4. Government hate speech crime prosecutions in defense of Asians
5. Sanctuary cities for illegal Asians, and other protected class groups of diversity
6. Asian espionage directed at the US is common, and many times goes unprosecuted
7. American trade policy allows mass importation of cheap Asian products built with slave labor
8. Whaling allowance for some Asian ethnic groups
9. Most H1-B visas awarded to AsiansThomm > , August 17, 2017 at 12:10 am GMT
Please stop trying to confuse Orientals with Indians and other subcontinentals. They are quite distinct.
In their original countries they are, but in America they are almost identical in all ways except appearance and diet.
And odor.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 12:12 am GMT
@War for Blair Mountain Thomm=the girly boy blatherings of a White Libertarian Cuck...
The benefit to the Historic Native Born White American Working Class of being voted into a White Racial Minority in California by Chinese "Americans"...Korean "Americans"....Hindu "Americans"...Sihk "Americans"...and Iranian "Americans"?
Answer:0.... Bring back the Chinese Legal Immigrant Exclusion Act!!!
Two Great pro-White Socialist Labor Leaders:Denis Kearney and Samuel Gompers...go read Denis Kearney's Rebel Rousing speeches...google Samuel Gompers' Congressional Testimony in favor of the passage of The Chinese Legal Immigrant Exclusion Act... It is MUCH better to be a libertarian than to be a Nationalist-Leftist. You have effectively admitted that you want intra-white socialism since you can't hack it yourself.
Socialists = untalented losers.
Plus, I guarantee that your ancestors were not in America since 1776. You are just some 2nd-gen Polack or something.Issac > , August 17, 2017 at 12:12 am GMT
Do you favor affirmative action?
Absolutely not. It is one of the worst things ever devised.Vinteuil > , August 17, 2017 at 12:14 am GMT
@Thomm Sounds like a Jewish fantasy.Issac > , August 17, 2017 at 12:15 am GMT
@Priss Factor Here is one 'smart Asian' who is not a Self-Righteous Addict of Proglobalism, but what a clown.
Dineshisms are always funny as hell.
Because KKK were Southern Democrats, Democratic Party is forever the KKK party. Never mind Democrats represented a broad swatch of people.
And Dinesh finds some parallels between Old Democrats and Nazi ideology, therefore Democrats are responsible for Nazism. I mean...
Doesn't he know that parties change? Democratic Party once used to be working class party. Aint no more.
GOP used to be Party of Lincoln. It is southern party now, and most loyal GOP-ers are Southerns with respect for Confederacy. GOP now wants Southern Neo-Confed votes but don't want Confed memorials. LOL.
Things change.
Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond came over to the GOP for a reason.
Dinesh seems to be stuck in 'caste' mentality. Because Dems once had KKK on its side, Democratic Party is forever cast or 'casted' as KKK. And now, 'Democrats are real Nazis'.
Actually, the real supremacism in America at the moment seems to be AIPAC-related.
Anyway, there were leftist elements in National Socialism, but its was more right than left.
Why? Because in the hierarchy of ideological priorities, the most important core value was the 'Aryan' Tribe. Socialized medicine was NOT the highest value among Nazis. Core conviction was the ideology of racial identity and unity. Thus, it was more right than left.
Just because National Socialism had some leftist elements doesn't make it a 'leftist' ideology.
Same is true of Soviet Communism. Stalin brought back high culture and classical music. He favored traditionalist aesthetics to experimental or avant-garde ones. And Soviets promoted some degree of Russian nationalism. And even though communists eradicated certain aspects of the past, they also restored respect for classic literature and culture. So, does that mean USSR was 'conservative' or 'rightist'? No, it had some rightist elements but its core ideology was about class egalitarianism, therefore, it was essentially leftist. "Stalin brought back high culture and classical music. He favored traditionalist aesthetics to experimental or avant-garde ones."
Priss, you haven't the first clue what you're talking about, here. Stalin didn't favor "traditionalist aesthetics" – he favored vulgar pop-crap.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 12:15 am GMT
@Joe Wong Ah yes, the whites are well known for their bigotry. That's why they're so mono-racial and China is so diverse. Good point Chang.Joe Wong > , August 17, 2017 at 12:15 am GMT
@Joe Franklin Asians receive federal entitlements the same as the other protected class groups of diversity.
Diversity ideology lectures us that Asians are oppressed by Occidentals.
1. Preferential US immigration, citizenship, and asylum policies for Asian people
2. Federal 8a set-aside government contracts for Asian owned businesses
3. Affirmative Action for Asians especially toward obtaining government jobs
4. Government anti-discrimination laws for Asians
4. Government hate speech crime prosecutions in defense of Asians
5. Sanctuary cities for illegal Asians, and other protected class groups of diversity
6. Asian espionage directed at the US is common, and many times goes unprosecuted
7. American trade policy allows mass importation of cheap Asian products built with slave labor
8. Whaling allowance for some Asian ethnic groups
9. Most H1-B visas awarded to Asians That is completely false. You just memorized that from some bogus site.
Section 8a is used more by white women than by Asians, and Asians get excluded from it due to high income. It should be done away with altogether, of course.
Asians face discrimination in University admissions, as the main article describes.
H1-Bs are awarded to Asians because white countries don't produce enough people who qualify.
Plus, Asian SAT scores are consistently higher than whites. That proves that Asian success was not due to AA.Saxon > , August 17, 2017 at 12:46 am GMT
the 110 year old Jewish black coalition will control
I am not sure the Muslim and Indian will agree to that, they have a very strong birth rate that can match if not surpass the blacks too.Ron Unz > , August 17, 2017 at 12:47 am GMT
@Thomm Green isn't a color that suits you. You're a subcontinental hanger-on who's only able to garner any success in any western country due to an anarcho-tyranny in enforcement against ethnonepotism as well as lavish handouts in the form of all sorts of party favors.
There are very few non-white groups that could do any well on a level playing field with equal enforcement against nepotism, and yours isn't one of them. Your country? Sad!Astuteobservor II > , August 17, 2017 at 1:03 am GMT
Whites will gradually disappear and the 110 year old Jewish black coalition will control the Asians and Hispanics through black crime and periodic riots.
I don't think this is correct
Since California already has (very roughly) the future demographics you're considering, I think it serves as a good test-case.
The Hispanic and Asian populations have been growing rapidly, and they tend to hold an increasing share of the political power, together with the large white population, though until very recently most of the top offices were still held by (elderly) whites. Whites would have much more political power, except that roughly half of them are still Republicans, and the Republican Party has almost none.
In most of the urban areas, there's relatively little black crime these days since so many of the blacks have been driven away or sent off to prison. I'd also say that major black riots in CA are almost unthinkable since many of the local police forces are heavily Hispanic: they don't particularly like blacks, and might easily shoot the black rioters dead while being backed up by the politicians, and many of the blacks probably recognize this. Admittedly, CA always had a relatively small black population, but that didn't prevent enormous black crime and black riots in the past due to the different demographics.
Meanwhile, Jewish-activists still possess enormous influence over CA politics, but they exert that influence through money and media, just like they do everywhere else in the country.Priss Factor > , August 17, 2017 at 1:26 am GMT
@F the media that is actually true about indians. I have first hand account of a 100+ tech dept getting taken over by indians in just 3 years :/ but that is not a "quota" that is just indians abusing their power once in position of power.Truth > , August 17, 2017 at 1:35 am GMT
@Vinteuil Priss, you haven't the first clue what you're talking about, here. Stalin didn't favor "traditionalist aesthetics" – he favored vulgar pop-crap.
Right.. Ballet, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and classic literature. That's some pop crap.
Soviet Culture was about commie Lena Dunhams.
Now, most of Soviet culture was what might be called kitsch or middlebrow stuff, but it was not 'pop crap' as known in the West.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 1:58 am GMT
@THe Realist LOL, if you're the one holding the knife, hatchet, billy club or brick, I like my chances.Joe Franklin > , August 17, 2017 at 2:03 am GMT
@Saxon Green isn't a color that suits you. You're a subcontinental hanger-on who's only able to garner any success in any western country due to an anarcho-tyranny in enforcement against ethnonepotism as well as lavish handouts in the form of all sorts of party favors.
There are very few non-white groups that could do any well on a level playing field with equal enforcement against nepotism, and yours isn't one of them. Your country? Sad! Whatever helps you sleep at night..
Yesterday I was called a Jew. Today, it is Indian. In reality, I am a white American guy.
You white trashionalists can't get your stories straight, can you? Well, WNs are known for having negro IQs.
Asians don't get affirmative action. They outscore whites in the SAT.
But even blacks outscore WNs like you.
Heh heh heh hehTruth > , August 17, 2017 at 2:20 am GMT
@Thomm That is completely false. You just memorized that from some bogus site.
Section 8a is used more by white women than by Asians, and Asians get excluded from it due to high income. It should be done away with altogether, of course.
Asians face discrimination in University admissions, as the main article describes.
H1-Bs are awarded to Asians because white countries don't produce enough people who qualify.
Plus, Asian SAT scores are consistently higher than whites. That proves that Asian success was not due to AA. You have reading comprehension problems to have confused Federal 8A government contacts with Section 8 housing.
8A contracts are federal contracts granted to "socially and economically disadvantaged individual(s)."
The business must be majority-owned (51 percent or more) and controlled/managed by socially and economically disadvantaged individual(s).
The individual(s) controlling and managing the firm on a full-time basis must meet the SBA requirement for disadvantage, by proving both social disadvantage and economic disadvantage.
http://sbda.com/sba_8(a) .htm
Definition of Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Individuals
Socially disadvantaged individuals are those who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias because of their identities as members of groups without regard to their individual qualities. The social disadvantage must stem from circumstances beyond their control.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the following individuals are presumed to be socially disadvantaged:
• Black Americans;
• Hispanic Americans (persons with origins from Latin America, South America, Portugal and Spain);
• Native Americans (American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians);
• Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Japan, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Samoa, Guam, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands [Republic of Palau], Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Laos, Cambodia [Kampuchea], Taiwan, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Macao, Hong Kong, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru);
• Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal);
• And members of other groups designated from time to time by the SBA.Beckow > , August 17, 2017 at 2:25 am GMT
@F the media
That's pretty funny. The guy's got balls.
Nah, just some goofy nerd working on his PhD in Library Science.
THIS Kat on the other hand is my N-!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaTLgw_akhgTruth > , August 17, 2017 at 2:33 am GMT
@Joe Wong Romans lived in Europe, get an atlas, Rome is in Europe. I will skip over your silly summaries of European history, we all can do it to any civilization all day. Pointless. Try China. Oh, I forgot, nobody knows much Chinese up and downs because it was mostly inconsequential.
If you call others 'racist' all the time, they might just not take your seriously. Or simply say, fine, if liking one's culture is now 'racism', if it is a white culture, then count me in. The rest of the world is tripping over itself to move – literally to physically move – to Europe and North America. Why do you think that is?Truth > , August 17, 2017 at 2:35 am GMT
@Ron Unz
I'd also say that major black riots in CA are almost unthinkable since many of the local police forces are heavily Hispanic: they don't particularly like blacks, and might easily shoot the black rioters dead
Oh, would you stop being a make-believe pundit, Ron? That is some commentary you copped from an OJ-era LA Times expose. You've had one conversation with a police officer in your life, and that was over an illegal left term outside the Loma Linda Starbucksand culminated in disturbing the peace when exited your Bentley yelling "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!" at the top of your lungs for 4 minutes.
Whenever you've had a nudity-mandatory, eyes-wide-shut, type globalist-soiree at your palatial mansion, the only people you invited were politicians, lawyers, Ivy-league economists, Silicon Valley tech nerds and hookers.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 2:37 am GMT
@Priss Factor They had to be into all that tired, boring, 11-century old shit; they didn't have any black people.War for Blair Mountain > , August 17, 2017 at 2:44 am GMT
@Joe Franklin We've been over this. 8a is not given to anyone with over $250,000 in assets, as your own link indicates. This means most Asians can't use it anyway (not that they need to).
The whole program should be done away with, of course.
What is funny is that you can't accept that Asians have higher SAT scores than whites, which pretty much proves that they can (and do) outperform without AA. You WN idiots can't come to terms with that.
But Section 8a should be removed just so that WN wiggers don't have anything to hide behind, since Asians don't need it to excel.uman > , August 17, 2017 at 3:09 am GMT
@Thomm These untalented Socialists you refer to would include the vast majority of America 1969 90 percent Native Born White America .a White Nation that placed two Alpha Native Born White American Males on the Moon .ten more after that. Seems that Socialism worked just fine.
If you prefer an Asian Majority you can always pack your bags and pick the Asian Nation of your choice.Ronnie > , August 17, 2017 at 3:11 am GMT
@Ron Unz hmm i don't know that will be the case nationally. Southern cities like Atlanta will not have hispanic or white govt. Same with nyc, no need for blacks in harlem or bronx to leave if government aid continues to pay for rent controlled affordable housing. Same case can be made for most large northern cities like chicago, detroit, boston, philadelphia, DC, etc.
So with future aa population of 14%, that's 60 million blacks in america in 2060 timeframe, although that will have an increasing amount of immigration from africa, which tends to be more educated (at least 1st and 2nd generation).
Asians will be about 8%, so that's a poweful community of 40 million. I see tech and wall street with increasing amount of asian representations.
What i would be interested in seeing if there will any maverick asian billionaires that could disrupt the narrative.Joe Franklin > , August 17, 2017 at 3:38 am GMT
This article may tend to take your mind off the real racial injustice at Harvard. In an article "Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans" in the NY Times, August 3, 2017 ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS and STEPHANIE SAUL wrote ""The Harvard lawsuit likens attitudes toward Asian-Americans to attitudes toward Jews at Harvard, beginning around 1920, when Jews were a high-achieving minority. In 1918, Jews reached 20 percent of the Harvard freshman class, and the university soon proposed a quota to lower the number of Jewish students."" In my humble opinion this is a misleading statement which implies that the admission of Jews remained below 20% in the years after 1918. In fact Hillel reports that in recent years the admission of jews to Harvard has been around 25% of the class. This means that almost half of the class are white and half of this white group are Jews. That seems like an amazing over-representation of Jews who are only 2% of our population. So, at least as many Jews as Asians are admitted to Harvard. No wonder the Asians are upset. I note that this article does not point out this Jewish bias in admissions at Harvard and neither did the Asians. Is this another manifestation of political correctness? Or is it an egregious example of racism? This problem is the real elephant in the room. This is the Jewish racism that dare not speak its name. Until lately.Priss Factor > , Website August 17, 2017 at 3:41 am GMT
@Thomm Thanks for changing the subject back to 8A contracts, a subject I first brought up.
You ignorantly labeled me a liar and then prattled on about unrelated Section 8 housing.
I've never mentioned anything about SAT scores because they are irrelevant to anything whatsoever that I've posted.
SAT scores are your irrelevant preoccupation, not mine.
I'm just a person that detests government diversity schemes, group entitlements, and federal protected class groups.
Like it or not, Asians are one of many federal protected class groups entitled by law.
I'm not a WN nor did I ever claim to be a WN; just another example of your fevered and imagined conversations with me.
You are fairly stupid to claim that "most Asians" are rich.
You appear to be a grossly ignorant and arrogant dickhead.Ron Unz > , August 17, 2017 at 3:54 am GMT
@Truth Truth, you is so wise and true. You's right. Them Russian dummies didn't have no vibrant black folks to make fun music that could make them wiggle their butts all their night long. So, they grew stale and bored and drank too much vodka, caught fish with penis, and wrestled with bears and didn't have the all the cool stuff like the US has.
All the world needs to be colonized by superior Negroes cuz folks will just die of boredom.
At least if you get killed by Negroes, it's exciting-like.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 4:23 am GMT
hmm i don't know that will be the case nationally. Southern cities like Atlanta will not have hispanic or white govt. Same with nyc, no need for blacks in harlem or bronx to leave if government aid continues to pay for rent controlled affordable housing. Same case can be made for most large northern cities like chicago, detroit, boston, philadelphia, DC, etc.
Well, my California analogy was self-admittedly very rough and approximate given the considerable differences in demographics. But I strongly suspect that such considerations provide a hidden key to some contentious national policies of the last couple of decades, and I've actually written extensively on the subject:
http://www.unz.com/runz/race-and-crime-in-america/#the-hidden-motive-for-heavy-immigrationMarkinLA > , August 17, 2017 at 4:27 am GMT
@Joe Franklin
You are fairly stupid to claim that "most Asians" are rich.
They have higher household income than whites. Many do not qualify for 8a (not that they needed).
But yes, 8a should be abolished, just like ALL other affirmative action.
SAT scores are your irrelevant preoccupation, not mine.
It is relevant, because it demolishes your retarded belief that Asian success would not have happened without affirmative action.
You really are quite lacking in basic intelligence. A typical white trashionalist.dearieme > , August 17, 2017 at 11:02 am GMT
@Anon I imagine it was far different before the defense wind-downs of the mid 90s. Along with the many cut-backs a lot of defense was moved out of California by the contractors as punishment for California's liberal Congressmen. Companies that merged with California based operation usually consolidated outside California such as when Raytheon swallowed up Hughes Aircraft Companies defense operations and moved R&D to Massachusetts.dearieme > , August 17, 2017 at 11:06 am GMT
@Liberty Mike I know several white people who would rather live in Botswana than the Ukraine. They have the advantage of having visited . The rest of your list seems pretty sound with the possible exception of Swaziland.
P.S. If you deleted Austria and Hungary and replaced them by Albania and Kosovo you might make your point even stronger.Saxon > , August 17, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT
@Joe Franklin Good God, how absolutely awful to hale from Portugal, Spain, or Singapore.Truth > , August 17, 2017 at 2:49 pm GMT
@Thomm You're non-white and really dumb to boot; you don't understand the ecology of a society. Even the white proles are better than your people's proles because they don't make functional civilizations impossible. If it were possible for a tiny minority to drag the lowers upwards you would be able to haul your lower castes upwards and make your own country work, then the Brahmins would have done it. They can't because the average abilities, intelligence and disposition of the masses is too low of quality in those countries to the point where tourists need to be given explicit warnings about rape and other problems which you will never need when visiting, say, some English village of completely average English people. The "white trash" you decry is probably only slightly below your midwit level of intelligence.
Asians do get affirmative action in employment and promotions in the workplace by the way, just not in education.MarkinLA > , August 17, 2017 at 2:59 pm GMT
@Priss Factor Alright, you're finally starting to get it.Abracadabra > , August 17, 2017 at 3:10 pm GMT
@Thomm I seem to remember you telling everybody that Asians DON'T get affirmative action JUST GOOGLE IT without ever offering proof. Of course it never occurred to you that there could never be any documented proof of something like that. There isn't even official documented proof that white males don't get affirmative action. When people claimed and linked to articles indicating Asians are considered disadvantaged by the government, you claimed those people didn't know what they were talking about JUST GOOGLE IT.
I think you made it quite obvious who the idiot is.Azn_bro > , August 17, 2017 at 3:22 pm GMT
It's time to force our "Golden Dozen" (Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Amherst and Williams) to admit 100% black until the average black income($43k) equals that of average white income($71k).
I'm Asian and I approve of this message.Abracadabra > , August 17, 2017 at 4:28 pm GMT
@Thomm The worst hate crimes I have personally witnessed were perpetrated by black men. I have also seen more casual racism against Asians from blacks than from whites. This might be different in other parts of the country or world.
Outside of the U.S., East Asians are the least likely to want to engage in some kind of anti-white alliance since all of the West's most embarrassing military defeats have come from East Asians. We have always relied on guns and not white guilt for racial equality.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 4:32 pm GMT
@Ronnie In case you haven't noticed, Jews run this country. They dominate the media, academia, Wall Street, Hollywood, Capitol Hill via the DNC and lobbying firms, Silicon Valley. Per the NYT 80% of Jews are self-proclaimed liberals. They are obsessed with dismantling the WASP World Order that in their mind has oppressed them for the last 2000 years. The Ivy League is the pipeline to these 6 sectors that collectively control the country, whoever controls Harvard controls the country. Jews not only make up majority of the elite college faculty (esp. in the social sciences) but are disproportionately benefiting from legacy admission and development cases(admission of the dim witted sons and daughters of the rich and famous like Malia Obama, Jared Kushner, all of Al Gore's kids).
Asians are the next up. Practically all Asians who've gone to the Ivy League or Stanford have voiced their support for affirmative action, many are left wing nuts like the Jews. CA house representative Ted Liu is one such kool-aid drinking Asian libtard, along with the HI judge Derrick Watson and Baltimore judge Theodore Chuang, both of whom blocked Trump's temp. suspension of Muslim refugees, both went to Harvard Law. As an Asian I would be more than happy if the Ivy League simply make themselves off limits to all Asians and turn their schools 100% black. We don't need more Asians to get indoctrinated in their dumb liberal ideology and go down in history as the group next to the Jews and the blacks who destroyed America.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 4:33 pm GMT
@Saxon You're non-white and really dumb to boot; you don't understand the ecology of a society. Even the white proles are better than your people's proles because they don't make functional civilizations impossible. If it were possible for a tiny minority to drag the lowers upwards you would be able to haul your lower castes upwards and make your own country work, then the Brahmins would have done it. They can't because the average abilities, intelligence and disposition of the masses is too low of quality in those countries to the point where tourists need to be given explicit warnings about rape and other problems which you will never need when visiting, say, some English village of completely average English people. The "white trash" you decry is probably only slightly below your midwit level of intelligence.
Asians do get affirmative action in employment and promotions in the workplace by the way, just not in education.
Asians do get affirmative action in employment and promotions in the workplace by the way, just not in education.
No they don't, as this very article explains. Could you BE more of a retard?
Plus, the fact that Asians get higher SAT scores than whites proves that they don't need it. There is a left-wing conspiracy to hide Asian success.
Now, regarding an underachieving WN faggot like you :
Remember that white variance is very high. Excellent whites (like me) exist only because genetic waste master has to be removed from the other end of the process. You and other WNs represent that genetic waste matter, and that is why white women are doing a heroic duty of cutting you off (at least the minority of WNs that are straight. Most are gay, as Jack Donovan has explained). Nature wants the waste matter you comprise of to be expelled.
If you cared about the white race, you would be extremely glad that white women are cutting you off, as that is necessary to get rid of the pollution that you represent.
Heh heh heh heh . it is so much fun to put a WN faggot in its place.
Heh heh heh hehThomm > , August 17, 2017 at 4:36 pm GMT
@Azn_bro Yes, what you say is true.
Any real American would be proud of Asian success, as that represents the American Dream that our country was founded on.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 4:43 pm GMT
@MarkinLA No, I talked about 8a even two weeks ago. Good god, you WN really do have negro IQs.
8a benefits Asians the least, and THE WHOLE THING SHOULD BE ABOLISHED ANYWAY. There should be no AA, ever.
8a harms Asians as it taints their otherwise pristine claim to having succeeded without AA. They don't need 8a, most don't qualify for it as they exceed the $250,000 cutoff, and it lets WN faggots claim that 'all of Asian success is due to AA', which is demonstrably false.
Read this slowly, 10 times, so that even a wigger like you can get it.Saxon > , August 17, 2017 at 6:00 pm GMT
@Abracadabra Heh.. good one.
Don't let these WN faggots get away with claiming all of Asian success is merely due to affirmative action. In reality, Asians don't get affirmative action (other than wrongly being included in the Section 8a code form the 1980s, which ultimately was used by barely 2% of the Asian community).
Remember that among us whites, variance is extremely high. The prettiest woman alongside pretty of ugly fat feminists (who the WN losers still worship). The smartest men, and then these loserish WNs with low IQs and no social skills. White variance is very high.
That is why WNs are so frustrated. They can't get other whites to give them the time of day, and white women are super-committed to shutting out WN loser males from respectable society.
Don't let them claim that Asian success is solely due to affirmative action. Remember, respectable whites hate these WN faggots.George Orwell > , August 17, 2017 at 6:41 pm GMT
@Thomm You're not white, though. You're a rentseeker hanging onto someone else's country and the fact that you write barely literate garbage posts with no substance to them tells all about your intellect and your "high achievement." You're not high quality. You're mediocre at best and probably not even that since your writing is so bad.
Do you even do statistics, though? Whites make up about 70% of the national merit scholars in the US yet aren't in the Ivies at that rate. Harvard for example is maybe only 25% white. Asians are over-represented compared to their merit and jews way over-represented over any merit. Now how does that happen without nepotism? The whole system of any racial favoritism should be scrapped but of course that wouldn't benefit people like you, Thomm.üeljang > , August 17, 2017 at 6:42 pm GMT
Whites aren't more innovative and ambitious than Chinese people. You only have to look at the chinless Unite the Right idiots in Charlottesville to dispel any idea that whites are the superior race. TheDiversity Heretic > , August 17, 2017 at 7:06 pm GMT
This Thomm character is obviously of East Asian origin. His tedious, repetitive blather about Asians, white women, and "white nationalist faggots" is a telltale sign. One of his type characteristically sounds like he would be so much less distressed if those white males were not white nationalist faggots.Abracadabra > , August 17, 2017 at 7:54 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh An interesting historical argument My reply Land isn't money Arguably the Normans came back in the form of the Plantagenets to contest the French throne in the 100 Years War. But by that time France wasn't nearly so feeble
Giving Negroes land in the form of a North American homeland appeals to me (provided whites get one too) although I know the geography is agonizing Blacks tend not to like this suggestion–they realize how depedent they are on whites That wasn't true of the Normans–quite self-reliant fellows!Abracadabra > , August 17, 2017 at 8:12 pm GMT
@Thomm I'm not sure what it was that I said that made you think I think all Asian success is due to AA. In fact I think the opposite is true, that Asians succeed in spite of AA, which is set up solely to hinder Asians from joining the club, and as far as I'm concern, it's a club of sell-out globalist libtards that I wouldn't want more Asians to join.
I've worked in tech long enough to know that in tech, no one gives a fudge where you went to school. I am surrounded by deca-millionaires who went to state schools, many aren't even flagship, some didn't even study STEM. Some didn't even go to college or graduate. The only people I know who still care about the Ivy League are 1st generation often FOB China/India trash, and a small number of Jewish kids looking to benefit from legacy admission, most are gay and/or serious libtards.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 8:52 pm GMT
You can tell that Jewish achievement has fallen off a cliff as Ron Unz asserted by looking at a certain popular college website. The longest running thread that's been up there for nearly a decade with over a thousand pages and over 18,000 posts is called "Colleges for the Jewish "B" student". The site is crawling with uber liberal Jewish mothers and monitored by a gang of Ivy graduated SJWs who strictly enforce their "safe space", posters who post anything at all that might offend anyone (affirmative action is always a sensitive topic) are either thrown in "jail" i.e. ban from posting for a month, or kicked off altogether. The SJW forum monitors even directly edit user comments as they see fit, first amendment rights be damned. This is the future of all online forums if the left have their way, the kind of censorship that Piers Morgan advocates.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 8:55 pm GMT
@Abracadabra Not *you* , them.
There are plenty of KKK losers on here claiming that Asian success is due to AA. I am saying you should join me in fighting them.
Note the comments above from Saxon, MarkinLA, etc. They are alll White Trashionalists.Vinteuil > , August 17, 2017 at 9:46 pm GMT
Asians are over-represented compared to their merit
False. The main article here alone proves otherwise, plus dozens of other research articles.
You just can't stand that Asian success is due to merit. But you have bigger problems, since as a WN, you can't even compete with blacks.
What bugs you the most is that successful white people like me never give WN faggots the time of day. Most tune you idiots out, but I like to remind you that you are waste matter that is being expunged through the natural evolutionary process.Vinteuil > , August 17, 2017 at 9:57 pm GMT
@Priss Factor Priss, please, please, please try to get this right:
Stalin DID NOT favor Prokofiev, or Shostakovich. He treated them exactly the same way he treated everybody else – like dirt under his feet.
Shostakovich's (admittedly disputed) memoirs are essential reading, here. Please check them out before you say anything more.Thomm > , August 17, 2017 at 11:04 pm GMT
@Thomm " successful white people like me never give WN faggots the time of day "
So you've got a problem with "faggots?"Astuteobservor II > , August 17, 2017 at 11:12 pm GMT
So you've got a problem with "faggots?"
Yes, more so if they are leftists (including Nationalist-Leftists like WNs are). But the fact that WNs are disproportionately gay (as Jack Donovan points out) also explains why they tend to look grotesque, and it supports the scientific rationale that they are wastebaskets designed to expedite the removal of genetic waste matter.
White variance in talent/looks/intelligence is high. WN loser males and fat, ugly feminists represent the bottom. In the old days, these two would be married to each other since even the lowest tiers were paired up. Today, thankfully, both are being weeded out.Pachyderm Pachyderma > , August 17, 2017 at 11:35 pm GMT
I just realized something. a commenter like thomm is the perfect counter to some of the others. hahaha.Pachyderm Pachyderma > , August 18, 2017 at 1:00 am GMT
@Saxon God! you are stupid, Saxon he isn't a Paki, he is a Chinaman. No wonder the Normans put you guys in thrall!Thomm > , August 18, 2017 at 1:27 am GMT
@Alden Sure you can why not go back to Europe to replace the growing number of Muslims? It can kill two birds with a single shor!MarkinLA > , August 18, 2017 at 3:02 am GMT
@Pachyderm Pachyderma Not just that, but some of these 'white nationalists' are just recent immigrants from Poland and Ukraine. They are desperate to take credit for Western Civilization that they did nothing to create. Deep down, they know that during the Cold War, they were not considered 'white' in America.
400 years? i.e. when most of what is now the lower-48 was controlled by a Spanish-speaking government? Yeah Many of these WNs have been here only 30-70 years. That is one category (the domestic WN wiggers are the other)
Both are equally underachieving and loserish.Thomm > , August 18, 2017 at 3:50 am GMT
@Thomm It's too late, everybody knows what I wrote is true and that you are some pathetic millennial libertarian pajama boy. The sad fact is that you can't even man up and admit that you wrote that BS about "Asians don't get affirmative action just google it". See that would have at least have been a sign of maturity, admitting you were wrong.
There is no point reading anything, even once, from a pathetic pajama boy like you.Thomm > , August 18, 2017 at 4:03 am GMT
@MarkinLA I openly said that I am proud to be libertarian. Remember, talented people can hack in on their own, so they are libertarians.
Untalented losers (like you) want socialism so that you can mooch off of others.
Plus, Asians don't get affirmative action outside of one obscure place (Section 8a) which they often don't qualify for ($250K asset cutoff), don't need, and was never used by more than 2% of the Asian-American community. The fact that Asian SAT scores are higher than whites explains why Asians outperform without AA.
Plus, this very article says that Asians are being held back. A WN faggot like you cannot grasp that even though you are commenting in the comments of this article. Could you be any dumber?
I realize you are not smart enough to grasp these basic concepts, but that is why we all know that white trashionalists have negro IQs.
Now begone; you are getting in the way of your betters.
Heh heh heh hehTWS > , August 18, 2017 at 4:38 pm GMT
Remember that White variance in brains/looks/talent/character is extremely high. Hence, whites occupy both extremities of human quality.
Hence, the hierarchy of economic productivity is :
Talented whites (including Jews)
Asians (East and South)
Untalented whites (aka these WN wastebaskets, and fat femtwats).
That is why :
1) WNs are never given a platform by respectable whites.
2) Bernie Sanders supporters are lily-white, despite his far-left views.
3) WN is a left-wing ideology, as their economic views are left-wing.
4) WNs are unable to even get any white women, as white women have no reason to pollute themselves with this waste matter. Mid-tier white women thus prefer nonwhite men over these WNs, which makes sense based on the hierarchy above.
5) WNs have the IQ of Negros, the poor social skills of an Asian spazoid, etc. They truly combine the worst of all worlds.
6) This is why white unity is impossible; there is no reason for respectable whites to have anything to do with white trashionalists.
7) Genetically, the very fact that superb whites even exists necessitates the production of individuals to act as wastebaskets for removal of genetic waste. WNs are these wastebaskets.
8) The 80s movie 'Twins' was in effect a way to make these wastebaskets feel good, as eventually, the Arnold Schwarzenegger character bonded with the Danny DeVito character. But these two twins effectively represent the sharp bimodal distribution of white quality. Successful whites are personified by the Schwarzenegger character, while WNs by the DeVito character. In reality, these two would never be on friendly terms, as nature produces waste for a reason.
This pretty much all there is to what White Trashionalists really are.Incontrovertible > , August 18, 2017 at 5:10 pm GMT
@Thomm Tiny Duck? You decided to larp under a different handle?Tradecraft46 > , August 18, 2017 at 10:00 pm GMT
Elite colleges are a prime example of left wing hypocrisy. The same people who are constantly calling for an equal society are at the same time perpetuating the most unequal society by clamoring to send their kids to a few elite schools that will ensure their entry to or retain their ranks among the elites. Equality for everyone else, elitism for me and my kids. David Brook's nausea inducing self-hating pablum "How we are ruining America" is a prime example of this hypocrisy.
Another good example of left wing hypocrisy is on "school integration". The same people who condemn "bad schools" for the urban poor and call for more integration are always the first to move into the whitest possible neighborhoods as soon as they have kids. They aren't willing to sacrifice their own kids, they just want other people to sacrifice their children by sending them to bad schools.
If the left didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.Gene Su > , August 19, 2017 at 1:46 am GMT
Look, the world is short handed: we need good help or we pay dues.
Affirmative action and the EEOC are not the answer.
When you need help you get help and don't care if they are green [in the color sense or have supernumerary digits.
I don't need agreement with my whimsy, I just need people who will turn to.Nicholas Stix > , Website August 19, 2017 at 2:42 am GMT
When I first saw the title of this article, I, being an Asian, was a tad insulted. It smelled like Dr. Weissberg was attempting to create (or at least escalate) racial strife between Asians and blacks. I then read through the article and evaluated the bad and the good.
First the bad: Dr. Weissberg's assertion that Asians are being hurt by the Affirmative Action promotion of blacks is a bit exaggerated. This is because most Asians go into rigorous difficult programs such as engineering, science, and medicine. Most black affirmative action babies go into soft programs such as Black Studies (and whatever else the humanities have degenerated into).
Now the good: I think this is the most true portion of the essay.
Better to have the handsomely paid Cornel West pontificating about white racism at Princeton where he is a full professor than fulminating at some Ghetto street corner. This status driven divide just reflects human nature. Why would a black Yalie on Wall Street socialize with the bro's left behind in the Hood? This is the strategy of preventing a large-scale, organized rebellion by decapitating its potential leadership.
I have once wrote that whites stopped sneering at MLK when Malcolm X and the Black Panthers began taking center stage. They sure became more accommodating of "moderate" blacks. With all of the terrorist attacks going on and with blacks converting to Islam, I don't think we're going to get rid of affirmative action any time soon.Priss Factor > , Website August 19, 2017 at 3:28 pm GMT
This is a politically plausible but morally craven plan, if we're in 1960.
Oops.Vinteuil > , August 19, 2017 at 6:31 pm GMT
@Vinteuil Stalin alternated between favoritism and intimidation. The truth is he did have an eye and ear for culture unlike Mao who was a total philistine.
If Stalin really hated artists, he would have killed all of them.
He appreciated them but kept a close eye.
He loved the first IVAN THE TERRIBLE by Eisenstein, but he sensed that the second one was a criticism of him, and Eisenstein came under great stress.DB Cooper > , August 19, 2017 at 7:41 pm GMT
OK, well, Stalin loved the movies, and may have had an eye for effective cinema. But when it came to music he was, precisely, a total philistine. On this point, I again recommend Shostakovich's disputed *Testimony,* a work unique in its combination of hilarity and horror, both of which come to a head in his account of the competition to write a new national anthem to replace the internationale – pp. 256-64. A must read.Stebbing Heuer > , Website August 19, 2017 at 8:33 pm GMT
@Thomm Can you explain why if South Asians has such high economic productivity India is such a sh*thole?MarkinLA > , August 19, 2017 at 11:29 pm GMT
@Rdm That's the second comment here picking on bald guys.
What do you have against the bald?
You do realise that it's not possible to control baldness? It's an outcome of genetics, yes?
You do also realise that there is zero correlation between baldness and the quality of one's character?
Are you really as stupid as you appear to be?Thomm > , August 20, 2017 at 3:04 am GMT
Is this the Onion?
I wonder how a Bruin is going to be a symbol of racism?Thomm > , August 20, 2017 at 3:11 am GMT
@DB Cooper For the same reason North Korea is poorer than South Korea, despite being the same people.
For the same reason the GDR was so much poorer than the FRG, despite the same people.
You probably never even thought about that.
A bad political system takes decades to recover from. Remember that the British also strip-mined India for 200 years..
Come on, these are novice questions
If you think the success of Asian-Americans in general (and Indian-Americans in particular) does not jive with your beliefs, then the burden of explaining what that is, is on you.
Indians happen to be the highest-income group in the US. Also very high are Filipinos and Taiwanese.
Most WNs are far, far below the intellectual level where they can grasp the complexities of issues like this.Russ Nieli > , August 20, 2017 at 8:11 am GMT
BTW, the economic center of gravity of the world has always been near Asia, except for a 200-year period from 1820-2020.
That the West would cede to Asia is really just a reversion to the historical norm.
WNs are not smart enough to understand maps/charts like this one, but others will find this interesting.Avalanche > , August 20, 2017 at 12:35 pm GMT
Racial preferences were ended at California public institutions -- including the elite public universities Berkley and UCLA -- by ballot initiative. No black violence ensued. There is little reason to think the black response would be different if the 8 Ivy League universities ended their policies of racial preferences. Blacks would adjust their expectations. Fear of black rioting and the desire to jumpstart the creation of a large and peaceful black middle class may have been important motives for the initial development of racial preference policies in the late 1960s; they are not major reasons for their retention and continued support from white administrators today. Other reasons and motives are operative (including what I call R-word dread).
PS: Cornel West has moved from Princeton to Harvard Divinity School.Avalanche > , August 20, 2017 at 1:08 pm GMT
"Nevertheless, when all added up, the costs would be far lowers than dealing with widespread 1960s style urban violence."
Except back in the '60′s; the White, Euro-derived people were unwilling to fight back. They felt guilty and half-blamed themselves. Not. Any. More! The costs -- social, mental, emotional, physical; pick your metric! -- have now exceeded the patience of WAY more Americans than the media is letting on.
Did you not see 20- and 30-THOUSAND, mostly White Euro-derived, Americans rallying to candidate -- and now President -- Trump's side? (No, the media carefully clipped the videos to hide those numbers, but there they (we!) were! We're done! We're fed up! "FEEDING" these destructive vermin to keep them from destroying our houses and families (and nation and country!) is no longer acceptable! You "don't let Gremlins eat after midnight"? Well, we did -- and now we're in a war against them.
You think this capitulating in education is preventing 'widespread 1960s-style urban violence? Have you not watched the news? We pretty much already are: ask NYC how many "sliced with a knife" attacks they have there! In JUST Jan. and Feb., there were well more than 500! (Seriously vicious attacks with knives and razor blades -- media mentioned it once for a few days, and then shut up.) Look at the fair in Indianapolis; count up rape statistics; investigate the "knock-out game" ("polar bear hunting" -- guess who's the polar bear?!). (Oh yeah, and: Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago; look at ANY black-filled ruin of a city ) If (when!) we finally have to (CHOOSE to) deal with this low-grade war -- WHO is better armed, better prepared, SMARTER, and fed up?
"This peace-keeping aspect of affirmative action understood, perhaps we ought to view those smart Asians unfairly rejected from Ivy League schools as sacrificial lambs."
Wait, wait -- these are White schools, built by White Americans FOR White Americans! "Oh, the poor Asians are not getting their 'fair share' cause the blacks are getting way more than their 'fair share'?! The Asians' 'fair share' is GO HOME!! The Asians don't have a 'fair share' in White AMERICAN universities; we LET them come here and study -- and that is a KINDNESS: they don't have a 'fair share' of OUR country! How about: stop giving preferences to every damned race and nationality other than the one that BUILT this country and these universities!
Check your premises!Avalanche > , August 20, 2017 at 1:17 pm GMT
@War for Blair Mountain Call them what they are: "paperwork Americans"! Having the paperwork does NOT make them Americans, and nothing ever will!
Imagine a virgin land with no inhabitants: if you took all the Chinese "Americans" or all the Pakistani "Americans" or Black "Americans" or Mexican "Americans" (funny, why did you leave those last two out?! Way more of them than the others ) and moved them there, would they -- COULD they ever -- create another America? No, they would create another China, or another Pakistan -- or their own version of the hellholes their forebears (or they themselves) came from. ONLY White, ONLY Euro-derived Americans could recreate an America.
And this goes, also, to answer the grumbling "Native" Americans who were also NOT native, yes? Siberia, Bering land bridge, ever heard of those? Do you not even know your own pre-history?! What "America" was here when it was a sparse population of warring tribes of variously related Indian groups? What did your forebears make of this continent?
Nothing. There would be no "America" where everyone wants to come and benefit by taking; because ONLY the White settlers (not immigrants: SETTLERS!) were able to create America! And as all you non-Americans (AND paperwork "Americans") continue to swamp and change America for your own benefit -- you will be losing the very thing you came here to take (unfair!) advantage of!Avalanche > ,
At that point, new public money could be channeled into funding people to leave. Blacks that don't like it in the U.S. would be given X amount of dollars to settle in an African country of their choice.
Chip 'em and ship 'em! Microchip where they CAN'T 'dig it out' to prevent them from ever ever ever returning! And ship 'em out! I'd pay a LOT to have this done!