- Joined
- Apr 10, 2010
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Jack - I don't know what's going on with you that you refuse to care about the numerous disasterous economic indicators that have been getting worse and worse for decades.
Like, it just blows my fucking mind that you just don't care. Or you pivot to hiding behind vague grandiose claims like "well on the whole, things are better than they've ever been!"
People are working more hours on average in the US, than they have for at least a century. It's completely commmonplace for people to be holding 2 or 3 jobs and barely scraping by. That is not normal. That is not an improvement from decades gone by.
The relative cost of a home has skyrocketed. Secure housing is THE MOST important of all human needs, and my entire generation is being priced out of it. The home ownership rate for my generation is HALF of what it was for boomers at this same point in their lives.
The average American household is living paycheck to paycheck and doesn't even have a few hundred bucks for emergencies. Savings have vanished.
The relative cost of a degree, that thing you need to have a shot at a decent future, has skyrocketed and its trapping multiple generations in a cycle of debt that will prevent them from owning a home and/or building any kind of real wealth.
Like, seriously, what is it with you, that you're aware of all of this, you KNOW the indicators and data points that I'm talking about, and you just go "meh, who cares? More people have civil rights now and that means everything is objectively better"
Need I also remind you - that more than 50,000 Americans die every year because they're too poor to afford healthcare. That isn't a thing that exists among our peer nations. That sounds like a smashing success to you?
It's not. People are suffering economically, tremendously, and you sound like an out of touch alien when you try to gaslight them into believing they're not suffering.
And that's all just domestic issues!
Should we even get into the global network of murder that is required for your neoliberal system to work? How the first world uses the IMF to trap 3rd world nations in predatory loan deals to extract the country's natural resources while also paying themselves to do billions in infrastructure contracts? Should we talk about Coca-Cola using death squads to exterminate striking workers in Latin America? Should we talk about how neoliberal capitalism necessitates a permanent underclass of third world workers to exploit in order to remain profitable? Should we talk about the numerous regime change wars that have killed millions of innocent people, in order to remove and replace regimes that were not friendly to western capital? Should we talk about how neoliberalism is completely reliant on unequal exchange with developing nations in order to remain functioning?
Give me a break. "Smashing success". Yeah bro - tell that to the 1 million dead Iraqis who died so that Dick Cheney and Haliburton could get billions of dollars in no-bid contracts, while we simultaneously installed a regime that would submit their oil reserves to the control of western energy companies. Tell that to the nearly 200 labor organizers murdered by Coca Cola in Colombia alone. Tell that to Salvador Allende, who was deposed by a US coup because his socialism made him hostile to western capital. Tell that to Thomas Sankara, who was assassinated by the west for having the audacity to lift Burkina Faso out of the mud, nationalize their natural resources and invest the money back into the country, while pulling countless numbers of his people out of starvation and disease. Tell that to the 13,000,000 people that starve to death every year, when they live in a world that produces enough food to feed all of them. If you count millions and millions of dead innocent people as a "smashing success", then sure dude, it's been pretty grand.
Just in case you need a reminder -
It's great that more people (women and minorities) have civil rights and legal protections now. I'm not going to downplay that. But there is no universe in which that means things are actually better economically than in 1970.
How in the world do you look at this kind of data and say "no no no, don't let your lying eyes deceive you. things are actually better now than they were from 1950-2000, despite what all of the charts and all of the data say!"
I would say technology and the internet along with information has made the average person able to compete.
Pre internet, most information stayed with the wealthy only. The little guy stayed poor, it was very difficult to become rich