After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

After the Crash

Tag Archives: Wealth Disparity

Should Taxpayers Be Subsidizing Obscene Salaries?

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By Adnan Al-Daini

Source: Dissident Voice

An article in the Guardian on bosses’ pay by the director of the High Pay Centre, Deborah Hargreaves, presents the disparity between bosses’ pay and the average wage in the UK thus:

“Chief executives in the FTSE 100 companies took home £4.96m in 2014 compared with average wages of £27,645. And, if anything, the pay gap is getting wider. A typical incentive award for a top boss increased by 50% of salary compared with the previous year, while workforce wages were up by £445. Bosses’ remuneration has risen from around 47 times average wages in the 1990s to around 180 times today.”

The pay gap shown by the above figures will be even wider if the salaries of bosses are expressed as a multiple of the median wage instead of the average wage. The average wage is skewed towards the top, thus most workers will earn below the average. The median wage is a better measure as it means half of the workers will earn below it and the other half above it.

Free-market ideologues would argue that salaries are fixed by market forces, and questioning such a disparity in income is tantamount to the politics of envy and interference in the freedom of markets. Such an argument is not really sustainable.

A company is a joint enterprise, and for it to be successful all its employees need to feel valued and justly rewarded. Such a disparity in income sends the wrong message to the many people who are working hard to make the company successful. It will lead to dissatisfaction and low morale amongst the workforce, and will eventually negatively impact the success of the company. A good boss will not accept such an obscene disparity in income between himself and his employees. Such salaries have become a virility symbol for bosses to compete with each other. It shouts – I am more important than you; just look at the size of my package!

If the wages paid by a company to its poorest employees are so low that it requires the state to top up their wages to provide them with the basics of life, then inflated salaries paid to the bosses are effectively being subsidized by the taxes we pay. It is a transfer of wealth from the many to the very few at the top. How can that be right? Where is the free-market in such practices?

If the income distribution is more equitable, the subsidy by the state to the low paid will be reduced, leaving more money for the government to spend on the NHS, infrastructure, police etc., things that are necessary for a civilized, functioning society.

Surely, then, that gives our elected government the right to enact laws and regulations to fix maximum salaries of bosses as a multiple of the lowest wage in that particular company. This will incentivize the bosses to increase the pay of their poorest employees to increase their own pay. The multiple should be certainly much lower than the figures quoted above.

Our taxation system needs to be overhauled to reflect the huge disparity in incomes; it is too narrowly set. Currently, we have a tax-free allowance of £10,600 and then a jump to 20% up to £42,385 then 40% up to income of £150,000, and a tax rate of 45% on income above £150,000.

A more progressive taxation system would start at a much lower rate and continue to rise incrementally well beyond the 45%. I am not a tax expert, so I leave it to those with the expertise to set the rates in such a way that we as a society ensure that the wealth of the nation is more equitably distributed.

Fairness and justice are the pillars on which successful, happy societies are built. The present system that siphons so much wealth to the top 1% to the impoverishment of the rest is neither fair, nor just. Failure to take action will result in the whole of society becoming the poorer; we will all suffer rich and poor.

 

Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Read other articles by Adnan.

 

The Popular Myth of Democracy in America

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

No nation in world history promised more and delivered less to its citizens and people worldwide. None more greatly threatens world peace – putting humanity’s survival up for grabs like never before.

None did more harm to more people globally over a longer duration. None matches the menace it represents – a presstitute media supported fascist gangster state willing to risk destroying planet earth to own it, run by a bipartisan criminal class.

From inception, America was always run by the people who own it, as first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay explained.

John Adams believed power belonged exclusively to the rich, well-born and able. Today it’s about monied interests in charge – deciding who holds all top positions in government, elected and appointed.

People have no say whatever. Ignore electoral politics, intended solely to deceive – manipulating people to believe new bums are more worthy than current ones.

Voting is a waste of time, accomplishing nothing. Duopoly power rules.

America is a one-party state with two wings, indistinguishable from each other on issues mattering most – militantly pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist no matter what names and faces hold top positions.

Police state laws enforced by powerful security forces at the federal, state and local levels assure wealth and privilege interests are exclusively served at the expense of public welfare.

Elections are farcical, exercises in theater, not democracy. Candidates for the nation’s top offices are cardboard cutouts of each other, distinguishable only by their disingenuous rhetoric – promises made, forgotten and broken once in office.

The public interest be damned. People are used, not served, deceived to believe politicians represent them.

Embedded power runs America, politicians serving entrenched interests exclusively, chosen for that reason. Ordinary people thinking their enfranchisement matters are living in a fantasy world.

Government of, by and for the people is the grandest of grand hoaxes. Media scoundrels perpetuate the myth with all the familiar slogans and high-minded posturing.

Jimmy Carter was right last summer calling America an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

Republicans and Democrats operate by the same corrupted standards. “(U)nlimited) money” serves their interests at the expense of constituents they represent.

America’s system is too debauched to fix. It’s too late for tinkering around the edges.

A complete makeover is needed – a popular revolution, replacing oligarchy with grassroots democracy for the first time in the nation’s history, freed from money control.

Today is the most perilous time in world history. We have a choice.

Accept the status quo, its endless wars, oligarch control over the greater good, unprecedented wealth disparity between rich and all others, along with harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers and risk of potential humanity destroying nuclear war – or refuse any longer to tolerate a system responsible for so much harm and misery to so many people worldwide.

Survival depends on choosing wisely. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind do you want your children to inherit?

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Economic grace of ‘Social Credit’: national dividend with compensated retail prices for consumer goods distribution in an age of technology

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quote-at-the-present-time-the-alternative-is-not-between-change-or-no-change-but-between-change-c-h-douglas-77-2-0224By Wallace Klinck

Source: The Daily Censored

“The unacknowledged, but obvious, truth is that unnecessary work, imposed by either edict or contrived financial legerdemain, is slavery and servitude—totally irrational and immoral.  Every engineer worthy of the name is trying to eliminate the need for human effort as a factor of production while every witless or hypocritical politician, pressured by the financial powers above and an insecure and uncomprehending population below, is professing, at least, to promote policies designed to ‘put people back to work.’” (from the below article)

Five minute video of Major C.H. Douglas, founder of Social Credit (1934):

Because of its deleterious impact on personal freedom and initiative, centralization of both economic and political power is the critical issue facing society. The primary obstacle to reversing this growing concentration of power is an almost universal ignorance of the manner in which the existing financial system renders the price-system increasingly non-self-liquidating, making impossible the recovery of industrial production costs through sales. Institutions and individuals attempt to resolve this problem by resorting to bank debt, thereby obtaining access to the products of industry by the self-defeating expedient of mortgaging our future–i.e., transferring these costs as an exponentially growing debt charge against future cycles of production–and by engaging in an orgy of wasteful and destructive activities, effectively culminating in continuous war.

Their monopolistic proclivities disincline both Finance-Capitalism operating under the Monopoly of Credit and every form of collectivist organization (e.g., socialism, communism or fascism) from grappling with this problem.  The solution must entail an appropriate modification of the existing financial-credit and price system so as to properly facilitate distribution of the immense output of modern technology-based industry, in the context of expanding leisure.

Nearly a century ago this emergent challenge was studied in depth by the British engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas, who not only analyzed the defects of the existing price system as it functions under present financial and industrial cost-accounting conventions, but also put forward realistic remedial proposals.  Between and for a period after the World Wars, Douglas’s ideas, which he named “Social Credit”, attracted large numbers of adherents and spawned many political movements in countries around the world.

Douglas recognized that life is more than bread alone and that in order to attain his full stature man must be released from unnecessary material concerns in order to make time for matters of the Mind and Spirit. This clearly was inherent in certain much-neglected aspects of the message of Jesus, who explicitly stated that lack of faith is the reason for our obsession with toiling our own way to material survival. Jesus asked how we could doubt that God, who provides for the fish and birds and the beasts, knows our needs and will provide even better for us. On more than one occasion Jesus unconditionally distributed loaves and fishes to crowds that had gathered to hear him. To indicate how reality operates outside of puritanical human notions of morality, Jesus pointed out that his heavenly Father causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and lets rain fall on both the just and the unjust.

An aspect of this divine caring is the ability we have been given to accumulate understanding of natural laws, which has resulted in an endless extension of “mechanical advantage”—termed by Social Crediters the Unearned Increment of Association—from which has emerged our amazing modern technology with its outflow of material abundance. Through learning how to associate effectively in the areas of both human endeavours and material resources, we have multiplied our productive capacity many thousands, if not millions, of times over.  The historical aggregation of Unearned Increments has provided the vast Cultural Heritage upon which we all so greatly, if unconsciously, depend.

This is the background of why Social Credit came to be perceived by its leading thinkers as “practical Christianity”. Although Douglas did not set out to design it as such, ongoing development of Social Credit thought has revealed it to be uniquely consonant with and revelatory of the assurances given by the founder of the Christian faith.

This realistic perception of our situation is absent from the major ideologies of our time.  For example, Libertarians promote the notion that the individual must “make it on his/her own”. No one today (apart maybe from individuals lost in the wilderness) is doing this; all have the benefit of the Cultural Heritage, which ties us in a web of dependencies not only with our contemporaries but also with previous generations.

Socialism, which calls for State ownership and administration of the means of production—the central planning of the economy and of human activity—similarly endeavors to alienate people from their heritage.  Besides specifically attacking the very principle of inheritance, Socialists force the energies of the members of society into mandatory employment in projects prescribed by the State. Suppression of individual initiative is an inevitable result of this constraint of access to the possibilities afforded by the richness of the Cultural heritage. This observation applies to all forms of “socialism”, whether national or international in nature.

Social Credit is the inverse of socialism and a negation of finance capitalism.  Many persons have it in their minds that a sharing society necessarily is socialistic; i.e., power centralizing. Presumably they think this way on the erroneous assumption that the sharing will be accomplished by redistributing existing wealth by means of various confiscatory forms of taxation.  However, Social Credit, uniquely, stands not for redistribution of earned incomes, but rather for distribution of consumer goods at source as they emerge from the production line.

Douglas enunciated and stressed the truism that production without consumption is sheer futility and waste.

The fundamental task of economic policy is to match and balance the cycles of consumption and production.  Producers’ costs cannot be recovered without money received from consumers, whose incomes alone provide business its means to liquidate all financial costs of production.

In order to effect this balance, Douglas recommended that National (Consumer) Dividends and Compensated (lowered) Prices at point of retail sale must be provided and financed by a Government Agency (created or existing, whatever is most efficient and convenient) with funds not derived from taxation but drawn down from a properly constructed National Credit Account.  This would be a continuously updated actuarial accounting of the nation’s real credit, being an inventory of all those resources which are available to be used for production and which, if so used, may result in the making of financial prices.

Unfortunately, the public are conditioned to reason from the false assumption that the economic “pie” is limited to the financial incomes paid out in production, and hence they perceive this as the only possible source of funding. This assumption includes the erroneous corollary that the price-system is self-liquidating; i.e., that incomes paid out as wages, salaries and dividends are not only equal to, but available to meet, the total financial costs of production. That this is a major fallacy is readily proved by the enormous accumulation of inflationary private and public debt created as loans by the banking system, which allows goods to be purchased after a fashion but does not liquidate their financial costs of production in a synchronized fashion.  As a kind of stop-gap expedient, these loans merely transfer these costs into the future, to be liquidated with income derived from later cycles of production unrelated to the cycles in which they were incurred.

The physical (i.e., real) costs of production are met as production takes place. Obviously, if this were not the case, production could not proceed.  This is self-evident and axiomatic. When goods are produced in finished form they are meant to be used and should be immediately available to the overall consuming public in toto and without entailing any residual financial debt.

This universal piling-up of debt is bogus and is required only because price increasingly includes, as real capital replaces labor as a factor of production, allocated charges in respect of real capital which are not distributed as income in the same cycle of production. Consumer income is cancelled prematurely, leaving a growing deficiency of income relative to the total prices of goods awaiting purchase. In other words, the flow of final prices increasingly exceeds the flow of effective financial purchasing-power. Purchasing-power is prematurely cancelled in respect of still existing real capital, whereas it should be cancelled only at the rate of actual physical consumption or depletion.  Money should be issued at the rate of production and cancelled at the rate of consumption

In the face of this predicament, we can simply forgo acquisition of these goods, leaving the producer no option but to warehouse or destroy them and go bankrupt—making his endeavors a mindless exercise in futility. Or we can ensure that, while required remaining actual “workers” (i.e., recipients of remuneration from others for services rendered) continue to have the benefit of their earnings, all citizens, workers included, have access to the full output of industry by being provided adequate aggregate purchasing-power to make this possible.

Besides being a practical necessity, such an arrangement recognizes the share all have in the almost fantastic Cultural Heritage of Civilization. In a Social Credit dispensation, Inheritance would be generalized.

In stark contrast is the socialist attitude, which is that inheritance is evil and should be abolished.

Social Credit stands most definitely, unashamedly and unabashedly, for a sharing society—and as labor is increasingly reduced by technology it would become more sharing with the passage of time. Unlike Socialism, which in reality has always been more about centralized control than about sharing, Social Credit does not involve State ownership, planning or administration of the economy or of social organization as such. By giving people as individuals full access to the ever-increasing abundance made possible by technology and to concomitant economic independence, it is in fact highly decentralizing.

The rational purpose of technology is to eliminate inefficiency, and “jobs” concocted merely for the sake of distributing incomes are precisely that—mere wasted energy and materials.  The solution to the problem of economic insecurity in the modern age of super-production does not lie primarily in “making” work, but increasingly in facilitating

distribution.  Those who clamor for “jobs” actually visualize a model along the lines of fascist and communist states, which give and demand of everyone endless work throughout their lifetime, in accordance with the rather suspect dictum that “work will make you free”—but not until you die.

The unacknowledged, but obvious, truth is that unnecessary work, imposed by either edict or contrived financial legerdemain, is slavery and servitude—totally irrational and immoral.  Every engineer worthy of the name is trying to eliminate the need for human effort as a factor of production while every witless or hypocritical politician, pressured by the financial powers above and an insecure and uncomprehending population below, is professing, at least, to promote policies designed to “put people back to work.”

Frankly, if I desire “work”, then I want to do it by my own choice and at my own leisure, increasingly freed from the enforced conformity and servitude of the existing system.

We should not be striving to provide more, and more, human work but rather more technological productive efficiency with augmented effective consumer purchasing-power capable of eliminating consumer debt and liquidating industrial costs in a timely manner.  Let robots do the work.  Tirelessly and without complaint, they perform the vast majority of it better than people can.

You want more work?  Then let’s have another war—or, better yet, continuous wars until we end up destroying the whole planet or all life upon it.

Indeed, the flaws in the current financial system provide a constant incentive for military war, which normally is just an extension of economic war. Unbalanced international trade is driven by the increasing inherent orthodox need to export—not to receive an equivalent of real wealth in return, but to capture financial credits from other nations to compensate for the internal intrinsic deficiency of consumer purchasing-power that exists in the domestic price-system of every nation.

Anyone who does not understand this compulsive destructive dynamic of the modern financial-economic system is totally unqualified even to comment on our economic position.

The abundance that technology makes possible should set men and women free from physical want, increasingly enabling them to choose independently and without duress their preferred activities in life. As opposed to the ubiquitous Keynesian, cognitively dissonant, counterfeit socialist concept of “economic democracy” as a centralized administrative proletarian Work-State, Social Credit gives real meaning to the concept of economic democracy by favoring a consumer-motivated system of production.

C. H. Douglas stressed the importance of understanding policy by tracing its pedigree.  From a metaphysical standpoint, Social Credit would be a practical, physical incarnation of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation by Unearned Grace—in contradistinction to the prevailing Judaic conception, and system, of Salvation through Works. The current financial system is predicated upon a materialist philosophy characterizable as do ut des,  meaning “this for that”—in other words, that nothing can be obtained except it be earned, that, as the saying goes, “There is no free lunch”. It is the underlying principle of the madness-inducing doctrine of “Salvation through Works”.

Hence, the existing financial system issues money only as debt for production and never for consumption, except in the latter case as debt which must be acquitted by future work This policy of issuing money only for work might have had some basis in equity in the primitive economy where production was primarily due to human effort. It makes no rational or moral sense whatever in the modern highly technological economy where non-human factors of production predominate and human intervention becomes increasingly a mere, although essential, catalyst within a vast productive complex.

Social Credit coheres profoundly with the Christian philosophy of Salvation through Unearned Grace–Grace being an outright gift from God. Spiritual Grace has, or should have, a physical counterpart, or incarnation, in the economic or material realm. Thus, from this philosophical standpoint access to consumer goods and services should increasingly be justified not by work alone but rather by the individual’s share in an inalienable inheritance of the communal capital that has accumulated over the ages.  The effect of growth of our historic Cultural Heritage has always been to advance the potential for faster, more diversified and less wasteful productivity, with an accompanying potential for enhanced human leisure.

Christian philosophy holds that it is a major sin to make an end of a means. The rational purpose and end of production is consumption, not to create work (a means). An economic system should provide goods and services for mankind as efficiently as possible with minimal trouble and effort for all concerned.

One might ask how it is possible for a nation such as the United States of America, professedly predicated upon Christian principles, to base its entire economy and social structure upon a financial system that is a total inversion of those principles. A clue to this strange contradiction may be found in Douglas’s observation that Finance and the Established Media are concentric. As a result, he said, society has been hypnotized, with the consequence that only a drastic de-hypnotization can save it.

If society can pursue a continuous, destructive, malevolent and malignant policy of devastating the continents and populations of foreign nations, then surely we can easily pursue instead the civilized alternative of providing (Consumer) Dividends and Compensated (lowered) Retail Prices to support a secure and leisured life for our citizens.  Under the existing iniquitous financial system we are driven to deliver those potential Dividends to other nations in the form of bombs.  This would appear to be insanity by any rational criterion, but it satisfies the overarching irrational one of providing plenty of “jobs” and “incomes” (not to mention “profits”)—albeit at the additional cost of stupendous physical waste, human suffering and a massive, exponentially expanding financial mortgage burdening our future.  This too would appear to be insanity, but apparently not to members of the banking fraternity, which finances it all with conspicuously detached equanimity.

Surely the time is long past when individuals and nations should have stopped “fighting” amongst themselves and instead concentrated their intelligence, energies and talents on demanding reality-grounded financial and economic policies.

I hope that the above commentary may help to clarify some of the major questions and issues often raised about Social Credit.

Dr. Oliver Heydorn has recently published a major informative book, comprehensively incorporating C. H. Douglas’s essential ideas. Refer:  http://www.socred.org

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

http://social-credit.blogspot.ca

http://www.socialcredit.com.au

http://socialcredit.schooljotter2.com

___________________________________________________________

The author was born during the so-called “Great Depression” when in 1935 the historic election of the world’s first “Social Credit” Government in the Province of Alberta, Canada startled the pundits and alarmed the global financial powers.  In later years he became acquainted with several Cabinet Ministers of that Government.  His close mentor was Mr. Leslie Denis Byrne, O.B.E., a British actuary and technical expert in Social Credit who was sent, with a colleague, from Britain by C. H. Douglas to advise the fledgling new Provincial Administration. The author holds baccalaureate degrees in Arts and Education. In Arts, he majored in political science, and minored in economics. In Education, he majored in social studies, secondary route.

Appreciation is expressed to Robert E. Klinck, M.A. for his considerate and patient assistance in editing this essay.

 

The Other Dieoffs

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By Chad Hill

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

Last week I realized that there were a few subtleties left out of my (rather depressing) topic. I argued that America was doing more than just throwing its working class under the bus; it was actively trying to eliminate of them. Meanwhile, the media, especially that tailored to the richest twenty percent of news consumers, is consistently waxing ecstatic on how this is the “best, richest, most peaceful time, ever,” because Facebook, even though most of us Americans are living in communities that are in an advanced state of decay, if not outright collapse.

The point I wanted to make is that the dieoff is happening not only at the end of life as we saw last week, but also at the beginning. By this I mean that it’s simply too expensive to have kids anymore.  Lowered birthrates are a sort of “stealth dieoff” among the lower classes, and the upper ones too.

Now, lowered birthrates is certainly something I can get behind, but I would rather it have come from choice rather than economic necessity. I realize that not everyone is like me, and for some, the desire to breed is unstoppable. The rich are perennially complaining that the poor are having children they can’t afford, a very Anglo-Saxon complaint that goes back several hundred years. Of course, the poor will continue to breed no matter what because a child costs nothing to produce, and if their ancestors hadn’t behaved the same way after all, they wouldn’t be here. The idea that poverty will stop the poor and indigent from breeding has a poor track record, especially with the numbers of poor and indigent consistently rising. All it means is that more children will be born in poverty, and we now know that there are a host of behavioral and epigenetic consequences of that. Most certainly, the fallout from that will once again be placed on individual failure rather than social circumstance.

Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor (HuffPo)

The number of kids in the US would be shrinking if it weren’t for immigrants. Americans are castigated for having children they can’t afford, with entire communities, especially rural ones, bereft of well-paying jobs. Meanwhile people in these communities see a massive influx immigrants with huge families working in all the blue collar occupations that they used to do. Is it any wonder that anti-immigrant demagoguery is a political winner in decaying Middle America? Corporate America felt they could keep a lid on this situation forever, even as they cynically stoked this reactionary fervor to delegitimize the very idea of the common good to gain tax benefits and hide the stealth takeover of government. Now they cannot control the demon they have unleashed. The nihilistic philosophy purveyed by the Right of every man for himself has reaped a whirlwind that even they can no longer control. It was only a matter of time before someone hijacked it and used it for their own personal ends.

This article is from the British newspaper The Guardian, but is just as relevant to the United States:

These hurdles to the world of adulthood continue to be a great source of sadness and anxiety, and I’m not alone. For swathes of people in their 20s and 30s, who largely thought they would be at least a bit sorted by now, achieving the adult lives they want seems a distant fantasy. Spiralling property prices coupled with the fetishisation of housing as an investment – expressed through buy-to-let properties and often poor rental conditions – means secure housing is off the table for many of us as we continue to subsidise our much richer landlords…The recession, unstable and unreliable unemployment, low pay compounded by a pensions shortfall and an ageing population, have all led to a situation in which many members of my generation feel not only short-changed, but helpless when it comes to building some semblance of a stable family life. While our generational predecessors, the baby boomers, reaped the rewards of free university education and affordable property prices, we have been disproportionately affected by austerity…

Jealousy towards baby boomers is an everyday occurrence. You’ll be sitting in a bar with friends and hear them lament the fact that their parents had bought a house by the time they were 27. .. Generation Y – or millennials, if you must – are still often portrayed as existing in a state of perpetual kidulthood; we’re Peter Pans who never want to grow up. Yet many of us are desperate to do so.

Unaffordable housing and living costs are often portrayed as a “London problem”. “Why not simply move?” detractors say, as though career opportunity, family ties or personal finances are not an issue. Yet I spoke to people in their 20s and 30s from all over the UK, and many felt the same way: that their chances of getting to the point where they are stable enough to settle down and have children are slim to none. Many of them feel great sadness about this, not only because they look to their parents’ generation and see opportunities they’ve never had, but because a gulf is opening within our own generation – between those who can start a family or whose parents can help them get on the property ladder, and those who can’t….

The more people I spoke to, the more apparent it became that this is not just about generational divides, but about class. Interviewees were forever mentioning friends or acquaintances who had been privileged enough to buy, while those from low-income backgrounds lost out.

‘Babies? An impossible dream’: the millennials priced out of parenthood (Guardian)

The decay of America’s working class is often chalked up sort of a moral turpitude, and this is depicted as something that emerged as a fallout of the permissive 1960’s, despite the fact that it more exactly coincides with the shuttering of factories all over the country than the flower children. The lower classes are consistently depicted by the media as stupid and lazy, and thus deserving of their plight. Meanwhile, the wealthy are depicted as increasingly hard-working and morally upstanding, constantly either studying for another certification or working to the point of exhaustion, and pushing their sheltered, overprivileged children to study hard and get into a good college so they can keep up with the Joneses. Yet at the same time, these poor, working class white Americans are held up as moral exemplars of the nation; the “Real Americans,” in contrast to the swarthy, godless, libertine city-dwellers living it up on welfare. Middle Americans get the mixed message that they are morally superior than the lazy, dark-skinned masses in the cities (where most of the economic activity takes place), at the same time as their communities are being overtaken by violence, family breakdown and chronic drug abuse. It’s a rather schizophrenic view, to say the least.

I recently read this comment on Disinfo :

Viewing this site without Adblocking software is quite the experience. Right now, I’ve got two professional wrestling ads and an ad for Kohls up top. Down at the bottom:

“The way Kim Kardashian lost her virginity is disgusting!”
“25 sexy girls who don’t hide that they’re bisexual!”
“14 selfies taken right before death!”
“20 unseemly moments caught on Walmart security cameras!”
“24 stars who forgot to wear underwear in public!”
Something about ultimate female fighter Ronda Rousey.

It’s like the server is emanating from “Idiocracy,” targeting the oh so coveted “13 Year Old Boy Who Jacks Off 23 Times a Day” demographic.

When I click on the banners, I’m brought to a site running so many simultaneous video ads that my computer freezes. “Gee, thanks! Say, could I perhaps buy something from you?”

This is in reply to a Matt Taibbi article, America is too dumb for TV news.

It’s our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.

The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.

What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.

And this coming not long after “Black Friday,” in which we are treated to scenes from all over the country of herds of people camping out outside in the freezing cold on one of our few holidays outside the blank, cinderblock boxes of suburban wasteland, so that they can trample themselves to death to secure a new big-screen TV, video game or juicer.

It does seem like Idiocracy, which was theoretically a parody movie, is increasingly an accurate depsiction of our society right now. We currently have a reality TV star running for president. What else is Donald Trump but our very own President Camacho?

Idiocracy is now. How much further can society plummet?

On this news website, chronicling just one area (upstate New York), every article was a depiction of the horror show that Middle America has become:

Mother hid dead body of 11-year-old daughter missing for over a year in freezer, police say

Rome police: Teen shot girlfriend’s baby after trying to stand with loaded gun

Man checks into Syracuse hospital with gunshot wound, but won’t say what happened

Armed Arizona man threatens Islamic community in Upstate NY

In Louisiana, a ‘picture-perfect’ family of 4 is dead in murder-suicide

Mississippi Man Guns Down Waffle House Waitress After She Asks Him Not to Smoke (Alternet)

Citing mass shootings, Upstate NY sheriff urges citizens to carry guns

This is not the sign of a healthy society. This is a society in the grip of madness. This is the other dieoff.

America is one giant tapestry of scam artistry. From pedophiles in Congress, to hedge-funders jacking the price of drugs, to shaking down taxpayers to fund sports stadiums for billionaires, to gutting finance laws, everywhere you turn there is a scam where someone is either trying to rip someone off, or is getting ripped off. And those who are getting ripped off are busily looking to get in on the hustle where they take advantage of someone else below them. It’s a society of predators and prey. And we think this is somehow normal. How much longer can a society like this last?

Isn’t it time we start acknowledging that this is what capitalism is. I mean inherently. It’s the law of the jungle. It’s every man for himself. It’s the “survival of the fittest.” It’s everyone jockeying for some sort of advantage, every minute of every day, morality be damned. It’s a society dedicated to nothing else besides getting every last dollar from the next guy by any means possible. It’s appealing to the lowest and basest instincts in humanity. Yet we’re told that “naked self interest” is natural and is the sole engine of prosperity, and that extreme inequality drives us to “achieve” by the pseudoscience of economics, and most of us appear to believe it.

This is the society we’ve made for ourselves. Are your proud of it? So is it any wonder there’s a backlash, whether from religious fundamentalists or radical political ideologies like Trumpism?

…on the free market it is legal and customary to instrumentalize our fellow human beings, violating their dignity because our goal is not to protect it. Our goal is to gain personal advantage, and in many cases this can be achieved more easily if we take advantage of others and violate their dignity…What is decisive is my attitude and my priority: am I interested in the greatest good and the preservation of the dignity of all, which is something which affects me automatically and which I benefit from as well, or am I primarily interested in my own welfare and my own advantage, which others might, but will not necessarily draw benefit from? If we pursue our own advantage as our supreme goal, the customary practice is to use others as means to achieve this goal and to take advantage of them accordingly.

If we must constantly fear that our fellow human beings will take advantage of us in the market as soon as they are in a position to do so, something else will be systematically destroyed: trust. Some economists say this doesn’t matter because the economy focuses completely on efficiency. But such a view must be disputed, for trust is the highest social and cultural good we know. Trust is what holds societies together from the inside – not efficiency!..The interim conclusion to be drawn is radical: so long as a market economy is based on pursuit of profit and competition and the mutual exploitation that results from it, it is reconcilable with neither human dignity nor liberty. It systematically destroys societal trust in the hope that the efficiency it yields will surpass that achieved by any other form of economy.

10 Moral Crises That Have Resulted From Unfettered, Free Market Capitalism (Alternet)

This comment to a Barbara Ehrenreich piece at Naked Capitalism describes one major reason the white working classes, especially who have bought into the “rugged individualism” ethos, are being skinned alive by this economic system.

I believe this analysis is missing a very important component. True, historically poor whites have experiences somewhat more privileged conditions than minorities (admittedly even today they still do), but that traditional privilege has simultaneously caused them to be somewhat more fragile, less resilient than other oppressed groups. Poor whites are more atomized, isolated people in America. They do not have, nor have access to, the same cohesive social structures that have tended to develop among minorities as a survival mechanism against white oppression in the past.

I don’t say that as a theory, but rather as experienced reality. In the trailer park my family still lives in minority groups tend be gregarious and social among themselves (and honestly among others as well if one were inclined to invite himself as I often was). From my experience they were mostly psychologically stable and had a good ability to roll with the punches. The poor whites on the other hand were near universally drug addicts and thieves, and even when they did (or do–they’re still there I mean) form (weak) social bonds they’d nevertheless steal from each other or rat each other out to the police regardless. This was something I never saw happen among minorities (though I’m sure it does happen; I just didn’t see it at all).

Anyway to continue on, I believe that our economic system is in decline across the board, and that everyone’s wealth and prosperity are taking a hit on average (and the poor are getting the worst of it, as is common in collapsing societies–as I believe I understood from Jared Diamond’s work as well as a Sciencedaily anthropology article I read a while back). This being the case, I put the two together and come up with the idea that poor whites simply do not have the social frameworks, that were previously forged by oppression among the minorities, required to survive a declining society–and thus are dying off.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/america-to-working-class-whites-drop-dead.html#comment-2520049

Which coincides with my observations.

Of course there are no social bonds in a society where it’s every man for himself trying to gain personal advantage. Humans were not meant to live like this. The endgame of such a society is Colin Turnbull’s description of the Ik in Uganda, also brought about by a rapid onset of scarcity and deracination. We’re doing the elite’s dirtywork ourselves. They don’t have to massacre us if they can get us to massacre each other.

Meanwhile, among the “meritocratic elite” winners, things are not looking so rosy either:

The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm. They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.” …From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success. Because a certain kind of success seems well within reach, they feel they have to attain it at all costs—a phenomenon she refers to as “I can, therefore I must.” Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.

The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents….

Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute. What disturbs her most is that the teenagers she sees no longer rebel. A decade ago, she used to referee family fights in her office, she told me, where the teens would tell their parents, “This is bad for me! I’m not doing this.” Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice. Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow. Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.

The Silicon Valley Suicides (The Atlantic)

One of the reason the children of the elites feel such a sense of anxiety is by design. We’ve made sure that anyone who doesn’t make it into the “cognitive elite” now lives a life of persistent humiliation, desperation and scarcity, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the debt collectors and predatory law enforcement. And now they can’t even afford to have a family, as we saw above. Add to that the fact that the social safety net is being gutted every day because it is “unaffordable,” even as the pool of jobs is inexorably shrinking. Is it any wonder they’re being driven to neurosis, even to the point of taking their own lives?

It’s yet another dieoff.

So who exactly is thriving in a society like this? Because I can’t find anyone. Yet we’re constantly told by economists that this is just the “natural” evolution of society, as inevitable as the phases of the moon or the law of gravity. There is simply nothing to be done but stomp down on the pedal of more growth and innovation. Really?

Can there be any doubt after reading stories like those above, that something is seriously wrong? for those of us who don’t live in gated communities, or the rarefied communities in Manhattan, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles where all of our media originates, we can see this with our own two eyes. We see the dysfunction around us. Yet the media constantly denies it. It’s dedicated to stoking our fears and insecurities to push product. Can there be any surprise that people in this frightened and decaying nation are turning to someone like Trump who ignores the economists and promises to “make us great again?” It was only a matter of time before someone did it.

Now, you might accuse me of cherry-picking the sordid and sensationalist stories above. I collected them last week entirely by happenstance intending to write about them, but in the interim, something else happened that you may have heard about. As cynical as I am, even my breath is constantly getting taken away.

I once wrote that mass-shootings will become so common in America that the media won’t even bother to cover them anymore. One remarkable thing about the massacre in San Bernardino was that it managed to completely obscure the other gun massacre that took place on the very same day! And it pushed coverage off of the religious fundamentalist massacre at an abortion clinic less than a week before. In other words, there are so many gun massacres that the media cant even cover them all!

Of the 30,000-plus people killed by firearms each year in the United States, more than 11,000 of those are homicides. That means there are more than 30 gun-related murders daily.

The San Bernardino massacre marked the 353rd mass shooting in America this year alone, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, which defines a mass shooting where at least four people are either injured or killed.

“You have 14 people dead in California, and that’s a horrible tragedy. But likely 88 other people died today from gun violence in the United States,” Everytown for Gun Safety’s Ted Alcorn told the New York Times.

In 2015 to date, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 12,223 people have died as a result of gun violence in America, while another 24,722 people have been injured.
“We’re having a mass shooting every day, it’s just happening under the radar,” Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Gun Policy and Research, told news.com.au.

New York Daily News front cover divides America: ‘God Isn’t Fixing This’ (news.com.au)

Legislation that was unobjectionable to the George W. Bush administration—laws that would simply prevent people on the FBI’s consolidated terrorist watch list from buying guns or explosives—are voted down in Congress. A physician, running for president, say,  “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” And 185,345 background checks to buy guns were processed on Black Friday alone—a new record. According to the FBI, “The previous high for receipts were the 177,170 received on 12/21/2012—a week after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.” Mass killings turn out to be extremely good news for the gun industry. 

Beyond the frequency and the brutality and the futility of effecting changes, maybe this is a statistic worth noting. As Joshua Holland writes: “Perhaps the most frightening thing we know about gun violence comes from a study conducted by researchers at Duke, Harvard, and Columbia that was published earlier this year in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law. It found that almost one in 10 Americans who have access to guns are also prone to impulsive outbursts of rage. Among this group are almost 4 million people who carry their guns around in public and say they ‘have tantrums or angry outbursts,’ ‘get so angry [that they] break or smash things’ and lose their temper and ‘get into physical fights.’ ” This is not about mental illness; it’s about anger, violence, and fear. And in no small part because of mass shootings, we become more angry, violent, and more fearful all the time. 

And while we read the same articles, and make the same phone calls, and buy more guns, and grow more frightened, one other thing does change. Our schools go into lockdown. More and more. Thursday in Denver (“reports … of an armed person at the school”). Thursday in Pleasant Grove, Utah (“after a student reported another student with a gun”). Thursday in Chicago. Thursday in Palm Beach, Florida. Thursday in Dallas. Thursday in Savannah, Georgia. Thursday (and two other days this week) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Friday in Philadelphia. Wait, what? Kids bring guns to schools? In what universe does this surprise us? For our children, a world of daily shootings and daily lockdowns is the way they will have been raised. For them, as a friend who lives near one of Thursday’s lockdowns puts it, “It’s not if. It’s when.”

Mass Shootings are Changing Us (Slate)

The irony is that, when it comes to real resources, America is one of the best placed societies in the world. We waste upwards of forty percent of our food and energy on a daily basis. While we do import oil, this is mainly due to our profligate ways rather than true scarcity or “need.” Our population density compared to land area is the envy of Europe, much less places like India, China and Nigeria. We have the resources to give people a much higher standard of living in an industrial decline situation than much of the world, it’s just that our frontier growth mentality and bootstrap ideals dictate that life must be a hard struggle, and that allowing the rich to accumulate massive fortunes is somehow not only morally, but also practically, ideal.

I feel somewhat fortunate that I understood from an early age that the American lifestyle is toxic just be observing the lives of people around me. I never bought into the bullshit, and it seems like the people who did are the ones who are struggling, particularly mentally. My circumstances are somewhat similar to this woman from the article cited above:

Some might argue that expectations are now simply too high. Thea, 26, certainly thinks so. “I come from a working-class background, so, while I have had some financial help from my parents when I’ve been desperate – I’m talking a couple of hundred quid a month – the onus has always been on me to achieve and get where I want to be in life. I’ve not had anything ‘handed’ to me, like a house or substantial amount of money that would help me settle down in future.”

But it doesn’t bother her too much. “My upbringing and background have helped me accept my current situation. Despite not having much money as a kid – we never went abroad, for example – I never felt I missed out on anything. I do think my expectations of what constitute necessities – foreign holidays, owning a house or car – are lower than those of some of my peers who had more middle-class upbringings.”

Thea has never wanted children and, as an only child, knows that she will inherit her parents’ house when they die. “I think the country, as far as wages, property, poverty and my generation actually being able to build secure finances, is in an absolute state and something undoubtedly needs to be done. But I also think part of the problem is that so many people go to uni now: it devalues a degree (I don’t have one) and doesn’t guarantee anyone a job. So you’re left with broke, unemployed twentysomethings in debt.”

In my office context, I saw countless examples of people pursuing the “American Dream” of going deep into debt for a fancy degree, clawing their way up the career ladder by working 80-hour weeks and hitting the links, marrying someone from a suitable class background, pumping out the babies immediately thereafter, and moving out of their cozy, walkable neighborhoods to a bloated starter mansion out in the distant exurban wastelands, with the requisite hour-plus commute to be in a good school district (and moving another ten miles out with every raise or promotion). This is the good life? Really? I had no intention (or even opportunity) to get into the competition of who has the bigger house, or whose kids have the best SAT scores, or any of that nonsense. Being born on the bottom with no family has its advantages. You don’t have to be a hermit to not buy into this society’s bullshit, you just have to think for yourself, something most people are conditioned never to do, because if they did the whole thing might fall apart.

But then, again it’s all falling apart anyway.

Oil and Money – Lessons Learned

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petrodollar-systemThis is a concluding post for an excellent 7 part long-form series featured on the Hipcrime Vocab blog. While this serves as an adequate synopsis of what was covered, I highly recommend the series for it’s depth and scope starting with the introduction.

Source: Hipcrime Vocab

The first thing I learned is that I bit off more than I could chew, lol. I was intending a simple book review, and it turned into a lot more than I intended to write. I also learned how difficult and thankless a task blogging can be. I’m glad at least a few of you chimed in to let me know you enjoyed it.

One major thing I learned (which I already sort-of knew) is how much real resources have to do with the economy, and economic history, despite economists’ insistence that land, labor and capital are all that matter. In fact, real resources appear to be the MAJOR driver of our economic fortunes. Even Forbes magazine had to admit: The Recessions of 1973,1980,1991,2001,2008 Were Caused By High Oil Prices. Energy doesn’t matter, huh?

I was really taken aback at how recent this all is. I was somewhat aware the historic problem with oil was that there was too much of the stuff.  Eric Roston, in The Carbon Age, writes, “Gasoline was a throwaway by product of kerosene refining until the early 1900s, used sometimes in solvents or as fuel for stoves. In 1892, two cents a gallon was a decent price. For another thirty years, apothecaries were the makeshift filling stations.”

But I had no idea just how much of a glut there was and how people thought it would last forever. That it was so cheap we needed the Texas Railroad Commission to hold back production so that the prices would be high enough. I mean, this substance contains the equivalent of ten to eleven years of human labor (1750 Kilowatt hours of human labor), for crying out loud! And it is a non-renewable resource! I was amazed at how far we went in coming up with new uses for the stuff, to the point destroying perfectly good and workable infrastructure just so we could use more of it. Can anything be more insane?

The long boom was driven by the exploitation of oil as a resource. This led to the dominance of the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). All of the knock-on effects of the ICE were behind the post-war boom. I mean, you could write a book about all the economic development caused by cars and trucks. In fact, truck driver/delivery is still the most common job in most states to this day! The ability to deliver goods cheaply anywhere had so many knock-on effects, from the creation of whole new cities to the rise of big-box retailers. Let’s not forget that everything in that big-box retailer is made from plastic which is made from petroleum feedstocks. Kunstler calls the suburbs the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It’s easy to see how that’s true.

I didn’t know that it was only as late as 1959 that petroleum overtook coal to be more than 50 percent of our energy use. I didn’t know that coal only became the world’s predominant energy source after 1900. Before that, we were still essentially in a wood/biofuel economy. As I wrote before, that’s pretty recent – less than three generations.

 We think of the 19th century as the era of coal, but as the distinguished Canadian energy economist Vaclav Smil has pointed out, coal only reached 5% of world energy supply in 1840, and it didn’t get to 50% until about 1900.

The modern oil industry began in 1859, but it took more than a century for oil to eclipse coal as the world’s No. 1 source. “The most important historical lesson,” Dr. Smil says, is that “energy resources require extended periods of development.”

The Power Revolutions (WSJ)

Peak oil ideas made it sound like oil (specifically petroleum) was the only resource that matters to the economy, so that once oil production stops growing, the economy will collapse. That’s clearly not the case (oil is 36 percent of the world’s energy). There are lots of other fuels in the mix. However, things like fracking, tar sands, and offshore drilling clearly mean that cheap, easy-to-get oil is on the wane. Oil is cheap now because of fracking – not the tight oil itself, but rather because the fear of it is keeping prices low by the Saudis. That will change. I’m always amazed at the people who run out and buy SUVs the minute the oil price goes down. Do they expect it to be cheap forever or do they expect to drive their car for only a year? It’s also cheap because our economy is in the crapper.

Forget who the candidates are and all the campaigning and the billions of dollars spent– If oil prices are high, the economy is in recession, and the incumbent party will lose power. You can pretty much predict any presidential election by this fact alone. Two-thousand is the only one that sort-of breaks the mold, and that was such a bizarre election between the hanging chads, the voting fraud and the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s not just the economy driven by energy prices – it’s the political world too. Everything else is just meaningless fluff.

At the end of the day, whether a president presides over a good economy or a bad economy is almost entirely down to oil prices.

The other thing that strikes you is the “Groundhog Day” nature of the situation. Oil prices get high, we get worried about the environment, and there’s a great boom in alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental impacts, worries about the economy and supply chains, and so forth. Then oil prices go down and we forget all about alternative energy and all the inherent problems with relying on a finite resource. All the progress toward getting off of oil stagnates, and people assume oil will be cheap forever. Then they get high again, and suddenly it all becomes important again, and we have to go back to square one (compare the EV-1 to Tesla, for example. Heck, Edison built an electric car!). Charles Mann had a great line along the lines of “The human propensity to see flukes of good fortune as never coming to an end,” or something like that.

Given the manipulation of oil prices, it’s hard to see natural economic factors as ever being able to do the right thing when it comes to energy. When prices get high, new supply comes online and alternatives are pursued. But then oil prices crush the economy, demand falls more in line with supply, the price falls, and the initiatives are halted. It feels like the invisible hand is attached to an idiot. Maybe this time we’ll finally get serious.

Prices are temporary conditions. Peak oil is permanent.

The drug dealer analogy of us being addicted to oil is shopworn, but it is just so accurate. It was only once we were addicted to the product that they could jack up the price, and then we HAD to pay what they demanded. But like a drug that devastates the lives of its users, when you hit rock-bottom you try to get on the twelve-step program and get your life back. Then, the dealers will lower the price to keep you addicted, and the cycle begins again. Plus, every dealer wants to be your dealer, so they need to be just a little bit cheaper than the next guy. Barring that, they will bind together with the other dealers to keep the price high and protect their “turf.” The economics of drug dealing and oil are eerily similar. I wonder if anyone’s formally studied this.

In the past each new energy source was added on to the previous ones. Now we are talking about substitution – a totally different ballgame. That is, new energy sources will replace old. That’s substitution, not expansion.

Cheap oil combined with the opening up of China drove globalization. There is no way we could build the largest moving structures ever built to transport goods if we didn’t have a fuel source cheap enough to make it worthwhile. A single ship can move 19,000 containers, enough to move 300 million tablet computers.

That oil played a role in foreign policy shouldn’t be a surprise, but looking at exactly how it led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the civil war in Syria, the removal of Qaddafi, the propping up or removing of dictators, and the positioning of armies around the globe was still eye-opening. So much foreign policy is dictated by access to oil. So much…

I was actually unaware of the Eurodollar and how I caused the fall of Bretton Woods. As Smith illustrates, going back to the gold standard is practically impossible (sorry libertarians). I was unaware of the role that Petrodollar recycling played in the Latin American debt crisis. I was aware of how the Petrodollars funded terrorism. I’m sure readers of Dmitry Orlov were familiar with the role oil and grain prices played in the fall of the Soviet Union. Again, this made Reagan look like a genius.

What I really wanted to describe is how the oil price crisis came about and how it led directly to the rise of Neoliberalism. I also wanted to show how Jimmy Carter’s “failure” and Ronald Reagan’s “success” was based mostly on oil prices. Some people would take issue with that, but it’s hard to separate one from the other. Is it 100 percent? Maybe not, but what percentage was oil prices? Seventy? Fifty? Twenty-five? Surely it played a role.

The problem is that it made Neoliberalism look like a success. People came to believe that unions were evil, and tax cuts for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and speculation were the magic keys to prosperity. But throughout the Neoliberal reign, oil prices were either stable or crashing. When that wasn’t the case, as in 2007-2008, the system came apart. The rise of China also made Neoliberalism appear to work. But it was smoke and mirrors – cheap uneducated labor, overinvestment, state-controlled enterprises, artificially cheap currencies, entire cities built with no people in them, etc. It was a Potemkin’s village on the scale of a nation. Globalization is a Ponzi scheme.

But now Neoliberalism is literally tearing the world apart. Some major reasons:

1.) Turning the speculators loose. The oil price rise and the food price rise seem to be mainly problems of market speculations (i.e. greed and fear, always the real movers of markets, not supply and demand). This has, in turn, led to political turmoil as we saw in the Arab Spring. If speculation continues to cause price rises for essentials like food, fuel and water to pad the fortunes of speculators, expect more chaos and collapse. Even in the U.S., the actions of Enron and “Kenny-boy” lay caused serious harm to economies, not expansion. And we spent enough on the bailouts to give every unemployed person a job and every homeless person a home, with billions left over. Is this how economies should be run?

2.) The suppression of worker wages has caused massive hardship around the world. The abandonment of full employment as a policy goal has led to a worldwide unemployment crisis that is destabilizing the world. Unemployed people have nothing to lose. People with nothing to lose tend to revolt (see above). The gutting of social services and welfare safety nets has also led to poverty and desperation all around the world. It calls into question the ability of capitalism to deliver broad increases in living standards everywhere. We are clearly not seeing that. We’ve been in reverse for some time. Shouldn’t an economic system make us ALL richer, rather than provide winners and losers? If it can’t, what kind of system is it?

3.) Globalism spreads not only the wealth around, but the poverty too. Some countries, notably Western Europe, have attempted to defend their citizens, while others like the United States, did nothing to insulate its workers from third-world wages and working conditions (and even encouraged them). Rising living standards in China and India are one thing, but falling living standards in formerly wealthy countries make the rich capitalists richer, but cause anger and consternation which is easily exploited by the unscrupulous and power-hungry. This is also destabilizing. Just look at all the anger in the U.S. today searching for a scapegoat.

4.) Austerity and the straitjacketing of governments has led to wealthy, industrialized countries “undeveloping.” The United States is a nation of private affluence and public squalor, with one-third of its children living in poverty, entire cities abandoned and crumbling, urban areas too expensive for median income workers, the infrastructure of a banana republic, poor access to education and healthcare, pockets of poverty, ghettoes, etc. Greece is being gutted as an example to the West. This is leading to rise of right-wing parties in Europe, again redolent of the run-up to the Second World War.

5.) The faith in Markets to solve all problems is especially disastrous with an ongoing environmental crisis. Instead of rationing or capping, instead we get easily gamed “cap and trade” markets to reduce emissions. Nature is just “natural capital,” and every drop of water, tree leaf, and grain of sand must be assigned an owner and a price. In other words, all of nature must be subsumed into the market, because markets are the only way we can solve our problems! This is a Neoliberal idea. Look at how the United States responded to the crisis in the seventies by contrast.

6.) Debt crises have caused massive hardship around the world. As I learned, Mexico’s reputation as a haven for poverty, prostitution, drug gangs, etc. was only after the Latin American debt crisis of 1982. That, in turn, led the massive influx of Latin American refugees into the United States turning America into a Latin country overnight.  Prior to 1979, places like Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Libya were stable, secular, relatively prosperous places (See this. And this). Now look at them. Yes, they had dictators and human rights violations. But compare it to today. Latin America has fared somewhat better, largely by finding a way to reject or bypass Neoliberalism. Africa has not fared well, either. Note that you only heard about collapse and famine after the 1980’s (remember Ethiopia?). Yes, Africa was poor before then, but it seemed to be heading in the right direction. Not any more.

7.) People from these wrecked countries are heading to the Western industrialized countries in massive waves of migration–Latin America for the United States and Canada, and the Middle East and Africa for the European Union. This has driven down wages and caused the rise of nativist parties. Everyone is heading for the lifeboats as more and more countries become failed states. There is simply not enough room for all. But rebuilding these countries would mean abandoning the Neoliberal paradigm, forgoing debt and putting into place quasi-socialist policies. Then again, the rich can always retreat to floating offshore islands (and eventually space colonies).

It’s clear that much of the money that has not been collected by governments has gone not only into speculation as opposed to productive activity, but in purchasing political representation. This has led to democracies devolving into oligarchies and a mistrust of democracy in general. The buying of politicians and the media blocks any attempts to deal with collapsing systems. We’ve seen ever greater instability and ever greater bubbles under Neoliberalism now that government has been “contained” and workers have been “disciplined.”

The answer to our problems should be clear: abandon Neoliberalism and return to the mixed economy. Stop hamstringing governments. End speculation. Tax the rich. Close offshore tax shelters. Raise tariffs. Defend domestic industries. Write down the debts. Pursue full employment policies such as a job guarantee, reduced working hours and an basic income guarantee. Distribute essential social services through the government, and let the market handle non-necessities. Regulate to deal with externalities. Impose limits on natural resource extraction. Decarbonize energy.

All of this used to be common-sense. Now it beyond the pale.

The problem is, it’s a ratchet effect. We cannot go back, because TPTB will not allow it. And since the 1970s, they learned they had to not only control the government, but the information we imbibe day after day, otherwise we would instruct our government to do something the powerful may not want. Instead, we had to be convinced that Neoliberalism is the only valid economy – hence the think tanks, talk radio, publishing mills, Fox news, etc. Any sense of common purpose or solidarity is evil “socialism.” As we learned, even “liberal” news sources are fully dedicated to defending this paradigm at all costs, even at the cost of credibility. And the funding of the political classes by the wealthy will ensure that anything that threatens the fortunes of the oligarchs will be a non-starter, even if people do see past the media rhetoric.

The change in economics swallowed the hope of the sixties. How much does it have to do with Neoliberalism, and how much with oil prices? A lot of commenters say, “Hey, the oil is gone, we just need to learn to be peasants.” They point out that American wages stopped growing in 1973, around the time domestic oil production peaked in the U.S. But I think that’s simplistic. American wages stopped growing, not everyone else’s–not what we’d expect in an energy descent scenario. Rather, I think it was the wealth transfer of the seventies, and the politics it engendered, that was the primary culprit. The oil shock opened the door for globalized Neoliberalism, and that is the primary cause of our misfortune. By using oil as an excuse to be politically passive, we remove any chance at creating an economy that works better for all and play into the hands of the powerful.

I think old economy Steve puts it best. Or shall we say, “mixed economy” Steve:

OY4w945

Skynet Ascendant

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t2skynetbdcap1

By Cory Doctorow

Source: Locus Online

As I’ve written here before, science fiction is terrible at predicting the future, but it’s great at predicting the present. SF writers imagine all the futures they can, and these futures are processed by a huge, dynamic system consisting of editors, booksellers, and readers. The futures that attain popular and commercial success tell us what fears and aspirations for technology and society are bubbling in our collective imaginations.

When you read an era’s popular SF, you don’t learn much about the future, but you sure learn a lot about the past. Fright and hope are the inner and outer boundaries of our imagination, and the stories that appeal to either are the parameters of an era’s political reality.

Pay close attention to the impossibilities. When we find ourselves fascinated by faster than light travel, consciousness uploading, or the silly business from The Matrix of AIs using human beings as batteries, there’s something there that’s chiming with our lived experience of technology and social change.

Postwar SF featured mass-scale, state-level projects, a kind of science fictional New Deal. Americans and their imperial rivals built cities in space, hung skyhooks in orbit, even made Dyson Spheres that treated all the Solar System’s matter as the raw material for the a new, human-optimized megaplanet/space-station that would harvest every photon put out by our sun and put it to work for the human race.

Meanwhile, the people buying these books were living in an era of rapid economic growth, and even more importantly, the fruits of that economic growth were distributed to the middle class as well as to society’s richest. This was thanks to nearly unprecedented policies that protected tenants at the expense of landlords, workers at the expense of employers, and buy­ers at the expense of sellers. How those policies came to be enacted is a question of great interest today, even as most of them have been sunsetted by successive governments across the developed world.

Thomas Piketty’s data-driven economics bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the vast capital destruction of the two World Wars (and the chaos of the interwar years) weakened the grip of the wealthy on the governments of the world’s developed states. The arguments in favor of workplace safety laws, taxes on capital gains, and other policies that undermined the wealthy and benefited the middle class were not new. What was new was the political possibility of these ideas.

As developed nations’ middle classes grew, so did their material wealth, political influence, and expectations that governments would build am­bitious projects like interstate highways and massive civil engineering projects. These were politically popular – because lawmakers could use them to secure pork for their voters – and also lucrative for government contractors, making ‘‘Big Government’’ a rare point of agreement between the rich and middle-income earners.

(A note on poor people: Piketty’s data suggests that the share of the national wealth controlled by the bottom 50% has not changed much for several centuries – eras of prosperity are mostly about redistributing from the top 10-20% to the next 30-40%)

Piketty hypothesizes that the returns on investment are usually greater than the rate of growth in an economy. The best way to get rich is to start with a bunch of money that you turn over to professional managers to invest for you – all things being equal, this will make you richer than you could get by inventing something everyone uses and loves. For example, Piketty contrasts Bill Gates’s fortunes as the founder of Microsoft, once the most profitable company in the world, with Gates’s fortunes as an investor after his retirement from the business. Gates-the-founder made a lot less by creating one of the most successful and profitable products in history than he did when he gave up making stuff and started owning stuff for a living.

By the early 1980s, the share of wealth controlled by the top decile tipped over to the point where they could make their political will felt again – again, Piketty supports this with data showing that nations elect seriously investor-friendly/worker-unfriendly governments when investors gain control over a critical percentage of the national wealth. Leaders like Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet, and Mulroney enacted legislative reforms that reversed the post-war trend, dis­mantling the rules that had given skilled workers an edge over their employers – and the investors the employers served.

The greed-is-good era was also the cyberpunk era of literary globalized corporate dystopias. Even though Neuromancer and Mirrorshades predated the anti-WTO protests by a decade and a half, they painted similar pictures. Educated, skilled people – people who comprised the mass of SF buyers – became a semi-disposable under­class in world where the hyperrich had literally ascended to the heavens, living in orbital luxury hotels and harvesting wealth from the bulk of humanity like whales straining krill.

Seen in this light, the vicious literary feuds between the cyberpunks and the old guard of space-colonizing stellar engineer writers can be seen as a struggle over our political imagination. If we crank the state’s dials all the way over the right, favoring the industrialist ‘‘job creators’’ to the exclusion of others, will we find our way to the stars by way of trickle-down, or will the overclass graft their way into a decadent New Old Rome, where reality TV and hedge fund raids consume the attention and work we once devoted to exploring our solar system?

Today, wealth disparity consumes the popular imagination and political debates. The front-running science fictional impossibility of the unequal age is rampant artificial intelligence. There were a lot of SF movies produced in the mid-eighties, but few retain the currency of the Termina­tor and its humanity-annihilating AI, Skynet. Everyone seems to thrum when that chord is plucked – even the NSA named one of its illegal mass surveillance programs SKYNET.

It’s been nearly 15 years since the Matrix movies debuted, but the Red Pill/Blue Pill business still gets a lot of play, and young adults who were small children when Neo fought the AIs know exactly what we mean when we talk about the Matrix.

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and other luminaries have issued pan­icked warnings about the coming age of humanity-hating computerized overlords. We dote on the party tricks of modern AIs, sending half-admiring/half-dreading laurels to the Watson team when it manages to win at Jeopardy or randomwalk its way into a new recipe.

The fear of AIs is way out of proportion to their performance. The Big Data-trawling systems that are supposed to find terrorists or figure out what ads to show you have been a consistent flop. Facebook’s new growth model is sending a lot of Web traffic to businesses whose Facebook followers are increasing, waiting for them to shift their major commercial strategies over to Facebook marketing, then turning off the traffic and demanding recurr­ing payments to send it back – a far cry from using all the facts of your life to figure out that you’re about to buy a car before even you know it.

Google’s self-driving cars can only operate on roads that humans have mapped by hand, manually marking every piece of street-furniture. The NSA can’t point to a single terrorist plot that mass-surveillance has disrupted. Ad personalization sucks so hard you can hear it from orbit.

We don’t need artificial intelligences that think like us, after all. We have a lot of human cognition lying around, going spare – so much that we have to create listicles and other cognitive busy-work to absorb it. An AI that thinks like a human is a redundant vanity project – a thinking version of the ornithopter, a useless mechanical novelty that flies like a bird.

We need machines that don’t fly like birds. We need AI that thinks unlike humans. For example, we need AIs that can be vigilant for bomb-parts on airport X-rays. Humans literally can’t do this. If you spend all day looking for bomb-parts but finding water bottles, your brain will rewire your neurons to look for water bottles. You can’t get good at something you never do.

What does the fear of futuristic AI tell us about the parameters of our present-day fears and hopes?

I think it’s corporations.

We haven’t made Skynet, but we have made these autonomous, transhuman, transnational technolo­gies whose bodies are distributed throughout our physical and economic reality. The Internet of Things version of the razorblade business model (sell cheap handles, use them to lock people into buying expensive blades) means that the products we buy treat us as adversaries, checking to see if we’re breaking the business logic of their makers and self-destructing if they sense tampering.

Corporations run on a form of code – financial regulation and accounting practices – and the modern version of this code literally prohibits corporations from treating human beings with empathy. The principle of fiduciary duty to inves­tors means that where there is a chance to make an investor richer while making a worker or customer miserable, management is obliged to side with the investor, so long as the misery doesn’t backfire so much that it harms the investor’s quarterly return.

We humans are the inconvenient gut-flora of the corporation. They aren’t hostile to us. They aren’t sympathetic to us. Just as every human carries a hundred times more non-human cells in her gut than she has in the rest of her body, every corpora­tion is made up of many separate living creatures that it relies upon for its survival, but which are fundamentally interchangeable and disposable for its purposes. Just as you view stray gut-flora that attacks you as a pathogen and fight it off with anti­biotics, corporations attack their human adversaries with an impersonal viciousness that is all the more terrifying for its lack of any emotional heat.

The age of automation gave us stories like Chap­lan’s Modern Times, and the age of multinational hedge-fund capitalism made The Matrix into an enduring parable. We’ve gone from being cogs to being a reproductive agar within which new cor­porations can breed. As Mitt Romney reminded us, ‘‘Corporations are people.’’

U.S. Wealth-Concentration: The Most-Accurate Current Estimates

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

CURRENT REALITIES:

Wealthiest Tenth (10%) of Americans Own 75% of America; They Draw 40% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Hundredth (1%) of Americans Own 43% of America; They Draw 20% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Thousandth (0.1%) of Americans Own 22% of America; They Draw 8% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Ten-Thousandth (0.01%) Own 11.2% of America; They Draw 5% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest 0.0025% (Forbes 400) Own 2.75% (of all trackable privately-held wealth, not including ‘non-profits’ that are controlled by them).

That last (2.75%) is this $2.29 trillion divided by this $83,296 billion (representing all of the privately owned wealth in the U.S.), in the final quarter of 2014.

Incidentally, the wealthiest tenth are worth over $1 million and draw incomes above $200,000; so: they’re all “millionaires” in common parlance; all of the “top 10%” are.

Following will be mirror-images of the above-cited breakdowns:

Poorest 90% of Americans Own 25% of America; They Draw 60% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99% of Americans Own 57% of America; They Draw 80% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.9% of Americans Own 78% of America; They Draw 92% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.99% of Americans Own Less Than 88.8% of America; They Draw Less Than 95% of All U.S. Income.

Poorer 50%: Comprehensive figures for the wealthier and poorer 50% of Americans haven’t been published as recently. However, for the year 2010, the wealthier 50% of Americans owned 98.9% of America, and the poorer 50% of Americans owned 1.1% of America. That was the year after the crash had supposedly ended in 2009. The last prior year in that same study was 2007, the economic peak, and it showed the wealthier half owning 97.5% of America, and the poorer half owning 2.5% of it. In other words: the losses from the Wall Street economic crash went overwhelmingly to the poorer half of the U.S. population (their wealth going down from 2.5% to only 1.1% of America’s total), because of the bailouts to Wall Street. Wall Street complains about “welfare programs,” as if it’s the poor who get bailed out; but those complaints are merely part of Wall Street’s — and their billionaires’ — scams that are targeted to sway fools. The figures show the exact opposite to be the actual truth. America is overwhelmingly a kleptocracy by the top against everybody else; not a “welfare state for the poor.” That’s just aristocrats’ scam, pumped by the economists they hire, and by the ‘news’ media which are controlled by aristocrats, and believed by suckers they fool.

HERE ARE THE TRENDS:

Right before the crash, in 2006 and 2007, the top 1% owned 33.8% of America; they drew 21.4% of all U.S. income.

A Congressional Research Service study, “An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010,” found that between the economic peak in 2007, and the end of the opening phase of the Wall Street bailouts in 2010, wealth-inequality in America soared, rising even faster than it had been rising during the George W. Bush years. As a consequence, whereas in 2007, the top 1% owned 33.8% of America, by 2010 this figure had risen to 34.5% — and the latest figure is 43%; so, this soaring is continuing (it wasn’t occurring only at the start of Obama’s Administration). What was bad under Bush has thus become lots worse under Obama, despite all of Obama’s rhetoric against wealth-inequality. And yet the Wall Street bailouts continue (under the guise of “QE”), as if the trickle-down policies of Obama and the Republicans had “ended” the “recession” for Americans generally, instead of only for the top 1% — which latter was the reality, and which reality makes a mockery of economists, who say that the “recession ended in 2009.” “Ended,” for whom? The policy is to bail out the megabanksters who made trillions from the MBS scams that brought the economy down — those people were bailed out when they were deep in the hole — while not bailing out their homeowners and cheated investors, who never recovered; statistics show they continue to suffer from those crimes. As a consequence, under Obama, wealth has risen only for the wealthiest of Americans.

However, incomes have been rising slightly for everyone else. For example, the “Bottom 99% Incomes Real Growth” during “2009-2014” was only 4.3% — less than 1% per year — while for the “Top 1%” it was 58% during that 5-year time-expanse. But that — bad as it is — is nonetheless an improvement, on income.

Throughout Obama’s first term, 2009-2012, the “Bottom 99% Incomes Real Growth” had been only 0.4% — less than 1% throughout that entire four-year period. The “Top 1%” received 95% of the “Incomes Real Growth” then. And yet, even though even the incomes of the bottom 99% of the U.S. population were stagnant throughout that four-year period ending in 2012 (all of Obama’s first term), economists still say that the “recession ended in 2009.” And the reality was even worse than this incomes-picture shows, because, in terms of wealth, which is even more important than income, there hasn’t yet  been a “recovery,” in the U.S., for the bottom 99% of Americans. What there has been, instead, is continuing scams, misinforming the public, about what’s actually happening, and what happened, and what caused it to happen. It’s just a racket.

THE DEEPER MEANING:

Under Presidents G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, economic inequality in America has been more extreme, for more years, than under any Presidents in all of the previous U.S. history. But, at least, Bush didn’t pretend to care about it. Obama does. He pretended to a concern for justice which he never really had; he was always merely faking liberalism. It was thus entirely true-to-form that President Obama had his Solicitor General present an argument to the U.S. Supreme Court that lying in politics is Constitutionally protected “free speech.”

But what, then, is really left of ‘democracy’ in the U.S.? After all, even before Obama, democracy in America was already dying, if not yet dead. And what meaningful democracy can even possibly exist in a nation where lying in politics is constitutionally protected ‘free speech,’ which no state may penalize, under any conditions? How may “the people” even conceivably rule in a republic where politicians can reasonably be expected to win only lying-contests, because not to lie in such a nation is not to be politically competitive there at all? Can democracy really consist of contests in deception? Is such a political race-to-the-bottom consistent with democracy?

Or, is it instead the case that such extreme wealth-disparities as exist in the U.S. are the natural result of decades of politics being (perhaps increasingly within recent times) little more than lying-contests? Is that the deeper truth, behind the deplorable figures here?

Is this extreme inequality the result of state-imposed reduction of ‘democracy’ to being basically contests in deceiving the public? Is that what it’s really all about — a racket, basically, against the public, for and on behalf of the aristocracy?

Is this extreme inequality the intended result, or is it merely the result of the stupidity of those who just happen to win high national office in the United States?

Do the farm animals just happen to end up as burger-meat? Or is that what they are there for? We know. Do they?

The Movie Every Screwed Millennial Should Watch

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By Arthur Chu

Source: Alternet

Jennifer Phang’s indie science fiction film “Advantageous,” a darling of 2015’s Sundance, came to Netflix Instant Streaming earlier this week. If you’re a millennial, you have Netflix. If you’re an un- or underemployed millennial, you have time. Every un- or underemployed millennial needs to see this movie.

We live in a renaissance of science fiction film and TV and “geek” culture in general — the accelerating pace of technological change thanks to Moore’s Law makes it hard to deny we’re living in “the future,” we’re all part-machine-part-human for practical purposes now, no one can guess what element of science fiction is next to become science fact, blah blah blah.

You’ve heard that song and dance before. They use it to sell everything from splashy popcorn blockbusters with robot villains to artsy thinky indie dramas with robot antiheroes.

But “Advantageous” is the first science fiction film I’ve seen that really grasps something I think is core to the experience of us young people who are on the bleeding edge of the troubling trend of Machines Taking Our Jobs Away.

And the core theme of the film that makes it so important is also the one that I worry will scare a lot of its audience away. Because this is a science fiction film but not an action film — there’s no violence, no gunplay. There’s no heroes or villains, precious little of good-vs-evil conflict. There’s no pulsing electronic backbeat and even though there’s smartphones and holograms, there’s not that much visible technology, no one tapping madly at keyboards while incomprehensible lines of green text scroll down the monitor.

Which makes sense, actually. These are all things we imagined would happen in “the future” of the 2010s back in the 1980s. The fears that defined the genre we call “cyberpunk” that set the tone for dark, dystopian futures for a generation were 1980s fears — fears of street gang violence, fears of nuclear war, fears of the drug trade. An adult in the 1980s, imagining a member of my generation, imagined someone doing designer drugs at raves, casually gunning people down in the street and hacking into the mainframe to trick China into launching their ICBMs.

We don’t do a lot of that. In fact, the least fortunate of our Lost Generation of millennials don’t do a lot of anything.

What “Advantageous” is that other science fiction films aren’t is quiet.

That’s my experience of being an unemployed millennial in the 2000s. Long stretches of unnerving silence. Being one of a handful of unlucky young people walking aimlessly around in the middle of the day when civilized people are at work. Failing to make eye contact with each other or speak because we’ve forgotten how to have in-person conversations. Turning to social media or aimless Web surfing to fill the long stretches of emptiness, of boredom.

I’ve joked, darkly, that the worst thing about being unemployed isn’t not having any money but not having anything to do.

And to a large extent that’s what “Advantageous” is about. Yes, the eerily empty streets our characters walk through might be a result of the film’s limited budget — but it also makes sense within the film’s setting. All the buildings are empty; all the stores are closed. Homeless people wander the parks and sleep in the bushes and stare numbly into the distance. (At one point the characters try to walk into a restaurant only to find that it’s been boarded up and the owner, sitting inside, ignores them. They treat this as a normal, everyday occurrence.)

We’re told that the world is in the grip of a tech-driven economic recession. There’s no jobs for anyone — anything the small elite of wealthy customers need done, they can get a machine to do for them better than any human can. Our protagonist, Gwen, is a spokesmodel for a cosmetics — essentially an eye-candy job.

Even though she mentions having gone to grad school and hoping to go into teaching, there’s no jobs out there for teachers now that people can get any information they want from machines. The only job out there for a flesh-and-blood human who’s not already rich is a job that involves looking pretty and smiling at rich people to try to sway their opinions, and it’s a job she’s lucky to get and devastated to lose.

(Every college-educated millennial who’s ended up taking a position in sales because it was the only thing on offer ought to be feeling a familiar twinge right now.)

The film gets a lot of mileage out of taking all-too-familiar scenes from the 2009 recession and exaggerating them just enough to make them fully dystopian. Anyone who’s dealt with the infuriating process of being forced to apply for jobs through poorly-designed automated Web forms will feel Gwen’s pain as she argues with a recruiter telling her her résumé has been “red flagged” and she slowly realizes, as the recruiter’s voice on the phone devolves into ELIZA-like nonsense responses, that she can’t get a job because she’s talking to a poorly-programmed machine that’s taken someone else’s job.

Anyone who’s felt the intense pressure of the college-application arms race will sigh at Gwen’s daughter, Jules — who appears to be 11 or 12 but talks, reads and writes at the college level — calmly telling her mother about a journal article she read describing how her generation’s high-pressure lifestyle means she’s likely to become infertile by her 20s.

Jules needs a $10,000 deposit to get into an exclusive summer camp in order to get into an exclusive prep school. Without those credentials, she’s unlikely to get a job — any job — at all. Her genius-level abilities are barely enough to get her foot in the door, and without connections and credentials and money, she’ll never be able to walk through it.

It sounds like an exaggeration, if you personally haven’t witnessed a Facebook feed filled with top-ranked students from top-ranked schools with thousands of dollars of student loan debt clawing and trampling each other to get minimum-wage call center work.

And Gwen’s response to the impossible situation of trying to secure a future for her daughter when she doesn’t even have an income anymore isn’t to pick up a gun and start shooting anyone. The long scenes of her sitting in brooding silence while racking her brains for a solution are, in fact, punctuated by explosions going off in the far distance, part of a hopeless war against the government by unnamed “rebel forces” — but those explosions are oddly silent, oddly peaceful, and they never feel completely real.

It feels like the warlike shouting and chanting from Zuccotti Park that most of us sat at home and watched on TV — a revolution I now feel happened mainly because our generation felt the essential frustration, the essential wrongness of the actual soundtrack of the recession, an eerie passive silence, and some of us tried to force some noise into the silence just to fill it up.

But it didn’t work, because there was no victory condition, no enemy to defeat, no Death Star to blow up. In retrospect the protests feel as futile as the quiet clouds of smoke in the “Advantageous” skyline. You can’t blow up an entire world, an entire economic system; you can’t beg it for mercy or shout moral imprecations at it either. Break things, throw things, scream things — at the end of the day you still don’t have a job.

I think on some level we’ve always understood this. I think on some level we’re silent because the damage done to us was done through silence — no one beat us up or assaulted us or stole anything from us. All that happened was the phone didn’t ring, the email never came, the poorly designed Web form spat out an automated “You will be contacted shortly” that was a lie.

“Advantageous” is a quiet film, and a pretty one. The city Gwen and Jules’ cramped apartment exists in is gorgeous and clean. When we do hear music, it’s not pulsing techno or anarchic punk but a street musician plying his trade, playing beautiful classical pieces on the violin — perhaps he got a degree from Juilliard only to end up as destitute as Gwen.

The gritty slums of the cyberpunk milieu purported to be about a world where technology was grinding down humanity but what they really showed was a world where humans could still strike back at things — could graffiti the walls, shatter the windows, shoot pockmarks into billboards, and the property owners couldn’t keep up with the damage. Vandalism is, at the very least, a sign of human activity — a sign that someone out there is still doing something.

The eerie Disney cleanness of Gwen’s city’s streets — the way the damage caused by the rebel bombings causes no one any concern and is seemingly fully repaired overnight — is a sign of a world where the things have won and the people have given up.

That, for me, was the worst thing about the recession — seeing shiny storefronts and clean-swept streets and all the trappings of a thriving economy — but none of us participating in it. The recovery from our recession was a so-called “jobless recovery” — still plenty of stuff being made, still plenty of money, in the hands of increasingly few people, to buy things with. The economy of things is doing fine, and always has been. It’s only the economy of people that collapsed.

The anger that comes from feeling oppressed, exploited, used — that’s one thing. The weary, quiet frustration from feeling ignored, forgotten, useless — that’s something different.

There are other themes in “Advantageous.” It’s mentioned that women have borne the brunt of this recession because, a suited executive bluntly tells Gwen, people fear the social disruptions frustrated men might cause more than they fear frustrated women —something that rings eerily true in the past few years, where a handful of men who feel left behind by the modern world are increasingly willing to channel their grievances into extremist ideologies and trying to puncture our generation’s silence with escalating acts of violence.

Gwen, a highly intelligent woman who’s been reduced to making a living solely off her looks, is being replaced by her employer because they want a younger and more “universal” look for their brand. Gwen is portrayed by Jacqueline Kim, an Asian-American actress who turned 50 this year and who co-wrote the script for “Advantageous” — it’s hard not to see this plot point as reflecting Kim’s real career.

And then there’s the climactic decision Gwen must make, whether to take advantage of a “cosmetic procedure” that involves uploading her mind into a more youthful, racially-ambiguous body. While it’s far from a unique conceit, in the context of this film the idea of reducing people, especially women, into commodities, where technology makes our identity mutable and economics makes it negotiable, takes on extra resonance.

We live in a world where cheap and plentiful technology has made us cheap — the market for human labor is glutted. There’s too many of us out there, we’re too easily replaceable, almost none of us are specifically needed for anything. As a result, just to survive — just to avoid being irrelevant — we give away more of ourselves than we have in generations, selling our time, our privacy, our rights just for a chance not to be left behind.

How much further will it go, “Advantageous” asks. How much less needed can people get, as the things get smarter and shinier and more efficient? How much more will you have to give away, if they ask you to — your body? Your mind? Your soul?

The film doesn’t give any easy answers. But that’s the question we all need to be asking.

Arthur Chu is an actor, comedian and blogger.

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