One thing to remember in the whole health insurance discussion is that back in those days, you went to work for a corporation and you were working for that corporation for the next 30-40 years of your life. So the company had an incentive to keep you healthy, because if you got sick you were less productive. But nowadays companies view workers as disposable, so much so that when the CTO of my (small) employer retired recently, as in, voluntarily decided that he’d had enough of that “work” stuff and it was time to play bocce and build his replica of the Tardis that he’s been designing for the past couple of years (the main thing he’s missing is the inside, the part that makes it go, but that part’s in use by someone else somewhen else right now ), everybody was in shock because *nobody* retires nowadays — *nobody*. They get laid off, then work contracts until they’re dead or no longer can find contracts. They don’t voluntarily leave, unless they’re going to another employer — it just doesn’t work that way!
So anyhow, that’s that. If your employees are disposable, you have no incentive to keep them healthy — you just throw them away and find someone else to use up, or import someone from India or elsewhere if you’ve already used up all your local people. So the whole paradigm of employer-paid health insurance is just a sick joke now, because they don’t care if you get sick and die — they’ll just hire someone else. The only reason they offer it is because of taxes and competitive benefit, and that’s hardly an incentive for them to offer effective health insurance, as in, health insurance that actually will pay for expensive treatments, given that it’s impossible for you the (maybe potential) employee to know ahead of time whether the insurer will actually pay if you get leukemia or will deny deny deny until you’re dead…
Basically what we have here is a new sharecropping system. Here’s how the sharecropping system worked: The oligarchs in the Deep South managed via hook or crook to gain ownership of the vast majority of productive land. Sometimes it was by crook — a common strategy was to burn down the county courthouse with all its recorded deeds, then record their own forged titles in the courthouse to “prove” that they owned land they wanted. And by paying for brutal sheriff’s departments that would kill for pleasure and by buying judges, they managed to enforce these forged deeds at gunpoint. Sometimes it was by simple monopoly power — by cooperating with other oligarchs to interfere with the ability of the little guys to buy seed and fertilizer, gin their cotton, or get their cotton to market, they could bankrupt the little guys and take over their land. Sometimes it was simply a case of economies of scale and redundancy — if a levee breaks and floods a field, that would bankrupt the little guy who owned that field, but if a big guy owned that field he’d shrug and harvest crops from his other fields, the ones that *didn’t* flood. So anyhow, the end result is that the oligarchs ended up owning most of the productive land of the South.
Thing about oligarchs is that they’re lazy. They had all this land, but they certainly didn’t want to (and physically couldn’t) work it all themselves. So instead, they told the disenfranchised hungry landless farmers, “I’ll let you farm on some acres of my land — but I get 75% of the crop.” The farmer either had to swallow his pride and do it, or starve to death. So the planters got rich on crop output produced by others who did the actual work of growing the crop — not because they were more industrious (no, they were uniformly lazy), but because they managed to grab a legal monopoly on the productive assets of the Southern economy and use that to take the wealth produced by the actual workers via threat of starvation.
The top 5% now owns over 75% of the capital assets of America. Think about that. The top 1% by themselves own over 50% of the capital assets of America. This is no different from the Southern sharecropping system, in the end. We who are engineers, factory workers, construction workers, we who create actual real wealth as vs legal bullshit, we’re all sharecroppers, creating wealth for our massa, but getting to keep a dwindling small percentage of what we create. By basically owning the “land” of a modern economy, our modern-day oligarchs have created a system where they don’t have to actually soil their own hands with work — instead, they merely take an increasingly large percentage of what others produce, and if you don’t like it, well, you can just die, already.
Of course, the downside of a sharecropping system is that nobody wants to be a sharecropper. That is a fact which oligarchs don’t like at all, because if the majority owned their own land (i.e. were self-employed using their own resources), they would no longer be available labor to use for sharecropping. But by monopolizing so many of the productive assets of the nation, buying laws transferring wealth from the majority to them, and by importing labor from other countries whenever they can’t find enough sharecroppers willing to work for massa on ye olde plantation, they’ve managed to implement a system that, at least for now, seems fairly stable. It took the twin shocks of the Great Depression and WW2 to disrupt the old sharecropping system. I haven’t the foggiest idea what it will take to disrupt the new one.
– Badtux the Sharecropper Penguin
I believe that you’re right. Sharecropping is the name used in the U.S. but the system was used extensively in Europe and elsewhere under various names. It continued in Italy until the mid-20th century. In medieval Europe, the conditions were similar to what they are today: increasing income inequality; declining incomes of the poor (the middle class was very small); rising inflation and taxation; plague, famine and war (we have 1 out of 3 and are working on 2 out of 3); and a sense that unequal distribution of property and wealth was against God. These points are obviously greatly simplified but I believe the parallels exist. There were revolts against these inequities from the 13th-16th centuries throughout Europe. The revolts will eventually come here too.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what it will take to disrupt the new one.
To echo the teacher’s remarks there, I reckon it will be social breakdown and anarchy that disrupts the system. Americans are not as docile as they used to be. They were never all that tame, if you read your American history about various worker and ethnic unrest. And there have long been underclass uprisings in every state on Earth. However, religion, lack of education and poor communication has been able to squelch them somewhat through the centuries.
However, the large number of dispossessed, alienated Americans is not as willing to eat shit sandwiches as the poor blacks and whites of the South of old. I’m not saying they’re going to get together in some common, coherent purpose. They’re just going to spend more time fucking shit up, burning stuff down, stealing what they can, shooting various other people (usually the people at their own social level or below, unfortunately.) It’s not going to accomplish much, but life will get shittier for everyone, including the massas at the top.
Congratulations, plantation owners! You have gotten more of the pie, but it’s a smaller pie, and it’s made of moose turds.
Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, I attended the retirement party of one of the psychiatric workers (the job title for a care aide on the mental ward) from my hospital. Really cool gay guy, full of wild stories, always laughing, able to talk sense (or at least try to) to the most manic paranoid schizophrenic. He had worked for the hospital system for 29 years, in a variety of settings. There were more than 200 people who crammed into his back yard to farewell him. His wasn’t the only retirement party I’ve attended in three years here. The old way still survives in some countries, at least in the big bureaucratic institutions here.
Of course, a week later I saw him at work. He took the call to come in and work a shift to replace someone who called in sick. Not because he needs the money, but because he enjoys the job. Lots of “retired” medical people do that. When your work does not suck balls, people like to do it more. When you’re a sharecropper, you want to put in as little effort as possible, steal whatever you can from the workplace, and neglect/vandalize the massa’s equipment just to get even a little.
I don’t think that most of these fuckers deserve to live anyway.
“english”, I think the word you’re looking for is ‘serfdom’. The difference between being a serf and being a sharecropper is that, as a serf, you are legally bound to a specific master and specific plot of land. As a sharecropper, if you decide the grass is greener on another massa’s plantation, you can go over there. It’s unlikely that it’ll be any greener, since all the massas play golf together and know what the going rate is for the sharecropper’s cut (i.e., collusion is the norm, not the exception), but at least you’re not legally bound to a specific massa under the sharecropper system.
Of course, you’re still working yourself to the bone to enrich other people, since you get to keep very little of what you produce for the oligarchs who own the majority of the productive assets of the nation, but that’s a different story.
And BTW, the current thinking amongst our Republican working class is that if they aren’t rich, it’s God’s will. They’ve been deluded into believing that God makes rich people rich and that if they aren’t rich, it’s because God doesn’t want them to be rich. It’s a very convenient belief — for rich people. Sort of like that whole “divine rights of kings” bit from the 13th-18th century.
Bukko, I’ve already mentioned that one reason why the United States has the most people in prison or on parole or probation of any nation in world history — even Stalin’s Soviet Union — is because the system is breaking down. When doing the “right” thing leads to nothing but poverty and misery, why do the “right” thing? The problem of “what next?” is one that I am still trying to figure out though. Clearly the current situation is untenable. We’re already using almost as much GDP to keep the peasants in their place as we use for the military, i.e., more than anybody else in the world, and there’s no way that this can continue without complete and utter collapse on a level that will make the slow motion collapse of the Soviet Union look like child’s play. But if the oligarchs allow democracy to break up the latifundias of our economy so that individuals have the ability to be free and independent agents, then the oligarchs would have to actually work for a living, and they will (pay other people to) fight to the end to keep that from happening.
Either way, I think the USA is fucked. Mexico North. Drugs, violence, a corrupt national government that cannot maintain control due to being deprived of resources by the oligarchs, and ultimately the impoverishment of the vast majority of the population so that a handful of billionaires can avoid having to work for a living. It is their dream, and our nightmare.
- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
Badtux,
You’re right about the idea of being rich and God’s will. From what I understand of Dominionism, it seems that the working class has been taken in by their propaganda. I used to be against home schooling because it seemed only right-wing fundamentalists were doing it. I’m beginning to think it’s not such a bad idea. At least, some of our children could be educated instead of indoctrinated. Sorry if that’s off topic but I think the decline in education standards has contributed to the serfdom that we are facing.
Teacher, I think I’ll post something on educational standards tomorrow…
The massas need to find a new phrase for sharecropping, something that would catapult the propaganda. “Profit-sharing” might work, although it uses that nasty “share” word. Like Big Brother’s language police in “1984,” if you eliminate the very word for a concept, perhaps you can eliminate the concept itself in the minds of the proles. You cannot think about what there is no word for, just as we cannot think about moving back and forth through the Fourth Dimension a la the Tralfamadorians in “Slaughterhouse Five.” So I’m thinking something like “partnership with the capitalists” would buffalo the worker mules.
As to how it all plays out, I was going to suggest looking at the declines and falls of other nations, such as literal Banana Republics. But that’s complicated by the potential civilization-ending military destructive power of the U.S. — if things go seriously awry, some homegrown Milosevic is going to start tossing nukes as a diversion or a control method, perhaps even inside the borders of the U.S. There’s also Peak Everything resource depletion and the overshoot of human population numbers. Doomblogger Jim Kunstler calls us “the yeast people” because, thanks to abundant hydrocarbons, our species has multiplied like yeast in a jar that someone poured sugar into. But yeast eventually choke to death on their own poison, and we get to drink tasty beer!
I think the rats will thank us humans for the tasty meals and living quarters when we eliminate ourselves en masse. Not the cockroaches, though. The common species that plague our houses depend on our detritus, and their numbers will fall off as soon as our corpses decay.
Bukko, the term you’re looking for is “ownership society”.
You’re leaving one factor out: the factor that every single one of the bastards in Congress, and the President himself, and state and local governments, is elected. I view the chances that the sheep will wake up and elect representatives willing to take on the oligarchs and restore the American dream at less than 5%, but given the alternative, it’s a chance worth working toward…