Hello Daily Kos. First off this if my first post here since I rather enjoy this place and have for a good while. Whats more, I wished to make my own views on things heard. I generally like this place and the content it provides, and well I've never really published anything of this nature before so bear with me if I come off as stilted or awkward. I suppose I feel nervious for some odd reason. Anyway on to the point at hand.
First off, I'm going to be rather blunt about how I, as a young 20 something struggling to find a decently paying job and who has too much free time and a interest in politics and a extensive knowledge of history feel about things.
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In all honesty, I feel as if we as a society are on the cusp of another major society upheaval similar to what occurred in 1848 with the spring of nations or in 1917 with the Russian revolution and the collapse of the old reactionary monarchies of Germany, Russia, Austria, and the Ottomans.
Our economies both in North America and Europe are going to pot and the upper classes in both are actively refusing to do anything to address the situation, and in fact go out of their way to worsen it because they ignorantly assume that because neo-liberal anti-nationalist capitalism works for them, it therefor works for everyone. And if you can’t make it then clearly it's your own fault and you deserve to suffer.
Nevermind the fact the majority of their wealth is accumulated through the looting of national treasuries and through the interest of wealth they already own instead of actually manufacturing or selling anything. As well as them paying literally zero taxes by pushing for both lower taxes and then taking advantages of tax loopholes and then tax havens that combined result in them paying ultimately nothing which forces the governments to put the cost on a already suffering middle class. And lets not ignore the fact that what little they do spend their money on is typically on the stock market with speculation, that when they make a mistake as they are often likely to do, can have disastrous consequences for the economy which they will of course never have to actually suffer or deal with because they will just lobby the government to bail them out.
Point is, despite whatever report about how the economy is improving, it’s actually not. Yes GDP might be getting higher and the economy might be still busy and profits for the rich might be at record highs, but where it counts most, the middle class, the situation is actually worse then it was before.
Poverty is increasing, the wealth disparity is getting roughly to the same point it was during the French and Russian revolutions and to compound things, every government’s response is, instead of pumping more money into their social services, is to cut these budgets. Whats more what little jobs are being made are actually not full time, lasting, economically healthy jobs but weak, temporarily part time jobs that pay little.
I mean already in Greece and Spain we see a increase support for radical political parties on the left and right and in Brazil there’s also a increased support for radical parties to fix the problem because moderate parties on both the left and right have demonstrated that they ultimately are more interested in towing the corporate line then fixing anything. And let's not even get into the mess that is Ukraine's current protests, which despite what western media would paint them as, are not pro-democracy rebels fighting a fachist government, but literally neo-nazi's of the most insidious sort.
And what should be concerning is that instead of doing something to fix these issues, much like the Tsarist aristocracy of Imperial Russia or the French nobility of Royal France, our so called elites instead feel they can simply ignore the problem and not do a thing to fix it or resort to brutish responses to keep the peasantry at bay.
Point is, history has demonstrated that there is a limit to how much poverty and abuse a entire nation will tolerate especially when they live in a country who’s government has promised them prosperity and fails to deliver.
And let’s be honest, how much of these austerity measures and openly corrupt governments are people gonna tolerate before they finally literally have nothing left to lose except for their chains?
And don't trust Obama to save us. I feel he means well, but out of both a lack of options and a genuine ideological support for, he's basically in league with the very same neo-absolutists trans-national capitalists that are responsible for the dismal and bleak state our nation and world is in. Despite comparisons to FDR, I personally feel he's more accurately a American Gorbachev. Someone who recognizes the failings and flaws of the economic and political system he's working with but who is simply too stymied by external forces to really be successful in the end. And much like his Soviet counterpart, I feel he's really too late at this point to fix the mess that is this nation. Much like the USSR, too many years of economic rot have finally taken their toll and at this point the whole house is mostly just waiting to fall.
But of course, as with all predictions, they must be taken with a grain of salt. And while I won't claim with total certainty that we will see a literal repeat of 1848 or 1917, I do feel that something cataclysmically big is gonna happen, and it's gonna be a massive and utterly terrifying wake up call for the parasitic upper classes of our world.
Let's just hope for once that should it happen we all actually succeed in ridding ourselves of them for all time for a change.
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