When the Riots Begin

Post Reply New Topic

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/w ... ugman.html

Rage pours out of these words, written in response to an unabashedly partisan columnist. Taken as the pulse of the well educated and well read, the sense of losing something precious and irretrievable amongst America's best and brightest is unmistakable; what more for those lower in the socio-economic ladder and thus worse hit by this never ending crisis?

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/e ... titialskip

It is the comments that are worth reading. The guy loses his $400,000 a year job, cannot find another one and decides to raise his profile by doing a publicity stunt posing for a ‘pity me’ article on USA Today. But all he has invited is unbridled scorn and bristling anger. Take it as the pulse of a wounded nation, this impotent rage that spits out from the public commentary. The response is spontaneous and extended with many of the commentators aiming to hurt the people profiled. Something is frayed and coming apart as people seek to blame someone else for the predicament that they are in.

After giving it some thought Zeno, I think its more likely that America will follow in the foot steps of the ancient Spartans. They will shift from a intellectual consumer based society into a militant minimalist one.

I dont see the collapse you do. In living memory is still the great depression and the joy that existed despite(and maybe because) of the hardship then.

The people you claim will riot will not. they are fat and indulgent in nature, mostly middle aged. To sustain your prediction you need a flood of young kids. Only they have the raw emotion and the lack of emotional maturity needed to act violently and impulsively. Consider the people who rioted and burned cars in France. It wasnt the middle aged and parents, but the youth.

When a society has low birthrates(like America) children are cherished and violence abhorred. If you have shortages and famines, birthrates dont suddenly jump.

When applied to present, history is but a misleading apparition. The Great Depression is nothing compared to what America is experiencing now. Back then, the United States was the world’s economic superpower by virtue of being at peace; never mind the westward expansion into bountiful lands. Europe was on the march to what we now call the Second World War as colonialism fell upon itself, China was in the throes of an abject collapse of a feudal order that invited a ruinous invasion by Japan and the Ottoman Empire dissolved completely leaving the vast Muslim lands headless, rudderless and dispirited. If nothing else, the opportunity to profiteer from the global wars that were breaking out pulled the American economy out of a stupor induced by overcapacity.

The current problems have nothing to do with surplus production capacity. In fact it is just the reverse: America does not produce enough of what it so greedily consumes. The Chinese have made it very clear that they will no longer support America’s profligacy. I used to tell people that if America continued to increase its reliance on China as a creditor, at some point it will be the Chinese who decide what America’s monetary and fiscal policies can be. Often people were dismissive and oftentimes downright hostile; some even decided that I was a racist for daring to suggest that China would come to dominate America so completely. Well, we are at the point where America’s national policies are no longer its own prerogatives but subject instead to the approval of a foreign power.

If China is not willing to lend, then one wonders where the hundreds of billions of dollars needed annually to continue paying those very generous unemployment benefits will come from. Under the leadership of Barrack Obama and with the support of key players like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, the Democrats have chosen to make healthcare reform their signature achievement for the years that they hold sway in Capitol Hill. As it is, healthcare costs can only ratchet exponentially higher as America ages. But by extending healthcare coverage to all Americans, and thus massively increasing the costs of already very expensive entitlement programs, there will be nothing leftover for the people who now hang onto middle class civility by virtue of their weekly unemployment benefit check. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showing no signs of abatement and the promised withdrawal of troops unlikely to materialize, the sharp tax increases that must come will not even cover the costs of the Obama administration’s new policy initiatives.

When unemployment benefits finally do end, up to a fifth of all American families will suddenly find themselves with zero income. A big part of the problems is that the pain will not be evenly distributed. African Americans and Hispanics are the ones who will bear the brunt of the catastrophe. Many will not qualify for welfare and even if they did, it would not be the life that they had signed up for.

Most people underestimate the currents of rage now building in the American masses. You think that the worst has passed and the country has turned the corner. But if you understand the actions taken by the Bush administration in its final days that were then extended and expanded by the Obama administration, you will see that not only has America not turned the corner, the bottom is so far away it is not even in sight. They shifted the pain into the future and unfortunately that future is now.

Read the comments on the USA Today article I posted earlier. Look at how vicious people are. They are in pain and they want to hurt someone, anyone. When those weekly $400 checks stop flowing, you will see that even fat pudgy guys have an inbuilt propensity for violence.

In the seasonal theory of civilisations, each society is expected to go through 4 phases - spring (the birth), summer (the peace), autumn (the decline) and winter (the collapse). Whilst civilisations can renew this cycle, it is not without immense challenge.

As an outsider in a country aligned to the USA, our press frequently asks the question as it relates to our own security - is America in that autmn/winter?

To be honest, I don't know. There are signs of both progress and stagnation/decline, so it is hard to tell. I believe that the world is shifting away from the three worlds model - The West, the Soviets, the Third World - and moving into a multi-polarised 'clash of civilisations' model. In such a scenario, it makes sense that America's superpower status will decline as it hedgemony is challenged by multiple quarters. In a globalised world where technology and wealth are being shifted quickly, is it possible to have one dominating power?

If the 19th was Britain's, and the 20th was America's, then perhaps the 21st century will be the world's.

Humans do what humans do, ie. Anihaliate anything which doesnt Look, Act and Smell like themselves

Nothing has changed, nothing ever will, Human society will become more and more homogonised, and wars will continue to be our prefered method of population control, eventually we will run out of space, and when that happens, u better pray you are a citzen of a country in a good position to kick some arse around the world stage, or your dead, simples.....or perhaps pray that Humanity can attain some kind of enlightened state, which means that violance is no longer needed (bahHaHaha..)

The U.S. has been on the verge of collapse since 1775.

ruveyn

Well if that's true, I guess you could say the same for a lot of other countries as well.

Using the four season theory - I'd say the spring was 1600's to 1950's. The summer was 1950s +

You can have a great depression and wars in springs - it's not a civilisation collapse until it actually collapses, which can of course can only be viewed in hindsight. But we can see that beginning in the 40's with World War II, America's isolationist policies shifted, it agrarian economy became industrialised and it began to push its worldwide hedgemony. Note that in the fifties, the last American state was added - thus its civilisation birth was completed.

I would be one of the rioters lol.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/american-decline

Mistaking the symbols of prosperity with the means to acquire and sustain the good life is perhaps the key difference between the declining rich and rising poor. Just because life is presently better in the United States does not imply that it will always be better and more prosperous. This article very neatly captures the fearfulness and blind-sidedness of the present American debate on the country’s decline. America sees not what everyone else sees with crystal clarity. And if Americans do not believe that there are deep and fundamental problems with the country’s socio-political-economic structure, then we should expect no action by America to turn things around. For any remedy that will improve or at least deflect the coming horror calls for sacrifice and certain pain. It is exactly just such pain that I find all of America desperate to avoid. And it is precisely the avoidance of present correction that will give rise to future catastrophe.

Do the rise and fall of nations fit the ebb and flow of seasons? Spring leads to summer and summer flows into autumn and autumn falls onto winter and winter thaws and thus there will be spring: the seasons we have with us always but civilizations and many a great nation have come and gone; history for them is not an eternal cycle, but a crooked line to dead end. If America does decline, it is not because fate has preordained that no one shall remain great forever, but because wealth corrodes the very values that created it.

The season theory is just a way of describing the phase of a civilisation in hindsight. But it is always spring->summer->autumn->winter because a civilisation rises then declines. The length of each period can vary greatly from a few years to a few centuries. You need only look at the Roman Empire, Alexander's Empire and the Khanate. There's no guarantee a civilisation will ever rise again, but some can if they have the will to do so. Some people interpret China's current situation as a rise and consider them to be in the Spring of a new civilisation. It's never fate. Although outside forces are a factor, throughout history the case has been that civilisation rise from within and decline from within. It doesn't mean it has to be a dramatic fall though. Great Britain is an example of a civilisation that fell and although it is in winter, it is still propsperous - but the glory is an echo. But the EU could be a new form of civilisation on the rise, but it too has endemic issues. America's rise has always been built on cheap energy - go back to the 1700's and you will see the same pattern. If nothing is done to secure a domestic source - fighting wars overseas is a terrible option - then it will wane.

That article reminds me of a debate I had with a friend recently about the World Trade Center. That event, not imaginable in most people's mind, was an attack on the power of America. In hindsight, will it be viewed as the moment the season turned?

Also interesting was that comment about foreign nationals not taking up Chinese citizenship. Look at any previous major civilisation. Outsiders became nationals. That's a bit of a worrying sign.

Instead of looking at nations as embodiments of cultures that become successful it might be worthwhile to look at the mobility of cultures that move from nation to nation as discrete successful entities. The USA has been successful on the basis of exploiting huge national resources and a rather open society that encourages new and innovative enterprise. In these latter decades powerful corporate entities have taken control to sequester innovation and capital to themselves and the innovators have basically become subjected to their financial masters to the extent that, at least to some degree, innovation has been partially squelched. China, which had been a society that dominated and suppressed individual enterprise has now opened up to a large degree and the natural inventiveness which is not the exclusive property of any human culture has been encouraged to the extent that, at least to some degree, the center of novel creativity has started to shift towards East Asia. The giants of finance in the USA have lost much of the original initiative of the country (although a great deal still remains) and the creativity of China and India is now in the process of major release and dynamics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magaz ... f=business

If everyone chooses not to pay their mortgage, who gets hurt?

You have an interesting way of phrasing it :"chooses not to pay".

The New York Times has been right up front in encouraging people to default on their mortgages. Even people who can afford to pay are told that the right thing to do is to walk away and stick it to the bank. Why pay a monthly $2,000 mortgage when you can rent for $1,300? That is the argument and the article above tries to make the case that morality does not figure into this purely financial decision. What they do not say is that whilst it may benefit an individual not to pay, the foreclosure will have an adverse impact on the community at all levels from the government, bank to the neighbors. Has America really become a nation of reckless and irresponsibly speculators?

I wonder where the morality lies when the people - very very many of them - are being kicked out into the winter streets because the banks are unwilling to readjust the mortgage payments to fit the current value of the property.