CHECK OUT THESE FIVE NAUGHTY CELEBRITY TATTOOS!

Call me a pessimist, but I've frequently thought that if all the recent economic ugliness has a silver lining, it must be that when quality of living and income inequality get bad enough, people will wake up.  The very people who caused this mess will face a backlash from the "99%".  And watching the super wealthy squirm and cry and lose everything when the party bus comes screeching to a halt does hold a certain appeal to me.  Not retribution, but justice.  After all, when  corporations are granted personhood by our judicial branch it can only be a matter of time before the torch mobs start forming.  Or so I thought.  Then upon listening to an incredible TED Talk by William Black which pointed out (among many other gems) the utter dearth of criminal prosecutions following the subprime mortgage debacle (he says there are zero to date) despite overwhelming evidence of fraud at every level of high finance, I thought that working class (read: poor) Americans would be calling for blood.  After all, people can only be pushed so far and Americans have a reputation for (and a long history of) being easily riled and recalcitrant.

Then yesterday I heard this piece on NPR's Here and Now program.  It describes the plight of retirement-age Americans continuing to work out of necessity, and the phenomenon of their willingness to live as migrant workers, living out of RVs and doing work that would normally be considered a bit hard for their age.  And it is a story of human resilience and determination, but I couldn't help but feel severely let down by it.  Here's why: It is an incredible windfall for mega corporations like Amazon (and many others, to be fair).  Not only will things continue to get worse with respect to income inequality and corporate profiteering, but the retiree voting bloc has long been one of the most feared and respected.  If they can't retire because they lost pensions, savings, and home equity, and they have the will to challenge the system, they would be effective.  Instead, they put their nose back to the grindstone and decide to keep on slogging for another decade or so, even for subsistence pay and no benefits.  Such an attitude would be virtuous, were it not feeding back into a corrupt system of economic oppression and generational looting.

EDIT: 12/23/2014 I have held the opinion that corporations such as W*l-M*rt are defrauding the taxpayers by paying a wage below subsistence rates while encouraging employees to take advantage of government benefits such as foodstamps and Medicaid, on the premise that the jobs would not be filled if the compensation was insufficient for survival, and also disqualified the workers from said government programs.  I suppose if Am*z*n is hiring retirement-age folks without benefits, it probably occurred to them that this will be tolerated because so many of these workers have Medicare benefits...
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Well, maybe we'll just have to wait until Social Security goes belly-up before the common people demand justice.  Unfortunately the most guilty parties will be six feet under by then, or at the very least living out their luxurious retirement in a far away land, probably one without extradition treaties.

A Puzzle Solved, No Solution Found

I have long been puzzled by the phenomenon of my countrymen voluntarily aligning themselves with one or another political archetype despite the undeniable absurdity of each.  I thought, "most people seem to be decent; most people identify as either liberal or conservative; neither ideology is decent.  What gives?"  Then I figured it out.  People tend to form their beliefs about social issues based mostly upon their own extremely narrow experience, as opposed to thinking deeply and abstractly about them.  For example, I know a person (we'll call him Hank) who seems to me to be a decent person.  Hank has very conservative views.  Pro-business, anti-labor, pro-military, anti-welfare, pro-gun, anti-immigrant, etc. etc.  How could a guy like Hank love his children and yet harbor no compassion for minimum wage workers?  The answer, I believe, is jaw-droppingly simple.  Hank was born into a middle class family, raised with white American middle class values, went to college, worked hard, and now makes a comfortable living.  As far as he can see, he has behaved according to the plan and it has worked.  Amazing.  He thinks that anyone who is struggling, ill, making minimum wage, or in any other way not succeeding, it is because they deviated from the plan.  The plan works! If you haven't arrived, it's because you did it wrong.  Your fault, your problem.  It is inconceivable (or at least unconceived) by Hank that a person could work hard and that the vicissitudes of fate may not reward her.  In this way Hank does not feel fortunate for what he has.  He feels justified.  This only exacerbates the problem, because while he's calling the welfare recipients lazy, they're becoming rabidly resentful of his class, ungrateful for their good fortune.

For the other side of the coin, I'll invent an imaginary character.  I'll name her Sophie.  Sophie grew up in a working class family, watched her parents struggle to make ends meet for the entirety of her childhood, witnessed some injustice that she interpreted as oppression by the wealthy, grew up, and now she works for Hank.  Sophie's dad has recently lost his job through no fault of his own (as far as Sophie knows), and is now reliant on unemployment benefits.  In Sophie's eyes, Hank is lucky to have his job, her dad is unlucky to have lost his, and all she hears at work is Hank railing against the greediness and laziness of the unemployed.  It seems natural for Sophie to form pro-labor/anti-business sentiments based on her perceptions of her long-suffering father and undeservedly fortunate boss.

If my hypothesis about this is correct, then I suppose that should be received as equal parts good and bad news.  Good because it should be very simple to demonstrate to a person that the narrowness and paltry experience of their personal life cannot be relied upon as sufficient evidence when formulating social and political beliefs.  Bad because it means that humans are even less prone to careful and critical thinking than I had previously believed. 

Maybe we deserve a completely fucked-up, dysfunctional government which attracts ethically vapid megalomaniacs like flies to shit.