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.
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