Economic indicators tell us that America is already on the brink of a complete social revolt, due in part to the mistreatment of America’s working class. As the haves take more, and the have nots are left with less and less, the environment is becoming ripe for revolt. Mike Papantonio talks about how a Mitt Romney presidency would only make things worse for American workers.
Most people have never heard of Peter Turchin and his study of what he calls Cliodynamics. The key to his science is mathematics and statistics. Turchin focuses on predictions of what happens within a culture when certain numbers and events line up a particular way – it is a predictive science. According to Turchin’s numbers, his predictive science has declared that America is on the brink of civil unrest and political upheaval, almost akin to revolution within this decade.
Turchin’s analysis is not much different than a model called the Gini Coefficient that the United Nations uses to determine a danger level for very serious social unrest. According to the UN, .40 is the danger reference they use to predict when social upheaval will go haywire in any country around the world.
As we speak, they the US a rating of .47 – the highest it has been in America since 1967. In its simplest form, GINI says depressed income and benefits to workers creates less consumption, which stops further job growth, which leads to a very unhealthy economy, which stifles opportunity; which creates serious social unrest.
Turchin has stated again and again that he personally hopes he is wrong, but according to him his numbers don’t lie. What Turchin does is evaluates social cohesion – its not complicated. He argues with graphs and statistics that overpopulation and worker replacement technology mixes with a few other factors – the class elite begins to take more and more, exploit more and more from the labor class that becomes a more desperate and easier to exploit pile of assets.
The division of haves and have nots becomes so top heavy that severe fracturalism develops to the point that there is no social cohesion. The state loses control of the labor class, and widespread anger and unrest turns into widespread violence.
Turchin plugs his numbers into economic indicators, wages, social inequality, demographic population shifts and labor supply. According to Turchin, his predictive science goes haywire and peaks in 2020.
But do we really need to rely on Turchin’s science to predict what can occur in an America where career workers are told that their jobs are being shipped to China under a model that the man who might be elected president actually designed? And that before they lose their job, before their ability to feed their family occurs, they must personally train the Chinese worker who is replacing them.
And all the while that worker knows that the company is already hugely profitable and world almost $2 billion dollars. But the worker is told that $200 million a year in profit is not enough for the piggish investors who bought their company. Do we really need Turchin to tell us what’s ahead?
And the same week that story is developing we learn that American workers can be treated like a cheap, brainless commodity by having their creepy, neo-nut Republican boss tell them that if they don’t vote for a complete dolt like Republican Mitt Romney, they will be fired. Do as we order you to do, as if those thousands of workers are nothing but low value property – sharecropper slaves who now can be ordered, directed hot to think, how to vote by a Republican CEO who controls their ability to pay their rent or feed their children. Piggish, vulgar employer lords who have no remaining sense of decency, no moral compass. Do you and I really need statistics or cliodynamics to tell us how this story is going to end?
Or how about the Wal-Mart story that every year surfaces in another ugly form? Where employees are ordered to clock out and then put in another hour of work for free. Or they’re told they can’t have a union or they are kept on for years as temporary employees so wages can be kept to a minimum and benefits of any kind never are awarded – basics like vacation or health care benefits. It’s the New Republican endorsed worker model for all of America.
Do we really need a Turchin scale or a UN scale to tell us that all that ends badly? That all of that breeds and fuels social unrest ultimately to the point of violence? Where that arrogant 1% – the Grey Poupon crowd is blamed for that social unrest disaster.
