Sad But True - Unemployment Losses/ Food Stamp Cuts/ Most Americans Don't Care

[TheMastersNemesis]

If you look at who cares about cutting food stamps and cutting unemployment benefits most Americans don't care as long as IT IS NOT THEM. The fact that voter turnout is so low and the GOP seldom suffers for its transgressions is very telling about our nation as a bunch of self absorbed bastards. I will best that most voters do not even know about the cuts. And too many probably approve. "Go to work" is their reply. In fact the GOP is actually rewarded for attacking the unemployed, the poor, the sick, the disabled and anyone else who does not make it in this new "Serengeti" economy. Survival of the fittest is the new reality for the US.

I can literally go down the street and talk to people and too many will complain about the "takers". The work hard for their little bit of money and resent having "socialist" politicians giving THEIR money to minorities and the underserving. How you get past that bad mantra stuck in their brain I do not know. All I know is that they vote GOP every time because of that belief.

The silence and complete lack of outrage over GOP monstrosities is just so disappointing. We are still moving backward into the abyss. The fact that the GOP will likely win elections in 2014 when they should lose by wide margins is hard to understand.

[Octafish]

1. ''Economic Darwinism'' is how we put it when Reaganomics first took off in 1981.

"Economic Survival of the Fittest" is what was meant. Then, too, few gave a damn what it meant for the poor and the Have-Nots. Now, 23 years later, it is getting obvious we are living in a nightmare economy for the vast majority, except for the Have-Mores.

[Blanks]

9. I think you lost a decade somewhere. Seems more like 33 years to me. eom

[Octafish]

21. Sorry, my bad. Thanks for the correction.

Seems like yesterday.

[Archaic]

16. In nature, you're not the fittest because you start with more food and protection.

The rich get all of that, and they benefit from previous generations of rich people tilting the game in their favor.

They start with hotels on Boardwalk, while we start on Baltic in the thimble.

[Octafish]

22. Excellent analogy.

And we're just renters, passing through.

[MrMickeysMom]

23. Though we understand that what we rent now...

We built then…

[Brigid]

2. They will start caring . . .

When it IS them. But sadly, not until then.

[rhett o rick]

8. But by then they will be convinced via propaganda that it's the fault of the left. nm

[etherealtruth]

3. It is a very sad commentary of what we (as a society) have become

What would Dickens write about us today?

[Fumesucker]

10. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times?

[etherealtruth]

11. Please sir, I want some more

[riderinthestorm]

4. Agreed. I have a couple of family members with this mentality and its sick

It will never hit them personally so they don't "care" about anyone else.

Pathological. And sad.

Huge K&R.

Thanks for posting this

[City Lights]

5. Americans have, for the most part, become extremely self-centered.

I think it's fair to say there are many Americans who not only don't give a shit about their fellow Americans, they actually despise them.

[Egalitarian Thug]

6. Why should they? The voice of opposition has been completely suppressed.

They're sheep mindlessly grazing through their lives and receiving all input from the God-Box. They don't ever hear anything but the fantasies pumped into their brains by their owners.

[jsr]

7. It's the new normal

[2naSalit]

12. So according to whom?

is this simply anecdotal info? And where do you live that there are so many that are untouched by the economic morass we are all living?

[jtuck004]

13. How else do you explain 300 million people being taken advantage of by, at most, 12 million?

Anyone who wishes to can hear the sentiments echoed in the OP in any store in town, on thousands of web spaces, most everywhere, and it is reflected in our daily lives - how else could one explain what we allow to happen?

The reasons have been written over the years, though I like this one the most, because he doesn't just criticize, he offers a real workable solution, and leaves up to us how we implement it. Simply replace tyrant with Koch bros, Jamie Dimon, any of thousands of people who run private equity funds, oil companies that send our citizens off to die in lonely places for their profit, etc...

...
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows— to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.
...

We could, of course, deliver ourselves from servitude any time we wish...but we would to realize that we are as dependent on our neighbors freedom and security as our own, which is the quality the OP sees as lacking.

...
From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces...

From: "The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" written by Etienne de la Boetie roughly around 1550, but it is no less insightful today.

[2naSalit]

17. But I don't see where you get

from "people don't care" (about the down-trodden from what I can gather in the OP) to loss of efficacy. Two different concerns that don't work together as a coherent statement as you posited in your original statement. People care and I, for one, have not heard one regular type of human claim that they didn't care about those who have no UI benefits or healthcare insurance or a job... What I have heard and say myself is that there are only a few tools in our collective toolkit and even less in our individual toolkits to work with to bring about change.

And much of what you post in your comment to me is pretty much what I have been telling folks for years. Claiming that people don't care is suspect at best, and especially with nothing to back it up... which is why I asked, according to whom? Which you still have not answered. You answered a question I didn't ask.

[jtuck004]

18. How do you know they care? What behavior do they evince? I am guessing you don't presume to read

minds, so all we can go by is what they say an do.

And what millions of people say, when you engage them in the subject of unemployment benefits, for instance, is to suggest that the beneficiary should "get a job". That the recipient of food stamps should "get a job" Nothing about their condition, nothing about the banks that sold off their jobs, nothing about the current administration that would rather cut social security benefits from the most vulnerable than lower the wealth of the already wealthy by reducing our trade imbalance and having those things made here - thus creating jobs in this country.

There is plenty of evidence, overt behavior that screams support for what the OP wrote.

[2naSalit]

19. So ranting

and personal anecdotal evidence equates to millions and it's all an opinion that I am required to simply believe because someone said so. Right.

So what I was saying is that the "people don't care" anecdote is not what I find in my experience and from people I speak with all over the country... the implication doesn't hold water.

And so I'll ask you, how do you know they don't? And I beg you, what overt behavior do you mean because I am not seeing it. I hear that there are well paid shills and cads on the TeeVee and satellite and radio broadcast that exhibit such behavior but I'm not seeing it on the streets nor am I hearing it from anyone anywhere who doesn't have a sponsored megaphone.

Can't come up with some poll or other viable source for that argument, I won't be buying it, sorry.

PS. I am one of those people whose UI benefits just ended and I live in a red state that won't be allowing me medical insurance and I am over fifty and can't find a FT/permanent job that pays a living wage. And I haven't heard one person tell me to get a job or that it's my fault that I don't have a job or that I'm lazy or any of that and I don't hear others saying it about anyone else in this situation, okay? What I do hear is people asking me if I do have a job and when they find I don't, they try to think of someone who is hiring or tell me that they have my number and will call if they have some work I can do for them... and if I need food to stop by their business and they will help me out.

Maybe you should stop watching the tube and find a creative way to deal with this crap rather than be an alarmist about the 1% and then blame the 99% for not caring. Calm down and think.

[jtuck004]

20. Maybe if they cared you would have a job? But I'm glad your experience is so pleasant.

Maybe it's warm there.



Anyway, we've been talking about this for two years, and I'm tired. Have a prosperous New Year! bye now...

[2naSalit]

24. Thanks for the

self portrait!

Have a good one!

[jtuck004]

14. So if we are going to change this, we have to get a window open in their minds - how...

What do we show or tell them (which we could make happen over food, coffee and doughnuts, etc) that might cause them to break the frozen pattern of their thinking, where they hold this idea that the problem is caused by the person living in the trailer who has no power, vs the bastard in the bank who buys it and uses it against us?

Watched Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" the other day, thought about how I might get a copy of that and start showing it on the side of a building at night...get some people trained up in how to deal with the questions, get a small group together and make it larger.

[BumRushDaShow]

15. "The silence and complete lack of outrage over GOP monstrosities is just so disappointing"

Actually, folks weren't silent in 2012, otherwise Rmoney and Lyin' Ryan would have become POTUS and VPOTUS and the rethugs wouldn't have lost 8 House seats and 2 Senate seats.

The issue is more that the vast majority of folks prefer not to obsess over politics, which inturn means that when they do go out in droves to make a point (generally during Presidential elections), they choose to step back out of the political arena in the following years... Most likely because by nature, they don't operate from a perspective of fear, anger, hate, and blame of someone else for all of the ills of the world, when it comes to their day-to-day lives. I.e., as long as the local politicians don't screw them too much, then they find it's easier to keep the status quo by letting someone else do the heavy-lifting of voting.

What has unfortunately happened however, is that there is a subset of the populace who DO operate from and respond to fearful circumstances, and these folks are gullible enough to believe the FUD being spewed 24/7 as it fits into their twisted perspectives. Thus they devolve into a freakish "survival" mode that demands that they must vote "for their very lives". And because they will always vote and others don't, they generally get what they want.... until the larger group shows up and swamps their efforts.

In essence, our society has managed to transform voting from being a "Civic Duty", to being a reactive vengeance-seeking reflex. And this sadly reinforces the apathy post-election (with the idea that the one "big vote" should "fix the problem&quot ... triggering even more fear among the dedicated paranoid few.

[Paula Sims]

25. Until it happens to them and then "woe iz me". . .

There, but for the grace of G-d (or the flying spaghetti monster), go I. . .

[MrMickeysMom]

26. It's a long standing formula, but "dumbing down" can only be dumbed down so far...

How long can the hustings be distracted by the fact that media forgot to do their job? ...

Dumbed down ("What's a matter with Kansas?&quot may vote against economic interests but they are not the only ones. But, many American's, both "dumbed down" and well off support parties that favour wealth redistribution. We are supposed to have a vision of a society that lives beyond it's own bank account.

From a 2012 article, "Why Do Poor White Voters Reject the Democrats?"…

It's patronising in the extreme to assume that poorer white people don't understand that. I may disagree with their decisions to vote on issues like abortion and gay marriage, but it's a different thing entirely to suggest that when they prioritise those things it's because they don't know what's best for them. Paradoxically, given that this argument comes from liberals, it is underpinned by an insistence not that they be less selfish, but more.

Secondly, if they were voting on economic issues alone, that might be a reason not to vote Republican but it's not necessarily a reason to vote Democrat. With unemployment still about 8%, many of the benefits of healthcare reform still to kick in and bankers still running amok, it's not like Democrats are offering much that would support the economic interests of the poor, regardless of their race. It was Bill Clinton who cut welfare, introduced the North American Free Trade Agreement and repealed the Glass-Steagall Act - which helped make the recent crisis possible.

Now, this is designed to pit the argument against "limousine liberals"… and perhaps the GOP are likely to win the 2014 elections, but maybe not… and not because of what monstrosities the GOP has pushed, along with bobble headed Democrats… It could be due to public outrage, which may finally rear its "disobedience" after the primaries.

I don't have a damned thing to back this up… except that Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can only support the top rungs so long as they grown so fucking much heavier for the 1%, despite how more and more grow at the "base" rungs.

[stopbush]

27. 7% unemployment doesn't look so bad if you're among the 93% who are employed.

eom

[99Forever]

29. I care.

But precisely what is it you propose I do about it?

I'll pass on the false guilt trip this go around, thank you very much.

[democratisphere]

30. The "I've got mine and I don't care about you" faction of our society is a national disgrace.

THEY even have the audacity to condemn Canada, UK and France for providing health care to all their citizens while doing everything possible to undermine the attempt to do the same for their own countryman.