Future Shock for America: Lessons from the Southern Hemisphere

In America, the republican rich have contempt for America's poor. In South Africa and South and Central America, the rich fear the poor.

As wealth descrepency gets wider and wider in America we are looking more and more like a third world country. The minority communities have been hardest hit with double the unemployment numbers as the white communities. With the new wave of repubes coming into local, state and national power, their theme is "belt tightening", meaning cutting off what little assistence there is from the government- unemployment insurance, layoffs of teachers, closing schools. Police departments being cut back is another ominous sign. When the future called for reducing poverty, the US is headed straight towards increasing it.

In S America and Africa, robbery murder and especially kidnapping rates are off the charts. The poor see the rich as fat targets.
The affluent in these countries live behind high walls and barbed wire. They send their children to school overseas for safety. They carry guns and hire personal security and drive around in bullet-proof cars
In Brazil you don't just get robbed by one or two perps. Whole gangs now round up people and take them off. They wait for a traffic jam and go up to people in their cars armed with submachine guns. One gang robbed an entire apartment building, gathering all the residents in the lobby and took their money. They swarm shopping malls and rob both stores and customers. The police in Brazil are a joke, so underpaid and corrupt that some of them join in the looting
In Mexico city they have kidnappers who own their own taxi cabs. They cruise around looking for well dressed people, let them in their cabs and they got them. The victim gets driven to an ATM where they make you clean out your bank account at gunpoint. If you're really rich they hold you for randsom, if you're a woman you get sexually assaulted and raped while you wait for your family to rescue you. If your family doesn't pay quick enough your body gets dumped off in an alley but your head gets delivered to your door.
The impoverished of these socieities have very little sense of pity for the haves. Class resentment and warfare have real meaning in these places.
America has become a plutocracy, where a small elite rich rule over the lives of a majority of downwardly mobile. That is old news in these other countries, America has yet to adapt to it's new reality. is this our future? Maybe, maybe not, depending on how long and deep the decrepency of wealth becomes

Re: The Return of the "Starve the BEAST!" Nonsense

Great article from Salon
LINK


Basicly saying that the myth that cutting taxes causes the goobermint to rein in spending is pure bullshit and never happens. it just creates bigger and bigger deficits

Re: Obama said to cave in to Repubes on taxcuts for the wealthy

This seemed to be a huge flare-up when Huffington Post ran an interview with David Axelrod who stated what sounded pretty much like Obama was indeed caving in to repube demands that the wealthy get to keep their budget busting deficit causing taxcuts
If you read the comments to the article you would have seen a firestorm of liberal dems calling Obama a spineless coward who caved in like a $5 lawn chair and everyone vowing to never cast another vote for him. Very telling, showing much of the the base of the party has just about had it with Wimpy Obama. If this was a trial balloon by the White House, it crashed like the Hindenberg
I for one have turned really sour on Obama over the past year and for this very reason. He is a wimp who won't fight for his base, instead chooses to follow the Rahm Emannuel playbook of surrounding himself with right-leaning advisors and Wall street scum
Ethan and the Whig responded by saying they have had enough with living in the US if this happens. I can relate in some ways, myself living overseas in Brazil for the past year.
The problem with that is that even watching the carnage from afar is kind of like being outside of a prison but your loved ones are still inside getting ass-raped by the guards and other prisoners. Lucky you for not being there but still it sucks to see this happen to your friends, family or just decent people in general.
I've been taken to task by some of the rather dimmer members in perspectives for living outside the US. I find it quite odd, seeing that we don't consider Koreans or other nationalities visiting and living in the US to be "traitors" to their fatherland. There's kind of a provincial attitude about many Americans, that america is such a superior swell place that leaving home except on vacation is sort of unthinkable and they take it as a slap in the face.
Opinionator had a problem with it, saying he is so much better because he "sticks it out here' rather than me 'running away". Oh niggga pleeez. What exactly is the diff if I live here or there? the only way to effect change is to 1) vote and 2) advocate. Well, I do both from 6000 miles away. What else am I expected to do, demonstrate with a bunch of smelly anarcists, burn tires in the streets? Hey, I don't have to live around the mistakes and stupidity by people I have no control over, anal rape doesn't appeal to me

I advise anyone who can get a better deal with work or healthcare in another country to grab it. You can get a sweet house in Costa Rica to retire in, complete with maid service for about for less than $20,000. You can't buy a garage in Detroit for that kind of money. So these dimwits expect me to live in poverty without decent healthcare just to make them happy? Don't think so

Anyways, if Obama caves like he did on off-shore drilling, investigating bush war crimes and the public option, he sucks and we should dump his ass in time for the 2012 primaries. Either that or take my earlier advice and let the repubs take the whole thing back, destroy what's left and THEN a Progressive party takes over. Obama had that chance and blew it

Welcome, abandon all hope all ye who enter!!

Hello there.
You've been invited to hang out in my treehouse to keep me company for the duration of my banning from Perspectives.com because Im soooo lonely =* (
It seems the powers that be over there have once again decided that they had enough of my aserbic wit and came up with another lame rule just so they could ban me
I like Perspectives, it suits my purpose. I just don't like the nanny-state moderators. When I first landed there six years ago the place was pretty wide open but as time went on they kept coming up with rules to squeeze the conversations down to near sterilization
Anyways I still "lurk" at the site. I have snuck in under different alliases but Jeffro, chief mod and headwaiter, has a particular bug up his ass about me and sends me threatening PMs of a perma-ban if i keep it up. So I created this blog to vent me views until my ban is up, but I expect to stay there only a short while until they come up with a newer "atta rule" to ban me with
I find it quite ironic that rightwing teabaggers like LoT decry the "nanny-state" while they are the ones who demand a nannier nanny-state at perspectives to protect their sensitive egos
Sooooo.......
Here we can chat about the board and it's members free of official retaliation, or just chat about anything we like.
I would like to grab a few perspectives threads and give my answers via exile, starting with...