Social Question

josie's avatar

Are the people who pull the wagon starting to rebel against the people who are riding in it?

Asked by josie (30934points) September 15th, 2011

It’s a political question, and a metaphor. Not literal.

Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0

50 Answers

wundayatta's avatar

One can only hope. It is time to stop the corporations from jerking us around and robbing us and treating us like scum. It’s time to get a government that will stand up for us against these thieves and scoundrels.

lucillelucillelucille's avatar

The elections the other day in New York and in Nevada could be taken as a sign.

josie's avatar

@wundayatta I am all for standing up against thieves and soundrals….

wundayatta's avatar

@josie Somehow I have a feeling that your thief is my scoundrel and vice versa.

That’s a metaphor—not meant to be literal.

Cruiser's avatar

If you want it to be political and a metaphor…why not!

jerv's avatar

That depends.

A lot of people are rebelling while a rather vocal group seem to be complaining that those lucky enough to ride in the wagon are each doing more to keep the wagon moving than 10,000 of the people pulling, and proclaiming that those pulling aren’t pulling hard enough to deserve even basic necessities like food.

zenvelo's avatar

Great metaphor. But based on our past opposite positions in various threads, I too think we disagree on who is pulling their weight, and who thinks they are entitled to collect fares from the labor pulling the wagon.

woken's avatar

Too much record sales from those who ride in the wagon for there to be a sign of rebellion from the wagon pullers.

Those who ride in the wagon offer irresistible products.

The wagon pullers just love those iPhones, iPads, and Macs too much.

The wagon pullers seem to also like their medicine, their food, their drinks, their clothing, their TV’s, their homes, their toothbrush, their toothpaste, their hair dryer, their shoes, their cars, their oil, their gas, their jobs, their movies, their video games, their loans, their banks, their internet, their computers, etc….

jerv's avatar

@woken Those in the wagon also like those things, only they get elective surgery, $50 entrees washed down with a $100 glass of wine, high fashion custom designs, 108” plasmas, mansions…. the same stuff only fancier. The free hand of the market can get bitten, so lets see how long this bubble lasts before bursting.

woken's avatar

@jerv Indeed they do, but this is a question of rebellion, and those riding in the wagon will not rebel against themselves.The wagon puller will buy the 55 inch plasma instead, no biggie

jerv's avatar

@woken Very true, but jealousy towards them may.

woken's avatar

@jerv

Yes, but as long as the product continues to get purchased, emotional responses (jealousy) will remain harmless – empty rhetoric. Nothing a few beers can’t fix.

woken's avatar

@jerv

Btw, you don’t need to wait for the bubble to burst here in the U.S. Utopian paradise awaits you in North Korea and Cuba.

tedd's avatar

Over the last decade the gap between those of us in the lower and middle classes and those in the upper class, has grown by over 100% (based on income increases of the top 5% vs the bottom 95%). While CEO paychecks have increased 10 fold, your average worker has seen his income stay the same, and he’s no losing a lot of his benefits and government assistance thanks to the efforts of conservative movements that are controlled by the same CEO’s who saw their paychecks grow. The rich are taking anything they can from the poor, one bit at a time, and slowly trying to turn us into modern day peasantry. So no, it doesn’t shock me that people are starting to get pissed off and push back.

jerv's avatar

@tedd Pretty much.

@woken And that is the system you support; one where the majority wind up impoverished while an elite few at the top have it all. Sounds like Communist Russia, or China to me, so tell me how it is that what you cherish so much is notably different from what you claim to be pure evil.

You are partially correct in that the masses can be placated into inaction… for a while. But eventually you wind up with people saying, “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”, and doing things. And some of us already are doing things, but we citizens are unorganized and can’t agree on a single direction in which we want to all go.

woken's avatar

@jerv,

Obviously you don’t understand what force and voluntary means.

Capitalism = Dynamic-Voluntary Transactions.
Communism/Socialism = Static-Planned-forceful transactions.

Did rich people force you to be poor? No, you did.
Are you helping the rich get richer? Yes, you’re.
Are you doing it voluntarily? Yes, you’re.

tedd's avatar

@woken If you are naive enough to think that the rich have nothing to do with the poor being poor, then you deserve the servitude you’re advocating.

woken's avatar

@jerv @tedd,

I know what you want.

You want to give the A student (Successful Capitalist) a C, then take the F student (Failed Capitalist) and give him/her a C which you subtracted from A, and the natural C student keeps his C, and now everyone is equal and we can all sing kumbaya in perfect harmony.

Basically, you punish the successful (A), and then you reward the failures (F), and you let the natural C student keep his/her C.

Paradise.

jerv's avatar

@woken Or you do what we do; give the slacker an A because his daddy earned A’s and take the hard workers that study and know things that should earn at least a B- and give them D’s and F’s because of a roll of the dice.

So long as you have the mistaken belief that hard work and success have more than a tangential relationship to each other, it is nearly impossible to take you seriously for the same reason that flat-Earthers are ridiculed.

woken's avatar

@jerv

It’s hard to take you seriously when you blame your shortcomings on random events and others rather then taking some responsibility for yourself.

What good are you achieving by blaming random events and others for your downfall?

What do you want to achieve? A hand out? Guess where that hand out is going to come from. Question is are you just going to take it at will or ask nicely and maybe you’ll be granted some mercy.

This is where respect comes in. Respect one’s choices or violate them.

tedd's avatar

@woken No, because that’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense. Let me give you an example of the world the rich are putting us into.

Lets say I’m born into a lower middle class family. My parents don’t make much money, but enough to live off of. My parents can’t afford private schooling or to have one stay home and home school, so I’m stuck in a public school that may be ridiculously under-funded (thanks to funding cuts put in place by conservatives). But let’s say I’m lucky enough to surpass that based on pure dedication, or just being lucky enough to be in one of the ok school districts.

Now I’m off to go to college, but wait, I can’t afford it. My parents have no money to contribute, they put all their money into raising me and paying the bills. I apply for Federal loans to cover the cost, but much to my surprise the cost of tuition has skyrocketed the last few decades (again thanks to schools losing federal funding, thankyou again conservatives). Where there was a time I could go to school for 5 or 6 thousand a year, now it’s an average of $20,000. My only recourse is to turn to private bank student loans, which often times have ridiculous interest rates. And go figure, these loans are insured by the federal government, so if I default the bank still gets it’s money (I wonder who put that rule into place… hmmm, conservatives again?) Anyways I go through school, get good grades, and graduate with a degree in…. chemistry (a degree I actually hold today).

I go out onto the job market, only to find it’s been massacred. Companies have been shipping jobs overseas because foreign governments will allow them to pay their workers a fraction of the minimum wage in the US, and they don’t have all those pesky regulations to protect the environment. But of course rather than punish those companies by inflicting tarriffs or taxes on the products they’re importing from those quasi-slave camps, our government (under the direction from conservatives yet again), has given these companies tax cuts, and stripped away regulation. As if being able to dump pollution into our waterways here just like you can in China, will change the fact that they can pay their workers in China a few cents a day whilst having little to no concern for their safety and well being. So now the job market sucks, but lets say I overcome… My grades are so incredibly awesome I find a job.

Well the average starting pay in my field is in the mid to upper teens an hour (I started at $15). To my surprise virtually no companies hire in directly anymore, and instead they use temp agencies. They do this so that they can fire me on a whim, and because they aren’t required to give me benefits. Thanks to conservatives they can even claim on their taxes that they are employing another company and helping them make jobs (yep, there’s a tax cut for hiring people through another company). But ok I go to work… But wait I had student loans. On average I owe about $100,000 for 4 years of school. I have to pay nearly $750 a month in those costs alone. Let alone rent, food, gas, etc… and I don’t even have health insurance! I can afford to pay the bills, but I’m not really accruing any savings (there’s no extra money to save). I’m floating by and making it, and someday I’ll pay off my loans… and heck raises will even eventually get me some spending cash. But unless I don’t ever want to have children, I’m never going to do more than just get by.

THIS is the America conservatives right now are bringing you too. THIS is what Big Business using the Republican party like a puppet is slowly dragging us too. We are being held down into modern day servitude and peasantry, for the sake of making the rich even richer.

And this isn’t a dream scenario. My mother was the Valedictorian at the University of Michigan in Organic Chemistry. She just reached the $60,000 a year mark last year, at age 53. She spent her entire life barely paying the bills and providing for my siblings and I. I can’t remember a week in my life that she didn’t wake up at 3am to go to work so she could get off in time to pick us up from school.

And myself. I went to Ohio State and graduated with a chemistry degree. My mom didn’t have the money to pay for my education, so we got student loans. Student loans that had higher interest rates because we didn’t have a lot of money (for all the sense that makes). I owe over $100,000 dollars, and I haven’t worked less than 60 hours in over two years to achieve the goal of paying that back. Even so, short of getting some huge raise, I won’t have my loans paid off until I’m in my early to mid 30’s.

My mother and I didn’t work hard? We didn’t put in the hours and dedication to get an education? We don’t work ourselves to the bone for hours and hours a week without vacation or even weekends?

And all the while, the rich got richer off of our work. Sitting back and trying to think up another way to give themselves a tax cut that will take away from even more of the basic help the government gave me and my mother over the years.

You’ve been blinded by ignorance.

Response moderated (Personal Attack)
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woken's avatar

@jerv,

A system where no human falls below the minimum required for survival is called charity.
You don’t steal from someone to achieve this system, you hope and beg for mercy.

No one is stopping you from earning as much as a CEO. You’re stopping you because you have a slave mindset. How about you figure out how and why they make the money they make and join them. No one has that gun to your head. You knew damn well what you were getting yourself involved in, and if you claim random events and ignorance, it’s a worthless excuse and no one cares.

woken's avatar

In order for someone to take you seriously, you should live in a jungle because all you’re doing is living in a capitalist system, and bitching about capitalism.

You’re typing from a computer that was brought from a Corporation. The clothes you were come from Corporations. You’re literally surrounded by products you purchased voluntarily all from Corporations, yet you blame these people for keeping you down in life because they wouldn’t give you a free hand out and expect you to pull your own weight.

Go throw that computer out the window and the clothes you wearing and the food you bought, and then you might persuade someone.

It’s like the smoker who tells you not to smoke.

Despicable.

Response moderated (Personal Attack)
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tedd's avatar

@woken Why should Public school be funded? Because the Founding Fathers said it should. Establishing public school in Virginia was Thomas Jefferson’s crowning achievement while he was governor there. Education is freedom, which is the back bone of our society.

No one said all companies and all corporations are bad. Do you think we actually think the CEO of Starbucks, or the owner of my own company, are in on some huge plot to undermine us all? There are good companies out there, but there are plenty of bad ones who are taking advantage of our government system to abuse our capitalist system. I’m sorry to tell you a pure capitalist system won’t work. If I have to work a blue collar job (ignoring for the fact your idealized system has shipped them all to China), how am I ever going to get an education and get out there to better our country? Your ignorance is astounding.

And quite frankly, you have no idea what a capitalist system is, the system you described in your previous 3 posts is a serfdom-oligarchy.

I think instead of North Korea and Cuba, I’ll go to Germany…

Response moderated (Personal Attack)
tedd's avatar

@woken lol… as an avid investor I can tell you that the government has little to nothing to do with the huge upswings and downswings in the market. Government bonds got downgraded last month and investors rushed to them.

You have a complete misunderstanding of how our country works, especially relating to its economic/government intertwining.

Are you 12oaks reincarnated?

SpatzieLover's avatar

@tedd That’s who I was thinking…or one other that keeps returning

@woken If you’d like to discuss could you use logic without pointing a finger at one person? [Not a Mod]

Response moderated (Personal Attack)
Raven_Rising's avatar

@woken – This is not a classroom. This is not a lecture hall. This is a place to respectfully share viewpoints and listen to what others may think. However, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing much in the way of listening.

Although you have made a couple of good points, your negativity towards the community is unwarranted. There is no need to call anyone failures because they don’t subscribe to your personal philosophy. If you are looking for a soapbox, your needs might be best served elsewhere.

If you want others to take you seriously here, you need to take it down a notch.

SpatzieLover's avatar

@woken has left the tidepool…@omegstr will be gone soon

jerv's avatar

Such is the nature of the free market; those that put out stuff that the market does not want go out of business.

Response moderated
Raven_Rising's avatar

Um, was it something I said?

BTW, Thank you, Mods

Allie's avatar

@woken You should check out Outliers. Take note on the parts about “failures” like Chris Langan.

Raven_Rising's avatar

@Allie Seems that woken has been set adrift. However, I’ve been meaning to read that book for a while now. Thank you for the reminder :)

Brian1946's avatar

Perhaps @woken will return with a new name- @Personal Attack. ;-)

Berserker's avatar

I know naught of politics…all I can think of are violent chariot races and Spartacus.

Although that should be fitting enough.

jerv's avatar

“I know naught of politics”
If you’re smart, you’ll keep it that way so you won’t cry yourself to sleep at night.

FutureMemory's avatar

Just ordered that book Allie linked. Looks interesting, thanks!

augustlan's avatar

It’s on my wishlist, too.

SpatzieLover's avatar

And I had the sample sent to my Kindle

augustlan's avatar

Fluther book club!

FutureMemory's avatar

Lets compare notes after we’ve all read it :)

Allie's avatar

Haha, glad you all like/are interested in it. It’s a pretty great book. One of my favorites.

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