How much more can the dwindling middle class take, before they shove back HARD against the upper class?

Never happen. Look how much crap is wrong with our society that people ignore.

A lot. The middle class (particularly the US white trash) are remarkably stupid.

Just look at the Tea Party and its supporters. These people are largely the folks who are the targets of the upper class, but the Tea Party supporters have drunk the Kool-Aid. They eat up the proto-economic-religious crap and ask for more.

Remember, it’s to the benefit of the upper class to have uneducated, needy followers.

so much for Christmas and good will toward all….............

I’ve wondered about that too. Imagine some old to middle-aged guy losing his pension because the top dogs mismanaged (stole) the company funds forcing the company into bankruptcy. The CEOs come out of it with more money they can spend and the thousands of employees are left with empty promises. Think Enron, Delphi, GM, Chrysler, Kodak….
Now imagine just 0.1% of those employees live in the same area as the CEOs, have nothing to lose and are just pissed enough to do something about it. Things could get ugly.
But the market is going up and gas prices are going down so that 0.1% number is going down, too.

and, @LuckyGuy don’t forget we are militarizing our police force to counter any such rebellion amongst the rabble.

It will take something drastic, something that takes away the bread and circuses and that hasn’t happened yet.

When things begin to get ugly those who are threatened usually just start another war. We still have Iran on the back-burner; although I think that the US is pretty burned out on this Middle East front and so are busy fomenting unrest in Eastern Europe and demonizing North Korea (not that they are not fully capable of doing that themselves) just in case it becomes necessary to have a common foe to distract the masses.

Lol….there’s no pushing back against the rich and the government. We have to wait until those greedy old people die.

So what are we talking about here, comrades? Where is the next Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, when you need one? We already have one of the highest standard of Living in the world. Turning to communism or socialism won’t improve anything but would drop us like a rock. Yes dear hearts, revolution is what we need.

I feel it only right to quote an icon of our time…”I have the powerrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!”
Big up to ma homie, de wan ‘n’ ownlee He-Man, go beeyatch!

@Jaxk It’s more like what @LuckyGuy said than to totally abandon Capitalism,but we should try and go back to the old way of Capitalism not this very distorted version that seems to only benefit the wealthy and everyone below them must pay.

This is why the wealthy live in gated communities. They know they need the gates….

The middle class want to be the upper class. They’re not got to do anything just in case they end up there. It’s the American dream after all.

I feel a purge a comin, better lock my gates ;-}

It’s like I said in a very earlier question no one seems to care if a CEO get a fairytale bonus, but say we need to raise the minimum wage a $1.00 an hour and the wealthy scream it will be the death of a nation.
The top have seen their pay increase something like 400% in the last 20 some years and the average working slob has his/hers go up something like 4% that is what I am getting at.

Anybody who wants to research and learn more about this topic, I highly recommend Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and producer of a great documentary, “Inequality for All.” It’s a great documentary, fun and yet so thought provoking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich

(documentary linked in article)

Thanks @jca will take a look into just that.

@elbanditoroso Very to the point answer,and oh so true.

@SQUEEKY2 – There’s always going to be crooks. As I recall one of the Enron guys committed suicide. Not exactly the picture painted by @LuckyGuy. The truth is you seem to want to be taken care of. No effort on your own but rather make the rich take care of me. It never works that way no matter what economic system you use. If you don’t want to have your retirement account dependent on the success of the company, take control of it yourself. Hell I would definitely support a law to make retirement under you personal control instead of the companies. When a company goes under, everyone loses. We’re seeing similar results from government entities such as Detroit and Stockton. If you don’t want someone else to control your retirement take control of it yourself and do the extra work required. If you want someone else to control it and take all the risks, occasionally, your going to lose.

@Jaxk: I am not understanding what you wrote about Enron. The Enron exec who committed suicide, Baxter, was bipolar and also was being personally sued due to selling 30 million of his Enron stock in the six months before Enron went belly up.

@jca – Yes and that doesn’t fit the picture painted by @LuckyGuy that the executives get rich while everyone else gets nothing. As I recall Skilling got 24 years in prison (subsequently reduced to 14). If that’s what you all mean by retiring to their gated communities, I stand corrected.

Well @Jaxk I think your way off base with my thinking I want the rich to take care of me,but it would be a nice change from all the years the working slob has had to haul their fat rich asses
around.
As for my retirement here in Canada we have RRSP’s which as far as I can tell are very similar to your State 401k’s and in most cases we trust some kind of investor to look after them and put them where they will build the most money, while we working slobs go out and try to stay alive.
All I want is a living wage for the lower class, but when that is said people start spouting communism and forth,or OMG the end of Capitalism as we know it, or the corporations will have to raise their costs to cover that,Walmart being one of the main examples.
Do you really think it would hurt the Walton family at all if their profit margin dropped 1 or 2% my God the horrors.
I don’t want anyone to take care of me, but I do want a fair wage so no one has to take care of anyone.

@SQUEEKY2 – I think I need some clarification. Exactly how do you haul all those rich bastards around? Are you a cab driver? And just to clarify, the Waltons are not rich because they get some big salary from Walmart but rather because they own the stock. The workers salary don’t contribute to the Waltons wealth. And the recent push for minimum wage is not a dollar raise but rather a salary doubling.

As for the 401Ks, those are individually owned. If the company goes bankrupt they are not part of the companies assets. The retirement plans referenced are company provided plans that are part of the company assets like government plans. You have no money in the plan but expect a monthly payout when you retire. We seem to be talking past each other.

@Jaxk Ok here are some dirty details. I’ll pick one company. Delphi Automotive had a paid retirement plan for their salaried employees. They matched contributions. Many employees contributed into the program their entire 35+ year careers. Right up until the day they retired they were told they would be receiving the monthly payments. AFTER they retired Delphi declared bankruptcy and admitted there was virtually no money in the account. It would fall on the back of the taxpayers through PBGC. The top dog executives were “in a different plan that remained funded” and received / continued to receive payments.

As certain top dog had as one of his deliverables for annual bonus, was cash on hand. To get the number up a certain employee was told to sell the precious metals used in the product. The employee stated she could not do that as there were customers for it but she was overruled. The precious metals were sold, the cash on hand was high, JTB got his huge bonus. The metals were repurchased early the next year. The metals dealer made money by selling and buying the metals back. Top dog got his payment. Thousands of employees were laid off because of poor cash flow.
The SEC got involved in this one but top dog had all his legal fees paid by the company. PM me and I will give you particulars. I have many others.

Home Depot – The top dog left with a $400 M package. The money had to come from somewhere so…. within months they began layoffs of thousands of employees.

@LuckyGuy but it’s still all the employees fault right??

@SQUEEKY2 Absolutely.
As a funny coincidence during the very some month Delphi anounced they were bankrupt , one of the top dogs’ house was featured in an exclusive real estate magazine like home of the rich and famous. As they were laying employees off people were passing around copies of the article.

And some people get confused when I say the working slob has to carry the rich pigs asses around.
And OMG don’t ever ask for a living wage that will just be the end of the nation.

I stopped going to Home Despot when they gave Robert Nardelli the $400M sayonara package. ” When the board reportedly ousted him in January 2007,[7] Nardelli’s severance package was estimated at $210 million.” (He was there for 7 years.)
The stock price remained flat while Lowe’s doubled during his tenure, by the way.
Did you ever ask a HD employee for help finding something? The answer is No! Why? Because you can’t find one. The Nardman’s kiss off took the salaries of 10,000 employees. Do the math yourself.
After not too much cyphering I calculated they did not need my money.

Hellloo Lowe’s! You are my new friend.

I’m fiscally conservative and a capitalist. I have my own business that lives and dies by what we produce. But even I see things are not quite right and unless something changes at some point there will be an explosion.

Stick with me here. I am making a point…
I hate giving money to welfare slobs. We working stiffs get taxed and it goes into the pockets of worthless warts who sit on their asses all day smoking crack and eating Big Macs. Right? But think about it for a second. Where does the money actually go? The welfare warts take their welfare money and give it to the slumlord who owns 50 section 8 units in the hood. They buy food at Lard Lad and McD and the money flows to the CEO Thompson ($10M in 2013) with an additional $200M to other sr. management staff. The welfare money eventually goes right into the accounts of the big boys. The same ones complaining about welfare.
The min wage employees are the ones who could use the cash. If they had an extra $1 per hour they might be able to afford “fries with that”. But Thommy and the Burger Boys would only get $5M and $100M respectively and that is just not acceptable. I guess they need it all to pay for their girlfriends’ ponies.

Whew!!! OK. My rant is over.

And that is what I was trying to get at.

The middle class are too busy killing themselves in their jobs (J ust O ver B roke conditions ) to try to look and live like the wealthy by acquiring cars, cash, clothes, and cribs with their plastic, going into massive amounts of debt. The middle class is a consumer nation that will always leave them distracted and broke because they would rather tailgate at a stadium they can hardly afford to go to than invest that money.

@LuckyGuy I do take exception to one point in your rant. It is not the “big boys” who complain about welfare; they know exactly where that money goes, who benefits in the long run, and that very little of the very little taxes they do pay goes to fund this program that helps keep the unwashed masses pacified.

The people who complain are the middle class. The ones who, on a percentage of income, pay much more toward this system all without reaping “the rewards” the big boys do. These are the same people who have allowed themselves to be convinced by the media, which is owned by the big boys, that organizing themselves into a more powerful bloc that could do something about it is a bad idea.

@LuckyGuy – Delphi is a fairly special case that gets muddied by the intervention of the Obama administration in the bankruptcy of GM. Which pensions were saved and which were not had more to do with Obama picking winners and losers than anything else. Your Home Depot example is good. That’s how business is supposed to work under a capitalistic system. If you don’t provide good service, you lose business. As for the McD example, that is simply way off base. Most of the minimum wages earners are not employees of McDonalds (most other fast food brands as well) but rather employees of the franchise owner, the small business owner. Paying the CEO of McDonalds more or less has nothing to do with the pay of the guy making french fries. These are the kinds of arguments we hear all the time and they simply don’t represent either business in general nor our system.

The issue with pensions is a real one. Unions and workers love to have someone else guarantee a fixed income for the rest of your life. Unfortunately the company is seldom in that business. The payout is 30–40 years down the road and how do you anticipate the final value when interest rates and markets move dramatically up and down. Hell we’ve had zero interest rates for 6 years now, if your trying to grow retirement funds how do you compensate for that? Plus the life expectancy has increased by 10 years and we have more women in the workforce which makes the life expectancy even longer. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we are retiring earlier.

Company pension plans are a thing of the past. 401s give you more control and take the money away from the corporate execs. We need a little more flexibility for them but if you want someone else to handle your money, occasionally they will rip you off. That’s life and the economic system has nothing to do with it.