In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
Ugh.
The official unemployment rate sits at 6.7%, but that's because they're not counting anybody who makes a single dollar in part-time employment while looking for a full-time job, i.e., pretty much everybody whose unemployment benefits have run out. Add those people in, and you get a mind-boggling 12.5% unemployment rate.
When that hits 15%, you will start seeing fireworks, folks. And at 20%, expect the food riots to begin...
-- Badtux the Depression Penguin
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"expect the food riots to begin..." Avoid the Chinese imports when Wal*Mart and The Dollar Store are raided.
ReplyDelete27% in Imperial County. Winter crops grown in Mexico now. Can't find link, it was on NPR yesterday.
ReplyDeleteYou really think Americans will riot, or is that snark? Because I believe they're such sheeple that unless there's something that strikes an emotional chord, like the Rodney King verdict, they won't get angry enough to burn down the Mall-Warts. Lose your job? Lose your house? Have to scrape by on food from a church? Americans are culturally conditioned to believe "It's all my fault. I must keep quiet, suck it up and blame it on the brown people." The key for the .gov is to keep things on a slow, steady slide to serfdom, without any overt precipitating events.
ReplyDeleteBukko, folks in Saddam's Iraq were unhappy, but they were fed and housed (albeit however poorly) and had health care (albeit without most modern medicines and procedures) so they just grumbled a bit. But you see what happens when you pull that social support network out from underneath a seemingly tranquil population. People who are hungry and homeless and desperate may blame themselves if they are a small minority, but when they see millions just like themselves in the same situation, they start getting a bit restless. In Iraq, that means that since they're dying, they figure they might as well take some Americans/Shia/Sunni with them, thus all the unrest...
ReplyDeleteThe volunteer food bank system BTW is on the verge of collapse. The shelves are bare. As people lose their jobs, they a) are no longer able to donate to the food banks, and b) are themselves clients of the food banks. Past a certain point, the system simply collapses and is unable to provide sufficient food to keep people from starving. And starvation is a *big* incentive for doing something, anything, to prevent starvation... thus food riots in the period 1930-1932 where crowds of starving people rushed into grocery stores and pillaged them of anything edible.
- Badtux the History Penguin
And tux, you forgot to count in the folks that have given up the hunt and gone feral already or are living off the circuit, the cash society.
ReplyDeleteBut, I don't expect the riots till late summer of fall. After the GMO crops finally fail.