http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/30/1242221/-The-Return-of-the-19th-Century?detail=email
A friend once told me that the wealthy elite didn't want to just "roll back" the New Deal, they wanted to roll back the entire 20th Century. His point was that all the social gains of the 20th Century were granted to us in order to combat global communism, and that with the collapse of communism the wealthy elite are going it take it all back.
I didn't fully appreciate his sentiments until recently.
The recent upsurge in global piracy seems strange and exotic in today's world, but in fact it is rather appropriate in the full context of national events. Below is a list of trends which show the 21st Century is going to look a lot more like the 19th Century than the 20th Century.
Big Labor
Can we finally stop saying "Big Labor"? Last year labor union membership had shrunk to 11.8% of the total workforce and only 6.6% of the private sector.
You have to go all the way back to 1900 to find such a small union footprint in the private sector.
Second Gilded Age
Along with the destruction of labor unions and the middle class we've see a dramatic rise in inequality. The U.S. has the worst inequality in the developed world.
Inequality has hit levels not seen since the Robber Barons.
In fact, inequality has reached levels not seen since the 18th Century.
American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774 — even if you factor in slavery.
The New Asylums
50 years ago people were horrified that the mentally ill were being "warehoused" in mental institutions. So the government turned the mentally ill out to live in the street. Now we have come full circle and the mentally ill are being warehoused again, but this time in dangerous prisons.
The most vulnerable in our society have been completely abandoned by our society.
It appears that the lessons in humanity that people learned 150 years ago have been forgotten.
this is not what the majority of those running around saying take our country back really has in mind because this would include them who do not have a 8 digit bank acct. they are cheering for their own demise and ignorantly looking forward to it.
The country's three biggest jail systems—Cook County, in Illinois; Los Angeles County; and New York City—are on the front lines. With more than 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, they represent by far the largest mental-health treatment facilities in the country. By comparison, the three largest state-run mental hospitals have a combined 4,000 beds.
"In every city and state I have visited, the jails have become the de facto mental institutions," says Esteban Gonzalez, president of the American Jail Association, an organization for jail employees...
Two centuries ago, reformers were disturbed to find large numbers of the mentally ill in jails, paving the way for the development of state-run institutions.
Worse than Slavery
With the end of the Civil War, employers all over the south were confronted by the reality of the end of free labor. They appealed to their state representatives for help and their representatives responded by finding a pool of free labor previously untapped - prisoners.
It was called Convict Leasing. The prisoners would work for companies during the day outside of prison, and then return to their cells at night. Neglect, brutality, and abuse of the prisoners were rampant, as was official corruption. The conditions were so harsh that prisoners rarely survived longer than 10 years, but everyone was making money from it (except for the prisoners, of course) so the system remained.
There are 220,000 people in private prisons right now (around 1 in 10 prisoners), and the states have quotas to meet to make sure that they stay full. In 2010, two prison corporations made $3 Billion in profit.
This is wrong on so many levels that I can't even count them all, but one of those levels is conflict of interests.
Then it became known that two of the judges were taking bribes from the owners of two private prisons for prescribing the harshest sentences for convicted juvenile offenders to ensure that these two prisons were kept pretty much full of gratuitous labor. The total amount of bribes was $ 2.6 million.
maybe this is what some envisioned just not for themselves, it's already started. i know this bit of history is something reasonable people would not wish on other Americans but when the right wing divider machines makes distinctions between them and us creating bogeymen out of their own false stories has half hating with no idea why. this very well could be our future allowing the republicans to hijack the house and billionaires to buy them and the rest of the gov't it would be just a hop skip and a jump away. 2016 recognize
