A Jobless Recovery

It seems to be widely agreed among those who should know that we are in for a jobless recovery. I love that terminology. It's just another way of saying that we're going to have a recovery for the affluent, but the same old economic distress for the rest of us. There's only one way this can play out and that's in a stratification of society like that in so-called Third World countries. There will be very small clique of the very rich at the top, a small managerial middle class, and the great teeming and increasingly impoverished masses below them.

This has happened so far without much open rebellion at all. I think it's because there are a lot of people out there who still believe that, no matter how bad things may have gotten, this is just a cyclical thing and things will eventually improve. There has been an increase in class warfare though, in the form of crime. There have been a number of high-profile armed robberies of Georgia Tech students, and a recent such incident at Emory University. These are elite universities and the robbers apparently think that's where the money is. There have also been a rash of smash-and-grab robberies here in Atlanta in recent months. These sorts of crimes are a manifestation of class warfare, albeit of an ineffectual and unfortunate sort.

A time will come though when it will be widely accepted that nothing even approximating the good times will be coming back for a very long time, if at all. Then the shit will really hit the fan, and it won't be pretty. Given that there is no real, vital Left in the United States, I expect that the first thing we'll see will be increased right-wing militancy. There will probably will be shootouts with the police, and perhaps even with the army. A lot of these guys joined the Army to get training, so they'll know how to fight. Don't think it can happen? And what makes the United States so special? It's happened elsewhere. It can happen here. Hell, it's already happened here. Remember that little dust-up called the Civil War?