Revolt bubbling along

What is the correlation, if any, of income disparity to rebellion, revolution, insurgency and civil society unrest? We can look at a map of the world by color-coded representations of income inequality (Gini coefficient) and say--what? That it is a factor, but not the dispositive variable.

China and the US have more income inequality than the other northern temperate nations, from Canada to Kazakhstan (and Australia). Indeed, China and the US are more unequal, internally, than India, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan or Algeria, never mind northern and western Europe. Clearly, this factor is only one contributory cause of social upheaval, not the one that decides the fate of a nation.

Still, dissatisfaction is increasing alongside poverty, homelessness and foreclosures and unemployment in the US. Looking at the list of how the most well off 10 percent of a nation's populace by income compares with the poorest 10 percent by income, the US is very unequal, and in fact places right between Nepal and Cote d'Ivore, two nations experiencing violent revolution very recently. Increasing nonviolence trainings and education is a prescribed inoculant from now on.

Reshuffle and deal again with nonviolence

We look now at the crumbling economy and the endangered environment and we ask, so, what happened to this house of cards and how do we reverse this apparent bad fortune, get a new deal, and start solving this set of problems?

Of course the first thing that happened was to hijack the public purse and direct the fruits of the labors of the workers toward the treasure chests of the rich. We have concentrated wealth and income in the US to the point where we are effectively a third world nation, with a Gini Coefficient (which measures income inequality) about the same as Turkmenistan or Sri Lanka. We are not as grossly skewed as Sierra Leone or Bolivia, but we are heading swiftly away from the far more egalitarian and well off status of Sweden or Japan. Our Banana Republicans (with the acquiescence of the Congressional Caviar Democrats) have set us in motion toward Panama and away from Germany. The rich get richer, the middle class slumps into poverty and the poor get squalid. Heckuva job.

Marc Pilisuk (2008) is a social psychologist and emeritus professor who has written about such problems since the late 1950s. He notes, “The principle strategy has been to create a fearsome and overarching enemy in the public mind” (p. 131).

The communists and terrorists have been perfect foils, haven't they? Thanks a lot, Stalin. Way to go, Osama. These bogeymen and others have served as useful idiots for the ambitions of war profiteers for generations of gullible, credulous Americans and we are puffed up like horripilated cats all around the world, with our military draining our paychecks every day.

Our solution is clearly nonviolence. Learning to manage all conflict with nonviolent methods is the single largest challenge we face as a nation and as a world. Doing so would save our economies and our environment, the two foundational aspects of our lives anywhere on Earth.

Learning nonviolence is learning how to stop skulking in fear or posturing with belligerence. Learning to take responsibility for our own collective defense instead of hiring weaponeers to devise extravagant killing technologies and then seducing young people into the armed forces to deploy and employ these death arsenals is how we free ourselves. Let's start today.

References
Pilisuk, Marc (2008). Who benefits from global violence and war: Uncovering a destructive system. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.

Why the Ds are losers

The Republicans were the party of war under Bush. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis and Afghans died thanks to the Bush regime. War budgets were passed that hollowed out the economy, false puffed-up Wall Street notwithstanding. Finally, Americans chose differently in 2008 and they got different--rhetoric.

Obama could have met Bush's economic disaster with a jobs program that put all Americans to work. He and the Democrats failed to do that. Instead of bailing out the people, they bailed out the wealthy just as blatantly as did Bush.

Obama and the Ds could have radically dialed back military spending--the kind of spending that produces the fewest jobs and the most moral offenses per $billion spent--but they actually increased it, starting with a surge into Afghanistan's doomed occupation. They actually spent MORE on nukes, which is way beyond belief.

Failing to create a peace economy that is sustainable and offers full employment and a lower Gini index of economic inequality made the Democrats losers. Somehow believing that if they just went along with the hawks that they could create more equality in health care was a doomed notion that provided the Rs with all the ammo they needed.

Yes, the fearmongers have been working overtime at Fox News and across the land. Americans are deathly afraid of their own shadows, which ironically and tragically has them buying guns willy-nilly and using them on each other. The frightened ones, rather than really opening up to ideas about how to get along in our world, are building fortified walls, sending troops out to conquer others, and stomping the heads of domestic dissenters.

The Democrats have shown themselves to be Republican-Lite rather than a true alternative, and the country is afraid, so they want the Real Thing. This will be tragic for Americans and everyone else, but the Democrats simply failed to provide a real alternative. Thus, they lost.

The gini is out of the bottle

Since 1998, the Gini index for the United States has risen to 0.47, the worst among industrialized nations (Ohmer & DeMasi, 2009, p. 36).

The Gini coefficient is essentially a number between 0 (perfect income equality) and 1 (one person has all the income). How is this related to nonviolence?

No justice, no peace.

Civil society is not happy when Poortowns are the norm with gated enclaves of Richistan.

Is the Gini coefficient the sole index of civil society activity toward upheaval? Of course not. Impoverished people who believe they have no chance of success will suffer much more silently.

Income gaps are not nearly as important if the lower income strata still have relatively comfortable lives.

The Gini coefficient does not measure the social safety net, which can at least protect the lowest income stratum from complete catastrophe.

Nevertheless, the index is important and connected to everything else. So the news of the home foreclosure epidemic only fueled unhappiness in civil society in the US as it built, and now that some of the beneficiaries of the massive bailout largess have declared a moratorium on further foreclosures for a time, one might think the Obama administration might be relieved and even try to claim some credit (Finally, it seems they are listening to me!).

But no, even as his own party is increasingly calling for a government-ordered moratorium on home foreclosures, and as the Republicans are rising to defend foreclosures, and as the Ds are about to take a severe spanking and slip into minority-party status and out of congressional leadership for at least two years, the Obama spokespeople are taking a murky, nuanced, cheesy and slippery approach, guaranteed, once again, to provide comfort to corporations and their Republican lawbots while sending victims of the war system-induced recession into worse hopelessness and despair. Smooth!

At what point, we wonder, will civil society really engage in this? The Tea Party is answering that from their side and their factions are more or less ready to rise up, more or less violently. The point is not to freak out about that, it is to realize that, if we believe that civil society is ready to rise up in substantial numbers, our work as nonviolent activists is to harness that toward nonviolence. As it is, the hatemongers and gun-toters are making great strides, leading us toward a demagoguery from the far right or a fascist suppression from the government. Nice choice!

Those who hope the uprising will use nonviolence are those who hope for safety for their families and friends. Those who jump in and help still have a chance to steer the justifiable rage toward a positive process. We may not achieve a Gini of 0--perfect equality--and we may not stop all the violence, but it is really time to reach out and help civil society realize that nonviolence is how we can most successfully change the game.

References

Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.