A recipe for revolution, if you ask me:
No matter where you’re from, not having enough to eat is the ultimate signifier of economic distress. Food is the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s the first concern in disaster zones. It’s usually the last thing to go — after the car and the nice apartment — when you lose your job.
If you can’t afford food, there’s really nowhere to go but up. That’s why it’s so shocking just how many more hungry people there are now in what were formerly known as the world’s well-off nations. According to a new Pew report released today, almost a quarter of people (24 percent) in the United States and Greece answered “yes” to the question, “Have there been times during the last year when you did not have enough money to buy food your family needed?”
The levels in other Western countries weren’t quite that high, but the rate at which hunger has swept the eurozone since 2007 is still really dramatic:
http://youtu.be/jOWYcARTwxo
OMG! Romney and the Austerians, the rightwad Republicans, and their ilk were RIGHT!!!
We ARE just like Greece!!!
Except, of course, it’s not in the area the above had predicted, in being unable to meet our national debt payments. Oh, no, in that we’re just fine and dandy, since we have a sovereign currency and can decide how much money to put into circulation. The Greeks don’t have that luxury, since they signed on to the Euro.
No, where we’re simliar is that stupid Austerians are calling the shots in how we use our money. For the Greeks, the EU banksters and their political lackeys have imposed this unwise and often deadly austerity. Here, in the US, Obama and the Repubs and stupid Dems are imposing a stupid and unwise austerity. It’s so cheap to buy pols, why not buy almost all of them?
We have a Fed bank which distributes lots and lots of money at incredibly low interest rates to the Big Banksters and others who can avail themselves of the back windows of the Fed; They’re doing just fine. In fact, during a period of teriible hardship for many, with extended high unemployment, the richest are making money hand over fist.
But, we have leaders, Obama, Timmeh, not Jack Lew, the crazy Repubs and the bought out Dems, who think it’s a damn fine idea to make little people suffer. What are those not in the top quintile, especially not in the tippy top, the Zero Dot One Percenters, worth, anyway?? Who needs’em? The small number of the richest can only hire so many servants and aides. So, riiiight, starve the little buggers and hope they get the message to Hurry Up and Die. Get fewer to live long enough to qualify for SocSec and Medicare. Yeah, they think, that’s the ticket.
Now, I’d say “Damn those leaders to hell,” but there probably isn’t an afterlife. What they specialize in is making life a hell on earth for those in the lower economic quintiles.
So, unwittingly (or with full understanding of their austerian policies), they have pushed many people into a form of hell. And, now we can have hunger pains just like a Greek….or Spaniard, Portuguese, Italian, Czech, and, last forced into this party, the Cyprus. There will be more, I bet.
Globalist Corporatists do not want the vast majority of their home country populations to have a middle class life: They want cheap labor, and the attendant low standard of living, everywhere. Except in their wealthy enclaves and gated estates.
It’s interesting that you bring up Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, because bin Laden brought it up again and again to explain why he did what he did and why he would keep on doing it in his “speechs to Americans.” He brought up the second need: Safety and Security, over and over. Bin Laden said that “free men do not give away their security” and if “we are not secure than you won’t be secure either.” “So don’t even draem of security” until ours has been restored to us. Blow back caused by American support for Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and our support of Middle Eastern dictators especially the King of Saudi Arabia.