The medieval empire

[Jankyn]

From last week's Sacramento News & Review:

The medieval empire
Is resistance futile as America goes feudal?

By Kel Munger

"Hateful poverty, of all evils worst!" It's an exclamation we might argue with in this time of seemingly endless consumption, but Geoffrey Chaucer makes a good case for placing extreme neediness at the top of the list of horrors to be endured. In the medieval poet’s best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, the character of the Man at Law spends his prologue expounding on the difficulties of a life without financial security: “It’s better to be dead than poor.”

Of course, Chaucer’s poetry is old. Really, really old. Poverty such as the Man at Law describes isn’t something with which we contemporary folk need be too concerned. To many of us, all the horrors of the medieval period--poverty and debt, poor health and no medicine, famine, being sent off to fight in wars for the profit of the nobility--seem so far away from our super-sized economy as to be of merely historical interest. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty.

A series of moves are afoot to turn the socioeconomic clock back for most wage earners--and we’re not talking just a few decades. William Greider, writing in The Nation a couple of years ago, argued that a neoconservative, Bush-administration-approved plan would take the United States back to the McKinley era--a time of robber barons, cheap labor and no pesky environmental regulations. In fact, current policy moves--the right’s plans for Social Security, pension systems, and access to debt relief through bankruptcy--aim to turn the clock backward, not to the 19th century, but to the 13th. They’re going totally medieval on the social safety net.

http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2005-04-07/essay.asp

[Technowitch]

1. Interesting essay--

And something I've been pondering myself, whether the actual goal of these folks isn't just power, but the imposition of a neo-feudalistic rule.

Thanks for posting -- and welcome to DU, Jankyn!

:toast:

[Warpy]

2. Poverty is the most destructive WMD the world has ever known

and I fully expect the consequences of keeping the American people artificially poor in a land of plenty will eventually be visited upon the rich and greedy.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Let's not forget the role of the Church in medieval society

the Church was powerful and was used to mollify the masses and to instill in them a belief system that kept the status quo-the rich DESERVED to be rich, etc. etc. It took natural catastrophes, such as the Black Death, to ahake up medieval society and to begin the liberation of the workers.

[oscar111]

4. Crazy writer. Out of touch with reality.

Ok, got your attention?
==================
QUOTE:
--debt
--no medicine
--famine
--off to war for nobility's profits
====================
these are what the author detailed as the medieval poor man's lot , "about which we need not be too concerned" these days.

What?

The writer is out of touch with reality. 3 million of us will be homeless at some point this year.
Every humane person ought to be concerned about that.

The homeless are in poverty as extreme as any medieval poor man.
=======================
debt? sure - many are flat broke
no medicine -- many even middle class folks have to do with none, due to cost
famine --- 12 million americans are in hunger {the only point where medieval man was worse off, was the existence of fatal hunger in entire regions of famine}
Off to war for profit -- can you spell Halliburton?
=============================
Our poverty is extreme. 1OO OOO / year die from heat, cold, rat bites, hunger --- as homeless folks. They die at three times the normal rate.

Little wonder. "Execution by exposure to the elements " was a slow execution used by the ancients. You can see a form of it today in any american city. Rocker Bruce Springsteen volunteers at homeless shelters. Join him.

Future historians will shake their heads at the lack of massive voter reaction to mass homelessness.

[oscar111]

5. Milton Friedman "the only functions of gov are courts, treasury, army"

rough paraphrase.

the article meshes with what RW guru Friedman said a while back.

Milton would end all social programs, keeping only three functions for government.

This is the real goal of the neocons.

Endless cuts in gov services. Get that in mind, and you will be less shocked as they continue to cut. Expect no end, till they reach the utopia Milton sees:

Mexico.

the GOP's utopia-model for america.

Initially, i thought Reagan's cuts would end at some point. After reading of Milton Friedman's "ideal", i now see what the RW has been reading. Amazingly primitive ideas.

Mexico, the utopia.

[Jankyn]

7. I think you missed the sarcasm...

...in the writer's statement. The way it's laid out, I think it's pretty clear that she's claiming that many already have it as bad as the medieval peasantry.

Jankyn

[silverweb]

6. An excellent essay.

It really lays everything out in unmistakable terms. We ignore it at our peril.

A lot of FFRs* are in such denial that when they reap what they've sown, they'll swear they never saw it coming. Even so, they'll still try to blame it on "libruls."

:shrug:

I've sent this to just about everyone I know.


* FFRs = Fundies, fools, & reTHUGlicans