Social stratification occurs in five main coordinates of human separation: race, ethnicity, income, education and work status. These coordinates are all humming along as the five major current issues in social stratification.
Race is an instant excuse for subjecting people to different qualities of treatment, attitudes, service, access, justice, punishment and support. Recent rises in racial hatred go along the lines of skin color, with the darkest skinned individuals of African origin recieving the worst treatment in all aspects of society, even from new and illegal immigrants.
The recent attention that is being given in the media toward a minority of people who are becoming aggressive and loud with outright racial slurs and religious attacks is fueling more attention to skin color, religion and appearance, with negative assumptions and qualities being assigned to the darkest skinned individuals. As a result, from discriminatory criminal sentencing to law enforcement abuse and even denial of medical care, skin color is the most critical aspect of today’s social stratification.
Ethnic strife, including religious conflict is a source of much alarm with post 911 and other attacks on Western civilization and religions as the ignition sources. What is being ignored are the constant intrusions and attacks that are made by Western countries on the peoples of the world, whether they are in Brazilian rain forests or victims of ongoing wars that are secretly financed and conducted by the worlds super powers. The majority of the world is simply fed up with Eurocentric Western civilization, but Eurocentric Western civilization refuses to acknowledge that intrusive and destructive wars are not acts of regret, recompense or rebuilding. As a result, the determined, unstable and stubborn guerrilia warrior, battling the increasingly irrational and unstable behemoths of well armed world governments are becoming the biggest threat to humanity in world history.
Income has not been so redistributed in world history. In less than 12 years, middle classes throughout the developed world have been in turmoil, if not under alarming levels of decimation. Labor rights and protections are being decimated. Outright theft and fraudulent redistribution of the US treasury has occurred with no sign of attempts to recover enough of it to return the country and the economy to any sense of order. Consumer protections were gutted, leaving hundreds of millions the victims of fraud, deceit and unconscionable taking of funds, property and jobs. Very few government systems or civilizations have lasted for long under such massive re distributions of wealth.
Because income has been redistributed, either through the greed of corporate investors or through excessively bad wastage at colleges and universities, education systems are in jeopardy of being a waste of time. How the same people who make horribly rich incomes can fail to educate American students so that they are competitive in the world is an indicator of more institutions that are out of control to the point of ineffectiveness. Even though there are many who are highly capable of working their way through college, the current problems are an indication that only the financial, racial, income, ethnic and social elites are to be attending college in the US of the future.
Work status is a joke in the US these days. Unlike the largest employer, the US Government and Military, corporate America seems to have lost its mind. After setting up Economic Development Corporations throughout America that were merely mechanisms for giving up the farm to get corporations to set up in a community, those same corporations stayed for a while, outsourced jobs, mostly to India, brought in foreign workers, mostly from India and eventually bailed out when the next Economic Development Corporation offered even more taxpayer supported goodies. As a result, union representation became useless, workers were abused, many have lost the jobs that were promised to the taxpayers, and the investors redistributed necessary company income to themselves.
President Ronald Regan introduced “Crack for Guns”, which introduced a scourge on his own country that has made many rich, either from drug trafficking or from the collusion between legislatures, courts and the private prison industries which have created their own system of law in order to profit from drug addiction.
The profit comes either from prison labor or from the taxpayer who pays the costs of the private prisons. As a result, three generations of Americans are now caught up in a system, not as criminals, but as “product” and as slave labor. Addicts are not going to have full working lives, so either prison, lives of crime or parole will be their permanent working status.
The long term unemployed who are able to work are doing as much as they can in temporary jobs and in underground economies of scale. They are doing barter, trade, flea markets, E-bay, drugs, prostitution, floor tiling, bookkeeping or whatever else it takes to make some income.
The most chilling release of information about plans for the American worker came when some members of Congress labeled them as lazy slackers who need to have their income cut off so that they can be forced into nonexistent, substandard or abusive working conditions. The lack of jobs, the appearance of thousands of applicants at sites where a handful of jobs are advertised and the inability of the same congressional team to produce any paying jobs indicates that there is an irrationality and instability in government that will only worsen after the mid term elections.
The unemployed, most of whom were hard working, skilled and eager workers are now the new underclass, regardless of their race, ethnicity, educational level or previous income. They were once the middle class and no nation, government or society will survive with such a redistribution of wealth, widespread introduction of drugs to society under Presidential and illegal decree and emotional instability and corruption among the nation’s lawmakers.
Social re-stratification, in summary, is reaching massive, destructive and destabilizing levels in all of the developed countries. Citizens who have done everything about work in the right ways are finding that everything is going wrong. They are looking for someone, some group or some political entities to punish. In doing so, they make the country ripe for a take over by charismatic and deceptive politicians who have even more wrong, destructive and negative agendas and who are financed by those entities which are only interested in their own enrichment, not in the will of the people or the public trust.
