Greatly Depressing: Will USA Go Communist?

People "from all walks of life" are lining up for donated bread in San Diego, 11% of U.S. mortgages are either late or in foreclosure, 8.3 million homeowners owe more than their house is worth, unemployment hasn't been so awful since 1948, 20% of Los Angeles County residents are on Public Assistance, 12.5 million jobless Americans are actively looking for work, and 84,000 homes in Maryland will have the power turned off next month due to lack of payment.

Will angry, hungry people rise up in revolution? Will the unemployed, bloated masses get off their sofas, turn off the teevees and launch a violent overthrow of the capitalist system?

Are working Americans ready to take the country back from Barack Obama and his team of Wall Street-Ivy League fat cat investment bankers?

Ha, right.

When "revolution" means putting a Ron Paul sticker on your gas-guzzling luxury tank or forwarding YouTube links to that CNBC stock jobber yelling about poor people having a roof over their heads, you can rest assured "angry Americans" will continue doing nothing more "radical" than sitting in their cars in the parking lot outside the Jack in the Box, listening to Rush Limbaugh and eating jalapeno poppers instead of looking for a job, like their wives keep telling them to do, or else.

The lasting effects of this Great Recession will be much worse than previous American downturns. With American manufacturing and retail and construction going into permanent retreat, a lot of these lost jobs will never come back. Whole regions of the United States are finished, economically -- those far-flung sunbelt exurbs of exurbs that existed solely on cheap credit and the housing boom's outrageously inflated prices will just die, forever, and the auto-industry cities will become ghost towns.

Even in the miserable depths of the 1930s' Great Depression, there wasn't much taste for a violent overthrow of the capitalist system. And if the lean, hungry Americans of that era couldn't get it together, there is very little chance today's bloated couch potatoes are going to do anything at all -- except whine, on the Internet.

When leftist American writers traveled the country in the 1930s, they thought there would be radical groups in every ruined farm town, ready to storm Washington and New York and seize the means of production. Instead, the people were baffled and beaten. Just getting by was hard enough.

Communist revolutions usually come from the top down, anyway. The poor workers at the bottom just get pushed around into whatever system the elitist tough guys decide to put in place. Obama and his Wall Street elitists are safe.

Ken Layne writes for workers newspapers such as Newer Socialism Review and Wonkette.