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It’s Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class
For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it. If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.
Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his “supply-side” economics. Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards. It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war. The results were two-fold: massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.
The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992. George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008. Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%. The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled. We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.
Shifts of this magnitude over such short periods of time have never been seen in American history. With the rich getting much, much richer, its means that everybody else is getting poorer. And in fact, real wages for median workers are lower today than they were in 1973. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom fifth of workers fell by $6,900 between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% saw its annual income increase by $741,000!
To try to keep up with living standards Americans resorted to debt. They increased their personal debt-to-income ratio from 62% in 1980 to 130% in 2008. When housing prices fell 35% nationwide in the recent collapse it left Americans with a smaller share of equity in their homes, 48%, than at any time since the Great Depression. The share they have lost has been taken by the banks.
In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
These effects and numbers can be numbing, even dizzying. But it’s important to understand that they have not been the result of random events or impersonal market forces. Rather, they have followed as the intended consequences of the relentless application of a wide array of government and industry policies.
The massive run-up in debt is one such policy. The wealthy are net lenders. This means that massive public and private debt transfers interest income to them from the rest of the economy. Another method for effecting massive wealth transfer: Beginning in 1981 the Reagan administration effectively stopped enforcing anti-trust laws, allowing monopolies to gouge everyone who had to buy their products.
The government actually provided tax subsidies so that corporations could eliminate jobs in the industrial heartland and ship them to Mexico and later, China, India, and other low-wage countries, reducing wages and pitting American workers against each other for those jobs remaining.
The bank deregulation that began in the early 1980s reached its apex with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in the late nineties. This set up the “casino capitalism” of the next decade that would spawn massive criminality and mortgage fraud by the nation’s leading banks—none of which has been prosecuted. The result was the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
But even as more than five million homeowners have lost their homes, the wealthy had their losses covered by the Bush and later Obama administrations. Bloomberg news estimates that the transfer to the banks through the financial bailout comes to some $13 trillion dollars.
We could go on and on and on with the roster of ways the wealthy have used the government to transfer national wealth to themselves. Environmental and health laws that are not enforced. Deals with the pharmaceutical industry so they don’t have to compete with foreign manufacturers. Health care “reform” that forces tens of millions of Americans to buy questionable insurance products, even as insurers continue to kick legitimate claimants off their rolls. Give-aways of the telecommunication spectrum worth hundreds of billions of dollars to media monopolies that ladle out state propaganda as if were news and never, ever challenge official narratives.
In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves. It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.
The result is vast impoverishment, demoralization, and the destruction of the American middle class. One out of eight Americans are on food stamps. One out of five people are in official poverty. One out of four children are raised in poverty. Twenty five million people cannot find enough work, while their skills atrophy and their families and communities are destroyed. These are not figures describing a banana republic, a disaster-stricken region, or a third world country. They describe the United States of America after three decades of plunder by the rich. And now they want to go in for the kill.
Not satisfied with the staggering wealth they have already siphoned away, the ultra-rich are now using Barack Obama’s National Deficit Commission to propose even more brazen plunder. And the looting is no longer taking place behind closed doors or under the cover of arcane public policies.
The commission proposes to cut the federal government’s budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. But 75% of the “savings” will come from gutting programs that help stabilize the middle class and their communities. None of it comes from policies that would harm the rich.
For example, the commission proposes cutting the tax deduction for mortgage payments. Not only will this render housing much less affordable for millions of prospective home buyers, it will reduce housing prices, perhaps substantially, for without the tax writeoff, buyers will be able to afford much less house. This will decimate the sole source of wealth of tens of millions of Americans.
It is housing wealth that undergirds retirement security for the middle class. Or, at least it did until one out of four homeowners went underwater on their mortgage in the recent bank-triggered collapse. Then, even as the Commission plans to decimate home prices and owner equity, it proposes cutting back benefits to Social Security recipients.
It would lower Social Security cost-of living adjustments while raising the minimum retirement age. And this is being proposed at the very moment that the bank-owned Federal Reserve Board is beginning to print hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks from what’s left of their toxic assets still held from the housing crash.
The ensuing inflation is going to destroy the value of retirement incomes at exactly the moment that 77 million baby boomers head off into retirement. It was exactly this process of money printing and bankrupting of retirees that destroyed the German middle class in the early 1920s, giving rise to Adolph Hitler.
The Commission’s proposals would increase co-pays and deductibles for Medicare, making it unaffordable to millions. It proposes taxing as income the health insurance benefits millions receive from their employers. The Child Tax Credit would be eliminated as would 10% of all federal government jobs. This, at a time when more than 20% of the workforce is already underemployed and there are five workers trying for every available job.
We should be crystal clear: these policies amount to a mortal assault on what remains of middle class solvency and the democracy that a vibrant middle class makes possible.
But even as it girds up for this assault, the Commission barely touches the ultra-rich on whose boards they serve and who have gained so much over the past 30 years. And it cannot go without being said that it was these same professional predators who actually wrecked the economy, pitching it into its greatest collapse since the Great Depression.
The Commission’s proposals would actually lower the maximum tax on the highest income earners, from 35% to 24%. The nominal tax rate on corporate income would fall as well, from 35% to 26%. There is nothing proposed to raise taxes after so many decades of steadily amassed wealth. No financial transactions tax (as the IMF recommends) to stanch the kind of tsunami of speculative buying and selling that brought down the economy. Such a tax would raise over $700 billion over the next decade.
Of course, there will be no claw-backs of the trillions of dollars transferred to the rich under the phony duress of “saving the system” during the height of the financial crisis. No proposal that the cap on earnings subject to Social Security withholding should be removed. That proviso alone would raise more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade.
In fact, it is in comparison with other give-aways to the rich that the take-aways from the middle class by the Commission can be seen as so one sided and venal. Remember, they propose to save $4 trillion over 10 years.
But the war in Iraq, which we now know was entirely premised on lies, will cost more than $5 trillion, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz. It has proven a huge boon to the rich weapons makers, bankers, logistics companies and oil companies that Bush used to coddle as his “base.”
As mentioned above, Bloomberg news estimates that the financial bailout cost some $13 trillion, all of it going to the very richest people on the planet. There is not a syllable in the Commission’s report proposing getting any of that back to help reduce the deficit.
Or consider the notorious Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 where fully 40% went to the top 1% of income earners. Obama once promised to overturn them but, as is his typically cowardly pattern, is now folding. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that they will cost the government more than $18 trillion over their lifetime—four times what the Deficit Commission claims it will achieve in savings. But God forbid we should ask for even a penny of that back to help battle the deficit.
In other words, there are many, many substantial and just ways that the savings the Commission proposes to create could be secured via small contributions from those who have gamed the system and gained the most over the past three decades. But that is not the Commission’s plan. And it is in that omission that its true intent is revealed.
There is no more time for stealth, no more need for subtlety. Western capitalist economies are declining at a pace that is frightening their elite stewards and compelling such desperate, slovenly measures as the wholesale printing of money to postpone the inevitable. While Obama sings lullabies of “hope” and “change” to tranquillize the suckers out front, the rich are backing the truck up to the vault in the back, no longer even deigning to disguise the heist. And of course, why should they? They have the additional diversion of the moronic Tea Party vigilantes (“Keep the government out of my Medicare”), ever ready to cut other people’s throats to cure their own nosebleeds.
The Commission’s proposal is the most naked, undisguised declaration of class warfare possible. Its agenda is not to reduce the deficit but rather to reduce what is left of the American middle class and American workers, to a condition of servitude, of feudal peonage. Their poverty will make them docile and subservient. This will make possible the final looting of America by those whose sociopathic greed has brought it so low already. The battle over this proposal is the last bulwark against the devastation and final destruction of America. It must be fought and won or our freedom and security ceded forever. There is no other choice.
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185 Comments so far
Show AllNo I haven't
I don't run around talking about you like this. What is your problem?
I don't care what you own, and we all have to survive somehow, I don't judge you at all. Clearly, you judge yourself or you would not be projecting this on to me, and that is a shame because there is no need to judge yourself over this. we could have some healing and understanding over this, or we could get pissy and defensive and snipe back and forth. Capitalism, the ownership society wounds all of us, landlord and tenant, it divides us, alienates us from one another. What we gain materially we lose spiritually, and it is almost impossible to play the game - at least well enough to survive - and adhere to principles of justice and human decency. We are all caught in the trap. Are we going to rise above that, or merely be at the effect of it?
Need I point out that your arguments could be used to justify anything - slavery, for example. "I hardly make any money off my slaves, and it is a big expense and hassle feeding and housing them. I barely make minimum wage. Not all slave owners are evil, like people are trying to say, and not all slaves are saints!" Or "those critics of slavery are using a broad brush, to scoop up everyone into the pot of 'the guilty' or 'the damned.'"
I criticized the system of haves and have-nots, the concept of property. You may not agree that this is analogous to slavery, and you are free to make your case. I think you must think that there is some truth to it, or you would not be so defensive and worked up about it. Just as slavery did, ownership corrupts all of us - owner and tenant, management and labor, boss and worker. One of the forms of corruption is just this - your personal attacks on me because I attacked a system from which you derive benefit. That was not an attack on you personally, any more than attacks on slavery were attacks on slave owners personally. What I cannot control is your guilt feelings about it, but those are not my fault (and I don't think you need have them, and I do not hold you as personally guilty of anything.)
I did not co-opt Edwards theme, I came up with it along time ago and passed it along to a staffer I know and Edwards decided to use it. He took my idea.
Your relentless attempts to spread suspicion about me through the use of insinuations and implications and speculations are really ugly and inappropriate.
You and I had some disagreements. You were unable to defend your views, You have been on a campaign of slander. I have been leaving you alone, and not arguing with you. But here you are slandering me out of the blue without provocation. I am asking you to stop with this obsession and live and let live.
Yes, something is fishy indeed; maybe you should stop trying to defend slum lords and get back to dispensing your Astrological wisdom for the sake of our collective enlightenment?
Old Guy from Old Gal,
I studied income taxes in the 1970's. I was outraged by what I learned in the class. The rich had their super attorneys to help write the U.S. tax laws to exempt them from taxes. They created "trust funds" and other devious mechanisms (generation-skipping, for instance to avoid taxes when passing on their wealth to their families after death. We, of the "middle class", at that time, had to pay a huge portion in taxes for inheriting a meager little house from our parents...) My professor had worked for Gulf Oil and he said that the company paid almost no taxes. Corporations had their attorneys writing tax laws, too. I'm sure that the deviousness proliferated since the 70's.
I do not see how taxing the sale price of homes and the rental income (unearned income) on houses (at the federal level), can help the housing situation. These new taxes are Obama taxes and are a rider to our National Health Care Bill. The very people hurting the most cannot sell their homes because they owe more than their homes are worth and, furthermore, they cannot afford to pay a realtor 5% or 6% plus the U.S. Government another 3.9% to sell their homes; they cannot rent their homes for enough to pay the mortgages of those houses and the U.S. Government wants 3.9% of rental income, as well, so they will probably lose them to the big banksters. They have squeezed us into a no-alternative situation.
If one looks at middle class citizens, the single most important component of their wealth is their home ownership. Probably, second are IRA's. Both of those are disappearing. If those are taken away, yes, we are just slaves who need to march.
As the communists say, "A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with."
There is no real middle class people. The middle class died a long time ago and the definition got changed here and there. Today's "middle class" would have been yesterday's lower class.
Make Way ePie
Make way for the debt ball
it’s a juggernaut of greed
it’s a runaway picking up monied speed
Make way for the money debt ball
selling short on the profit of the fall
the money ball overwhelms us all
The debt ball is our treadmill
our treadmill for the man
the corporate puppeteers for Uncle Sam;
the hankers of the bankers and the sackers of the gold
The surge is up and the trickle is down
while profit is the poppy clown
Make way for the bat and ball
it’s clarion call is:
“bomb rebuild and feed,
bomb rebuild and feed”
The snowballing money ball free fall
is cheered on by the neo liberal republican dons
and media cons who feed on wars
called spreading freedom
Since there is no other way
make way for the TINA ball
The full spectrum ball way of the lay a way
with total dominance on the way
Make way for the juggernaut of greed
it’s a runaway picking up speed
Dance with the stars of ‘duck and cover’
the debt/money ball juggernaut just flattened the clover
and it ain’t going to stop for the ‘cliffs of Dover’
It feeds for nukes and neo con pukes
leveraged trump towers and freedom spooks
as it rolls on yellow ribbons
it’s a runaway....
Make way for the ball
while it builds another wall
and squeezes those with least
for their ‘duck and cover’ is our bread and butter
Make way for ballsy ball
as it inflates .. as if turned on by yeast
to not spurn the beast with the ‘least of these’
Parsimony won’t deter the ball as
US the marks get inflated with the fall
just to build another wall
If you don’t see the glow of dawn
you may miss the debt/money ball
for....
it’s a runaway
Glendon Wayne
I'm grateful for a recent comment at CD which included this URL to a 9-min. video. Unless ignorance is preferred, this video is truly a must-see, @
www.realecontv.com/videos/central-banks/what-happened-to-america.html
I'm an ordinary citizen, not a financial wizard. This video was a major 'ah hah' moment for me. Robert Freeman's article and that of Matt Taibbi recently [www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611?RS_show_page=0] point to stunning symptoms of a ruthless, cruel monetary policy which was unleashed with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. (See also the background info. if not the excellent DVD at themoneymasters.com.) Hopeful news is that 300 million citizens are fully capable of solving problems. A key to problem-solving is accurately identifying and understanding the actual problem, then taking responsibility for solving it. Even big problems can be broken down into manageable pieces and strategies. See also: www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/12-0
So the writer of this piece claims that there is a war on the "middle class".
Well, if the "middle class" has it so bad, why are they still middle class?
What about the poor?
There is code-language, with subtly racist overtones, behind this "save the middle class" coming from so-called progressives. The code language basically says: "Save the middle class.. .er...but not the poor, who we fully agree with you rich guys are either lazy bums or provide the menial low-wage labor that makes our middle class lifestyle possible.
I'm with you here. I'm not a big fan of "save the middle class!" pieces at all.
I am wondering if part of the problem is that "middle class"--the bourgeoisie--is more a mind set, not necessarily indicative of actually possessing a "comfortable" life, and a mindset actually shared by parts of the working and unemployed poor...shared "values" of consumerism. Who is actually questioning the purpose of Life and its meaning? Rather than "man know thyself" the portals of Western "Civilization" are inscribed with the cold terror of "Abandon all hope all yee who enter".
It's a problem in our culture, obviously. The core appeal of the American Dream (TM) is essentially that sort of "promise" extended to the losers of the social and economic dogfight in order to keep the peace and ensure compliance witht he rules of an often rigged competition. So yeah, there's a high level of adoption on the part of working and under- class minds of what I think you are referring to as a middle class mentality.
Personally, that mindset is what you're trying to overcome when you agitate and organize among the lower classes in the US.
Yes. The American Dream mindset is the narcotic to overcome in organizing.
And many people who are actaully poor (nowadays, $22K for a family of four) still insist on calling themselves "middle class". 80% of our organizing work could be accomplished if US workers would simply start calling themselves "poor" and "wage slaves" instead of "middle class".
"When I see a first-class individual who makes $80,000 a year, he's lower middle class. When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class. When I see anyone above that, that's upper middle class."
--Rep. Fred Heineman (R-NC), explaining that his yearly income of $180,000 leaves him short of middle-class status
We should not assume that lowering the tax rates will help anyone except the rich. When Reagan lowered taxes, he also took away the deduction for interest on consumer loans, so my taxes went up, even though my income was flat over that period.
So I suspect that many in the middle class will quickly become poor if the interest deduction on mortgages is done away with.
I don't remember where I read this but someone quoted a Bushman in Africa as being astounded that some people in America eat well and others are hungry. He said: "Lions could do that, but not men." Little did he know.
not to mention~
Who Pays? New ITEP Study Finds State & Local Taxes Hit Poor & Middle Class Far Harder than the Wealthy
November 18, 2009 11:29 AM
Read ITEP's New Report: Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of Tax Systems in All 50 States
By an overwhelming margin, most states tax their middle- and low-income families far more heavily than the wealthy, according to a new study by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy (ITEP).
“In the coming months, lawmakers across the nation will be forced to make difficult decisions about budget-balancing tax changes—which makes it vital to understand who is hit hardest by state and local taxes right now,” said Matthew Gardner, lead author of the study, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States. “The harsh reality is that most states require their poor and middle-income taxpayers to pay the most taxes as a share of income.”
Nationwide, the study found that middle- and low-income non-elderly families pay much higher shares of their income in state and local taxes than do the very well-off:
-- The average state and local tax rate on the best-off one percent of families is 6.4 percent before accounting for the tax savings from federal itemized deductions. After the federal offset, the effective tax rate on the best off one percent is a mere 5.2 percent.
-- The average tax rate on families in the middle 20 percent of the income spectrum is 9.7 percent before the federal offset and 9.4 percent after—almost twice the effective rate that the richest people pay.
-- The average tax rate on the poorest 20 percent of families is the highest of all. At 10.9 percent, it is more than double the effective rate on the very wealthy.
“Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.” noted Gardner. “But virtually anyone would agree that this upside-down approach to state and local taxes is astonishingly inequitable.”
http://www.itepnet.org/whopays/
Another stellar observation, SaboCat.
The middle class is the engine of the economy while the poor have nothing to spend. This is why the economic engine is slowing down. Saving the middle class is like saying save the economy.
The poor are poor because they are exploited more than anyone else.
The middle class is not the engine for the economy, they are the technocrats in service to the wealthy, the bosses. The working poor are the ones producing all wealth.
Saving the middle class merely means saving the illusion about "America - the noble and the prosperous, the free and the brave" - and preserving that illusion means that millions are kept to poverty, or worse.
Did I say the "free and the brave?" The "enslaved and intimidated" is more like it. "Noble and prosperous?" More like "compromised and bribed."
Shed no tears for the collapse of the American middle class. The world will breathe a sigh of relief.
ah, you mean the petit bourgoise. Like lawyers and doctors. They would be upper class.
The rich are the American Aristocracy.
White collar and service industry workers think they are middle class just because they aren't in a factory .
I beg to differ, they are just as much a powerless worker as any blue collar.
And wasn't Bob Cratchit an accountant? He wasn't exactly bourgoise or well off was he.
I did not say that white collar professionals are not working class, nor did I say they didn't work hard. I said they are prone to defending the interests of the ruling class rather than the working class.
Many white collar workers think they are middle class because they think they are better than those in a factory. I don't know how there can be any disputing that, since right here a day does not go by without scathing contempt for blue collar people being expressed. This should not surprise us, since higher education is continually promoted as a way to "improve yourself" and to "get ahead" and to "rise above." Naturally enough, those people then believe themselves to be improved, to have gotten ahead, and to have risen above.
No, those with higher incomes are not "just as powerless" - certainly not in their own estimation. They have more freedom and a wider range of options, they have more opportunity to have others working for them rather than the other way around - even if it is greater ability to have someone to clean their office and home, watch their children, clean their pool or mow their lawn.
The house slaves most definitely have it better than the field slaves, if only marginally, and they are still slaves. In exchange for the better conditions and more freedom, they are required to represent and promote the interests of the master.
We have been heading down hill for 30 years and Bush drove us over the cliff. What's a surf to do?
The war on the unions is also contributing to the death of the middle class. It took many decades of struggle and bloodshed for the unionization rate to reach effective levels by which workers would have some say and clout. The unionization rate in 1953 was 32.5%. Now it is down to about 12% and falling every year. Unions created the middle class by leveling the playfield between workers and management. Reagan really got the ball rolling for the destruction of unions in America with his firing of the air traffic controllers. We need a return to strong unions which can challenge the billionaire oligarchs. Passing of the Employee Free Choice Act would certainly be a step in the right direction but the Democrats are too gutless to confront the GOP. When the GOP gains control you can just forget about EFCA for the next millennium. Strong unions will restore the middle class but the chances of returning to a unionization rate of 32% seem remote and far off. Canada has a unionization rate above 25%, Germany is about the same and Finland has an amazing unionization rate higher than 80%. All of the other industrialized, affluent democracies have higher unionization rates than the US. China has virtual slave labor, workers have no rights and no protections. Sounds like America.
Unions have been demonized and swiftboated in this country, especially in the past 30 years. We have class warfare between union and non-union workers and the oligarchs are laughing all the way to the bank. Public sector unions are especially vilified by the right wingers. Here in NJ, Christie has declared all out war on public sector unions especially the teachers' union, the NJEA. Unfortunately, too many low information jackasses who listen to right wing hate radio are lapping up all of Christie's demagoguery and bluster. I really loathe this fascist pig.
The governor of Indiana (Mitch Daniels) has also declared war on the teachers' union. And now he has Republican majorities in each house of the legislature, so he can decimate the union as his first step to running for President year after next.
This is the guy who, as head of Bush's OMB, assured Congress that the war on Terror would only cost a few billion dollars. I guess they did not stress or logic when he went to school.
"Reagan really got the ball rolling for the destruction of unions in America"
Hmmmm, And I thought it was the Labor–Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley) that really got the ball rolling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft_Hartley
Read it and weep.
I thought it was the backward sloping supply/demand curve. It's really sad when the unions and the government demand more in compensation per hour than the workers get per hour net.
Why don't we arrest them all !! We the people need to insist the highly paid Federal Attornys, go after these men, all of them. This is not at all impossible, it just is not being done. If we put them in JAIL, and siezed all thier assests we could pay off China, and start fresh.
When will the silly people realize they are not going to get wealthy, and the very few that do, will not mind paying fair taxes, because they will have nothing else to base thier wealth on. Now the old rich, will get pissed (so f^*nig what) when we put the tax codes back to pre-Vietnam,but our country will prosper. Our bridges will get fixed, our schools can teach again,and our science and technology can thrive to make us the Country we used to be, and even better !
Most all of these CEO's have committed crimes, or ordered someone to commit a crime, either way only a small percentage of rich people are not criminals ,we must go after them. We must prosecute Bush, and his Mobsters as well. Show all the bad guys that if you break the law in America to get rich, or further your power, you go to Jail !
"While Obama sings lullabies of 'hope' and 'change' to tranquilize the suckers out front, the rich are backing the truck up to the vault in the back, no longer even deigning to disquise the heist." Robert Freeman
This is one of the most brilliant political sentences of our time. Let's spread this article like wildfire and see if slumbering America might begin to wake up. It's worth a try.
The issue is of course, these people do not limit their vision to making every Citizen of the United States of America a serf. They have eyes on the entire world which is why the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other such institutions exist.
They have no loyalty to country. You can find these people in each and every country of the world. When you read mainstream news about the struggles in some third country for "Liberty and freedom" 9 times out of 10 the intent is to have that country dismantle all of its Social programs and open up its country to those same investors so that they too can be OWNED.
They want the water. They want the food supply. They want the forests, the lands, the rivers and the seas and all that in them to call "MY Property" and the US Military is tasked with defending and extending those "Property rights" into the 4 corners of the Globe. (Thus the lavish spending on the Military even as they cry out the need to gut spending)
Resist and you are a "terrorist".
Right you are. The oligarchies of the world are engaged in an undeclared
war of attrition against any safeguards a truly democratic peoples could
adopt in order to foster any kind of sane society. It's the same old story,
there are always those that can be bought as they too dream of having so much
more than most others. What is different now is the gargantuan pace of the global behemoth which churns its prey at an ever faster rate with the technological aid
of faster, meaner machinery and super speed trading of commodities and financial
instruments by way of ever faster computers. Human history has never witnessed
anything like it before where the ill-effects and decimation of the common classes
is now further and further removed from their points of origin, the glass towers
of investment banks' corporate headquarters and their subsidiaries. These are acts of financial terrorism against the greater body of humanity and the natural world
which sustains it. As these global ponzi schemes continue unabated, the only colors
remaining on its rubik's cube-like endgame will be those of the international
financial classes and their compliant serfs.
Yes. A central flaw of capitalism is the notion of private "ownership" of the commons such as what you mention. Property is sacred people are expendable. This is what the US business class means every time they mention fighting to "protect" the American way of life. And of course they do not mean for their kids to join the military only yours. And since they possess most of the wealth you are manipulated into fighting for them to retain their ill gotten wealth. And since the US has anointed itself to be the defenders of the world's oligarchs it stands to reason that their "job" program is predominately in the military or some low wage job servicing the rich. Time to turn that way of life on its head.
Right on GwNorth. A good primer on this is "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", if you have not already read it. It is sad that so many citizens are so brainwashed and ill educated to not see what is really going on, (or don't want to).
peacekeepertwo;Nationalize the Federal Reserve Bank.I am no Expert in International Finance, however I take away from what I have Read, there are two ways the Fed prints New Bank notes. First; reason to print new bank notes, to replace old worn out bank notes. Second; reason to print bank notes, to finance debt repayment. Banks refuse to Restructure Mortgage Debt. Growth/Profits come from Debt Repayment. The only way to change the rules for printing money is to give Control of the Federal Reserve to the People. If the People own the Bank they can decide how to run it. Rule number one, as before you replace worn out Bank notes with new Bank Notes. Rule number two; has changed; bank notes are printed to pay Wages for Labor performed. There is no other acceptable reason to print Bank Notes. We really need to change the objective of our System. Another words; access to wealth should not be the only the only Objective in our society. We can’t expect volunteers to provide all Social Services, which are not Profitable. We know how trickledown economics works; you trust the Rich will have a Conscience and share the wealth with the rest of us. The wealthy don’t care about the Poor. Unemployed workers are too busy surviving, to worry about other poor people. A Social Safety net controlled by the People is the only way to sustain the Capitalist System. Workers must be able to purchase what the produce. Allowing Bankers to Control the Federal Reserve is like putting the fox in charge of the Hen House. Once the people have control of the Fed; the president must demand Wall Street Banks Restructure all personal Debt. Banks must accept 35 cents on the Dollar.
in a time of competition and inverted war from steadily increasing world-wide operational scarcity, the winners win, consolidating and protecting their winnings, while the losers are left to die.
Check this out on a PBS documentary on the Great Depression.
www.documentary-film.net/search/watch.php?&ref=170
And while they are making war on the middle class they filled their heads with resentment toward the poor as the "source" of their economic woes: the immigrants. people of color, the elderly, the disabled. And why do the middle classes who are loosing ground willingly blame these groups instead of those at the very top of the economic system? Because they refuse to give up on their dream of being "rich". So we all suffer as long as they refuse to make common cause with all of capitalism's victims.
Ist sort of reminds me of a scene in "Dumb and Dumber" where the Jim Carry chracter asks a chick if he has a chance of going out with her...
She scoffs and says "Maybe one in a million..."
He cheers and says "so you mean I got a chance'?
This is the mindset of that Voter who thinks they will one day be rich...
The only difference is in the Movie..he got the chick.
No article that mentions the President’s National Deficit Commission is complete unless it states that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit or the national debt. It is a stand alone program that would do even better if the cap were raised. Although it is illegal for the federal govenment to steal from Social Security funds, it has often done so. That is probaly why thieves on the President’s National Deficit Commission think Social Security has anything to do with the deficit or the debt.
So why do the very wealthiest seem to enjoy a huge federal debt? Obviously because it's more money in their pockets and why do they press for endless wars--note the latest drum beat to attack Iran--? Not only to distract the people from their misery but to provide "jobs" for the people but in the hope of killing as many of them off as possible (there will "always" be more desperate men and women to fill the ranks) and to protect the interests of the business class.. The "owner" class sell "patriotism" to the masses while their own actions undermine the country--they care nothing for the nation-- so that the masses become willing slaves. But history has shown that there is always a tipping point: Revolution. Sooner or later...
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Warren Buffett, New York Times, November 26, 2006.
I just have to say this. When I was young, we were allowed to deduct our health care insurance and hospital bills from our income taxes. Why were those abolished? It was a form of subsidizing health care and coverage was not so expensive. I had a baby in Louisiana in 1970 with no health care coverage and I paid $150 for the doctor and $150 for the hospital. Try having a baby these days for those prices. You will get a couple of strands of hair delivered from your baby for that much.
Gen. Buffet who like all the oligarchs uses his $$ to corrupt whomever he needs to get even more wealth. America is a Plutocracy now and nothing or no one will change that any time soon. Barry was just another stooge placed in power to continue the robbery.
CHA CHING,,,,,,,
AND THE BEAT GOES ON, AND ON, AND ON,,,
WE HAVE NOT GIVEN FREE TRADE , AND TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS ENOUGH TIME,30 YEARS IS NOT ENOUGH TIME, IF ONLY RONALD REAGAN WERE HERE, HE COULD FIX AMERICA,,,,
BESIDES ITS OK FOR 90 PERCENT OF AMERICA TO BE BROKE, BUT HEAVEN FORBID THAT THE TOP 10 PERCENT GO BROKE, DO YOU WANT TO RUIN THE ECONOMY??
IF YOU TAKE THE TAXES FROM THE RICH, WHO WILL BE LEFT TO MOVE THE REST OF OUR JOBS OUT OF THE COUNTRY,WHO WILL WALL STREET TAKE MONEY FROM,
WHAT THE HECK, LEAVE THE BUSH TAX CUTS IN PLACE.
Perhaps it is time that intelligent people like Mr. Robert Freeman start reading Karl Marx. For a long time the working classes of the prosperous west have sung the praises of their capitalists and truly believe that capitalism as we know it is the destiny of mankind, regardless of their knowledge of the centuries of colonisation and current exploitations of the lands and peoples of the rest of the world. Perhaps this rude awakening that comes in the form of the Great Recession is a good thing for our souls if not for our bodies.
This Great Recession which is born out of this Capitalist Globalisation is definitely a logical step in the evolution of this prominent ideology of the last few centuries. The peoples of the Third World have been describing the working classes of the prosperous West in terms like, "the Nobility and Aristocracies of the working class". A skilled worker in the West holding a high paying job earns in one day what it takes a worker in the Third World a year to earn, more or less.
So may I ask what exactly people like Mr. Robert Freeman really want? Going back to the days of the old version of Capitalism that was raging around the world before this new-fanged financial capitalist-Globalisation? Is that possible, even with more regional and global wars? People like Bush and Obama are quite happy with this "Globalisation" as it still allows them to rob the rest of the world with innovative financial tricks like Quantitative Easing Mark II.
So some of us are hurting. And what do we produce? Because of our education, propaganda and mindset, what else but shortsighted people like the Tea Baggers and Mr. Robert Freemen and Paul Krugman. More and bigger beggar-thy-global-neighbours stimulus packages? We need to go beyond the "local concerns" of Mr. Freedom and Mr. Paul Krugman and think global.
"Western capitalist economies are declining at a pace that is frightening their elite stewards and compelling such desperate, slovenly measures as the wholesale printing of money to postpone the inevitable."
suggestion... for mr freeman's next article... this aspect... if they (the elites) know they're sinking their own ship... why do they keep poking more holes in the bulwarks...?
a "flyspeck on the wall perspective" would be great...
mr freeman has done his homework...
only one "elite" has substantively challenged this 'assualt"... H. Ross Perot... 1992... self made billionaire... by all accounts... "the" american dream... it was primarily his candidacy that paved the way for a balanced budget during the 90's...
perotcharts.com has one chart that CLEARLY shows what mr freeman states... quadrupling of the debt by reagan/bush sr (1-4B) and doubling again by bush jr. (5-10B... roughly)
france... they "propose" raising the retirement age 2 years... massive street protests
england... they "propose" tuition hikes and cutbacks to universities... massive street protests
greece... they "propose" severe austerity measures... massive street portests..
iceland... they suffer the shock of the overleveraging by banks... massive street protests....
india... they try to introduce genetically engineered seeds... massive street protests...
USof"A"... hey hon... what time does idol come on...? and didja didja heer... what that fiesty sarah palin just said... and hurry up with the facebook updates... i gotta twitter someone i'm talking to on my $600 iphone...
Forget the middle class.
The original American reference to a "middle class" probably comes from Britain. It referred, as on the continent, to the propertied but untitled yeomanry of the countryside, the rising burghers in the cities, and the mercantile classes as a whole. It was an accurate naming. What was to become the bourgeoisie really did originally stand between the aristocracy and the property-less classes.
The next stage in this evolution was the rise of the absolute monarchies with the former middle class becoming a major, and sometimes equal, pillar of the state, alongside the aristocracy (the "Third Estate" in France, as an example). In Britain, this evolution was stillborn in many ways because the British bourgeoisie came to power much earlier than in many other countries (in the Civil War of 1648). The English bourgeoisie followed regicide with a “restoration” of a slavish monarchy, and then merged the old aristocracy with itself. Large estates became alienable, titles could be bought and sold, and the monarchical institutions became largely ceremonial. In turn, the middle class "gentlemen" of the 18th century really were an income tier - possessing enough property to avoid the coarser trades but lacking the wherewithal to buy title and transcendence. The Americas were colonized by such... or at least the local power descended from such.
At this point, the meaning of middle-class diverges. On the Continent, the middle-class came to be a description of the mass of small property holders, owning their own means of production but typically employing only their own labor or perhaps a handful of others and even that, often seasonally. This is the infamous "petite-bourgeoisie" and it owed its infamy to its instability. Aspiring to raise itself within the ranks of the property owners on the one hand, it was continuously expropriated and diminished in numbers on the other. The story of the next 100 years of European history is precisely that story.
In Britain, a similar process transpired, but with two counteracting influences. Just as in Europe, the lands were "cleared" and the small holders were expropriated, but at the same time the British mercantile monopolies bore fruit. A worldwide colonial empire was transformed into the engine of capital accumulation and its essential product was the industrial revolution. In both cases, it was not just a vast army of proletarians who were created but also a sea of unusually skilled “labor aristocrats”, specialists, managers, colonial officials, minor civil servants, and professionals of every type and description. This was more a new social stratum than a class, but it echoed some of the perspectives of that which came before it, and it was dependent on and wedded to the social system of Empire. It was not so much that the proceeds of Indian labor went to London bank clerks, as it was that Indian banks were located in London… certainly their management and their hierarchy of favored positions was located in London. This is the genesis of the transformation of the British middle-class, from a continental to an Imperial definition.
That British middle-class, the source of endless political stability and social philistinism, lasted as long as the Empire and industrial ascendancy did. The bankruptcy of that Empire after WW2 and its rapid dismantling also ended the rein of middle-class politics. Politics, in turn, was just a reflection of the decomposition of the “class”, itself. While middle-class nostalgia was producing Thatcher Tories, the British standard of living was falling to the same level as that of Italy or Portugal. Today, few such illusions remain, although a “New” Britain has risen in the nexus of EU and American economics.
With this allegory in mind, it is possible to look at America. While, the origin of the term may be British, for most of its history, the American middle-class went by a Continental definition. America was a “middle-class” country from its inception… built on “free” land (in the dual sense… i.e. also “freed” from its former inhabitants). As late as the decades after the Civil War, 70% of the population owned their own means of production, even if it was modest in most cases. The subsequent transformation of that status was partly the operation of the very same forces as we have already described and partly the result of the flood of European immigrants, recently freed from their property. Daveparts has referred to the backwardness of rural America in the 1930s. On this, he is quite right. In approximately 60 years, the population of freeholders fell from 70% to less than 10%. It is less than 5% today, once the various tax schemes and contractor rackets are abstracted away. The story of America before the War is the story of The Grapes of Wrath and in no way could the U.S. be accurately described as a “middle-class country”.
So what has changed, since? Was it FDR, the New Deal, Democrats… a new “Enlightenment” perhaps? In fact, it was a positive outcome to the Second World War. What Britain lost, the U.S. inherited. And among that inheritance was a new definition for “middle-class”, adopted from the English. Social mobility, the movement up the division of labor, a certain level of prosperity, advancement through education… and all of it made possible from industrial ascendancy and the fact that Indian banks were now located in New York. The end of that era comes with globalization. It makes little difference whether the new era produces a new capitalist competition or whether the very success of American Empire relocates Indian banks to India. The inevitable result will be the decomposition of the American middle-class and there is not a single political perspective which promises otherwise. It is the division of misery in the decline that is in question.
All attempts to paint the existence of the middle-class as an aspect of “politics” or policy, positively or negatively, are simply wrong. The "middle-class" is a historically created, changing, and ultimately decomposing social structure which is no more a permanent part of America than Conestoga Wagons or the railroads.
- anaxarchos
mcoyote,
Robert Freeman, the author, here. I appreciate your informed contribution. I’d quibble with your seventeenth and eighteenth century characterizations (the third estate definitely was NOT an equal of the first or second in France, otherwise there would have been no need for a Revolution; and the Restoration in England in 1660 hardly produced a slavish monarchy, otherwise there would have been no need to run off James II and stage a Glorious Revolution 29 years later.) But those are nits.
I wonder if the rest isn’t just angel counting. Call it what you will, conjure it from where you must, conceive of it how you like, since the founding of the country there has been something akin to what we call a middle class. Sometimes bigger, sometimes more activist, sometime more or less overtly political, but the essential characteristic was that they had property. This was so novel a social invention—that millions of a society should have property—that it is what drove the U.S. population from 5 million in 1800 to 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000; astounding demographic changes never seen anywhere else outside of war and famine. People flocked from all over the world to get a piece of the action.
To be sure, it reached an apex in the decades following World War II. That was the time when there was broadly shared prosperity; when government, business and labor worked together (think of Galbraith’s New Industrial State) to expand opportunities and prosperity for all; when that cooperation produced sufficient wealth to provide free public education to every citizen and the highest quality higher education on the planet; when for the first time since the dawn of civilization leisure was available to vast swaths of the population; the insidious diseases of, well, disease, malnutrition, racism and sexism were addressed and in some meaningful measure beaten back (though on course, not conquered); and so on.
Yes, yes, there was pollution, imperialism, corruption, anomie, men in grey flannel suits, and all the other standard pathologies of a hyper-materialist industrial society. Insert your favorite hobby horse here:________________. But what property gave to people was a chance to be an arbiter—at least to some extent, however fictive or real—of their own destiny. That is perhaps the baseline requirement to be considered a free human being. Absent that capacity, we are no more than two legged cattle.
And that is the point I’m trying to make: that we are returning to a society in which the majority of the population do not own property because it has been stolen from. It is far worse to be returned to the cattle pen after having learned to walk on two legs and make moral choices for yourself, than if you had never been out in the first place. And yes, I’m all too aware of the complicity of the people in their own re-enslavement, a complicity that doesn’t make the degradation any less humiliating or justified, or the frustration about it less agonizing.
So I guess I don’t understand the point of your post. Is it that the measure of meaning for our existence is realized when we define profound problems out of the way, like arguing that the middle class is only an amorphous concept and so (I’m extending the argument) we don’t need to worry about its destruction? What about the simple standard of honesty in our government, the longing for dignity among all human beings, the right to fairness and justice in our affairs with each other, and so on. Even absent the destruction of democracy that will be attendant on the demise of the middle class, do not human values themselves matter, and provide an impetus to some kind of action?
What we need is less Sophistry (heh, heh). As Augustine said, “It is better to will the good than to know the truth.”
RF: "But what property gave to people was a chance to be an arbiter—at least to some extent, however fictive or real—of their own destiny. That is perhaps the baseline requirement to be considered a free human being. Absent that capacity, we are no more than two legged cattle."
Normally I don't butt in in places like this, but essentially what I read is a romantic defense of property as the primary vehicle to self-realization. It's odd language you've chosen here, because if the image of self-destiny is fictive--a lie perhaps?--then wouldn't the fact of self-destiny also be a lie? How is that different fromt eh extreme of the cattle pen that you place in opposition to property ownership?
While this you may see this as sophistry, as someone who occupies a significantly lower social rung than yourself, all I can tell you is that "middle" anything requires something beneath. And that destiny--apparently your hallmark for membership in the middle-- which you claim to value apparently can only be had if it is denied to others.
Forgive many of us for taking exception to being relegated by decree to that fate.
Drone,
Thank you for this. Thank you especially for getting engaged and having the courage to speak out.
First, you don’t know my social status so I blanche to hear you say, “…as someone who occupies a significantly lower social rung than yourself.”
And second, you haven’t been “relegated by decree” to anything except by the construct you proffered…that a middle implies something above and below, or that having property means denying it to someone else.
Look, we live in a material world. We have to work for a living, for an existence. At least I do. I would rather have choices about what kind of work I do, who I work for, how much I work, how long I have to work, etc. The only way I can do that is to have some capacity to say “go to hell” if the work gets too unpalatable. Without that capacity I am reduced to being the instrument of someone else’s ends, and not my own. Cattle.
That is what we are losing--the capacity to choose--when 40% of the country (soon to be 50% when underwater mortgages are washed out) owns absolutely nothing. It used to be called feudalism, though as one poster noted, that actually was a better status than proletarianism under capitalism because feudalism at least conveyed obligations on the part of the feudal lord.
My question, implied in my citation of Augustine, was, “What is everyone going to do about it?” We can all strut and preen on message boards, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” or we can actually do something that might affect some change. My frustration is that I see a lot of strutting and preening, a lot of would be sophist-ication (that’s between me and mcoyote), but little call to action.
I’m doing what I can do to try to help salvage what used to be a decent country. Are you?