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Clearcutting the Middle Class
by arendt (January 8, 2003)
"Today is history. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Kraków. By this evening, those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."
-S.S. Commandant Goeth
(Schindler's List)
If you are a still a member of the rapidly shrinking American middle class,
especially if you are a credentialed professional (doctor, scientist, teacher,
etc.), you should have no doubt that you have been targeted for economic
and political destruction by a Southern Republican Aristocracy and its
fundamentalist footsoldiers, as surely as the Jews were targeted by the Nazis.
(Being truly middle class means that you have a college or post-graduate education,
a secure career instead of an insecure job, a pleasant, crime-free place to live, decent
health care, and retirement security; and that you can afford to prepare your children
to obtain the same things. Given the ever-rising cost of college education and the
replacement of fixed-payout pensions by fixed-contribution 401ks, you need to
have a damn good job to consider yourself truly middle class, as opposed to merely
being near a steadily decreasing median income level.)
If you are unaware of being under attack, consider the implications of a few
widely-known facts about Fundamentalism.
First, it is rabidly anti-intellectual. Fundies actually believe that thinking too
much is one of Satan's snares, that belief is more important than understanding.
Their fanatical denial of modern biology is long-standing (coinciding with the
founding of modern fundamentalism); and it goes hand-in-hand with their
congenital distrust of higher educational institutions and their "moral relativism".
Second, their discounting of the body and of worldly pleasures, to the point of
facilitating a mid-East war to bring on Armageddon today, demonstrates their
disregard for sensible planning regarding life's well-known vicissitudes, such as
ill-health and old-age.
Third, consider their Calvinistic attitude that wealth indicates God's favor.
This sets up fundies to give a free pass to the corrupt Republican plutocracy,
who are seen as God's chosen elect instead of a swarm of locusts.
Finally, consider the strongly regional nature of fundamentalism, and its
long-standing ties with neo-Confederate, States-Rights sympathizers. The
overlap between fundamentalism, militarism, mysogyny, homophobia,
and racism is large; and for Manicheans like them, those who are not with
them are against them.
Not only are these facts widely-known, they are being stressed most strongly
by some prominent people who used to be Republicans. Kevin Phillips, the
actual author of Nixon's "Southern Strategy", has repeatedly inveighed against
the hijacking of the Republican Party. Michael Lind, the former conservative
ideologue who exposed Pat Robertson's anti-Semitism and was blackballed
for doing so, has just written a book about the "Southern takeover".
So, if you are a professional in denial about being targeted, you have no one to
blame but yourself. You are smart enough to realize the media has been hijacked.
The history and the theory is out there, and here are some unpleasant current
events to go with that theory:
The Bush Administration is gleefully supporting more HMO depredations
of doctor's rights and earning power, installing corporate shills and
fundamentalist ideologues to previously objective scientific advisory panels,
plotting to loot (i.e., privatize) Social Security, giving the green light to
"re-defining" (i.e., gutting) pre-existing pension plans, denying emergency
room treatment to Medicaid patients, hypocritically trying to strike race
from a diversity policy at U. Michigan that includes alumni preference,
engaging in McCarthy-ite loyalty oath campaigns on campus, wrecking the budget
with giveaways to the rich, fiddling while the economy burns, polluting
and drilling when and where they please, and warmongering like they want
no tomorrow.
----
This surreal domination of our national government by a fringe of unrepentant
Confederate warmongers, racists, and Bible-belters is ideally positioned to take
advantage of twenty years of runaway corporations sending our manufacturing
capacity overseas.
The corrupt Southern oil aristocracy that has hijacked our democracy is
pulling out all the stops to destroy what little is left of the American
economy. George Bush is the perfect cat's paw for this long-planned
trainwreck. He gives the brains behind the aristocracy "deniability".
They can hide their economic coup behind his so-called religious
principles; and if things go wrong, even he is expendable. That is
not to say they aren't backing him to the hilt. His fundamentalism and
anti-intellectualism are down-played by the corporate media, which laughably present this Yalie scion of a blueblood family as "just plain folks". The media
has declared him untouchable as a "wartime leader"; and his deliberate
mishandling of the economy on behalf of the aristocracy is also given kid-gloves
treatment.
Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, what the aristocracy wants is "more".
The aristocracy wants to return the uppity middle class to the subservient status
it held in Europe before the French Revolution. The aristocracy thinks it can run
a 21st century economy on the backs of Asian sweatshop labor and cheap Chinese
and Indian professionals.
So, it has detonated the demolition charges under the American economy. It
has deliberately unbalanced the budget with massive giveaways to the
rich. Then it increased military spending (on useless boondoggles like
Son of Star Wars) when we already are spending more than our ten nearest
competitors combined. Finally, it has done nothing to help an economy reeling
from a stock market bubble, massive corporate fraud, and massive government
disruption of normal business practices in the name of fighting terrorism.
The aristocracy has used the rest of America as a booster rocket to put
themselves into permanent economic orbit, where they will collect their rents,
royalties, and dividends and enforce their so-called intellectual property
rights in perpetuum.
The first stage of this financial rocket, the lower class, was burned out and
jettisoned under Reagan, in the early 80s recession and the first wave of overseas
job flight. The second stage of the rocket, the non-professional middle-class, was
thrown overboard in the early 90s, when the defense industries contracted after
the end of communism. At that time large chunks of the middle class wound up
working at fast food joints, losing medical insurance, and being priced out of
the housing market and college tuition. We are now witnessing third stage separation, where the innovative economy run by the highly educated class is
no longer needed.
That educated professional class has massive savings, which have already been
massively looted by the low-tech, highly-Repulbican-connected thugs and crooks whose fraud has ruined the stock market. The failure of the stock market has shut
off the flow of investment capital to innovative companies and resulted in
unprecedented professional unemployment. So, another big chunk of professional
savings is being consumed to pay bills, while unemployment insurance is
deliberately limited in the moment when it is most obviously needed.
The rest of the middle class's treasure will be clearcut by one means or another:
runaway inflation or deflation, massive taxes to fund the war/security machine, confiscation for "supporting terrrorists", whatever. When you have absolute power,
you don't need a good reason; you just need a gun.
The aristocracy believes that it no longer needs the innovative economy. It believes
that the existing innovations are more than enough for a Praetorian Guard/Gestapo
to control the rest of humanity. Thank you suckers; now bend over.
The aristocracy believes it no longer needs a middle class because it can use its
newly deregulated monopoly power to extort sufficient profits for themselves from
choiceless consumers, no matter how poor they are. (Does the song "16 Tons"
ring any bells?) This has already worked for Enron, who extorted tens of billions
of dollars from California and has yet to be brought to any kind of justice.
The aristocracy believes it can use The Corporate State of America's monopoly on military power to grab any natural resource on earth, mostly oil, but soon water
and food. The Southern aristos hypocritically made sure that government military
pork and bases flowed disproportionately to their region, in spite of their hatred of
big government handouts.
Those bases and the solidly Southern Republican domination of the Congressional
military subcommittes gives the aristos a power base that should worry the rest of
America. That power is behind the increasingly naked and unprincipled belligerence
of the Southern Republican Aristocrats, both abroad and at home. The militaristic
South and West which they dominate threatens to play the role of a rural Prussia towards an urban, commercial, but disorganized Northeast/Midwest and Pacific
Coast
In short, the aristocracy has reached a level of military and economic power
that allows it to reimpose serfdom on the middle class. And they intend to begin
with the American middle class - the biggest, richest, dumbest middle class on
the planet; a thoroughly de-politicized middle class that has failed to defend the
democratic machinery that allowed it (under progressive presidents from Teddy
Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson) to rollback the power of the Robber Barons and
create an unprecedented prosperity for the majority of citizens.
The aristos daily go about sending troops around the world, trashing the U.S.
Constitution with Federalist Society judicial stooges and the fanatical
fundamentalist Ashcroft, issuing ludicrous, non-credible, but intimidating
terrorism alerts whenever there is a pause in the war drumbeat, and stirring
up new religious and racial animosity against a major monotheistic religion and
a major ethnic group, while simultaneously restarting discrimination against
black Americans.
----
I don't know how much more I can do to spell it out. We are at war all right.
It is war on the American Middle Class and the American Constitution; and
it has been going on for two years already. If you haven't noticed, the middle
class is losing without putting up a fight. In fact, it is voting for the people
who are shooting at them. That makes it about as clueless as the Polish
Jews who allowed themselves to be stuffed into cattle cars, hoping for the
best.
Some middle class folks (mostly libertarians who don't understand that their
status as 'useful idiots' has been revoked) think they can help the aristos to
rationalize the economy. Like the helpful Jewish engineer in Schindler's List,
they will discover that giving unrequested advice to the masters, even when trying
to help , will be rewarded with a bullet to the head.
To paraphrase Commandant Goeth, the Southern Republican Fundamentalist
Party is saying:
"For two centuries there has been a middle class democratic America. By the
time of the next rigged, phony presidential election, those two centuries will be
a rumor. They never happened."
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