Thoughtforfood said:
I was at the rally yesterday. Amazing number of people.
I don't know if I am a pinko as much as I recognize that government has helped produce the greatest amount of wealth for the greatest number of people in the history of mankind because of socialist ideas. I fear we have such an uneducated populace (and "education" reformers like those in the Texas Dept of Education re-writing history) that reality has been supplanted by a lie meant to concentrate more wealth into the hands of the wealthiest Americans.
The conservatives like to call them the "job creators." The reality is that for the past 20 years, the debt of the middle class has been the proximate cause of the job growth. The money never trickled down. It was kept and lent back at 23% revolving. It is a f**king lie perpetrated by those who kept the money, and ignorantly disseminated by people who are made to believe that they have a legitimate shot at attaining that stature. The wealthy privatized their wealth and the socialized their loss when the sh!t hit the fan. "Too big to fail" is a euphemism for "We own your a$$. Write us a check and clean the toilet before you leave b!tch."
Its funny, you keep hearing about how if we let the tax on the wealthiest Americans lapse, they won't create jobs. Where the f**k are the jobs now that their taxes are low? Where are the loans for small businesses? I know the profit of the banks is up because they don't lend, but who is getting rich off of that? Who is paying their bills and creating jobs in a local economy with that? They were talking to David Stockman, President Reagan's budget director on 60 minutes tonight, and it was enlightening to hear a conservative admit that tax cut perpetuation is a lie.
Honestly, I fear that our country has past its expiration date. Sometimes I fear that, and sometimes I welcome that, as the materialistic shallow nature of our existence is the saddest, most repulsive "culture" a society can form. What is passed off as "freedom" is merely the jealously guarded right to have a shopping spree for new clothes, a car, and some fake t!ts.
I really didn't want to get started today, but the political junkie in me comes out sometimes. I get this eerie feeling that once I get my law degree, I will run for office.
So true.
There was an interesting article today in the
la Repubblica daily, which basically had to do with a disconcerting sentiment that is currently spreading throughout middle class America. Namely, that for the first time in the country's history, there is a widespread perception that the golden years are now behind the nation, that history has taken a turn for the worst, and that people in America don't see a way for America to rise above the problems it now faces for a happier future. In other words, that Americans are becoming more
fatalistic and pessimistic about what they see as a future rife with danger and uncertainty. By contrast, for the first time an emerging class in India is seeing the possibility of happier times down the road as their shared destiny.
The Indian transformation seems to be connected to the benefits it has received from globalization and entering the world's markets. How real those perceptions will turn out to be entirely remains to be seen. Though one thing seems certain: 30 years of US government enacting a fiscal policy that overwhelmingly has benefited the protagonists of the deregulated financial and corporate universes, at the expense of an any socially motivated ideological law-making, has devastated the already tried and struggling middle classes while pushing a significant number to the poverty threshold. Moreover such a middle class, without capital and diminishing or merely holding wages, has literally been made beholden to debt (credit cards and loans), which the financial gurus at the top had presented to them as their only means to material gains. Not wanting the working class wages to actually rise, because that would make workers less exploitable to the world of finance, the alpha class is more than happy to "accommodate" their material desires on credit. Indeed, as you mention, the loaning institutions (themselves corporate entities with broad economic and political portfolios- given the lobbies and that so many of Washington's politicians have been borne out of this machine) then profiteer from the interest on repayments of that debt, which is reinvested by the rich to perpetuate this iniquitous money making scam. Basically the rich get richer on the backs of those less well off, if not entirely poor, who are then forever reliant upon such debt to make ends meet. At the same time the government has taken away all forms of social guarantees, those nets which should be put up in the form of business profit regulations and tax based welfare and public assistance, which any enlightened civil code understands as both humane and necessary, to save the worst off or precarious from being exploited or placed in danger by bad business and financial practices, and thus from falling completely to their doom while the rich presumably stand by and watch. And then those same rich in positions of power and influence embark upon a propaganda campaign to demonize everything which goes against their interests, in a way that makes the common people actually believe that what is disgustingly against their better interests, and hence those of the nation at large, is in fact most congenial to them and in reality to think otherwise is insane, unpatriotic and
un-American. Yet they have succeed quite triumphantly! Tax dollars are thus spent on repaying a national debt, which, because not accrued on social expenses, has accumulated from private corporate-financial disasters and especially military escalation. The latter being the one force which can be ultimately relied upon, when the nation's industrial resource and economic interests are placed under threat. Of course if the US nation were more socially just from within, by real wages meeting consumer market demands, then the alpha class would be less decisive in establishing the private interests that are often at the heart of its own internal conflicts, as well as, bellicose ones abroad. D. Harvey points out that it is his job to tell people how much they have been defrauded for all these reasons. And this has nothing to do with the rich vs. the poor per se, but the total favoritism toward the one at the detriment and expense of the other. What's really frightful is that this imbalanced, unfair and unjust system has, since the Regan years, become the praxis of both right-wing and left-wing factions and so has transcended political ideology to become the very culture of an anti-social American democracy and its form of neoliberal capitalism.
One other thing to remember: the idea that social democratic states are unaffordable is largely a myth. When the government is able to keep the Public sector protected from the assaults of the private interests and people pay their taxes it is. It has worked in the past before Reganomics and the Thatcherist ideology of the State, began to creep over to the Continent in the post-Soviet era. The triumph of one ideology has led to the sinking of another. And when we consider that the US has by far the largest fiscal deficit proportional to GNP on the planet, the rhetoric which says that social democratic states simply waste tax payers contributions seems at best an odd logic, at worst the vapid ideology of a dominant class. And the US has such a luxury only because of its superpower status and thus two major reasons: that the dollar is still the petrol currency and that China invests in the dollar (which allows the US to maintain its gargantuan military apparatus, while borrowing on top of this to finance its multi-front wars). America is the only nation that has been able to maintain its living standard while accruing a staggering public debt, without having to suffer seriously negative economic consequences for this reason. Till now at least. And if the oil currency were to change, say to the Euro? And if China starts asking for a return on its US investments? Even the possibility coupled with prospect of seeing future generations (the children of today's parents and their children's children and their children's, children's children) paying off today's spending, is enough to demonstrate how such a privilege may not have been exclusively a beneficiary asset. It will probably also ensure that future economic growth will be agonizingly slow. All this while to try and save the system the current leadership allowed private debt to been socialized, while transferring public tax funds to the private institutions that have caused the crisis. It's just maddening.
Oh and, by the way: this is precisely what began to take place in the late Roman world between the minority haves and the majority have nots, which became the basis for the subsequent medieval feudal system between the monarchs, vassals and serfs. Perhaps we aren't headed back to the feudal world, but if this system remains unaltered in the future we may well be headed toward a new type of Middle Ages, which leaves us with little comfort. Perhaps middle class Americans have already sensed the
coming darkness.
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