Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Class War : It’s About Time




Whenever murmurs among the people indicate growing awareness that they are paying an exorbitant price in order to enrich a tiny minority, the terrified cry of “class war” is raised by the poor huddled masses of billionaires, millionaires and their corporate servants in politics and media. This contradicts the fictional notion that there are no classes in American society, that we are all “middle class” and oh, a few unfortunates are poor but that’s only temporary. As soon as their investments pay off they too will arrive at the exalted status of “middle”. That would be right after the Easter bunny delivers chocolate covered Tooth Fairies to all the little boys and girls.

In truth, this nation has been a stratified class society since its origins under the rule of rich Europeans who drafted a constitution ensuring their rights of property and assuring that the majority rabble would not threaten those sacred scriptures. It was Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising of the common people incensed over debts and foreclosures – sound familiar? - that brought about the first ten amendments to that document and saw to it that human beings and not just their property owning masters had some rights. Unfortunately, you still need lots of money to establish that equality in court but corporate mind management has done a great job creating illusions among a great mass of Americans that they are somehow equal to  a very small group which  earns (?)millions and even billions a year. In fact, while demonstrators at Wall Street and in other cities representing the 99% of us who live below the top 1% strive to create real democracy, it should be understood that only a fraction of that 1% are rich beyond the imaginations of ancient rulers who were seen as deities by the peasants of their times. That these modern god-like creatures  can manipulate citizens of an alleged democracy into thinking they are just like common working people is indication of how successful their faithful servants in media and politics have been at warping the collective mind. But those days are nearing an end.

Even though the “class war”  label still draws negative response from subjects who have been on their knees for so long they may never be able to stand up, a majority of citizens who refuse minority masters ruling their world into what could be a terminal state are indeed on their feet loudly saying, no way. That scares the hell out of rich owners of a fiction they have been calling  democracy. It’s threatening to become just that and they and their minions are in desperation that the majority rule they fear may soon become reality.

In defense of inequality, hand wringing pleaders for the opulent weep about their enormous tax bills, leaving out the massive amount of dollars they maintain after taxes. Even with the old 90% top tax brackets of the 1950s republican Eisenhower administration, a poor soul with a billion dollars would be left with a measly 100 million. Oh dear! And rest assured that after their well compensated accountants took massive deductions and did other book juggling, nobody ever paid anything remotely close to 90%. And now we have tax rates on the wealthy that are so low even some of them are embarrassed .

When the 400 richest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million Americans - about half the population – and use that wealth to buy politicians and government power , only corporate mind management and slack jawed imbeciles can call that a democratic system. Our income disparity is greater than at any time since 1928. As evidence, over the past twenty five years 80 percent of increased income in America went to the top 5 percent, while the bottom 60 percent lost 7.5 percent. The US has the most billionaires in the world (413), and among those global deities with $5 billion or more there are 57 from the US. If you’re not weeping in pity but in rage, you’re part of the 99%.

The last major crisis of capitalism, the Great Depression, ended with what was called the New Deal. It simply replaced private investment with public investment in order to create jobs, avoid social revolution and save the capitalist profit system for the wealthy minority. This time the crisis is even more serious and it calls for something greater than a New Deal. In fact, we need a whole New Deck.

The increased problems of warfare, environmental destruction, unemployment, poverty and a besieged public sector cannot be solved by relying on the market lust for private profit which created them in the first place. These universal crises call for radical transformation of the political economics at their core. It does seem that more people the world over are demanding change but the forces of reaction will try to channel those demands into further acceptance of a status quo. We need  a party that stands against the one percent capitalism that rules, and for the 99% democracy that should. Republicans boldly stride toward soft-core fascism while Democrats mince closer to hard core neo-liberalism. Not just America but humanity cannot accept anything less than wholesale, radical restructuring of the system that threatens all into one that benefits everyone.

Class war? It may be an idea whose time has finally come.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Frank,

Thanks for sending me your excellent article with its deep running social analysis.

But for my person I am not sure if I can agree with you that what we have got on our hands here is a class war as known from olden days.

What we can see unfolding before our eyes is the eerie and unreal (if not ghostly) usurpation of the mightiest nation on earth, a white nation, originally mainly of European extraction, the usurpation and take-over of which having been achieved by criminal syndicates hailing primarily from the Middle East, and who have understood it to fall upon their prey like piranhas leaving barely the bone structure of what America has once been!

People realise that this is not a war of underpaid factory workers against an unconnected and/or unorganised middle class originating essentially from the same racial background and being distributed evenly over the vast land expanses of the US (even such compact and cosy pictures may have holographic properties for we know how long the mind manipulators are already at work), but what I can increasingly recognise through the electronic chatter of the internet is that most people are aware or are becoming aware that this is a fight for life or death. "...to be or not to be.." as Shakespeare put it. And this is not a fight against an alien enemy on other continents or behind the borders of neighbouring countries, but it is a fight against an invisible enemy within, a well camouflaged enemy who takes our shape and speaks our language, an enemy that can even rely on some popular support - for it is not everybody`s natural pre-disposition to recognise this type of incremental fraud and destruction, last but not least on account of the cameleon-like attributes of these not entirely ungifted, sometimes even alluring, but otherwise criminal and cultureless circles!

My attention was drawn to the action of a courageous black woman, who a few days ago has said in her
own words what I am offering to you above. The Lady was working as a stand-in schoolteacher in LA
and lost her job as soon as her observations were published. She said, not verbatim "...the Jews are running the FED, they are running the Banks and they are running the newspapers, they are running our Government and indeed they are running the entire country.It is time for the American people to run them out of this
place...". Could it be that the white American population is full of fear when the word "Jew" is pronounced? Could it be that the Whites of America are prone to induced halluzinations such as that they should all serve the Jews as that is allegedly God`s Will? Does he not say so when he says he has chosen the Jews? Might it be that the Blacks are less prone to have their brains "washed"? And finally: Is a scenario thinkable that the Whites of North America may get their freedom back as a result of the actions of courageous Black People? Would this not be an irony of history!

Friendly greetings from Munich / Germany