It's The Class War, Stupid

By Steve Hynd

I'm a great believer in the theory that the most important issues in life are always essentially simple, able to be explained in terms any family gathered around the kitchen table can understand. Take for instance the current political debate over stimulus vs debt reduction. If the normal family has $50 spare and a debt of $5,000 the rational thing to do is use that $50 to get to work, not throw it at the debt. The paychecks earned will not only provide basic needs, but another $50 to get to work next month and, eventually, a surplus to throw at the debt the original $50 would hardly have scratched. If you're really in a bind, you borrow that first $50 that sets you of to work and the chance of earning your way out of the hole.

The vast majority of families in the U.S. are implementing this commonsense solution on a monthly basis right now. Times are tough and a family income doesn't go nearly as far as it used to in decades gone by.

So what's the problem with lawmakers and pundits who don't get this simple equation?

Unemployment claims are up, home sales are plunging without government incentives and manufacturing growth is slowing.

Meanwhile, 1.3 million people are without federal jobless benefits now that Congress adjourned for a weeklong Independence Day recess without passing an extension. That number could grow to 3.3 million by the end of the month if lawmakers can't resolve the issue when they return.

All of this worries economists. As jobless claims grow and benefits shrink, Americans have less money to spend and the economy can't grow fast enough to create new jobs. Some are revising their forecasts for growth in the third quarter. Others are afraid the country is on the verge of falling back into a recession.

...New claims for benefits jumped by 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 472,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average, which smooths fluctuations, rose to 466,500, its highest level since March.

...For the third time in as many weeks, Senate Republicans blocked a bill Wednesday night that would have continued unemployment checks to people who have been laid off for long stretches. The House is slated to vote on a similar measure Thursday, though the Senate's action renders the vote a futile gesture as Congress prepares to depart Washington for its holiday recess.

During the recession, Congress added up to 73 weeks of extra benefits on top of the 26 weeks typically provided by states. Democrats in the House and Senate want them extended through November. Republicans want the $34 billion cost of the bill to be paid for with money remaining from last year's stimulus package. Democrats argue that it is emergency spending and should be added to the deficit.

Fred Clark is right - if you tell me the thing to be doing right now is to throw miniscule amounts of money at the deficit, I'll conclude that you're a moral imbecile...either that or an old-fashioned "I'm alright, Jack" borderline sociopath with no empathy for other human beings who find themselves in direr straights than your own.

And here's where I show you a graphic that tells you all you need to know about the whys and wherefores of America's current economic situation. (Source: Prof. G. William Domhoff.)

 

Wealth inequality has accelerated throughout the last decade (PDF, Levy Economics Institute), with continuing trends: share ownership and general wealth concentrating in the hands of older, non-ethnic people who were already rich. While median wealth in the U.S. plunged 39% during the housing crash, the wealth of the upper 1% dropped less than 12%. The rich aren't hurting nearly as much as the poor and mostly just don't care about our getting to work - the priority for them is debt reduction because it helps safeguard the value of the investments they hold.

And our lawmakers? They definitely fall into those upper brackets. In 2008, the average net worth of a Senator was almost $14 million. The average net worth of a Congressman was $4.6 million.

Which brings me neatly to Chris Hedges' latest column:

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same nightmare seen in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in New England to the abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, mourning their dead, live each day.

Capitalism was once viewed in America as a system that had to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. And so, even as Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars and the Gulf of Mexico is turned into a toxic swamp, we do not know what to do or say. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. The liberal class has a misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that have refused to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Liberals bow before a Democratic Party that ignores them and does the bidding of corporations. The reflexive deference to the Democrats by the liberal class is the result of cowardice and fear. It is also the result of an infantile understanding of the mechanisms of power. The divide is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.

Most Republican lawmakers are incredibly bad at concealing this from the useful idiots who write op-eds for them and vote for them. It's just that the pundits don't care - they know their job is to keep the poor folks distracted and voting GOP with talk of guns, God, gays and Teh Illegal. They get it. You know who doesn't get it? Those pundits and think-tankers who hitch themselves to the Democrat wagon or who see themselves as impartial members of the establishment press, both of whom "have become corporate servants." Hedges quotes Irving Howe:

�The truly powerless people are those intellectuals�the new realists�who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,� Howe wrote. �For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades�as well as to the relationship between �wealth� and �intellect��that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals. The institutional world needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals but it does not want them as intellectuals. It beckons to them because of what they are but it will not allow them, at least within its sphere of articulation, either to remain or entirely cease being what they are. It needs them for their knowledge, their talent, their inclinations and passions; it insists that they retain a measure of these endowments, which it means to employ for its own ends, and without which the intellectuals would be of no use to it whatever. A simplified but useful equation suggests itself: the relation of the institutional world to the intellectuals is as the relation of middlebrow culture to serious culture, the one battens on the other, absorbs and raids it with increasing frequency and skill, subsidizes and encourages it enough to make further raids possible�at times the parasite will support its victim. Surely this relationship must be one reason for the high incidence of neurosis that is supposed to prevail among intellectuals. A total estrangement from the sources of power and prestige, even a blind unreasoning rejection of every aspect of our culture, would be far healthier if only because it would permit a free discharge of aggression.�

The liberal class prefers comfort to confrontation. It will not challenge the decaying structures of the corporate state. It is intolerant within its ranks of those who do. It clings pathetically to the carcass of the Obama presidency. It has been exposed as a dead force in American politics. We must find our way back to the old radicals, to the discredited Marxists, socialists and anarchists, including Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Day. Language is our first step toward salvation. We cannot fight what we cannot describe.

The rich as a class and their poorer shills are the problem. They have engineered our current economic dire straits as the direct consequence of their unfettered seeking for more riches and their sociopathic inability to empathise for the effects of that seeking on the rest of us. They have engineered a political system where our only real choices are between all-out asset strippers - the Republicans - and those who pretend to have our interests at heart while doing the bidding of the rich who run corporations which have bought and paid for lawmakers. That means everyone is stuck in this cycle until the vast majority who must scrape to make ends meet each month stop voting for them.

Solidarinosc.

P.S. If you're reading this from Europe, then the same applies. Just substitute your main local conservative rich-folks party and local "once-was-Labour" democratic but faux-socialist party for the American ones.