Do you find yourself enthralled with Lou Dobbs’s shining soliloquies in defense of America’s middle class? I do. (Who says we don’t have a class driven society?)
While I find Lou’s xenophobia and racism reprehensible as regards the immigration issue, I find myself nodding my head and yupping ol’ Lou when he waxes poetic about our jobs sent over seas for cheap labor and the corporate ‘money power’s’ willful neglect of America’s working class to the point of ruin.
Lou Dobbs is no prairie populist, though he sings that song. Lou Dobbs is as elite as they come. Frankly, Lou Dobbs is a snob. So why his heartfelt lamentations over the dire straits of America’s middle class? You don’t hear a breath about the billions of folks who face death and dying everyday through poverty, disease and oppression by tyrants with Swiss bank accounts on the payroll of ‘free trading’ transnational corporations.
So what’s up with Lou and his ilk? They don’t give a damn about people.
No, Lou’s alarm at the plight of the middle class isn’t because he cares about your kids, but because he cares about himself. This isn’t about jobs, or American egalitarianism or the economy directly. The truth is the middle class acts as a moat around the Castle Elite and protects the oppressors from the wrath of those who have nothing to lose and are willing to sacrifice themselves for the hope of a better future for their children.
The strategy is common in a slave society.
In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and two thousand black slaves. It had been a hard winter and the poor – slave and free – had suffered greatly. When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria developed against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by informers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves hanged and thirteen slaves were burned alive.
Only one fear was greater than the fear of a black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation. As Edmund Morgan sees it:
There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.
As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the same way they had always perceived servants…shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful, ungrateful and dishonest…” And “if freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.”
And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the assembly,
Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring master to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.
Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous and more respectable. He began to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.”
Howard Zinn; A People’s History of the United States (pg. 37)
Divide and conquer.
That’s what they are afraid of; common cause between the lower and middle classes against the upper. It’s always been this way. But, in America, the middle class finds itself in its weakest position since the Great Depression. As a matter of fact, our economy, pinned as it has been on the Petro-dollar, is one or two Bush follies away from a major “correction.”
The middle class has been so screwed over the last generation or so by the “market” that the elite can no longer ignore the numbers and the stress suffered by worker bees. The November election was a shot heard around the world. Though Iraq was a huge issue, so was America’s sense that the social contract with the government, the economy and, yes, the future itself was a potential house of cards in a hurricane.
People understand, even if they can’t articulate it, that the difference between civilization and barbarism is thin ice in an ever warming world. We see it on TV everyday, everywhere, not just Iraq. The incongruity of shopping mall America and shantytown World is bound, if unconsciously, to cause stress, guilt perhaps, that we have plenty, while others have none.
And, then, as we see our own fortunes dwindle and necessarily support the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed upon credit, debt and interest, and find ourselves poorer and poorer while the rich get richer and richer, why, it may occur to some that something is out of kilter.
This is what they are afraid of; that enough of us will see through the veneer of the cynical narrative of America; where we have no classes and therefore no class warfare; where we all have equal opportunity to achieve the “dream” of happiness and where the poor and dispossessed have a safety net, provided by the people as a whole, to ease the indignity of poverty and allow a crash-landing that isn’t deadly.
Yet, even with the recent increase in the minimum wage, it would have to double to provide a living wage.
As American debt increases and the value of the almighty dollar decreases, the middle class, at the mercy of corporations, whose first allegiance is to profit and not people, will find themselves squeezed further and further between a rock and a hard place.
And because the Bush regime has squandered so much cash and credibility in pursuit of easy oil (necessary to prevent the collapse of our fragile economy, but as easily gotten by playing nice), there is no safety net anymore. The Bush policy is the policy of madmen.
There is no longer a social contract between a ‘government of the people’ and the people, because the government does not represent the people, if it ever did. There is no loyalty to the working class by the corporate state because the unions have been busted and the people alienated from each other to the extent that organizing (in spite of the organizing power of the internet, which should give you an idea of how far the individual has been alienated from the “union”) against ‘power’ is a foreign and unpracticed idea.
And this is precisely the problem. In the old days, when we had neighborhoods and unions, people organized protests and action early, in spite of the oppressive power arrayed against them, to make change in the status quo before armed insurrection could develop.
But now, and this is what the elites like Lou Dobbs fear, because the people are not organized, when the people finally have had enough, society will explode in fury at those (comparatively) few who own more collectively than the many by a wide margin, who buy politicians to make laws so the few can retain their position of power, and further separate themselves from ‘the rabble’ by restricting the opportunities of the many, and facilitate the few’s consolidation of wealth and power.
There is a huge underclass in this society, primed by poverty and oppression for generations that is ready to rebel against the way things are. They don’t because the middle classes are the enforcers for the elites. But, when middle class fortunes fall, and workers lose faith in the system and insecurities and stress overload the senses to the point that people can see the gulf between the haves and have-nots, the time is right for a coalition to form between the have-nots and those who thought they were on the road to ‘have’ but find themselves stuck and sliding backwards from debt, wage stagnation and corporations that play the market instead of enrich and empower their non-executive employees.
I think folks now are at the stage that if the perception persists that “politicians,” who in actuality work for corporations, continue to ignore the will of the people, all hell finally will break lose. The American People are at a tipping point.
And that is why many elites are worried about the middle class. Not that they care about others, but that they care about themselves.
Don’t be fooled when millionaires and billionaires rush to your defense.
It’s not about you. It’s about them. And it always has been.
Crossposted from My Left Wing