In case you missed it, the billionaires' final solution to the problem of the American middle class (as created by FDR) has been underway since the 2008 crash.
For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.
- Amon Goeth in Shindler's List
Of course, three generations of the post-WW2 middle class cannot objectively be compared to the six hundred years of the Kracow ghetto; but it is one-third of American history. We are watching an entire economic class being thrown out of decent jobs, healthcare, and education while having their every button-push, utterance, and public appearance recorded. It is not a concentration camp; but it is an open-air panopticon prison/sweatshop. In short, it is "an historic event".
It is not hyperbole to call this a final solution. The goal here is to destroy the New Deal middle class by destroying or privatizing every governmental function that supports that middle class. And, even worse, by destroying the social ethos which said that Americans care about community, the poor, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the little guy. The goal is to turn America into "Pottersville", a Social Darwinistic hellhole.
The program of destruction, along with the glorification of greed and callousness, is now out in the open. Not a day goes by without some rightwing politico or rightwing thinktank declaring yet another fundamental governmental function to be obsolete, "inefficient"(the USPS is the posterboy for this kind of knee-capping), promoting "moochers", or threatening someone's religious "freedom" or their religious right to bear arms.
The solution? Always the same: privatize it, deregulate it, or kill it. I cannot do anywhere near as good a job of summing up the treasonous malevolence of this assault as the inimitable Charlie Pierce. See his piece: Going For Broke: The Republicans Throw Long On The Budget
The goal is to make the middle class destitute, unskilled, unorganized wage labor again. We are more than halfway there. 50% of school children live in poverty. 60% of Americans can't come up with $500 for an emergency. Union membership is at lows not seen since the 1920s, and more onerous, anti-union laws are being passed, state-by-state, every week.
The endgame is to wind up with an economy run by slumlords, who make a living from sharecroppers, and who keep troublemakers in line by racist/sexist cops and vigilanteism.
1. Slumlords
In the past, I had described neoliberalism as the most advanced form of looting. But, now, they have looted just about everything of value. They own it all. The next shock for Americans is that they may own it, but they don't care about it. They will just milk it and throw it away. A looter who can't fence his loot becomes a slumlord.
It's the era of the Slumlord.
Many of us did not grow up in slums. Now the entire country is getting a real life lesson of real time life in the slums. We are learning what a slumlord is and how they operate. They neglect infrastructure until it's time for them to sell the neglected property at a huge profit. While they are holding the property, they are extracting the highest amount of rent bearable, like payday loan sharks. They don't care if a tenant gets hurt or killed due to the dilapidated conditions the slumlords themselves caused. It's all about extracting profit without reinvesting in infrastructure. Then when it's the time they chose to gentrify the neighborhood, they sell the run-down property at an enormous profit. Making big profits on the way up and on the way down. That's how slumlords work.
GOP = SLUMLORDS
- Don't Call Me Shirley at Democratic Underground
Why Improve Infrastructure When You Plan To Sell It Off To Lowest Bidders.
The dirtiest little secret about the GOP agenda is that they will NEVER NEVER improve infrastructure. And the worst part of this secret is that it is up for sale to whoever is willing to buy it. So under their control the bridge you cross and pay a toll on in the future might even be owned by China, India, or even some terrorist organization.
- The Masters Nemesis at Democratic Underground
People are starting to realize that the plutocrats are not only greedy, but also incredibly short-sighted. They have seen neglect that beggars common sense long enough to realize that neglect makes sense to the looters/slumlords. Finally, people are seeing Frank Zappa's "wall at the back of the theatre".
2. The Share-crop-ping Economy
You have probably heard the latest bullshit buzzword "the sharing economy". Those nice folks at Uber, and AirBnB, and MechanicalTurk(Amazon), and TaskRabbit. Well, another thing people are starting to notice is that the Internet isn't helping them as much as it's surveilling them, commodifying them, and making end runs around the law.
Here is a refreshingly honest take on what the techno-libertarian sociopaths running this ripoff are actually doing:
Let's just turn everything into the so-called sharing economy, a hyperefficient and frictionless platform for networked buyers and sellers. Let's outsource labor so that everyone is paid by the day, by the hour, by the minute....there is no role for unions, no place for anything protecting the rights of the laborer, no collective sense of identity, no dignity of work...It's a two-tier system of overlords and the unemployed, the underemployed, and the occasionally employed. An economy where menial tasks are handled by an outsourced underclass who will do anything for an hourly rate on labor networks like TaskRabbit. Rather than revolutionizing the world's labor force, TaskRabbit is commodifying life itself so that everything can be bought and sold.
- Andrew Keen, The Internet is NOT the Answer
Mr. Keen quotes someone as saying that the privatization (there's that word again) of the internet was the "Largest legal creation of wealth in history." Why? Because the government spent 20 years building the internet, and then gave it away for free, forgoing any royalties, fees, or taxes from this magnificent techological achievment. Geez, at least
feudalists taxed the land.
Keen's description of the sharing economy reminded me of something...
Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land...
Sharecropping became widespread as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction... President Andrew Johnson, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, instead ordered all land under federal control be returned to its previous owners. This meant that plantation and land owners in the South regained their land but lacked a labor force. The solution was to use Sharecropping....
Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant loaned money for food and supplies. At harvest time the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half), which paid off his debt to the merchant. By the late 1880s white farmers also became sharecroppers...
The situation of landless farmers who challenged the system in the rural south as late as 1941 has been described thus: "he is at once a target subject of ridicule and vitriolic denunciation; he may even be waylaid by hooded or unhooded leaders of the community, some of whom may be public officials. If a white man persists in 'causing trouble', the night riders (that is, the KKK) may pay him a visit, or the officials may haul him into court; if he is a Negro, a mob may hunt him down."
- Wikipedia, sharecropping
But, no, a bunch of out of work farmers who had to trade their labor for a pittance because the government handed the ownership of the commons back to a bunch of treasonous oligarchs, that doesn't remind me of "the sharing economy". Not a bit.
Well, actually, it does. The Uber drivers are sharecroppers. They bring the tools, but it is Uber which provides the cyberspace "property" upon which the drivers perform their labors. Uber takes about as big a cut as a plantation owner did from his sharecroppers.
And, it goes downhill from their. The whole "sharing economy" racket is nothing but sharecropping in a wrecked economy. We are returning to piecework at wages set by the owners, part-time employment at the discretion of the employer, child labor, and other horrors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Piled on top of that are the arbitrary scheduling of part-time that is destroying peoples home lives.
And, if you think the government might intervene to correct well-understood historic wrongs, just remember the TPP/TTIP corporate coup that is coming:
TPP elevates capitalization — the expectation of profit — as a principle to the principles of, say, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And then, government, when it provides concrete material benefits to its citizens, must “compensate” capitalists whenever their calculated, immaterial expectations — capitalization — have been “expropriated.” What a racket! TPP is the biggest enclosure in the history of the world!
- Lambert Strether, Towards absolutist capitalism
And, the hits just keep coming. Corporations are trying to leverage the horrendous Digital Millenium Copyright Act to deprive everyone of ownership of anything. Only corporations will be allowed to own stuff with even the tiniest computer chip in it.
In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.
Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership
At least sharecroppers got to own property. Say hello to peasantry and feudalism
3. Racism, sexism, and vigilanteism
Several authors, most prominently Michael Lind, have written extensively about the correspondence between GOP policies and tactics and those of the ante-Bellum South, the so-called Bourbon Democrat era.
Unlike the North between Lincoln and Wilson, the South of that era provides many parallels with today’s American right:
1. Politicians generally favored free trade
2. Local elites defended states’ rights against federal authority.
3. Political and economic elites sought to use voting rules to disfranchise blacks and many low-income whites.
4. State governments blocked unionization and kept state and local welfare systems miserly.
5. State governments lured out-of-state corporations with a mix of cheap, non-union labor, low taxes and sometimes subsidies.
Let 21st century American progressives tout their Golden Age between Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. Conservatives can try to inspire the American people with their alternative ideal: Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Texas, between Reconstruction and World War I.
Michael Lind, Why conservatives are doomed by their own golden age
Here's a another quote that ties the sharecropping economy to the sharing economy.
...the Republican Right wants to return us, via their strict constructionist view of the Founder’s intent in writing the Constitution, to the same weak federal state that they say characterized the great 19th century, a century when we didn’t have a regulatory state, environmentalists, powerful labor unions or consumer movements, or a vast printing press at the Federal Reserve. With these countervailing powers out of the way, and taxes reduced by the ever shrinking government, the average citizen will have to face the awesome power of modern capitalism alone....The fact that (a conservative writer) totally ignores the vast concentration of private power, national wealth and income that had been accumulated by the Robber Barons and their trusts by the late 19th is an astonishing feature of his assertions. It is as if no abuse ever came out of this system of private property which is the foundation underneath capitalism, the real name of our economic system...
We all must ask where your “demon” big government came from...Could a larger role for government have possibly been generated by the failures and power abuses of the private sector economy, the one that produced the Panics of 1819, 1825, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907, the last resulting, at banker urging, in the creation of the Federal Reserve?
These panics did not stand alone: they were accompanied by years of recession and even depression, and the hard times that followed the one in 1873 led to the great railroad strikes and violence of 1877, after wages were repeatedly cut, yet dividends raised, on the B&O Railroad...
- William Neil, THE "HEAVENLY CITY" OF THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT
So, it only makes sense that those who find the ante-bellum South to be an economic golden age would also find it a social golden age, which they have been busy recreating over the last 20 years.
First there was the New Jim Crow, wherein the War on Drugs was used disproportionally against people of color. This has been followed by the school-to-prison pipeline, which enriches both the hedge-fund driven charter school privatization (that word again) movement and the obscene private (and again) prisons business. After imprisonment, felony convictions are used for disenfranchisement. Finally, with the election of a black president, naked, ugly racism can walk in public again. We have already regressed fifty years.
Then there is the whole vigilante, gun thing. People who know more than I about Southern history tell me that the 2nd ammendment was written for slave-hunting militias. They tell me that white southerners were always armed against possible slave rebellions. They tell me that in the ante-bellum South, vigilante justice was nothing more than KKK terrorism. So, why am I not surprised that whites are the vigilantes and blacks and protestors of all types are the target of vigilante and police violence? Why am I not surprised that "Stand Your Ground Laws" got started in the old Confederacy?
As with the war on some terrorists, and the war on some drugs, we have the right of white people to bear arms. Today, though, it's not just the south that buys into the New Jim Crow. It's the west. It's any police department. It's angry downwardly-mobile whites anywhere.
And, it's not just blacks they want to terrorize. They want gays, women and non-"Christian-ists" (that means you, Jewish folk, Unitarians, and the wrong synod of Baptists) - to become second class citizens. They are in an absolute moral panic against all things Moslem. They want women to be baby factories. They want gays to be murdered. They want blacks to be slaves in for-profit prison industries. They want to shove their sick Christian-ism (white, macho Jesus) down everyone else's throats. They demand their religious freedom to be violent, tribalistic bigots. It is all completely consistent with Lind's and Neil's theory that they want their "golden age" of free markets and bigotry back.
It is really sad. This is the third time America has seen this movie: first, the Civil War, second, the Jim Crow south, and now, the rollback of the Civil Rights/Women's Rights Era, thrown as a cheap bone to the self-mutilating "conservative" enablers of billionaire neo-feudalism.
4. Quo vadis
Despite the impossible-to-avoid clarity of it all, things continue to get worse. The GOP gets crazier and more heavily funded than ever. State after state falls to the GOP war on government. The police state continues to encroach - even on the sacred white tribe. Our country continues to be sold for scrap or run down. Our culture continues to be debased and dumbed down. The media is nothing but a mouthpiece for TPTB - non-stop war and toxic voyeurism.
They have already taken our jobs, our savings, and our houses. Now they are coming for our government with the TPP. Fast Track for TPP is the jail door starting to swing shut on us. Once they have locked that door, we are a corporate vassal state, not a democracy.
So, can everyone please stop fighting about Hillary long enough to make the 2016 elections more meaningful than an audition for a prison talent show? The absolute media blackout on the TPP demonstrates just how important it is. The first episode of the 18 month long burlesque that our elections have become is nothing more than a distraction. In less than two months, Fast Track will be voted on.
We need to be in the streets, like the Europeans are over TTIP, like South Americans are with their pots and pans.
This is your final warning. System destruct in two months.