In an economic system undiluted by government regulation or public decency, the system dreamed of by Ayn Rand, Grover Norquist, and Scott Walker, there is no such thing as a Middle Class. The Middle Class in the sense that we know it is an economic fiction, one of two that were brought into being and maintained by the power of the government and the belief among certain elites that social and economic justice are in their long-term best interest.
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Prior to the New Deal, there was little Middle Class to speak of and what existed did so under the most precarious of circumstances. By and large, you were either a landowner or a field hand, a factory owner or a factory worker. While there were farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen, these people lived on the economic margins, susceptible to being financially ruined at the whim of a large corporation – farmers, for example, could find themselves wiped out by predatory increases of shipping rates by the railroads.
The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, made it easier for working people to band together in labor unions and to negotiate fair wages and working conditions. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 codified the eight-hour day and the forty-hour work week and create the minimum wage. Workers now were guaranteed a decent days’ wage for a shorter days’ work. Among other things, these laws ensured that Americans would enjoy leisure time and not be forced to toil sixty hours per week at near-starvation wages.
These fundamental laws, which are as much about human dignity as they are about economics and profitability, are under assault here in Wisconsin. What Scott Walker and his puppeteers want is a return to a workplace where management can dictate hours and wages and working conditions. They want a return to sixty-hour work weeks with no health care and a promise of a pink slip for anybody who dares to complain. They want to have full authority to ordain by fiat the quality of life for the working people of Wisconsin.
Their goal is nothing less than the end of the Middle Class, and if you’re reasonably comfortable right now and don’t have the benefits of union protection, you might be thinking that this fight isn’t about you. But if you think that once the Koch Brothers will be satisfied once they get done busting the unions, then you really haven’t been paying attention for the past thirty years. And while the Middle Class has been under assault for three decades, it hasn’t through the use of Class Warfare. Not at all.
The Middle Class has been undermined by economic ninjas who work so secretively and so subtly that most Americans haven’t seen them at work – at least not until last night in Madison. It started with Ronald Reagan telling Americans that government was the problem and not the solution. As long as citizens are predisposed to believe the institutions that we created (WE CREATED) are no longer there to serve our interests, there’s almost no end to the mischief that one can accomplish.
It continued through the 1980’s and into the 1990’s until even some Democrats no longer believed in the ability of government to be a force for good in our society. When Bill Clinton announced in 1996 that “the era of Big Government is over,” the plutocrats had scored an impressive and important victory. It was a turning point something akin to the Battle of Midway in World War II – their enemy was still out there, but its strength had been broken. It was now simply a war of attrition.
And now we’ve reached a point where many working Americans seem to be suffering from some variation on the Stockholm Syndrome, where captives begin to bond with those holding them in bondage. We see Middle Class people in Wisconsin dutifully waiving “Stand With Walker” signs, expressing fealty to the very same people who intend to rob them blind. Working people who demand lower wages and fewer benefits for the sake of preserving the fiction of economic “competition” in the State of Wisconsin.
Yes. Competition is the other economic fiction that can only be maintained by the power of government. Every game has a winner, you see, and the ultimate winner in the game of commerce is the one who manages to destroy its rivals. Need an example? Drive through a rural community in Iowa and ask the locals what in the hell happened to Main Street and why so many storefronts are now boarded up. The deregulated economy in our post-Big Government era has unleashed disaster for any business too small to “compete” with its corporate rivals.
Look at what has happened to journalism in the past thirty years. As the companies that provide news and information grow larger by the minute, our sources of truly independent public affairs reporting dwindle. In most major cities, an independent, locally-owned daily newspaper is almost impossible to find and the same holds true for local broadcasting. The alternative music station at the bottom of your FM dial is pretty much the last game in town. So much for competition under an oligarchy.
In the news the other day was a story about how the mansion on Long Island that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald in the writing of “The Great Gatsby” was going to be torn down. The current owners, who bought the property in 2004, said that the edifice was rotten and beyond repair. They had no alternative but to tear it down and subdivide the estate into ten individual, and smaller, properties. Those estates will still be opulent enough, I'm sure, but not nearly as grandiose as the original.
There’s a lesson, here.
The Gilded Age fortunes that created those mansions are things of the past, like Jim Crow laws and child labor, and they crumbled under the weight of their own decadence. Scott Walker and the Koch Brothers are struggling mightily in the State of Wisconsin to recreate a society that was and still is rotten and beyond repair. This mansion deserves to be torn down, brick by brick, and we should sow salt in the soil where it once stood as a reminder that nothing of this kind should ever be acceptable in a nation of free people.