Over the last thirty years, our financial elites have "enclosed" small businesses, small towns, local mortgages, union shops, and intellectual property to the extent that the American middle class has been dispossesed of its livelihood and its assets. This enclosure is the same process by which peasants were driven off the land in the run-up to the industrial revolution:
Enclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land. Once enclosed, these uses of the land become restricted to the owner, and it ceases to be common land.
- Wikipedia
It is also as naked and brutal a power grab as the original enclosure:
Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.
– George Orwell, As I Please, Tribune, 18 August, 1944
Post-dated titles and raw power. Hmm. Can anyone say Mortgage Foreclosure Fraud?
Below the fold we will compare the social impact of the agricultural and the post-industrial enclosures; and we will see that the current assault on Social Security and other social programs are nothing less than the imposition of new Poor Laws meant to deal (harshly) with the collateral damage from the primitive accumulation of neoliberal capitalism.
Comparison 1: Who was/is unemployed?
handloom weavers, framework knitters, etc...were not unskilled and ignorant riff-raff...these had been the most skilled, the most educated, the most self-reliant, the flower of the laboring people...For the free man entry into the factory as a mere "hand" was entry into something a little better than slavery, and all but the most famished tended to avoid it.
- Eric Hobsbawm, "The Age of Revolution - 1789 - 1848", Chapter 11, "The Labouring Poor"
In the face of depression-level shrinkage in manufacturing jobs, due to outsourcing (a form of enclosure), many workers strongly resist the low pay/no benefits McJobs on offer. But, as in the British Enclosure, hunger or other personal privations drive some people to give in and accept their new status as serfs.
Of course, it is corporations, not governments (except by its failure to enforce the law), who have made these productive workers into peasants.
Comparison 2: What was/is the morale of the dispossed?
Deprived of the traditional institutions and guides to behavior, how could many fail to sink into an abyss of hand-to-mouth expedients, where families pawned their blankets each week until pay-day and where alcohol was "the quickest way out of Manchester".
Drink was not the only sign of this demoralization...(there was also) an increase in crime and that growing and often purposeless violence which was a sort of blind personal assertion against the forces threatening to engulf the passive. The spread of apocalyptic, mystical, or other sects and cults in this period indicates a similar incapacity to deal with the earthquakes of society which were breaking down mens' lives.
Urban development of the period was a gigantic process of class segregation, which pushed the new laboring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centers of government and business and the newly specialized residential area of the middle class.
- E. Hobsbawm
Welcome to the new America, where payday loan-sharking is perfectly legal and heavily invested in by our amoral financial elites. The same communities most fastened upon by these loan sharks are also some of the most conservative parts of the country. There are even "Christian" ministers running these rackets, pulling in the suckers with their obscene endorsements.
The current, frankly insane, political situation - with candidates jibbering like competing Napoleons in a back ward - is exactly the kind of reaction that you see when the social routines they have lived in are destroyed and people are pushed beyond their breaking point. You get Cargo Cults, Ghost Dances, etc.
Comparison 3: What provision was/will be made for the dispossesed?
The Commission's recommendations were based on two principles. The first was less eligibility – conditions within workhouses should be made worse than the worst conditions outside of the workhouse so that workhouses served as a deterrent – only the most needy would consider entering them. The other was the "workhouse test", that relief should only be available in the workhouse.
- Poor Laws
Today, Fox News has revived Social Darwinism, with possession of a microwave (sometimes a loss leader at $30) cited as a sign we are coddling the poor.
Basically, Fox News is lobbying that a person needs to give up everything to be considered eligible for the most meager of "charity". Of course, this is nothing more than an extremist marker to make the coming sellout by both parties seem something less than the looting of Social Security.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
The only growth industry in post-enclosure America is private prisons. And they are growing because the use of SLAVE LABOR has been legalized. See any of Bob Sloane's diaries on the moral depravity of our elites. Our prisons are the new workhouses. And they are hellholes.
Private prisons are the elites' answer to the fact they have impoverished our country. We currently have the largest absolute and percent-wise prison populations in the world. Prisons are de facto the solution to the problem of the poor. The solution is not just locking people up, it is also about creating brutalizing, demeaning jobs managing prison populations. We have huge numbers of prison guards, security guards, etc. All of these people are what is called "guard labor":
In a study published in 1992, three economists coined the term "garrison economy" -- also described as the cost of keeping people down. The garrison economy encompasses "guard labor" and "threat labor." Guard labor includes the full range of enforcement activities necessary to maintain the peace: workplace supervisors, police, judicial and corrections employees, private security personnel, the armed forces, civilian defense employees, and producers of military and domestic security equipment. Threat labor consists of those who make credible the peril of job dismissal: the unemployed, "discouraged workers" and prisoners.
- Lauri E. Kallio, Cultural, Economic and Workforce Structures Help Reinforce U.S. Militarism
In a bit of synchronicity, I refer you to the current diary: Slavery in Florida's Tomato Fields for an example of just what we tolerate in this decaying society.
Then, there are the Dominionists, who favor slavery to work off debt. Looks like the brutal right and the crackpot right agree that slavery is a good thing. We are truly fucked when this barbaric situation is barely remarked upon by the corporate propaganda machine.
The only question is how many more people will be pushed into crime by the looting of their pensions, the denial of affordable health care, and the crushing frustration of watching their lives ruined and their country looted by financial criminals and their bought and paid for politicians.
Comparison 4: Who did/do people blame for their situation?
Whatever the actual situation of the laboring poor, there can be absolutely no doubt that every one of them who thought at all considered the laborer to be exploited and impoverished by the rich, who were getting richer while the poor became poorer.
- E. Hobsbawm
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Comparison 5: What were/are the chances of breaking this corrupt Good Cop/Bad Cop political system?
A movement like Chartism in Britain would collapse, time and again, under its political weakness. Time and again sheer hunger - the intolerable burden which rested on millions of the laboring poor - would revive it.
- E. Hobsbawm
Translation: slim to none, but people will keep trying. Huge numbers of Americans are now going to bed hungry. Hunger motivates people.
What is the endgame of an enclosure that de-industrializes?
At least the British industrialists had the excuse that they were building something, making the country stronger. And statistically, that was actually true. But our elites have done nothing but loot. They have built nothing except paper empires and computer trading system whose function is high-speed looting. Every industry they get their hands on is murdered and sold for scrap value. The only "industry" they truly invest (our money) in is the ruinously inefficient (production runs so small they amount to piecework), totally unproductive striving for more and better weapons with which to control the bottom 99%.
What it looks like to me is that they are running the Industrial Revolution in reverse, melting down our physical plant and burning our social capital for their short-term personal gain.
When, oh when, will Americans get it:
Humans: What do you want us to do?
Aliens: We want you to die.
- "Independence Day"
You see, right now, Americans, like the British peasants, are simply in the way of making money out of the land. Unlike the British situation, our elites have no need to move the peasants out of the way. Basically, the elites have looted/outsourced everything of value above ground, and all that is left to loot is below ground. And, they simply don't care if going after that mineral wealth will kill and cripple large segments of the American population.
As I write this, the GOP is trying to kill the EPA so that polluters can blow up mountains to get at coal, so that frackers can continue to poison the water supply, so that BP can continue to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. Obama continues to shill for the moribund and dangerous nuclear power industry.
The takeaway here:
What you really need to feel in your guts is that the elites are perfectly happy to murder Americans, by neglect, by pollution, by starvation. They are implementing slave labor. We are lower than cattle to them.
These "elites" are basically nomadic barbarian outlaws, moving from country to country, running up bubbles, looting everything in sight, then getting out in front of the collapse. Another name for looters is extractors. They extract value. Its no accident the most rapacious of the elites are in the energy and mineral extraction business. Its no accident that Wall St. has mutated from investing to looting.
The sooner we start treating these folks like the criminals and murderers that they are, instead of coddling them and bribing them, the sooner this country will get up off its back. Where are the Seven Samurai when you need them?